Hello, My Name Is...

Wolfe.

My life is boring. I hadn't realized this, or at least I remained in denial about it, until I got an assignment to write this blog. Nobody would want to read about me, and so I'm going to do my best to change that. This page will document my efforts to become more interesting.

I guess I should tell a little about my current situation, so you can know at what level of boring I'm starting at and really grasp the difficulty involved in this project.

I'm a male NYU student, turning 22 in a week, majoring in journalism and Middle Eastern studies. I'm a lazy vegan, or conviegan, meaning a vegetarian who avoids eggs and dairy when it's convenient (I can't pass up a blueberry pancake now and then.)



I work in publishing - kid's books specifically. I read submissions and proposals for potential kids books every day and write rejection letters (crush dreams). I get paid to be immature and think like a kid, which is pretty awesome in my opinion.

I'm a traveler and a couch surfer. I love the website couchsurfing.org, which basically lets you stay anywhere for free when you're travelling and host travelers from all over the world when you aren't. Last summer I went on a road trip with my best friend, Eli (who is spending this semester in Cameroon and just recently broke his veganism by eating porcupine meat! Disgust! Outrage!). Eli and I spent three weeks hiking through the southern U.S. and surfing people's couches on that road trip, and afterwards I went to Paris to study creative writing.

In Paris I learned about the tumbleweeds...people that live at the Shakespeare & CO. bookstore and spend a few hours shelving books every day to earn their keep. In France, even a bookstore can be a socialist safe haven.

After Paris, I headed to Tel Aviv for the semester to spend the semester studying Hebrew and Arabic and working at Ha Aretz, Israel's New York Times. It wasn't all that glamorous, however, because my main job was censoring comments on the online version of the paper. As you can imagine, an Israeli newspaper's website gets a lot of comments, only about .05% of which are publishable. I saw so many insane comments on that site, (from all political perspectives) that by the end of every workday I had completely lost faith in humanity. Spending a night out in Tel Aviv can restore that faith, or at least distract you from your lack of it, anyway. Maybe that's why they call Tel Aviv "The Bubble." It's in the middle of this extremely politically charged area, and yet it is party and rave-central. We watched a movie about suicide bombings in nightclubs. Often, some Israeli's told me, in the 90's, they would get to their favorite club to see a smoking crater instead, and so they would just head on to the next club.

Since returning from Tel Aviv, I've been trying to teach myself how to cook (unsuccessfully), and have moved into a new apartment in Gramercy. My two main distractions currently are waiting to host my first couch surfer in my new apartment and reading Eli's emails from Cameroon, (he was told to be ready to witness domestic violence and to ignore it, and was also told NEVER to tell anyone that he doesn't believe in god or that he supports gay rights. Of course he did tell people these things, and apparently people are always completely shocked to hear them.)

So that's where I'm starting from. I've had a few adventures over the past six months, and maybe that's why my life now seems even more boring. Somehow, over the course of this blog, I'll figure out how to be interesting - or else die trying.