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.

persons of the year

i never took pictures of people. i think i was scared of people. i mean, they're strange and threatening creatures what with their talking and hugging and other societal idiosyncrasies. then you realize, oh they're pretty photogenic and entertaining in their own right.

that's all it boils down to. people. love em or hate, we're all in this together so make the best of it. and if you try a bit more, you get a lot more. so thanks, you people. you're number one on my nonexistent year end list.

mixed blessings

so that ascent? check. i'm there. we're there, i mean. we can sit back on a rock under the moon and the stars and just bask in the radiance. luckily there was one last christmas/holiday/solstice party to wrap up the year before i've come back home. now we play the waiting game, but what better way to kill time for a week other than christmas. and it'll be that magically strange week between december 25th and january 1st where the calendar just hangs in the cosmic purgatory. how enchanting.

my dad was diagnosed with cancer. and it took everything in both of us to even bring it up today. this dates back to the mid summer nights phone call concerning his blood clots. in the scope of things, i guess it's relatively worry free, being lance armstrong cancer and all. my dad even went bicycling on his old italian speeder this week, i guess in preparation for the tour. but there's a few more tests and a range of treatment ahead of him so i should get used to talking about it with him. and maybe get used to talking about women. we aren't much for such sharing but there comes a time when you have to fight against your instincts.

happy holy days

on the other side of the year, time in san antonio is wrapping up. in the grand wish list of it all, i'm getting some closure, but wishes aren't so great if you always get what you asked for. it leaves something to be desired. each week is more interesting than the previous and it's good to have this constant momentum towards something but at the end of the day you want to reach a plateau and look back at the ascent in a breathless well deserved daze. at the end of the year. at the end of the fuse a bomb goes off or a fuse just goes out. fireworks also apply. you know, on account of the new year.

and cruelly enough, the days get shorter. and the nights get longer. and the druids dress as fairies in celebration of it all.

up the mountain

and one year ago i watched that gradual sunset over the atlantic. unspoken plans of matching the experiences i had in europe with life in america have been a success. fall 2005 might even trump 2004 in its own slow and methodical way. another round of college students heads out into the real world and i'll just bide my time here a bit longer.

winter jitters

there comes a time when you have to fight your instincts and climb a giant rock in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night in the mid to low twenties. that time is now.

generation i

i don't have an ipod. and i'd be fine for the rest of my life if i never owned one, but there is some inner child pulling at my pant leg saying, "i want." i am entranced by apple hardware. but i feel like i'm winning some great cultural battle by not having one thus far. those little white ear buds might as well be yellow stars singling out the youth of the nation. listen to deathcab, watch laguna beach, and wear over sized jLo glasses. maybe it's me taking this 7 month career-in-a-box vacation, but i feel disconnected from the kids.

more of it is that the kids listen to their ipods 24/7. do you really need music piped in at all times? has the world become that boring? there's so much entertainment/information available on demand whenever we want it, that's there's little time left to walk down the street and enjoy it for its own sake. i guess my eureka moment was losing my tv remote. sure i tried to find it and had the couch turned upside down, but i gave up and have been all the better ever since. who is america's next top model? and why do we care?

somehow i had also managed to sidestep the whole text messaging movement. who is sending these to whom? can my phone even receive them? these are the questions i asked my mom two weeks ago, and then the telephonic gods stepped up and i've since received six different messages from various sources. it's fate.

maybe i've led my mother to believe i might possibly want a 30 gig music/photo/video player while claiming that i "was not an ipod person." i mean come on, i'm adding to the information ether with this little blog so i might as well cast off my old fashioned chains and plug into the white plastic grid. i can still avoid dvr and satellite radio...for now. i'm no simple farm boy. the elephant in the room we're all avoiding is that i lost a remote control in a twelve foot square space and i plan to take a $300 remote with a screen out into the world on a daily basis. if my conflicted christmas wish does come true, the fates will ultimately decide if i was to be one of the youth of the nation. cast the ivory walkman into the wind. we're all gonna be old one day so i might as well start now.

Thanksgiven

i was awakened thanksgiving morning to a call from my brother-law to look in the trunk of the car. after an early morning hunting trip between him and my father, what would one expect to find in the trunk of a honda accord? a deer. and what good is a freshly killed deer just sitting in the trunk of a honda accord? no good. and what y-chromosome call to order did i fulfill in order to rectify the situation? i helped hoist the carcass up from my childhood basketball goal for the following skinning and gutting, of course.

let's all backtrack and note that my immediate family is far removed from white trash, especially when compared to the whole of east texas. we only have garage sales every other year and have never owned a truck (as can be proved by the hunting vehicle of choice). my father even has this running joke about how my uncles have spent the entirety of thanksgivings past telling deer stories. and there he was pouring intestines into an old tin washtub where i used to practice my lay-ups. they shoved a freakin deer into a midsize sedan. this is a deer story that will live on through my children's children, forever stained crimson red into my concrete surfaced memory.

then i return to san antone to find a gaggle of flies having their own thanksgiving get together on every previously sanitized surface in my apartment. i did my best billy crystal impression to round them up out the door through an intricate series of desk lamp light lochs that lead out the door to the front porch/pacific ocean/colorado plains. pick your metaphor.

if having your apartment infested with flies is cool, consider me miles davis.

her name was nita

over the years i've managed to become selfless, cold, and composed in the face of women. one dare not let down one's defenses when females make the advance, or else one might fall for them and we all know how long a drop that is.

