I like to connect with people, share adventures and perspectives, have fun, be chill, expand my mind, and do memorable things.

I'm mono, bi, or tri lingual, depending on your threshold. My Spanish ranges from terrible to fluent depending on the situation and my state of mind. My French is barely adequate for toy conversations, getting directions, ordering food, haggling taxi fares, convincing myself I understand the newspaper when probably I don't.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

Every new person I meet and talk to enriches my life. I live alone and want to share my life more while still being independent. I have an attractive 1bdrm apartment full of books and music, built in the 1920s in a quiet-ish corner of my city's most dynamic neighborhood. I have that rare sofa bed that's not ugly, and would like it to be of use more often than just when friends from out of town visit. I also would like to travel solo and - does this go without saying? - make connections with others and have a less generic and formal experience than with even hostels, let alone hotels. And of course save money.

Interests

I'm into photography, I have a bunch of different kinds of cameras, some display-worthy, I shoot nature, landscapes, walls, structures, shapes, dilapidated and abandoned things, people walking.

I've at other times been obsessed with ski mountaineering, backpacking, distance running, black holes, botanical taxonomy, queer theory, music, and, well, whatever, you get the idea. I don't have time for my job. So I guess I quit it, and am going to do some more travel.

• books
• photography
• marathon
• running
• reading
• traveling
• music
• guitar
• cycling
• backpacking
• mountaineering
• skiing

Music, Movies, and Books

All kinds of buzz, noise, ring, flow, screech, scratch, growl, drone, sheen, crunch, bleep, clink, hiss, thump, trip, bounce, rage, bliss, indignation, chill, laugh, cry, dance, think...hmm, words and notes too. My nostalgic music is the classic grunge from my adopted city.

Books: I went through a nonfiction phase, mainly interested in evolutionary biology, cosmology, geology, and philosophy, and then for a few years switched to literary fiction; mainly existentialist (Dostoevsky, Kafka, etc), modernist (Joyce, etc), and postmodernist, experimental, and/or non-dead-anglo-male (e.g. David Foster Wallace, Hubert Selby Jr, Zadie Smith, Mario Vargas Llosa). I've basically been a pretentious dilettante embarrassed of my podunk roots; it's all kinda beyond me and a blurry jumble in my head, but it has enriched me personally. I had a recent phase where I mostly read about music and art, and then critical theory/identity politics. Mostly just studying Spanish now.

Don't make time for many movies, but i enjoy going to film festivals and seeing films i'd never otherwise be able to see. Foreign films, feel-good indie films, weird artsy films.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

"barefoot"-shoed marathon on a gravel course

What I Can Share with Hosts

i could give more or less elementary guitar, mountaineering, language, or photography tips, offbeat/neurotic running advice, and thoughtful reading or listening suggestions

Countries I’ve Visited

Argentina, Belize, Canada, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, England, France, Gambia, Guatemala, Honduras, India, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru, Portugal, Senegal, Spain

Countries I’ve Lived In

United States