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
