Jesse Friedman: Me

Hi, I'm Jesse.

I'm 23 years old. I did my undergrad at The University of Chicago, and stayed in the Second City to work for a year. Now I'm back in the Bay Area because it's an unbeatable combination of delicious, intelligent, innovative, happy, and famiily.

Now, while I appreciate tradition plenty, what really gets me going is new experiences, and especially discovering how to do things better. My interests, and especially the way I go about them, reflect this attitude.

Oh, and I'm sometimes on AIM: JFHatesMustard.

Food

My interests in food are wide and eclectic , and my dislike of routine and ordinary far surpasses any fear of finding something I won't like. I think I'm a pretty darn good cook (well trained in baking by Mom and cooking by Dad). I'll make a frittata with leftovers, cook up a lamb's-tongue stew with a recipe I've found through Google on my cell phone, and always make cake from scratch.

Drink

I enjoy beer and wine. For me, so much of it is the thrill of the hunt: the same bottle at a lower cost just tastes better. That's not to say I'll settle for just whatever's on sale, however. On the great beer scale, I'm closer to malt than to hops. As far as wine, I'm always good for a Spanish rioja, an earthy Côtes du Rhône, or an Australian cab-shiraz.

Travel

I love a good journey, whether by road trip or abroad. It's plenty okay to play the tourist — as long as you learn something along the way, chat with the locals, and always order the most typical beer/fish/cheese/pickled thing. I've been fortunate to have gone to enough places that I'll surely end up returning to, but in the meanwhile, I'm always wondering where the next new experience will be. I've been to Asia (three times to Japan, and once to Vietnam and Thailand); Europe (family trips to Italy, France, England, and Spain, as well as a five-month romp through nine countries last year); and Costa Rica, Mexico, and even Canada.

Road Trips

My first road trip was from Oakland to Chicago, starting on September 11, 2001. Despite, or possibly because of, the circumstances, I found the passing countryside and strange little roadside attractions really enjoyable. Since then, I've taken two Scav Hunt trips (all around Illinois, and around Lake Michigan), and driven from both coasts to Chicago. The most recent was the drive back from Chicago to the Bay. The price of gas be damned — as long as you've got the time, the best way to understand where you're going is to see the land around it.

Learning

You can take a man out of school, but you can't take school out of this man. To me, the pursuit of happiness is inextricable from the pursuit of knowledge — because the more you know, the more likely you are to know the things that wil help make your life better. I love to research, and relish the moment of finding a particular piece of elusive data. And nothing fires me up more than a good debate: depending on the outcome, I either get the satisfaction of being right, or the joy of learning something new.

Categorizing

I'm a taxonomist at heart, meaning I get turned on by categorizing things, from the etymology of words to consumer lifestages. It makes me a lot more comfortable to know what something is called, or where it came from, or how it relates to other items at similar places in a hierarchy or grid.

Chicago

Dozens of cars park in the right-hand lane of Lake Shore Drive to watch the Air and Water Show. Richard M. Daley, Mayor, decided he didn't like an airport, so he bulldozed it overnight and built a concert pavilion there instead. Lesbians, crack-heads, yuppies, Vietnamese, Swedes, and Ghanaians relatively peacefully coexist in the same one-mile radius. The trains run 24 hours a day. And downtown is the most beautiful compliation of skyscrapers in the world. It's impossible to pinpoint how exactly this city manages to be so stubbornly awesome and unabashedly grandiose — maybe the bitter winters, rusting bridges, and ingrained corruption need balancing out — but whenever I see a newspaper headline about the latest scandal going on in City Hall, somehow it doesn't seem at all out of place that I would feelan odd swell of pride in this, my adopted Second City.

The Bay Area

If I thought Chicago was cool, well, it took coming back here to realize it gets even better. $1 oyster happy hours. Sflickr meetups. 50 microbrews served on a WWII-era ship. Redwoods. Web 2.0. Web 2.0!! The sheer confluence of creativity is ridiculous. I'm so excited to be here.