Colette

Calling you g----- or r----- didn’t seem best way to start, so figured I’d give you a name. Took a shot and went with Colette. Classic, modern, seemed to fit. Figure you’ll let me know otherwise if you decide to write back, but meantime going with a smiling surfing slightly nerdy Colette who likes Amelie, the Way of the Peaceful Warrior, baking, and, um, getting down and dirty in the mud. So hi. Know my profile’s empty, hopefully not from lacking some sort of observation along the way of experience. Throwing out a skeleton sketch of experience/observations here, see if anything inspires. Includes a stint as a Silicon Valley corporate lawyer, to a PhD in (evolutionary) psychology, to teaching now at one of the major LA universities. Plus, an entertainment phase in between, writing and directing an independent feature with a friend, having some small success, the kind where in the aftermath you’re sent out by day to have a series of alternating monologues standing in as dialogue with production execs, and by night you meet people who tend to hold deep secrets near the surface, making for unfiltered conversations that can have kind of a beauty attached to them, but that can also be surprisingly hard to remember by the light of the next day. Suppose that’s part of the beauty of it, if that makes sense. Before that had gone to law school at Stanford, staying in the area after graduating, working at a big corporate firm with one of those nice office views, until film festivals got in the way. After spell in entertainment, parted amicably, bought an old beach home to have some quiet when needed from the mess of the city, and decided on the career as a university professor (the outdoors and architecture of a big college campus, the optimism, people in flux, creativity aspects), which explains the Ph.D. Have a little time now with the academic year in summer to write you this way too long message. Well-traveled, eclectic friends, good taste in music, film… all the usual things people say. So there you go. A bit out of your age range (leaving behind the 30s this year), but if you feel like writing back, please do. Like the positive vibe. Mark