i'm zwerg (he/him). i am a midwit and a pseud.

i'm a f(l)ailing academic with a phd from a middling program in a
field that does not need more phds. i live in a coastal city in the
United States with my homosexual domestic life partner, where i drink
elitist specialty coffee and read books by europeans. i'm jewish
through my mother. my dad's one of the few white dude buddhists from
the '90s who ended up sticking with it. mom lives on the west coast;
dad and stepmom live in aotearoa (north island). i benefited from a
modest religious education, but i was raised and i remain secular.

i like playing guitar and piano, though i'm not particularly good at
either. my guitar is a 1971 gibson lg-0 i overpaid for at a second-
hand shop in fall 2015. my gay lover is a woodwind musician whose
musical facility greatly exceeds my own. i listen to a lot of music,
particularly '60s revival folk and blues, '70s jazz, '80s punk,
powerviolence, death metal, grindcore, industrial, and alt-country.
i'm a bit of a computer hobbyist, and i collect soviet wristwatches.
my favorite is one released in 1989 to commemorate the malta summit,
with bush and gorbachev's faces on the dial (gorbachev's birthmark
tastefully omitted). i used to draw cartoons in a former life, but
i've fallen out of the habit.

i can read german, but i can't speak it for the life of me. i know a
little latin, which i'm trying to brush up on. both languages i took
in grad school. i have "schoolboy hebrew," as michael walzer would
call it, and i took japanese in high school for reasons i'm still
unsure of. i was never very good at it. i've been making websites
since childhood so i'm comfortable in html/css, and i learned a
little in a few actual programming languages for the sake of basic
competence in data analysis practices (r, python). 

i dislike driving and flying, unpleasant activities that make the
world empirically worse. i try to be conscious of my resource usage
generally. i've been vegetarian for the last decade (whatieat.txt),
but i'm unsure how much difference that makes in the grand scheme of
things. i'm worried about what the rest of this century looks like.
my personal "fuck you, got mine" plan is to buy a small house in the
great lakes region (stable climate, fresh water access), ideally on
the canadian side. i'm not a prepper, but i see the writing on the
wall (an apt analogy, as like belshazzar i will not escape my fate).

ideologically, i am a marxist, in the sense that i find marxism
broadly understood a useful lens through which to understand the
world. that said, i am politically demobilized, and could not be
called a "socialist"/"communist" if those words are to carry any
meaning. i am a pessimist of intellect and will. my attitude is a
selfish, self-preservationist one, a hope of finding high enough
ground on the titanic to die of old age before it finishes sinking.