thursday night lights

After 8 pm, San Antonio goes to sleep. Most traces of city life shut down enough to question the idea of being the ninth largest city in the country. It can be a downer, especially when you recall the buzz of Austin kids eating breakfast at 11pm. I'm sure the roads are teeming with cars outside the loop, but I actually enjoy the vacuum of central San Antonio after dark. It's like Vanilla Sky without Tom Cruise around to crowd things. That's when I go jogging.

It's during such times that I grew attached to the city last year. You're one of the few about and suddenly you feel like you have stake in a city. Where Austin is limitless, San Antonio is finite. Accessible, calm, and finite. In all the things one can do, the greatest thing to do is nothing. And in the dark, you see the scattered others, the other content San Antonians enjoying our quiet. Open avenues become our hang out and barely an exchange is exchanged. We understand each other and tonight have the mutual goal of nothing. And when that radio booth somewhere is playing that song somehow, any attempts to find its source will leave you empty handed, tired, and ready for bed.

sleetfall on third street

the weather has returned to that glorious temperature where windshields freeze, knuckles bleed, and random wintery things might happen as a result of it all. maybe it's all the sugar we're eating, but there's an extra skip in the step of san antonio. why don't you grab a cookie or four, hunker down with us, and celebrate this rare thing we call december.

let's go ride a bike.

big empty house

this week i became the proud owner of a home theater. in one false swoop i said goodbye to the oversized stereo and undersized tv of the last millennium that had previously marked my ascension to early adulthood. i had really done well cramming them into whatever collegiate space i inhabited. microwave tops were media centers and all was well.

like clockwork, i graduated, got a job, got a larger apartment, and now own a big screen tv and microspeaker bose system and extended cable. in my own defense, he cable guy gave me more channels than i asked for, the tv is not that as big as most, and the speakers look a little older than the seller let on, so i can comfortably stay below the yuppy poverty line for a little bit longer. i still sit on borrowed furniture and my ceiling does leak water from the room above. i've got that landlord still balking on new paint. but it's that i have the time to worry about such things and that fixing and upgrading what i have has become one of my life goals, is where we should all be scared. this freedom from school forces us to find a new master. a slave to a new machine, no matter how rusty the machine is. why do we do this? gotta do something.

and because brokeback mountain is so much more in hi-def surround sound.

cold feet/warm socks

Yeah, that's better.

I've begun to understand the stereotypes against men. For years, I could stand on the outside and wonder what we as a people had done wrong to so many women. Why do we engender slumber party rants and chocolate chip cookie dough indulgence? Give us a break, I said.

Slowly growing into the roll has shown the inherent bastardness that manhood entails. It's something innate, though not as grandiose as Sarah Jessica Parker would have us believe. It's the subtly of our short comings that causes the problems. We're not out to cause trouble. We're the puppy dogs who ate the people food and threw up. That's right, men are dogs. Puppy dogs. So why not let us learn from our mistakes, get cat scratches in the face, and grow up to be those good middle aged dogs that want to sit by you on the couch and jump around only when encouraged.

I have reached phase two-medium sized dog in my Purina growth chart.

the city

new york city is exactly what i expected. only more. more people, buildings, food, people, dirt, clothes, streets, and people than i've ever seen. semi worldliness and architectural know-how did little to prevent me from emerging from the subway wide-eyed and camera happy. norman, frank, ludwig, frederick, and renzo were all there to lead the way, but it's the general cityness that really got me. that is architecture. it's not neat or necessarily high end. it's everything.

by day three i returned to stern faced urbanisto while quietly overloading on ambiance. silence is found on quiet snl sets, in back hallway hair bleachings, and amidst queens area housing projects. by the end, i'm in a half limp running-fall, down escalators across the city until the notepad sonnet of a transient pirate taught me the beauty of this great nation and its great cities. five strangers in five minutes said hello, exchanged stories of our destinations, realized none were from new york and were thus all transient, listened awkwardly, then intently to the pirates tale, then waved bye at terminal six while filtering back into the other transients.

now i'm home in san antonio to heal me blisters, sort my pictures, and make sense of it all.

san antonians on parade

I've found that my observations of San Antonio aren't that unique. In the grand encyclopedia of it all, I'd be lucky to write something unique about East Ashby Avenue without treading on a Trinity professor's tome regarding half way houses and the socio-economic implications of gentroficative relocation. This house is over a hundred years old, so the foundation was more than likely always askew, and some San Antonio College literature minor probably at some point was driven to write corollaries between subfloor stray cats and beating tell tale hearts.

