About

Me!

My name is Marie.

Fun Facts

• I like to drive barefoot.
• I find dipping McDonald's french fries in their vanilla sundaes to be delicious.
• My favorite color is maroon.
• When I was in high school, I clapped two plastic coconut halves together as I followed my friend awkwardly galloping ahead as King Arthur. We did this all day, in between classes.
• I have never actually completed my favorite video game on my own. I watched my brother play it the majority of the time, and I would only jump in when he had trouble beating a boss or getting an ultimate weapon. I simply enjoyed watching my brother play.
• I am, of course, referring to the ultra-fantasterrific game, Final Fantasy X. 
• Good writing turns me on.
• One reason why I don't watch TV is because I can watch almost anything and find it interesting. I can find infomercials and how to build a porch even though I probably never will on my own interesting. And then I just never leave.
• I think Anthony Bourdain has the best job in whole damn world. 

Eudaemonia

During my senior year of college, I took a religion class on the development of Western moral philosophy in conjunction with Western Christian theology. One of the first books I had to study was Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics. And, well, I'll let Wikipedia do the rest of the explaining:

"Eudaimonia or eudaemonia . . .is a Greek word commonly translated as happiness or welfare; however, "human flourishing" has been proposed as a more accurate translation. Etymologically, it consists of the words "eu" ("good") and "daimōn" (a type of supernatural being).

"'Eudaimonia' is a central concept in Aristotelian ethics. . . . In Aristotle's works, eudaimonia was used as a term for the highest human good, and so it is the aim of practical philosophy, including ethics and political philosophy, to consider (and also experience) what it really is, and how it can be achieved."

[I also like the aesthetic of euademonia more than eudaimonia.]

As my understanding of moral philosophy developed throughout the semester, in conjunction with a postmodernism and religion class, conversations with various people, and my own life-changing experiences, I kept coming back to this central question: what exactly is the good life? How can I flourish as an individual? What is happiness? For Aristotle in the one book I read by him, the good life is the life of contemplation. Happiness is contemplating. Flourishing as a human being is maximizing the function of the human as an irrational but ultimately rational being, by which one... can contemplate.

Alright. I didn't totally buy this. Contemplating is great. I'm definitely an academic, I love thinking, many times I overthink to my detriment, etcetera. But pure contemplation just seems too selfish and unproductive to make me happy. I want to be useful, and while I greatly value my own desires, a big part of my desires is to be helpful to other people. Which, I suppose, is selfish in itself because I desire helping people and find happiness in it, but it's more virtuous than just contemplating all the time. (And what do I mean by "virtuous"? Perhaps this will be a blog topic.)

Thus, it's good for me to write down my thoughts and allow others to see and comment on them. And maybe, just maybe, I'll be that much closer to figuring out what makes me happy. I hope you will, too, if you don't get enough entertainment from my confusing myself.