(a collection of misc things)

[wittingly]

• Ian once had a student that went on one of those reality shows where you pitch your business ideas. The kid wanted to sell oranges with built-in wet wipes. He says he didn't make it past the first round because he couldn't figure out how to get the wipe in there.
• He was a latch-key kid to a single mom, who worked 2 jobs to support them. She was an absolute hippy, extremely feminist, and raised him to follow a lot of those same open-minded ideas. This planted the seed for the low-key hippy he's become himself. She also drove him really hard to study and to learn in the hopes that he could make a career for himself that gave him a better quality of life than she could give them.
• His mother was a smoker, and she passed away from lung cancer a couple of years after he graduated college. She smoked up until the day she died. When he asked her to quit, she said "honey, why bother stopping now if it's already got me?"
• He never knew his father, and his mother says he wasn't worth knowing. He thinks she might not even know who he is either, but that she's got a loose idea. After he hit his teen years, he never really mourned what he was missing out on.
• From middle school on his normal routine would be to go home, smoke weed, and take stuff apart to try and put it back together again. He was bad at it for a long time until he wasn't anymore, and he wound up fixing their vacuum cleaner, their garbage disposal, all their small appliances, anything that broke down he could normally fix.
• He had a tight knit gang of friends from around sixth grade all the way to high school graduation, but going to different colleges made them slowly lose touch over time. 
• He has never been married. He's had a few flings, and in college he slept around a lot with both men and women - not in a way he regrets, so much as that he just isn't like that anymore. He stopped finding it fulfilling. Instead, he's a little romantic and he harbors romanticized ideals of people that he becomes infatuated with for a short duration of time until who they really are overrides that. He's never had a relationship last for over a year. He's been called "too aloof" by partners.
• He likes animals, but he doesn't consider himself a cat person or a dog person. He gets too wrapped up in his work to give either of them the attention they deserve, and he's not a big fan of the responsibility. He did, however, have a pretty impressive fish tank before the world fell apart. It filtered itself through an aquaponic herb garden system on top of it. All of his fish were named some variation of "Melvin".
• In keeping with his theme of "too aloof", Ian outwardly seems sociable and outgoing - but doesn't have anyone he considers himself close to. He doesn't form intimate connections easily, possibly because he grew up being solitary and fatherless. All of his friends have felt surface-level, hence falling so easily out of touch with his friend-group in high-school, then again with his college peers that he regularly hung out with. One or two still hit him up to grab a drink every now and then, but they don't know his mother's name.
• Teaching a group of students is almost easy because of this; every year he gets the illusion of a personal connection with a few students that really take to his class, but once they stop being his students he typically never hears from them again. This allows him to coast through life with the illusion of a fulfilling social life.
• It was only after the world fell apart and he had no one to mourn that he realized the truth of himself, about his lack of attachments. He's aware of it, but he doesn't know how to fix it or if he wants to. The truth is he just doesn't really know how to let himself become vulnerable or dependent on someone.
• He's one of those people that makes a social media account and then forget it exists, never uses it or updates it. His Facebook account has a years-old picture and pretty much only contains people commenting "happy birthday" on his wall.
• He's surprisingly political, and he'll get in calm discussions about politics for a long time probing and asking questions trying to make conservative people more deeply consider their own takes on issues. It can get super annoying for everyone involved.
• He has something of an ego, and while he's aware of that and tries to check it with humility he can occasionally assume he knows best about a subject and believe his opinion is the Right opinion. He comes across as accidentally condescending because of it.
• Doing the "right" thing and being morally superior seem real easy from up there on his high horse.
• It comes from a place of good intention, though - he really does want to see people learn and grow. It makes him feel really good to teach, to inspire, to watch people develop a curiosity and then follow it.
• He's incredibly compassionate, and while he doesn't have the bandwidth to organize charity events he'll happily attend them and participate in them to support the cause.
• But he isn't a pushover. Just because a student comes at him with a sob story doesn't mean he's going to bend over and accommodate them.
• He can be firm when he needs to be, he can push back and become challenging. He always does it with a level head and from a place of rationality instead of emotion, unless he's incredibly passionate about an issue - then he starts to get swept up in it, and may even raise his voice.
• His favorite author is Stephen King, but he is not a huge fan of the horror genre in general. He just likes the writer. His favorite book is Gerald's Game. Runner-up is The Road, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.