So Who Is Francis?

A fair question, asked of me often enough that I have had to develop an answer. The honest one is that I do not think I am one thing, and I have stopped apologizing for it.

People get read as one-dimensional. The finance guy. The athlete. The funny one. Two dimensions if you are lucky, and three if somebody bothers to stay in the room. I would like to make the case that I am at minimum four, and that the fourth one is the interesting one, because it is the part that connects the other three and it is the part almost nobody asks about.

My spirit animal is a monkey who talked back to heaven

Sun Wukong. The Monkey King. His defining traits are appetite, cleverness, and mischief of the particular kind that makes trouble and makes people love him anyway. He is enormously capable and enormously undisciplined about it. He argues with heaven. He gets pinned under a mountain for five hundred years and comes out the same creature, still funny, still impossible, but finally pointed somewhere.

I did not pick him to be flattering. I picked him because the appetite is real, the mischief is real, and I have had my own much shorter stint under a mountain.

The paperwork

Sign

Pisces

Lunar year

Golden Pig

Trait I am accused of

Quicksilver tongued

Trait I would claim

Intelligent playfulness

Three words for 2026

Effervescent. Wonder-filled. Indomitable.

Standing instruction

Doubt the default

Second standing instruction

Talk to strangers

What Ms. Yu said

My trigonometry teacher, asked about me for the school paper, described me as the kind of student who gives the teacher a headache in class, and then the teacher goes home and secretly laughs about all his antics.

I have never disputed it. I have it more or less framed.

There were other teachers who got as far as the headache and stopped. She is the one who kept reading, and I have thought about the difference between those two teachers for years.

Three things that explain me faster than I can

Set as plates rather than posters. The artwork belongs to the people who made these and I am not going to republish it on my own site.

I am a lover boy and I am not embarrassed about it

I am a poet before I am an analyst. I like the beach, I like reflecting, I like feeling things deeply and then going and finding somebody to talk about it with. Romance films work on me every single time and I have stopped pretending to be above them.

And I have very specific instructions about how to treat somebody, because my mother taught them to me and she did not present them as optional. Buy the flowers, for no occasion. Say the compliment out loud instead of thinking it. Never go to bed upset, not once, no matter how late it makes the night. Open the door, every time, forever.

And when something goes wrong, do the harder thing: sit down and work out whether this is actually a you problem, because it very often is, and it is almost never only a you problem either. It is a we. Take the accountability all the way to the bottom of it, past the point where it stops feeling good, and then keep going a little further.

And I am also the other thing

I look up to bodybuilders. I watch a genuinely unreasonable amount of NFL. I was a captain on a football team and I am the person yelling in the huddle, and I like being that person, and I do not think it is in tension with any of the paragraph above.

That is the whole point I am making. Those are supposed to be different men. They are not.

Things I will read about until three in the morning

Human pathogenesis. Biology and anatomy, mechanism-first, always. I keep profiles on myself and run bloodwork against them, which sounds clinical and is actually just curiosity pointed inward.

Then: human history. Archaeology. Ancient civilizations. What people did before they had any of this. I was an absolutely insufferable dinosaur child and I have simply redirected it.

Here is the one I bring up at dinner and refuse to let go of. For most of recorded European history people did not sleep the way we do. They slept in two shifts. You went down not long after dark for roughly four hours, then woke naturally around midnight into an interval people simply called the watch, and stayed up for an hour or two. Not anxiously. On purpose. They prayed, tended the fire, talked to whoever was next to them, visited neighbours, had sex, interpreted the dreams they had just surfaced from. Then a second sleep until dawn.

The historian A. Roger Ekirch found hundreds of references to it, casually, across centuries, in diaries and court records and medical texts, described the way you would describe breakfast. It disappeared within a few generations of artificial light, and it disappeared so completely that we now diagnose the waking as a disorder and medicate it.

We took a thing humans did for a thousand years, forgot it entirely, and started treating it as a symptom.

I think about that constantly, and not only about sleep. I think about how much of what we call normal is about two hundred years old and wearing a very convincing costume.

The small operations

I take an unreasonable number of selfies, for nobody. I film short videos of completely ordinary afternoons, because a year from now the ordinary afternoon is exactly the thing I will want back.

I talk to myself more or less constantly, out loud, and I tell myself jokes, and I find them funny. This is either a warning sign or the cheapest entertainment ever devised and I have chosen to believe it is the second one.

I care about clothes. I like talking to strangers and I will do it in any queue, anywhere. And the genuine highlight of a given week is the part where all my roommates and I finally clean the apartment, and somebody puts music on, and everybody is loose and slightly stupid and dancing badly in a kitchen that is finally not disgusting. I would not trade that for a single yacht party.

And once a day, every day, I send somebody a genuine compliment. There is a longer argument about why, but the short version is that it costs nothing and returns more than anything else I do.

I love waking up. I have never once been sorry that a day started.

The rules I actually keep

• I will never raise my voice at my mother, my brother, or anyone in my family.
• I will not gossip, and I will not be disrespectful to friends or to strangers.
• I will spread encouragement to the people around me, on purpose, out loud.
• I will be more afraid of not trying than of failing.

Those are written down in a note on my phone, which I realize is a slightly ridiculous place to keep a moral code. They have held up.

And three cats

Who have supervised, between them, most of the homework in this house. One of them appears in the first photograph on the site, which tells you roughly how long this arrangement has been going on.