that being said, today i got a manicure. i'd run to the rivercenter mall during lunch to buy enough socks to get me to thanksgiving at home, where a cornucopia of whites would be bleached back to their rightful aryan superiority...so yeah, i was at the mall. and i was headed back when the most beautiful "excuse me, sir" did cross my ears. she was about 5'7", no older than me, dressed in a slim black sweater and knee length black skirt, with a matching head of jet black hair hanging around a porcelain white face which were in turn pierced by deep brown eyes and traces of freckles upon further inspection. i can qualify such inspections cause the next thing i knew this girl had grabbed my right hand and pulled me in (literally and figuratively) to a closeness i hadn't experienced in a while. she was working a nail care mall kiosk.

the next moments played out with me being pulled further and further in, as she dug deeper and deeper into my cuticles with a nail buffer. she'd bat her eyes, i'd blink, and next thing i knew i was saying "my thumbnail has never looked nicer." it was even better with the side-by-side comparison where she held both my hands together, close to my chest, close to her. i managed to say that it really wasn't my kind of product but maybe something more for my mom, which gave her an in into the need for caring for all things female. did i mention she had a gorgeous eastern european accent? she WAS offering me half price off $50 for today only, but i thought of the fantastic lie that i could only afford $10 for mom. and then things got grim as she lowered her voice and put her delicate finger to her now noticeably red lips, saying "shhhh, i can offer you a deal but you have to promise not to tell anyone..."

and that's when the old brain jumped in and told every other part of my body that this was my last chance to bail. "i really have to get back to work. i'm sorry." i hope i let her down gently enough. the look on her face as i backed away either said "i'll never again meet a man like that" or "damn, i almost made that sale."

and that's how i roll. i can block off any innate male tendencies to love and propagate when actually given the opportunity. everything in me said buy the nail buffer and sweep her off her feet, but i didn't. i live on the line between gentleman and loner. there's a chance i could go back there tomorrow, but it wouldn't be the same. when the moment is passed, it's passed. she'll find other impressionable young men with disposable incomes, and i'll at least for the next few days have my shiny and slightly bleeding thumbnail.

the night it got real cold

i would run out and do it all in a second if the clock stopped ticking.

oh, i'm one of thooose people

that's it. i'm here. i'm writing from the ivory tower. fight it i did, but i've now inducted myself into the culturally elite as a result of my actions. tonight i spent a hundred dollars on a week's worth of central market groceries.

it's not that i need goat cheese, but it's a nice alternative to a prepackaged processed cheese appetizer. i mean, what else am i supposed to garnish fresh baked ciabatta with? sun dried tomatoes and freshly minced basil alone aren't gonna cut it.

no, it doesn't stop at being a snobbish grocery whore. i buy those fancy five dollar greetings cards, ride my bike to work, and listen to college radio. what the hell? is free form jazz good? how would i know. aren't you just supposed to listen to it so as to feel special in a town that loves pro wrestling and hummers. that's why i like san antonio. in seattle, i'd have been guaranteed all the drum circles and and organic coffee a little boy could ever hope for, but here being bohemian is a bit harder. and this is coming from someone of actual bohemian blood. it's my destiny to wear tight jeans.

and that brings us to arrested development. a show so witty and subtle that we knew it couldn't last. it happened. they're taking it away from us as punishment for all the obscure literary references we tried passing over the heads of the masses for years. before they take our wes anderson box sets, we must run further underground my blogging brethren and warm ourselves only by the heat of a mocha latte and feed off the proverbial loaf of ciabatta. we will transmit communications via npr. godspeed.

noviembre

is always my favorite month. or at least top five. good movies come out, texas settles into being cold, and the word wreath reenters our collective lexicon. i know i'm wearing shorts and t shirt right now with the windows open, but pretend with me and tend to the yard with my imaginary rake.

further checking off my list of unique things to do in san antonio, this week i bought an old whiskey bottle from the o'neil ford estate, drank shiner as i watched willy nelson sing under the hill country stars, and did the first friday art walk which ends in an argyle sea of 16 year old hipsters with crooked haircuts. all along the way i learned about the incapability of social awkwardness and how it's the one thing that ties us all together as a twenty something populace.

now with the moving out of another semi house mate this week, casa myrtle is feelin extra empty. an emptiness that can only be filled with the sweet smell of brownies and hot wassle. come a wassle with me.

the day of deadline

at one point during the summer i had heard november 1st would be the grand ending deadline to it all. beach club detailed to a T and on to bigger and better things. like new york. i spent one night in july requesting tickets to anything entertaining that was recording live during that first week of november. i was gonna go to the big city, wear autumn clothes, and see some of them movie stars.

i slowly learned that thanksgiving would be the new deadline and anytime between then and then would have to be dedicated to work. ok, fine. i want to see this thing to the end and an extended thanksgiving holiday that includes seeing friends in ny, ny sounds great.

christmas. it'll go til then now and and hopes of visiting people when there are still people to see are pretty much gone. i'll still be working here in san antonio as those around the country head back home to texas. i'm loving my job here but I hate i haven't really gotten to get away from SA that much. one day i'm just gonna jump in my car and fly away. just you wait.

and damnit, i've got a bowl full of candy kids. why won't you come and eat my candy?

the unbearable lightness of being single

i usually get away with avoiding the topic of love. or even like for that matter. maybe that stems from the fact that san antonio has almost entirely avoided offering either up. and i love it.

and herein lies the problem. i am at times fiercely independent. not necessarily in the way of playing by my own rules, skateboarding on top of people's cars, and paying my utilities bill late, but i often like to be alone. independent of others. the freedom to unhook from the grid every once in a while.

