Rants and Ramblings

Yet another ex professional computer geek gone off in search of meaningful work. Currently that's turning out to be neurobiology / computational biochemistry / biomechanics, but some of the tangents seem to confuse most other people. Sometimes I need to stop and check my compass, too.

I'm no longer living on a housebarge in Seattle, but I miss it! I'm still spending most of my time in the lab or doing martial arts. (In fact, I rarely see anyone unless I am doing research or martial arts with them. I have very little of what most people would call a life - but I like my life.) I moved to Cleveland, OH in 2007 and am pursuing a PhD in... Biology. (Weird, huh? Neurobiology and biomechanics in particular, right now. I'm starting to think that I'm actually a systems biologist, I just want to do the grand tour.) This has put me at a great distance from my martial arts communities in Seattle, but I'm continuing to practice Chen Taiji and Shaolin Gongfu, am teaching Chen classes at the zendo where I live and head back to Seattle to train twice a year or so.

If you know that I'm geeky, poly, bi and came of age in the Seattle area pagan community, you probably have a reasonable idea of my social circles. However, I'm a slowpoke and too busy to date much, I'm mostly non-theistic, and my primary spiritual practices involve a lot of martial arts, a lot of sitting, not to mention math, washing dishes and paying attention. I'm a member of a Chan Buddhist order, though my primary martial art is Daoist (and I live in a zendo affiliated with a different Zen group). I have dabbled heavily in food writing, gardening, and fiber art, and I've been several kinds of teacher. I ride a recumbent bicycle. I study mycology, mostly as a hobby, but with more lab time than most hobbyists. My undergrad work was mostly in Chinese language and literature and international political economics. When I can find the time, I like to go hiking and foraging for wild plants and mushrooms. If you ask me about any of this, I'll likely tell you. Take care.

At one point corivax requested that I write a (humorous) care and feeding manual for myself. It is here. (Perhaps I should update this. Though except for some changes in dietary preferences, it mostly still holds true.)

I'm sometimes working on a food project wherein I'm trying to write out one quick and healthy (and generally seasonal and vegan) recipe a week (er... or as time permits, though I'd like to up the frequency again) as well as more general babble about food. If you poke around there you can find my general recipe index, too, some of which have less socially redeeming value.

My LJ reading habits vary a lot. Sometimes I check LJ every ten minutes and read everything (usually if I'm in the lab, waiting on something) other times I skim my whole friends list for about five minutes once a day. If I haven't been responding to your posts, it's fairly likely it's because I haven't really seen them. If there's something important I should see, drop me email.

I'm pretty liberal about friending people who have friended me -- though if we don't obviously have friends in common, I really appreciate it if people drop me a note just to mention how they ended up here. I post a mix of public and filtered posts, some of the filters are conditionally opt in. I also post regularly about the status of my body, as I've had some fairly major spine injuries that I'm attempting to keep quiescent through an exercise regimen that includes my martial arts practice. Oh, did I mention the obsession with biomechanics? (Everyone's biomechanics. I try very hard not to treat people as research subjects without their consent, though.)

I run the communities fgp -- Freaks and Geeks in the Peaks, a small hiking club for people who are most comfortable hiking with their fellow weirdoes, psma, the Puget Sound Martial Artist community, and bphaf the Body Positive Health and Fitness Community. If these sound right, you ought to join them.