reading for forte's class

"But everywhere, and in all parts of the country, in planning a country house, let the habits, and wants, and mode of life (assuming them to be good and truthful ones) stamp themselves on the main features of the house. It is thus that our domestic architecture will always be growing better, more truthful, more individual, and therefore more rational and sincere, rather than more foreign and affected."
downing

pass this on

oh man class was awful today. we are still reviewing algebra stuff, and no one says SHIT when he asks anything, for good reason - he asks these questions where you know it, but it's such an easy question you don't answer because the embarassment of getting it wrong would be unbearable. elliot kept falling asleep and SNORING next to me. me and the girl next to him kept trying to hit him awake, and he wouldnt budge. it was awful. then i picked up two packages - one was my skipants/goggles/gloves from my mom.

i have a conference with claudia at 12. okay.

yesterday night was great - right as i published that part about the girl next door doing it so loud, katie and amy called me to say they were taking a walk in the snow. they came to my room and we went back in the trees in slonim - it was so dark, but glowing because it was snow-covered. it reminded me of the woods behind shady side. i pulled a dad/rich thing - i hid behind a big tree and jumped out at them and they FREAKED out - it was so great, and easy - i was barely two feet ahead of them when i hid and they were all "kelsey? kelsey where are you?" classic. then we walked back by the ECC, and then back behind the new polshek VAC and then to marshall field, the old music building. it's a beautiful building. it feels so much like shady side, i couldn't stop thinking about it once we left. dark red carpet, chandaliers, wood panelling, eggshell paint, the whole nine yards. and a big swooping staircase. we walked up to one of the bigger rooms and stayed there for an hour or two, we just talked. it was very awesome. they are so great. it made me feel a lot better about the situation with our friends. it felt like talking to them in old times. we talked about high school, and suburbs, and swimsuits. they want to start going to the gym and going bathing suit shopping. anyways it was a very nice few hours. clarifying.

we also decided that we don't party enough like we did freshman and sophmore yr (i.e. a handle of vodka, "a flat sprite" and a bottle of cranberry juice from the pub, and some ladytron or similar fare). so we're doing that in my room friday night. we have to be careful though, no more than 16 people can be caught in my room now because i'm on housing probation from the last party we had at my house - the infamous WWF party.

then saturday we have a plan to drive into the city and go to a few bars and sleep until we can drive home.

trees there will be

it started snowing tonight, only like a quarter of an inch. we had the group for design in jiddy's room, justin made me so mad: we were talking about planning a trip to russel wright's house upstate, and justin says "someone really just needs to take responsibility and plan this, and book the van and ask for money." i said, "well, go ahead!" and he said "why should i have to, i don't even know who this guy is and i sure as hell don't care about going to his house." ugh i was so angry. he'll suggest things to do and then ask US to follow up on them - he'll never do it. it's because he's afraid of being embarassed or ashamed by this group. he'd rather do nothing than feel like an idiot. then he got bored and left. he was stoned and said he had to go to a "hillel meeting," which of course he later referred to as "my friends from my israel trip smoking up and talking about israel." it's like cool, make us feel like lazy assholes who refuse to do your bidding and then run off to get even more stoned. it was so lame. he refuses to contribute to the group, but criticizes us for not doing things he wants to do. i feel bad, i think rachael and sarah expected more from us...we just wanted to talk about stephen holl and droog design. then jiddy and sarah and i left to go to the pub/library. i like sarah, she's from houston and is just very cool - she has these fancy cowboy boots and monogrammed cardigans and stuff...she suggested we eat dinner sometime, which made me happy. she knew a ton about droog design, too.. i felt embarassed for saying "drOOg" instead of "draghh" like the dutch would. she saw one of their designers speak a while ago. also jiddy revealed she and whitney are thinking about applying to eindhoven in holland, for the "IM" program, which is the "interior, industrial and identity design program." WTF? it sounds awesome. of course a program like that would be in the netherlands. never have i seen such bizarre synthesis of interior/product/commercial design...row houses painted sky blue and galleries consisting of hilarious couches and projections of fireplaces and stuff. that place was nuts. i also got drunker in rotterdam than i've ever been in a dinner-setting, at a restaraunt called "new york" right by the erasmus bridge. embarassing, but also funny.

