This is a "theme song" for the novel The Magicians by Lev Grossman. I enjoy the existence of this a lot. What do you think? 

--BB

I don't post very often anymore, and this is probably going to be a lackluster post at best. Because It is about 2 in the morning, and I am sitting in my apartment listening to an epic thunderstorm that is almost shaking my building with its thunderings. The funny thing is that it isn't the thunderstorm which is preventing my being asleep now. I normally enjoy sleeping through thunderstorms. My brain is wrestling with a bit of a ( puzzle ). That's about the normal level of encryption for an LJ post from me. So I'll close with a link to a myspace music entry that I think is really good, having heard her on the radio tonight. Enjoy this one, I hope.

BB

I have lots of things to say. I have nothing to say. I want to see all of you, but in reality will see almost none of you. Summer comes, but my finals loom and more papers than I'm comfortable doing right now crowd on to be done by this time's next advent. There is a touch of tiny personal drama intermingled with a couple of sparks of hopeful forward motion in my life, and I finally initiated with my fraternity two weeks and a day ago. This is one of those entries where my mind wanders; I see everyone around me under stress and my own unsuccessful attempts at persevering and coping with it. Msr. de Lubac beckons me from the afternoon, and Rahner from the earliest suncracking of my delayed morning. I played music for a close female friend of mine tonight, and I wonder about much more than I need. I suppose wonder isn't really a sin, but the time for wonder is the time of freedom and not the time of stress. Even as I attempt to relight torches that I have extinguished with a different kind of fire, I wonder whether a fountain's bath wouldn't cool my soul. And then I wonder what a fountain's bath is under this metaphor anyway. It's just the kind of person that I am to wonder about things that would be better left alone, and as I seek to construct webs--finally laying down the kinds of friendships that are worth keeping--people shuffle out and about my life. For everything in life there is a season, but who's season is now? 

Anyway; sorry I've been quiet this semester. It's a conglomeration of factors, and I am more distant from all of you than I used to be. I got confirmation that I can do my research on campus this summer, albeit on my own time and dime, but it's a start, and I think that doing research, even the kind you don't always get paid for, is a better use of my time than flipping burgers, pumping gas, or most any of the unrewarding and unbenefiting things that the young of our generation spend their summers doing. Truth be told, I envy those of you who continually find time and place to serve others. More to follow on my summer plans as dates are flushed out.

Yours in appreciation of the glories of life,
On and ever upward;

Ben

*edit: changed the spelling of the name of the theologian I'm writing the paper on to the proper way.*

Hi! I'm Alive! The primary reason for me not having posted is having the draft of an eternally long 2010 summary that I had been working on over Christmas break on the continual draft loop for about the past three months. I imagine I will eventually get to finishing that, at present it's an invisible entry, but I'll link to it when I get it finished.

Anyway, that aside, my classes are cool (now that I dropped the one that was more or less dead-weight to me), sufficiently challenging and interesting. I'm currently in the process of applying for a research grant for Summer to do some cool Mormonism research here. Oh, and I've been sick with something that a number of people have now concluded to be the notorious mononucleosis (no, I do not have swollen lymph nodes...) since I got back after getting my wisdom teeth out.

I'll post more often; I enjoy reading about all of you and your successes and the things you see. There's probably one big somewhat important update to follow sometime in the near future, actually, definitely before 11 April.

Here's hoping your health is better and your spirit as perky as mine,

Ben

Looking for some break reading? You might try "The Magicians" by Lev Grossman. My some-spoilers-having review can be found here.

So, it's 3:25 am and I feel like writing. Here are 6 short notes that I won't ever send, including number four, which is written to a certain collective person-hood, but which feel somewhat useful to write all the same.

( 1 )
( 2 )
( 3 )
( 4 )

( 5 )

( 6 )

Happy Christmas Eve,

Ben

List of things to do this weekend: 

• Vestigialism wiki, an article for Intro to Religion about the recently discovered religion of Jurassic Dinosaurs in what is now Antarctica. 
• Paper revisions for Human Relations.
• Candidate talk to fill vacancy in the Religion Department (see below)
• Blog entry for Human Relations. Whoops, forgot that that was due earlier than I would have expected, and it's not worth it to post right now. See below.
• See "Three Sisters" by Anton Chekhov at Coe Theater. Put off until next weekend...
• Finish Ratatouille, write part of wiki for Human Relations concerning some classroom-able theme from the movie.
• Code up one of my now-late Operating Systems assignments.
• Code up one my now-late Discrete Structures assignments.
• For Sanity's Sake: D&D to the rescue, although there is some work associated with that as well. This went well.

Actually, that's a bit less scary than I thought it was. I think I can do most of that, and getting through to next week is the important part. A couple of issues are really on my mind right now, though, and I need to vent ( them a little bit.  )Here's hoping your Friday weekend is happier spent with somebody special for you than mine,

Ben

 Tonight I am in the annoying position of having to write computer code when my brain is in the mode to write poetry. I hope I have the most poetic computer code ever, I guess. 

And I suppose there was newsworthy news recently, although the precise details of that bit of newsworthy news are especially foggy to me. To be more detailed, I am no longer seeing Megan, for a variety of reasons mostly rooted in distance/non-interaction. There may be more to that story, but as far as that goes, I have moved on. Not really feeling guilty about something like that is a nice change, although I'm not sure lack of guilt is worth some of the other aspects of that relationship/breakup. That's probably all that is worth saying on that, for innumerable reasons. 

Timed more separate from those things than they might seem, I have made some new friends lately. 

Here's to moderation, 
Ben

So, lacking any progress on that crazy acronym that I am too lazy to type out here, if you are looking to keep up with me over the weekend, you can follow my updates over at http://www.virallore.blogspot.com where I will be posting roughly every 4-6 hours after we get started.

Last week I wrote this beginning to an entry, but I have decided it is good enough to stand alone: My definition of Love, in non-detail.

I had planned to follow the scheduling of talking about what food I ate one day (prompt 4), but thinking about it a little while ago, I came to this conclusion: my eating habits are legitimately scary. For this reason I will not be posting about them on the internet right now. So on to the next prompt I have committed to: my definition of love, in great detail. To be brutally honest, I don't have time to write this, I am quite behind on some work that absolutely must be turned in this week, but this is where my mind has gone.

I think the question "What is Love?" is probably the question I try (and often fail) to address most on this blog, with "What did you do today?" possibly out-pacing it only due to the ease of answering. Questions about definitions are hard, and love is the hardest among them. Even in the last couple of months, I have put forward a couple of different people's ideas about what love is, although even the apostle Paul's writings in 1 Corinthians fail to really do it for me. In thinking about it tonight, I have come to a slightly different definition of what love is than before. Put simply: love is successful overcoming of everything else you feel.