I am Joel Morgan Kearney. I am a writer, editor, part-time idea man, and full-time intellectual. This is my story:
My childhood was amazing; I traveled with my parents to lands both foreign and comfortable, and was enveloped by all the trappings of a first class scholarly upbringing. My father was a liberal arts professor and taught at four major public universities during my life, generally switching to a new one every seven or eight years to take advantage of the opportunity to go on sabbaticals. This meant that I didn’t really have any friends who had been in my life an exceptionally long amount of time, and as I was a very shy child oftentimes the only people with whom I had to converse were the friends and colleagues of my parents. This in turn meant that I was to miss out on some of the typical childhood experiences, but it also meant that I was raised in an international environment that encouraged higher thought. Then, during the summer before my senior year in high school, my life was to change completely.
I was in a motor vehicle accident in the summer of 2003, and suffered a Traumatic Brain Injury. After taking my senior year off to concentrate on therapy-excepting my theatre and tech theatre classes that I sort of audited with the help of my sweet drama teacher, both to get me out of the house and to spend more time with my friends-I graduated high school in the spring of 2005. The following autumn I enrolled at UNC, and would go on to graduate in 2009 with an English degree. The next year I started an MS in technical communications at NC State, and after graduating that in 2011 was finally done with school. Next it was on to the working life, where I worked a 9-to-5er at an online homework company for around five years before they got bought out and I lost my job. But that is all my personal history, and not who I am.
I am a contradiction in terms. My mind is very bright and often takes flights of fancy, but my body is not so nimble and sometimes drags it down. I have a kind heart and generally display a sweet demeanor, but am a notorious jokester and seldom go out of my way to spare someone’s feelings. You can call me blunt or rude, but the fact is I just calls it like I sees it. I have a slight speech impediment and can be a bit difficult to understand if I don’t remember to slow my speech down, but you can usually rest assured that my mind is already far ahead of the conversation at hand. I am pretty darn nerdy, and play both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: the Gathering with friends on the weekends, but also have a surprising number of friends who are DJs or otherwise register as ‘cool’, and I often frequent bars and dance clubs. I am very liberal but do not consider myself a Democrat in the American understanding thereof. And even though I consider myself a Buddhist (a Dharma Practitioner to be specific), I find the Christian mythology fascinating and love reading different takes on it, especially as it pertains to the Christ).
My intellectual interests-of which this site serves as a showcase-are very broad, and range from the literature on which I based my college career to foreign cultures to new languages and language itself to politics to astrophysics, and everything in between. When I need a new book to read I usually just go into my library-yes, I have a library! Life goal achieved-and pick one out seemingly at random. But along with my numerous intellectual pursuits I get a kick out of watching most college and professional sports and love to sit back and have a few beers with friends and family. This site is more or less a place for me to post things that interest me, hopefully encourage discussion of those things, and get the feedback I need to allow me to move forward with my plans of world domination.
