CURRENT MISSION

to constantly shatter and constantly recreate my vision of the world

ABOUT ME

I am an American child who has to do adult stuff now so I spend my time studying the imagination.

I like people and experiences that I am not familiar with, which remind me both of my connection to everything else and my inability to fully understand any single thing, including my own relationship with the world around me.

PHILOSOPHY

The world is interesting to me largely because it is surprising. Surprises appear when you seek them - by travelling, for instance - but also when you seem to be avoiding them. I value routine and contentment, but largely because I think they provide an apparently stable setting in which surprises arise and are all the more wondrous because they were uninvited.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

I've never Couchsurfed before...but I'm excited to start.

Interests

Academics: Language, literature, history, philosophy, chaos!
Music: I mostly sing, but also like playing piano, drums, and guitar. Songwriting with piano or guitar. Listening to and sharing music in general.
Creative: Mostly language...I write songs, poems, prose poems, and strange "diary entries" which quickly collapse into rambling that could be about anyone

I also love the outdoors. Hiking in hills and mountains is great but I also like deserts, plains, and wide-open flat spaces in general. I love these places for their own merits but also love the relationship between nature and imagination, and I think spending time in the natural world allows us to understand civilization and history in fresh and exciting ways.

Other than those big things, I'd say my other "main" interest is travel. Most of this has happened in Northern California, the extremely beautiful and diverse place where I was lucky enough to grow up. Unfortunately, I haven't had the chance to travel much outside of the United States, although I will be going to Europe for the first time this summer. But I am very eager to travel to other regions as well, learn other languages, and meet many different sorts of people. I'm interested in visiting historic cities like Vienna, Jerusaelm, and Tokyo but also want to travel in more rural areas, to see sorts of life that I have had very little contact with.

Oh, I also love badminton, the best-looking sport on the planet.

• literature
• poetry
• singing
• walking
• traveling
• music
• guitar
• piano
• trumpet
• drums
• outdoor activities
• hiking
• sports
• badminton
• history
• languages
• mountains

Music, Movies, and Books

Music: '50s-'60s Jazz (Bill Evans, Chet Baker, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins)
Emo/pop-punk (Taking Back Sunday, Brand New, Sunny Day Real Estate, Blink-182, Weezer)
Ambient/Electronic (Aphex Twin, Stars of the Lid, Boards of Canada)
Classic Rock (Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath)
Grunge (Nirvana, Soundgarden)
I also really like music at Jewish services and events, at the synagogue from my childhood but also from the others I've attended.
...my music taste is somewhat random but the point is I'm open-minded to pretty much anything!

Movies...It's hard to pick favorites but I'll list some recent favorites: Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" "City Lights" and "The Gold Rush"; John Ford's "The Searchers"; "Gone With the Wind"; "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind"; the original Star Wars trilogy; Alfred Hitchcock movies...I like old romantic comedies and westerns.

Books:
Tolstoy's War and Peace, Melville's Moby Dick, and Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment are probably my favorite novels. I also like detective novels by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.
English/American poetry (John Milton, Samuel Coleridge, and Wallace Stevens are probably my favorite poets.)
Epics (The Odyssey, Paradise Lost)
I also like history! Especially Medieval European and Russian history.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

Seen: The Lost Coast in northern California.

Done: improvising music with two boys (ages 8 and 11) I babysat last summer. Neither of them had ever jammed and the younger one had never even taken formal music lessons but we played for hours sometimes on piano, guitar, trumpet, and drums that we made out of pots and buckets.

The experience was really incredible because the three of us were all of such drastically different musical abilities and yet it still made something that was both enjoyable to listen to and sentimental to create. There was no sense that anyone was evaluating anyone else, but only that we were all contributing whatever we could to create something unique and important.

Teach, Learn, Share

One of my favorite things to do is beatbox. I do it all the time walking around. I think that people assume that it's something you have to practice a lot to be any good at, but I think it can be really fun and even humorous without too much effort. I really like singing while I beatbox to try to make a little "band" out of my mouth. There's a lot of pretty simple sounds that can be learned very easily that allow someone to beatbox on their own or with other people. I think I could teach these to someone pretty easily. I can say from experience that beatboxing frequently actually helps a lot with understanding rhythms and even with composing music!

Countries I’ve Visited

United States

Countries I’ve Lived In

United States