Beautiful Day

It is a truly gorgeous day outside today! This is CRAZY weather for January but I prefer the sunshine to any other kind of weather, so I really wish I could be outside right now. Pismo must be amazing and I'm fantasizing about what I could be doing there. There is a picture up in my studio of my mom, grandmother and myself on the Rialto in Venezia. It was blazingly gorgeous that week, the first week it hadn't been raining a lot.

I wish I could be there: Venice, the coast, with my family, outside. Any of those places.

I'm a little conflicted though; the lack of rain is going to hurt the ag industry...which not only affects my family's livelihood, but so many other things and people and places. Global warming is shitty like that.

Bipolar

Sometimes I think I might be mildly bipolar. Sunday/Monday I was a huge mess over studio and life....the worst I've EVER been....but Tuesday and Today I was totally fine. I scared everyone and then scared them again by suddenly being okay again. I don't think I'm actually bipolar though...I just felt like there was no hope and no way out of my situation until I talked to a friend and realized that I just have to get through things and take it all one day at a time. Which isn't the first time I've heard it, but coming from this particular person it finally resonated with me.

Anyways, this is going to be a very difficult semester thanks to studio. I'm told that I need to not feel guilty over calling on my friends for support when I need them so I am going to try to not feel guilty about it. Even though I think I dump too much crap on some of my friends as it is.

Somehow my econ homework took me like five hours to do this week. WTF it's beginning Microeconomics!! I think my brain is wired for macro instead.........time to learn how to "think differently" even if I feel like I might be thinking stupider. Ah well I'd rather feel stupid than worthless.

And this is going up so that I remember it later....I stayed in Wurster for 21 hours Tues/Wed and was up for 30 hours before taking a 3 hour nap and then heading off to NSU's first gen. Needless to say I was so out of it at the meeting (apologies!!). I do not think that it justifies the terrible amounts of sleep that I lost, but my one model turned out to be very instructive and the professor didn't throw it into the FAIL PILE. He literally has a fail pile. Well, it's called the "Danger Zone" but we all know he means FAIL PILE. I had a productive failure.

I did not get the other two models done though. I do not consider this epic fail though because for once in a long time I really did try my best.....it's so disappointing to have pulled 2 all-nighters in the second week of studio though. I want to become one of those people who doesn't pull all-nighters!! So I guess I need to stop doing NSU, stop watching any tv or youtube or anything ever, steal someone's creative genius, become a morning person, not procastinate, and impose (and follow!) a bedtime. Basically, I have to stop being me...

Misery Loves Company

Company also stops me from crying uncontrollably, which I spent too much of my evening doing.

Sighhhhh. I can't write much because I MUST FINISH ASAP...I want to go home...and I have no clue how long plotting will take me. Nonetheless...I will just say that studio is stressing me out more than necessary and I am not sure why. I do know it's not okay and once I get through this drawing I am going to seek a solution of some sort to ease all the anxiety and stress I've got. Tonight I found temporary aid in the form of amazing friends coming to help me stop freaking out. I feel bad for taking them away from their comfy apartments for a few hours, but their presence was a lifesaver so I am glad to have the friends that I do.

Ok this is too long. I can analyze why I'm reacting terribly irrationally to the events in my life during 130 lecture.

Welcome Back to Architecture School.

Oh man life has been happening away from the blog. Actually, I sat around and did nothing for the break but I was too lazy to even blog about that. I got myself into a fair bit of trouble for not checking my e-mail/phone/communications during break but I think I've recovered from them.

School has begun again and I'm having a terrible time. I tried to approach studio positively but I barely even got in off of the waitlist and the professsor has really made me feel like I do not belong there. I am realizing now that 100A in the summer was an easy studio but it didn't prepare me at all for this one. Luckily, Rhino is really easy to pick up thanks to my cad skills (it even has PREDICTIVE TEXT COMMANDS how awesome is that??). Unluckily, I've gotten out of practice of designing things. So for the past two days I've been walking around on edge, feeling like my inside (or rather my confidence) is crumbling faster than this nation's infrastructure, hoping that I can build a rope ladder fast enough to get me out of the giant hole I'm in - fast enough to get out without all the rain filling it up and drowning me, since I can't really swim.

Well that was an interesting metaphor.....too bad I'm better with words than images. What I mean to say is that I am not feeling hopeful because I've let fear take over and everywhere I go I feel guilty for not working on my projects, but panicked because when I sit down to do my project I won't have any ideas. I'm coming off as really distant to most of my friends who are all...enjoying life before graduation. Which I will finally be able to do, come May 11th.

On a different note (one that contrasts w/studio so much that I feel even more conflicted) I want to take too many other classes. I've narrowed down the debate to Econ c3 (evironmental econ) vs. ED 100 ("The City"). Econ is useful but freshman-level and I don'tr eally get it. I know that I should be able to understand demand curves but they seem backwards. I can tell you the world's largest producer of rice, the second most traded commodity on Wall Street, or the implications of using food for fuel, but I can't immediately figure out economic models. Stupid, I know. ED 100 is not going to help me as much on my grad school apps, but I feel like I should take that class to become a more informed person. I learned more about modern Baghdad (we covered ancient Baghdad in 170A) in 20 minutes than I have in the past eight years.  On this whole political economy stuff I think I flew before I learned how to walk with it...which is why Econ seems relatively difficult for me. Yay for no fundamentals!!