This is me, Monty Maxwell, having a beer in a pub in Cambridge, England during the 2010 World Cup. I like this picture and tend to use it for internet forum avatars. But aside from all that, this page is dedicated to summarizing me with little facts of the sort that people find important enough to make profile pages out of. I don’t like “social media”, but it seems to be a thing that is here to stay, just like I can’t seem to quit using it. But this is my central profile, as I really, really want to quit using things like Myspace and Facebook. I’m not even starting a Google+ page, so just forget about all that. These days we’re spread all over the internet so much that we lose ourselves somewhere. But Romantic Antihero is fixing that for me. It’s my central online presence, and way cooler than all those other crud sites anyway. You want me: Monty Maxwell? This is as close as you’re going to get online. For starters, I am called Max by most folks. This wasn’t always the case, it just sort of came into being around 2002 and I’ve run with it since then. Some people like to show off how well they know me by calling me Monty instead, and that’s fine I suppose, but I prefer Max if anybody cares to know. You can show off how well you know me, or you can show off how much you care about what I prefer. Your choice.
There’s usually some kind of list on these online profile things. Awfully important things like where I went to high school, a list of books I want the world to know I’ve read and believe I understand, or favorite television shows or music bands to somehow tell everyone what my personality is like. Because, really, that’s what this age reduces us to: personality by proxy. I wear designer shirts, am over educated, and have elitist hobbies, so that must mean I’m some sort of special person, right? Wrong. That works for most people, though, so I’ll tell you about them eventually. What I believe makes up a person is what they’ve done, what they’re doing, and where they’re likely to go. So I will start off by showing you what I’ve done.
Left to right: I was in the Army from 1996 to 1999 as an 11-H infantry heavy weapons specialist in the 101st Airborne. After some post-Army mucking about I lived in Florida for a year learning to fly helicopters. Following that I moved back to Kansas and eventually got serious about school, graduating in 2009 from Johnson County Community College with an A.A. before going to KU, which is my current school. The picture at the top of the page was a pre-law oriented study abroad I did at the University of Cambridge, Trinity Hall, through the University of Kansas. During my time at JCCC I became involved in Japanese cultural studies through language classes, and the picture of me in martial arts gear is from a kendo competition I went to with my club. Second to last is a folk celebration of kith and kin, representing my own expression of spirituality and religion. The very last picture is me wearing a tinfoil hat while holding a can of Mountain Dew and a can of Roddenberry’s boiled peanuts, because you can’t be serious all the bloody time without becoming a boring tool. I like to have fun, yo.
