KSENIYA
YAROSH

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Kseniya Yarosh was born in Ukraine, 100 km south of Chernobyl, in 1984. She was one and a half years old when reactor number four at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant exploded, killing dozens directly and exposing millions of others in the general area to a hideous amount of radiation. She and her family are still investigating any effects they may have incurred.

In 1994, she moved with her mother to Rockville, MD, where she learned how to not have a very profitable social life and instead meet people on the Internet.

In 2004, she moved again, this time alone, to New York to attend Eugene Lang College at the New School for Liberal Arts. Here, her awkwardness, Internet-reliant social training, and a surplus of interesting possible friends exploded like a faulty reactor into her face. She chronicled her weird and usually very funny episodes meeting people on the Internet, and then in public (often through Craigslist) on her website and in a series of intimate zines called the Skye is Falling, Oh No Oh My, and most recently, Fuck You.

She has been working odd jobs and moving around quite a bit from apartment to apartment in New York since graduating in 2006. She has also been working like the slowest snail on a longer sort of text glob about her aforementioned experiences, which we hope to be able to publish. An original working title was People I Met on the Internet, which I like a lot. She told me today (March 10, 2008), though, that her current mental title for the project is the Boys You've Seen Me With Around Town. Says Ksen:

"Eventually it will be something, that something being a collection of vignettes on my various meetings with boys in New York, DC, and Paris (one boy..), most met through the internet but several not."

In the same e-mail, she reminded me of the following additional biographical details:

"medical:
- I suffer from ACHOO syndrome
- I have a mild case of Grapheme -> color synesthesia
- I am allergic to honey
- I have had a difficult time remembering I am 23; 22 was an easier number to remember

likes:
- radio
- pineapples
- hats

dislikes:
- capers
- Hemingway
- orange (the color)"

She is one of the most interesting and bright humans on Earth.