ah, yes. christmas! it was so exciting, we got mom and iphone, and were so excited to see her face when she opened it. yet last night, as we were trying to give her this gift, dad brought out two other gifts and was trying to make us open them at the same time. annicka and i were sort of annoyed since we were trying to take pictures and watch the magic.. it turned out, they'd gotten us iphones too! so now we're just one big happy iphone family except that dad has a treo, which i think has been difficult to look at for the last couple of hours. but he has been consoled by the fact that there are rumours of a business model of iphone coming out. woo! his bday is january 12, and though i don't think it will be out by then, the mac convention does happen in january, i think! so maybe then it'll be unveiled.

in other apple news, i think annicka might be going to work at the apple store on michigan ave. in chicago, as a creative! coool!!! her friend works there and they are hiring, so i'm sure they'll snap her up. she's the best teacher of all things electric. patient, see!

well we are leaving for colorado on the 27th, to go to grandma's 80th bday. of course mom is organizing some crazy shit, for example, the other day a box of like 5,000 m&ms with the words "Happy Birthday Nancy!" inscribed on them arrived. AWESOME. also, it's a casino themed party. oooooh snap. i cannot wait.

i'm a little nervous about the drive, since we drove last yr to go skiing for a few days and let me say.. it was a trek. but i figure, i'll have my iphone to keep my occupied, right? i'll need to download some game apps i guess..

the night before christmas eve was fun too, dad wanted to go to nobu so that was very fun and delicious. the nobu here is in this absolutely insane complex in the center of the city, which looks like what can only be described as a victorian skyscraper. or maybe, not a skyscraped, but a mega-structure. it's this cream colored brick, trimmed with bizarre white molded iron decorations, and lit up at night with old school string lights, just naked bulbs. awesome. it's so horrible and wonderful. actually many find it horrible, but i really like it in this weird way. it looks great in texas, let's say. actually, here's a picture of it i took back in august.



and that's just the back end of the sucker. anyways, so that's where nobu is, and we went and had a really good dinner, though the service really sucked. i had lobster ceviche, crab with spicy sauce, and a shrimp role. we drank prosecco, since it was a very celebratory evening, annicka having just gotten home.



we also took some hilarious "jumping" pictures:




anyways it was a very fun night. now i am just sitting here, messing with my iphone. i love it! excited to return to school in january, especially now that they announced who the critics will be. it lends an air of.. newness or something. the term ended up fine, i feel pretty good about everything. i'm nervous about next term, when we'll now have two different structures classes - structures II and environments and enclosures. ohhh, boy. i'm also considering moving, because i feel really far away from the action for some reason. just isolated i guess? the thing is, i either need to move all the way downtown so i'm close to my slc friends, or back uptown to be closer to school. hmmm

im going through a civil war phase... make that.. life

classic studio moments 2

alright, these videos are pretty old now, but i got the urge to post them. these two are classic, you gotta watch this one first. mid-studio final allnighters, after having total freakout/panic attacks and getting a whey protein bar at hamilton deli. which features in the second video as RAT BAIT as you can see, the 'rat gag' escalated over the night.

rocking high tops and saying no to stilettos

this has been a weird few days! my schedule is all fucked up still from studio finals. i thought i had pretty much recovered after a week of sleeping more, but apparently there are more long-term effects than i realized. i haven't been able to go to sleep until about 5am every morning and i am weirdly hyperactive and then really lazy. like i fall asleep at 6pm until 12am, and then can't sleep until 6am. uuugh it's horrible cuz i have shit to DO!!!

friday was FUN, my friend leah whom i met in berlin came over with some delicious wine from her restaurant and we drank that... then we went to jarett's bday party in brooklyn at the jefferson loft and that was pretty fun. ojay and his entourage were there which is always crazy and hilarious. also there was sophie, who went to slc but is doing a yr abroad at the columbia/paris program, and i loooove her. hopefully we'll hang out more soon. i was also really excited to see jiddy and justin, though amy had left earlier which was disappointing. but going home from that place blows. it takes like 1-2 hours on the train. and its never a one, so youve got to walk from 96th.




not being at studio all the time is weird and alienating.. like i don't know where my center is or something? my sleep schedule is all fucked up so i'm always walking home at 4am and stuff. i never see any daylight..




im excited to buy some stuff for my family.. annicka if you are reading this, tell me what you want, cuz for some reason i'm an idiot at buying stuff for you. i always see somehting i think you'll think is funny and you end up like wtf is this??!?!? so let me know. PLS!!!

i finally belong somewhere

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final review triply surface with hiking boot run through

woOOOOOOOO! rhino is in FREE BETA TESTING for OSX!



the irony of this is that there are only 3 days left in the term.

