I like to read a lot and have intelligent conversations. I'd like to meet guys who can handle themselves in a good wrestling match, make me laugh, and make me think. I'm a firm believer in having a sound mind in a sound body. I've practiced martial arts in some form or another for close to 15 years or so. Currently, I train in Hung Gar and Choy Lay Fut and just began training at a school in Boston.

I tend to have a positive outlook on life, believing that there is good everywhere; one just needs to look hard for it. That having been said, I'm not a Pollyanna and realize that there are bad things in the world. But without one, the other cannot exist.

Andre Gide wrote that we should "work and struggle and never accept an evil we can change." There are many problems in the world, and I think that the solution to them all is education. I'm a huge advocate for improving the quality of our educational system from the ground up. All the problems we have now, notably the whole gay marriage issue but others as well, can be solved with more exposure to other view points. Of course there needs to be a certain receptiveness too. All of this can happen if we get our kids to start thinking and analyzing information for themselves, which is really not what they are being taught to do most places.

I've traveled around a lot and can see why people from other countries have such a negative view of what an "American" is. In that vein, I like to show them that there is more to America than the superficial, shallow, sensationalist persona that has become synonymous with our flag.

I've just finished my master's degree in the Classics. I wrote about the Athenian Funeral Orations delivered almost annually for the war-dead in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. The orators use four myths fairly consistently, and so I sought to figure out why. In short, I think they function as cognitive metaphors which structure not only how the Athenians conceive of the ritual cycle for burying their dead, but also the ideologies that fueled the militarism that allowed the Athenians to be in a relatively constant state of war for more than a century.

While seemingly boring--and it probably is--I used cognitive psychology and linguistics as a means of elucidating how the Athenians thought then with the hope that similar paradigms can be used today in analyses of interstate relations. Perhaps it's a naive hope as I'd like to think we can learn from our past to make a better future.

May marked a change in my path. I graduated and I'm shifting to work in higher educational administration in campus life and student services. Looking back at what I've done, I get much more satisfaction out of my work with students outside of the classroom, firmly believing that more learning gets done in that arena. It takes a village to raise a child, and I want to help create an atmosphere that challenges our nation's future to think critically, act responsible, lead effectively, and live humanely.

****Happily taken right now**** sorry guys..... If you'd like to be friends, however, I am more than happy to talk!

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