and all those lonely night down by the river, brought me bread and water, by the kith and the kin

i'm finally done. so hungover, spilled beer all over my computer and so on.i think it's because i still haven't made up my sleep debt - when the work induced sleep deprivation ended, the booze induced sleep deprivation began.

i was so sleepy in my last pre-calc class that i went to the bathroom in sheffield, sat down on the toilet with my pants still up and fell asleep with my head propped up against the toilet paper dispenser. some guy woke me up knocking - i was sure it was my prof coming to yell at me two hours later.

we had forte's last class, which was anticlimactic becuase instead of the traditional "end of year slide show extravaganza" we just has class as usual, but with mimosas. and you know, i'll never learn, because every end of semester in joe's class we have all this champagne and every time i drink it and fall asleep because i'm so tired, and have an awful day because i'm drunk/sleepy. and i say, never again will i drink in the morning during conference week! but next thing i know im telling the person to make mine a DOUBLE MIMOSA! ugh

i finished my thesis and turned it in yesterday... i'll admit i didn't even proof read the goddamn thing. it turned out to be about 80 pages with pictures. it's seriously so bad i'm avoiding joe.
trying to figure out what to get for graduation and the don/donnee dinner.

yesterday night was so great. we went to the malthouse, the last bar night FOREVER. yesterday was all "lasts." our last bates dinner - i had a sandwhich, some toast with jam and butter, and some coffee and ice cream. delicious. i made a toast - to the future! skoal. we drank so much last night but it wasn't in a bad way. everything was good at the malthouse, not weird like it sometimes is. i drank long island iced teas and white russians. boring! i really wanted a mojito but poor joe, the bartender. i can't believe they don't have two bartenders on nights like those. all this funny stuff happened, like justin had a complete freakout when they played "i would do anything for love" on the speakers. i mean really, a complete freak out. hahahhahhaha! i remember when annicka and i were little, we'd go up to the bedroom in the attic of our old house, and put pillows under our shirts to look fat, and sing that song dancing on the bed. BUT I WON'T DOOOOOO THAT! oh god it was so funny. so then we went back to campus and ordered wraps from eileen's. something else funny happened but i can't remember. then i went to bed finally at three or four, and woke up to what i think must have been the sound of someone puking in our bathroom, again. it sounded pretty bad..i felt bad for whoever it was, i felt like i should go see if they were okay but i've found sometimes i need to just let people be, i'm too inquisitive.

oh god i can't wait for this shift to be over so i can go back to bed. unfortunately every time i try to there's some "last ____" that i have to be at, so i don't sleep. i'm excited for tonight, i don't know why, i just am.

btw check out annicka's latest post:

celebrate the new, celebrate the few

i'm so excited, tonight is our HIGH RISE MULTI-USE TOWER CRAWL! wooo! in forte's class we're giving group presentations on contemporary arch. typologies, and me/justin/jiddy/sarah chose the multi-use tower. so tonight we are going to do a 'tower bar crawl' and make a movie out of it. i'm so damn excited!!!

last night was great - we went to the malthouse as is our wont on thursdays. jiddy showed up so that was funny. at the end of the night we were doing shots of sambuca and that crap is so sugary and greasy, when someone handed me mine, it slipped right out of my hand! oh god it was awful. now everything i own smells like licorice. i guess it could be worse. but seriously, the section of my pants where it got spilled was literally hard by the end of the night - like it had been sprayed with some kind of disgusting clear sealant. hah! so anyways the end of the night was just really great. and then after that katie, amy chris and i went to eileen's - YES. eileen's is so great. then starsha charis and richard came too. these obnoxious yonkers kids started making fun of the irish waitress' accent cuz she kicked one out for smoking inside, and as they left, richard jumped up and said "i am just so mad right now." and ran out, and picked up two trashcans and threw them at the cars of these kids as they drove away. he then got in his car and tried to follow them. he was back in 10 minutes though for a burger - it was pretty hilarious/badass.

