Manhattan Visa Commercial

• small refrigerator/freezer found on craigslist: $75
• man with a van from Brooklyn willing to move said refrigerator from Chelsea-Midtown to the East Village: $35
• tip: $10
• hours spent scouring the website in search of the perfectly-sized appliance for tiny new loft: too many
• five adorably pleasant, flamingly homosexual men emphatically illustrating the proper solvent to use to remove tape residue while additionally attempting to sell the crystal chandelier from the cieling of the disbanding Gay Cable Network Archives office space: priceless.

hard times, good times

New York is keeping me busy enough to not blog as often as I like.

Last Thursday was my office's holiday party. Very swanky compared to the past few years of Seattle parties. We were at Public, a restaurant and lounge not far from my place in NoLIta on Elizabeth street. Servers circulated with over-designed canapes that took mad skills to eat, and everyone got super drunk on the prosecco being circulated and open bar of chic specialty cocktails (who'd have thought to use lemongrass as a straw? people truly devoted to beverages, apparently.). It was a swell time and a great success. When everyone was ready to go home / too sloshed to remain at a company function, a bunch of us braved the torrential rain (someone took my umbrella so I knowingly took someone else's, and I am still feeling guilty) to trek a half-dozen blocks to a karaoke bar.

Though I can say I wasn't as drunk as many (and was blessed with a high alcohol tolerance... but is that truly a blessing?), I was loose enough with my coworkers of five weeks after a few drinks to do karaoke myself. Which is pretty impressive, as I tend to hold my bubbly temperament down a bit until I feel comfortable, and I'm not one to scramble to the stagelights. I sang "I Will Survive," accompanied on stage by every single female coworker. It's one of two songs you can get me to do in karaoke (along with "Brown-Eyed Girl"). The best part was my sloshed coworkers. The normally-stoic dude crumbling down on the floor to sing a power ballad, and the just-out-of-school blonde girl from the midwest doing a great version of "Baby Got Back?" Priceless. And I didn't even pay for a single thing that night.

Downside of that night was thinking that I was close to home and deciding to walk through lower Manhattan at 3 am. I had started somewhat near, but then the afterparty brought me twenty-plus blocks from my place in SoHo. I was wearing treacherous shoes and completely biffed it in an intersection walking along super-busy Houston Street. I thought I was generally okay, but had to pull chunks of skin out of my cable-knit tights when I got home and went to put on pajamas. I now have a painful, skinless knee. Gross!

Next day was a going-away party for a good friend moving back to our hometown near Seattle, and I was so pooped and sore that I couldn't make it past midnight (which, if you're not familiar, is early and not even really past dinnertime here). I did stay long enough however to turn the penises someone had defiled his going-away poster/card on the wall with into palm trees and was quite pleased with myself.

With my closest friend out of town last weekend, I was able to regroup a bit and tackle Christmas shopping. I went to Bust Magazine's Craftacular bazaar on 18th in Chelsea. Which ended up being totally awesome and overwhelming. Not only did I purchase a couple out of twenty-five or so things I reeeeealllly wanted (as gifts, too, alas my restraint!), I got to meet Amy Sedaris as she promoted her "I Like You" domestic advice parody book, and even bought one in which she fortuitously wrote "good times! hard times." But more on why that's fortuitous later. Maneuvering through the crowds five minutes later, I actually physically bumped into Chris Kattan eating a slice of cheese pizza while walking. It was funny because, even the huge Saturday Night Live fan that I am, I don't think I'd have recognized him if I hadn't actually been close enough to bump into him while he was speaking; the voice was what did it for me. I'm not sure what he was doing there, but he spent a good hour lingering around Amy Sedaris' table while seemingly not speaking to her at all. Strange times. To round out the celebrity-fest, I heard that a Project Runway designer was also selling wares there, but I know nothing of such things, so I'll have to trust on that one.

