Hi.

I'm Sarah.

I've devoted myself to making an 'About' page, knowing that I love reading other people's and thus assuming that someone might want to read mine, but that doesn't mean I quite know what to stick on it. Here are some facts, to get us started:

I'm in my early twenties, living in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Adding the 'Canada' makes that sentence look gangly and unpleasant, but I don't want to be presumptuous, despite the fact that I adore this city and thus assume that everyone on Earth should have heard of it. (Snerk.) I was born in Saint John, New Brunswick, which is about 1000 miles and a million years away from here; I miss my family, a handful of dear friends, the fog, and the ability to take the freeways at 160 kilometres per hour without much fear of being pulled over, but I doubt I'll live there again. There's too much to be said for bountiful juice bars, wildly goth-related clubs, and people who make me feel like my home is wherever they are.

I have a Bachelor of Arts from the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton campus, which declares that I can write exceedingly long essays and talk about nothing for hours on end. More specifically, I have an Honours in English, with a whole slew of other stuff: computer science (mainly Java), psychology (mainly neuropsych), Classics (thank you, 1.5 years of Ancient Greek!), and history. The last three years of the degree were happy in some ways, but my mind was an uncreative wasteland for most of that time - there's a reason this site didn't really exist then. Whew.

Right now, I'm doing my MA in English at the University of Toronto, which is sprawling and massive and pompous and amazing so long as you don't think too much about how lifeless 90% of your classmates are. My brain is full of Old English poetry and postcolonial theory, and the friends I've picked up like merry hobos along the roadside of my graduate education are doing wonders for my imagination. (This is to say nothing of the varsity rowing team, which has collectively inspired at least two novels yet to be written by two authors.)

As you might have noticed, my main love in life is the written word; I'm open about my linguiphilia, which leads me to shift back and forth between obnoxious grammar-nazi-ism and cheerful digressions about various words' etymologies and relationships to others. Thankfully, I'm not as boring as that sentence makes me sound... I hope. My other obsessions are with music (I'd give a genre here, but since I love everything from gypsy ska to crunchy electro to mid-90's British alternative, that's challenging), photography, dancing (amusingly), and all things computer-related. Yes, I am a total geek - gadgetry, programming, theory and games all intrigue me. In fact, I've been coding and writing for a text-based online game for one-third of my life (my god, I'd never thought about it in those terms before... ack, moving on...). That'd be A Dark Portal, and this site is shamelessly piggybacking on its bandwidth. I've lost track of my nerdier pursuits in favour of getting out and about lately, but that doesn't mean you can't sit me down for a five-hour talk about whether or not the universe is coded in FORTRAN.

Although if you tried, I'd argue you to death, since it's clearly the product of Java.

(If you're curious about the technology that brings you this website and the pictures therein, click here. Yes, I am totally geeky enough to devote a page to my gear.)