i'm also not a fan of compromise. making important life decisions such as finding-a-job-and-moving-somewhere is a decision loaded with enough factors besides "where does she want to go in life?" i am a a big fan of being considerate so i'd probably outweigh my own wants/needs with hers and compromise myself in the end.

this all sounds like the talk of someone without a whole lot of experience in relationships. that's right. but i have observed a lot of relationships in the last year rise and fall on the basis independence and thinking-about-the-future. i'm even asked to offer my advice, and that's like me critiquing the astros. sure i've played a little baseball in my day, but do you see any world series/wedding rings on my finger? do i want one? more than craig biggio would ever know.

this all stems from be right now reading, Superstud by Paul Feig. he created freaks and geeks and directed some arrested developments and pretty much wrote my own autobiography with this book. it's him being a hopeless romantic without having much luck at romance. it's hilarious and eye opening in that same feeling i got from watching wedding crashers. in the end owen wilson gets the girl.

so then maybe i'm getting most of my knowledge of love from pop culture and that means i simply need to step outside a little more often. it is quite beautiful out there. enjoy the weather.

run home, jack

i just got back from my nephew's football game in the montgomery area 4-6 year old league. if you look past the the fact that it's just wrong to stick a kid who can't tie his shoes in pads and a helmet, it's fun to watch your lineage score three of the game's 5 touchdowns. i didn't have that much time to watch the game though as i was designated my 2 year old nephew's caretaker. i gave him my camera as i held on to the reigns and answered his "what is that?" questions as he pointed at everything from a chain link fence to a perplexed one year old. garrison is way too intelligent for his age so tomorrow, for his third birthday i'm getting him books. were my uncles this lame? tomorrow being his birthday party also means being surrounded by thirty-somethings, their yukon-xls, and a myriad of other kids named evan, tyler, and madison.

to top it all off, i'll be watching the astros hit the world series from my native environment with nick on parentally-provided and freshly aquired hdtv. you can literally see each tear falling from jeff bagwell's DLed face. in his memory, i made a run at a full fall classic beard, but commited a sleep deprived trimmer error yesterday and landed myself with a spring training goat.

jinx, buy me a coke.

coley the racist steam engine

once again the internet becomes an anonymous forum for grossly insensitive chit chat. once again, the conversation has been slightly altered to protect the innocent, though mainly to make us not look like total racists. once again we join this conversation in progress…

Cram Leppot: i'll follow up for you
Cornbread is Gr8: thanks pal
Cram Leppot: anytime chum
Cram Leppot: shark food
Cornbread is Gr8: fish heads
Cornbread is Gr8: I wish I was a shark so I could eat chum
Cram Leppot: ha
Cornbread is Gr8: Or Chinese, they eat it too
Cornbread is Gr8: they love chum
Cram Leppot: i'm sure some restaurant in LA serves chum
Cornbread is Gr8: I'm gonna start a chum factory and export all our unused chum into china
Cram Leppot: it's the new thing
Cornbread is Gr8: haha. they eat chum. that's sick
Cram Leppot: well it's their culture
Cram Leppot: don't laugh at their habits
Cornbread is Gr8: i'm high
Cram Leppot: oh goodie
Cornbread is Gr8: i'm just kidding!
Cornbread is Gr8: it sounded like i was
Cram Leppot: well i just had a beer so watch out!
Cram Leppot: i'm loopy lou
Cornbread is Gr8: you're a beer drinker! you're so adult
Cram Leppot: yeah, and after work with the coworkers
Cornbread is Gr8: no one wants to go out for drinks in my job. wah.
Cram Leppot: that's like having an architect hang out at a construction site after work
Cram Leppot: oh wait, we did that too
Cornbread is Gr8: ha
Cram Leppot: now i'm hungry so i'm getting cranky
Cornbread is Gr8: you sound like a mom
Cram Leppot: a mom unto my self
Cornbread is Gr8: exactly
Cram Leppot: that's deep
Cram Leppot: i'm deep
Cram Leppot: deep like a shark
Cornbread is Gr8: that eats chinese people
Cram Leppot: deep like your MOM
Cornbread is Gr8:You're gross! i'm telling her you said that
Cram Leppot: so is your chinese shark mom
Cornbread is Gr8: please don't sleep with my mom
Cram Leppot: “nicowr, come eat your chum dinner and fowtune cookies”
Cram Leppot: that's your chinese shark mom talking
Cornbread is Gr8: is nicowr my chinese name?
Cram Leppot: yes, sound it out
Cornbread is Gr8: that's hard to say
Cram Leppot: i know, try thinking how to spell it
Cornbread is Gr8: yes i see
Cram Leppot: i'm glad we're both smart and can have such conversations
Cornbread is Gr8: don't get boring. let's talk some more about chum
Cornbread is Gr8: Just think of all the chum americans waste
Cornbread is Gr8: we could make so much money shipping out our chum
Cram Leppot: i thought i got to go eat now
Cram Leppot: though you're taking away my appetite
Cornbread is Gr8: NO
Cornbread is Gr8: c'mon, chum. hahahaha.
Cram Leppot: if only we knew someone who specialized in food and drink distribution
Cornbread is Gr8: drink? hmmmm
Cornbread is Gr8: good idea, like clamato
Cram Leppot: chum soda
Cram Leppot: sangria del tiburon!
Cornbread is Gr8: hey that sounds delish
Cram Leppot: it'll kill you
Cornbread is Gr8: only if i eat the eyes
Cram Leppot: a tasty death, like choking on a mcgriddle
Cornbread is Gr8: the chinese say eating the eyes is like eating their SOUL
Cornbread is Gr8: and you can only have so many fish souls
Cram Leppot: i think that's when you take a shark's picture
Cornbread is Gr8: oh yeah and then you eat the picture right?
Cram Leppot: shamu must be very sad
Cornbread is Gr8: he has negative souls
Cram Leppot: i'll go visit him tonight
Cornbread is Gr8: hey i have a sea world too, the real one
Cornbread is Gr8: i will visit shamu. stay home with your beer
Cornbread is Gr8: in my apartment complex I threw some koi in the pool
Cornbread is Gr8: i feed them bread

texas my texas?

