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Halloween: A Reason to Be A Kid Again

November 1, 2009

This past week has been ridiculously busy. All of the papers, exams, presentations, and such have combined for a perfect storm. It is a far cry from those simple worksheets that you had to bring home and complete in ten minutes from back in elementary school. Needless to say, I was more than ready to feel like a kid again.  So, I was very glad that Halloween has arrived. I was always a clown for Halloween as a kid. Middle school and high school saw the celebration of Halloween become almost nonexistent for me. However, in college. Halloween is probably the biggest holiday of the year… at least that we celebrate together. Remember this for when you go to college. Halloween is HUGE!!! Everyone comes up with the craziest and funnest costumes and the entire campus celebrates…. for three consecutive nights.

I hadn’t put much thought into my costume, but two of my friends convinced me to join them as contestants on “Legends of the Hidden Temple”, which in case you don’t recall, is a fantastic game show from when I was a kid. We ordered the costume online and it arrived in time. For Halloween night, I threw a dance party for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. It was a pretty great event. I saw Calvin and Hobbes, Jack Sparrow, a Ghostbuster, and so many more. We also decided to do a service project for our campus and hand out free pancakes all night to the partygoers passing by our apartment dance party. We handed out over two hundred pancakes and it was a great success, despite the horrible rain. So, Halloween was a fun break, but now I am back to work with group projects galore and many other meetings and lectures to attend.

Quote of the Week: “It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.” -James Thurber
YouTube Video of the Week:

A clip from “Legends of the Hidden Temple” 

Published by Ben on November 5, 2009 in InterVarsity. 0 Comments

Chocolate Pudding, Pumpkins, and Ice

September 27, 2009

So, it’s been quite a busy week again. Some of it has been homework, such as my trip to a local truck stop this week to interview truckers on their consumer behavior for a Marketing class. Some has been meetings, such as my two-hour meeting to determine a mission statement for one of my organizations. Some other stuff has been fun, like the magician on Friday night or the football game (which we won, making us 4-0 and still ranked as #1 in the country in the FCS). The biggest event, though, was getting ready for a Career Fair. I scraped together a resume and then met with potential employers at an on-campus Career Fair. It went well and, even though it’s doubtful I’ll find an internship I want for next summer, it made me start looking ahead for my career.

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A glimpse at my busy schedule from this week

There are two events, though, that are worth noting. One was the InterVarsity Olympics. I planned them and we had four teams compete. The events were a little off-the-wall, but a lot of fun. For example, the events included Ultimate Pumpkin, an egg relay, a pie relay, an onion-eating contest, and a race to see which team can melt a block of ice the fastest using nothing but body heat. Having an event that can combine chocolate pudding, pumpkins, onions, soap, and ice is pretty spectacular. It was very messy, but a lot of fun.

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Onion Eating Contest
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Ultimate Pumpkin
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The after-effects of the Pie Relay

This week also saw the start of 3000-13. I’m attempting to do 3000 push-ups in the next two weeks as well as memorize thirteen Bible verses. The goal is to prove that we can be both phyically and spiritually strong. I did it during my Freshman year and finished in a week, but I am finding that this year is so much more difficult. The push-ups are proving to be quite exhausting. Here’s a promotional video I did for it. I’m quite proud of it considering that I put it together in less than an hour:

 


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My friend working on his push-ups during this week

Quote of the Week: “Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.” -Sidney Harris
YouTube Video of the Week:

I thought this was fairly neat

Published by Ben on September 27, 2009 in InterVarsity. 0 Comments

The Kamikaze Life

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

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The group of us that traveled to Virginia Beach
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The sun rising over the Atlantic Ocean
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The creation of the promo video
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“Brinner Mania” as I call it
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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

Published by Ben on September 19, 2009 in InterVarsity and Miscellaneous. 1 Comment
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