~ME~ By Kendra Logan

Here is the "about me" paper I had to write for school. I don't know what else to say, so I'm posting it. I hope you don't think I'm, like, being all annoying and "it's all about me" ish. Anyway, here it is; enjoy! :

As everyone here hopefully knows, my name is Kendra Logan, and I’m fifteen years old. When it comes to my having namesakes, there is not much to tell. I don’t really have a namesake except my aunt. Even so, my parents say they mostly chose my middle name because it sounds right with with Kendra. Overall, I like my name fine, but I frequently wish it were something more exciting and unique (it's not actually Kendra. I only use that for blogs :D). To my extended family, however, it is unique, because it isn’t a family name. My grandparents strongly wanted me to have a family name, but there were not many good ones to chose from. If I had been a boy and my parents had decided to go with a family name, I would have been called either Clyde Lester Logan, or Marvin Lee Logan. Thank goodness I was not a boy, and my parents decided not to stick with family names.

While I don’t particularly like the names of my ancestors, I do find my family history interesting. I have a hard time remembering much about the history of my dad’s side because everyone has so many nicknames! I have relatives who are called everything from Pineapple, to Red, to Cricket, to Joker, and many more names. This makes it difficult sometimes to follow who did what, but I actually like having such colorful characters for relatives. It makes family gatherings interesting, and gets my creative juices going. Someday I think I might writing something based off of my relatives. It would certainly be entertaining.

When I was little, I had a very vivid imagination. I’m sure most of you find that hard to believe. Whenever my two cousins would come over for the holidays, we would always play an imaginary game. Usually the game would revolve around us being poor and orphaned and having to fend for ourselves, although occasionally we would play Slaves. I don’t know why we played such dark games. Maybe it’s because we had such nice lives that we decided it was more fun to pretend the bad stuff. One specific instance I remember happened when I was about five years old. My cousins, Sarah, and I were playing poor people in the guest bedroom at my grandmother’s house. The guest bedroom is where most of our games took place. We were snooping around for things to use in our game, and we came across a box of pennies. We thought that would be perfect to use since poor people most likely only had pennies anyway. We played the game with the pennies all day and had fun, but when the grownups found out, they got very upset that we had touched someone else’s money. None of us understood what was so bad about playing with a bunch of pennies, and to this day I don’t know why. Maybe the pennies were special or something.

When I was little, I was very persuasive. I remember multiple times when I tricked the babysitter into letting me do things I wasn’t supposed to, but the funniest instance of all occurred when my grandparents were babysitting me. I was about two at the time. I told them I was thirsty, and so my grandfather and I went to the fridge to get something for me to drink. I spotted a bottle of lemon juice on the shelf in the refrigerator. “That,” I said. “I want some of that, please.” I can remember my grandfather’s confused and hesitant frown. “Your mother lets you drink lemon juice?” he asked. I put on my most solemn face and nodded. “Yes,” I said. After a moment of convincing, my grandfather poured me a Sippy cup of lemon juice. I’m not sure if he really believed me, or just decided to humor me, but either way, the lemon juice was awful. I remember thinking that next time I should probably be careful what I persuade people of.

Also when I was around two years old, I attended play practice for the Christmas play at my church. I was too little to have a part, but I went along anyway, I guess. During a break in practicing, the adults went aside to talk about some details and make some decisions. Meanwhile, I convinced the older children and teenagers to march around the sanctuary being camels. When the adults looked up from their planning, there was a train of teenagers stomping around the sanctuary pretending to be camels—with me at the front of the procession.

I don’t think my personality has changed much in the past ten or thirteen years. I still have an imagination and like to persuade people of things. Of course, I no longer act out the stories I come up with, I do write them down, and I enjoy playing imaginary games with little kids. I guess I’m still a six year old at heart. Of course, having a vivid imagination is great, I guess, but not so much when you’re home at night with only a little sister to keep you company.
When I was ten and Sarah was eight, my parents left us home for an hour or so to go to band practice at our church. Things were fine at home for a little while, but then Sarah and I heard a noise coming from my dad’s office. It sounded like my dad talking on the phone, so we weren’t bothered by that, until we remembered that our dad wasn’t home. Then we sort of freaked out a little. Sarah demanded that I go and check in my dad’s office to see if someone was there. After a lot of arguing and freaking out together, I did. I didn’t see anyone, but both of us were convinced we had heard someone. The rest of the night we kept hearing people! Upstairs, in the bathroom, in the kitchen, in our parents’ bedroom. We finally decided that the intruders had to be invisible. It was the only explanation. I had actually been doing some research on invisibility cloaks for a story I was writing, so unfortunately I knew that being invisible was actually possible. Sarah and I ended up calling our parents, who were more than little ticked off at me for getting us both all scared. For a long time after that, I really believed that there were people in my house wearing invisibility cloaks. That’s definitely the downside to having a powerful imagination. Of course, my being persuasive didn’t help that situation much either.

