About Me
Since I'm new around here, I thought I'd post a little bit about myself.
I live-as I have for almost my entire adult life-in the city of San Francisco, a place as frustrating as it is beautiful. I live with my partner of 22 years; we celebrated our anniversary just a few nights ago. I'm 41 and he's 39, so you can do the math and figure out we were young and crazy when we got together. Ours is that rare teenage romance that lasts, and I hope it does for the rest of our days.
Also, it turned out that the 1980's were an excellent time to fall into a committed, monogamous relationship as young gay men (boys?) in an urban area. We saw people die like flies; we dodged the bullet.
I work in politics, and we'll leave it at that; I'm having one of those midlife crises where I'm 41 and trying to decide what I want to do when I grow up, and I doubt it'll be what I'm doing now. At some point, I promised myself I wouldn't become that midlife crisis guy but I did. On the other hand, I promised myself I wouldn't go bald, and that worked out fine. And my midlife crisis hasn't resulted in the buying of a sports car with a low center of gravity that makes me look like that midlife crisis guy, so I think I'm ahead of the game.
My partner works as a senior manager for a Very High Profile Silicon Valley company. I went to college (and more college, and more college) and he didn't. He makes a good deal more money than I do. So just in case you're wondering if the universe is fair: no, no it's not. I'm an active investor, and I surely make more money from that than I do from politics, so when people ask what I do for a living it's, as they say on Facebook, complicated.
I'm fascinated by cities and towns, buildings and streetscapes, the spaces, public and private we create for ourselves. And I'm always in search of the perfect place to live.
I'm a guy of many divergent interests. This makes career planning an almost insurmountable challenge, but life an ever unfolding pleasure. Like a lot of people whose interests spread out in every direction like the roots of an old tree, busting up some sidewalk here and there, I live on the business end of an info fire-hydrant, with too many books and magazines to read, to many films to see, too many seasons of The Wire to catch up on, too many newspapers to browse, and too many blogs to check. And yet I want to add my own bit of pressure to the hydrant. I'm here because I feel like I have something to say, but I won't know what until I write it.
A few core beliefs, to give you a sense of my overall Weltanschauung:
I live-as I have for almost my entire adult life-in the city of San Francisco, a place as frustrating as it is beautiful. I live with my partner of 22 years; we celebrated our anniversary just a few nights ago. I'm 41 and he's 39, so you can do the math and figure out we were young and crazy when we got together. Ours is that rare teenage romance that lasts, and I hope it does for the rest of our days.
Also, it turned out that the 1980's were an excellent time to fall into a committed, monogamous relationship as young gay men (boys?) in an urban area. We saw people die like flies; we dodged the bullet.
I work in politics, and we'll leave it at that; I'm having one of those midlife crises where I'm 41 and trying to decide what I want to do when I grow up, and I doubt it'll be what I'm doing now. At some point, I promised myself I wouldn't become that midlife crisis guy but I did. On the other hand, I promised myself I wouldn't go bald, and that worked out fine. And my midlife crisis hasn't resulted in the buying of a sports car with a low center of gravity that makes me look like that midlife crisis guy, so I think I'm ahead of the game.
My partner works as a senior manager for a Very High Profile Silicon Valley company. I went to college (and more college, and more college) and he didn't. He makes a good deal more money than I do. So just in case you're wondering if the universe is fair: no, no it's not. I'm an active investor, and I surely make more money from that than I do from politics, so when people ask what I do for a living it's, as they say on Facebook, complicated.
I'm fascinated by cities and towns, buildings and streetscapes, the spaces, public and private we create for ourselves. And I'm always in search of the perfect place to live.
I'm a guy of many divergent interests. This makes career planning an almost insurmountable challenge, but life an ever unfolding pleasure. Like a lot of people whose interests spread out in every direction like the roots of an old tree, busting up some sidewalk here and there, I live on the business end of an info fire-hydrant, with too many books and magazines to read, to many films to see, too many seasons of The Wire to catch up on, too many newspapers to browse, and too many blogs to check. And yet I want to add my own bit of pressure to the hydrant. I'm here because I feel like I have something to say, but I won't know what until I write it.
A few core beliefs, to give you a sense of my overall Weltanschauung:
- The good old days weren't. If you doubt me, read up on pre-20th century dental care.
- Market capitalism with division of labor and trade is the single best idea anyone ever had about anything.
- The internet and the accompanying Long Tail mean much more than a wider array of colored sweatshirts to buy at Wal-Mart; they profoundly empower our species.
- Manned space exploration, and eventual colonization, is important because astronomy and geology have shown clearly that catastrophic things happen to planets all the time.
- Science and reason are the only ways we have of knowing anything.
- Religion and spirituality have vastly less to tell us about our lives than literature and art.
- Wealth is not a zero-sum game. The rise of the economies China and India are unambiguously good things. Competition? Bring it on.
- Technological singularity? Maybe.
- Enjoy in moderation.