About Me
It’s too easy for anyone to hijack their own “About Me” page. The temptation is to provide your life’s story or a sales pitch. While this is important for those trying to sell themselves, I’m not trying to sell you (or anyone else) anything, especially not myself. If you like what I have to say and want to get in touch or find out all those boring biographical bits, I invite you to contact me via Twitter (@nivesallison) or email nivesallison@gmail.com. If you don’t like what I have to say that’s absolutely cool too. Please just don’t tell me. Just kidding, feel free to debate me via comments so everyone can see you take me on.
But, so you do have some sense of who I am and what I will likely be doing a good deal of writing about, I should probably give you some indication of what I like and what I don’t like. I don’t like closed shower curtains when not in use (I fear ghosts playing poker in my bathtub), networking events, impoliteness, brown rice, concerts of beginner violinists, crowds of homogenous groups of people, narrow-mindedness, winters in Ottawa, people who give up rather than fighting back, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, upstairs neighbors who wear shoes in the house and flakiness (in paint, food or people). So if you are here to read about the new Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ album, the glory of Winterlude or Twinkies, you’ve come to the wrong place.
Figuring out what to say I like is a bit trickier because I genuinely like most things. It’s not that I say I like lots of different things in a desperate attempt to get people to like me, it’s just that most things people put in front of me I will like. I like basketball and comic books, Richard English and Nick Hornby, art galleries and Playstation. Though I generally have an attention span shorter than a chipmunk on speed, I’m remarkably dedicated to the things I love – helping people, filmmaking, education reform, human security, music, basketball. I also tend to be a workaholic, but I’m learning to scale back. More than anything I like helping people see the connections in supposedly unrelated things, such as the relationship between comic books and law in transitional societies or how films affect people’s propensity to commit acts of terrorism as opposed to starting social movements. Some people call it interdisciplinarity or insight, others call it a ridiculous waste of time , but I really do believe that things are always more connected than they appear and that these connections are the key to understanding the world.
They main thing that anyone reading this blog needs to know, I think, is that there is absolutely no point in trying to pin me down or define me. Though I can fit into tons of boxes, none of them feel right, making me boxxed out!
