Describe your ultimate escape plan (and tell us what you’re escaping from).

Frankly I’ve never really had to escape from anything in my life. I’ve been thinking about that recently. That I kind of grew up in a very protected place. Upstate New York doesn’t really suffer from any real substantive disasters as the rest of the country does. We didn’t really have any earthquakes (very small tremors every 20 years doesn’t count, it just upsets pets and that’s it), no Tornadoes as the surrounding drumlins, hills, and in a roundabout way the foothills to the Adirondack Mountain Chain just tear thunderstorms apart so they can’t really gather up enough oomph to spawn twisters. Hurricanes are also out of the question because if a Hurricane got that far north, it’d be just a really heavy wet rainstorm at that point. The only real risk is snowfall. Come on! When it comes to surviving a natural disaster, snow is not really on the map. Get to shoveling! Not really that scary. So escape was never really in my head anyways, not growing up and not really now. Now, however things are different. A gaggle of years ago I moved to Michigan and I no longer have one of the sentinels of security protecting me. There aren’t any handy mountain chains to tear up passing thunderstorms and so, I happen to live around the area that could be regarded as the northern tip of Tornado Alley. So now I have to consider escaping where I work because of a Tornado, but I don’t really think about it because there really isn’t ever any chance to actually escape. If I’m at work, it’s into the basement we all go, to die under a mess of torn-apart brickwork. So, no, no real escape plan.

What activity, task, or game most brings out your competitive streak?

I’ve never been very competitive. I have been related things before however. I’ve been impatient, I’ve been disappointed, but mostly it’s because I don’t measure personal success just for myself, but rather did I help anything greater than myself improve? That’s what I’m most proud of, not the little personal wins, but the huge towering wins that an entire band of people can claim working together. I rarely have these feelings mind you, so infrequent I do treasure them when they come.

Mostly I don’t follow sports or engage much in game play. The only guilty pleasure I have is Letterpress, but even in that game I’m not lusting after winning, or even smurfing my opponents. I’m much more apt to enjoy a long game where people leave the obviously difficult-to-play character alone, say a lonely Q, Z, or X and spend the rest of the time trying to assemble words to move the game along. In many ways, the way I play a game is a lot like that saying you’ve heard about enjoying the journey more than the destination when you are going someplace new. The destination is rarely as rah-rah as the journey it took to get there. Unless you’re speaking about Paris, in that case, it’s the opposite.

I try not to play with overly competitive people because if I win, they lose poorly and if I lose, they gloat. They are usually poor losers and poor winners. The best response to winning a game is to offer the loser to play again. The best response to losing a game is to offer the winner to play again. Again it’s not about the number of right or wrong, win or lose, but in how much fun you had. Life is a lot like Who’s Line, the games are made up and the points don’t matter.

Do parties and crowds fill you with energy, or send you scurrying for peace and quiet?

I quite enjoy throwing parties and attending them, however it has a limit. There is only so much socialization I can do before it starts to really wear me down. I need a balance, much like the tides are balanced, so if I spend too much time traveling and feeling disconnected I balance that out with staying at home and reading, for example. I couldn’t put on the mantle of the high-pressure socializer for very long before I would devolve into a grumpy, grunting misanthrope. For all the wonders that are other people, hell is other people as well. Take everything in measure, including them. It’s the times when you don’t have to deal with other people that gives you the recharged batteries to put up with other people when you must. The balance must always be maintained.