CURRENT MISSION

Finish graduate school without my brain exploding, be in love with the world.

ABOUT ME

Right now, the biggest thing about me is that I'm a student. I really love what I study- late medieval and Renaissance literature in England and Italy- and I hope to be able to teach in a university someday. I love teaching. I think it's a cross between theater and research, and I've always liked both of those too. I even like my students when they're being annoying and rude. I'm not sure why, but I do.

My only complaint about graduate school is that I can only study one thing. I chose the subject that let me study the widest range possible (comparative literature), but I miss math and science. I love to hear other people talk about what they study or do for a living, and especially when I don't know anything about their field.

I love words. I love reading, writing, talking, listening, using words, playing with them. Maybe it's like an art- making things worth saying by how you say them, making them worth hearing and reading. Perhaps it's about the communication too, the art of saying exactly what you want and knowing that it's understood, and of understanding what other people are saying. The people I get along with best are people who also play with words in their own ways- other academics, people who love to read, writers, people with word-based senses of humor. As a student I sometimes feel like my whole life could turn into just words and that might be OK.

I am a strange mix of sometimes shy and sometimes outgoing. I think maybe I just learned at some point that if I wanted to meet new people I had to just say hello and start a conversation, so sometimes I can be really good at that, but sometimes I just want to be quiet and not say anything. I love to laugh, though, and if I can make the people around me laugh, I won't be shy at all.

I love reading and writing, two quiet activities. I like sitting in beautiful places listening to the world, I even like listening to the world in less beautiful places. I hardly ever have headphones on because I want to know what's going on around me. I like sitting in crowded places and watching the people going by, especially if I can do it with someone else and talk about everything we see.

I tend to be very organized, and I used to have trouble when things didn't go as planned, but I've gotten much better at being flexible as I've grown up. Much of that is probably from traveling- you never know what's going to happen, and sometimes it doesn't matter. I used to hate getting lost, and now sometimes I try to get lost in new cities to find out more about them (I do some research first though so I don't get lost in dangerous parts of cities).

I am not always completely polite; I can be sarcastic and cynical. Deep down, though, I like people and I love the world. I even like my students when they're asking to turn papers in late for no good reason, but don't tell them I said that!

PHILOSOPHY

I don't know if I have a philosophy. Doesn't a philosophy have to be coherent within itself? I think that I am not always consistent about things. I think basically my philosophy might be simply to do my best. Not just in an academic sense or for activities that I do, but for trying as hard as I can to be a kind person, a good friend, a real human. I'm not religious, and I think that the most good we can do is to be good people, for ourselves and everyone else. Which means, of course, different things for different people, and sometimes perhaps even different things for me on different days.

Why I’m on Couchsurfing

HOW I PARTICIPATE IN COUCHSURFING

I've hosted one woman who told me about CS, but that was through the conference we were participating in, not through CS. Right now I can't host (housemate's not OK with the idea); I can meet up for coffee though, and maybe show people around. Iin the summer I have free time to show people around the area but during school I can't usually play guide.

COUCHSURFING EXPERIENCE

Surfed in Murcia, Spain, met some other couchsurfers as I traveled through Spain.

Interests

Literature, travel, libraries, languages, rock climbing, salsa dancing, classical music, rock music, swimming, talking, walking, seeing new things, meeting new people.

• arts
• writing
• literature
• theater
• dancing
• salsa dancing
• dining
• cooking
• cheese
• coffee
• walking
• boating
• clothing
• reading
• traveling
• origami
• music
• classical music
• rock music
• hiking
• rock climbing
• track and field
• swimming
• geology
• languages
• mathematics
• science
• tourism

Music, Movies, and Books

I have a sad failing for bad, mainstream action movies and romantic comedies. It's embarrassing to confess, but there it is! I also like foreign films; I often like modern German and Scandinavian cinema. Some of my favorite movies: Italian for Beginners, French Kiss, Love Actually, Topsy Turvy, Der Krieger und die Kaiserin...

I listen to classical music, and popular music or rock in the car. My friends introduce me to indie rock and punk. Most of the CDs I actually own are classical, most of the time I'm not listening to them. I also play classical piano. I love Brahms and Bach, have a fondness for classical guitar, like opera (love Tosca and Die Zauberflöte). I like the Beatles, the Kaiser Chiefs, Rasputina, West African drumming...

Where to start with books? I'm a medievalist/Renaissance person, so I love the Divina Commedia (Dante), the Decameron (Boccaccio), the Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), Piers Plowman (Langland), Shakespeare, the Faerie Queene (Spenser). For fun, I've recently read almost all of the Sister Fidelma mysteries (set in ancient Ireland, Tremayne), and Foucault's Pendulum (Eco). I also really like Jane Austen, Edith Wharton, Charles Dickens, and Henry James's writing, but not his actual books.

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

When I was on my junior year of college in Italy, I took a trip with a few of my friends to the Aeolian Islands (off the north-east coast of Sicily). We had been traveling in a group around Sicily with all of our teachers, and then had the option of going back to Florence with everyone, or starting our spring break in Sicily and just figuring out our own travel plans. None of us knew anything about the islands except random information we found online.

One of the other girls and I decided to sign up for a trip from Lipari, the main island, to Stromboli, another of the islands, which is basically just a big volcano with a couple tiny villages perched on the sides. The tour included the boat to and from Stromboli plus a guided hike all the way up the volcano to the top, where we would arrive slightly after sunset and be able to see the volcano erupting (it's the namesake of strombolian eruptions- periodic and not very violent- so a geologist friend later told me). The idea was that we would bring food, hike up for three hours, see the eruptions at night, and then hike back down the other side, which was mostly sandy.

I was totally out of shape. Or at least mostly out of shape. I'd walked a lot that year, but no real hiking. My friend and I brought bread, cheese, and two large bottles of water. And cameras. It was a pretty demanding hike. 1000 meters, out of shape, starting to get dark at the top. We got up to the top and it was cold too (we'd bought extra clothes at a local store because we didn't have long-sleeved shirts with us). We huddled in little stone enclosures that protected us from the wind while we ate our dinner. And then we slid/hiked back down the sandy side of the mountain, on a track maybe a foot wide with a steady drop on one side and a steady incline on the other.

It was cloudy and foggy, so all we really saw at the top was clouds occasionally vaguely lit up with reddish light.

It was fantastic.

Teach, Learn, Share

I know a bunch of languages and weird things about literature. I can tell you about how the medieval Irish are some of the coolest scholars of the medieval period in Europe. I can show you how to do modular mathematical origami. I've taught language (Italian) and would love to help people practice their English.

I like to cook, and want to learn how to cook new things. I like cooking with people, hanging out in the kitchen (my kitchen is pretty big) and laughing while we make mistakes and try to get something to work right.

I want to learn other languages, even just a little bit of them. I want to hear about places I've never been so that I can add them to my list of places I want to go. I want to learn aikido, but it's probably best to do that by actually going to a dojo.

Countries I’ve Visited

Costa Rica, France, Germany, Spain, Taiwan, United Kingdom

Countries I’ve Lived In

Italy, United Kingdom, United States