W/O: 20 or more facts about me.
Apr 06 '03 (Updated Jun 28 '03)
The Bottom Line read the frigging article ...
Thanks to "corpgent" for giving us all permission to go on about ourselves! Here, then, are the 20 most important facts about me, in declining order of likely interest to anyone else ...
1. I'm a gay man, but you probably wouldn't know by meeting me, and I have no attraction to Global Gay Culture. To get my attention, talk about literature and geography, my two obsessions dating back to childhood (others came later).
2. I like to think of my age not as halfway to 82, but as 1/3 of the way to 123.
3. I'm single at the moment, eligible but not desperate.
4. I don't know where I'm supposed to live, but it's somewhere in the Pacific Time Zone or maybe SE Australia or possibly southern France. I want to provisionally settle this in the next year. For the moment, I'm in San Francisco.
5. Environmentalism is the core value that drives my political and professional work.
6. Friends are used to my fatalistic streak, and my ability to make fun of it. The first movie I remember seeing was "2001: A Space Odyssey" at age seven, and I remember the end of this film even more vividly than its famous beginning. My 2001 New Years letter was called "Now Exiting the American Century: Open the Airlock, Hal!" My 2002 New Years letter was called "2001: Skip the Year; See the Movie." I was too depressed at New Years 2003 to write a letter.
7. I marched in Vietnam war protests at age 6. I marched again in 2003. I tend not to be a loud marcher ... just a body for the count and an observer of these great cultural events.
8. I always vote, even for the lesser of two evils.
9. I am capable of tremendous personal loyalty, though this trait is rarely called upon.
10. I have a BA in Mathematics, a PhD in theatre and humanities, and a career in city planning. The PhD is from Stanford, 1984-96, a special 12-year plan for the indecisive. It is especially decorative, though I think it may have fallen behind the couch again.
11. I would rather read the book than see the movie. See my profile page for the kind of literature that moves me.
12. I am 6'5, 225 lb, and recently started shaving my head.
13. The happiest six months of my childhood were spent living close to a community of what we would now call hippies, in 1968. They all loved me in a way that a healthy family loves its child. None of my more nuclear family experiences has been anywhere near as joyous, though I am far beyond blaming anyone.
14. My mother, only 20 years older than I, is a very close friend. (Not that I recommend having kids at 20.)
15. What does "Urbanist" mean? I believe in cities as centers of civilization. I also respect sustainable rural lifestyles and treasure wilderness. Suburbs, on the other hand ...
16. Like most aware and empathic people, I'm frequently depressed. I like to claim that "if you're not depressed or angry, you're not paying attention." But the depression is partly a chemical thing, and I have no reluctance about taking the necessary pills. Writing the series of travel articles called "How to Be Depressed In ..." has also been fun, though I have no illusions about their ultimate shallowness.
17. I believe there are no coincidences.
18. I'm theoretically writing a book about public transportation (my professional specialty) for interested citizens, activists, and people in related fields. Basically, the idea is to demystify what James Howard Kunstler called "the manifest complexities of public transportation" by getting back to first principles. The thesis is that the building blocks of good public transportation are not hard to understand, though a few are counterintuitive and therefore frequently misunderstood.
19. I miss academia. I taught public transit planning at UC Berkeley for one semester, and had great fun. I miss the constant, maddening, challenging company of people who are smarter than I am.
20. The glass is half empty. But I keep refilling it.
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Epinions.com ID:
Urbanist
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Location: San Francisco
Reviews written: 78
Trusted by: 72 members
About Me:
Streetwise, academically credentialed gay renaissance man. For real bio, click "more" in profile.
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