showdown in chicago

I’m not eating any wheat, gluten, or bread right now which is crazy. I
actually really like it – I thought I’d shrivel up and die without bread
but it turns out there are delicious alternatives to wheat, like sorghum
beer and rice and almond bread. I can’t wait to go out to dinner with
jiddy when I get back to ny. In other news, I am bored as hell here at
work. Oh my god. It’s beyond descriptions of boredom. The guy whos
supposed to be my boss just made a joke about someone else playing the
skin flute. This presents a dilemma: does this comment open the door for
me user these kinds of idioms, or am I disqualified by being an intern and
the youngest/newest/least paid person in the office? I’m not totally sure
I want to find out – after all these people pray before they eat
applebee’s for lunch.
In other news I am so excited for the fourth of july because we are going
to the horse races in grand prairie! HORSE RACES! Hahahha also they have
fireworks. Holy crap. I have to look into getting a ridiculous pastel hat.
Or is that just at the Kentucky derby? Who cares.
Actually I have a feeling that a more fitting outfit for a horse race on
independence day in ft.worth, texas would probably be a bikini made from a revolutionary-war era American flag and cowboy hat. by the way i am becoming more and more obsessed with abe lincoln, i am at the part of my book where he just gained the republican party nomination.


also, i got some info from columbia, like about ids and email.

iphone approaches

oh boy, either a lot or very little has been happening in my life lately. i have a full time job as a graphic designer for this ridiculously inept "volunteer abroad" company which has seen a 300% increase in sales in the last year, and i'm producing their literature. oy!!! it's run by these two nepalese guys who seem to be.... prismatically transforming business geniuses. they're constantly changing - like friday i made a brochure for one of the other companies they run, this one called global future inst., and the brochure listed them as forestry, agriculture and poverty researchers. wha??? five days a week all i see is them convicing naive college students that the guy meeting them at the airport in nairobi isn't someone they found loitering outside a bus station on their last visit (he is). but they are really nice. it's just been the weirdest experience ever. i overheard a conversation the other day where this 22-yr old canadian volunteer was calling saying they wanted to go home because they got chased by people with machetes. the people at the office were like "we're not giving you a refund, this is all hearsay." booyah!

i have also been living in the loft which i have made into a very cute little place. for two more months i will be here before leaving for manhattan. i can't wait to go back, mainly because all my friends are having parties every night and i want to hit that before studio starts!!! jarett got a part in a production of macbeth, reinforcing the constant stream of people insisting he's going to be famous. justin and he are living together, about 10 blocks from my future abode! or, not having gotten a place yet, neighborhood. this is lucky because it will be easier to join parties, so that we can find justin his future relationship, with someone from the GSAPP. it's his goal for this year and it would suit both of our interests, a marriage!

today my mom is away in madison, having a little reunion party with her best friends from grad school. dad, annicka, and i went to burger bar last night in the west village (imagine prenzlauer berg in berlin, but only 4 years old, planned by a new urbanist, and populated by wealthy texans - albeit fun). it was amazing. i had a turkey burger with cranberries, avacado, pepperjack, and sweet potatoe fries. and the best mojito i've ever had! ever! delicious. like drinking minty heaven. burger bar is this sort of up-scale after-bar hangout, sort of done up in copenhagen-chic --- big huge ambient chandaliers, lots of wood and metal. it stays open til 3am every night so all the dallesiens who can't stand to set foot in a diner love it!

many other things have been happening to me - it turns out i am "on" the celiac's disease scale, though my tests are "overall" negative - so i'm getting on a gluten-free diet! oh shit!!!!! so i have been eating special almond rice bread and cookies, which i actually like better than the gluten-y old kind. plus, i dont feel like puking after i eat it. though, strangely, i've actually been getting more rashes since i started (rashes are a big indicator of celiac's)

i skipped work to meet with an architect here in our neighborhood the other day, who regaled me with stories of working under michael graves at princeton in the seventies and going up to columbia for the football game, and has a son doing conceptual art at harvard. i think i may have impressed him by trotting out my almost encyclopedic knowledge of alvar aalto. he was telling me about how he visited alvar's own house in finland which he'd "never met anyone else who'd been there," and i identified the house. oh yeah! he sent me on my way by saying we should have a beer. awesome.

well on the apartment front i am having a hard time of committing. i am excited for rhode island because i'm gonna take the train into manhattan, sign a sublet or lease, and then take some of my friends back up to the beach houses for a few days. i can only imagine what the meeting of those two little universes will be like. irish swedes and russian jews. remarkably alike, theyre actually almost exactly the same, when you really get to know them.

