Hey hey everyone... my name's Sebastian (or Seb, or Sebby for short), and welcome to my webpage - now new and improved, with 15 essential nutrients, and MIDI, flashing-text, and obnoxious dancing animal GIF free!
So... hi! *waves frantically* I'm just your average 26 year old guy living in the capital city of Canada (Ottawa, Ontario). Right now I'm a masters student at the University of Ottawa, studying computer science (specifically combinatorics and optimization). In an attempt to make myself even more geeky and unappealing to other gay guys, I'm hoping to do my Ph.D. in math (commutative algebra and finite fields) at the University of Toronto. Admittedly, saying that is basically gay repellant *merrily watches the timid internet folk flee in horror*.
Yeah... I'm gay. I've known that I was attracted to guys as far back as I can remember, and despite what the happy, joyous, loving Christian fundamentalists might want to believe, I was never sexually abused, I fit in well with other guys my own age, and I had a pretty good relationship with my father. My first "gay" memories are from when I was maybe five years old or so, and I watched a couple kiss on TV, and I recall thinking how wonderful it would feel to kiss another boy. Fourteen years later, I finally got my wish, and now I'm out of the closet and entirely comfortable with who I am. I'm not big into the gay community, just because I find it overly gossipy and shallow. I prefer to just do my own thing and maintain a circle of friends, be they gay or straight, who I can have fun with and be myself around.
I have a wonderful boyfriend, Jeff, who I'm fully committed to, and whom I love with all of my heart. If you want to face the strong possibility of nauseating lovey-doveyness, check out my page dedicated to him.
When I'm not fawning and doting over my boyfriend, bitching about nasty cold Canadian winters, or pushing old ladies into oncoming traffic, some of my hobbies include jogging, writing novels and poetry, reading, wasting way too much time online, yoga, Reiki, listening to music, watching movies, mixing really bad electronic music, watching cartoons, painting, cooking, and studying a variety of subjects, including algebra, Taoism, world religions, ethnobotany, neuropharmacology, and psychopharmacology.
I love food and spend way too much time thinking about it, cooking it, and eating it. My absolute favourite is Thai food, and I could, and often do, eat it until I'm blue in the face. I love rice noodles with a passion, and I find that Thai food has this amazing ability to stimulate a huge number of your taste buds at once and gives you this wicked sensory orgasm. Besides that, I pretty much like anything spicy, and I'm a huge fan of Sri Lankan food as well. I also love Indian, Vietnamese, and Mexican, but I'm also totally into your more standard fare like pizza, roast beef, bacon (mmmmm... bacon), and hell, even the occasional dose of liver-poisoning McDonald's :D.
I like reading, although I haven't been doing it all that much lately, just because I've been feeling largely unmotivated. After a long week of school, Archie comics are pretty much all I can manage. Incidentally, I do have a huge collection of Archie comics. I know that they're retartedly stupid, and they're neither cute nor funny, but for some reason, they're still addictive. I'm also a big fan of trashy gay teen fiction, just because it's fun and lighthearted. If I had to pick some of my favourite authors of all time, I'd say David Eddings, Agatha Christie, Terence McKenna, Alexander and Ann Shulgin, Amy Tan, Paul Russell, and Daniel Quinn come to mind. I'm also big into writing, and I've written five novels, one award-winning novella, and a whole slew of poetry. If you're interested in suffering through some of my stuff, check out my writing page.
Musically, my absolute favouritest group ever is Stereolab. If you haven't heard of them, check them out immediately! Shoo! Shoo! The styles of music I'm most interested in are various forms of electronica (mostly IDM and ambient), jazz, and various forms of indie pop and rock. I'm really not into the top 40 stuff and I think people like Britney Spears are so frightfully untalented that it boggles my mind. Some of the artists that I really love include Autechre, Biosphere, Metric, the Orb, Orbital, the Squirrel Nut Zippers, the Smashing Pumpkins, Bjork, Saint Etienne, Yoko Ono, and Billie Holiday.
