Ben Crowder

I love downtowns. There’s something about them — something alive, something spine-tingling, something mysterious — that’s got me hooked. So many interesting things. So many intertwined lives and histories. And so many stories. You know, I think that in a way it’s the stories that giddify me. And cities, particularly downtown areas, are pregnant with ‘em. Every alleyway has something to say.

Beyond that, though, there’s the feeling of exploration and discovery. Of course, it only lasts as long as there still remains an unknown, but even just a small bit of it is vastly satisfying. For example, I haven’t spent much time in downtown Provo, and so it’s mostly unknown and therefore mysterious and therefore even just the thought of Center Street gives me goosebumps. I’m a man of simple pleasures. :)

Anyway, I’ve got a master’s degree seminar in Vegas this weekend (I leave tomorrow and get back Monday night), and while Vegas isn’t exactly my favorite city in the world (why couldn’t this seminar be in London? ~wistful sigh~), the exploration factor has me excited. (No, no, not that kind of exploration. That’s why I detest the place. I’m talking about innocent venues.)

I think I’ll still have occasional Internet access, but my guess is that y’all will get lucky as this torrential deluge of blog posts from the top of the mountains slows down to a trickle for the weekend. Let the rejoicing begin. ;)

It’s snowing. A lot. And I’m tucked up somewhat cozily on the fifth floor of the library, pecking away on this post as I do my darndest to avoid working on my final for my reference class. The guy next to me has a tinny “Deck the Halls” piping out of his earbuds, and I close my eyes in a moment of silence in memoriam of my iPod. Not that I really miss it all that much, I have to say, but every once in a while I think how it would be nice. And then I go on with my life. Besides, I’m surrounded by books — how could I not be satisfied?

Oh, that’s right, the final. This beast is a two-pronged pitchfork, actually, with the final proper being the first half and a final project being the second. While I did break the first prong off about an hour ago, I’ve still got the other prong left, and this one has a huge slab of grimy, greasy, gristly devilmeat gored on it.

Except it’s not really that bad, I suppose. It’s an annotated bibliography, 20 sources (10-15 pages), due by Monday night. That’s the nasty part (though I really can’t complain — it could be 40 pages, 100 sources, or worse). The good part (which will hopefully make the prong melt away in my hands — gloved hands, that is) is that my topic (chosen by me) is mythopoeic literature. C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, George MacDonald, that kind of thing. It happens to be one of my favorite kinds of literature, and I get goosebumps and start salivating just thinking of it, so it shouldn’t be too bad. It’s just getting started that’s the hard part. (Hey, that sounds familiar… :))

In other news, NaNoWriMo has left me with an addiction to writing that won’t go away. I’m going to start writing a nonfiction book soon, though I’m not sure what the topic (or format) will be yet. And this morning when I woke up, an idea for a full-length play immediately plopped onto my head. Its egg started cracking while I took my shower, and I’m mustering all my willpower to make sure I finish my final before I dive headlong into writing a first draft. Oh, and I’m also working with my little brother on turning one of the Grimms’ fairy tales into a 3D animated short film — probably “Snow-White and Rose-Red,” but I haven’t quite decided yet.

I’m just hoping that the fire alarm doesn’t go off and force us all to evacuate the library, because the umbrella just isn’t cutting it. I should’ve brought my parka (amend that to should’ve bought a parka so I could then bring it) instead of this flimsy jacket. Why does coolness trump common sense so often with me? ~sigh~

Well, the feelings of guilt are now overcoming the feelings of freedom, and so I must return to this final. But let’s look at the bright side — doing this research is almost inevitably going to end up as a blog post or two. (Yes, I think it’s safe to say that almost any event, no matter how dire or bitter, becomes swallowable if I remember that I can blog about it. :P)

Enter NaBloPoMo. Along with Janssen and Katherine (and if you’re going to do it, too, leave a comment with a link to your blog), I’ll be posting every day in November. Granted, I pretty much do that anyway, but this month there’ll be nary a gap.