This next story, like the previous one, deals a little with my imaginative side, but primarily with my persistent side. Behind the Long House, the place where my church meets, there is a “huge” dirt hill. At least, it was “huge” when my friends and I were nine years old. I played on that hill with my friends every chance I got. We played on it after church, after Wednesday night Bible study, even after the classes for our homeschool group that met at the Long House. We played slaves on it after church and Bible study, but after homeschool classes, the Hill became a place of war. We homeschool kids had divided ourselves into two teams, and we battled for control over the Hill. Needless to say, that hunk of dirt and weeds was a big part of our lives. We loved playing on it. It was the best playground imaginable. We had trails coming off of it, we had carved steps into the back side, there was a hole in the side for treasure, it was a kids paradise. That’s probably why the news of its planned demolition hit us so hard. Well, it hit me hard anyway. When I found out the Hill was scheduled to be destroyed and flattened out to make the Long House a prettier-looking place, I was devastated. I asked my dad if he would tell the bulldozer guy not to do it. My dad said that the hill really did need to go. It was ugly and not useful to anyone. I kept pestering him, though. Finally he told me that if I loved the hill so much, I should do something about it. I began plotting what to do, and decided that I would make a petition. I grabbed a piece of lined paper before homeschool group one day and labeled it Save The Hill. I went around telling the kids what I was doing, and before long, I had a ton of signatures. I did the same thing at church the next week. By the time I was finished, the paper had almost a hundred signatures. When the guy came to destroy the hill, I showed him the paper, and told him why we wanted the hill to stay. He actually listened to me, a little nine-year-old-girl. I finished explaining and held my breath. He shrugged. “Okay.” I was speechless. My idea had actually worked! The Dirt Hill is alive today, and still sitting happily behind the Long House.

As anyone who knows me well will tell you, I am a lover of words, or a logophile. Logophile comes from the Greek words “logos” meaning “word”, and “philos” meaning “loving”. I love writing, languages, names, and virtually anything that has to do with words. I want to eventually be fluent in Spanish, French, Italian, and Gaelic. I don’t just enjoy writing, I like finding the perfect word for what I’m feeling or trying to say. People often tell me that I sound like a walking dictionary, but I like being articulate even if it means sometimes people don’t understand the words I use. My being a logophile doesn’t only extend to writing stories; names are also very important to me. I love looking up names and their meanings.

While my personality has remained more or less the same all my life, I have certainly experienced many changes this year. I believe I’ve learned to harness my imagination and channel it into doing more constructive things. Instead of letting my imagination control me, I believe I’m now controlling it. This brings me to the first big character change I’ve had this year: I’ve become more practical and realistic. I still make silly choices sometimes and like to engage in crazy hypothetical conversations, but I think I’ve definitely grown away from the dreamy, unrealistic side of myself. I realized this most when I picked my favorite philosopher. I picked Plato almost out of habit. He focused on the “idea realm” and on things we can’t see. After doing research on Plato, I began to realized that he wasn’t my favorite philosopher at all! I really like Aristotle the best, for the very opposite reason I picked Plato: Aristotle is very concrete, realistic, and indisputably an empiricist. If I had to classify myself as a rationalist or an empiricist, I don’t necessarily think I would be a straight-up empiricist, but I do have some of those tendencies now. Instead of being the one to suggest unrealistic ideas or possibilities, I’m now the one who tries to bring people back to the real world and focus on what’s practical.

Besides the emotional change of becoming more realistic, I’ve grown intellectually this school year as well. With all the academically challenging work, it was impossible not to! Philosophy has had one of the greatest impacts on me. Through reading Sophie’s World, I feel I’ve opened my eyes to many new ways of thinking. Sophie’s World challenged my thinking and made me think about things I never had before. Through physical science, I’ve learned more about the universe around me than I ever knew before; it’s wonderful! I think debate has also greatly shaped me as a person. I believe the accountability and amount of work involved has made me a more diligent student. All the subjects studied this year have made me a different—and hopefully better—person intellectually.

I’m not sure how much I’ve changed socially over the course of this year, but I think I’ve become a bit easier to be around. I know I still have a lot to work on, but I believe I’ve become a less demanding person, and have learned to somewhat curb my know-it-all tendencies. I also have more friends outside of class than I ever have before. I’ve grown closer to my friends at dance, and am getting along better with my church friends also. Protocol gave me much-needed practice in the area of conducting myself in high-class social situations.

When I was younger, I had three goals for my future: becoming an artist, an orphanage keeper, and the first woman president. While my dreams now are a bit different, the general ideas of what I want to do are surprisingly similar. I guess when you’re little, you have a pretty good idea of what you want in life after all. Now, I want to be a writer, a lawyer, a kindergarten teacher and a mom.

I recently looked back at the “books” I made when I was a little kid. I would draw pictures and then tell my mom what to write under each picture. I thought that I wanted to be an artist because I loved to draw the pictures so much, but now I see that really I wanted to be a writer all along! I just thought I was being an artist, when I was really being an author even then.
I still think it would be challenging and exciting to be the president, but that is no longer what I want to do with my life. I’d rather be the world’s best lawyer! However, I’m not really sure how that will work out with the rest of my dreams for the future. If I chose to be a lawyer, I will be in school until I’m twenty-six years old. I don’t think it would be too difficult to balance being a writer and a lawyer, but being a mother and a law school student might be a bit too much to do simultaneously. Also, I’m wondering if it’s really best to dive into a heavy career so young. Is it even realistic to expect law firms to immediately promote me to a high position?

Recently I’ve been contemplating becoming a kindergarten teacher. I really love little kids, and teaching, so the idea of becoming a kindergarten teacher was surprisingly appealing. While this career possibility did not really occur to me until a few weeks ago, I think it is one that I might pursue.

Being a writer is my only goal for the future that has never shifted once. Even when I was a toddler, I wanted to be a writer, although I thought I wanted to be an artist. My other dreams have all changed or been dropped, but I have always wanted to write stories for other people to enjoy. Being a writer would take all three of my most prominent characteristics. It would use my imagination, my persistence and persuasiveness, and obviously my love for words. Because of all these events and passions pointing to my becoming a writer, I do believe it is the one goal that I am certain about. I firmly believe that God’s purpose for me has at least something to do with my being a writer. While all my other career goals and dreams may shift and change, I think being a writer is something that will always be close to my heart.