CURRENT MISSION

My current goal is to see this great land and study this great culture and language, and also to hold down a job so the college loan people don't crush me while I'm over here. 我的目标是学习中国的文化和语言。

ABOUT ME

I'm very open-minded, friendly, and hopeful. I can also be neurotic, cynical, and altogether too eager to please, which is perhaps a good quality in a couchsurfer and a host. I'm a nerd, hippy, free spirit, and a fire rabbit (Chinese zodiac). I like to study English literature, philosophy, and critical theory. I try to use ideas to trip myself out instead of drugs, though I hold the latter method in regard, because the druggies try to do intuitively what I want to do with study and thought experiment, which is to soar to new heights and understand completely foreign systems of language and thought to my own patterns of reasoning.
I'm also a vegan, and I don't eat meat, eggs, milk, or seafood (or at least in China I try to avoid them as much as possible). I like to cook and am in the process of learning how to make dumplings, hotpot, and a various other stir-fry dishes.
我很开朗和轻松.我很喜欢念英文的文学，学中文（和别的语言），做饭，听音乐，等等。我是严格食素主义者，不吃肉，海鲜，牛奶，鸡蛋，可是最喜欢蔬菜饺子，火锅，什么的！

PHILOSOPHY

To start with, I would put myself into the experientialist and empiricist camps of philosophy. I'm a fan of Locke. Descartes and I have a more complicated relationship, I praise him when the machine seems to be working for me and curse him when it screws me.

My personal philosophy is to play the game and live each day, but if you can try to string together good contacts and build reputation and standing where you can, but if you can't, you have to let everything you think you have go and start anew somewhere else. I'm still trying to navigate those tricky winds of fortune in Qingdao, and I'm not entirely sure if I'll stay now that my job situation has gotten rocky. Essentially they think they can move me around wherever they please and I think they have another thing coming.

I don't think we're the same person each day. We have the same address sometimes and walk and talk and act a certain way, but we could just as well act and talk any other way. I try to keep things consistent enough so that I don't go insane of dissolution, but fluid enough to adapt or to pick up and completely change living circumstances when I have to.

I think that each of us only gets by with the help of his or her friends. That's why I like the idea of this site.

I don't have any particular reason for living my life. It changes every day, and I try to just live with the meaninglessness for now in hopes of finding meaning later. I'm an existentialist as well, and though it can be difficult to explain my lack of faith (especially in Chinese to my Christian friends), I get along.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

I want to offer a place to stay as well as stay in places myself, in order to see more of China than I am currently (right now I'm kind of isolated in my Qingdao residence, but I don't want to be, so this is my way of branching out).

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

About a month and a half ago I stayed with my friend's mother in Brooklyn. We had an awesome time, and she even brought me to a yoga class. I worked so hard that I hurt my back, and after that she was nervous to take me again. I think it'd be nice to take up yoga...anyways, mostly we just stayed up all night eating awesome Russian food and watching Disney movies. Sweet!

Interests

Chinese culture and languages, linguistics (Lakoff and the cognitive linguistics tradition in particular), English literature and culture (i.e. the culture of various English-speaking countries, including but not limited to America, England, and Australia), philosophy (Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, that whole thing), theory and criticism (Foucault, Deleuze, Jameson, Bourdieu, Marx of course, Althusser), Star Trek, Star Wars (so let's say sci-fi in general), watching people, hanging out with my friends, thinking, twirling strands of long hippy hair, cutting it then entering the workforce, deciding I'm frustrated with the workforce and fuck it all

• culture
• literature
• folklore
• dining
• seafood
• cooking
• vegan
• yoga
• movies
• languages

Music, Movies, and Books

Movies

Ran, Yojimbo, Star Wars (all of them, in no painstakingly critical order), Paprika, American Beauty, Fern Gully, Alice in Wonderland, Boondock Saints, Aladdin, Pulp Fiction, V for Vendetta, Lion in Winter, The Wall, The Matrix (the FIRST one, of course), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Music

Iron Maiden, Megadeth, Led Zeppelin, Alice Cooper, Pink Floyd, The Who, Yes, The Faint, FREEZEPOP!, Jesus Christ Superstar, The Beatles, System of a Down, Rammstein, Nightwish, Evita, Cake, The Shins, Imogen Heap, The Decemberists, Kimya Dawson, Phantom of the Opera, The Gypsy Kings, Ladytron, VNV Nation, Yelle, Couperin, Bach, Handel, Purcell

Books

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Paradise Lost (The first 4 books), Dante's Inferno, Remains of the Day, The Metamorphoses, The Stranger, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

I dunno, I've never really done or seen anything (or anyone) amazing. I've been to Blarney castle and kissed the Blarney stone, I dunno if it gave me the gift of gab for real. I've yet to see the biggest tourist sites in China.

Teach, Learn, Share

Well, any laowai like me slogging through China has to know a few important phrases, one is ce4suo３厕所，toilet, or, if being a bit more formal, wei4sheng1jian１ 卫生间. If you're a veggie eater like me and unsure of a strange new menu, some of the more common dishes in China are tu3dou4si1 土豆丝　(potato pieces), yun2dou4 芸豆, string beans, bai2cai4 白菜，Chinese cabbage. Also if you want to explain what you don't eat, you can say simply bu4chi1rou4不吃肉，　I don't eat meat, but you can also say bu4chi1xia1不吃虾，I don't eat shrimp (a common ingredient that peskier chefs tryin' to do you a favor will put on). I also say bu4chi1ji1dan4不吃鸡蛋，I don't eat eggs, and if you want to make it explicit that you don't want milk used, you can say bie2yong４niu2nai3别用牛奶. Often when I eat I use some combination of these phrases as needed, and once you start going to a restaurant more often and you know the people a bit better, they tend to like you more and let you know what they've actually been putting in the food these past few days they thought you were just another laowai (hah).