I was born at noon on the 28th of September 1982 in Charleston, South Carolina. My ancestry is one-half Ashkenazi Jew (all on my father's side - the wrong side – making me gentile in all but the most reformed temples), one-eighth Swedish, one-eighth Basque, one-eighth Irish, and one-eighth Armenian-Lebanese (likely Armenians fleeing to Lebanon to escape Turkish genocide). My mother's grandmother came from a Swedish family that I always heard had some royal ancestry. They allegedly owned significant property in Stockholm during the late nineteenth century, but the patriarch's drinking and gambling problems destroyed this fortune. Many people on my mother's side of the family have had problems with alcohol and mental instability. My maternal grandmother's uncle won the Eurovision song competition (sort of like the musical Olympics for Europe though more political) for Sweden in the 1970s, but eventually he died a hermit; it was months before anyone discovered his body.

My maternal grandfather's father owned a small plantation estate in Louisiana during the early 20th century, complete with black tenant farmers and the like, but committed drunken suicide one night by parking his car on the railroad tracks. My maternal grandfather grew up fairly poor in a small town called Berwick, Louisiana after the depression ruined the agriculture business in the region. He joined the army at the onset of WWII and later became a Foreign Service officer. He married my maternal grandmother, the Swede, and spent his life moving around to different geopolitical hotspots (India, Pakistan, Sweden, Malaysia, Mexico,Switzerland) in the service of the State Department. He died in 1999 from esophageal cancer linked to liquor intake and chronic acid reflux that eroded his throat lining.

My father's side of the family is descended from immigrant Jews from Germany and Russia. My paternal great-grandfather became successful in the holiday greeting card business (ironically a Jew making Christmas cards) and that side of my family has remained pretty well off. My paternal grandfather was a B-25 navigator in the Army Air Corps during World War II and flew bombing missions against Japanese forces in Burma. My father was one of three boys in the family who grew up in the New York suburbs. My father worked in the family business for a decade, but eventually lost his stake in it as it dissolved under internal and external pressures in the early 1970s. My mother was born in Stockholm, but was shuttled all over the world as part her father's Foreign Service career, she ended up speaking a number of languages: Swedish, English, Spanish, French. However, she dropped out of college at LSU to work as a flight attendant for Pan American Airlines for a dozen or so years. She met my father while she was based out of New York and they got married a couple of years later. In the late 1970s, my father got a chance to set up and run the American branch of a Dutch office supplies company called Kores in South Carolina and he and my mother moved there, effectively ending her career (not a lot of big airline hubs near SC).

Shortly after I was born, my father had to get serious heart surgery (cigarettes, fast food) after which he bowed out of his executive position in the company. We moved in 1989 to Ponte Vedra Beach, FL, a nice upper middle class resort community with a great school system. I spent my childhood less than a mile from the beach involved all kinds of recreational pursuits like surfing, skateboarding, rollerblading/hockey, golf, tennis, etc. My mother was diagnosed with cervical and lymphatic cancer in 1992 and suffered heavily from the surgery and treatment for the rest of her life, making both of my parents significantly handicapped healthwise. Being the only child, I grew to dislike my parents constant presence at home and mostly undivided attention to me. I became a very rebellious young teenager in the drug subculture. I spent my life from the ages of 12 to15 using and selling relatively soft drugs and constantly getting high on marijuana. I got arrested for trying to shoplift hundreds of dollars of Christmas presents at the mall when I was 13 and had lots of lesser run-ins other with the police and other authority figures during the next few years.

I never could make the varsity golf team at my high school, probably not due to drug use, but to my hometown having the nation's highest concentration of golf courses and the huge pool of talent that came with it. This probably my greatest failure. I did however manage to occupy the fifth spot on the varsity tennis team, but this was mostly to fill a spot for extracurricular activities on college applications. At age 16, I became bored with drugs and quickly became interested in nonfiction books and magazines. Indeed, I actually started occasionally applying myself in school. Many of my friends from the beaches were and still are drug abusers, blatant sexists and racists, and occasionally violent criminals, but I still find myself loyal to them and occasionally caught up in their personal troubles. I worked as a golf cart attendant for two years and as a beach rentals attendant for another year, earning the best wages of anybody my age at both jobs. I really do like simplistic hard work more than most people and I have never much respected the life of early retirement leisure that my parents chose. They divorced in my senior year of high school and my mother later died of alcoholism-related liver disease on August 23, 2003. My father still lives at the beach and I enjoy visiting his home and my old friends on occasion.

I came to the University of Florida in the Fall of 2000 and immediately became very involved in a small leftist circle of friends around campus. I was at the small riot in Washington D.C. during the last presidential inauguration participating in the anarchist black block. I attended many protests during that first year of college, but I became quickly disillusioned with that particular subcultural scene. Also, I was arrested for trespassing in Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes in February of 2001 when I was trying to see for myself what life was like in some of the nation's worst public housing projects. I began living in my girlfriend Jillian's 15 by 12 non-air conditioned dorm with her roommate and eventually her roommate's boyfriend as well. During the summer of that year, my friend Maggie and I hitchhiked from Florida to Maine and back, stopping in the major cities, staying with friends and family in some places, meeting new people in others, and occasionally sleeping on rooftops.