i'm past that imaginary half way point here in san antonio and that's got me looking beyond. everything that i stressed about in applying for this residency now gets multiplied by a billion or so. in the past week i've been finding out how the recent grads went about finding their jobs and what cities and firms that looked at. sounds like it's 90% timing and good luck. the remaining 20% could be my portfolio, which i've been staying up late working on so as to prevent spring time stress fests. oh yeah, it's gonna be a 110% effort.

then as kind of a grand escape from all that, i ran up to wimberly, tx this weekend to hang out with kate and the gang. sitting quietly for three hours before everyone woke up, looking at hill country magazines and 2003 central texas christmas lighting schedules, then strolling around on the chilly wood deck overlooking the blanco river makes you wonder why you'd want to leave texas. let it be said here that zoe suggested that i move to phoenix. what and leave this weather?

oh yeah, ut beat ou and the astros beat the braves. all other states suck.

i bet i think this song is about me

though the model may be long gone, i did have some of the final pics i wanted to show off. i present to you the project whose name i shall not mention for fear of curious googlers researching as of yet non-existent beach clubs for as of yet non-existent cities in coastal florida. somewhere along the line, kids will be swimming here and you don't want my deep dark NC-17 secrets traveling across the web to them now do you?





so this is our little jewel in the sand, and going back to the last post i believe this to be good architecture. yet the client payed us upwards of $10,000 to just build this model. the months of detailing cost many thousands more, so this obviously isn't architecture for the masses. could architecture be more than just for the 2% who can aford it? yet, isn't there something liberating about sheet rock and 2 by 4 paradises that can be done in a weekend? yes and yes.

designing homes that fit your lifestyle!

this one has been a long time coming but my conversation with my sister just now makes it urgent. upon finding herself and family with a good chunk of wealth, she is now looking to buy lakeside land and build a new house. i am of course not to the point where i could detail out her dream home so she's taken up the task of browsing southern living floor plans and passing along "architects" names that i should advise her on. the latest is Gary Keith Jackson and hopefully he's not the last. at what point did the extruded street facade become architecture? does wrapping everything in marble make for fine living? what color would you like: golden desert wheat or beigy beige beige? i partially blame you, creator of MTV cribs.

and then of course the same people who live in these mansions fund the creation of cheap soul sucking strip centers that are meant to stand for about 20 years then they all fall down. i can't even name whatever material that is being caked on every new commercial building around. fake stucco? it lacks relation to anything real and tangible so they paint and cornice it to death until it slightly resembles some other type of material. it's architectural tofu.

what's got me most scared is how we rebuild after the hurricanes. first off do you? and secondly if you do, do you write a blank check to contractors and have them throw up placeless floor plans. southern louisiana and mississippi still held traces of thoughtful architecture. a lot of that may be gone because of things beyond our control, but do you just give up and forget all about the shotgun houses?

why do you think americans find europe so enchanting and name our mansions mediterranean? there's a fascination with places that stand the test of time. let's build some of those. if they get destroyed, then learn your lesson and build smarter (not just better). rant complete.

the timeless days of summer

oh how me and the neighborhood boys would play stick ball neath the power lines. we'd fetch tadpoles from the nearby creek. and nothing says summer like an afternoon escape to the local shake n' fries.

for those of us not on the public school seasonal schedule, summer ends this week. i ended up spending the end right where it started with my dad down along the gulf coast. in between i've tossed aside the aqua socks of summers past and donned a pair of wingtips. ok, i am allowed to wear flip flops at work, but i've been told i'm handling this adulthood thing really well either way. then again today i was likened to a 40 year old virgin, trapped between man and boyhood.

earlier on in july during a cliff diving excursion, i misplaced my watch and had been going tan line free ever since. it was borderline liberating for my buttoned down lifestyle. my dad urged me to retrieve the watch in order to be a man, or something, so lo and behold, thank you david for getting it back for me.

so cue the cicadas and fire up the conroe high school fighting tiger marching tiger band, as summer 2005 slowly rumbles to an end. i'm gonna stop short of quoting sappy green day lyrics. it's fall.

day 2

my dad and i tried relating what we'd seen in mississippi to jerry, the developer at st. joe i'm working with. how can you actually justify building an entire city along the gulf coast of florida when it could just as easily be gone in half a day? and building from scratch seams inane when there's so much that needs to be repaired elsewhere. building material costs rise. labor is impossible to come by. makes you think where priorities lie. jerry was in between shook and depressed.

i guess i don't have to wax on such complexities of architecture as i'm just an intern. for the rest of the day my dad and i were running around the deep south trying to make our way back to texas. tip: remember to set your watch to eastern time so you don't your overnight bus. i was slightly better off and had my discount flight that took me back through miami. shaq, will smith, and david caruso send their best.

journey complete.

day 1

my dad ended up jumping on for the trip east. and coming from the man who originally told me to stay far north of any of the hurricane damage, i found it surprising that we took a two hour detour south into mississippi. along the way we met a man who swept sand from the driveway of his house that was no longer there. we met fema workers and national guardsmen. we met a woman who'd stayed for 4 days in new orleans to care for her nursing home patients. we met another who'd watched people die in the convention center. most of these photos are from waveland, mississippi where cars were on top of cars and entire houses were missing save for the foundation and front steps.

amidst all of that, it was nice to see the gulfport applebee's back open and serving hot plates of whatever it is they serve at an applebee's.

