Work is life. (edited by John P. Loonam)

What is a human being except for the work that she does?

Work is life. Just as your lungs expand and contract for every breath of sustenance on this earth, you can either consciously decide to place effort into the things you do, transforming what was once a stack of cardboard you bought for a measly five dollars into a model which represents a tactic to ease the plaguing social problems in this world. Five dollars to change the world. True, your project might never come into existence, but the idea has been hatched through months of rigorous intellectual and aesthetic review, and you have discovered or invented information that can only be useful in the future. Beyond such obvious, pain-inducing work, you might not have even recognized some of the more subtle work that you do almost automatically, which is work for survival. In order to sustain our position in school or the job force, we have to cleverly consider every relationship that we have. Even the simple task of breaking the ice with someone you think has the greenest eyes you’ve ever seen requires the passage of air through your vocal cords and the movement of hundreds of muscles in your face, a phenomenon that you do not recognize. These relationships, both human to human and human to concept, are the only things that define our humanity. We are the only beings alive have such an extended capability of self-reflection. Some use this ability to judge others, but are completely blind to their own faults. So many of us in our late teens/early 20’s, wholeheartedly wish to “just do nothing all day.” But even without the hindering expectations that society has placed on you to produce, people feel the need to create social order for the sake of production. A dialogue between a math teacher, Ishigami, and a physicist, Yukawa, in the Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino, reveals:

“The gray-haired man with the ponytail was hanging up the laundry. Beyond him, the Can Man was well into his daily routine.

                ‘It’s the same thing every day,’ Ishigami said. ‘This entire past month, nothing’s changed a bit. You could set your watch by these people.’

                ‘That’s what happens when you free people from the restraints of time. They make their own rigid schedule.’ (92)

Because we are, we do.

How many days have you spent lusting after a dream man or woman, yet the frowning alien that glares back at you in your bathroom mirror is as far from your dreams a pimple-faced cynic whose color has completely drained from her skin? You live by your voracious craving for these objects outside of yourself, yet what dies with you are not these objects but only that which you can call yourself. The existence that you are can hardly be extended outside of your body through possession. It soothes but a momentary lapse in the consciousness of your mortal being. Furthermore, why is it that you assume that others are not looking at you the same way you evaluate your classmates through your judgmental eyes? What makes you desirable when the only thing you do is lust, unable to tame the feelings that have consumed you and unable to recognize that your obsession is a manifestation of your fear of yourself? Are you happy being alone? If the answer is not yes, then why do you suppose someone else has to shoulder twice the responsibility of making two happy? You have willfully let go of your own desire to maintain yourself, and instead look to others as examples of success, never wishing to put effort into the things that we fear and desire the most. Self-transformation, defiance, revolution. Have you not learned, in the early years of your innocence, that you only receive what you give, that love is the last thing to come to those who haven’t a sense to love themselves?

You may think, how can I love myself? I am so ugly and wretched, my youth waning with every gray hair I find in my fading locks, and I approach death with every step I take. The truth is, you’re already on a conveyer belt, and lest you have the courage to walk towards what you want, even if that means pushing past a crowd of the irritable and the fearful, and using extra force to go against the momentum of laziness, you will forever be swept in a direction of which you dread. If you still have the strength in you, why not use it? That strength too, has been fading with time, a concept that the human body is not yet familiar with at the ripe decade of your 20’s. More than fearing to reach out, you should be absolutely horrified at the person you may become in your 30’s, unfounded and graying, undesirable and unloving, full of hatred for the world and kicking at the air for not sustaining you without automatic inhalation, tossing money as a cheap tactic to make the world echo back only your misery. You believe that you deserve more, as do those that are better than you. What makes you think that they will halt in their step to piggy back someone who has not a shred of usefulness, as you? You look to your back and realize that there are still some people behind you. But how long will that temporary relief last, or will you continue to look backwards as they surpass you?

You are standing still, complaining that nobody is willing to put you on his shoulders and work for twice that they have earned, and once more for your ungrateful attitude. By the time you have reached a point where you understand this, wholeheartedly, when the signs of decay have begun to physically manifest themselves, would you rather be taught the hard way? If you want people to notice you, work for it. If you want to be good at school, work for it. If you want anything, work for it. Somebody labored to place the food on your table every day. Your existence is by no means free, but work can be freeing. Work frees you from fear, and dread, and anxiety, because you know that there is nothing else in this world as self-satisfying and concrete than the things you build with your own two hands. So please, be a good person to yourself, take true care of yourself, for if you wish to experience more than the tip of the iceberg of the dessert that is life, then you must be prepared to endure the worst. Only after you’ve found yourself miserable, slaving away hours of your life on a photoshop document or leaving the windowless library to find that the sun has risen, will you find, a day or a year or a decade later, that you’ve become better than you were before. Soothe your fears and take responsibility for the brilliant person that you are entirely capable of becoming.

The clock makes two revolutons.

