Long post regarding my Thesis, my livejournal, cool Japanese music, the future of Markos, and general Markos related items

So, off the bat, you all should check out this song by the Japanese band Stance Punks. They did the ending to this anime the anime club has been showing and its really catchy and peppy. Follow the youtube link! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzH8_VI-rC0

Now then, my Livejournal. Ive been thinking about reviving it. Ive invested too many years just to abandon it. So I think I will start occasionally posting there again. Maybe use it to dedicate it to a particular topic, so as not to have another unneccessary blog when this has served me well.

As for my Thesis. Ive decided to do it on Citizenship, specifically Normative Citizenship Education. Aside from questions like "What does it mean to be a citizen? Is citizenship a purely legal thing, like liberal universalists want to say, or is it something else? What is the catagorical distinction here?" I want to focus on the question "What does it mean to be a GOOD citizen? Can there be a such thing as a good citizen and is the phrase "Good Citizen" redundent, seeing as how some argue that Citizen is already a value-laden normative term to begin with? How does one learn to be a good citizen? Is learning, or teaching, such a thing possible?"

In general, I am taking a Neo-Aristotilean stance in saying that citizenship is association, much like friendship. Its something organic. One thing that I hope to try to include is this thread I find in both Aristotle and Wittgenstein of "Ontology as its use."

I have a whole bunch of articles and book chapters printed up and Ive read through half of them already. As soon as I finish the other half I hope to begin writing.

So, this is my last year as an undergraduate. Hopefully I will get into the UH Philosophy masters program. In case I dont, I am also applying to Texas Tech's MA prgoram and A&M's MA program (all three of these programs being in the top 10philosophy MA programs in the country.)

What do I do afterwards? I dont know. I have a lot of ideas. Somedays I want to go to law school, start up my own firm in some college town and work short hours. Other days I want to try and get my PhD and desperately look for a tenure track job at a small liberal arts college. And other times I imagine myself as a private school teacher, teaching high school philosophy at a boarding school, then teaching philosophy in the evenings at a local college. And even further still, I think about maybe going to library school and working at a university library.

There are two things all these jobs have in common. The first is the most obvious: I cant help but want to work in an academic sort of enviorment. I really like the feel of being on a campus, the self contained and autonomous nature of a university; almost like an ancient Greek city state. And then the laid bake nature of campuses leads me to the more subtle shared trait of my would be careers:

I value leisure time very heavily. I could not imagine myself working 60 hour work weeks in an office with only 2 weeks of vacation a year. Id sooner die. I need time to watch junk food TV, to hang out at the library and read, to take long walks while listening to an NPR podcast.

So...what do I do. I dunno =/

Anyway. This semester so far is alright. My classes are interesting and dont seem TOO difficult, which is good because it will allow me to slack to compensate for the amount of hours Im taking (18! WTF!) The hardest class is easily Philosophy of Language, which not coincidentally happens to be the most interesting thus far. I dont like Chompsky much; what he advocates sounds A LOT like private language, and thats just co-co puffs coo-coo.

Fair Trade group is still moving forward. We have a lot of good ideas for this semester and have claimed some minor victories, which really add up. I cant talk too much about it though. Sorry guys!

In the past two weeks I have seen an UNGODLY amount of anime. More than like, in the past two years. Ive also experienced a really STRONG amount of nerd and geek. Which is a nice change of pace from the crowd I normally run with, which fall into the catagory vaguely labeled "Semi-Hipsters with nerd like qualities who read many books and advocate causes." (Sorry guys! I love you!)

My bicycle is a beigish yellow Miyata 710 from the mid 80s. Its pretty nice and it goes a lot faster than my mountain bike would (which I gave to a friend of mine,) but Houston streets are not always well taken care of. For this reason, I am thinking of buying a mountain bike for longer trips (like anything off campus further than five miles,) and putting some smooth tires on it, adding some fenders, a back rack, a chain guard, and a head light and making my own little durable commuter. Yeah. Thats the ticket.

Alright guys. Thats it for me.

Listen to that Stance Punks song! Its catchy!