Upon some serious internal reflection, I was able to deduce the answer (actually, it came from here):
global $profileuser;
$user_id = $profileuser->ID;
$profileuser is apparently a global and rather accessible variable for user info.
were you able to successfully add in user metadata through the user-edit page?
i’m trying to do the same thing, and all the solutions i’ve found involve either kludgey plugins or things that add extra tables for their own data. meh.
i’ve can set and get the data in my templates like so:
update_usermeta($userId,'level',"1");
$UserLevel = get_usermeta($userId,'level');
but i’m stuck at being able to see/edit that field in the user edit page.