so i'm almost 100% on columbia. gotta get a money order (for some reason i have no checks) and send that off. i applied for housing yesterday!? i had been feeling for a few days after ithaca that columbia was the right place for me, but i kept trying to convince myself of cornell because when we were there, my mom was really quiet about judging it. so i assumed that she wanted me to go there. so i kept thinking "mom must see something i don't" so i spent a while trying to see how i should go there. but slowly i realized it wasn't gonna happen, so i was dreading telling my parents, since i thought they'd be dissapointed. so last night i called them and i was kind of slowly trying to say that i was going with columbia, and my mom goes "THANK GOD! now i can finally say something! we were on pins and needles that you might choose cornell, but we didn't want to influence your decision!" it was like the biggest miscommunication ever - i thought my mom wanted me to go and she thought i wanted to go, but we both knew i should go to columbia. hah. anyways that's done. i'm so relieved to put that decision behind me. cornell's open house was pretty weird - no one asked questions and in general the admitted students just seemed kind of...blase? i mean on the other hand the kids at columbia's open house acted like they were all on meth or something. i would prefer something more in the middle, but i don't really have another choice! so, here's to decades of debt and three miserable, oppresively anxious, sleep-deprived years!

"i spent the winter on the verge of a nervous breakdown while living in norway"

i'll begin with this delightful post (entitled "bonkers in yonkers") from curbed.com about the ridiculous new will alsop project in yonkers:

and here's a little excerpt:

The hulking 80,000-square-foot power plant will lose its two smokestacks and gain a large residential tower. A third of the 400 units will be luxury condos and the rest rentals, with some reserved for low-income residents... The $250 million project also calls for adding a contemporary art museum, located in a former switch-house, and a new apartment structure, nicknamed the “magic tower,” with a boxy upper portion balanced on tentacle-like stilts.

Seriously, Will Alsop, where have you been all our lives? Your Google Image Search results alone have won you our eternal devotion.

haaaaaaaa! i love when curbed gets all... funny.

so what an intense few days.

re: columbia open house
i feel like i'm a pregnant woman, having bizarre mood swings every 10 minutes about this shit. and then of course today forte drops the bomb: "you know, you could defer and apply to the other top schools next yr!" its like OHHHH NOOOOOOO!!! in a way i know he's right, i didn't apply to yale/harvard/princeton because my portfolio wasn't ready back in december, and those schools might be better matches for me, but i have spent WAY TOO MUCH TIME, sweat, tears, and money on this to just let it all come to nothing. i am beginning my m.arch in four months. that's the story.
the columbia open house was pretty enlightening, but also very confusing. the dean, mark wigley, is awesome, and after talking to him a bit i can see how he's changing columbia from the stuffy robert a.m. stern environment into something more engaging. the big kicker is: columbia's facilities SUCK!!! actually worse than suck. you're paying 35,000 dollars a year to share a computer and desk with someone else? geez. walking through the studios, they're just so awfully cramped and depressing - not the good kind of messy, the miserable kind of messy. all the kids just had these looks on their faces like "dear god please let this moment pass!" one guy i talked to told me how to build his model he had to put a piece of plywood on a garbage can in the hall and build it out there. on the other hand:
did i look like that in studio last yr? i'm sure - sleeping under a desk and only drinking 7-11 espresso and gummi bears for 3 days, it doesn't matter if you're working in a suite at the four seasons - right? and what really matters in those situations is who's sitting around you.
speaking of the people - i was incredibly surprised by how cool they all were. i met so many nice people - what?? i thought everyone at this school was supposed to be a jerk! no. the first guy i met was so cool, he's coming to cu to do AAD, graduated from cornell two years ago and has been working for kohn pedersen fox since then, and has been in dallas working on their new 50-story tower next to the W hotel, right by our house! and he wants to go back to school so he has time to 'think.'! awesome!
i also met this girl who's been working at GM designing cars in detroit - they recruited her one night in her studio at u of i or somewhere. mysterious.

anyways the whole thing is that columbia clearly is better connections/better jobs while cornell is better facitities/education. now for a humanities situation, obviously the right choice is the school with a better education. however, in an m.arch program the focus is on preparing for your career afterwards, and your professors are more critics of what you do in studio than anything. so i really have to be careful here - this isn't choosing between small liberal arts colleges where the emphasis is on building a humanities foundation, this is about choosing a school that's gonna guide me towards the best place afterwards.

i'm terrified that the day before the deadline next week i'm gonna have a panic attack and defer for a year. but the truth is i will regret that so bad it's not even imaginable.

in other news (believe me there is not much happening with me right now except this stuff), jarett/starsh/emma's play is this weekend and i am looking forward to seeing it. we went to the bar last night and everyone there gave it very very good reviews. the bar was so weird - it was so crowded and all with freshman - how did they get served? hey, if you can get it, mazel tov!

