and the ghost of carl, he approached my window

well girl's night out went great. the boys were trying to rub their boys night out in our faces and we prevailed and actually might have surpassed them. they were not happy campers on the train home. and they all dressed in matching sports jackets. i have been feeling very wacky lately i think because i have been watching so much scrubs. it's as if i am finally letting my true personality out. actually i think i might embarrass my friends with these antics but they're stuck with me now.
anyways we went to dinner at risotteria in the east village where you can get gluten-free italian (jiddy has celiac's disease and i may have it too), so i had a gluten free beer, panini, and cupcake! it was so delicious. i spent most of the night trying to 'judge' ny which i could tell pissed jiddy off. then we went over to decibel which is this good sake bar but there was a 30 minute wait, so instead we went to KGB bar. which supposedly is in an old KGB hangout. but in my experience every large western city has one of these red-painted daily-worker-plastered places that claims to be an ex-KGB hangout. then again, never underestimate the reaches of a secret police force. my most memorable fake-commie-hangout-bar was in krakow, propaganda (duh) where this guy tried to drug our cider. what a weird place - depressing.
so we had some drinks and did some shots of sambuca, which was nice and reminded me of copenhagen. good stories were told - i told my trelleborg arch program initiation story which always puts me in a good mood.
wearing my longhorns shirt is now a bittersweet experience. the one place i actually wanted to go rejected me! probably because my math scores are so low i couldn't even tell them to my family, and there are three college level courses (college calculus, physics I and II) that i'd have to take between now and the fall to even be able to enroll. but still . everyone says i wouldn't be happy there as a theorist because it's more engineering than anything, but i don't care. anyways now it really is between cornell and columbia. i wanted to get out of ny but it looks like i've got another 3-4 years here.
here i am in the library trying to write an introduction to my marshall field project. this whole thing has turned more into a case study of how to get people to speak candidly about their surroundings - i've interviewed people, and even put up one of those 'free online surveys' which was sort of a shot in the dark, but actually turned out great. i asked a few basic questions like "have you had problems with MF?" and "are you a music student?" because i am envisioning the presentation as a much more statistics-oriented affair with many koolhassian charts and 3D maps. which is another way of saying, i want my design to be rooted in statistical analysis of basic programmatic data about the school and the site. i'm not sure what i'd think if i was asked to answer these questions, but whatever. more and more i want to find out how to bring institutional arch back to the people - i.e. the end of starchitecture. it's a collaborative process so it shouldn't be viewed as anything else. i want people to reengage with their environments. that's how i arrived at the question-asking approach - wanting this design to be founded somewhere other than my own ridiculous imagination.
i found this thread with FIFTY NINE pages on archinect called "m.arch 2007 applicants commiserate here!" which would have been an incredible resource five months ago. they've all been having panic attacks and stuff just like me, but they all had each other! well now i am posting and hopefully will find some others trying to decide between these schools - painfully, some of the people on the site who didn't get into columbia were accepted to UT austin! WHYYYY

silent shout

just got back from health services. today was a weird day. it's not over yet. i had forte's class. we talked about new york, about the crystal palace, and about the relationship that emerson and carlyle had (and how it relates to consumerism in america). very interesting things, but i wish we had looked at more slides. more and more, our course is less about architecture and more about cultural philosophy. which i enjoy, but am less motivated to work for.
i went to lunch with justin and jiddy - jiddy was about to get a ride with forte into the city, she was going to the last day of this thai cowboy movie at film forum.
we have so much work coming up in the next two weeks - our pondfield road exhibition hangs on the 12th, claudia wants me to hang up my presentation from tuesday next week, i have to begin my marshall field conference project, group for design is apparently kicking into high gear, and i'm trying to organize a mult-disciplinary panel in the VAC theatre on the future of marshall field. i thought of that in the shower last night - it'd be great to have forte, an administrator, and chet biscardi (the music dept. head) up there having it out about the future of that whole site. i'm interested now. i'm gonna go buy an iTalk ipod recorder so i can start doing interviews with the faculty and music kids. also the archs. the biggest dilemma for me is the fantastic interior spaces in the existing building, and the problematic that would arise from either tearing them down or adding on, or recreating them. it's hard to know what the right thing to do is in this case.
last night was great, katie and i went to the gym and played squash for an hour, and then worked out. squash was awesome. there's a tournament on the 20th that we're joking about entering. today my wrist hurts from the POWER i was bringing from the game last night.
today is an important date in two ways for me: my ut austin application was officially due today, and one year ago today i arrived in berlin. how can that be?