Hi! I'm Ben. This is my personal page. A place for me to think out loud. A place for me to write about things that I love and things that I hate. A place ...
I have been having a hard time recently. I probably have a mild but undiagnosed and untreated case of ADHD. My father has a diagnosis and has been on and off of meds for years. I struggled against the H in ADHD for years. I've never been a hyper person, even when I was a little kid. I was quiet, reserved, and bookish, but never hyper. I found out relatively recently that there are two types of…
I wasn't going to write this. Well, actually, I wrote part of it in an email to Super Lemon , but then I saw Antonio's post and thought maybe I should respond publicly. I know the feeling of thinking you're in a silo. I so strongly remember getting that feeling when I first realized that the internet looks completely different depending on who is looking. I fell down a dark hole of wondering…
I’m worried about what higher education will look like for my boys. College for me was a transformative place. It’s where I met my wife, where I found people who shared my interests and views of the world. It’s where I finally stopped being afraid to say the words that were rattling around in my head. It's where I stopped being a child, even if I was not yet an adult. Reading all the variations of…
I just had a sudden and intense longing for the summers of my youth. I think I am 10, maybe 12. Mom was trying to get us out of the house on a regular basis. We had a pool club. The heat was oppressive and saturated. I remember thunderheads dyed deep purple against the defiant sun. They seemed as tall as mountains. Nostalgia for lost youth is nothing new to me. It's a recurring thought, although…
Sometimes I have to just say something like "This will do nothing for me except bring another thing into my home." I get this way with computer stuff. It's the new Apple hotness or a monitor or a keyboard. Stuff like this is endlessly tinker-able, endlessly adjustable. Odds are if I buy that mechanical keyboard I have had my eye on I will really like it for about a week. Then it will just become…
This is less of a blog post and more of an intention. A plan. Something to put out into the world to encourage myself to take action. I don’t think I’m alone in feeling deeply powerless in the face of the world. Every day brings some new violation, some new terror. If people are not being snatched off the streets in Minneapolis then girls schools are being bombed in Iran. Institutions are…