So, as the semi-official kickoff, I read Paul Graham’s recent essay on startups this morning. Now, business does not run in my veins. It’s like a foreign virus, and whenever I come in contact with it (in an entrepreneurial sense), my immune system generates antibodies which slaughter it quickly and cleanly. I don’t do business. (Except I do, with my freelance design work. Three cheers for paradoxes. ~sigh~)

Anyway, Graham’s essay was mildly interesting to me at first, being mostly about business — which I still try to read up about on the off-chance that someday my anti-business gene will flip and I’ll become some rabid entrepreneur — but it wasn’t until point 8 that my interest got caught:

8. College Will Change If the best hackers start their own companies after college instead of getting jobs, that will change what happens in college. [...] One change will be in the meaning of “after college,” which will switch from when one graduates from college to when one leaves it. If you’re starting your own company, why do you need a degree? [...] I grew up in a time where college degrees seemed really important, so I’m alarmed to be saying things like this, but there’s nothing magical about a degree. There’s nothing that magically changes after you take that last exam. The importance of degrees is due solely to the administrative needs of large organizations. These can certainly affect your life—it’s hard to get into grad school, or to get a work visa in the US, without an undergraduate degree—but tests like this will matter less and less. As well as mattering less whether students get degrees, it will also start to matter less where they go to college. In a startup you’re judged by users, and they don’t care where you went to college. So in a world of startups, elite universities will play less of a role as gatekeepers. In the US it’s a national scandal how easily children of rich parents game college admissions. But the way this problem ultimately gets solved may not be by reforming the universities but by going around them. We in the technology world are used to that sort of solution: you don’t beat the incumbents; you redefine the problem to make them irrelevant. The greatest value of universities is not the brand name or perhaps even the classes so much as the people you meet. If it becomes common to start a startup after college, students may start trying to maximize this. Instead of focusing on getting internships at companies they want to work for, they may start to focus on working with other students they want as cofounders. What students do in their classes will change too. Instead of trying to get good grades to impress future employers, students will try to learn things. We’re talking about some pretty dramatic changes here.

A few years ago I never thought I’d hear myself say this, but wow, I really agree. Yes, getting an education is important, but that’s different from getting a degree. One has real value; the other is only valuable because of “the administrative needs of large organizations.” What really matters is whether you can do the work. For example, as I mentioned earlier, I do freelance graphic/book design. I don’t have a degree in either, but that hasn’t stopped me from being relatively successful with it. (Yes, getting a degree in graphic design would make me a better designer, but that’s because of things I would learn, not the degree itself. And I could still learn those things outside of a degree program, were I determined enough.)

I’m not planning on dropping out of my MLS program, of course, but the idea of blazing my own path — as a designer, artist, writer, programmer — and creating a custom-fit job that fills my needs perfectly (or pretty darn close) is getting rather tasty. More and more I’m seeing myself go that route in the long run. Does that mean no more librarianship for Ben? Not necessarily. In my ideal world (at least so far as I’ve got it figured out), I’d spend the rest of my life doing half my time at a library and half on my own projects. I don’t know if I can pull that off, but we’ll see. (After all, I make two to five times as much on design projects as I do at the library. Not that I’m doing any of this for the money — if I were, I’d become a doctor :) — but money does figure into it, seeing as I have to make a living, and someday support a family.)

But maybe I just feel this way because I’ve got a looming midterm due tomorrow. :P

My master’s degree is an online program, which means no in-person classes other than occasional seminars (once a semester). And that means no constant reminders to do my homework. And that means it’s nowhere near the front of my mind.

Now, since this was giving me grief (namely that I haven’t remembered my homework until an hour before it was due, which doesn’t do anything to lower my stress level), I took an hour tonight to cull all the pertinent out of the syllabi for my two classes and distill it into a page on my personal wiki, with relevant calendar dates marked in Google Calendar. Out of the darkness and into the light. And now that I’ve finally started doing my reading, I’m finding that I really, really, really like it! It’s so up my alley it’s almost unbelievable. For example, this week’s module is on dictionaries. All the readings are about dictionaries and information-seeking behavior. So cool.