As for movies, I like pretty much anything, but I'm big into stupid comedies: for example, I was at the theatre on the opening night of Bubble Boy, and out of the 15 or so people that showed up, I think me and my companion were the only ones over the age of 17 :D. My top movies are Dancer in the Dark, Trainspotting, Kids, L.I.E., Go, Requiem for a Dream, and Bubble Boy.
In terms of TV shows, I don't watch much TV on TV, just because I find commercials to be painfully stupid. Instead, I download the shows I like off BitTorrent and KaZaa. That way I can watch what I want, when I want to, without having to see car and beer ads that hurt your brain. My four favourite shows of all time, in order, are Clone High, Daria, South Park, and the Family Guy. I also love Malcolm in the Middle, That 70s Show, the Simpsons, Mission Hill, Undergrads, Will and Grace, and Absolutely Fabulous.
I'm probably the type of guy that your mother warned you about. I like to drink beer and smoke cigarettes on occasion (a couple times a month), and I use drugs for recreation and as an integral part of my spirituality. My drug of choice used to be nitrous oxide (aka laughing gas), which has been the most important driving force behind my spiritual beliefs (see my spirituality page for more info), but after several experiences that were so wildly intense that I couldn't rationalize them at all and left me feeling very nihilistic about the universe, I pretty much stopped using it. I still like to smoke weed regularly, and I enjoy occasional oral doses of benzodiazepines and opiates when I can get my hands on them. I'm somewhat of a recovering alcoholic (I used to drink upwards of 70 drinks a week) who's managed to resume drinking with a reasonable level of moderation after a four year hiatus, and I used to be addicted to cigarettes (holy fux0rs... quitting was awful), which is why I only smoke and drink infrequently these days. I have played around with other drugs, most notably dextromethorphan, and I'm curious about mescaline, MDMA, and several others, but don't have the courage to try them in the forseeable future. So yeah, if you think that "drugs are bad, mmmkay?" then I guess I'm a bit of a badass. And I stay up way past my bedtime. So nyah. I'm of the opinion that the majority of drugs can be used safely if people simply bother to inform themselves, and I personally spend hours reading up on a substance before I'd even consider putting it in my body. Also, I have to say that I feel much, much safer smoking marijuana than I do eating a bag of Doritos - have you read the ingredients on those things? I mean, humans have been smoking marijuana for hundreds or thousands of years and we understand well the side effects and long term consequences of marijuana use. Most of those happy, joyous, unpronounceable chemicals that you'll find on the ingredient list of a lot of foods have only been in existence for less than 50 years, and we can't possibly predict how these poorly researched compounds are going to affect us and future generations down the road. This is why I try to eat naturally and organically when possible, but have no qualms about drug use: at least I get something positive out of drug use (recreation or spiritual exploration), whereas when I buy chemical laden sacks of garbage, all I get is the warm satisfaction of knowing that I've fattened some corporation's bank account by allowing them to maximize profits by using inferior ingredients. Yay!
Spiritually, I identify as a Taoist with nihilistic beliefs, but I incorporate a variety of different techniques into my spiritual practices, including Reiki, kundalini yoga, meditation, and shamanic dance. I like Taoism because it's flexible (in the sense that I can both acknowledge the validity of other religions and use whatever I want from other belief structures), which is important to me. I think all religions have a lot of validity - they're the collective experiences of huge numbers of peoples over long periods of time - and to assert that one is more correct than another is sheer absurdity, given that we can't possibly know. I'm of the opinion that all religions are simply different interpretations of human consciousness and reality, and it's largely a focus on the particulars that drives us apart and leads us to disagreement. The mystic and philosophical sides of most religions seem to coexist fairly nicely, in my opinion.
If you've made it this far and I haven't scared you off, then you'd better get off your ass and e-mail me :D.