 A new day, a new dream that has been instantaneously shattered by the annoying tug of your alarm. You could almost go back to sleep. You do go back to sleep, drifting on that fine line between visibility and utter insanity. Even if you remember the solidity of your body, the only thing you feel in the morning is the mind, which tends to grow numb as you sink deeper and deeper into the other realm. You reel your feet in under the covers upon contact with the chilly metal window sill, windowpane that has now been frosted over from the changing of the seasons. Your phone rings, this time it's a different sound, less annoying than what usually pierces your ears at 8:00AM, then 8:05AM, then 8:10AM, and on and on it goes, repetitive torture. The sounds suddenly drops out, and your curiosity is much better at waking you up than any plans of self-discipline ever could. Your favorite song has become the most loathed of the bunch, bane of your existence, so much so that your roommate even yaps on about it in drunken fervor, times when the gates of the usually tight-lipped are overthrown by alcohol-induced excitement. Your toes curl in, you slowly push your antiquated skeleton upright to brave the rush of morning dizziness, and despite the wailing of your limbs to stop moving and hold still, where the pain cannot be felt, you reach for your phone.

"Delivery!"

"Who's calling?"

"Winter."

A sudden gust of frosty air sweeps into the room and slams you back down into your pillow, the gust hard and unforgiving. The wind is knocked out of you and you, once again, are drenched in pain-soaked feeling of wintry despair.

Withered walls along which the weary walk under weeping flakes of white crusted blood.



Your wrists cannot bear the clicking anymore, and the your whole damn hand breaks off from its joint. But you keep clicking with the detached limb as if in a trance-like state, induced by the fear of your professor reaching down your throat and pulling out nothing but a cheap imitation of famous works past. Of what substance are you made of?

You stare at the computer screen, cracked by an earlier impulse to destroy everything that was ever meaningful in your life, cracked like your wrist, cracked like those conversations you've been having with yourself in the shower, cracked like the huge personality flaw that has gluttonously fed on your insecurity to become a behemoth that has resurfaced to render your life obsolete, cracked like the relationships you have with everyone, cracked like how you are to yourself, silent and unforgiving.

Hallenbeck dances a sultry dance and turns you twice in his arms. Foster makes you his partner. Fox cooks up a storm in the kitchen and begs you to try his new recipe from his shop. And onward you trudge in this whether which is weather like now or like ice, impending doom, all else failing but misery. In a year, in seven hundred and thirty revolutions of the clock, all else has faded, yourself jaded, and even the memory of these old friends that you have traded for whatever was convenient, within a mile of which the center is you. Who were they, and why do you care still? And nonsense and nonsense and nonsense, will bring about meaning in the world.

The clock will never stop turning twice, because you have willed it so.

Tempest 81

Original film shot October 2013. I'm going to let it speak for itself.

Here is a film that my partner and I made for our first studio project of the year.

The site is the old Erie Canal trail park.


Shot and edited September 2013.

(I'm secretly proud because it's my first time using film as a medium)

Play the Blood, Sea the Music

You glance down at your journal. Something seems to be sliding across the page, slimy and dirty and depositing its blackness across the aged yellow finish of the surface. The page undulates with each release of ink from the metal nib on what used to be organic matter, and at times the liquid glistens as it catches the light of the afternoon sun, pretending to be something that lives and breathes as you do. The light reflecting off the page is an annoying cloudy glare, so much that you narrow your eyes like an angry cat. As your eyes slowly adjust, your mind becomes clearer and more active. Thoughts jump around and you relentlessly pursue them with your hand, a setup for invariable failure. And it's frustrating that the itching feeling inside of your lung cavity is like bubbling hot steam, so volatile that it cannot exist in its true form outside the container of your body. The original message is filtered through the brain, the only existing connection with which you navigate the external world. Even then, the brain is filtered by the hand, which cannot even act at half the speed that the brain operates with. Up, down, loop, scribble, dot, lift, press, release. It can do these simple modular motions in complex ways, but these modular motions cannot themselves evolve in complexity. Since the first day you learned to recite the alphabet, a baseline has been etched into the way you think, and the way you subsequently live according to your thoughts.

Filters on filters on filters.

Language has become so simplified and reductive that you cannot convey anything that is outside of the normal realm of expression. What is “politically correct” speech? If you choose to speak in only generalities, omitting 90% of the English language tinted with history that invariably offends someone, what message are you actually delivering? The act of giving a speech does not entail the deliverance of the message. After you apply copious amounts of self-editing, the original expressions that have rung clear in your mind is spewed out as an inglorious vomit of clichés. Because everything has a precedent, it is difficult for those less-disciplined to refrain from plagiarism, because you have no faith in your originality. You will always be a watered down version of that which has existed prior.

With each stroke of the pen, you lift and pause, creating a junction that has to be abridged. Like an animation, you make up for the lack of coherence between each still frame by manipulating speed--by seeing dots appear before you so quickly they become a line--by understanding words faster and faster until they become sentences and paragraphs and essays. Deep down inside, you know that the human system of comprehension will always be flawed. Normally you skip over the holes in logic in order to stay at peace with those around you, but at times the fragility of the constructed system nags at your instincts, raising emotions that are neither explained nor forgiving. The lack of control you have over yourself makes you realize that maybe others are treading in the same watery grave as you, that uniformity creates only falsehoods. You don't even know what you don't even know and you look to new media as the beacon of hope in guiding original experience, except you often forget that the people creating these media, are, like you, swimming in a closed universe. They have been swimming all their lives and cannot be expected to know what is outside of the system because they are trapped within. What then, of your fervor? Will it, someday or somehow, take you somewhere better than the dreary wet concrete you planted yourself on today? Will it fly the text off the page and imprint it in a way that has never been done before?