In other news, it’s been a while since I’ve blogged about what I’m reading. After a long period of separation, I’ve picked up A Tale of Two Cities again and I’m loving it. I also started reading Wide Sargasso Sea at a friend’s recommendation (it’s by Jean Rhys and is a prequel to Jane Eyre, telling the backstory of the madwoman in the attic). Definitely not what I expected, but I do like it. (I’m around 70 pages in.) I’m halfway through Elizabeth Marie Pope’s The Sherwood Ring, and while I read the first half fairly quickly, it’s been a couple of weeks since I last picked it up. That’ll change soon. :) Those are the main books near the forefront; the rest are back burner, and there are a lot of them (Tolstoy’s War and Peace; Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy; L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Avonlea; John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring; Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel; Diana Wynne Jones’ Dogsbody and Cart and Cwidder; Jan Tschichold’s The Form of the Book; George Maestri’s Digital Character Animation; and a few others).

As for the other library books on my shelf — the ones I haven’t yet gotten to — I’ve got a few books on piano playing, two histories of mathematics, As Long As I Have You (the fifth volume of Dean Hughes’ Children of the Promise series), some books on playwriting, some on Unicode, two programming-related books (one on Perl and one on Vim), three books on bookbinding, Dante’s Commedia in Italian, Grimm’s Kinder- Und Hausmärchen in German, and Book of Mormons in a handful of different languages (Tamil, Hindi, Amharic, and Mongolian, if you’re curious) for my BoM bibliography project. I also checked out Gerald Lund’s The Alliance yesterday. And today I checked out some histories of script deciphering (hieroglyphs, Etruscan, Linear A/B, that sort of thing) and Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae, which I’ve never read but heard lots about, and which I thought was much longer than it really is. (I got a nice Clarendon edition, very beautiful to the eye.)

Heck, since this is quite a book post as it is, why don’t I go ahead and list some of the books I’m hoping to read soon. :) In general, my knowledge of the classics isn’t as extensive as I’d like, and I want to read Trollope, Proust, Thackeray, Hardy, and such, including people I know I probably won’t like very much like Hemingway. I also want to read the rest of the Jane Austen corpus (I’ve only read Pride & Prejudice and Persuasion). Ditto for L.M. Montgomery (I’ve read the first two Anne books). There’s a book called The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman which I started once and got a few chapters into, and which I loved, but I never finished it. I’ve also seen several copies of Good to Great lying around campus and want to check it out. The Arbinger Institute has put out a book called Leadership and Self-Deception which looks rather interesting. I’ve been meaning to read Freakonomics for a while. Back to fiction, Watership Down looks like it’ll be my type, and I’ve also been planning to read some John Buchan novels. Not to mention the massive Scottish novels George MacDonald wrote. I’ve heard The Phantom Tollbooth is really good, by the way. Oh, and I want to read Bushman’s biography of Joseph Smith, Rough Stone Rolling. And my roommate read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose a while back and I’ve been wanting to read it ever since. Oh, and William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End. (I read The Wood Beyond the World years and years ago. William Morris, by the way, is an inspiration to me with all of his projects, particularly his printing work.) And there’s a children’s book called Snow Treasure which comes to me highly recommended.

Well, I could go on about books forever. I won’t, but since I can, I think I ought to blog about books more frequently. (After all, book posts are easier to write and I enjoy them very much. :)) Yes, libraries are definitely the place for me.

Hmm, WordPress marked three recent comments of y’all’s as spam, and I’m not sure why, seeing as there weren’t any links in them. They’re back up now, but until I figure out why it’s doing this, take this as a general rule: if you don’t see your comment up within a few hours (unless you posted it at night and I’m asleep :)), e-mail me and let me know so I can pull it out of the spam drain. Don’t worry, I’m not censoring anyone’s comments. :)

As a side note, I’m leaving for Vegas tomorrow to begin my master’s degree, and I’m not sure how much time I’ll have for Internet between then and Monday at midnight when I get back. (It’s an introductory seminar; the rest of my MLS is online.) If I do have time, I’ll make comment rescue operations my top priority so we don’t end up with severely disjointed threads. :)

The last time I was in Vegas was a year ago for my roommate’s wedding reception. (One of the few I’ve gone to. :)) And at the end of next month my sister’s having an open house there, after the main reception here at home. I really ought to just find a girl down there and head over to the Chapel O’ Love and end my season of singleness. Anyone know where the Vegas singles’ ward meets? :P

The other day I got a hankering for Welsh books, so I trucked up to the fifth floor of the library and slipped in among the PB shelves. (I’ve spent so much time with the language books that I usually don’t need to check the catalog anymore. :P Besides, I was browsing, not looking for a specific book.) Found some cool grammars, along with a slim text on Welsh literature and another on Celtic versecraft. And a grammar of Irish Gaelic as well.