wait til i get my money right

last night was pretty fun. i met up with starsha, jarett and justin, whom i hadn't seen in like a monthhhh because of school. we ate at the old town or old town or whtever the fuck, and it was delicious. bar food. wings and cider. mmmm anyways, then we went down to tribeca to stop by andrea's house, where she was having her birthday. wow was it ever fun! their place is amazing, her parents are both architects so it the whole place was done by them - really beautiful. the party was great. there were lots of planners, who turned out to be great. they're like the architecture kids, but a little less into themselves in some way? which i can appreciate. there was also a pinata. YES. i also tried many types of booze, or "liqueur" as they say, which i had never had. for example, absolut pepper with pomegranate. and so on. it was fuuun. then we had to leave to go to the mckibbin lofts.

it was going to take 45 hours to go back uptown and then get on the damn L, so we took a cab and went across the williamsburg bridge. it was great. so we got there at like 2, when a bunch of people had already left, but it was nice to see everyone. the place was decorated all christmasy and we walked in during a walk off ala tyra mail. hilarious.

i stupidly only got out my camera for about 5 minutes of the evening, so i have a weirdly concentrated, small number of photos.
here are some highlights.






and this, for my money, is the stupidest and funniest picture of the night. wtf is wrong with us in this picture. it looks like 1991

kanye in chicago

im watching this over and over...

Yeah, i know envelopes is spelled wrong.

i don't want to sound overdramatic about this, because the second and third years act like it's nothing.. but this is definitely an experience i have never had before.

all the days run together, which sounds like a cliche, but i mean it literally: you can't remember which is which because there's no change in activity to mark the day's passing, like sleep. mom reminded me today that the last time i had been home/slept was sunday morning from 7-9. it's like: you stay at studio for 6 days straight, with 2-3 hour breaks each 24 hours to nap and change your clothes. there are more people in studio at 5am then there normally are at 2pm on a weekday. sunday morning, before i went for the nap, was great: smokers coming in from outside said it was snowing! ashley and i went out, there was snow! it wasn't dawn yet, but there was enough to see the snow in a real way. as ashley said, it was 'snow light.!'

here's a picture i took later that morning when the snow had melted mostly:


malika told me i might have repetitive stress injuries in my last two fingers on each hand and my shoulders, from resting my elbows on my desk when computering, cuz i guess that means i use the tendons in my sholders (which connect to my last two fingers) to move shit around and that means a lot of constant movement and pressure. it feels WEIRD. like your shoulders aren't TIRED, but they feel all crunchy and wobbly and my two fingers tingle and go numb. from sitting! white collar injury!

i'm getting worried to leave our little bay in studio. i love it. people are so funny. i take videos, but afterwards you can never tell whats happening in them or why the hell it was funny at all. but it WAS SO FUNNY!

Youtubing

Pimp My Model with X-ACTO

HAHAH

FOA's Yokohama Ferry Terminal Sermon

Awesome

efterklang

Cell Phone Tower May be Built Inside Cross

elevator at ICA

4th model light tabel pics

there were lots of irish people

good start to weekend!

i decided at the last minute (11.00am friday during drawing) to go to boston for the night to see my parents, who were at ASHA (american speech and hearing assoc). i took the bus up for port authority, and they met me at south station - where i immediately ran into a girl i studied abroad with in copenhagen. weird! we ate dinner at "elephant walk," a cambodian-french (and also gluten free) restauraunt. delicious.

unfortunately, i jumped on the bus in my disgusting still unwashed since the review clothes and only a pair of thermal underwear (why!?!?!), not realizing i was getting to boston just in time for all the celebratory honors cocktail parties. oooh, boy! hello thousands of people to make a good impression to! haha, and i was so out of it. you know it's bad when you find yourself in a ten minute conversation with the guy they hired to dress up as paul revere for people who want pictures with a legend at the "texas" party. it was surreal! as evidenced below.



my mom and dad were staying at this really nice new westin, so they had this great room high up with a wall of windows and a great view. the best part was the beds. oh man, those beds are great. so many pillows. so high off the ground. great sheets. ahhh that bed. i couldn't stop getting up to look out that wall of glass though. somehow glass like that makes the scene outside so much better. it frames it, i guess. but equally across the whole plane.



then this morning i got to go down to the convention and see my mom's new book's publisher's stand! cooool! here's my dad looking happy about it. i guess it's been reaaally well recieved and sold out, but my mom would never admit to it wholly - so everyone else says so! oh man i am so happy for her. i guess the publishers are really happy cuz theyve had tons of orders from universities.




so then we had some seafood, i had looobbssttteeeer WOOO! and went to the new diller+scofidio+renfro building right next door, the institute for contemporary art. wowwww. i was really pretty impressed with in, especially with the structural clarity of it, in terms of tectonics - the large horizontal ribbon cutting through (i.e. the shape on the side of the block) the whole volume and these little snippets cut off and in. i'm not sure about how the decided to site the whole thing, it seems like it was just kind of plopped down there but really i only saw about 15 seconds of its surroundings so who am i to comment. i really just like diller+scofidio.