antarctica

oh to be only either hungover or sick. not both. or is one a symptom of the other? the weirdest parts of my body hurt - ears, knees, hair. like piercing joint pain in my legs. and my boss is playing blonde redhead really loud. come on.
last night we went to the bar. it got awesome at the end. usually the bar seems kind of...i dont know. its an oppressive atmosphere sometimes. but last night it was very relaxed, very open. joe (the bartender) gave us tons of free drinks, and had jarett analee and i do these tequila shots. i think he just wanted to see us act like idiots. that's what i'd do if i were a bartender - which i probably will have to be soon enough. charis (i.e. a brit) was with us, and shes very good friends with joe so maybe that was part of it. but there were also a bunch of freshman at the bar - are they not carding anymore? whatevs, some of them were really kind of cool.
then around 3 or so it was time to go to eileen's, this little old irish diner in the irish part of yonkers. we were the only ones there, but there were like 45 of us. i ordered three scrambled eggs and two silver dollars but then when my plate arrived, there were like FIVE eggs and literally 12 pancakes. and i wont question the will of whoever was in the kitchen. last night they taught me a lesson.
im having a lot of fun with my new 'micromemo' ipod recorder. i am making joes class into a little podcast so everyone in our class can listen to it. i feel so dumb, saying 'podcast,' maybe i should revise that and say 'file.' but ive also found that taping conversations is way funner than i thought.
yesterday afternoon before dinner justin jiddy and i were smoking and talking about the future as we are wont to do, and i tried it out. the conversation turned into just justin and i talking about history and whether we can talk about it as the kind of narrative that modernism and arch history generally apply to it. in other words: the rome/usa debate. i couldnt believe it - it was something out of first yr. so interesting. justin and i get in these conversations where we kind of go deeper and deeper into these weird vocabularies whose meanings are oblique to the actual subjects being discussed. its like were talking in a secret language - sometimes you get lost too, but you try and get back on the same path as the other. ive never been able to do this with our other friends. i think it has to do with sharing a certain awe-struck-ness in 'the future.' or history, in this case the same thing. and its always about america, in some way or another. america and the future.
there were a few real gems.

: facebook is crazy..the things that are happening to our generation..i dont think we're prepared.
: the modernists, they were all making utopian dreams at our age. im just, we dont have anything. theres too many ideas, information. in 10 yrs everyone will be a business major.
: we lost 500 points so we can spend the next five yrs building it all back up, and then do it again (re: stock market)
: the fact that dubai exists means that our system is corrupt.
: im an optimist. ive taken poly science stuff, ive seen breakthroughs.
: nobody cares about the packaging at grocery stores - why our cereal cant be in bags. target doesnt have to be a daily activity. but it is for me, when im home in the suburbs. but as you come to this realization, that you dont need it, you find yourself consuming more and more.
: the moneys gonna dry up, there's going to be a global recession. why do we have to call it a panic?
: the katrina cottage was a shotgun house but didnt have the back door which is what validates the whole form. the cottages use a/c. its not a dignified way to live - it should have been a temporary, government solution.
: im suddenly into thinking again

the reason i have apocolypse dreams is the same reason i love this kind of shit. its like destructoporn. its all so cryptic. its related to an intense fear of death.

ive had this project in mind today. in that way you do sometimes, when you keep a place or image in the background of your mind as you go about conversations and so on - just sort of a reticent image that sticks around and that you associate with whatever conversation you had while it was there.
but today its the utrecht university library, which we saw last yr. "the anti-seattle public library," also by a dutch firm, wiel arets. i loved it. its very imposing but at the same time, sort of...empyreal? is that the word? it adheres to this kind of somber color coded classicism thats the direct opposite of oma's witticisms. sort of refreshingly stoic.


(images via googleimage)
a propos utrecht - this was a place i felt i could stay for a while. the netherlands to me is the most alien european country, but had the smartest and happiest design and public spaces.

