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New Haven, Connecticut, United States
@EVERYTHING
Member since 2008
CURRENT MISSION Trying to leave this place a little better than I found it. ABOUT ME I'm an ecologist but I don't get all sanctimonious about it :-) a really nice guy, I clean up after myself, tip waiters well, and let people merge on the highway. PHILOSOPHY "Be nice and see if it works" - Chinese fortune cookie, Berkeley CA, 1974. I wish I could say that was *my* fortune cookie but it wasn't. This is just something I read in someone's profile on some other website 10 years ago and loved it so much I've used it ever since. I love the simplicity and kindness accompanied by a subtle veiled threat: in the event that being nice doesn't work, are you then free to go ahead and be a selfish mean-spirited douchebag? Just kidding!
Interested in Adventure Sports
Interested in Art
Fluent in English
Learning German
Why I'm on Couchsurfing
HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING I'd be happy to host but I don't picture many couch surfers passing through New Haven! COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE Had a terrific hosting experience with someone from Germany in summer 2009. It was great to have a chance to practice my German. Also, when I moved to NYC from Seattle years ago I couch surfed, not through this site, but with a guy I knew from a mailing list for my favorite band. I ended up sharing an apartment with a friend of his, so that worked out really well.
Music, Movies, and Books
"Any kind of music as long as it's good" - that's supposedly how Duke Ellington replied when asked about his preferences. My reading is very random: right now I'm reading Isak Dinesen, Thomas Pynchon, and Joan Didion, and books on the history of calendars and on forgotten pre-automobile altnerative transportation technologies. ...David Sedaris, that goes without saying!
One Amazing Thing I've Done
Lived for three months in a roadless village in Papua New Guinea accessible only by small planes which landed on a patch of grass. There was only one outsider besides me. Lived for three months in the rainforest in Borneo. This place had a road but just barely! Seeing the Northern Lights. Visiting the Jewish Museum in Berlin and learning a bit of how Germany confronts its history; that was pretty moving. also in Germany...Checkpoint Charlie! Yep, before unification. Andy Warhol walking down Madison Avenue in 1986
Teach, Learn, Share
environmental stuff + anything in the 'Interests' section above
My Interests
architecture, design, and art, 1400 - present (yeah, that's pretty broad, but there's definitely certain stuff I like more than others!) music: pop and R&B 1960-85, newer electronicy stuff, miscellaneous classical and jazz, some Brazilian, African and Asian cooking the outdoors also see my photos: http://picasaweb.google.com/rjkarty