i went to drudgereport.com this morning as is my wont after i wake up, and i saw this headline, "FORECAST: CHAOS" and they had a picture of a skyline, i think manhattan..it was like all my crazy apocolypse-dreams were coming true, i couldn't imagine, was it a huge blizzard, a hurricane, an airborne toxic event ala white noise? but no, it was something both dissapointing and scarier than those things - the results from the big climate change report or whatever it's called. very frightening.

i'm not really looking forward to math tomorrow. it's getting more boring/weirder/harder by the day.

GOD DAMN IT the new girl next door is having really loud, freaky sex. great. i guess i can expect this for the next four months. i think i'm done with this.

dark mac lab

oh man i'm bored right now. i'm in hour 2 minute 44 of maya class. heres the gist of what i presented today:




pretty much some bullshit i pulled together in the two hours before class, but i like the pukey-colored one. i think that one is good.
tonight is our first meeting of slc group for design this term, which would have stayed defunct but other people in joe's class kept complaining. so we're having it in jiddy's room at eight. great. i dont have much to say now, im just exhausted.
i went over to the gym today to pay my 100 dollars in cash for the ski trip. i'm just worried about who i'll room/ski/eat with now that jiddy's not going.
i'm trying to type really quietly so claudia won't think i'm not paying attention, but whatever. i have a headache.

meditating and/or procrastinating

here i am in the computer lab, trying to figure out something to present for tomorrow. im too lazy to draw and too lazy to go to the other room where the computers have maya, so instead i'm writing on this. a bunch of graphite exploded in my bag so now everything i own is shiny metallic.
i can't really come up for much for this concept right now. all i have is really, a plan for what the facade will look like and where the museum is going to be situated within the arcade. the original (existing) arcade facade -

basic guidelines for renovation -

concept for what each side of the facade will appear as -


so as you can see i haven't done much work. instead i am sitting here writing into space about it. the idea is that this is a museum for this design critic who collects kitsch objects, Victor Margolin , and the museum is meant to be built inside the Providence Arcade, which was the first indoor shopping mall in the US (we had to model it earlier in the yr in maya). My idea is about a kind of gibsonian "viral" presentation of the objects..i want the facade to look like a decaying formation of small glass boxes, each housing a kitsch object. it's sort of about the vast number of products manufactured each day in the world, and the awareness that the machines are always running, somewhere in the world, even when you sleep. it's kind of about ghosts, and decay, and sheer force of numbers... we'll see. i think the interior of each side is going to be a ramp, circling upwards a tornado-like amalgamation of the objects inside of the same glass boxes...and a bridge 'made' from these boxes will connect the two sides of the museum.

aha! now ive spent enough time talking about what ive already done, its time for dinner with amy and justin.

auch helden haben schlechte tage

just woke up from bad dreams. i'd taken a tylenol pm around eight. laura ( my next door neighbor) moved out this afternoon, now some other girl moved in, while i was asleep. there's the sound of people and stuff, it makes me feel lonely. i miss when my room was the center for us, it was both freshman and sophmore yr.

i wish i could do something but complain. the thing is, i really just want us to be okay. this room, it's a wooden box that feels a million miles away from anything. i just hope it's not a preview of next yr. but actually being thousands of miles away from this would be better than being here and feeling as though you're a thousand miles away. at least you have tangible distance to blame. but why am i complaining? it's such a silly problem.

