Why I Love Home

So it's been a little over a week since I've been home, and tonight I'm yet again reminded of something I don't miss. As we have guests over, and, as daddy never cleans up his papers, our dining room is covered in his litter. Mom asked him to clean up his junk since we have guests over. And now he's throwing a temper tantrum. Why the hell is he throwing a tantrum?

New York Again

Today was my second trip to New York in less than a week. I've had so much going on since I got home that I feel like I've already been here a month.
Anyhoo, this time, I went with May which proved much more pleasant because 1) May doesn't spend the entire trip bitching about how I need a rich boyfriend and more importantly 2) She's willing to walk from Grandcentral (Which is somewhere to 42nd St and 4th Ave) to the Chinese Consulate (Which is on 42nd and 12th Ave). I timed us, and I'll admit it took a while, but I didn't really mind. In any case, we walked many of those blocks, maybe six of them, right behind this woman who was wearing a tight black dress and heels and big "partied-last-night-now-hung-over" sun-glasses. It was very amusing because we were right behind her and got to see all the admiring glances she got, namely almost every man that walked past her. We started keeping count of how many men turned to gape (and I do mean gape) and it was around fifteen. And who said New Yorkers weren't friendly.
We got to the consulate during their lunch break so we went to a little deli and got sandwiches. We decided to eat at the tables outside Starbucks despite not buying a single bit of Starbucks merchandise and then I ditched May there while I stood in line for half an hour to pick up my Visa. That was made all the more bearable by my reading a copy of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" Really, why don't they teach Philip K. Dick in schools? It's just as good if not better than Kurt Vonnegut.
Next stop was Broadway between 32nd and 33rd St for my plane tickets. I will be flying Japan Airlines, woohoo! After that, we meandered our way back up, stopping at H&M, Zara and Banana Republic. Surprisingly, I didn't see anything at Zara that I liked, so we ended up only getting stuff from Banana Republic.
Then we walked up to Grand Central, bought gelato smoothies and made it just in time for the 4:20 train, which, contrary to the information on metro north, is in fact a peak fare train. O well, we only got charged $3.25 extra per person.

Settling In

So now I'm home. I had a pretty hectic home-coming as the moment I got home, my mom started berating me about getting my visa and then I got an email from one of my students informing me that my internet apparently farted out mid-grade-inputting so I had to try to figure out who got what grade as quickly as possible. Fortunately, I didn't throw out the grade sheet and was able to call my roomie and she could tell me what the numbers were. Then, Friday and Saturday were spent in New York. Friday kind of sucked because I had to wake up at 5:30 in the morning, get to the train station and from there get to the consulate. Normally getting from Grand Central to the consulate would take me maybe half an hour of walking, but since I had mom in tow, and mommy doesn't like to walk very much, we had to stand at the bus stop outside Bryant Park for about an hour with no bus in sight until mommy gave in and we caught a $6.50 cab ride. I mentioned to her that I could have gotten to the consulate in half the time for free, but as usual, mom refused to listen. As it was, the whole time we were there, it was pouring.
At the consulate, contrary to popular belief, we didn't have to wait an hour. In fact, by the time I finished filling out the paperwork, they had already passed our number, so my mom argued with one of the annoyed people behind the scary windows and we handed my papers in. Right now I'm on a tourist visa. I told mom I had to have proof of employment before I could get the right visa. Mom, of course, disagreed with me so now I have to go and switch around my visas when I get to China.
Saturday was nice. We went around and got groceries, sat around the apartment and left when we realized the Mets game was about to end (we didn't want to get caught in traffic). So now I'm home. Monday, May and I are going to the library. Wednesday, I have to go back to New York to pick up my visa. Stupid visa...

I Hate CT

I have been home less than three hours and I want to go back to Pittsburgh already. I walk in the door and mom is already demanding this and that, and then I get an email from a student asking about lab grades and I realize that my internet at my apartment is so screwed up that half the grades I input didn't go through. And now I have to figure out what everything is except that my grade sheet is in Pittsburgh and I can't reach my roommate and I think final grades have to be in by tomorrow. I'm probably going to get fired for this. FUCK! Why couldn't my students have brought that to my attention sooner!
I really miss Ben, and I really miss having privacy. It's nice seeing my sister and my dad, but mom is getting on my nerves and I have to waking up at F-ing 5:00 tomorrow morning so we can hop on the train to the consulate to get my visa.
I miss Pittsburgh.

