CURRENT MISSION

To collect 'fragments, splinters, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul' (Henry Miller)

PHILOSOPHY

My goal in life is to experience everything. It's an absurd, impossible philosophy, but I respond better to absurd and to impossible than I do to anything else.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

I've stayed on my fair share of couches in the past few years, but only those of friends (or friends of friends). I haven't done any official couchsurfing yet.

Interests

Most of what I'm interested in leads back somehow to stories, literature, language, and people. I'm in university studying literature; my research is primarily in modern and postmodern literature, especially post-World War I American. I have minor obsessions with cities, etymology, semantics, punctuation, typography, design, architecture, politics, and, of course, traveling.

• books
• literature
• architecture
• design
• politics
• traveling
• teaching
• etymology

Music, Movies, and Books

Bringing up any one of these three topics warrants my launching into a lengthy discussion. I love all three of these things.

Movies: Big Fish; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; La Scaphandre et le Papillon; The Reader; Amelie; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Matilda; Closer; Donnie Darko; Requiem for a Dream; Fight Club; Y Tu Mama Tambien; Saved!; etc etc

Music: The National; Yeasayer; Phoenix; Margot and the Nuclear So and So's; Sufjan Stevens; Andrew Bird; Stars; Voxtrot; The Decemberists; The Shins; etc etc

Books: One Hundred Years of Solitude (Garcia Marquez); Lolita (Nabokov); White Noise (DeLillo); Tropic of Cancer (Miller); Absalom, Absalom! (Faulkner); Everything is Illuminated (Foer); The Time-Travelers Wife (Niffeneger); Slaughterhouse-Five (Vennegut); The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Kundera); Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (Albee); "Howl" (Ginsberg); anything by T.S. Eliot; "For Esme--With Love and Squalor" (Salinger); etc etc

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

The day I arrived in Montreal (we got off the train around 8 pm and stepped out of the Metro station by 9) was the same day a protest ended violently and most of rue Sherbrooke was covered in broken glass. It wasn't the way I expected my first time out of the US to begin, but it was memorable, and that's enough for me.

My trip to Montreal was the first time I'd traveled alone, the first time I'd taken a train (and I'm quick to romanticize train travel), the first time I'd left the United States, and the first time I'd be able to use my French in a native setting. Needless to say, those nine days in Canada completely changed the way I thought about traveling and solidified in me the obsessive impulse to see new places and meet new people.

Teach, Learn, Share

"'It's amazing how many people teach these days,' I said. 'There is a teacher for every person. Everyone I know is either a teacher or a student. What do you think it means?'" - Don DeLillo, "White Noise"

"I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it: we must search for fragments, splinters, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and soul." - Henry Miller, "Tropic of Cancer"

Countries I’ve Visited

Canada, United States

Countries I’ve Lived In

United States