onomatopoeia - About Me

About Me

on•o•mato•poe•ia
Pronunciation: "ä-n&-"mä-t&-'pE-&, -"ma-
Function: noun
Etymology: Late Latin, from Greek onomatopoiia, from onomat-, onoma name + poiein to make
Date: circa 1577
1 : the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it (as buzz, hiss)
2 : the use of words whose sound suggests the sense

Matt in a Nutshell™ summary:

I'm a 34 year old living in Vancouver, BC. I previously lived in Dallas, TX.

I'm married to a spunky Transylvanian.

I can whistle. I can roll my tongue. I can't juggle (believe me, I've tried), and I can't do that spin-the-pen-around-the-fingers trick that people in dull meetings always do. But I can solve a Rubik's Cube in less than 4 minutes, so maybe that makes up for the juggling.

I always have very, very, very intense dreams — ever since I was a kid. I usually remember at least 2 or 3 of them every morning. Sometimes I write them down. Read with caution.

I'm a movie freak. I once calculated that based on sheer count of films I'd seen, I'd spent over 1% of my life watching moves.

I love to read and write, and I'm picky about people's grammar. But I still like to begin sentences with conjunctions, to intentionally split infinitives, flouting good parallelism, and to use prepositions to end sentences with. And throwing sentence fragments around, too, of course. I can do it only because I know better.

I've played the piano since I was 11. I put out a CD in college, as a pet project. I can more or less play any instrument anyone puts in front of me, as long as it's not one I have to blow into anywhere, in which case it sounds more like a wind tunnel than an instrument (only exception see above, re whistling).

I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

I'm allergic to wheat and shellfish. Welcome to my breadless, oysterless world.

I maintain two streaming audio music broadcasts: a Trip-Hop one, and a Glitch Pop one.

I love food. I watch those people who subsist solely on health shakes and the like, only for the sake of that elusive extra 5 lost pounds, and wonder what it's all really worth. Dining out is perhaps one of my favorite activities, and I pursue a sort of unofficial goal of exploring every nationality and regional variety of food I can find.

I spent the summer of 2004 in China. I wrote some things about it.

My cat is as neurotic as I am, and probably smarter. Although I don't rub my poop on the carpet, so perhaps we're even.

I hate it when my hair touches my ears or when I can feel my fingernails past the ends of my fingers. The former will impel me to get a haircut within a matter of hours, and for the latter I keep a pair of fingernail clippers in my desk at work in case of emergencies.

My body seems to be particularly undetectable by motion-activated lights and doors — people often see me in front of them waving my hands or frantically jumping up and down, trying to get the door to open. Never figured this one out, but others have claimed similar experiences.

I love the thrill of opening a new CD. I hate it, though, when they've put a sticker on the jewel case instead of on the cellophane. Stickers in general really tick me off. So do the slimy peel-off foil tops from yogurt cups, sticky can lids, those little sauce containers, and other instant food containers.

As long as I can remember, I've loved the smell of Play-Doh and hated the smell of bologna. Refrigerators (especially at work) that smell like bologna and mayonnaise still give me bad lunchbox flashbacks which make my stomach turn.

I have an intense psychologically-conditioned aversion to the taste and smell of bananas, due to them being the only thing I would eat during an early childhood hospital stay for gastro-intestinal problems. Some people think it's funny to torment me about this. Few people are still laughing when I've thrown up on them.

If you want to say "hi," feel free to email me at matt-at-onomatopoeia-dot-org.

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