I was born, as they say, at an early age. Since then I’ve gotten into far less trouble than I deserve, and at the age of twenty-nine am neither ripe nor merry. I am, however, inordinately silly, a little thoughtful, a little smart, a little cruel, and very good at laughing at myself. I speak Hebrew fairly well, even though there’s no reason for me to, and Mandarin only haltingly, even though I have every reason to be fluent. I like singing. I like science. (I also like various other things that start with the letter S; semi-colons are one of them.)

I never know what to check on the ethnicity box when I’m filling out forms, since I, like my favorite Nantucket Nectars flavor, fall into the category of both this and that. My roots are in Singapore, where I visit about once a year to see my sister’s babies and eat my fill of nasi lemak and Hainanese chicken rice and thosai and otak-otak and oh-so-many-things.

I’m married. I have no pets and no children, but I do own five cameras, two pairs of opera glasses, and some WWII binoculars, so there’s that. I have an ambivalent relationship with the notion of home.

I used to be a lot more self-analytical, but a few years ago I quit a job I thought was going to be my vocation (though why I thought that I haven’t a clue) and overdosed on contemplation afterwards. Now I feel about it the way I feel about tequila: I drank too much of the cheap stuff when I was a kid, and these days it just makes me feel vaguely ill.

I lived in Boston (or Waltham, or Cambridge) for nine years, but now I live in Chicago, where I write for a living and—since I work from home—am quickly forgetting how to conduct basic human interactions. You can help by sending me an email to keep me cheerful and friendly. Alternatively, you could send me presents. Cheese is always appreciated.

This (randomly chosen image from a set of self-portraits on Flickr) is (possibly probably sort of) what I look like right now: