opus 36

well i just sent in my five hundred buckeroos to columbia. or, should i say, my parent's 500 buckeroos. the point is, i'm either going to columbia in the fall or i'm giving them a free half grand. either way, whew.

yesterday was weird... after work i came home and took a nap, where i had a crazy night terror/nightmare. i'm really worried my night terrors are coming back (i've had bad reoccuring nightmares about volanoes and fires and stuff since i was little, but then senior yr in high school i had crazy apocolypse nightmares constantly and my mom made me go to therapy for it). it would make sense since i think those nightmares were symptoms of repressed anxiety, and the pattern of senior yr right before graduation also fits. anyways this one was particularly terrifying - it started out innocently enough: i was on a ferris wheel waiting for my friends (it looked a lot like the columbian exposition of 1893's midway area, though i knew i was in bronxville), doing work on my laptop. it started to go really fast and my bag fell off - so i jumped off the ferris wheel to go pick it up. as i was doing so, i heard a huge vibrating BOOM and looked in the direction of manhattan - there was a crazy mushroom cloud. so i dropped to the ground and tried to push my head down in the sand of the midway. the next thing i knew, katie and i were in some room at slc with the windows drawn, trying to figure out what our next move would be - leave, head north, or try to wait it out in the room until someone came to get us. but would anyone? there were some other people there too i think. two security guards came in and said they had a van that was working - they could take us. so we got in. for some reason we headed down into manhattan, and we stopped outside of the main gate of columbia's campus. the buildings were all torn up and it looked like a disaster zone. for some reason we went in, and went to the administration building. we walked into a room where there were three clearly higher-ups from the board of directors maybe? the funny thing was, they were all dressed in turn of the century tuxedos - tail flaps, crisp white collars, and so on. a few of them even had white andrew carnegie-style beards. anyways we talked to one, and i forget but we had to ask them a question. so he turned to the other two, who were both looking away. when they turned towards us, i finally saw that they were zombies from the nuclear fallout. they both had two different colored eyes. there mouthes were hanging open and they just sat at their mohogany desks and looked in our eyes. then i woke up. BOOYAH!

dang was that scary. the two different colored eyes thing is from the promo poster for the new 28 weeks later movie. which i am SO EXCITED FOR! then i spent some time researching how to survive a nuclear attack (answer: there really is no way to survive a nuclear attack!). it's bad, because the Apocolypse and related apocolypses are the most fascinating ideas to me - i love books about them and movies and stories and so on...but that stuff is also the scariest stuff EVER to me. so it's like a vicious cycle of alternating fascination and terror. but geez i hope these dreams don't continue. i'm gonna have a hard time living in manhattan if they do.

anyways we postponed our tower crawl because justin had some kind of nervous break the night before and only slept an hour, so he was too tired to go. so i woke up all disgustingly sweaty and freaked out, then katie drove us all to new rochelle, so we could go to one of their favorite midwestern chain restaurants, buffalo wild wings. we ordered ONE HUNDRED wings and got them in medium, mango habenero, and asian zing sauces. oh my god. i've never really been to a place for wings so this was new to me. everyone chided me throughout the meal because apparently, i am a very wasteful wing eater. as justin yelled, "THE CARTILAGE IS THE BEST PART! CRACK OPEN THE BONES!" ugh. but it was delicious.

i'm excited for tonight, there's a party in DL on justin's hall and those are always the best ones.