I continue because the ice cream man is still spreading the good word of Tim Duncan over the wandering riffs of The Entertainer. Everyone needs a muse. Mine just happens to be selling Frito pies out of the back of his blue painted short bus to ex-cons across the street.

watched ice cube trays never freeze

I'd like to believe that the greatest times in our lives are not known until after they're over. you're not conscious of it, and if you're trying for the kodagraphic memory you'll probably be disappointed. the greatest thing on a grocery list is that tub of cookies and cream that never makes this list in the first place.

it's when you get in that routine of buying chocolate milk half gallon for half gallon of the plain white milk, that that chocolate doesn't taste so great. you know that flavor. that's not chocolate at all. it's some kind of chemically lactosey powder, more than likely, but that doesn't matter when you take that first sip after being three months sober. it's grand and naive and simple. at one point we grow up and buy that milk just to fill some sort of nostalgic craving, or worse to feel guilt and pleasure at the same time just for the sake of feeling something. i say let's appreciate ice cream and chocolate milk by the frosty bowl and glassful when you really want it, and it's easier to not take it for granted.

i think the same applies to entire sour straws packages, though there might be people who recognize the importance of every last grain of sugar.

everyone knows now that every night now will be marc's last night in town

i'm on the move again, and hopefully not again for quite a while. our american roots as wandering buffalo chasers will lead me to a mixed agricultural society reaping the crops of my mid twenties in the semi-arid architectural terrain of south texas. my last week has me eager to settle down and build a wigwam, maybe have a few papooses around, smoking the peace pipe of my later days. yeah it's hard to leave austin. it's apparently the town to be in now, but i'm jumping ship, or kayak as it were. it's in good hands, though one could argue austin is in a fast rising coke-induced thrill ride of an evening that will leave skeletons of skyscrapers and remnants of half finished murals as creased dog ears on the rambling memoir that is my college home. it was always an on again off again address, as it may continue to be. that's such a town that will always welcome you back because my grand total of under five years has me considered an old local to the new comers. i recommend the ducks tours, yet i can't say from first hand experience. there's a lot left to do.

Day 5-6: The Desert Spirit Journey is Complete

The stretch of continent between the eastern end of the Grand Canyon and the north central side of Austin is marked by nothing. Miles and miles of sand, some rocks, and shrubs. And of course it's here that we learn the true meaning behind the trip.

My dad and I are both the same person and very different at the same time. Stubborn, easy going, anxious, thorough, sensitive, stoic, adventurous, and cautious simultaneously in different directions so that we've learned to just be silent to let the other one take this one when differences may arise. We know that before long, we'll be in that moment of perfect agreement and nothing else will matter. At one point it took an old Hopi wise man to show us the way. Even though, he looked to be in mid thirties and was born in Riverside, California, his informal tour of the old village he lived in now interested us both greatly. History and architecture, Yes! The oldest existing continually inhabited settlement in America, to be exact, and now just a collection of crumbling stone huts with old residents not far removed from the original inhabitants. No pictures or brochures, and barely a stop, but amazing.

One of the few other stops took us to Loving, New Mexico, again in the middle of the desert. My grandmother, my dad's-mother-in-law, was married here at this church back around the late-nineties to her high school sweetheart, Sonny. It was an amazing happy time in her life, and in a time when I was just beginning to get to know her better. Anyway, within the next few years Sonny died and Nanny passed away in 2002. We never had much time to learn that much about him and technically I would have family around Loving, but all we knew to look for was a small Catholic church on the edge of the town. We found it, stopped, took a picture, and went on our way back to Texas.

Day 3-4: The Grand Canyon

We woke up Sunday morning stuck with the sun rising to reveal the mountains and trees of north central Arizona. Oh and our prositute neighbor at the shanty motel seems to have broken a window and poored alcohol on the Honda. Any fears of Black Canyon City were quickly dispelled/transferred upon our service station meeting with Merle and Gene and Hoss, two old prospectors and a dog that hung around decked out in six shooters and belt bandoliers. My dad of course asked them to take a picture with his unknowing son and thus we have the first appearance of me on the blog. It's worth it.

The rest of day was spent realizing that we could see the canyon by sundown. Doing so required my dad leadfooting it past most of the towns I was told to see, but when he's making time, there's nothing you can do. To be fair, we did stop by another architecture commune, known as Arcosanti, but our pre-tourtime visit made the stop quick.

