CURRENT MISSION

I care a lot about injustice and systems of oppression, and figuring out what we can do about them.

PHILOSOPHY

"If the nectar is not in the journey, where else could it possibly be?"

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

I've been on CS for a while and have made some great friends through it.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

I used to travel with the goal of seeing neat places. Now it's more about meeting interesting people who I can learn from. I can't imagine traveling (in cities at least) without CS.

One downside to traveling to connect with people is that I've lost some of my initiative for going very far from home. I believe in building relationships locally to strengthen communities, and I'm unsure of how meeting people halfway across the world is going to help change things locally... but maybe someone can teach me!

Interests

Sustainable living and community organizing. Foraging for wild food. Growing food. Home building and renovation. Bicycling. Scrap bike-building and repair. Not spending money, but supporting local businesses when I do. Local music. Live music. Dancing (square dancing, contra, clubs, zumba). Cooking. Coffee shops. Fiction and non. Film. Photography. Philosophy. Community-building. Fighting gentrification. Cooperatively-owned businesses and collectives.

Music, Movies, and Books

Music (many of these are local to Minnesota): Charlie Parr, Bob Dylan, Guided by Voices, Cloud Cult, Terracide, Children of Euler, Built to Spill, Superchunk, Modest Mouse, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Balkan Beat Box, Kronos Quartet, Skoal Kodiak, Lightning Bolt, Malachi Constant, Dark Dark Dark, The Mountain Goats, Regina Spektor, Bulgarian women's chiors, The Brass Messengers, The Great Confinement, Godspeed You Black Emperor, Fiery Furnaces, Pert Near Sandstone, campy things like The Raveonettes, '80s rock, local old-timey punk bands like Alas, Alas and Chokecherry, any live metal in a basement.

Books: Italo Calvino, Nabakov, Infinite Jest, Ray Bradbury, Margaret Atwood, Tove Jansson, zines, non-fiction on social issues, Uncle Scrooge comic books.

Movies: Mostly weird stuff that makes me think. Tarkovsky, Eric Rhomer, Wim Wenders, Hal Hartley, Peter Greenaway, David Lynch, John Sayles, Bernardo Bertolucci.

When I saw "shows", I thought it meant live music... I guess this tells how much TV I watch.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

I lived in a small town in Morocco for a year when I was 5 years old.

Teach, Learn, Share

I can teach: Moroccan and Indian cooking. Bike repair. Black and white photo developing. Lead remediation. Living cheaply. Making kraut, kombucha, ginger ale. Collective house ownership. Vegan, gluten-free, and sugar free baking.

Teach me: bread-making, plant identification, or herbal medicine? Also more building skills, and masonry (especially masonry stoves or rocket-mass heaters for home-heating), and veggie oil diesel engine conversions. And singing, dance, and drum-playing.

Countries I’ve Visited

Canada, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Mexico, Poland, Spain

Countries I’ve Lived In

Morocco, United States