im sunburned today

i can wait, i can wait

Ooh boy, office jobs are so boring. I mean, some kinds of offices I enjoy very much –ones that are in a field I’m interested in, ones which are doing something important, or even just ones that are doing something totally boring but have a good culture – i.e. the employees like each other. Unfortunately my summer job doesn’t really fit into any of those three categories. my computer hasn’t arrived yet (after four days of full-time work) so basically I am doing ridiculous and useless work, like checking the entire website for spelling and grammar errors. Needless to say they picked the wrong guy. But then again, I now am dreading the arrival of the computer, because it means I’ll be held accountable for semi-independent work (creating all their .pdf graphic files in indesign). It’s just counting down the hours that really gets to you. Like right now, I have five and a half more hours here, since I’ve been here for two and a half. God this place is weird. It’s in this weird old seventies office building off of the freeway that goes to the airport. It’s one of those office bldgs with the orangy-glass cladding. From the window I’ve been sitting at, I can see the city’s skyline and the freeway leading towards it. The white dome of the Cowboy’s stadium is to the left, while endless car dealerships and fast food places are to both sides. One fun thing is to watch the weather roll in and out – it’s so flat here that you can see for hundreds of miles, so storms that are in Oklahoma are visible to the eye.
This building is really a dump - tons of mirrors, a rickety elevator, cockroaches, and an ornery maintenance man who claims he’s retired! Today they told me that the men’s bathroom is being used by “vagrants” at night, because the door lock is gone. I asked what vagrants, and they were all “don’t worry!” and I was like, I’m not worried, I meant seriously, what homeless person would come all the way out here on the airport highway to use these shitty bathrooms? And go to all that trouble? So my opinion is it’s an inside job. Oh boy am I excited to get out of work. Maybe it will be sunny and I can go to the pool.
This weekend was kind of sad simply because it rained the whole time, and I was so excited to go to the pool. But father’s day was yesterday and that was great because I made dad some blueberry and raspberry pancakes.

pavan

i discovered i really like all bands on 'flogsta danshall.' i wish i had known when i was in dk.. just didnt pay attention i guess. but now im really getting into it. its good for summer. i am obsessed by looking for an apartment in new york. i found the best place ever but it's 20 blocks south of avery, and people say that no one in the arch program should live beyond walking distance since you have to go home at like 5am every night. i dunno, my mom says i'd just have to alot some money each week to taking cabs home. still, it would suck to have to take the subway so much. i mean its walkable but itd take longer. i dunno. plus this place doesn't move in until nov.1 so id have to find some other place for two months??? which would blow. but it's so beautiful, three windows on the 10th flr of a building on broadway and 101st. niiice!!!

i had a job interview today, it went well though it seems like the job might be a little bit boring. basically producing indesign files for a study abroad organization. i mean its full time and pays awesome, but honestly i'd rather not work in an office and have to carry through every day with the awful 9-5 office talk. for some reason that really got to me at my last office/graphics job. it just gets to you after a while. i never expected to feel that way... but right now i just want a job at starbucks and call it a summer.

were going to wisconsin this weekend to annicka's graduation, im really excited. mom and dad are going early to go to a conference in madison, and then on saturday im flying in and then we'll all drive up to appleton. YES! i love appleton! then i am going to drive home in the scion with annicka and all her stuff, which is going to be awesome because on monday we're gonna go to chicago and stay with caitlin, whos gonna be there. her grandma has an apartment really high up on lakeshore drive, i cant WAIT to see caitlin. she's annicka's friend who lives in dallas and is so awesome. but i wanna go see IIT again and then maybe around..then we'll drink that night and so on. oh chicago i love it. then we'll drive straight down through the country, probably stop in omaha to see our grandma jean. then get home. im really excited cuz we'll be able to stop and take lots of pictures and see all the weird stuff along the way. i am personally looking forward to the weird alien nebraska plains myself. last time i was there i didn't have my polaroid out and missed getting a picture of them i think.

so anyways. dallas. weird. ive been riding my bike around everywhere. mom was in dc a few days ago so dad and i were hanging out, we went to little katana where i had the best sushi ive ever tasted, in particular a sunny roll which is shrimp tempura, crabmeat, avacado creamcheese wrapped in some kind of rice noodle with orange and eel sauce and one other i forget.. heres a picture of it

i cant wait to go back and have another it was so great.