Hello family! My apologies for being in contact so poorly the past few months...as mentoring stuff wound down, grad school stuff and my stress levels wound up. That's all (hopefully) coming to an end soon though. First, I have stepped down as President of the philosophy club, giving that over to a very capable sophomore. He'll do a good job. Then I planned a trip to Madison, Wisconsin for 7 people to a Meta-ethics Workshop--starting about 5 days before we left. It snuck up on me, but the trip was well worth it, and Madison is a beautiful place. Great for cycling, pedestrians, and, listening to Dr. Geenen's own stories, students. Returning from that we had fall break this weekend, for which I elected to stay here and complete another one of my outstanding stressors: Westminster College's BikeSharing Program. As of this afternoon, the program is usable, and by Christmas break we should have it operating at 100%. After that it's just to find replacements for myself and the other officers!

My housemate and fellow bike club officer Andrew
takes a photo of some of the detail on one of the bikes

In the foreground is one of the three bikes that we had donated,
fixed up, and then painted all by ourselves. There's about 10 more
in our garage,  plus 6 new ones that were donated.

We got the program done finally by really committing to it--that is, we stayed up to 4AM last night ironing out some of the details. (Which, by the way, Grandma, thank you so, so much for that coffee. I made some of the strongest I'd ever had last night). Finally, the last big stressor, besides actually applying to grad school, has been a one-two combination of my writing sample and paper for a local conference, a paper for Asian philosophy, and a conference I want to go to in Memphis. I thought I would link them below so anyone who was interested could get a taste of what kind of things I do for fun/keep me here in Fulton. Just a few more weeks and I'll be done applying though and mostly free! Hope to see you all at Thanksgiving.

My writing sample (to be) and paper for the Columbia Undergraduate Philosophy Conference in two weeks. It's 90% done.

Genetic Free-Markets and the Diffusion of Modifications: An Unfair Process

The paper I'll submit to the Ida B. Wells Philosophy Conference in a few days. Then I'll have to wait to see if I've been accepted. It's 60% done.

Resolving Conflicts in Liberal Societies: No Panacea but a Pallative

And, obviously related to the paper above it, my Asian philosophy paper. I didn't want to write anything new, so worked pretty hard to connect Asian philosophy and what I was already working on for the Ida B. Wells Conference. It's complete now.

Using Mencius' Five Relations to Make Changes in Liberal Society

Also, one final note for those of you who hadn't heard: my lovely little cat Noel died recently. I'll miss having her there when I come home!