Profile

Updated 11 July 2012

Hello! Welcome to my journal. I'm a research psychologist, female, living with my younger son and our humorously barrel-shaped cat, Lillian, adolescent kittens Ajani and Sorin in Eugene, Oregon. I was born on the Oregon coast (I'm a fifth-generation Oregonian), and I also lived in the Bay Area for 11 years, graduating from U.C. Berkeley. I love forests and meadows and quirky bookstores. (Here are my pictures of local wildflowers.)

I'm engaged professionally in health behavior research, and in 2012 I finished my Ph.D. in psychology at the Univ. of Oregon, working with the social/personality faculty on topics related to narratives and metanarratives. One of these days I also intend to get back to some projects related to the foundations of environmentalism, the psychology of persuasion, and the relationship between wild nature and religion.

Nearly all of my posts are public, but privacy is important to me, and I try not to mention people by name except where they're already a part of the public record. My LJ friends get access to a key to the initials I use in my posts (here), but it's rather outdated.

I’m always interested in meeting new people on LJ. Before you friend me, though, please note a couple of things. First, I post daily, and it’s probably unusual for someone to be interested in both my academic thoughts and my family life, let alone my hobbies (which include fantasy novels and gaming), so be forewarned before you clutter up your friends page with my posts. Second, I am much more attuned to (thoughtful) enthusiasm than to cynicism, and I don't buy the mentality that people we only know via the Internet are somehow less "real" and less deserving of the kind of goodwill between individuals that one would expect to see in person. With those caveats in mind, welcome to my LJ!