CURRENT MISSION

Finding realer people!

ABOUT ME

I love the rain, and the smell of wet concrete. I used to draw caricatures as gifts for friends. My favorite song is Stevie Ray Vaughan's rendition of "Little Wing." My favorite poem is "Creed" by Meg Kearney. Nothing beats pineapple buns from Hong Kong. I've trained in the hard martial arts for ten years (kenpo karate), and soft martial arts for two years (tai chi). I write poetry and I'm on the third draft of my first novel. I firebreathe sometimes. I've gone skydiving, and I climb a lot of rooftops because the world is never proper when you look at it from a straight vantage point.

PHILOSOPHY

I'm fascinated by the eclectic, and I constantly plagiarize people's lives for my stories. I think if we all took time every day to read about each other, the world would actually get bigger instead of smaller, but that would keep us honest and connect our myopia.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

I've surfed in Italy and can host people when I'm not living at home with Mom.

Interests

literature, comics, blues & jazz, martial arts, philosophy, joss whedon (buffy! firefly! dollhouse!)

• arts
• writing
• books
• literature
• poetry
• comics
• drawing
• jazz
• blues
• skydiving
• martial arts

Music, Movies, and Books

Music:
- blues (SRV, Allman Bros, Clapton, the Kings, Eva Cassidy)
- jazz (Davis, Coltrane, Monk, Flanagan, Hancock)
- soul (Aretha! Etta! Norah Jones is cool too)

Books:
- the classics (Dante, Virgil, Milton)
- the populars (Life of Pi, Ender's Game)
- the raconteurs (Cheever, Hemingway, Gardner)
- the beats (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Ferlinghetti)
- the poets (Pinsky, Moore, Gluck, di Piero, et al et al)

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

When I was teaching creative writing in Hong Kong last summer, I had one 4-year-old named Angeline who filled out this worksheet for me about adjectives and facial expressions. At the bottom was a space in which she drew a picture of herself in a dress with long hair and sunrays beaming at her. Beside it she wrote, "Im so shine."

Teach, Learn, Share

When I started this account, I had just finished a project called px365, in which I wrote a poem for or about a different person every day for a year (http://365poems.livejournal.com). It was humbling to think of and honor people in my life through verse. "People are poems," wrote Jacqueline Woodson.

Countries I’ve Visited

Italy, United States

Countries I’ve Lived In

China, United Kingdom, United States

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