It should probably come as no surprise that I enjoy sex, & in addition to my clients, I pursue encounters during my down time from work; & so I reckon it'd be fair to say I have sex for fun. It's also my automatic go-to & typically wins out over most of my other interests as far as how I allocate my free time. As the maxim goes: love what you do, & you'll never work a day in your life. That I spend most of my personal time engaged in the same pursuits and exploring the same terrain that I deal with in my profession is surely proof-positive that if I don't love having sex for the pure pleasure of it, at the very least I have a pattern of behavior concerning sex that places it somewhere between a hobby & an assemblage of sensation and feeling to which I've become addicted.
Aside from sex, I was at various earlier times in my life a voracious and avid reader. When my interest moves beyond the carnal, I still find that I get tremendous enjoyment and pleasure from reading. That I also, during the aforementioned earlier points in my life, would have fancied myself an aspiring writer was the complimentary expression and celebration of that love of language, the sense of its power.

The single most impactful thing in anyone's life is who your parents are, and no one gets to choose that. The second most impactful experience in my life (I am construing "greatest" to mean 'most significant,' in lieu of 'most pleasurable,' etc.) was my time living in Puerto Rico during the height of the pandemic in 2020. There is something ineffable and profoundly life-enriching about nature when it is at the height of its powers, with its primordial kind of majesty and its transcendent beauty. The time I spent in Dorado was like living in paradise. I lived practically on the beach, and I walked the full length of my section of the playa, delimited by the rocks that became breakwater on either end, every morning at sunrise and every evening at sunset. I swam in the ocean that was so crystal clear, at 20 or 30 feet of depth, the bottom was clearly visible. I drank Barelitos three-Star rum and coconut water every night on the veranda and listened to music by Tortoise, Morton Feldman, Horsejumper of Love, and others. I lived with a friend and his dog, Pitorro. It was all rather idyllic and paradisical, and I discovered places within myself that I had been long-estranged from.

My sense of humor is something I both enjoy and value. The capability to laugh at myself, especially in the midst of circumstances or when dealing with matters that are serious, where there is real uncertainty, or that are characterized by loss or pain, has been a saving grace for my quality of life. My god, life is hard; and despite all the posturing that might seem to the contrary, everyone is working with a huge deficit in understanding with respect to what any one of us knows compared with all possible knowledge. It's a profoundly tragic situation, really, when one considers the stakes. So for me, to be able to take a step back and just shrug it off and laugh -because it's truly an absurd situation- is the sweetest reprieve from the weight of the burdens we all carry. I'm a firm believer in taking a lot of breaks, so I make it a point to laugh a lot.

The first observation people usually point out to me is that they are a bit surprised, if not impressed, by the way I speak, particularly my vocabulary. I read a lot growing up, and it was my practice that any time I came to a term I didn’t know I wrote it down, and later I would look it up. I made lists. I made flash cards. Looking back, it seems so nerdy; but I did acquire great proficiency in English, due in no small part to my reading habits.