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here I am! here I am! I am here, 2013, it is june 3rd all of a sudden, it is 1 am, it has just finished being rainy, street glows on my roof. here we are. here I am.

taste in my mouth: things ending. ending and ending and starting and starting.

what to say? a lot of things, rolling over each other. school is over. finishing school and getting a degree ('school', m.arch, graduate school, masters of architecture, what have you not) is like getting a medal for climbing a mountain to the top. which is to say, some questions immediately follow, such as: "if I didn't climb all the way to the top, but stopped a dozen meters from the top, would anything have been different?" or "why do I get a medal for undergoing what is, ultimately, a personal relationship to one's own being?" the value of completion seeming so tangential, orthogonal, ancillary, compared to the process undertaken.

here I am. I am standing here. I know a little bit more about the world, and a little bit more about myself. I am still in movement, leaning forwards. I am still excited to face everything. I am still excited to be independent. to work on projects. to exert one's being. to think for myself.

more than ever I believe less in the canon of names and fetishized architecture (as in, fetishized from the actual labor process, the same way that art becomes fetishized from labor object into art object) but more in the ecology of activity and action. these names, these ideas, these discourse. from where do they come from, and why should I care? or at least, why should I have these factors flow upstream? I am here, working, on what interests me, and I hope I can do that and talk about that for the rest of my life, and I will be happy:

to practice; to conceptualize; to teach; to practice; to conceptualize; to teach.

other endings. more solid. more firmly in the realm of history, of past time.

sometimes there are decisions that cannot be regretted, just cannot, because regret implies the possibility of an alternative change. but these decisions block out an alternative world entirely, because the decision itself has changed you. (an example being: regretting being born, which of course is a funny statement, since you are only here to regret having been born, etc. etc. etc.)

and I say to you: like moving away, like for example, to LA, which is like a decision that cannot be regretted but only further acted upon, by moving back, because moves like that only happen like tides, or like large gestures. they are self-changing. there is no other timeline in which any other alternative happened. just the endless crashing waves of decision, action, movement, time.

amidst being sad there is like this titter of a voice that is excited; excited to navigate this terrain more solidly, to be more friendly, to understand that the good things are hard and hazy, without conceptual clarity. in other words: listen, you're just going to have to work it out. there's no clarity in love or peace, only in hate and war.

from my post-palestine musings sometime two years ago:

and then inevitably: the thing meant by the word "peace" will have to be this messy dirty earthy thing, always, an active haggling between pros and cons, gives and takes. never an abstract shining absolute. I'll take five of that for seven of this; let's trade, barter, calculate difference, a quarter fraction of this, a pinch of that, subtract this, here we go. never anything exact or absolute or clean-cut; never a single solution or answer; perhaps just a series of messy messy messy resolutions that will leave each side wondering if it was the right thing.