i have pre-calc tomorrow morning, which is okay. i kinda like being up at 9, and the people in my class are nice. it's mostly first and sophmore yr girls, plus elliot from joe' 'consuming architecture' and julian, the 24-yr old freshman from botswana, and this other guy who i think is an older first yr too. also, a bunch of continuing education/early childhood education people. jiddy and i were signed up for this ski trip to vermont on the 9th, and now jiddy can't go since her sister's thesis show is that weekend, so now i'm kind of confused. who am i gonna room with? who am i gonna hang out with at night? ride on the bus with? feels very middle school, all of these thoughts. in fact i've had this thought several times the last few days. just not sure how fun skiing alone for 2 days sounds.

im afraid of going back to sleep now, since the dream. i'm letting all this stuff be written down, i'm sure most of it sounds pretty dumb. but i'm not afraid, they're just thoughts. maybe i should eat an apple, it might help with the tylenol. one yr ago today i was about to get on a plane to berlin. i remember the plane was so old - it was dark and quiet, and no tvs in the seats or anything - like being on a movie set for a film set on a plane in the 1970s. colored with sort of muted navy, red, mustard yellow... it was hard to tell we were going anywhere. and in the same sense, it was hard to accept that in truth we were in a little metal cylander over the ocean. in the big tech-y planes i've always flown, it's easy to feel like you're going on some alien journey, not 35000 ft over the atlantic. this was like being in a bond movie, or a gibson book.

the golden city

i just got back from brunch with justin, it was good. we were going to the city but ended up not getting the van, so we just went down to bates. it was nice to actually talk to him... we talked a lot about our friends and what's been happening, and what will happen. the real question right now is spring break. no one wants to spend a grand to have a miserable time. we all know that people will fight. it's true, a thousand dollars could buy a lot of fun otherwise.
amy and jiddy came down after a half hour or so, and amy says "do you guys want to go to bronxville with us," and i said
"to do what?"
"eat"
"no, we already ate here"
and then she realizes i'm confused about what she means, and makes a face, and then i say
"don't be mad at me, i thought you were telling me you're about to go eat in bronxville, so i said no we've eaten here"
and of course she stormed off to go sit at hunter and eli's table.
i didn't immediately apologize for not understanding her (and pissing her off), so she's mad at me. get over it. jiddy sat with us, and said we should start a competition to see from whom amy storms off the most, and how far. i remember when justin pissed her off and she walked back up the hill, he ran after her apologizing and she screamed RAPE to get him to go back down. i don't know why this keeps happening - but i do know one thing - people aren't perfect. but goddamnit, it's tearing us apart. it's like, come on man, get over it. there's nothing to be mad at. it just sucks. you never know when she's gonna storm off or be pissed at you. i miss when she was happy most of the time, and when she was mad you knew it was for a good reason.
i talked to my parents, they were walking down the katy trail to go see victory plaza in dallas. justin and i talked a lot about america, as we usually do when we're alone, and that was okay. he's set on israel now - i keep thinking it'll blow over but he seems serious, and that makes me happy, since he's clearly happy about it. i like hearing him talk about it, and about palestine. i'm proud of him for not being brainwashed by birthright - i'm sure so many kids come back and hate arabs. but he took a few days and travelled without the group in palestine, and is not more on their side than anyone's, though he still believes in a jewish state. he has a video of him walking towards the dome of the rock, where they believe muhammad rose from,

"the spot from which Muhammad ascended to God in heaven, accompanied by the angel Gabriel. There he consulted with Moses and was given the (now obligatory) Islamic prayers before returning to Earth. A Qur'anic verse says that Muhammad took an instantaneous night journey on his horse Buraq from al-Masjid al-Haram ("the sacred mosque," interpreted as being in Mecca) to al-Masjid al-Aqsa ("the farthest mosque," interpreted as being in Jerusalem),"

and the sun is setting and you hear the islamic call to prayer, and the mosque looks so beautiful, it's made from the same jerusalem white rock, which as justin says turns gold when the light hits it. it's the most incredible video. it made me want to go to israel, a want that i haven't really had before. but the sound of the adhan and all that gold...it was really spectacularly great. i finally kind of got what justin kept ranting about... i'll see if he'll send it to me so i can upload it.

