there is something funny about the student of architecture who spends so much time thinking about buildings, spaces, social arrangements, and how they work, that (s)he never has the time to be home. I've always got a change of clothes hidden in my bag. I've been sleeping on friends' couches. at studio, I have a fridge, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a spare shirt & pair of socks & underwear & pants, jelly and jam, bread, a desk lamp, my cellphone charger, my laptop charger. I live here. but it doesn't seem altogether crazy, or unbelievable -- it's as if it's an extension of myself, as if it was the only understandable sequence that made sense to my brain: me working here, at night, 1:26am having spent the night on a couch last night for 4 hours, probably doing the same tonight (if I don't go home, that is), showering at the gym. I've got this email to write, another email to write, scripts to code, websites to build, climatologists to think about, buildings to model, grasshopper/rhino pythonscripts to code, lectures to go to. but in the midst of this all I'm keeping up, doing all the work, replying to all the emails. keeping in touch. finding space. seeing friends. dancing at dean st. deliriously tilted sideways, listing sideways. running in sunny prospect park on a beautiful day? yes? well? it's a little bit fast, but not too fast. just right.

(but I do hate this self-exoticizing: I don't mean an exoticizing of the self, but of one's routines, one's experiences. isn't it crazy that this thing happened to me in this country when I was traveling then? one of the lines I wrote for M's manifesto show (but never submitted): "a deferral of initial judgment generates a productive glossolalia". I think there's value in being fascinated and enthralled but not shocked at the new, because that initial 'shock' is the spark which creates that laughter, the horrified laughter stemming from a breaching of propriety. the gesture of a gentle shock (not a real, major, shock, but a smaller one), rather than being a celebratory exultation of newness, is in fact an event that happens at the moment of a rending/tearing-apart that ends up sealing everything back up again. the nervous laughter at a black-tie party, maybe, is itself a powerful force that seals off the origin of that laughter maybe: a gaze over spectacles and a surprised laugh at a miscreant, being the disciplinary gesture that silences this so-called miscreant. that sort of thing. instead, in the face of these breaches of routines that will always happen (and should), the better path is probably to accept things with a (mostly silent) deferral of judgment: simply a wait-and-see. okay, that's that. that's how things are; what now? what now? and that way things happen. it's not a blasé-ness or a disinterestedness, or a insincerity -- just a temporary deferral of a judgment within an otherwise insistently earnest reception of things...)

and this is probably why I'm hesitant to describe this gsapp experience as a crazy crazy thing, because while on one hand it is, on the other hand it seems to feel right, a fit. there are all-nighters, there are conversations, there are dialogues. as A put it yesterday: I am searching for fecundity, potent loamy and all manure-like, and within this process I'm getting it, operating within it. and so on. and this happens. and there is tomorrow. and it is 1:42am and I'll get home by 3, maybe, go to sleep for a few hours, or maybe not. who knows? the sun will rise and I'll be tired but fulfilled, happily stressed, stressfully happy.

p.s. must create an architectural sestina one day. or, at least, a diagram/study model that is a sestina. or a villanelle.