About

Who am I?

I am me.

I like riding mountain bikes. I enjoy hiking too, and walks… if it involves trails and forests, I like it. Even if it’s raining. I also like fibre art, staring at my phone, and reading books that aren’t boring.

I think it’s okay to just like things. We don’t have to be excited about everything. It’s okay to dislike things too; life isn’t meant to be a highlight reel.

Here are some random lists of things that I like enough to call favourites:

TV shows, in order:

• Twin Peaks: the original and the return
• Three’s Company
• Firefly
• Game of Thrones
• The Daily Show

Movies, in order:

• Inglorious Basterds (2009)
• The Darjeeling Limited
• Mr. Blandings Builds His Dreamhouse
• Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
• The Women (1939)
• FUBAR II
• Game of Thrones, Season 8, Episode 3: The Battle of Winterfell

Rush songs, NOT in order:

• Hemispheres
• Fly By Night
• Working Man
• Anthem
• Circumstances
• La Villa Strangiato
• Different Strings
• Tow Sawyer
• YYZ
• Limelight
• Subdivisions
• The Weapon
• Afterimage
• Red Sector A
• The Pass
• Test for Echo
• Driven
• One Little Victory
• Digital Man
• New World Man
• Time and Motion
• The Main Monkey Business
• Malignant Narcissism
• Caravan
• Seven Cities of Gold
• Here Again
• Between the Wheels
• The Big Money
• Losing it
• Best I can

Fact-ish: If you play the above songs in random order while you are working/writing, you will increase your productivity by at least 200%.

Writing that I like equally, and read again and again:

• If This is a Woman, by Sarah Helm
• Life After God, by Douglas Coupland
• Warriors of the Rainbow, by Robert Hunter
• Everything in A Song of Ice and Fire, by George RR Martin
• On the Shores of Darkness, There is Light, by Cordelia Strube
• And for my fellow satire fans:
  • Everything David Thorne has ever published.
  • Everything Samantha Irby has ever published.

Animals, in order:

• Cats
• Dogs
• Dragons
• Pigs
• Jumping spiders

I like to take pictures.

Someday I hope to write biographies and memoirs. Not mine, but yours.

But who am I, really?

Broadly, I’m an overthinker, a skeptic, a self-doubter, and a procrastinator. Yet I possess modest amounts of talent, intelligence and hope and, somehow I usually accomplish things with a degree of proficiency and generally recognize when opportunities present themselves. For that, and a bunch of statistical odds that I’ll never wrap my head around, I am still alive after a few decades. Who knows? I may even be thriving.

Gratefully, I find myself managing through life in generally good spirits, and just sort of making things up as I go along. I think that is what most of us do.

I have some deeply grounded convictions, but I don’t have a religion, nor do I want one. I’m also not an atheist. It’s okay with me if you have a religion, especially if you never force it on others nor use it to justify hurting anyone.

On those occasions when I need to spiritually recalibrate, I spend a minute reflecting on Max Ehrmann’s Disiderata. It does the trick.

Speaking of compasses (weren’t we?), here is a random piece of me-trivia: I have all four forms of spatial-sequence synethesia. It’s a mostly useless super power that ensures April is pink, Saturday is to the Northwest, 1986 is behind me slightly curved to the left, and that my day/month/year recall for past events is instinctive. On the slightly more useful side, it’s helpful for document composition and information categorization, which is convenient because I write for a living.