$2.89

with things how they are, this might be the last great american road trip. in the next few days i'll drive by the astrodome, up to conroe, head out early monday morning along I-10 as far as that will get me into louisiana, through the backroads of mississippi and alabama and everything else katrina, and into tallahassee simply to deliver a model without risk of destruction. after that, it's a whirlwind flight tuesday down to miami and back up to houston/conroe for the night only to make it back here to work around lunchtime wednesday.

i wasn't kidding in my last post about the delta being hit hard. it wasn't until today though that it made the news. click on the video there too, if you feel like you haven't seen enough footage for the past week and a half.

on a lighter note, while sorting to find some donations i discovered a shirt i haven't actually worn since high school. it's somehow been following me around through all my college closets until now. it might have even made it to italy. anyway, i hope there's some new orleanian going through a big fat plaid phase.

worry some

next week i'll be in new orleans. or i was supposed to be. the thing is me and my model still have to make our way to tallahassee before september 15th, but that now requires a detour and a new pitstop city. either way i'm crossing the path of katrina and taking my camera.

as scary as things are in new orleans right now, i know everything i saw along the mississippi delta back at the beginning of summer is destroyed. the town at the end, ironically named venice, was nothing but mobil homes, shanty baptist churches, and oil refineries butting up against levees. seems like none of that is left.

some of our structural consulatants are headed over there before long to...well consult structure and see if they can save any of the surviving buildings. in our office we're raising money for the new orleans AIA. as stupid as that sounds, architecture is a big part of what makes new orleans new orleans and not just a third world war zone.

oh, and the saints will be playing football here in the alamodome this season. bored spurs fan nonchalantly rejoice.

up the river

considering that one year ago today i stepped off a bus in tuscany, i'm just fine with south texas. this weekend at ted's land was good. good in the way you actually watch the sun rise and fall two days in a row. good in hearing roosters crow and rain falling on the metal roof where you sleep. good in really getting to know your coworkers, bosses, and friends.

out in the middle of nowhere it's very quiet and you can get a lot of thinking done. that's both good and bad. ultimately you reach a higher state of being and a good tan, and you can't trade that for the world.

best week ever?

lying in a hospital bed, covered in cardiogram electrodes, and being surrounded by comatose stroke victims wasn't in my plans for today. but beggers can't be choosers and life is just one bitch of a level scale.

for most of this week i was either moving on up to the third floor or schmoozing with the clients from florida. by schoozing i mean i stayed quiet and watched everyone who wasn't paid by the hour talk architecture. yesterday our team got back together to plan out the rest of this project. i now with my new found knowledge of bigwig talk, chimed in a couple times to earn that $9.50. in between there was plenty of company catered food, an hour long presentation on linoleum, and i got to meet the mayor of san antonio at a genuine ribbon cutting.

today i woke up and was immediately on the floor in back pain. i figured i just slept wrong so i stretched it out, headed to work, and chalked it up to being a man of my age. in fact at the office i was called out on walking like an old man a couple times. soon after i was struggling to breath and really hurting. soon after that there i was in the emergency room.

i was diagnosed with severely pulled parasternal intercostals (i slept severely wrong) so now i'm chalk full of high grade narcotics with a carton of epsom salts primed for a morning bath. sadly, a planned trip to austin tomorrow might be in jeopardy with my inability to operate heavy machinery.

my facester

somehow i broke down and signed back on to facebook right as the summer started. half as a way to pass the time on a quiet night and half to stalk people. well that quiet night has lasted all summer and i'm sure i have a few restraining orders by now. as much as i indulge, i'm still 100% against the likes of facebook, friendster, and my space (the only one i've managed to steer clear of) on the sole basis of acquaintanship. that's all we are nowadays it seems, casual friends who you can too easily read blogs and away messages of or see their naked pictures of (i'm not allowed to tell) from across the country without having to actually talk face to face. know the deepest darkest secrets of someone and then merely give a hello nod when passing on the street. though i'd shake zach braff's hand.

in following suit, i looked up everyone with my last name, and now they're my virtual friends. i'd always felt lonely in the world having never met another, but now i "have" and that makes me feel "good." i even furthered the non-necessity of future high school reunion small talk by linking to this blog and giving out my screenname on facebook. read away semistrangers, even you unknown person in san angelo. my favorite though is big "breasted italian women" searcher who found this thing by searching for big breasted italian women. if my knowledge of yahoo search engine code is right and this thing has been hit before, this blog should be the future search engine champion for big breasted italian women.

if any of y'all are ever actually in san antonio, let's grab a margarita on the riverwalk. i'll even shake your hand.

the most worthless blog entry ever

it's funny the things you occupy your time with when living alone. the things you do that for your own pure amusement, that have no effect on anyone else in the world but yourself. no one to impress, to entertain, compromise for. it makes you understand where your actual interests lie.