Krispy Kreme Hands

Today Waz and I went to get our end of the semester treat - manicures. We went to a place that's about a block away from where I live called Daniel & Co. The lady who did our nails is very enthusiastic - first we got oil rubbed onto our nails, then the nails got filed, and then we dipped our hands in a tub of hot wax. Our hands came out with a thin coat of wax and for a while, I was trying to think of the best description possible, and the only thing I could come up with is Krispy Kreme Hands. We had a layer of glaze and now I know what I would feel like if I were a Krispy Kreme Donut. So yes, we got a nice little hand massage and we got our nails painted, the whole while the nail lady, Vicky, was giving us all her opinions on everything. It was very...interesting...
So when we left, I told Waz I would screw up my nails in 10 minutes. I definitely didn't try to screw them up, I certainly wasn't trying, but when I went to close my umbrella not 15 minutes ago, I caught my nail in the plastic handle part of the darned thing and scraped a chunk of polish right off. O well, I never was good with nail polish...

Wondering

So I got my studio grade just now. I got a B which is what I really was hoping for. Well, it was a B-, but still, I got the B. I really wonder why I'm sad and yet really uncaring, and why I'm so relieved with getting a B. It isn't great, it isn't at all what I ought to be wanting for my grades. Maybe it's just this year that has me so down, maybe it's the whole studio situation.
I really wonder what I'm doing here sometimes. Even though I decided in high school that I wanted to be an architect, I never really had a clear idea as to why I wanted architecture, and what I would do in the architecture field. I find that I'm so much more interested in other things - the bookbinding class I'm taking next semester has me much more excited than studio. Studio, in fact, I am dreading. As usual. So I wonder, what am I doing here? Maybe I really need to rethink what my goals are. But then again, it's already fourth year. I think it's already too late to turn back. So I guess I'll just have to finish out my time here and think about what I really want to do when I leave school.
I think right now all that's really keeping me here is the fact that I've spent so much time working towards this degree. That and the fact that with the architecture degree, I can have a lot more options than if I were to have a comm design or art degree. I sometimes wonder if I should have done communication design because I spent so much time in school figuring out how to make books and working on layouts. I just had no idea that that was communication design. In fact, I never heard of communication design until I lived with someone who had it for her major.
And then there are those times when I'm so excited about architecture. I really wanted to work for Archi-tectonics, and I'm really hoping for that job with LWMA. Maybe it's just the atmosphere here at school that's getting me down. Everyone's depressed, no one's really interested, just cynical. I've spent a greater portion of this year trying to avoid studio by hiding behind my six other classes, or my job. Incidentally, I think my grades in my other classes are going to turn out pretty well, so much that hopefully I'll make Dean's List again - finally... Hope for the best, work through the crap. That's going to be my motto for a while.

O yes, and I had a super crappy conversation with my mother today where she basically told me, yet again, that I should stop wasting my time with my boyfriend. I don't think she realizes how I find that grossly offensive and that whenever she mentions it, I just decide that I'm not going to listen to another word she says. I hate how she's racist.

Shanghai

It really seems like all the firms in NY are full up for the summer. So now my choices are two - I can work for a really awesome architect in Shanghai over the summer, narrowly avoid heat stroke and see what living abroad without my mother bitching at me about my boyfriend the whole time can be like. Or I can stay home in Connecticut, work at some dinky job that's completely unrelated to architecture, and learn to drive. Those are my options.
As much as I need to learn to drive, that option isn't nearly as tantalizing or glamorous as Shanghai...Hey, who doesn't want heat-stroke after all? The down-side is that my pay is going to be equivalent to a McDonald's worker in China. I guess that means I'll be making a dollar a day. O well, food there is cheap and I won't have to pay rent. Woohoo!

Negativity

Yesterday I got the most negative comment I ever received since coming to college. Last night, a bunch of us were working in the computer labs on our templates. Templates which I was hired to create. Of course, the whole time, people were griping about the template, but I didn't mind too much because it was about having to do the template as opposed to disliking my template.
Then while people were griping, Ben Saks decided to up and say, "Yah, Angela, I have to say, your template is really bad." Thinking that he was joking, I made a pouty sad face and then he said, "No, I'm not joking, I really think it's bad." I thought a few moments, 'Maybe he's still joking?' Apparently not. Then I asked him why he thought so and he mentioned a few reasons - for example, that the 20x20 panels weren't at maximum size, and that there were spaces for things that he didn't want to put in so he had to make that up on the spot. Boy was I mad. In the end, I just told him it's the difference between me having taken a class that had some communication design focus (we learned that white space is good) and him never having taken one.
Still, as I said, it's the single most negative comment I have ever received. It wasn't a "I hate the template." It was a, "I hate your template." Meaning that I'm completely inadequate as a designer and should give up now and switch to engineering while I still have a chance because apparently all I'm good at is math.
This was supposed to be a short post. I think if I see Ben today, I'm really going to yell at him.

