CURRENT MISSION

learn, explore, and eat amazing food

ABOUT ME

I lived in Burbank, California for most of my life, experiencing my first big move when I left for college. I know it sounds a little pathetic, but moving to Provo was the hardest thing I had ever done. It was terrible. Close relationships with friends and family + immature, emotional teenager = extreme homesickness. I spent the first two years of college plotting my escape back to California, either through transferring to a different school or dropping out. Lucky for me, I realized how extreme those options were and decided against them. As a result, I grew up a little through that experience and I am grateful for the things I learned about myself and the opportunities I had because I went to BYU.

I ended up majoring in Microbiology, and while I was at BYU I worked for a professor doing cancer research, where I was tricked into thinking I wanted to spend the rest of my life wearing a white lab coat, protective goggles, and latex gloves. Turns out…I might not want to spend my life in a lab. As soon as I graduated college I panicked and realized I had no idea what to do next. So I stayed in Provo for about a year and just worked as a server at a restaurant. After doing that for a year I discovered 3 things:

1. People take food very seriously.

2. I hate serving people.

3. I hate people.

When I couldn’t handle the anxiety of not doing anything with my life (serving has that affect on most people), I realized I needed to make a decision about what I wanted to do for a living. After many sleepless nights, I came to a decision that I was excited about: Law school. So instead of an isolated life of lab tests and computers, I opted for an isolated life of legal paper work and computers. It wasn’t a huge breakthrough, but I liked it. So I took the lsat, applied for law school, and now I am currently living in Boston, Massachusetts, miles away from home, attending Suffolk University Law School and living off student loans.

If you have any desire to know what kind of person I am, I can do my best to try and figure that out right now (which I find somewhat strange... a person giving their own opinion about themselves. The person will either a) not give himself enough credit or b) will completely exaggerate their good qualities until the person they are describing is no longer them. In both cases you end up with a distorted version of the person…) Anyway, here it goes:

I try to be positive, but oftentimes find my cynicism overwhelming. I have a strong desire to meet new people but one of the hardest things for me to do is talk to people I don’t know. I prefer to avoid confrontation, which means I almost always end up sacrificing my own desire for the sake of someone else. This might sound terrible, until you realize that for the most part I am more concerned with other people’s feelings than my own, and in reality I really don’t have a strong opinion or care enough about what I want. So when someone says, “where do you want to eat?” and I say, “it doesn’t matter,” I really mean it doesn’t matter. (Not, I am going to pretend like I don’t care but I secretly want Mexican food. If I ever wanted Mexican food badly enough and was asked that question, I would say it. And if someone else really wanted Chinese, I wouldn’t mind compromising my need for a burrito to eat some great orange chicken). I’m not sure what that says about my personality, or if that got the point across, but now I am just hungry. I love sharing new ideas, hearing new ideas, and participating in a stimulating conversation. I like when people disagree with me. I embrace different opinions, and I actually prefer discussions where people have a different viewpoint. It takes a lot to make me upset or angry, and I hardly ever cry about things going wrong in my life. (But talk about something someone else is struggling with or put on a movie about a tragic event in a character’s life and it’s like someone shoved raw onion in my face). My friendship never expires. Kind of like a Twinkie. You can put the opened box on the shelf for months at a time, and then when you feel the craving for sweet cream surrounded by yellow, fluffy cake, I am there. My shelf life is kind of incredible. Again…don’t know why my examples revolve around food. Maybe I should eat.

I’m moving on to something easier to describe: My interests (aka-things I used to enjoy before law school). I love snowboarding, mountain biking (and when I say mountain biking, I mean I went twice last summer, bought my own bike, and haven’t been since…), music (singing and just listening—I love small venue shows with like 30 people crammed into some tiny space watching a local band perform original music), video games (Guitar Hero and Wii Mario Kart are my latest obsessions), I like cooking if it is a social thing (I rarely cook for just myself), movies, books (I read East of Eden and Atlas Shrugged last year…amazing), and a lot of other random things I could probably put down but I just realized how ridiculously long this letter has become and it’s likely you’ve stopped reading a few paragraphs back. If you really did read this whole thing, I apologize.

Interests

• books
• singing
• performing arts
• dining
• cooking
• mexican food
• movies
• video games
• reading
• music
• guitar
• cycling
• snowboarding
• boxing
• teaching
• law

Music, Movies, and Books

Movies: eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, guess who's coming to dinner, momento, love actually, the dark knight, garden state, annie hall, the graduate, pans labyrinth

Music: the anniversary, the beatles, belle & sebastian, bright eyes, cadillac blindside, cat stevens, communique, cursive, death cab for cutie, the decemberists, the get up kids, the good life, the impossibles, iron & wine, koufax, maria taylor, the mars volta, mates of state, the new amsterdams, the parson redheads, piebald, queen, rocky votolato, the shins, sigur ros, smoking popes, sufjan stevens, the weakerthans

Books: great expectations by charles dickens, the blind watchmaker by richard dawkins, east of eaden by john steinbeck, the catcher in the rye by jd salinger, candid by voltaire

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