take for instance my pile of change. i first started using cash at the age of 7 or 8, but you know just a school lunch here or an arcade marathon there. it all added up to a lot in my mind, and in fact i added it all up every few months to determine my wealth. i actually stored five dollar birthday bills in my old half of an encyclopedia set, in the m-volume, under money. i was a veritable bruce wayne. as time went on, i had 3 or 4 jobs then which for the most part went into savings. any one dollar bills or pocket change i did have was funneled into my then 16 year old gasoline fund. remember back in 1998, gas was cheap and driving out to church seemed like a grand adventure.

since then, i've had 5 or 6 more jobs, all non-cash, yet i'm still carrying around that same pile of change in my little red train tin i got from some junior high band candy fundraiser. now the debit card is king and though my famous frank lloyd wright checks i got right before college are almost all gone, i'm sure i'll find something equally as dorky/pretentious to take me into the next 5 years. so i've made it my personal goal here in san antonio to use those nickels whenever possible (i love parking meters) and simplify my life enough to where i can count it all up, organized by demonination on my bedspread. long story short...er, yesterday when making an impromptu bread run at HEB, i grabbed what i'd stashed in the honda coinscoop and discovered a worn souvenir pressed penny that i'd gotten at fisherman's wharf in san francisco, a family trip back from when i was 10 or 11.

i was content to stand in the humbling nostalgia of the moment and just leave it at that, but no it was too precious so i decided to share it with you.

five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundredpieces of basswood

how do you measure, measure a month? in headaches? in bandades? in runs to hobby lobby?

it should have been about a month, but it kept going and now i'm afraid to figure out how long it took. let's just agree that for all of july 2005 my sole purpose was to create this model of a florida beach club. it was my existence.

outside of that, i'd have to say july 2005 was quite a good month in terms of living in san antonio and dealing with those responsibilities and feeling the passing of time a little bit more than i'm used to. august means it gets even hotter and i have to contend with back to school sales/tax free weekends at the mall, like i did yesterday. carry on children as i go tie shopping and get my car inspected.

and make my little doll houses. tomorrow i unveil this thing that i finished on this sunday night and hopefully start anew on a few drawings and definitely wear my new shirt.

you actually measure in 32nds of an inch and eyeball anything smaller. and on a similar note, this month i remembered to pay my RENT.

"have you met my ex-wife?"

that's the line my dad has used countless times in the past to make in-laws laugh and relative strangers feel uncomfortable. that's the line he used today when his nurse came in to check on him. that's the same nurse we would later learn is the mother of a girl i once dated which led to me making akward conversation and feeling relatively uncomfortable.

chalk it up to our famed y-chromosone and our unwillingness to treat serious stuff too seriously. for the first time today i heard the story about how my dad (and his friend john (who was my junior high principal)) arrived back from their long trip to india in the early seventies. keeping in mind that he hadn't seen his wife (my mother (not his nurse) in six weeks, and could have possibly gone through a beattles-esque rebirth during that time, donned the traditional indian robe and head piece he'd bought there, in the airport bathroom. my mom failed to recognize the skinnier, tanner indian man who looked like her husband. But of course her mother (my grandmother (his in-law)) picked him out of the crowd i'm sure with relative bewilderment.

another revelation by dad concerned the previously mentioned post-op yard trenching therapy session. why he didn't dislocate his new shoulder, he did cut up a few sprinkler system pipes which he had to fix and relocate. doing so required hours of crouching which led to his knee surgery a year later and made his legs constantly fall asleep. now he believes that that same poor circulation caused the current clots.

again, he is feeling fine but is still confined to his hospital room. furthermore, today he discovered room service and with it their nice selection of ice cream. i promise i'll tell his donkey delivery story soon.

m.a.t.

my dad went into the hospital late last night because of a blood clot in his leg. a CAT scan revealed that he had further clotting in his lungs. considering all this, he's not in pain and is more annoyed by the fact that he has to sleep on his back until it clears up. hell he can't be anywhere but his back for the next few days. at first i was quick to point out his poor diet of red meat and ice cream, but it's more likely hereditary or caused by cancer. the tests haven't come back yet.

because of this, he's having to back out saturday of his first wedding in thirty whatever years of photographing weddings. possibly the saturday after that too. he had asked me to shoot this weekend's, but he found a replacement. an old coworker of his back from when he first started off.

it's nice to see that he's confident enough in me to take over one wedding. however i definitely don't feel ready to take over the family part time business and hopefully he's not ready to give it up. after all, this is the same man who two days after having replacement shoulder surgery, rented a gasoline powered trencher and tore up the back yard.

turn and face the strain

once again, it all changes. my life got flip turned upsidedown. three times this week i step outside of casa myrtle and actually make friends here and now it's time for them to leave. it's in between sad and annoying. soon enough too, the fall semester starts up and i lose any of the few casual summer visits that i've had anyway. in adulthood there is no summer, just hotter workdays.

even if i don't see any human faces outside of the cast of everybody loves raymond, there's always my love for correspondence. within the last few days i've gotten letters/emails/postcards/phone calls from austin, malibu, boston, vancouver, san fransisco, tehran, london, barcelona, paris, and seabrook, texas of all places. actually i think it's easier to be friends if you never have to meet face to face, which is why the upcoming weeks scare the hell out of me.

christmas in july and the porkchop shaped stocking

a cool front came through and my family was in town bearing random gifts of cranberry juice, tortilla chips, and porkchops. honestly i love porkchops as much as anyone else who eats porkchops, but now i have enough to make anyone who eats porkchops very sick of eating porkchops very soon. and this is right as i'm starting to eat less meat anyway so i'll have to put that on hold for a while.

