Matt:

• Is a twenty-something gay man living in Metropolitan Washington. He hails originally from Georgia and claims his hometown to be Atlanta, but will admit that it’s actually somewhere in the rural hinterlands to the north if pressed. He is a graduate student at the University of Maryland studying transportation planning. Matt’ practices what he preaches by not owning a car. He chooses to transport himself on foot, by bicycle, and on the Metro.

• His personality type is ENFJ, in which he puts far more stock than his horoscope sign (Pisces). His nickname circulates incongito by appending itself to his type-written name as an errant apostrophe. This nickname started as a bad calculus joke while he was an undergraduate at the Georgia Institute of Technology and is a long story. Regardless, his nickname, Matt’, is pronounced “Matt Prime” and his friends often refer to him as such, especially in the presence of other people named Matt, who happen to make up approximately 27% of the world’s population.

• His hobbies include photography, hiking, and biking. He almost always has a camera with him but isn’t sure he’ll ever find the shot, something he’s constantly in search of. His personal belief is that photographers don’t create art; they merely capture the magesty of this tiny planet. Matt’ often gets weak at the knees upon hearing the sound of a train, whether in the distance or not, which is fairly normal if one believes Paul Simon. He loves to travel, especially by rail, and at the time of this writing had traveled on inter-city trains in twenty-two American states and the District of Columbia, eight Canadian provinces, Germany, and Austria. Like Edna St. Vincent Millay, “there isn’t a train [he] wouldn’t take, no matter where it’s going.”

• Matt’ has been referred to as an anachronism, primarily because he makes reference to obscure pop-culture at random intervals. His favorite TV shows are MacGyver, CHiPs, and Fawlty Towers. He believes that good music, with few exceptions, stopped being made at around the same time that the Berlin Wall fell. Additionally, he believes that the world would be a far better place if people broke into song periodically, as they do in musicals. On that note, he’d “like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company.”

• As a die-hard advocate for series and an Oxford Commanist, Matt’ fights the space-concious, tyrannical editors who oppress these comma-deprived lists. His tireless efforts on behalf of the Oxford Comma Liberation Front will continue until ambiguity and despotism have been banished from the page. He believes that people who don’t find grammar funny don’t have a close-enough relationship to it. Writing is one of his favorite activities, and it stands alongisde languages as a lifelong interest. He speaks German and is taking courses in French.

In addition to his regular column Dispatches from Left Field here at The New Gay, Matt’ also writes about transportation, planning, and policy issues at his blog, Track Twenty-Nine. Dispatches appears weekly on Wednesdays at noon. He can be contacted at Matt@Thenewgay.net.

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