“because for Chad, ‘social’ and ‘life’ are indistinguishable…”

In the back of his 1986 Volvo station wagon, a vehicle dubbed the “Big Back Seat,” Chad Poist carries a basketball, a football, a Frisbee, four kites, swim gear, soccer cleats, a towel, a change of clothes and a toothbrush.

From his fourth-floor walk-up in Woodley Park he shares takeout food and Popsicles back and forth across the six-foot gap between his fire-escape balcony and the balcony of his neighbors Ben Bradburn and Lisa Rolle in the apartment building next door. He learned salsa dancing from the Colombian guys who used to live across the hall, who would snatch him off the stairwell with a cry of “Chad!” and thrust him into a cramped, gyrating mass of swivelling hips and dark-eyed women. He learned Japanese from a two-year postgraduate stint in Japan, where he taught English and subsequently starred in a ramen noodle ad. He once ran a speed-dating service with his cousin and his aunt. He is trying to launch his own cooking show, though he doesn’t actually know how to cook, which is why the show is called, for now, “The Pretend Chef.”

Chad doesn’t smoke or drink alcohol or coffee. He wears sunscreen when playing outdoors and earplugs when he goes clubbing. He appears to subsist largely on party food and Grape Nuts with plain, nonfat yogurt, a pasty beige sludge that he pre-mixes by the quart, stores in the fridge and eats straight from the container with a soup spoon.

Chad Poist is 30 and single, with a history degree from Haverford and a day job as a systems engineer that he negotiated by text messaging, with the key condition that he wouldn’t have to get to work before noon. Because for Chad, “social” and “life” are synonymous and indistinguishable, and a night that sees Chad in bed before dawn is a night, as far as Chad’s concerned, not lived to its fullest potential. (Read more in The Washington Post)