now i'm just sitting here thinking i should do some work. tuesday our concept presentations for victor margolin's museum are due - claudia is sending them to victor to comment on. it's a big deal, you have to try and sell it with a few pictures, really. i should do some sketches, cuz right now all i have is a super conceptual idea, which looks cool but doesn't compare to a fully modeled building, which some of the other people already have. i can't work in maya today since the lab is closed and i forgot my mouse in dallas, so i guess i'll have to whip something up tomorrow after precalc.

check out this hoodie designed by kiser. it reads "weapons of mass destruction" in arabic.

we share our mother's health

its so grey here...it looks like oxford, how i remember it last year. sarah lawrence is a bizarre place, especially now. there's no more drag queens or glitter or coming out dances.. so now it can't justify itself by being special.
yesterday night was weird, we drank beers in jarett's room and then had to go down to this party katie was co-hosting, but there was barely anyone there and the music sucked. i left before everyone else did, i couldn't take the awkwardness. there's something about an almost empty room and loud music that i can only take for 4-5 minutes... plus the obligatory sad guy on his phone outside. its too depressing.
i came home and went right to bed. it felt like 10 out, so my room was freezing. it was hard to go to sleep. i had a dream about something crazy which i now can't remember...it had to do with being in a 1960s prefab highrise utopia with streets and stuff, jetsons' style, and being in a class where the professor was a mix of house/forte/jarett.

1.00am
i just came home, because everyone was smoking a joint and for us, that means that in 30 minutes we'll be fighting. tonight we went out for mexican, i forgot my ID so when i ordered a beer at the bar i got embarassed. i think this drunk old scarsdalian who later spilled his margarita laughed at me. though i talked to jarett about next yr and he said that texas is big for actors right now? i guess his friend who had a 5-episode role on prisonbreak had been living in austin. it makes me feel better to think that everyone but me won't necessarily be living in manhattan next yr. justin and jarett have been trying to figure out how to tell amy that they can't live with her next yr - too much fighting i guess. even though this is negative it still makes me feel left out. but then when i consider the alternative - living in manhattan on minimum wage - i realize i would never do it. it makes no sense. why pay 800 dollars a month to live in some shithole and work like a dog to be able to, and have no fun because the weather sucks and everyone's a dick. plus, i'm sure we'd never get to see each other, so why not wait for a time when we can all afford to live right by each other and actually be able to enjoy it. maybe i'm an idiot, missing the phase of 'miserable post college apartment/job' with your friends, but the way things are going with us...it seems unlikely. walking to the car today, jarett said "it seems like all our friends are going seperate ways." it was such a sad moment. i felt like crying...everyone can say that except him. he's always acted oblivious to infighting, and just let it blow over. it was a kind of...deafening statement. katie spent the whole night in karis' room with evan, mattso, owen and owen's friend. really, the guy seems so self-important. everyone likes him because hes in lampoon. i think he's trying so hard to make up for his shortness/etc. that he's convinced everyone he's a nice/funny guy. he comes across as pretty vacant.
early today after brunch, justin amy and laura and i watched the prince of egypt, which was unexpectedly great. justin is obsessed with all things jewish since he returned from israel, and so that includes early dreamworks adaptations of exodus. jeff goldblum was aaron (aron? i dont know), classic.
tomorrow justin and i have plans to go into the city and see the josef hoffmann interiors show at die neue gallerie and then go to the new uniqlo, which is the first US store of "japan's GAP." 60dollar cashmere sweaters, blah blah...im excited though, i need to spend some cash. unfortch i dont have much left after that shitty mexican food tonight and my grad application fees and all the other shit i've bought. but nonetheless i'm excited.

today someone in claudia's other class mentioned this video of joseph kittinger, parachuting from 102.800 feet above the earth. he broke the speed of sound he was travelling so fast.

