Hey! I'm an aspiring (aka unemployed) writer who is hoping to tumble around NYC some before returning to grad school. I just graduated from the University of Chicago, studying English Literature, and my favorite books are Don Quixote and Moby-Dick, but I'm a fan of all genres and love talking about books almost as much as I love reading them.

I grew up in the Appalachian mountains and am looking for work on the road around NYC, and I hope to meet some people who are interested in reading, learning (tech, poetry, languages), and running.

Looking forward to meeting you on the road!

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

Hoping to visit New York while I'm looking for a job, and need some place to stay while I'm on the search.

Music, Movies, and Books

Books: Moby-Dick, Don Quixote, Divine Comedy, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, East of Eden, The Secret History, Brothers Karamazov, any Shakespeare and any Walt Whitman

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Here is a funny story: One time, I was mugged in Peru. Three guys came out of a car at night, ran up to me, and one had his hand in his hoody and yelled at me: DA ME SU MOCHILLA. I did not speak a lot of Spanish at the time, but I had had enough pisco to believe that I was fluent enough to handle the situation. I was also with a girl, and this did not help. So I put on a brave face, said back to him in perfect Spanish: "No." And this must have confused him, because the hand in the hoody trick probably had a 100% success rate, and so he just said "Da me su mochilla" again, but this time assertive and offended, like I had just cut him in line or something, (as if I was the one being rude in this situation). I said, again, "No." He said his thing again, I said mine again. Then he pushed me. So I pushed him back. I could tell this was like his third mugging, and I was starting to get annoyed that my first-ever mugging was not as malicious as I had secretly hoped (did he not even bring a knife???), so I turned to see what the girl I was with was up to, and saw that the other two guys had done the hand-in-the-hoody trick to much more success, and she was unzipping her backpack.

I did a quick adrenaline-induced calculation of the situation, and realized a.) that they probably didn't have a gun either, b.) how goddamn cool I would be if I saved her from a mugger. So, pisco coursing through my veins, I pushed them both very hard, at which point they turned and looked at me as if I was being extremely rude, which at the time was baffling, but is now very funny to me. They looked at me like "Hey man, we're trying to do something here." They pushed me back, and my first little friend then went to the girl and started trying to rip her backpack away. Teamwork and communication is key to any good mugging, and these guys were not teamplayers at all. I truly believe that if a car had not passed us by at that very moment, and they had not scattered back to their car, we would have pushed each other back and forth until the sun came up. Anyway, they ran back to the car they came from, but my friend--the first mugger, probably ashamed that someone with such a small grasp of the Spanish language had bested him---turned to look at me, and said (in perfect English, I might add), "We never forget an American's face."

Countries I’ve Visited

France, Italy, Peru, Spain, United Kingdom

Countries I’ve Lived In

Peru