If you've never seen it and have not had someone tell you before, the Grand Canyon is big. And it's hard to express in pictures the idea of a basically flat area in the middle of the woods opening up to a mile deep. We spent a majority of our time in the park staring at the infinite abyss from above, but tried the hike Monday to find a thousand more photogenic places and thousand more reasons why we should be in better shape. Ultimately, the 3 mile trail got us below most of the campers, so we trudged back up to complete the seven hour walk. I'm not saying I couldn't have done it faster without my dad, but I might have really hurt the next day if I'd run while carrying a mule as I'd originally planned.

The thing about the grand canyon that you get there through isolated roads and out of cell phone range, only to arrive in campgrounds filled with an outdoorsy league of nations. Frenchies, Swedes, Germans and other types of rich North Europeans. And Darien too right as we were leaving the park, with my amazing abilty to run into classmates on family vacations. He too was on a desert spirit journey before starting work, so I wished him luck and away we went.

Day 1-2: West by Southwest

The hard core shortened summer of Austin '06 is quickly coming to close so my dad and I once again jumped in the Accord and hit the ground driving. Without a specific plan or a map from the last 15 years it took nearly two hours to even enter the hill country. However, into the 80 mph speed havens of west Texas, the Grand Canyon became a goal, grail, and brass ring of our desert spirit journey. In the race against time and raising gas prices, we arrived somewhere on the other side of Phoenix by day two. Places to note: The Tucson area Furr's Family Dining and their undercooked fried chicken and underrated overhead speaker version of Sting's Desert Rose. And then there's Taliesin West, the winter home and hemiannual campus of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. It was my first Wright building to see, and I can say it's all true. He was a short Welshman, he invented everything, and damnit he was an amazing architect. Here I'll thank Benjamin Lloyd Lynn for his own adventures that partly inspired my desire for dry heat.

all that glitters is not fools gold

i'm returning to san antonio for all of the reasons i always knew i'd return for. and in spite of all the reasons i told myself no. after a series of minirevalations leading me towards a multitude of paths, i simply realized we're young and there's a million things left to happen. we can't microplan every step we take in pursuit of perfection. it doesn't exist. when you realize that, my friend, it all becomes a lot easier. we're got a chance, as the children of the boom, to do great things before time runs up. after that, who knows? nobody. so strap on your sandals and fire up the tortilla machine, i'm coming home.

but not before i head west for a bit.

it's time for something biblical

that's enough. i've been delaying the decision of what-do-i-want-to-do-with-my-life for a bit too long and holding out for any longer is not helping anyone. for the past few months i've called on the loyal council of friends and family hoping to defer the responsibility, but i imagine they're ready to update their rolodexes with ink for a change. i envisioned every possible career path until i realized that i can't do that. every single great thing over the last couple of years came through some combination of short sighted opportunism and blind optimism.

so the time has come for me to make a phone call, but not right now. because it's 1am. there's time to sleep on it and room for some other sort of revelation. the problem is i've already decided.

a link to the past

i just got off the phone with nini and jayjay, the old couple who babysat me and a few generations of kids. with graduation, an announcement was sent out that preceded a cross-state forwarding marathon of congratulations and thank you cards that finally ended today. "At this special time in your life may your dreams guide you to a wonderful future filled with success and happiness." The card itself seems as old as me, out of a stock drawer of theirs, that depicts flowers, a diploma, and a globe clearly showing the great stretch of the mighty USSR. most of my earliest memories were from staying with them for the better part of my four year old days. sleeping mats. canned spinach. getting my tooth knocked out in the great wheel barrow massacre of '87. the pattern on their white ceiling fan in the white room in the back of their house that i laid under after a firm spanking. considering how many toddlers they'd had under that roof, they still recall stories of me watching chilly willy and questioning the concept of perspective.

right before that i held a conversation with my newly seven year old nephew about his birthday gamecube. i at 23 have equally been enjoying the vices of video game immersion lately along with the near sighted problem solving of saving zelda for the fifteenth time. of course, the light arrows! i clearly remember my sister telling me how she'd beaten the nes original when i was away. i couldn't ever master that maze, but i guess i've showed her.

