Describing Myself
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Hi. My name is Toby and I am the writer and teacher behind Bite-Sized-English.com. Today, I want to tell you a little bit about myself. About the person behind the voice you hear so often at Bite-Sized-English.com.
You know I am a teacher, but I think my profession is only a small part of who I am. I view myself as an American living in Germany. I really enjoy living in Germany, but I also really enjoy being an American. I don’t think I will ever want to become German.
I view myself as an avid reader. ‘Avid’ is a word that means that I like to do it. I love to read. I read, I don’t know, probably a hundred pages a day. I can read a good book in three hours, if it’s a really good book. I read, partly to improve my German. (You know I live in Germany and I think it’s important to speak the language where you live.) And I read often in English just to unwind. I prefer a good book over the TV, anyday.
Something else I really enjoy is drinking coffee. I am coffee-lover! I am not what I think of as a snobby or stuck-up coffee drinker. I don’t drink expensive coffee, I drink good coffee at a cheap price, and I drink a lot of it.
I also really enjoy being in the outdoors. I enjoy sunshine and walking through the woods and, to that end, or, for that reason, I have a dog. Her name is Katze, she’s a dachshund. And I really enjoy having her for company, I enjoy the life and excitement she brings into our apartment and I definitely enjoy spending time outside with her.
As for my personality of the kind of person I am, I think I’m a very laid-back person, I think I’m a very relaxed person. I inherited my father’s tendency to always want to be very, very on time. But I also experienced enough of that as a child to keep it bottled up inside. When we start to get behind and I want to start yelling for everyone to go fast, I know how annoying that is, and so I just swallow that urge and I say “Toby, calm down, it’s okay.” I think that’s the only time I get really excited.
There are some things I don’t like. I don’t like driving a car. It’s unusual for an American, but I drove a lot both privately when I was living in the U.S. driving to and from school and in the Army, I was a Humvee driver and I spent way too much time driving and I would not mind if I never drove again.
I do not like full trams. I love public transportation. I love walking to the tram, getting on, reading a book and, after I read a chapter or two, I’m at work. I love how relaxed that is. But I hate it when I go to the tram and there’s no room to sit and I’ve been excited about reading and the tram is too full. I don’t like it.
Uh, I have one more thing I don’t like then one more thing I do like, and then I’ll stop.
What I don’t like is exercise. I exercise a lot because I don’t want to be ‘the fat American’ For many of my students, I am the only American I know and it’s important to me that they don’t have only one American in their life and he is very fat. The stereotype is already bad enough. So, I do go jogging. In the winter we started going swimming once a week, and I exercise in the apartment. I don’t like it, but I do.
And the reason I do it—and the last thing I like—is I love to eat. I am an eater. I like food. I would eat just about anything that came across my path. Even worse, my wife is a wonderful cook. And that means I have a lot of good food to eat and, if I didn’t exercise, I would have to stop eating as much and I like the food more than I hate exercising.
Well, that’s all for today. I hope that this has been a good introduction to me.