"He set records for highest balloon ascent, highest parachute jump, longest freefall and fastest speed by a man through the atmosphere"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MkB6NkQs

in which our hero has a mediocre time at the bar

i REALLY like the new fashionista blog. i like that it's a fashion blog that is somehow obliquely related to gawker - it makes it feel less shallow. it just posted about how to copy chanel's new nailpolish shade.

yesterday i thought i had a conference with my precalc professor, and so i went down there, and i was waiting outside and i think i shocked him or something...he was coming out of the bathroom and i was standing right there. he then told me he specifically said, conferences start NEXT week. oh well.

then katie and i went out to THE WESTCHESTER MALL ahaha which is the dumbest mall ever. katie needed to buy a new computer, so we went to the apple store and she bought a new white macbook. i tried on these great flats, but they were 110 dollars and i ruin flats in 3 weeks, so i felt bad about buying them. they were great though. mom probably would have told me to get them, but i get so guilty.

last night was thursday night, so we headed out to the malthouse around 11. there were SO many girls! i don't think i've ever seen so many females in one place, literally. mind you i've never had much of an issue with the SLC 80% female population - whatever. but last night, watching that tiny little room fill up with more and more screeching, maniacal hipsters..i almost had to leave, it was so overwhelming. things are weird with my friends, the bar is always weird because it's a tiny room filled with 50-75 people that you know, but don't necessarily have things to talk about with for longer than 30 mins. and last night was freshman heavy (when i was a freshman i NEVER would have been caught dead at this nasty bar), and so there was a lot of awkward grinding and cranberry juice. also this freshman who was making out with this androgynous girl and slow dancing to the stupid 90s dance songs while people were trying to talk around them. kept making eye contact with me. that's the worst, because then you feel like its YOUR fault. i dunno. i met this norwegian girl who spoke swedish with me - when i could reply she screamed super loud. she seemed nice. we were the last people to leave - katie told me that the bartender had just made her a come shot --- vodka, and a little bit of bailey's? that bar is class all the way, im telling you. we went outside and it was SO COLD. i think it got down to 9, which really isn't all that cold but with the blasting wind and humidity was ICY. i came home and made some easy mac, which i ate while i watched the last 15 minutes of an episode of house. that house. i would treat him right if given the chance.

i'm trying to decide how to make this semester work...my rejection letters will be arriving in 6 weeks, so maybe i should disappear until 2 weeks afterwards, so no one will remember to ask? my 3d professor basically told me i was screwed with such low math scores. it sucks that you can get all As and great verbal scores and still get rejected. it also sucks that i spent so much time on this endeavor. right now i wish i could just got back to dallas and go to bed. but here i am, a lab monitor until 4. and then we have to go to this party tonight. and its called "submission." IM SO EMBARRASSED FOR MYSELF

Hi everybody, i'm starting this blog because i have too much time on my hands. i've had blogs and livejournals and crap before, but generally i'm embarassed of those...this i hope will just be a chance for me to use up time that would otherwise be spent watching allfg.org episodes of house or the simpsons...or ugly betty. or prison break.

my second term as a senior hasn't even really begun yet, and im already ready to be done with it. i mean, eight people are here that are the best people ever. i love them. but now we're older, and everyone has their own shit to do (plays, work, grad stuff) and we can't all constantly hang out like we always have. plus, now we fight. yesterday amy got mad at me, because she kept saying she didn't want to go on our spring break cruise anymore because she was afraid she was going to get raped..and i said "thats the dumbest thing to worry about, youre not gonna get raped none of us would let that happen" and she was so angry! she said "DO YOU SEE ME? I'M NOT LAUGHING." its like come on man, its a cruise. this from the person who two yrs ago said she wanted to go abroad so she could find out the other uses of broomsticks. come on.

i feel bad right now, because this morning in forte's class, he was talking about me helping out one of the other pondfield road redesign groups with their 3D model and presentation..and i rolled my eyes at justin, cuz its his group and i didnt want him to think that i was better than him at modelling...i was just trying to show that i was on his side..and forte was like "oh kelsey's rolling her eyes over there" and i felt terrible, since he's the one that nominated me to help, and i'm the one who AGREED to it. then after class he called me a punk. i feel bad in any case.