never insult a redneck with a chainsaw

so it's been three days since the last time i posted. geez. what a weird few days. i guess i'll start at the beginning.
skiing was awesome - on the ride up to belleayre mountain it slowly began to dawn on me it was kind of a wash in terms of the people on the trip. like, not in terms of being mean, but just in terms of acting like losers. i skied with them for a while thinking, hey, maybe theyre not so bad! no. they were that bad. so after a while i broke off from the group and skied with some other people, and then for a while by myself. the big drama for me was falling on a double black diamond i was kind of forced into going down with the assistant AD of the sports center. i was okay for the first half, and then i stopped and froze up - it was so icy, the hill below me was CLEAR! i'm not kidding. so i went for it and fell for like 55 feet it was such an incline. it was pretty shameful. but i pulled it together and was on what they call 'my a-game' for the rest of the trip. the next day on the lift up, these two kids asked me why i left to ski alone - they were like "because they're so lame?" i thought i was the lone wolf on this trip. i clearly should have hung out with them, the last night they partied with the 45-year old firemen having a big birthday party downstairs.
we stayed in this old civil-war-era colonial inn, that had tons of bears and stags on the walls. the first night there, cool runnings was on the big screen tv in the lounge, so that got me all psyched up to ski the next day. that movie is a true classic.
it was cool to be on the road in the east again - after moving to dallas i havent seem much dreary eastern seaboard highway. before dallas, we were always driving back and forth from ny or to seven springs or somewhere. those drives were always very cozy, hangin out with mom and dad and annicka.
so we got back, and i got straight to work on the maya model for our big pondfield road show that was opening tuesday night. i woke up at 5am with my computer on my stomach and my hand on the mouse. was it ever hot. but we got it done - as rob and big might say we DO WORK. joe came by the lab and gave us all a hug when he saw the renderings. he said "four years ago! i can't believe it!" by the time we hung the show people were so excited - it turned out to be a Very Big Deal. i think joe was probably using it to rouse up excitement and interest for the new Design Studies concentration - we got the atrium gallery and a bunch of profs and people from the administration showed up to the opening. joe brought tons of food and about 10 bottles of wine, but still had to go make a liquor run at about 7pm. the opening turned out to incredible - lots of people, lots of nice things said, which of course was okay with us. here's our section of the wall, with amy looking on

it turned out very well, but the posters could have been spaced better. we just ran out of time.

and we got the chance to take another group picture with joe, to compliment the one we took of our first year studies.


something about the whole night was fantastically exciting for me. it was like our school was transformed into a different place - somewhere where i wanted to be? everyone was being normal, there was great work - work done together! everyone was equally happy and so excited. it really felt sincere, which for me is a rare feeling here. generally there's some element of bitterness or embarassment or the like when it comes to social/academic/art events here - people have too much self-loathing maybe. that night was some kind of alchemical concoction of people who were relaxed but also excited, sharing their credit with everyone else in their groups, all very understated - because you didn't NEED to overstate it, as corny as that sounds. usually openings are all about people making a big show of themselves to some how knit a mythology of 'brilliance' around their art/etc., but in this case people just showed up and had a good time. it was great. as naive as this sounds that's what i hope arch school will feel like. that's definitely what copenhagen studio felt like.
anyways later that night justin, jarett, amy, and i watched casino royale in jarett's room. so great and dissapointing at the same time. one of the first scenes is this badass fight that takes place on a construction site built with what we can assume is "dirty money." there's a shot in there of daniel craig busting through a sheet of DRYWALL haahhahaha running after this guy. at one point they're fighting each other on two huge crains above the site. hilarious. i think they were trying too hard to deviate from the classic bond plot, though - there was enough deviation from the gadget-ish stuff to make it a winner already. they didn't need to fuck with the model any more. but i liked it. the credits looked awesome.
we got some snow on wednesday - well six inches of sleet is more like it. it's still on the ground - but it's completely iced over now, so it's fun to walk on if you're wearing boots. last night we saw evan's new play, "lions," open - written by a grad student. evan played this good ol' boy peacekeeper in an unspecified african civil war situation who dies waving the UN flag over the raging battle below. he grew this molester moustache for the part - he was brilliant! i was so impressed. by far the best actor in the show. the play was actually really amazing - stayed away from a lot of the corny shit i hate about theatre, and made some good and important points about history and how we live and so on.
mr. lif of def jux records came to campus last night, which was AMAZING. an embarassingly small number of people showed up - so few that even WE were in the front row. but he was amazing. so great. we talked to him afterwards and he was the coolest guy. then we went to richard's party in ac9, which was okay at first but then ended up being kind of a bust because it was all freshman. so we drank a few of the beers and went and hung out in ac11. then i went to bed and woke up in a nightmare where this redneck guy had just cut through the skin that connected your thumb and your index finger with a chainsaw - because i had laughed at him when he was telling his girlfriend that they should put up a billboard outside their house that advertised her new job at bare elegance, a strip club in pittsburgh. wtf?? and annicka and caitlin were like michael scofield and link, and had been wrongfully imprisoned. i stumbled out with my hand all bloody and cut down towards the base of my thumb, and i found all of their electronics in the grass where i knew they had been arrested - which in my dream was now right outside of my house here at slc. i scooped all the ipods, slvr phones, and backup phones into my shirt i think. it was so weird. i began to panic because i couldn't feel my hand, and then pins and needles - i woke up and realized that i was laying on that hand and it was in fact asleep. it was still scary though. the goriness of it.
now here i am, fridays in the lab from 10-4. dang.

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.