Karja profile picture

Karja

I ski to crash.

About Me


I'm your huckleberry.
Home from a night of walking the warm rainy December streets of the east in my boots of the west to find glitter amid the dirt on the heels.
I climb mountains, and then jump off of them.
I wear chacos and crocs out of a utilitarian rather than aesthetic sense - my roll is tighter than your little sister and I can tie a flying bowline while keeled over 70 degrees.
I'm currently studying for my B.S. in Architecture and Environmental Design, and getting ahead of the game on an Urban Planning master, with every serious intention of designing the first Mars colony.
Don't laugh, I'm serious.
In the meantime I'm more than happy taking nothing too seriously and having more fun than your mom on a Friday night doing so.
I currently live in a work-in-progress 100 year old west-downtown Balti rowhome with my younger sister, a bike riding, food slinging irishman, a physics major who likes to leave messages on the kitchen table in neatly trimmed tinfoil letters, a wolf-husky mix and a great dane.
I cherish height - be it mountains, buildings or men. I grok the architectural attraction felt by Poliphilo and Howard Roark.
I was a journalist for nearly 4 years and I'd have felt less disgusted with myself if I'd just kept modeling.
My opinions on Tabasco sauce, the Pacific Northwest, suburban sprawl, fake watermelon flavor, the trig unit circle and extrasolar colonization are pretty much solid - all else is subject to violent fluidity when in the presence of intelligence.
Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistence.
You must be the change you want to see in the world.
This confession has meant nothing.
Travel:
Road trip: visit all the current and up and coming whitewater course parks in the lower 48, write the next great american novel, whose syntax will operate as a verbal retrovirus - precipitating a leap in mental evolution.
Competition:
25th Speight's Coast to Coast
A grueling 243 km from the Tasman Sea on the west coast of New Zealand's South Island, across the Southern Alpine by foot, bike and kayak to the Pacific Coast near Christchurch - in under 16 hours. This early February race is the benchmark by which all others are measured.
While there I will also be continuing my study on outdoor and extreme sports' positive impact on society and culture, and the need to re-integrate it into our everyday urban environments and lives. Oh, and doing lots of kayak surfing.

My Interests

Times which are either cold stone mellow or hyped.

Calling my boat a Yacht when talking to people who haven't seen my boat.

Getting hopped up on cereal.

I'd like to meet:


Everyone. All at once.

People who refer to themselves or others as "dapper."

People with passion and ambition - preferably for things I could also get excited about. But who don't let them stop them from having fun - or better yet - have fun following those passions and ambitions.

The man who can perfectly rock a pink shirt with a popped collar and a faux/mo-hawk. This includes not being a (complete) asshole. The ability to rock a full beard is a plus.

People who take chips on their sandwiches.

Someone to rent the fifth room in my house - it finally has a ceiling and I patched that hole to hell in the wall that I found after ripping out the door to nowhere. Really, its a great room though, nice view, you should pay me to live there.

Anyone who's up to learn how to kiteboard ... in the Baltimore Harbor.

Time travelers.

Those with more to say than "Hi! we should talk," or perhaps the only slightly less common, "We should get naked and watch each other get off," or those with the ability to actually spell out "you" and "your," as well as differentiate correctly between "your" and "you're."

As with everything in life - be engaging, make an effort, or don't bother.

Music:

ACDC, Andre 3000, Arctic Monkeys, At The Drive In, Blink, Bloodhound Gang, Brand New, Cars, Clumsy Lovers, Color Gray, Cowboy Mouth, Cheap Trick, Common Rider, Deftones, Don McClean, Double Dagger, Fatboy Slim, Flogging Molly, Fall Out Boy, Frank Zappa, Gogol Bordello, Gordon LIghtfoot, Gorillaz, Hum, Imogen Heap, James Brown, Joy Division, Less Than Jake, Lucero, Mama Cass, Materials, Matisyahu, Mars Volta, Millencolin, Misfits, Morissey, Mos Def, Murder City Devils, New Pornographers, Nurses, OAR, Op Ivy, Paul Anka, Phil Collins, Pixies, Placebo, Postal Service, Primus, Prodigy, QOTSA, Rammstein, RHC, Roots, Run DMC, Save Ferris, Sev, Sigur Ros, Smiths, Sneaker Pimps, Soul Coughing, Stevie Nicks, Ten Foot Pole, Tenacious D, Toasters, Tom Waits, Transplants, White Stripes, White Zombie, Zep.

Movies:

39 Pounds of Love, 2001, Abyss, American Psycho, Blade Runner, Boondock Saints, Clockwork Orange, Contact, Dark City, Dune (sci-fi versions), GATTACA, Garden State, Guitar Wolf, I [heart] Huckabees, Office Space, Sin City, Starship Troopers, The Kayak Roll, Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, Total Recall, V for Vendetta, Wedding Crashers.

Television:

That dusty box in the corner? I threw a brick through it last time I watched the evening news and haven't missed it yet. I do download Battlestar Galactica, John Stewart and Lost from iTunes though, and have Simpsons, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and Sea Lab 2021 on DVD. This also leads to me frequenting pubs to catch ESL games, but thats OK as football calls for a pint anyhow.

Books:

Favorites: Adam's Hitchhikers Guide, Asimov's Foundation series, Card's Ender books, anything Clarke, Diamond's Collapse, Duany, Plater-Zyberk and Speck's Suburban Nation, Hamilton's Mythology, Hawking's A Brief History of Time, anything Heinlein, Herbert's Dune series, Kerrane and Yagota's Art of Fact, Kynoch's Teach Yourself Doric, The Mabinogion, Niven's Ringworld, Orwell's 1984, Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead, Reynold's Revelation Space, GB Shaw's Misalliance, Sturluson's Edda, Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, Zahn's Icarus Hunt
Currently Reading: Blish's Cities in Flight, Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals, Lonely Planet's Australia and New Zealand, Glennon's Water Follies, Funes' Sustainable Agriculture and Resistance.

Heroes:

Ami Ankilewitz, Anaxagoras, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Leonardo da Vinci, Andres Duany, Albert Einstein, Harlan Ellison, Galileo Galilei, Alexandra Hansen, Stephen Hawking (doubly so), Hippodamus, Owen Meany, Friedrich Nietzsche, Chris Onstad, Jeff Speck, Zarathustra, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.

My Blog

http://karja.teracityspace.com

if you're really that interested. You're not, really, are you? marginally updated, jam packed with rubbish. I make no claims otherwise.
Posted by Karja on Fri, 26 May 2006 08:48:00 PST