How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

la vida simple

at the same fateful intersection of last tuesday's traffic violation, i found myself welcomely exhausted. a late night deadline, early morning soccer defeat, back to back interviews, and a barage of public transportation and walkable citying had left me stranded there staring at a cross signal with one eye and the lowering sun on the other.

i like this setup of a drafting board, lamp light, and playlist shuffle taking me into the wee hours, forcing the hand to actually design something that will actually be built. weak signaled univision play-by-play adds just enough spice to keep from the cabin fever symptoms of last week. not to say starting an official job will end the honeymoon, but let us not forget bigg's prophecy of mo' money mo' problems.

and i spilled a bunch of milk

if anyone wants tips on simultaneously breaking your car's window while defending your illegal right turn in front of the motorcycle cop you just cut off, i'm giving lectures all this week. though despite the best efforts of both myself and mother nature, i came out of the day mostly unscathed and slightly more employed than the day before. yet i'm not making it easy.

just want to be a better man

right before the point of self flagellation became an entertaining alternative, things have gotten interesting again. pouring out my heart, soul, and resume to the electronic world has reaped a couple of job opportunities that see marc fulfilling two destinies. i can do contract work for an engineer out of my apartment at a low hourly rate which involves trudging through flee infested ram shackles and shortchanging father's day weekends. OR, i can sit in air conditioned comfort, getting my registration credits, whilst earning a great salary with good security and great BENEFITS.

and he seems to have chosen the former. why? well actually i always forget which is former and which is latter, but i can say the design/build engineering gig seems to be a bit more of a risk and thus a challenge to myself. i still feel the need to prove things to the world before i get free health insurance. and i wonder if health insurance covers the soul.

and i feel fine

We seem to have made it through the demonic day of hell spawn unscathed. Lava and lightening filled tornadoes wouldn’t sound that complicated though when compared to the act of God called adulthood. For some reason having placed yourself in a quality position doesn’t make the decision making any easier. I recall an English IV AP paper I wrote that compared the comparative happiness of the educated versus uneducated based upon Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Sadly I don’t remember my conclusion and I got a virus here freshman year that wiped out my hard drive.

Now I sit here a graduate, clinging on to rentable laptops and free wifi on the south mall at midnight checking to see if anyone wants to offer me a job. I have achieved the slacker stereotype.

So in the meanwhile why not have that Austin summer you always dreamt of. Swim, run, and fetch to your heart’s desire. Stroll around the capitol at night and look at fountains. Build a sand“castle” and get a sunburn before the clock runs out. These are the days of our lives.

don't want to be a richer man

a "crossroads" of sorts has come up. within one week i've graduated, found out that the firm i thought i was starting was gone, will be moving out of my house, and more. again everything "intersects" all at once. i wish i had a "sign" to "guide" the "way."

so here's a farewell to the mercat palace and to blackland architects. here's to moving into beehives and moving on to more secure jobs. i hear the sirens calling. a mercat is half cat/half fish.

dear nina,

thank you. it's been kind of a rush of everything over the past five months and i feel like i haven't given credit to you enough. amidst the moves, weddings, papers, projects, graduation, and jack rabbit navigation you've been right there or at least a long winded phone call away. i'm proud of where you've put yourself and can't wait to be your loyal cheerleader in the coming months.

thanks to everyone else for the past five years, though i don't think we're entering some kind of bookend. or maybe it's one of the intermediate bookends that holds the middle of a volume of encyclopedias. they're usually not fancy or gilded, but they serve the same function of holding stuff up. yeah, that's what y'all've done, supporting volumes H-K while definitely touching on the hearty LMNOP of our next stage. and now i'm mixing my metaphors. hey, who wants to go swimming?

how i wonder what you are. -marc

the final review

i'm a few days removed from the big presentation, but i'm not exactly sure how long. outside of school and finals, all i have to schedule by are major holidays and graduations. and i can't even seem to pull that one off. the point is that i'm done with this semester and all school indefinitely.

in celebration, i will allow myself to stretch. no papers or exams or design focus forums to cramp my spine. just me going about the months, setting my own schedules, and being responsible to myself and that which i really care about. i'm laying down, standing up, or doing whatever possible to avoid what this wicked wooden chair has done to my vertebrae over the past year. the world is a big place, but even more than that it's infinitely large when you look closer. so we'll start there, sitting in the middle of a field. outstretched. rolling around in the freakin grass.

roll on.