So, with my treasures in hand, I went down to the circulation desk and handed the girl my ID card. She sensitized the books (they’re de-sensitized when they come back in, but popular usage has it backwards — oh well) and said, “They’re due October 5.”

What? October? My first thought was, did I slip into a coma up there and lose two months of my life? “Um, are you sure about that? Shouldn’t it be August?”

“Well,” she replied, “it says October. Are you a graduate student?”

“Yes, but not here. I mean, I work at Special Collections, but I’m doing an online degree through another university.” And I’d asked the circ people about whether being a grad student elsewhere would qualify me for grad student library privileges here. It doesn’t.

“It says you’re grad student or staff,” she said.

“I will be staff soon, in a couple of weeks, I think.” Assuming they do hire me, of course.

She handed me my books and said, “Well, they’re due in October.”

And I thanked her and went on my way rejoicing. Three months! Somehow they’ve already switched me to staff privileges, which means I get books for a glorious three months! I seriously had a flutter of excitement twitching around in my heart as I walked away from that desk. It’s the best birthday present BYU has ever given me. :P

Speaking of that flutter of excitement, by the way: walking in the stacks is, for me, like finding out that the girl (or boy) you like, likes you back. Mmm.

Good news: yesterday afternoon I got an e-mail from the University of North Texas saying I’d gotten the MLS scholarship. ~breathe sigh of relief, wipe sweat from brow, slow heartrate back down to normal, etc.~ Actually, I found myself strangely calm about the whole thing. I don’t think I would have been devastated in the least if I hadn’t gotten the scholarship. That’s odd.

Anyway, oddness aside, I faxed my acceptance letter in (and I blush to admit that I had to get help — here I am, a computer programmer who can fix most computer problems, needing help to send a blinking fax! ;)) and so it’s official.

And now for an abrupt change of topic. Over the past few days I’ve noticed that I need books almost as badly as I need food and water. The last two weeks haven’t given me much time for leisure reading — various projects eating up my after-work hours — and it was starting to affect me more than I realized. Starvation. Distended book stomach. Parched throat from lack of words. And I could tell that it was books I was hungering and thirsting after, because the mere thought of books was as delicious as the thought of water on Fast Sunday. :)

I don’t think all people have this kind of book hunger, though. Just a select few. And this makes me wonder, is it acquired or did I come to earth already salivating at the sight of print? I don’t know. My guess would be the former, but at the same time I wouldn’t be surprised in the least to find out I was a librarian in the pre-mortal existence. :)

At any rate, no longer will I let a day go by without reading at least a chapter of some book. (Not counting the scriptures.) I’m almost done with Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (rereading before Deathly Hallows comes out), and very much enjoying it. In fact, at work today I came across a mention of one of Tyco Brahe’s astronomical works, and the sight of the name somehow made me start craving Harry Potter. I’m guessing “Tyco Brahe” somehow reminded me of Nicolas Flamel. At any rate, it’s nice knowing there’s still five books waiting for me. :)

[tags]MLS, LDS, Mormon, reading, books, Harry Potter[/tags]

I just realized today that at the library, pretty much everyone is on a first-name basis. It stuck out at me because at the university in general, that isn’t the case — you call professors by Prof. or Dr. or Mr./Mrs. or Brother/Sister (we’re talking BYU, of course :)) — but here in the library, I haven’t seen any of that. Even the top-level people go by their first name. Randy. Terry. Scott. Brad. It’s all first names. Heck, I don’t even know what I’d call them if I didn’t — Dr. feels weird in a library setting, and saying Librarian Olsen is just tacky, leaving only Brother/Sister, but even then it’s BYU-only behavior.

This first-name basis thing is, for me, yet another testament to the unwavering friendliness of almost all library people. It’s so cool. You’d think that libraries would be about books, and they are, to an extent, but in the end they’re really about people.