In 2002 I started taking graduate classes in the Sociology department as part of their BA/MA program. I began with my undergraduate scholarship with a study of credit card debt and financial competency among students at UF. I wrote my honors thesis on trying to apply a Scandinavian cohousing housing strategy the New Everyday Life (NEL) to disadvantaged neighborhoods in the United States. In the summer of 2002 I traveled to Mexico for two months to improve my Spanish and tour Oaxaca, Chiapas, and Mexico City. In 2003 I became active in trying to enrich the youth program at my local community center, located in a predominantly African American neighborhood. I had the opportunity to co-teach a 3000 level section of American Families in the Spring of 2003 and integrate a service-learning curriculum into the class involving the curriculum at the community center. We enacted an action research program attempting to involve local residents in the activities there. I ended up writing my Master's Thesis on the experience and the policy implications of my findings.

I attended the anti-FTAA protests in Miami in November 2003 as part of an ethnographic research endeavor and was for the first time both tear gassed and shot at repeatedly by the largest and best organized protest policing operation in history (now known as the Miami Model). However, it is not state repression, but the overall ineffectiveness of the protest/activist subculture which continues to intrigue me. The next year, I got the opportunity to observe the rise and fall of a really well intentioned subcultural organization in my neighborhood called the Community Cafe, which allowed me to connect some of the sensitizing concepts I had developed in Miami to more a more local setting. My girlfriend of five years and I spent the summer of 2004 taking an extended graduation trip for three months in Europe, exploring alternative means of tourism by riding bicycles, camping, and staying with people we met through accommodation-sharing sites on the internet. In August 2004, I began teaching Principles of Sociology at UF with a class of 60 students. In the summer of 2005, I taught an upper division course in social inequality. My teaching philosophy is built on discovery based learning, a model many students have difficulty fully appreciating. However, to my own credit, I put more time and effort into my classes than anyone else I have ever seen.

My PhD topic has yet to become crystal clear, but I have some converging interests. I fear the ultimate effects of rising levels of unsustainable resource consumption. This trend is most pronounced in developed nations like our own, but perhaps the larger problem is that the lifestyle fueling the flames is quickly being adopted in the developing world via cultural/economic imperialism. Global biospheric and atmospheric processes are being affected in unprecedented ways by anthropogenic (human-based) forces. While this system is quite resilient, it cannot continue to function in the way currently does if its fundamental processes are altered in significant ways. We don't seem to know much about what shape this the potential realignment will take or how it may affect humankind, but most people are content to be marching towards answering that question in about the most uniformed and dangerous way imaginable. For a more popularized and toned-down cautionary report, see the Millennial Ecosystem Assessment.

Most of all, consumerism, today's opiate of the masses and chief economic growth stimulus, is to blame. However, one cannot really question consumerism without questioning the fundamental logic of capitalist economies and the value systems they bring with them. This line of inquiry quickly becomes very theoretical and unhelpful for resolving the dilemma at hand with anyone outside of academic or Marxist cults. So, I tried to ground this discussion in contemporary social behavior patterns and particularly innovative organizational forms. The three main conceptual arenas I am working in to further this discussion are community, consumption, and social movements. I am interested in the strategies of contemporary groups and organizations that use value based solutions to fill niches in mainstream market/state institutions and decommodify important social processes. All of my research interests and life ambitions revolve around the idea that novel organizational models can offer a way for individuals to be more empowered to make more ethical and enjoyable choices in how to live their lives and contribute to others'. Moreover, I believe some of these examples (social networking systems, wikis, cohousing, community co-ops, accomodation sharing) are indicative of a potential social trend turning us away from homogenized daily life in a mass society that the economic dictates of instrumental rationality forces upon us.

At one point, I was most interested in how people who create and maintain these various social innovations understand their their relationship to this larger social trend. It seemed important to understand how these organizations compare and contrast with the big contemporary American subcultural social movements (like Punk, Hip Hop, and New Age) which have been mostly co-opted and assimilated by the same market forces they originally sought to oppose. I thought grasping this larger conceptual underpinning would be key to my ability to understand, as well as effectively advocate and strategize for the burgeoning anti-consumerism/connected lifestyle movements, which I am committed to making much more prominent in the near future. However, I quickly found that interviews with the lead organizers of such groups got bogged down in fairly vapid political and relativistic cultural issues that didn't further my inquiry much. Moreover, I came to believe that solutions which were going to be most scalable in addressing these problems would need to have a strong online component. So, my interest has become much more focused on web applications that encourage resource sharing, especially those that utilize social networking systems and complex trust models to accomplish their goals.

I would like to do the majority of my dissertation research as a traveling investigator seeking out more organizations of this type and witnessing on a first hand basis their everyday operation and lifestyles of the people most committed to them. I hope to eventually make this evolving project available in multimedia formats so that it may appeal to a wider range of audiences than it might if it was kept it in a strictly academic research form. This will involve both web and video documentary components, both of which are indispensable in trying to reach out to a large number of interested individuals in today's media dense environment.