Enough about you, let’s talk about me.

As much as I’ve been able to figure it out, and at the risk of being contacted by Oprah’s lawyer, here’s what I know for sure: (is there a TM after this?)

I’m motivated by two things: to make good(s), and to help people feel good in their own skin.

It’s a neverending road, where I’m mostly drawn towards:

+ The human anatomy, physiology, and psychology.
+ Design.
+ Languages.
+ Mushy hippie stuff. Stuff Walt Whitman wrote about, Leonard Cohen sang about, and Dali painted about.

I’m a small time trouble-maker learning to be mindful.

I often find myself precariously climbing up things, to my mom’s chagrin, but the real danger are those soccer balls that always seem to find my knees, or any human body part that disagrees with full-on contact with a fast-flying soccer ball (all of them, it turns out).

I’m a vata with my keys, wallet, and phone. I’m a pitta with pixels. I’m a kapha around cats.

I’ve got the pompatus of love for yoga, meditation, rock climbing, soccer, and shiny fruity stuff.

I received a Bachelor of Science in Informatics, a Bachelor of Arts in Business Information Systems, and a certificate of International Studies in Business at the University of Washington. (I didn’t have caffeine in my blood, I had blood in my caffeine.) I spent my sophomore year hopping European trains (going anywhere), chasing boys, buying cheap wine and expensive cheese, and studying French literature and history at Université de Nantes in Northwestern France.

This is one of my favorite poems by the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Prologue

by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, 1955

I’m many-sided.
I’m overworked,
and idle too.
I have a goal
and yet I’m aimless.
I don’t, all of me, fit in;

I’m awkward,
shy and rude,
nasty and good-natured.
I love it,
when one thing follows another
and so much of everything is mixed in me:
from west to east,
from envy to delight.

I know, you’ll ask:
‘What about the overall goal? ‘
There’s tremendous value in this all!
I’m indispensable to you!
I’m heaped as high
as a truck with fresh-mown hay!

I fly through voices,
through branches,
light and chirping,
and butterflies flutter in my eyes,
and hay pushes out of cracks.

I greet all movement! Ardor,
and eagerness, triumphant eagerness!
Frontiers are in my way.

It is embarrassing
for me not to know Buenos Aires and New York.
I want to walk at will
through London,
and talk with everyone,
even in broken English.
I want to ride
through Paris in the morning,
hanging on to a bus like a boy.

I want art to be
as diverse as myself;
and what if art be my torment
and harass me
on every side,

I am already by art besieged.
I’ve seen myself in every everything:
I feel kin to Yesenin
and Walt Whitman,
to Mussorgsky grasping the whole stage,
and Gauguin’s pure virgin line.

I like
to use my skates in winter,
and, scribbling with a pen,
spend sleepless nights.

I like
to defy an enemy to his face,
and bear a woman across a stream.

I bite into books, and carry firewood,
pine,
seek something vague,
and in the August heat I love to crunch
cool scarlet slices of watermelon.

I sing and drink,
giving no thought to death;
with arms outspread
I fall upon the grass,
and if, in this wide world, I come to die,
then it’s certain to be
from sheer joy that I live.

Translated by George Reavey (revised)