texan rain storm

to say i'm writing by candlelight wouldn't be not true, but the warmth of a seventeen inch monitor seems to lessen the effect. nonetheless, a huge storm rolled in tonight and knocked out power for a few good hours. so in the midst of tomorrow being my last day of school ever and me spending these past couple nights entrenched in my new job, it was nice for austin to just shut down for a while and chat with kate amidst candles. everyone's plans seem to be falling into place, despite the fact that no one knows what the hell we're doing.

get your children out of the muddy muddy. children of the lord.

the other ryan

just now when typing out my final paper for japanese architecture, my mind wandered through a series of images and word associations until landing on the memory of this friend i had as a child. i don't remember his whole name, only ryan. and not my other friend ryan, who i haven't really talked to in a long time anyway. no this ryan was the kid who always had to wear sunglasses and me and my mom bought him a basketball for his sixth birthday. all of a sudden, he moved away to somewhere on the other side of houston. i hadn't thought about him in a few years and being so young, it's hard to recall anything more than the glasses and basketball. so if you're that kid, let me know. there's only one week of classes left.

i'm all about duality

within five minutes, i received two bits of earth shaking information today. all that i had come to understand about this world would be turned upside down. you, me, and everything on this plane of existence would slip between hyperbolic paraboloids of yin and yang and the continents would shift just a tad bit. ready? i know you're not, but i'm afraid you never will be. and we don't have time to waste.

my girlfriend got accepted into the university of texas school of architecture. after a long, arduous, setback filled few months, she got a call that completely reversed the rejection letter received earlier in the week. there's nothing more to say than i'm proud of her.

ah hem. i'll try not to be gushy as i move on to the following very tragic topic. today, at some point between 8am and 2pm, one blue schwinn suburban bicycle was ripped from her hastily locked rack in broad day light by evil forces. i guess i had it coming to me, not giving her the proper attention lately. at a time when the city of san antonio was big and foreign, she was a recognizable face that showed me around. we fought against a few trucks, jumped a lot of curbs, and had our spats involving me flying over the handle bars three times, but i guess now i just have our memories. that and the front tire with the u-lock still ironically steadfast. in memoriam...her birth...and her most recent photo. we ask that you make donations in lieu of flowers.

the lesson today is to appreciate your blessings and hold on to your dreams, because one day the unexpected could happen.

the soil is rich

as an architect, you're expected to live in the middle land between extremes of creativity and rationale, public good and financial gain, big and small. as an architecture student, you can usually lop off half those expectations and create your idealized little paper project that finds its half life before completion. any frustrations are covered in three cheese pizza and revenge of the sith bonus material. snap, end of story.

the reality, as i have learned in the past few months, is much closer to those other requirements. architecture becomes the big complex pool full of ping pong balls that all need submergence. how do you invest that life and time in something that might not happen, or will at least come into the hands of someone else who is determined to make it happen differently.

in both my studio and my new job, i'm attempting to stick to the guns i've been given, while seeing a whole other set of new challenges. actual things are happening in austin and i'm fortunate enough to play a part in it. this is where architecture gets exciting. where things are on the line and obi wan can't really help.

i really enjoy making my bed.

i really enjoy making my bed. when all the world is giving you deadlines, birthday morning parking tickets, and endless stacks of paper work, there's no better way to land your plaid patterned flag on a twin sized rectangular stake of land and claim, "I see what you offer world, but be aware. I have conquered my bed, and you are next!"

i really enjoy making my bed.

a tale of five cities

dallas, as many of you know has always been the other city. houston is the city, and thus dallas is the other one. that's what it's like growing up in the greater h-town metropolitan. there are the astros, rockets, and oilers and any other claims at representing texan identity might as well be coming from gay yankees. that said, there are a lot of career week firms in DFW and handful who have emailed me lately. apparently they don't know where i'm from, but apparently the mavericks are actually a good team now. you might find me in dallas next year if mark cuban himself shows up at my front door grinning with a five million dollar giant check like signing bonus.

seattle apparently has a good football team now, but who the hell cares. the firms are good and the opportunity is everywhere. people care about building, and when those people are named bill gates and mr. boeing, they care about big buildings. which i have started to find myself caring about too. through the strangest phone call ever in the midst of career week, a job has appeared which makes the fantasy as possibilty. do i want to live in a flannel covered fantasy, or do i want to live in..

austin. wait, i live here now and i kinda like it. take seattle and add texan reserve and badassness and here you have my most times home for the past five years. in a cryptic email at the tail end of career week, a chance of a lifetime has arisen in which i apprentice under a local architect and we double handedly start our own firm with a loft project downtown. there's facades to be developed and money to be determined, but in the meanwhile we should figure out a firm name. this is exciting, folks (and somewhat dangerous).

