Testing out this thing

The site has been having troubles, but I think this will actually post...
My name is Daniel McWhirter, and I grew up alternately in up-state NY and northern CA. Bethany Eising and I were married this summer, which gives me ties now to Ontario, Canada and the mid-west. For anyone considering marriage, I must say that when it is done well it is a very good thing. Both Bethany and I have been surrounded by people telling us that, from their experience, "it just gets better," and we have found that to be true for us.

I grew up in academia. When I was very young my father was a PhD student in physics at Cornell University, and later on he taught physics for nine years at Union College. Through that time my mother stayed at home, and home-schooled my siblings and I through highschool. A significant number of my parents friends growing up were either science grad students or professors, many of whom found it immensely humorous to induce me to use words like "spectroscopy" and "quark" at an early age. I also grew up in the church, since both parents were very much involved in local congregations wherever we lived. Most of these churches were rather on the conservative, baptistish, side of things, which made for a curious contrast with the academy. So, on the one hand I grew up taking the big-bang for granted, while continually running into people at church who were adamant 6-day creationists. But I usually liked both the people at church and the people I knew who used cool lasers and expensive cryostats to delve into secrets the church people thought should probably be left alone.

One of my mentors through college, David Smith, first interested me in cross-cultural issues. Through teaching me German, David taught me how to learn about myself through the eyes of another culture, as well as how to help others better know themselves. I have found that often students on the left and the right take a monological view of cross-cultural communications: those on the right tend to tout their culture above all others, while those on the left tend towards a curious form of cultural self-loathing and view all other cultures as superior to their own. I’m interested in pursuing a more dialogical cross-cultural communication, one in which there is give-and-take, and where the complex and contradictory nature of all cultures, foreign and domestic, is recognized.