Jordan Shapiro

I’m Jordo. I do lots of things. It has never seemed honest or authentic to try to reduce myself into any single category. I always feel troubled when I ‘m at a cocktail party — or anyplace where I meet new people — and someone asks, “what do you do?” I feel like they want to turn me into a packaged object, a product, something they can easily consume. It is as if they are asking which aisle of an imaginary Target or Walmart I belong on. I was always confused when I used to walk into music stores (back when people bought CDs at the mall) and try to figure out whether the musician I was interested in was shelved as blues, or soul, or hip-hop, or rock, or country. Seriously, what are the Rolling Stones? They define Rock and Roll with a bluesy, country, rhythm and blues twang. Music is like life: paradoxical. It doesn’t fit into the fantasy of genres. The chaotic experience of being in the world is ambiguous. What do I do? Mostly I am. I am in the world as myself. I am Jordo. Pragmatically, I teach in the College of Liberal Arts at Temple University. I write for FORBES. I'm an author, editor, and contributor to a variety of books. I own a coffee shop in Philadelphia. I facilitate organizational communications for companies that are willing to pay a consultant. I used to be a cook and a chef — I owned a diner and cracked eggs and scrambled, fried, poached, or “omelet-ed” them for 1200 people every Saturday morning. But that’s just a financial run down — what I DO for money. What I always DO (whether or not it is for money) is try to approach the world with curiosity, openness, and flexibility. I try to give thought and give thanks to/for everything. I try to constantly disrupt cultural constructed ways of knowing things — to bypass habitual perspectives — to try to meet the world with new authenticity everyday.