san antonio is not just a city. it's an idea. an idealized dream that at times doesn't match up with the city itself. it's a texas-great job-good money combo that's everything i want and my father demands. i made a good friend of the office and would be a fool to pass on it being a friend with benefits. i'll be back, i say, but when? anthony asks.

terlingua. want to go back to the desert and build a theater for our local troupe of actors, all the while undertaking a daily spirit journey with a side of hallucinogens? possibly. do you know how to build a theater? no. i'm only 22.

everybody loves architecture

or at least i hope they do. and i hope they love me. twenty interviews down and i did my best to woo them all, but there comes a point where you try to be everything to everybody and you barely get anywhere in the first place. i was compromising before i even got a second interview.

sitting there learning about the wonders of health care design and trying to remember what a 401k actually is gave me a good bit of time to think. i was in a different world where i'm jet setting around, meeting interesting people, unveiling sky scraper renderings, wearing expensive blazers, and reordering business cards. then i was a master welder, sweating away in some rural enclave working to finish up enough before night fall and hoping my fellow craftsmen had caught enough salmon for the night's supper. in yet another world, i'm entrenched in the lamp lit hollows of a late night studio, mulling away at the world's greatest detail. i'd be at the forefront of architecture, i'd be changing the world. designer. builder. doer. jack.

what does it take to do in that which you're not sure in what you want. huh.

the intersection of everything

it all comes together in a far reaching, deep, cavernous hell of a fortnight where we now find ourselves in the midst of. school. work. life. it's all happening kids, and it's now too late to jump off the bike. the pedals are spinning and all you've got are a pair of squeaky brakes and some sense of wits.

somehow i've managed to arrange upwards of twenty job interviews this week without any passionate interest in any. sure i'll fetch the suit out the closet and bring some semblance of shininess to my shoes, but i won't like it. it's not that i want to stay in school forever and have some detached logic that i'm too good for work, i just fear compromise. and i know lots of these people are selling compromise at an amazing low discount.

brace yourself or brace yourself against someone because adulthood is coming whether you're ready or not.

Big Bend

I think I can recount this past week seeing as I'm now well cleaned, well rested, and well adjusted. Life in the desert...is a good thing. Not that we can say much as a pack full of gringos decked out in our Whole Earth gear and a sack full of tuna, but we were rougher than most city girls and boys are during spring break. Unless you call passing out on the beach in South Padre roughing it.

Am I a city boy though? No, though the low clearance Japanese sports car may prove otherwise. My dad has done his best to instill small town/country upbringing into me and I have to say it’s a part of me. I can ride a horse and shoot a gun. I feel just as much at home in a dirty meat market as a glitzy restaurant. Growing up in the suburbs though tends to cancel out both sides. That’s the point, it’s a comfort from the extremes.



My point is that comfort is misleading. Get your diploma, find your job, and voila: the Friday special at Applebee’s. Just follow the pattern and everything will be ok. As much as my family has blessed me with traveling and higher education, they ultimately want me to move back home and share childcare responsibilities. Be careful, they say. And then there’s Terlingua.

Terlingua, TX is a little smudge of a town right outside of Big Bend that’s managed to stay a few light years behind. And probably on purpose too, seeing as the majority of its inhabitants and wait staff look worldly. They’ve just decided to take there knowledge and possessions to a smudge town and pass the time on a big porch, playing Freebird of course.

Maybe that’s all crap and the hunter gatherer wanderer movement died out for a reason. I got tired of eating tuna and I don’t think I’d like to eat tuna again for a while. But I would like to keep stepping back from it all.

The best thing about the trip was the silence and the complete unnecessity to fill it up with noise. Let the mind do the wandering and there’s no need to even leave the front door. Share the silence with someone and talking seems like busy work. Forget the past and worry about the future when it comes, because the present can be a gift. What a smart girl.

it's friggin' spring

i will stop short of photographing the first buds, for it has been done. instead i shall write a haiku with the help of my magnetic poetry calendar i got for february christmas.

