I’m no believer in astrology, but I do believe that I was born under the right sign for me.

I’m a Gemini. I see two sides, I embody two sides, I am both sides. I can feel your pain. I
possibly listen to you better than you listen to yourself. I not only hear you; I affirm you.
I am fascinated by symmetry, dichotomy, irony, ambiguity. All these things have two facets.
I sometimes overdo the irony thing, saying stuff that is patently untrue, just to somehow
get at the truth, or get the other person to stop and think, to invite them to see the matter
differently, or just for a laugh. Some people find this charming or funny; it can be annoying
after a while–even for me.

Seeing two sides also is the essence of empathy, and I do feel for the other guy, especially
the downtrodden. I’m the guy who has a stack of $1 bills in his glove compartment to give
the folks asking for money at the corner. When I get up in the middle of the night and
notice that my house is cold, I think of the people in tents under the freeway who have only
blankets and no bathroom. My heart aches for them.

I grew up in Europe and wrote many letters, and became a writer almost by accident, just
by writing a lot. I was the “other” in another country, managed to learn the language, but
retained the sense of being on the outside. So I trained as an ESL teacher, then focused on
writing because I was good at it.

But in my heart, I’m a song writer. I write songs, what might be called ‘pop songs’: they are
honest to the point of confessional, with love at the center, almost always written to
somebody rather than about a person or issue. My one iTunes album is called Sentimental
Dreamer, and I am indeed a sentimental guy. I like novels about rediscovered romance,
where she returns to her hometown in her 30s after a divorce or a career obstacle or to
handle an inheritance, and happens to meet a love from years before, and things proceed in
a sweet and romantic way. I’m no fan of edgy crime dramas or horror films; I’m more of a
rom-com guy.

I suppose there are two sides to most everyone; we all embody contradictions and
complements. Me, I love the cultured life as well as the worker life, though I lean toward
the worker: I’m most comfortable in work clothes, and I need for my hands to be in the dirt
regularly. I make compost on Saturday mornings at my community garden, and can’t not
be growing something. Yet, I was raised early in life in Barcelona Spain, went to private
schools and belonged to a tennis club, learned languages, and generally lived the cultured
European life that my father provided.

Until he died, of cancer. Back in the US, I figured out a way to become American again.
This was the 1970s, when Roe v. Wade happened, when my mother found her feminist
footing and made me understand in no uncertain terms that my job as a man was to join
the “women’s liberation” movement, as it was called at the time. Which I did. My songs
reflect that: I’m curious about how women think, what they want, and how to relate to
them.

Some people believe that everything happens for a reason. I believe that we live in a cold,
dark, random universe where things simply happen, and that all the warm and fuzzy stuff
that we feel and talk about are the result of human consciousness, which itself, ultimately,
is the result of a universe of random collisions of molecules which, given 13.2 billion years,
eventually produced planets and life and consciousness. And so, here we are.

I’m a leukemia survivor. I survived somehow, don’t ask me how, but I’ll always believe that
it was luck alone that saved me—not anything I deserved. Too many of my cohort did not
survive for me to think that I was anything but fortunate.

They say you can tell a lot about a person by how they handle conflict. I avoid it! I also
avoid power: I don’t want power over anyone else, as I think that power, like too much
money, corrupts. I want a world of equality and peace, and work toward that by trying to
create a relationship of equals when possible. I happen to be a teacher, which offers me a
certain amount of power, but I try to diffuse it, try to make the teacher-student thing a
matter of relationship between people who are at different stages of their life journeys.
Because for me, everything is personal, ultimately, which maybe is why I am a teacher: my
work involves other people and me in a way that the job of a bureaucrat or a scientist or a
clerk or a laborer does not.

How to know me? My songs probably say it best. In true Gemini fashion, I go by two
names: the name you know, as well as my name as a song writer, Kai Landauer, which I use
on my website. You can know me by my writing also, of which you get a taste here.