In September 2009, I celebrated my 5-year anniversary with About.com. I’m the Manager of Content Development, where I head recruitment and training of freelance writers and also lead search engine optimization (SEO) for content.
In February 2009, I started a Facebook group to gather people who live in the apartments in Brooklyn where I have lived since 2007. The group is growing and now has over 170 members. Â It has become a community resource where neighbors have organized a beautification project, shared information about crime in the area, and offer services like babysitting and dog-walking. I am active in the group, responding to posts and alerting the group members to important posts via Facebook messaging.
I wrote an article about being an atheist and being inspired by Revolution NYC, a nondenominational gay-affirming Christian church that holds services in a Williamsburg bar on Sunday afternoons. The following Sunday, Rev. Vince Anderson referenced me in his sermon (skip to 45:45 in the mp3).
Inspired by a life-threatening accident I survived, I got a tattoo of a roaring tiger cub in 2009. My artist, Joshua Lord, is phenomenal, as are the other artists at his studio, East Side Ink here in New York City.  Inked magazine wrote, “If Leonardo da Vinci and Charles Darwin had a love child who decided to embark on a career as a tattoo artist, that would be [Josh] Lord.” Josh completed body art work for M. Night Shyamalan’s 2010 movie, The Last Airbender.
In 2008, I was the organizational leader of a Burning Man camp of 120 friends. I pulled together teams working on transportation, construction, fund raising, budget, kitchen, wellness and Leave No Trace. I innovated within my community by publishing a regular email newsletter to keep this worldwide community informed. Feedback from the campers was that I had led the most community-oriented experience this particular camp had had yet.
I had the misfortune of having bedbugs throughout the 60-unit New York apartment building where I lived in 2004. Growing bedbug problems were not yet widely reported, and I found little support online at the time. I wrote about my own trials with bedbugs on a semi-anonymous blog I kept. This resource was the first online diary of a New York City bedbug experience, and was an early hub of support for others who emerged as having similar problems. One of my diary entries was quoted in a 2005 New Yorker article about bedbugs. Currently, I maintain a resource for bed bug sufferers called How to Kill Bed Bugs.
Always supportive of friends’ endeavors, I went to a Cuddle Party in the spring of 2004, a communication workshop co-created by friend Marcia Baczynski. I wrote about my experience on the blog I had at the time. This post got a link from Gawker, and began a flood of media attention for Cuddle Party, which included articles in Newsweek and People magazines. For my service, Cuddle Party named me the first inductee to their Hall of Fame.
Edited June 16, 2010