CURRENT MISSION

Training a personality test to find true love for the world

ABOUT ME

Here is my MySpace Profile.

I am unlike anyone else that you will ever meet. When I talk to my friends I focus in on them completely. I am a very attentive listener, and people are quick to reveal all their deep, dark secrets when my focus turns to them.

I am very physically affectionate. I'm most attracted to ladies who run up and jump onto me with flying full-body hugs. I have the opposite of "personal space." I'm much more likely to feel disappointed that someone is staying too far away from me than that they're getting too close. Unless they're being obnoxious about hitting on me when I'm clearly not interested, then I suddenly have LOTS of personal space!

I make my living by studying romantic chemistry. I talk about relationships all day long. People used to say that was strange, so I made it my profession and now they understand that I'm just doing my job all of the time. (To me that sounds even stranger, but I'll go with what works).

I think what makes me most different from other people is that I'm really unassuming. That seems surprising coming from a person whose job is to guess everything about your psychology from a 30 minute conversation, but the reason I'm good at that is that I start from scratch with each person and build up a perception of the world based on their assumptions and appreciate that set of rules even though it's different from what I use. I sound really technical when I'm typing out sentences, but in person I'm the smiliest, most accepting and unconditionally loving person you'll meet.

I've been doing my job of psychologically profiling people for so long that I really can't help but analyze people's sentences in every conversation. I look for basic assumptions made in the sentence and word choice among a million other things. Basically I really want to know what you're thinking and how your mind works when you say something, not only the content of what you're saying but how you're seeing the world and interpreting information that leads you to send those particular words out of your mouth in that order.

I travel constantly. I don't feel tied to any particular physical location (working on the Internet allows that, which is wonderful). I travel so much that it stopped making sense to have an apartment in a fixed location, so I've been 'on the road' for almost a year living with people all over the world who've taken my personality test and want to help train it to recognize real-world personality types better. I have way too many people still on my list to even begin thinking of where my next fixed location should be.

I love the fact that I'm always turning new corners and meeting new people. It is kind of weird to not have a "home." I was hoping that I'd feel like the whole world is my home by traveling so much, but it turns out that every now and then I'd kinda like a room with a closing door which I could hide away in to chill out and recharge. I'm not sure when I'll want to stay in one place again, but for right now I like that I'm constantly walking into the unknown.

I also really enjoy this opportunity to see just how little in the way of material possessions I need to be happy. I can fit everything into three bags, two for carry-on plus one which has a comforter to sleep in. I've spent half of the year without my car (thanks to friends in Tulsa, Newark and Seattle who watched it for me). I have six days of clothes, which I have to replace surprisingly often since I wear them out and accidentally leave things behind.

PHILOSOPHY

I grew up thinking that I didn't have a "calling" like other people do, so I became a Chemical Engineer because it paid the most and therefore seemed most needed by the rest of society. Over time I realized that I was built to study romantic chemistry and now I've put ten years into isolating the factors involved in making people feel attraction. I now run my own matchmaking website: eChemistry.com and I travel the world meeting people who have taken the personality test on my site and interviewing them to find out what their results should have been. I then type those results into the test and it learns to correlate people's self perceptions (their test answers) to their real-world actual personalities.

Por qué estoy en Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

Right now I'm living on the road. I started in Tampa, Florida and have been up and down and across the whole US, Sweden and Spain. It took a whole year, but I finally made it to Seattle, Washington where I stayed for a little over a month and now I'm on my winding way back to Tampa, stopping in to visit the towns I missed and also visit all the friends I made on the way out here.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

I've been doing essentially the couchsurfing 'thing' for a year now, but through the swing dancing (lindyhop and jitterbug) community (not to be confused with 'swinging' relationships, have no idea about that stuff. I'm with the kind that dances to big band music in Gap commercials). I'd like to be a citizen of the world more than just one little physical spot so I'm trying to experience as much and meet as many people as I can.

Intereses

Personality typing, philosophy, dancing, romantic chemistry, relationships

• dancing
• swing dancing
• running
• walking
• flying
• clothing
• traveling
• socializing
• music
• chemistry
• engineering
• psychology

Música, películas y libros

Casablanca, Memento, Truman Show, Fight Club, Matrix, Amelie, 50 First Dates, Ferris Beuler's Day Off, Fargo, Office Space, Swingers, Tao of Steve, Wag the Dog, The Village, The Shape of Things, Les Miserables, Flatliners, Boondock Saints, Falling Down, What the Bleep Do We Know, The Experiment, Star Wars, Gandhi, Gattaca, Cruel Intentions, Anne of Green Gables, Shallow Hal, Band of Brothers, Super Size Me, Murderball