hot the blooming sky
season flower spring winter while
shiver beach always

but really, i think these new leaves are literally, literally pushing out the old ones so that we're getting this fallback/springforward brown/green pollack of a week that smells a little like compost. before we know it beaches will be made of snow and hats will wear people! or college students will get jobs. yes, the recruiters have come a courtin and i am constantly forced to question what i'm doing in the next year. and then i force the question on others and we then all grow another gray hair. not that i have a gray hair, but i might. i have a lot of hair and that's gonna go. can't have a proper spring break send off without cutting it all off. can't have a proper spring break if you don't actually do anything. so quit talking about it and just shove off into the grand sea of west texas. it'll be grand, she said, and i tend to like what she says.

the seven syllable second line has always been restructive.

ash wednesday night

the mercat palace is as empty as it gets on a weekday night. my team mates are out on midweek dates, some normal, some with old french sugar mommas. usually by now we're cooking something with some kind of root based vegetable and dicussing dinner parties past and future. not that there's not a huge one coming up friday, but let's say it's the calm before. i am somewhat tired of running around, but that seems to be a condition of keeping busy. don't let yourself breath too much or else that resume will never finish. this is the difference between work and school, yet i know i'll miss it as soon as it's gone. so we should appreciate it now and not get caught up in the details. come on lent, let's rumble.

christmas in februaryand the swedish meatball shaped stocking

in between ginger ale departure and cranberry juice arrival, i hopped over to frigid dallas this weekend for the family's much delayed christmas gathering. say what? uh huh!

we did our best to trick the rest of the world that their calendars were indeed off, requesting christmas themed pies from local bakeries and asking for the holiday specials at ikea. alas though it failed to catch on so we took revenge on any free samples carts we came across. otherwise we rooted ourselves in for wide screen high definition winter olympic glory.

in the midst of it all we did find a determined snow flake wandering down to the pavement.

blankings of a blankety blank

don't fool yourself. nobody is what they seem. and that, of course, is a good thing. in a world of television characters, we like to make generalizations of character in order to rationalize things a bit more. are you the nutty next door neighbor or the gritty ex-ctu agent that can never forget where you came from? it's so much easier to process when we're one dimensional. even the fact that i try to sum up an entire week's worth of amazing bicycle-centric events with the old "short sentence-short sentence-short sentence-in a world of..." opener goes to show that we even try and generalize ourselves. i'm gonna be the insightful reporter of the collective twenty something super ego.

or i'm gonna be the caring boyfriend. and the self centered jackass. or all three. in a world of those six point something billion people, we're going to have a wide range of friends. because no person in that six point something is alike, we're going to have to adapt constantly to suit our surroundings. we don't do it consciously. it's just part of our id. (anyone who has any passing knowledge of freudian psychology, please disregard any use of any words i use.)

so when we find ourselves surrounded by people that bring about qualities in ourselves that we find pleasing, have we found our ideal situation or are we just avoiding some facets of our true nature? what about the forgotten sides of your ideal pals. what if they showed all of their complexities and contradictions all at once? would you still like them and would you yourself still isolate your favorite facets? what if you combined all of your friends and made them hang out and thus had to be everything to everyone.

if we all were truly everything would we all be the same? all six point something billion. brain dead robots and will smith won't be around to save us. i don't know, try it out.

the only thing anybody ever really cares about

is love. despite everything else you spend your life doing or working on, it's all details comparatively. we all just secretly want our own piece of the pie, and knowing that the six point something billion people of the world basically divvy up half and half, it all seems easy. same goes for you ten percenters. find yourself someone who kind of looks like you and does what you do and there you go. love. as obi wan kenobi once said, all you need is love.

but it's far from that simple. it's a many complicated thing. it's a lust/trust/comfort thing. it's time and distance. it's two random people crossing the stars and hoping to collide or at least have enough gravitational pull to orbit for a bit. the more stars you pass the more you learn how infinitely complex our universe is.

and suddenly going from curious astronomer to wandering astronaut shows that outhere is not exactly what i'd expected, yet again nothing i had necessarily planned for. ask any astronauts you know and they'll tell you the same. wait i think i'm about to make a point. i'll share all my otherworldly knowledge with you kids.

it's not easy and that's what makes it worth it. i wish i could say more, but it's as simple as that. i think. oh, you'll understand when you're older. what? yes, i know. okay, well goodnight.

lost in east austin

and north, south, and west for that matter. i've been on this urge to explore and see all corners of this world of mini mansions and medium sized cottages. i spent the first few years here camping out in dorms and apartments. what there's another side of west campus? but ironically seeing the sites of tuscany, london, the tallahassee metroplex, etc has made me a bit of a obsessive explorer in my own backyards. i want to uncover every stone and cut myself on every piece of contaminated trash in midnight-dark abondoned lots in east austin. just get in your car/bike/cross training athletic shoes and head off in a direction. oh you'll get lost, but usually there's a cluster of radio towers compassing you back.

