Hey y'all!

Basically, I'm half shy dork and half outgoing dancer. My job makes me more into the shy dork, so that's where this profile is coming from right now.

THE FACTS

- I moved to Alabama from Ohio when I was 13
- Lived in Germany for a year when I was 17
- Studied Anthropology, Psychology, and a touch of filmmaking for my Bachelors degree
- Moved to Atlanta for grad school
- Studied user experience, locomotion, wearable technology and video editing for my Masters degree
- Working at a therapeutic game development company

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

I've been couching and surfing swing dancers since around 2007, which is before I even knew about couchsurfing.com! I love making people feel at home and I love seeing how other people decorate their homes and generally how people live.

But lately I've been really busy with work, so my place isn't the coziest and I don't have much time to show people around. I want to offer my couch and cot because I know how expensive hotels are and I want to help people out. Unfortunately, I can't really offer much more than a place to crash!

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

I didn't know there was a word for it at the time, but as a swing dancer I've couchsurfed on many the floor/couch of other dancers in foreign cities. We all go out dancing, come back and crash. It's exhausting and wonderful.

My official couchsurfing experience started on my 27th birthday - Aug 1st, 2011. It was a beautiful, sunny German day at the Schwetzingen castle. I was visiting my sister for an undetermined amount of time and was in desperate need of non-family socializing. Unfortunately, I still had to babysit my 12 yr old niece, but the couchsurfing couple I met was totally cool with it. We had lunch, they gave me a present (!!!!!), took me to a theme park, invited me over for dinner and spent every single day with them from that moment onward, as long as I was in the country. I wasn't planning to spend much time in that small village which doesn't have much going for it, but with my new surfer friends I found myself hesitating to leave, planning a detour to join them in Hamburg, and returning to Schwetzingen much sooner! Now they're visiting me this summer, 2012!

I have also lived with 3 different host families when I spent a high school year in Germany.

Interests

Everything about people - their relationships, muscles, bones, brains, cultures, likes, dislikes, motives...

Also filmmaking, assistive technology, virtual reality, sewing, and dancing (tango, swing, and blues). Pleeeease tell me where I can dance!

• design
• film making
• dancing
• tango
• technology
• socializing
• blues
• surfing
• boxing
• anthropology
• psychology

Music, Movies, and Books

Movies: Amelie, Son of Rambow, White (a.k.a. Blanc), Pirate Radio, Kill Bill, Amadeus, Hum dil de Chuke Sanam, Little Otik

Authors: Malcolm Gladwell, Franz de Waal, Agatha Christie, Stephen King, Helen Fisher

Podcasts: RadioLab, Freakonomics, Savage Love

Music: The Gotan Project, April Smith and the Great Picture Show, Elephant Revival (thanks to a great couchsurfing experience!), Greg Patillo

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Schnitzel in Schwetzingen
Gesticulationarily learning how to roll cigarettes from an old Danish man in a blues bar in Copenhagen
Falling to my virtual death from the top of a castle in a "VisCube" (a giant virtual reality box).

Teach, Learn, Share

I've given a presentation on love hormones, joined the FBI for a body excavation and bomb site analysis training day, lived in Germany for a year, been a massage therapist for 8, poked and prodded skulls with a 3D scanner, and am currently trying to learn about technological stuffs so I can be involved with making cool shit. I'm not sure what yet.

*That was written in 2011. I'm currently a game designer for therapeutic "virtual reality" games.

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