CURRENT MISSION

Reading books, learning more about Iranian Cinema, teaching English, writing as much as I can...

"If one were to judge by reality, then there would be no play. And without play, what would remain?" "Childhood" - Leo Tolstoy

ABOUT ME

I played college baseball, but graduated with a degree in English Literature. I like the outdoors, but also cinema. I like summer, but the winter just as much.

I think that I am pretty easy going and low maintenance, but it could be I just want to be seen that way.

I used to teach English on the internet to South Koreans so I could work and travel. I'm currently doing Master's Degree in English and work part-time at a public high school.

PHILOSOPHY

“Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking?” ...I hope I am a good person.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

Surfing & Hosting. I can host at my apartment in South Philly which is only a couple blocks away from the Subway and in a pretty good neighborhood for bars and restaurants. I have three roommates (2 girls, 1 guy) who are really nice and generous, but they have never done Couchsurfing before. So rule number 1, if you want to stay with us, is to make my roommates happy. We have a nice couch and even a spare mattress.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

Surfing, Hosting, Meetups, etc... I like to share stories about traveling and believe in the generosity of the CS community, but I'm not necessarily a free-spirit, wanderlust guy. Commitment is cool too.

Interests

Fiction is my biggest interest, almost my only interest. Why is it that something "fictional" is so important?

"...prosody and grammar as the stuff out of which we build a social world, a way of organizing meaning and time that belongs to nobody in particular but comes through us all."

"Reading, above the level of the simplest information, is an act of great inwardness and subjectivity, and this is why and how it had such a profound meaning while it did--the soul encountered itself in its response to a text, first 'Genesis' or 'Mathew' and then 'Paradise Lost' or 'Leaves of Grass'."

...something like that.

• arts
• writing
• literature
• cooking
• wine
• beer
• reading
• baseball
• teaching

Music, Movies, and Books

Music: the Mountain Goats, Wilco, Billie Holiday, Kurt Vile, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Yo La Tengo, Bob Dylan, Swearin', Sufjan Stevens, Jonathan Richman, Sheer Mag, Jens Lekman, Spoon, The Cramps, Waxahatchee, Real Estate, Joanna Newsom, Angel Olsen, Dirty Projectors, The National, The Minutemen, The Smiths, The Cure, Talking Heads, Mekons, Okkervil River, The Only Ones, The Feelies, R.E.M., Pavement, Bessie Smith, Tom Waits, Fionna Apple, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison...

Film: Eric Rohmer, Krystof Kieslowski, Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Abbas Kiarostami, Asghar Farhadi, Richard Linklater, Dariush Mehrjui, Andrei Tarkovsky, Howard Hawks, The Coen Brothers, David Lynch, Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, Billie August, Carl Theodore Dreyer, Robert Bresson, Agnes Varda, Federico Fellini, Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Noah Baumbach, John Ford, John Houston, Lars Von Trier, Jafar Panahi...

Fiction: Alice Munro, Leo Tolstoy, Marilynne Robinson, Jonathan Franzen, Ben Lerner, Valdimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Kay Ryan, Nikolai Gogol, James Joyce, Charles Dickens, John Updike, Ivan Turgenev, Aleksandr Pushkin, Jane Smiley, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie, Don Delillo, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Christina Stead, William Wordsworth, Wallace Stevens, William Butler Yeats, William Blake, Henry James, Toni Morrison, Emily Dickinson, Edith Wharton, Cormac McCarthy, Jeffrey Eugenides, Edward P. Jones...

Teach, Learn, Share

I can teach you why Baseball is so exciting (if you don't already know). I used to be an English Language teacher, so there's that as well. I can live and cook pretty cheaply, but would like to learn more ways to save!

Countries I’ve Visited

Argentina, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Slovakia, South Korea, Spain, Uruguay

Countries I’ve Lived In

Austria, United States