CURRENT MISSION

Baltic rambling

ABOUT ME

My own flattering assessment of myself would be, I'm empathetic to a fault and a social chameleon that enjoys contact with people that challenge me. I'm pretty zen without much spiritual discipline and like to flirt with heady religious ideas without daring to hope for salvation. I make up for my northern european standards in small talk with a piercing wit and sarcasm. My favourite thing is working through something that is entirely novel and surprising to me, or that speaks to the spirit of the location, like shooting shotguns with fundamentalists, or trying to remain polite as a vegetarian at college football tailgaiting party. I like ridiculously emotional music and slow modes of transportation and coming up with impossible ideas of internet startups. I also teach and produce anthropology at a local university, currently writing a thesis on Texas.

PHILOSOPHY

I'm going to put here a boasty quote from Michel Foucault:

"I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end. My field is the history of thought. Man (sic) is a thinking being."

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

I've enjoyed the hospitality kindly offered by people through couchsurfing in China, Nepal, India, Mongolia, Russia and Spain, and always had a great time. I have offered my couch in Oxford and Berlin when I lived there.

Interests

I could on about the usual, pretentious photography, independent film, obscure books and music, cycling, fairly unsuccessful cooking. Friday comedy from Radio 4. Perhaps more distinctively, I love to scroll through news headlines looking for the unusual. Stories about people without identities appearing in cities, cows running away from their owners into the wild, stories about national differences in caring for lawns or discoveries made from margins in second-hand books. Narratives that don't fit the news format but are somehow revealing still. I like odd marketplaces, like car boot sales, free shops in squats or spontaneous street offerings. I enjoy looking at facebook pictures of social occasions trying to look away from people's faces and expressions and into the surroundings, trying to figure out what was going on. Though I probably should spend less time looking at pictures on facebook. I come up with ideas for websites quite a lot and generally am more successful in thinking about them rather than actually making them. I like to purchase postcards from every museum or destination I go to and carry a rather ridiculous stack of them around whenever I move to a new place. I like travelling alone, and at times I hate it too. I like to purchase stationary, notebooks and fancy pens. The pens I quickly lose and the notebooks fill up with the wrong things and I want to have new ones.

• writing
• books
• photography
• make up
• cooking
• vegetarian
• dieting
• running
• partying
• news
• traveling
• music
• cycling
• hunting
• skiing
• soccer
• anthropology
• history
• beaches

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Stars on Zanzibar beach. Cross-country skiing on the ice of a lake on the first day of spring. Writing a paper that was cited both in the Guardian and the Daily Mail. Sleeping in a Gandhian community next to a belching brahmin. Surviving a period of squatting in east london and a diet of largely hare krishna hand-outs. Understanding both object-oriented programming and object-oriented philosophy. Taking other people seriously.

Teach, Learn, Share

I'm happy to cook vegetarian things. I can't say that I'm a master in any particular type of cuisine, but I can make some Finnish traditional things with a fusion twist, like split pea soup with wasabi and a hint of lemon. I've also perfected the skill of finding PDFs of books in the Internet. Not sure if I should mention that.

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