CURRENT MISSION

Writing, traveling, exploring Seoul and Korea, making a lot of mistakes in Korean.

ABOUT ME

'I guess I heard about original sin. I heard the dude blamed the chick. I heard the chick blamed the snake. And I heard they were naked when they got busted. And I heard things ain't been the same since.'

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

Now that I'm settled, doing my best to pay back all the hospitality and love I was shown while I was on the road.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

Yet to have a bad one.

Interests

Reading, writing, travel, AS Roma, Forward Madison FC, FC Seoul, soccer, baseball, secular humanism, style, religions, music, the New Yorker, social justice, being thorough, Italy, Korea, Burma, international news, shrugging my shoulders in befuddlement at social conservatives, popular uprisings, countries with long histories of political instability, cooking, public spaces, urban planning, the postal system, public transportation, fiscal irresponsibility, rotary phones, understatement, wit, reticence

• writing
• cooking
• news
• reading
• traveling
• music
• baseball
• soccer
• religion

Music, Movies, and Books

BOOKS:
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez, Centuria: 100 Ouroboric Novels - Giorgio Manganelli, How to Be Alone - Jonathan Franzen; Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson, Migrations - Sebastião Salgado, Dreamtigers - Jorge Luis Borges, Homage to Catalonia - George Orwell, Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay - Michael Chabon, Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World - Haruki Murakami, Italo Calvino's short story 'All at One Point', John Haskell's short story 'Good World', The Best American Nonrequired Reading series, The Best American Travel Writing series

MUSIC:
The Walkmen, Radiohead, The Quiett, The Brilliant Green, Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Spoon, The National, Bon Iver, Bob Dylan, MIA, The Hold Steady!, Thievery Corporation, The Roots, Mos Def, Wilco, Federico Aubele, The Clash, The Very Best, Jeff Buckley, British Sea Power, Manu Chao, St. Germain, Jorge Ben Jor, Beth Orton, Sam Cooke, TV on the Radio, Gogol Bordello, Shorty Cat, The Knife, Korean hip-hop, 50's and 60's r&b

MOVIES:
A Night at the Opera, Death Race 2000

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Slept under the stars in the Egyptian desert; watched the Arirang Mass Games in Pyongyang; saw the sunrise off the coast of Venice; helped slaughter a buffalo, got detained by the border police, and was chased out of a Red Dzao wedding (through no fault of my own, mind you) in the course of a day in Vietnam.

Countries I’ve Visited

Armenia, Austria, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, China, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, Morocco, Myanmar, Netherlands, North Korea, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, Vatican City State, Viet Nam

Countries I’ve Lived In

Australia, Italy, New Zealand, South Korea, United States

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