Brokeback

Yes, I did it. I watched the gay cowboy movie. And you know what? It was really good. I don't think really good describes it well enough - I think it might even be one of the best movies I have ever seen. It was quite tasteful for the most part other than one scene half an hour into the movie that made my jaw drop a mile. I still haven't finished thinking about the movie yet, there's a lot of depth to it, but I just thought I'd let people know that movie fully deserved all of its nominations.

Loneliness

I have no reason for feeling this way, but maybe it's because I just watched Pride and Prejudice, but I feel incredibly lonely. Darn those romance flicks with their perfect image of love. Completely unattainable, I hate them.

Vindicated

It's been a long time since I've written. Mostly it's because this year, I've had an extra extended hell week. It dropped be to an all time low for depression to the point where I would cry for seemingly no reason at all at strange times. For example, walking to class I would start thinking about it, and my eyes would start to burn and my mouth would tremble. But now, that's over, and for the first time in a week, I feel like eating. Yes, ladies and gents, I feel vindicated.
So let me tell you what happened. As usual, the last couple weeks of class were spent preparing for final reviews. I was well on my way, doing everything on the computer. I did a lot of AutoCAD and exported into photoshop and saved myself money on paints and paper and had some really nice drawings. And then the unspeakable happened. Monday morning, five hours to presentation, I was putting together my boards. It was probably because I had CAD, InDesign and Photoshop all opened at the same time, but suddenly my computer shut down. Melted down. Geeked out. Flipped out. Threw a tantrum. No blue screen of death. It just suddenly went black. No worries, I thought, so I hit the power button. Nothing. Well, maybe it just needs a moment, I thought, so I went and took a shower. After my shower I hit the power button and it turned on, but then windows wouldn't load. Not good, I thought, so I called Steve Lee (the studio coordinator) to let him know the situation. I tried a few more times, sort of freaking out and finally, I got things up and running. By then, it was about 12:30, and I thought, awesome, I can still do this, so I called Steve and let him know the situation. And then, I realized that most of the files I had open were corrupted. Somehow some of the pdfs had miracuously changed from yellow toned to green toned, and there were chunks that were grey. Not good. But at least my older files were okay, so I figured I would use those. I slapped together what I had into the required 40x40, hoping to get some sort of presentation that day. I wandered over to campus to get things plotted and by then it was 1:30 - that was when I was supposed to present. I went to the plotter and found out I had a couple hours wait, so I stuck around and regaled Buzz and Bob with my horrible tale of computer woes and they offered some good advice about how to fix the computer. So at 3:30, I got my plots and went to present. What happened was horrible. Everyone stared and said nothing. Gerard tried to be nice and said, "Well, let's look at what we do have..." I can't remember most of what happened, except that at the end, first one professor told me there was just nothing there to comment on, and then my own professor, Walbert, said that the presentation had to be redone, that it wasn't worthy of my project. I think Walbert's comment hurt me the most. Fortunately, but then, it was time for me to go to dance class, so I left with Rebecca and immediately started sobbing when we walked into the stairwell. I contintued to sob through half of dance class and cheered up when we started learning a dance for "You Can't Stop the Beat" from Hairspray. After dance, I went home and cried a lot, and called Ben and cried to him. Poor Benny-bean, I didn't mean to make him so uncomfortable.
In any case, I agreed with Walbert that my presentation was crap, so I spent the week recreating everything in just autoCAD and watercolors, this time saving all the hard computer thinking for the school computers. I finished about an hour and a half into studio today and Buzz was kind enough to plot it for me while telling me all about beer and whisky. I now know whisky tastes better if you order it on the rocks and let it melt a little.
I brought the new printouts to studio where Walbert kept giving me apologetic smiles while I trimmed the plots. I finally showed him what I had and he told me that I had too much white space. Waz disagrees, so it's all good. I showed her and Zack and other people in Fisher studio and then decided I needed to see how it looked on a board so I hung it up and started to write down what revisions I need to make (those revisions will most assuredly also be done on a school computer) when Walbert walked in and gave Chang a crit. After he was done with Chang, Walbert asked me if I was waiting for stray professors to give me crits and I replied that no, I was just writing down things that I needed to change for my own purposes. Meaning that now that I know I'm not half bad at creating presentations, it's become a point of pride to make all of my presentations attractive. After I talked with him a bit, I decided I wanted to show Steve what I fixed because he also seemed severely disappointed with my presentation on Monday, so I brought it up to him and he gave it a thumbs up. We talked a bit about Monday and he asked me why I didn't try to explain the situation to which I replied that Gerard was there, and Gerard doesn't take those kinds of excuses.
All in all, I now have a nice final project, and, even if I end up with a C in studio, I know that it was a good project and I really didn my best.