Things have been going well at work. It can be stressful at times due to different personalities, and the fact that I'm still settling in, and people generally take things a little more seriously than they did in Seattle, and do more work hours and less lunch hours. Having an office three times the size might contribute to the feeling of more busy-ness as well. However, I love my projects. I've been working on a city initiative to turn asphalt (really pathetic, encircled in tall chain link fence) schoolyards into better school and community playgrounds. It's very urban, and not a lot of actual planting, but with my interest in education, and here a direct involvement in designing for and with children, it makes me happy.

And then yesterday the bomb dropped. A dozen or so people were laid off. I happened to be at home sick that morning, and waltzed in at almost noon, totally oblivious to the fact that coworkers were dropping like flies. It was a mystery to me initially what the situation really was, though I overheard the general news, and then we had an ambiguous meeting, I didn't know who, or how things were affected. With a slow economy, construction and development is directly affected. Architects were hit much harder and earlier, but the effects are beginning to trickle down. We had a large project financed by Lehman, and that went away. Lots of people were light on work because less work is coming in. There are more firms competing for less work. I think I was safer because I am needed on my long-term, public sector project, and compared to over half of the people in the office who started in the past year, my almost four years give me comparitive seniority. I don't know...but I do feel awkward that I was hired just a month and a half ago; the last one in the door and just another hungry mouth to feed. I just started and am still easing into the office; I don't even really know anyone well yet. But everyone's pretty shaken up, and it will probably be a while before things feel at all normal. Everyone's afraid that it's going to happen again.

Also, no salary increases this year. Boo. Hard times. Enjoy what we have, folks. Don't take it for granted.

Happy Holidays.

the fast lane

It's a well-known fact that time flies much faster here in New York.

It generally happens as you get older, time whooshing by, but it's amazing how the hustle of the city just pulls you along until another week has passed by. I constantly find myself incredulous that it's another Monday/Friday/deadline, etc.

I'm currently wearing myself out trying to move into my totally adorable and incredibly tiny (around 200 sf) loft apartment- it's like starting over from scratch, with most of my things in storage in Seattle and not worth the effort to ship out. The blank slate is kind of fun, but mostly overwhelming.

I spent all evening after work in search of things like towels and shower curtain rings and found myself ravenous, achey, and exhausted at eleven pm when I wrapped it up, trudging back to the East Village to drop my heavy, awkward bags after their retail jaunt and subway journey.



This place will totally wear you out, carrying you away in the swarm of the city. I can't wait to have a furnished apartment to lay down in after a long day! I'm about two steps from walking into Macy's or CB2 and putting all the furnishings I need on my card and asking them to take it to my place. I'm sleeping in SoHo until I've got things to sit/lay on.

Life here is great, but man, is it a lot of work.

On top of all this, I'm supposed to be spending this time enjoying shopping for gifts for others and not stressing out over storage solutions at Bed Bath and Beyond as I did today... so now instead of a christmas present for grandma, I have some lovely moss-green bath towels.

Will write about my crazy past few days involving my knee wound and meeting of celebrities when I have more time and can do it justice. For now, I'm going to try and get my nightly five and a half hours of sleep (ouch).

CRAP

the market for recycling is in a slump, says the new york times.



what are we going to do with all of our junk?

(please try to make less)

photo- chris jordan

in my pants

definitely lewd, but very funny and a quality music video, courtesy SNL (oh, andy samberg....)-

lolcat of the day

...they were the worst of times

as a followup related to my previous happy post...

It's funny how we're constantly hearing recession recession recession economy economy economy and I still don't feel like it directly affects me one bit. I still have a job. I have friends (also in the architecture industry) without jobs, so I say this and knock on wood, as though I've been at my firm quite a while, I don't want to jinx anything. If I were to lose my job (like all the WAMU employees in Seattle), then I might be singing a different tune.

However, my circumstances, lifestyle and viewpoint have left me unscathed. My money is not in stocks. I don't rely on sales or commissions for my income, and I don't own a home to lose value. I don't spend a lot of money on things, and I certainly don't think about money that much. The tiny socialist/communist inside of me is quite pleased with the recession. Does that sound blasphemous?

