Ben, ‘11

September 19, 2009

This week, I have one prominent theme tying together two main events in my life from this past week. The first event involves my friend, Cameron, and myself. Since coming to Richmond, I haven’t been particularly good at finding a time to workout and exercise. The gym is spectacular, but I’m not really a gym fanatic. I mentioned this the other day to my friends and he mentioned that he was of the same opinion. Having people watch us attempt to run or lift or whatever wasn’t our idea of a good time. So, he mentioned that he likes to run around the lake on-campus. I asked if I could join him and we ended up running together one time last week. We figured that it probably was a good idea to continue, so we founded our own running club. I wanted to name it “The People Who Don’t Run Running Club”, but Cameron came up with a better name that truly reflected what we were doing– “The Kamikazes”. We are basically self-destructing ourselves for no truly great reason. We don’t have a ton of time to go run, but we do about a mile and a half roughly three times a week and are hoping to slowly build it up. And the best time that works for us? Yep, late at night. Ridiculously late at night. In fact, we went for a run last night starting at midnight. We probably will never run a marathon or be good runners, but it’s something that we both have meant to do more of, but never got around to.

The other event representing my Kamikaze life is the Virginia Beach Sunrise Trip. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, of which I am a member, plans a trip every year to Virginia Beach to watch the sunrise over the Atlantic Ocean. That involves getting up at a ridiculous hour… namely 2:00 AM. We journey through the dark night to watch the great sights, have a breakfast together, and then return home. As I am writing this, I have been awake for eighteen hours and am starting to crash. Because I planned the event, I had plenty of work arranging drivers, directions, and everything else. We had roughly eighty people go and a vast majority of them were International Students who had never been to the Atlantic Ocean before. It’s a fun event but absolutely exhausting for myself as a driver and planner, which makes it tie into my Kamikaze theme. Below is a promotional video that my friends and I made for the trip. We’re quite proud of it.

The Virginia Beach Sunrise Trip Promo Video

The group of us that traveled to Virginia Beach

The sun rising over the Atlantic Ocean

The creation of the promo video

“Brinner Mania” as I call it

Digging in, but only managing to eat a small portion of it

Quote of the Week: “If you make people think they’re thinking, they’ll love you; But if you really make them think, they’ll hate you.” -Don Marquis
YouTube Video of the Week:

One of the biggest viral videos of this year