i introduced them to all things lf including my office and us "accidentally" coming across 5 or 6 buildings across downtown. it's great when we're just walking along and my mom points out jokingly "is that yours too?" and i say yes. oh and my dad elaborated on his donkey at the strip club story for the inlaws. one day i'll tell you.

if you'll excuse me it's a blistery 81 degrees outside and my mittens are primed for sledding and snowball skirmishes. ta ta.

the ice cream man cometh (steve, willy, and kevin too)

i had been hearing his rendition of the entertainer outside for a few weeks now, but it wasn't until i saw his tricked out special school bus painted blue that i understood. furthermore, i drove by what i guess was his house the other night cause i spotted the 300 pound hairy backed (how did i know he was hairy?) mexican man clearing out his ice cream inventory shirtless (that's how i knew) and maybe doing a little dance.

my next favorite character is fifty cent steve. i call him that cause he looks like a steve and keeps asking me in my front yard for change to make a phone call. he's a waifish hippy type, looking a month unwashed so i guess he's calling his stock broker.

i chose willy's barber shop from the yellowpages yet the description didn't tell me that i'd be the only white kid amongst three 60 year old men chatting in spanish over the piped in selena dance numbers. turns out willy himself is is an seventy year old, 8 times married, world war II dischargee, whose youngest son is 17. after showing me miguel's prom picture, willy proceeded to give advice to my generation including what to do with those wild girls who wear the short skirts and the thongs.

maybe not my favorite but definitely the most talkative is kiosk kevin. he called out to me from his european frangrance booth at the mall only to ask what i was shopping for. that led to discussing my office's dress code, to discussing architecture in general, to comparing the interior of nearby abercrombie and fitch to that of historic russian cathedrals. no kidding. in the end, i think i convinced him to be an architect. i like san antonio.

"you picked the wrong city"

the more i think about it the more i loved london. at any given second there's a million things going on and you can't possibly perceive everything all at once. in effect you find your little nitch somewhere in there and go about life knowing that nitch passionately well. it's hard to stop something so big and diverse and that quick on its feet.

i'm glad all my friends there are safe and well.

as for san antonio, it's been very hot. my attempt at eating lunch at alamo plaza was shortened by 102 degrees of pure fahrenheit. and it's been staying in the hundreds up until 8pm sometimes. i did spot a few strikes of lightning last night yet found even fewer drops of rain on my car this morning, so i think i'll basically be staying high and dry here until one of my neighbors leaves a sprinkler on and unattended.

le tour de tejas

i'll call it the great extended indepence weekend of reccuring themes 2005.

canada day friday started with me going to cycle world again to buy bike tubes and soon after figuring out that new tubes also refuse to fill up. after drowning my flat tire sorrows in a two-for-one pizza deal from pizza classics, i find myself with nick and others on our way to hang out with the real world austin cast at some san antonio bar that i forget the name of. for legal reasons, plans changed at the last second which was fine since i hadn't seen the show and could generally care less for the show. the plan change involved us and dissolved real world groupies hanging out in line for popular downtown gay dance club. me not being gay and nick not being gay and neither of us having homosexual worthy dance moves, back out at the last second and called it a canada day night soon after.

saturday morning i downed a few more pieces of my wonderful discount pizza, which was cold seeing as i still didn't have a microwave, and threw my discount bike tubes in my trunk. third trip in a week to cycle world discovered that my pump bought in trip one and not the tubes bought in trip two was the problem. also being in a bike shop that often makes you catch lance fever and almost makes you almost want to buy a yellow wrist band. from there i was out of town. i stopped in austin to pick up jennifer, picked up a bit more of the lance vibe with banners draped everywhere, and picked up some austin nostalgia seeing as i hadn't been back since i moved out. our ride to conroe involved jen warning me not to see war of the worlds, agreeing that the real world was the stupiest thing ever, and her repeatedly ejecting my ben folds cd i had just bought at cheapos. at home i soon discovered that my nephew's 6th birthday involved not surprisingly a pizza party. four more pieces of pizza accomplished my mom and i decided to check out the new conroe theater and see the only late showing which of course was war of the worlds. in an even later showing back at the house i was about asleep when an hour and a half showing of real world austin came on. i mean, come on, i was feeling all nostalgic for atx so how could i resist?

the late owlness and all day pizza diet apparently put me out until 12:30pm on sunday which may be the latest i've ever slept. a chat with dad over mom's pork roast lunch attempted to teach me that i should never go near another gay dance club. soon after my mom and i were off to watch fireworks at my aunt's lake house and my dad was off to photograph a wedding that i would later find out was done by a gay preacher who proceeded to take advantage of the first slow dance of the recpetion with his partner. my dad didn't tell me if he took a picture. oh, and at my aunt had luckliy just cooked a nice big pork roast for dinner.

america day monday was pretty unique seeing as it involved cliff diving with david and tacos and gretchen all back in austin - though jennifer is still a music nazi on the way back. oh yeah, i jammed my knee into some rock climbing out of the water and gretchen jammed her knee through a glass pane in her door and so we were both sitting there pretty gimp with various amounts of blood coming out of both of us. the late drive last night involved the windows rolled down, fireworks going off all the way down I-35, ben folds playing loudly on the speakers, and my parent's 30 year old wedding present microwave nesteled in the back seat alongside a new bike pump and a pair of inflated schwinn tires.

today i overslept and ate warm leftover pizza.

