I am someone.

My name is not significant, but if you really want to know, I will tell you that it is Kevin. At other points in my life, I have variously called myself Madison, Madison Grey, Phillip, Ren, and Dr. Ninge. I hope now to have demonstrated how complete is my irreverance for naming conventions. On the other hand, I do realize that sometimes it is worthwhile to know what someone looks like. As such, I have suffered myself to be seen leaning against the railing of a New Orleans cemetary after what turned out to be the worst of the 15-some-odd Mardi Gras that I have attended.

So, yeah, I'm from New Orleans. Or that's what I tell people anyway, although some people I know would sooner have me say that I am from River Ridge, since that is technically the suburb in which I was born and raised. But whatever. I still have a greater feeling of affinity and fraternity for New Orleans.

Through the 10th grade, I attended St Martin's Episcopal School, where my only real friends were fictive and well-spoken until the 9th grade, wherein I met Rebekah Gordon, who continues to be my steadiest and naughtiest friend ... even though she lives far far away in Chicago.

For my last two years of high school, I somehow convinced my parents to let me go to the Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts, a.k.a. LSMSA. Doing so simultaneously destroyed and saved my life in ways that I do not wish to get into with people who are potentially complete strangers.

Suffice it to say that I loved it and I hated it. But I will always always remember it incredibly fondly, mainly due to its incredible formative impact and the fact that it gave me a two year head-start (two pre-college years, that is) to get comfortable with myself and my homosexuality. Taking a boy to prom helped on both counts.

From there, I went on to Hendrix College in Conway, Arkanas. And, in utter spite of what it might seem like from geographical context, the college was a wonderfully intellectual institution, full of acceptance yet again.

Thanks to a mandatory freshman course (a blessing in disguise called WIT: Western Intellectual Traditions), I found something that has become inextricable from my concept of myself: philosophy. I have been influenced by any number of philosophers while on my way to my degree in it. I have particularly enjoyed Aristotle (not Plato), Nietzsche (not Sartre), Mill (not Kant), and Rorty (not Wittgenstein, but only cuz I never read anything by him). However, most of all, I am in love with William James. The height of his career came round about 1890-1910, where he published a great deal in both the fields of psychology and philosophy, doing great things for both fields. Apart from being one of the founders of modern psychology and the single most accomplished (sorry, Dewey) expositor of Pragmatism, he wrote the book that was destined to eliminate all vestiges of self-loathing from my immature soul. That book was The Will to Believe.

I have no way of knowing for sure, but I believe it to have been mostly by virtue of my thesis on William James that I received the highest distinction for a philosophy student. I love that man.

But enough already, eh? Apart from dear Willie, I also met some other wonderful people at Hendrix. I will not go into a huge string of names. But I will say those of the people who, in the end, stood closest by. They are Maureen McClung, a biologist whose drive to excel is utterly admirable; Clint Cargile, an actor whose craziness and refusal to take any shit brought me off my high horse on several occasions; and Heidi Richie, whose death in a car crash the summer before senior year sobered me enormously and robbed everyone of one of the most simple and beautiful people I have ever known.

After graduating from Hendrix, I spent a little bit more time in Conway, working at RadioShack and watching a mediocre relationship fester into a disgusting one. I did pretty well at RadioShack, actually. I made a decent living for a young, single guy.

So, yeah. Then, the January after the May that saw me graduate with a bachelor's in philosophy, I entered into what is the current phase of my life: Peace Corps. I am currently serving in the Dominican Republic as a volunteer in what they call "Information Technology for Education". So, technically, I'm an Education volunteer, but effectively I'm an IT volunteer. (Interestingly enough, the former is what the bosses refer to us as, and the latter is our way of referring to ourselves.) My group of IT volunteers is the second in the country. The first were mostly teachers and found that they couldn't keep the hardware working for long enough to do much. So they pulled all us techies together, and now we're more or less seeing that we're too interested in the technical stuff to be very much interested in educating people. HA! Not really, but still sort of.

I work in Santiago, a really nice city, all things considered. My money doesn't go very far, but I stretch it pretty well all the same. I go to a movie once every month or two and whatnot. I used to go to the movies more, but the peso has been doing pretty poorly in the last 6 months, mainly due to the failure of what I believe to have been the largest bank in the country. Yeah, and you thought Enron was bad. These people stole an enormous amount of money. And what do the authorities have to say about it? "Oh, well." Nothing they can do about it, of course. But I'm doing all right all the same. The electricity doesn't go out all that often where I live, and the water only does so on extremely rare occasions. The other volunteers in Santiago were not so lucky as I in the acquisition of such a nice place.