[tags]BYU[/tags]

My diploma arrived in the mail today, sitting on top of my apartment’s row of mailboxes (mailboxen?) in a white, official-looking envelope. Tomorrow it will have been exactly one month since I graduated. A whole month. How does time pass this quickly? Anyway, finally holding the diploma in my hand seems to have made concrete what was only a glimmer and a wisp before. Sure, I know I graduated, and a week or two after convocation I found to my relief that I even passed all of my classes. (There was one where I wasn’t sure if I would or not. I needn’t have worried.)

But it hasn’t been exactly real. I emerged from the library this morning en route to snag some lunch, and I hadn’t taken ten steps when I myself got snagged, this time by a girl reporting for BYUTV. When I first realized she was beelining for me with her microphone in hand, I instinctively started to reach for my cell phone and call someone — anyone! — to avoid having to be on TV, but it was too late. I thought about making myself immediately busy, on the run, gotta go, sorry, but for some reason that didn’t feel right, even though it was mostly true. And so I followed her off to the side and stood in front of the camera. All the while the thing that was running through my head was, “But you’re not even a student anymore, Ben! You’re an impostor! You shouldn’t be in front of this camera.” She asked me what I thought about gas prices rising. “Well, I don’t have a car,” I said, “but it’s sad that the prices keep going up.” She asked if I thought the government should do something about it. “I don’t know enough about the political situation to say one way or the other.” Embarrassing but true. Honesty is the best policy, right?

Getting back to the theme of this post, I haven’t missed homework at all. Nada. Nor tests. Evenings and weekends have been blissfully free from the burden of Atlas which I bore for so many years. I’m still far too busy, of course, but no longer does homework gnaw at the back of my brain like a buck-toothed Ethiopian rat.

But what I do miss is classes. People. I walked through the basement of the JFSB twice this past week, and as I passed by the classrooms where I spent so much time these past couple of years, stalactite pangs of nostalgia gored my heart over and over again, leaving it bleeding. In those moments, I’d give anything to go back and be a normal student again. It’s part of me. I can’t just abandon it. And yet I’ve got to move on, growing up and learning what life is like in the real world. (Granted, I’ll be a grad student in the fall, but it’s online. Not the same.) Don’t get me wrong — I love my jobs, and I don’t really want to go back and be an undergrad all over again. But I do miss my professors and classmates, dearly.

Looking this post over, I think I should win some points for sappy sentimentality. ;)

[tags]BYU[/tags]

I’m dead tired (from spending all morning scrubbing away for our cleaning check — luckily we passed with flying colors), so this’ll be short. Convocation yesterday was good. There were a lot of names to read through — the whole College of Humanities — but it went by faster than I expected. And before long it was my turn. I’d thought I would be nervous, but I wasn’t. It was like walking down the street. With smiling people shaking my hand at every step. :)

Afterwards I went home with my family and we had a nice dinner. Then, while the adults were talking, I joined my two youngest brothers (nine and seven years old) and two cousins (seven and probably five or so) in our family room to play Turbo Cranium. (While I do enjoy talking with adults, playing with kids is far more enjoyable. Especially when I talk with adults every day but hardly ever see anyone under the age of 18.)

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever played Turbo Cranium, but when I pulled out the first card, I realized instantly that it wasn’t going to fly. Seven-year-olds are not going to get most of the answers, let alone the questions. (I could hardly get them!) Rather than scrap the game, though, I decided to alter the rules, bringing it down to a seven-year-old level.

With green, I whispered a word in each player’s ear (a different word), and they had 30 seconds to draw their thing with their eyes closed. When the 30 seconds were up, everyone opened their eyes and tried to guess what each other had. With blue, the player whose turn it was got to sculpt something and everyone else had to guess. With red, I whispered a word in the ear of the player and they had to act it out (and again, everyone else had to guess). And finally, with yellow, I would hum the first five notes of a Primary song and the player had to guess which one it was.

I really can’t wait to have kids. Sure, they come with temper tantrums and dirty diapers attached, and many have a penchant for shrieking out like a banshee just when you most want them to be quiet (like, say, sacrament meeting), but heck, I’m willing to put up with that. I wonder if they’d let a single guy adopt… ;)