WARNING: This blog entry is stupid. Someone needs to do something to piss me off so I can rant.

I had my final review for Surface/Effects today. It went pretty well. The course is essentially making a cool wall system with some type of visual effect. We started with the idea of water and how it reflects, refracts and is transparent at the same time. The one juror claimed that we didn't start with the idea of water and posed it to me as some sort of question. I responded by staring at her with a WTF face and then she just kind of said "I'm just saying stuff..to myself...rambling...I dunno." It was hilarious. After the review everyone was like "What the hell was that comment?" We started using Lumisty, and went through a variety of experiments. My partner and I were trying to get a cool effect with a minimum of surface modulation or what have you. We kind of wanted to see what we could get out of a flat surface or layering of surfaces rather than milling something, casting something or something like that. In a sense it was a cool thing to try to achieve, but ultimately it might have been cooler to try to do something more 'extreme.' We ended up pretty much applying car window tint to plexi. The effect was a pretty cool exquisite corpse type thing, but somewhat unsatifying for a semester of work. I feel like that a lot in school, just kind of unsatisfied. There is so much that you have to work on, that it never seems like you really get to explore one thing and really work with it. I don't feel like a lot of my efforts can be put in a portfolio which is a disappointment. I think for all the time I spend here, I don't have a lot that I would want to show as evidence of my skill(?). Maybe that's just a result of the poor time management skills I've aquired since coming to grad school. I remember back in the day, umm 2 years ago, when I was a machine at getting stuff done. I thought that would help me in school, but I really lost that and never get to all the stuff that I wanted to do. Our mock up was huge though haha.



Final studio review is Wednesday. I need to get a good night's sleep tonight to ramp up for some rigor for the next few days. I hate review period. It's probably the most miserable time of my life and it occurs four times a year. It's the time when you bring all your sleepless nights together and realize how stupid your project is, followed by an anticlimactic 30 minutes of people talking about stuff that you don't understand because you are hardly awake.

Did I ever tell you about my first final review? I showed up 6 hours late. I went home at 8 am to sleep for 2 hours but ended up sleeping through my alarm, 7 phone calls, and my friend pounding on my door. This was back when I lived in the feces ridden Acrapolis with the three worst roommates of all time. You probably saw that craptank on COPS at some point. I need some kind of nonlinear blog condition to explain my random stories. I need to finish describing this crappy apartment now that I started. I wish I could have footnotes or something. Anyway. I lived with three "anti-establishment" type females. One was your typical scenester (worked at Urban Outfitters), the other looked like a 14 year old boy (worked at Starbucks), and the third had a pink mohawk and always wore tank tops so you could see her hairy pits (sold tickets at a theater). They had three cats, literboxes in the kitchen (along with turds on the flor and liter on the stove), emptied once every...2-3 weeks. I almost vomited when I came back from X-mas break. They also liked to leave bags of trash in the kitchen rather than take them out and since they kind of silently fought over who would feed the "fat cats" the "rich people food" the cats sometimes didn't eat for a long time and then would tear open the trash and throw it all over the place. One time I found a tampon applicator in my room (kicked under the door because I would tie my door shut). In my half awake state I PICKED IT UP! OH GOD that place sucked hahaha.

180...Finally, the second time she came and rang my doorbell, I woke up thinking "DAMN those undergrads, it's 5:30 am, stop ringing my doorbell!" Followed by "Wait, I came home at 8:00am. Wait! It's now TUESDAY AT 5:30 AM!" I slept for a day and a half! No, wait, it's 5:30 PM, on Monday.(It was December so it was dark at 5:30 pm) SHIT! Review started at noon! I'm not going in! [picks up cell phone and just hits send, my friend answers] WHAT HAPPENED!?" She says "Where are you?" "UHHHH I just woke up. Is Mark pissed? (Mark Wasiuta, you may know him as the water bartender in the D+S Blur project renderings) "Just get in here!" Somehow I managed to shave, shower, eat breakfast, and call my parents, yet get to my review in a total of about 45 minutes and I lived 10 blocks from Meyerson. Then at my review I'm in a total daze. Like I just woke up from hypersleep in Alien. My juror asked me a question and I just stared at her for a few seconds. Mark said "Bob, you're awake now." I just kind of laughed and then said "Ummm I'm not sure what you're asking me." Mark got up and pretty much defended my project while I just stood there and nodded. Then I went home and slept for another 10 hours. It was a day to remember for years to come. It's funny, so many people know about it. It's legendary.

My Japan internship is all set for the most part. But I won't be relaxed until my Certificate of Eligibility gets here. I need to get that from the Foreign Ministry so I can go to the Japanese Consulate in NYC and get my visa. But they told me not to buy a plane ticket until I get my COE. Hopefully that will come soon. The guy that did the internship last year told me it took about 2 weeks to get it. I hope it comes soon so I can get my ticket for less than $908349234. They are already $1200.

One of our own archinect'ers may be subletting my sweet crib this summer. That's boring news right? Yeah.