personal
Academics being one of those professions from which one rarely gets to clock out, I am happy to say I love to teach and I thoroughly enjoy my research. I don't think of my work as strictly segregated from a non-academic world, however, and I believe most all aspects of life are worth pursuing with the same passion, fuelled by the twin drives of delight and concern.
I am myself happiest when on bike, but I am also a devoted advocate of cycling, walking, and general self-propulsion as the primary modes of personal transportation, and of the concomitant rethinking of urban, suburban, and rural infrastructure. Hiking the boreal forests is a pleasure I now rarely have the opportunity to enjoy, but I always keep my tent within reach just in case. Over breakfast, I devour information regarding current affairs, local life, technology, and sustainability. When I am not teaching or otherwise engaged with dead languages and their literatures, I enjoy photography and cinema, and one day I hope to have memorised all of Tommy on the guitar. I insist on doing my own webdesign. I consider basic html/css a form of literacy, and am happy to say my humble grasp of php, sql, bash, and c is steadily improving. Every now and again I will spend a rainy day tweaking my configuration of GNU/Linux. When all is said and done, however, language remains one of my fondest passions, and I look forward to a day when I can resume my acquaintance with Finnish or improve my command of the modern Scandinavian languages.
I feel strongly about a number of interrelated global threats to do with ecosystemic and societal sustainability, and know that the economic drives and lifestyle patterns that have given rise to them must be radically overhauled for these threats to abate. While the most political tool at my disposal to this end is the electoral system, I also believe in practising personal responsibility through choices in diet, frugality, family planning, and transportation. I wholeheartedly recommend the resources at the Post Carbon Institute and The Story of Stuff:
