Mountain biking, hiking, surfing, scuba diving, sailing,...oh wait, do you mean here in Baton Rouge? Oh. Uh, drinking, sleeping, eating, pining, reading, playing boccé, playing chess, chilling, expounding, waxing philosophic, waxing poetic. Ha ha, I amuse myself thus. I'm also interested in developmental biology, medical issues, world events, domestic politics, the Spanish and French languages, books, movies, travel, anti-consumerism, and a few other things...
I'd like to meet:
...the Nobel Committee, to thank them for selecting me. Also, my better self. Also, fun people who like to do the following: read, think, argue, learn, smoke, drink, bare-knuckle brawl, throw bocce balls, ponder the issues of our strange times, appreciate the things (health, love, friendship) they have, try to improve the world in small ways, and enjoy life.
Music:
The Flaming Lips, the Magnetic Fields, Josh Rouse, Elliot Smith, the White Stripes, Rufus Wainwright, David Bowie, the Police, Sting, Beck, Radiohead, the Cure, the Cars, Modest Mouse, Lucinda Williams, Sheryl Crow, Natalie Merchant, Jimi Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, the Misfits, Flo & Eddie, the Turtles (they don't suck, really!), Tarnation, Tom Waits, the Eurythmics, Bob Dylan, Tracy Chapman, REM, the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, the Cowboy Junkies, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Sufjan Stevens, Peter Gabriel, Andres Segovia, the Gypsy Kings, Depeche Mode, Duran Duran, a few more guilty pleasures (I have a crush on Kelly Clarkson- is that so wrong?), some Baroque classical, and a lot more music than I can remember.
Movies:
Wonder Boys, Stand By Me, The Big Lebowski, The Ring, The Seventh Seal, Dead Man, Down By Law, Mulholland Drive, Next Stop Wonderland, Office Space, Riding Giants, Searching for Tom Curren, Elizabeth, The Shipping News, An American Werewolf in London, The Royal Tannenbaums, Rushmore, Igby Goes Down, some pretentious art-house titles that don't come to mind right now...
Television:
The Colbert Report and The Daily Show are funny, and there are a lot of educational things worth watching, like a lot of what's on PBS and the Discovery Channel, but I only get to watch any of those when I'm at other peoples' houses. Except for DVD's, I don't watch TV at home- as far as I'm concerned the whole enterprise of television can go straight to hell.
Books:
The Big Sleep (Raymond Chandler), Strange Pilgrims (Gabriel Garcia Marquez), The Periodic Table (Primo Levi), Ravelstein (Saul Bellow), Sir Vidia's Shadow (Paul Theroux), The Gulag Archipelago (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn), An Anthropologist on Mars (Oliver Sacks), The Myth of Sisyphus (Albert Camus), any issue of the Paris Review, and here are a few favorite poets: Philip Levine, Louis MacNiece, John Berryman, William Blake.
Heroes:
Paul Anbinder, my friend and former employer from when I worked for his small publishing company in NYC; Todd Newberry, one of my professors at UCSC; all the whistleblowers, mavericks and nonconformists who go against the flow because their consciences demand it (just as long as that doesn't mean sniping doctors in their cars, blowing up Planned Parenthood clinics, being a suicide bomber, etc.)