Pause. Think. Speak. Silence.

Plan Libre

Music only for myself.

Lately I've been losing myself practicing piano. I think, I should be doing this ten hours a day, not laboring over a Rhino model in studio, sipping my third Venti Black Eye of the night and hating myself for not having any good ideas. But then I realized that if I was forced to fulfill a certain quota for music every day, I would probably begin to think of it as more of a burden than an invaluable source of play and pleasure, as things currently stand.

The relationship between architecture and music, for me at least, is similar to the one between system and facade in modern construction. No longer are bearing walls my only option in design, a system limited in spatial aesthetics because it also has to dutifully hold up the building. I can dump all of my formal educational and moral loads onto the disciplined framework that is architectural education...so that I can freely pursue music as if it were a free plan/facade on a modern building. Nobody cares if you didn't follow the state building code in music. There is no Code in music. Code is one of the most unforgiving things ever, because it is meant to protect those that hold little power by arbitrarily constructing a line of acceptable behavior for the others. And if the boundaries are constructed with little thought and lots of stupidity (they often go together), then you're fucked. In comparison, music doesn't have to make the world better. Music takes no responsibility for the future. Music doesn't have to bear the weight of my existence, neither financially nor psychologically, and I dear hope not physically. Music is detached from, yet still perceivable by others!

"Humans have their feet planted into the Earth and their heads in the heavens," said my Building Systems professor in his last lecture. In the same way, I am grateful to architecture for grounding me, for producing me thus far in order that I can lust for endless possibilities in the musical heavens, in order that I can converse with deceased white male composers through the ethereal medium of sound. So let it be that I have to leave every practice desperately wishing that I had played my pieces just one more time, even if my fingers are on the verge of contracting tendonitis. When I crawl out from the nightmarish practice rooms into the piercing sun-bleached quad, I am at ease with the knowledge that the Crouse dungeons, in all of their musky, wooden, dirty, cacophonous glory, will always be the welcoming womb of engagement for me and my music. Those are the bedchambers for a psychedelic lover that is everywhere and nowhere, a lover created by and existing only within myself.

001

Here are some T-Squares. We use them in architecture sometimes.

This is a lemon.

In case you are an idiot, this is what this blog will be about.

(photos courtesy of the G-man.)

Introduction to Bullshit Course Description: ITB101

Unspoken thoughts have this habit of accumulating behind my sternum until they have created enough force explode a hole in my physical body, leaving nothing but my bag of skin looking like a deflated husk of rubber.

I don't think something like attempting to translate them into text is the right way to get them out, nor do I feel as though language is able to properly work out all of these microscopic knots that are constantly forming in my mind/heart/soul/whatever the fuck is responsible for them. It's like trying to hand sew an entire outfit in one sitting. You become exponentially emotionally depraved with the passing of time, and suddenly stitches become crooked, which turns into poking holes into the same finger and then you're taking off a hand and then you take an axe to your head and-

I can't trust myself to write about anything I actually care about. I can speak bullshit with (false) clarity and precision, but when asked about my underlying moral standards or beliefs, I have a difficult time convincing others (and mainly myself) that I stand for...well, what I stand for. Feminism, Anti-Human Trafficking, Sustainability, your typical GenY shit. I don't think I have learned enough about these politically-charged ideas to withstand a barrage of nit-picky, lawyer-type questions from expert non-believers. Socially accepted terms such as "Conservative" and "Liberal," are so damn deceiving, since people that identify as such wish to be seen as a part of larger, positive entities. But have they ever considered how much that would confuse a a political noob (aka an international student)? 

Conclusion: more digging is to be done on said controversies. 

If you are inherently made of complex and informative entities, or are an entity of complex nature (I do hope you are), then you should be able to reach inside of yourself and excavate something of value in your identity. But this identity that you possess constantly changes and produces changes which cannot be measured or predicted. In which case, how do you grow? And why do you grow in response to particular experiences and not others? Or do you positively respond to all changes? Changes changes changes changes changes. Is change itself conservative after all?

Watching a field of text grow before my eyes soothes me, just like dumping my shit in a toilet or removing trash from my room. But where does the trash and garbage and non-recyclables all go? In the end, sweeping your room doesn't get rid of the dust; it just transports it from a place in which it displeases you to somewhere where it has no active relationship to your mood or public persona. Is this really how we should live, by covering up that which was once useful but is now just an eyesore or health hazard? We created these health hazards, and someone else, or something else, or somethings elses is/are/will be taking responsibility for it. Shit doesn't just disappear. Even when you die, the atoms which have made you to be who you were in your lifetime still exist in the air...they just sort of come apart and are free from any humanly recognizable identity. YOU don't exist, but your particles do. Forever and ever and ever and ever and ever.