the predatory wasp of the palisades

geez i haven't been able to post for three days i've been so busy! what an intense week. it was bad and good.
the big news on wednesday was that we bought out tickets to the BAHAMAS!!! hahahah! i feel so bad for spending so much of my parents' money but i'm picking up more hours at the lab and have a pay-back schedule. the big drama was that justin booked my plane ticket to nassau in MY MOM'S NAME! i pretty much blew my stack. i had to cancel that ticket and buy a NEW one. goddamnit. i won't dwell on this event now, since it all got worked out, but i'll tell you what, i was PISSED. my pissiness has subsided, mostly because poor justin cant leave his room he's so sick, he'll puke everywhere.
so we're going to nassau for seven days. now it's all anyone can talk about - it's really only a month away. we're staying in some shitty hotel but it's on the beach, and has two pools, so wtf?
then thursday (yesterday) was weird, we had forte's class where we talked about the NY 1851 crystal palace and the 'handiwork' movement in america, as well as how emerson/thoreau/pugin/aj downing all relate to each other in their notions of individualism and consumerism as essentially similar and natural affects of the american ideology. i feel like we've been talking about 1850s NY for five weeks now, but this particular class was actually very interesting. we saw some slides of 1860s NY 'county houses' and a henry cole painting where he painted one of these weekend houses as a 'frontier home,' made of logs and inhabited by a lumberjack and his wife/kids.
i went to cross county, though the walk was so cold, because i had to change my PIN number for my bank of america account. luckily that was easy and the guy was very nice. i bought a pair of new leggings for the ski trip and a pair of flipflops for the spring break trip. geez i sound like a real jet setter here.
then last night was great - jarett's play 'the big funk,' opened, and let me tell you, it was FANTASTIC. if i wasnt going away this afternoon i'd see it again. i'd also encourage all people to read the play. i HATE theatre - and this thing really resonated with me. i think it's because it's similar in many ways to don delillo's white noise, in the sense that the focus of much of the dialogue is indirectly the state of our society in america and the deep fear of dying that many americans have. that sounds heavy, but it was also HILARIOUS. there were only four characters, jarett, starsha, owen, and a girl i didn't know. i guess the play is referred to as 'surrealist,' in the sense that some crazy shit happens - this girl gets slathered in vaseline and then gets bathed on stage, owen had to be completely naked for his last scene, etc.etc., but really it's sort of poetic realism. but the last scene was intense. they're all eating dinner and owen leaves, and then he comes back NAKED. i mean i was prepared for this - ive heard him talking a lot about whether he should try to uh, 'enhance' his performance before walking out onstage, but man, nothing can compare to seeing the real thing just inches away from the front row's face. mind you, the play was in downstage, so there aren't set seats, it's just a little black box with folding chairs. so i felt okay about seeing this guy naked, no big deal, but it was when he put his robes ON that i felt super embarassed - something about seeing him right AFTERwards was the most nervewracking part. mostly because he takes a china teacup and is supposed to be drinking from it, and his hands were shaking so hard it sounded like an alarm bell. oh god i couldnt even watch when this was happening. but it was really a fantastic play, and for someone like me to say that, i mean it really has to be amazing. plus, jarett is seriously a comedic/thearical genius. i have no doubt hes going to go very far with this. he had everyone in the audience hanging on his every facial expression. i felt very proud of him..
so then we headed out to the malthouse, it being thursday night, and tipped back a few long island iced teas. and a beer. played some darts - im actually pretty damn good at darts! the great thing about the bar last night was apparently they recently got busted for serving underage kids - so last night there were NO asshole freshman filling up the place. we could even sit down. it was great. i talked to this norweigan girl again, and we did a SKOAL. it was like being back in DK. so funny.
this morning i woke up so painfully - i had only gotten to bed at about four. now here i am in the lab - waiting until two when someone is going to come and take my last two hours so i can go get ready for the ski trip, for which we leave at four. im pretty excited about it - were staying at this civil war-era bed and breakfast and skiing saturday and sunday from 9-4. granted, i was nervous cuz both jiddy AND katie cancelled on me, but at the orientation meeting i met a few really cool people and me and this girl estelle agreed to room together - she seems so awesome. im excited. also, mom told me that upstate NY just got like 100 inches of snow, so maybe its heading for the catskills? im pretty foggy on NY geography to be honest. but i can hope. right now theres a 23' base - hah, imagine just a month ago i was skiing in four feet of powder! ah, like i care. i grew up skiing the anthills of the east and for that i am grateful. as i told the group at the meeting, if you grew up skiing on ice (in the east), you've got one thing going for you: you're not afraid of anything. you just go with it. of course there are a bunch of westerners on the trip who were getting their panties in a twist over the lack of base. dorks.
im panicking, because im nowhere near done with our pondfield model. but fuck it. im a second term senior. everyones just gonna have to deal with possibly not having a fly through. IM GOING SKIING

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