opticnerve

I suppose I ought to get this out of the way. I'm Asian and I wear glasses. I'm also paid well to be a professional geek. If any of those things turns you off, let me just say thanks for reading my profile and good luck.

I haven't written one of these things in a long time, but I find myself getting the dating itch. Maybe it's the smell of the New England spring. Maybe it's the envy I felt when my brother told me he was engaged. Maybe it's the collective primitive urge to relieve our individual solitudes we all inherited from our distant ancestors, urging me unto the breach. Who knows? In any event, I find myself wanting to find someone with whom to share a cup of coffee, a cigarette and good conversation. Well, not the cigarette because I'm a non-smoker and maybe not the coffee because it stains your teeth, but I am up for good conversation. Anyway. Like I said, I'm a professional geek (I'm a video game developer), but, unlike the stereotypes of geeks in the popular media, I, like a lot of my friends (and just about everybody else in the world), defy categorization. I mean, I love 'geeky' subjects like math and science, but I also love to read (some of my favourite authors are Naomi Klein and Christopher Moore), I snowboard in winter and surf in the summer, I study classical Japanese jiujitsu (I'm a black-belt, if that stuff is important to you), I'm teaching myself to play guitar (badly), I write awesome reviews on Yelp (or so I've been told by my friend who is a Yelp community manager), I like playing out-of-doors (ultimate frisbee and I'm going to start soccer soon) and I am a devotee of hockey. Yeah, I think and talk about video games on a critical level, but that is because I love my job and my career, which is, according to the knowledge I gleaned from my experience of being engaged to a lawyer who hated being a lawyer, a rarity amongst people my age.

I'm Asian and I'm proud of my ethnic heritage, but I grew up in Canada, so I'm a good Canadian boy, socialist democrat leanings and all. I'm pretty active, and while I'm no Sidney Crosby, an ex-girlfriend once told me that I look like the cute Filipino version of Peter Parker, post-radioactive-spider-bite. I'm in my mid-thirties, but I really don't look it. Several people have mistakenly guessed my age to be in the mid-twenties. I really have to give props to my mom and to my dad for the awesome genetic material they handed down to me. I think it's pretty cool that I look like the age of the scenester kids you see at shows, but I have my shit together, as the youngin's are wont to say.

Anyway, some more facts about me:

* I like music (who doesn't?), but my professional life has kept me so busy that I have not had time to update my scenester street cred. I rely on my friend Kat to keep me in the know about the kind of hip bands who have obscure names and small but rabid fan-bases of groupies that would do Rivers Cuomo proud.

* I'm a bit of a gypsy because of my career. I've lived in five different cities (Toronto, LA, Montreal, Vancouver, Boston) the last 5 years.

* I don't have cable, so I read a lot. Not because I think TV is an opiate for the masses thing, but because I feel that 'Dancing With The Stars' and 'Grey's Anatomy' don't speak to the demographic of which I count myself a member.

* I have a smarmy kind of charm around the people I really love.

* I will entertain you with my impression of Daniel Day Lewis in 'There Will Be Blood'.

* I'm fairly happy. I mean, I still get my moments of anxiety, like when I listen to NPR or play 'Google the Ex', but, for the most part, I'm really grateful for how my life has turned out.

I guess this is the part where I tell you about the kind of lady I'd like to meet. Now that I've come to it, I'm finding it hard to describe the kind of girl I'm attracted to. If I had to choose a fictional character who represented the kind of girl that piques my interest, I'd have to say it would be Winona Ryder's character in the movie Lucas, the shy brainy girl who is, astoundingly, over-looked by the the movie's protagonists. She definitely has to be intelligent and educated (formally or informally). She has to like reading meatier stuff than Us Magazine (though I will admit to perusing that publication to keep my knowledge of LiLo's antics up to date). I've been around the block enough times to know that loves of the same movies and of the same music don't guarantee that a relationship won't catch fire, but they are pretty good accelerants when there are sparks, so I guess I should tell you that I dig Yo La Tengo and that I believe there are only 3 Indiana Jones movies. Anyway. What else? It'd be cool if you liked being outside and even cooler if you liked playing in the ocean. I'd think it would be dandy if you liked going to concerts, because I am in sore need of a concert buddy.

I guess that's it.