don't call it a comeback

being in your last semester of your second year seniority could lend oneself to a bad case of i'm-too-old-for-this-itis, but for various reasons i'm set on putting more into this than before. incubating in san antonio has got me geared up to do great things, or stumble greatly along the way. i've got good friends, an awesome house, wicked classes, and a totally tubular girl riding sidecar along the way. this is what we've been doing the drills for kids.

on the other hand i might explode.

The City of Pulsing Red Spires

I wrote a thesis around those damned red lights in the west. Wherever I go they're there welcoming me back to this town in the hills. Austin, TX for one last time. Let it be known that I'll finally make it out there in the next few months, climb one (ala kindergarten cop), and tell you all about it.

But I won't tell you about her. Too much.

exit st. mary's

i moved in last june with a bible sitting on my doorstop. while a bit more frayed from the elements, it's still there where i found it. as some things change it's nice to see things stay the same.

they drained the river

at some point san antonio became family. and with every new employee being inducted, i try to ingrain the idea into them. what you've been living in seattle where the city is a virtual petri dish for any cotton swab of architecture? wait, you've been to a place where the coffee is great and the chicken fried steak doesn't need to be as big as your face? well which six flags theme park do you have? the great thing about family though, is that you don't get to pick them. you have to learn to live with them, cause like it or not they're more like you than anyone else. if you constantly plan your escape, you'll miss out on the beautiful meanwhile.

some say san antonio is the 9th largest city in america-bigger than miami, denver, and boston. and seattle. but i still find this hard to believe. it never makes the national news. its celebrities are limited to ex spurs players and tommy lee jones. maybe it's because i never drive outside the loop, but everyone seems to know each other. we barricade ourselves in with a ring of churches like some kind of inverted medieval wall, allowing only a few thousands of tourists every year to run around in their rental cars filled with tortilla chips and cheap mexican exports, respectively. ha, i said we.

i say all of this as an argument for and against my return. the offer has been put on the table, and i too have found a wonderful little local souvenir for myself, but it all goes against everything i've learned in the past year. when an opportunity arises, you take it. when an opportunity isn't there, you look for it. don't settle. don't settle down. there's a whole lot of land and days ahead. so goodbye lf. goodbye interns. goodbye utsa crew. goodbye low brow thursdays. goodbye mission drive in. goodbye helotes. goodbye exchange building. goodbye twins. goodbye laundromat. goodbye southtown. goodbye brackenridge. goodbye earl abels. goodbye trinity. goodbye olmos park and alamo heights bourgeois. goodbye goodbye liberty bar. goodbye beethovens. goodbye bluestar. goodbye o'neil ford. goodbye herman and charles butt and your outstanding grocery stores. goodbye mrs moneypenny. goodbye sunday morning beatles. goodbye monday night hip hop. goodbye third coast. goodbye ice cream man. goodbye perfume kiosk kevin. goodbye manicure kiosk nita. goodbye crack cocaine peter, descendant of san pedro himself. goodbye tobin hill and myrtle street.

now replace goodbye with maybei'llseeyousoon? and you'll know where i'm at. i'll at least be back to visit, but visitor is just another word for tourist. it's time for austin.

English 325 - Lesson Twelve

The color red had finally arrived in San Arturo, blanketing its streets and driveways with last year’s leaves. Fall had come and gone with a spell of cold fronts stretched thin but the majority of the foliage had stayed suspended in a green brown weave until now blocking out the slowly lowering sun. Windshield wiper blades that once ushered off hurricane rains and layers of ice within weeks of each other now simply tossed the dry scraps from side to side in a lazy Sunday manner. Above the red blanket and through the now bare trees a new sun showed barely through a morning haze. The blue that did show was vibrant. The whole range of color that peeked through the clouds for the rest of the day remained muffled though in comparison to the leaves.

Autumn had been happening all along, however. It took this day off after New Years celebrations for the people to realize it. Their cars were parked outside of treeless garages and their drivers too were taking the day off. In groups they walked outside to church or up from hangovers and together breathed in the late blooming fall air. Like most of the world they were filled with resolutions, but no one knew the reality. San Arturo would never really change.