summer reading list

where the sidewalk ends is quite possibly the greatest combination of paper and ink ever created. that's why i'm giving it to nephew alex for his sixth birthday this weekend and that's why i'm reading his copy now. i'm reading these poems and looking at the illustrations and each one is taking me back fifteen years and conjuring up vivid memories of sitting in the b.b. rice elementary school library being read these poems and shown those illustrations in the typical 180-degree-make-sure-all-the-children-see-it fashion. good god it's like yesterday. damnit "iclke me, pickle me, tickle me too" is beautiful.

so you can see why i'm turning off the endless everybody loves raymond and friends blocks to actually read a bit more this summer. i've already run though the da vinci code (very interesting topic, very horrible writing) like the rest of america and spent a good couple hours at the laundromat last sunday starting a "brave new world." i raided my closet in conroe for all the old classics my dad had stolen from libraries of all the schools he's worked at since the late sixties and with that i rediscovered my love for that old book smell. after those i end my harry potter protest, and after those i should begin my correspondence course on creative writing which takes care of my elusive humanities credit, and after all that i write my own great american (or in most cases, britsh) novel and hopefully, just hopefully learn to communicate a complex thought without resorting to overly-hyphenated and drawn out run-on sentences.

i think i will name my son shel.

hallelujah

you could say i'm now situated and full on into the routine of work, eat, sleep like all the other little adults. granted i do love my job so the hours kinda fly by and friday afternoon i stayed there a bit longer before heading back into my one room isolation chamber.

small things work well to break up the normalcy like winning nba championships. immediately after the game thursday i witnessed what seemed to be a southern texas apocolypse complete with car horns, car crashes, fireworks shooting at me on the freeway, and a giant neon star of david which i think means the second coming of jesus christ.

this evening was the parade and enough player introductions to get me caught up with the san antonians. tomorrow i try again with the bike pump and see if i can explore beyond my front porch.

stir crazy in spanish america

i made a trip to HEB for the second night in a row to pick up a new box of floss and to simply see other living beings after the sun went down. box of floss? or is it floss container? am i having conversations with myself?

the nights only get longer from here...literally!

go spurs go?

i can't really hear the game from the computer too well cause the window unit is on full throttle and they're losing quite badly anyway. it was neat to see from the time i first interviewed in april to now that the ubiquitous "go spurs go" signs have become more ubiquitous and the entire city seems to be naming their children manu.

i gave the riverwalk a few attempts today in search of the perfect father's day gift but unless dad want's a don't mess with texas tshirt or a cd of peruvian flute music, i got nothin.

also today i finished the 3 day training of the CAD program that lf bought back in the reagan administration and i swear bears a striking resemblance to LOGO. if you don't know what i'm talking about then maybe you didn't take keyboarding with ms. parsley back in fifth grade and you don't know to not "copy that floppy." seriously i think that film introduced the idea that we were even capable of copying that floppy.

saint anthony and me

hola. i'm quickly learning what's it's like to live alone, work a full time job, and be a san antonian. basically it's really quiet and you get lost a lot.

but hell i like it here. i live in the historic tobin hill neighborhood just north of downtown. i say it has a lot of character, yet my parents say don't go outside at night. i've filled the hardwood floors to the brim with empty seats and now the fridge is full of HEB produce. THIS is the HEB mecca.

work is good even though i failed to learn many of the 50 new names. i can't even remember the company dog's name. i think when i get my own desk and do more than play with scotch tape all day, i might meet people. i foresee great things.

and then while walking through downtown a family asked me how to get to the alamo. tourists! but i guess that means that i'm a local now even though i'm pretty sure i pointed in a completely wrong direction. i want to keep on exploring and eat in every restaurant i come across but the first round of bills has left me bankrupt so i think i'll just stay in and keep eating soup left over from austin.

both the irish and the scots had magical powers. the irish made pots of gold and the scots made tape.

here i go

conroe. austin. castiglion fiorentino...san antonio.

985 miles from nowhere

cabin fervor

my dad and I are out to find the end of the mississippi. not the minnesota end of course but the vast delta, marshy, louisiana end. conquistador style. it's good cause i need an escape from all things cable tv and central air conditioning. i came down with some nauseous headache the other night i think cause i had been inside all day.

just for a dramaic touch, imagine this as huckleberry finn's escape from the tedium of st. petersburg only my dad isn't a large black man named jim and the river raft role will be played by a 1999 honda accord.

check the papers and the tv

the oasis is gone. that definitely is a sign it was time to leave austin, with all it's beauiful sunsets and huge burning decks and all. i know they'll rebuild it eventually but it's just sad to see. watch the video.

at the same time i saw that in my inbox, the AIM ad reminded me of a little show premiering tonight on WB called Beauty and the Geek. Read more here. Fans of this blog will remember Lauren B. and her rise to fame in the Lingerie Bowl 2005 but this one is big and she'll be mostly clothed this time. oh wait i was wrong, watch the video.

making conroe even prouder and again proving that CHS cheerleaders turned homecoming queen candidates turned underwear models can make a difference, '00 graduate Blair T. is apparently gracing the pages of playboy, earning co-ed of the week honors. i guess that means she actually followed through with college. i'd link to a picture but i try to keep this blog parental advisory free.

other than petty gossip and yellow journalism, i do use my time in conroe to catch up on the world. deep throat has revealed himself and my dad's long standing belief that it was Bush (41) is wrong. my parents we're in DC when it happened and remember reading the washington post in the morning and wondering why someone would want to steal campaign buttons. i don't know but apparently it changed america.