Correction: in my last newsletter, I said that five college friends and one college acquaintance got married this summer. I have begun slowly re-inserting myself into the social media world of Facebook this week, and it turns out that SIX friends and TWO acquaintances got married this summer. And to think, I didn't even go to a Christian college.

A brief bit of housekeeping: you'll notice I've migrated the newsletter from TinyLetter to Buttondown. I did this on a whim, but it seems to be a justified one so far, since Buttondown supports Markdown formatting, which makes it much easier to have consistently sized and spaced text headers. Without further ado—!

what i've been smelling

hot dogs

An interesting perk of my new location in Lancaster City is that I now live directly behind a hot dog factory, which often produces a noticeable ... savory(?) aroma. Fun fact! Not complaining a bit.

fresh laundry

I line-dried my laundry for the first time last week, which is an odd sort of milestone that I somehow found extremely stressful, largely because I kept dropping, or coming close to dropping, my clothes off a second-story balcony. Every single one of my jeans ended up taking the plunge, and one pair ended up in a grape arbor I had to pull them out of whilst standing on a chair most unstable.

(That being said: hanging clothes on a clothesline strikes me as a nearly meditative activity. It's like walking instead of driving, or making oatmeal on a stove instead of a microwave — simpler, more natural, requiring more time but not filling your mind with white noise as the quicker alternative would. Perhaps I shall write an obnoxious essay at the end of this year extolling the use of clotheslines as the first step to a successful, happy, and contemplative life.)

Despite knowing that many people line-dry their clothes, I nonetheless felt skeptical that my clothes wouldn't smell terrible afterwards. But when I googled how to keep line-dried laundry from smelling terrible, all the suggested AutoComplete questions were along the lines of "why do line-dried clothes smell so GOOD?". Fortunately, my fears were not vindicated, and I thought my shirts smelled quite pleasant the next morning.

what i've been reading

Hamlet

Despite having at least 20 books on my shelf I've started but not finished, I found a copy of Hamlet and decided to read it, probably because of Bill and Ted.

No, really. Someone on Twitter shared a 20-year old Rolling Stone interview with Keanu Reeves (Ted in the just-completed Bill & Ted trilogy, of course), in which Reeves spoke artfully about the poetry and emotional power of Hamlet:

Reeves feels strongly about his Shakespeare. There is a real boyish gusto in his voice when he talks about it. “I tend to throw out a little Shakespeare once in a while,” he says. “I do love it . . . . It’s like this kind of code that once you start to inhabit it with breath and sound and feeling and thought, it is the most powerful and consuming and freeing at the same time. Just, literally, elemental in sound, consonants and vowels.”

He says that he knows a few sonnets and soliloquies by heart, and that he brings Hamlet with him when he travels. He has a copy here in San Francisco, presumably somewhere near the Archers of Loaf. He likes to recite parts of it out loud, alone in his room. “I love the melancholy, I guess, perhaps, of it,” he guesses, perhaps.

... in 1995, he agreed to play Hamlet onstage for a month in Winnipeg. “What I learned,” he says, “is that as far as you can go, Hamlet just looks at you and goes, ‘How about here?’ It’s beautiful and terrifying. I feel that Hamlet is one that even great actors . . . ” He mentions, as he puts it, “Mr. Daniel Day-Lewis.” Day-Lewis pulled out of Hamlet midway through a run in London, partly, it is said, due to the emotions it stirred up about his recently deceased father.

So when I came across a used copy of a Folger edition of Hamlet (turns out the Folger editions are rather well-liked and respected?), I bought it, digitally borrowed the audiobook from Hoopla* (also performed from the Folger edition, there being some textual discrepancies in extant copies of Shakespeare's works), and have been following along with the recorded performance as I read.

*(Hoopla Digital, in case you don't know, is a streaming service that many public libraries provide access to: if your library system is a participant, you can sign up for a free account and then check out 2 or 3 ebooks/audiobooks/movies/albums a month. Highly recommend.)

what i've been doing

Family and friends alike have been pestering me for an account of what I'm doing for work. And the truthful answer is: not much, yet. In the next week or so, I'll hopefully get to help my organization set up their new website; but in the meantime, I've been set on 5 years' worth of digital photographs and tasked with giving them more interesting filenames than "IMG_7373", "IMG_7374", "IMG_7375", and so on.

Three years and seven months ago — thank goodness I documented it — I completed a similar file renaming project for the Millersville University Archives, and in both cases my idea has been to use the ultra-powerful (if you can figure out how to use it) command line tool Microsoft Powershell to algorithmically create new filenames based on a given custom naming convention.

I'm a little scared, because I don't have the best track record with Powershell — last year, I came up with the genius idea to take most of my personal files on my own computer from the past decade, and use Powershell to put every single file in one gigantic folder. This is a prime example of "being too smart for your own good," because I was both able to achieve this and not able to realize ahead of time how much of a disaster it would be to have millions of files in the same folder. You can't find anything in there.

But in this case at work, Powershell seems to be delivering usable results.

pictures and a video

Me and the housemates on a hike by one of Lancaster's famous covered bridges

You see all sorts of things when you take the time to walk instead of driving (or even riding the bus)

Some slice-of-life footage of me and the housemates walking around Lancaster City

other things occupying my brain-space!

• Did you all know my father wrote a book last year? (Which, if I may say, I had a somewhat extensive hand in editing.) It's called Motorcycle Information Safety Systems, and it was never going to win any Nobel prizes, but I found it an interesting distillation of his own worldview as filtered through the subject of riding motorcycles and not dying while doing so, which is arguably his life's passion.
• I've had the hypnotic song "Why Does My Soul Feel So Bad" by Moby on endless repeat. * But I've also been listening a lot to Weird Al polka medleys like this one, which, I kid you not, I find oddly moving at times. "Closing Time" is just as good when excerpted as a double-time polka.
• I'm starting a 2-credit online Mennonite seminary class this week! It's called "Spiritual Practices: Prayer and Scripture" and I hope to write about it more in future emails.
• Everywhere I go in life, there's something called Chestnut Hill. A friend with a house named Chestnut Hill. A friend whose house can be reached by way of Chestnut Hill Rd. A shopping center near my college named Chestnut Hill. And now, in a walk about the city, I see:

As always, if you reply directly to this email, it should show up in my inbox. Let me know what you're up to! I'd love to hear from you.

Best,
Benjamin