My outlook, further explained: I like the economy slowing down because our economy was so unnaturally consumptive, like some gurgling, belching, shitting monster, that it was unhealthy. We all are now beginning to re-evaluate... the driving of giant gas-slurpers, the constant replacement of absolute-newest technologies, the entitlement to travel often, the bottled water. The culture of owning and not sharing, of consuming and not conserving. The exponential growth multiplied until it exploded and crashed.

And now we learn that life is more than economic growth. And I like that, because there is so much more richness to human existence than many seem to imagine. Take a breath- stop watching the DOW, stop shopping online, and enjoy dinner with your parents. Listen to some music before you go to bed instead of fiddling with an iphone; watch fireflies and moths in the evenings.

Screw the economy. History shows that art flourishes during harder economic times. People think differently. More creatively, perhaps, because they don't have the luxury of not thinking carefully. So now we are free to sit around and tell stories, or play poker, or make collages. We can have a less-lavish holiday and enjoy eachother's presence; let our hair grow a littler scragglier between cuts and put less meat in our sandwiches. Because it's the most capitalistic folk who are feeling the pinch, so who's going to judge now, even if they would have before?

It's a hard lesson to learn, for many of us. It's too bad for those who took mortgages that it turns out they couldn't afford. It's hard to be unemployed. It's hard for small businesses and the self-employed to stay afloat. But I do beleive that it's a lesson that life does go on- we have to learn- of conserving, of being creative and careful, of being thoughtful and ingenuitive. The identity our culture had gained- of being over-consumptive, of hoarding, and as big and fat and excessive and dumb and wasteful, was not something I identified with as a person. I didn't enjoy calling myself an American, or even more generally, a westerner, when those cultural associations came along. We are also a culture of pioneers, of entrepreneurs, and idealists; of craftsmen, and of great artists, and now is our time to show that we have not lost that cultural identity.

And that is exciting, and heartening. I realize that the stoic "it's good for you" outlook that was installed in me by my German/Scandinavian upbringing may sound harsh. But it's true that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. We were getting too soft, too flabby and spineless as a culture, and now we can all re-evaluate. It is a great thing.

they were the best of times

I am doing what I really want to be doing with my life right now. That's pretty awesome. A year ago I didn't have too much of an idea what I wanted to be doing. I was a bit at a loss.

I would say I'm a pretty passionate/opinionated person about things that are important to me, and one of those things is doing good things with one's energy. I think it's our duty, especially those of us with decent educations, to use our faculties to make a positive impact.


I became a landscape architect because I wanted to make great places, for people and for the world. When I started working, I began to learn how ideology crossed with pragmatism in everyone's life in different ways, and started trying to figure out how to simultaneously live for my own well-being and happiness as well as do right by the world.

Situational difficulties and distractions took precedence for a year or two, and I found myself asking where I really wanted to be, as I was struggling to feel passionate about what I was doing with life.

I wouldn't have been able to predict that where I'd eventually take myself would be so great for me both personally and professionally. I made a gamble based on a social/cultural instinct, and it's turning out to be wonderful for me with regard to my life's efforts and personal/professional focus. I'm designing for environmental education in urban environments as I've been aiming to do since my research grant on environmental learning.

My current project work has me designing public schoolyards in Brooklyn: completely barren asphalt yards to be turned into proper playgrounds through contracts from New York Department of Parks. It is so rewarding to be working with students and communities in designing better learning and community spaces, and helping people learn and grow to value their environments by providing them with good ones.

I have been going through series of meetings and design charettes with school staff, community members, and young students themselves. Working with them directly is such an important and tangible reminder as to why I do what I do every day. There were days when I'd be at work in Seattle and question whether I was doing what I really what I found valuable with my 9 hours every day. So I made a change, and the opportunity waiting for me turned out to be wonderful.

Oddly enough, I'm working for the same firm, and the office environment and culture can be more stressful and difficult by far than my old office. Granted, I'm still getting accustomed, and don't have the luxury of experience or comfort in the big, new, New York office. But I enjoy it because I love what I'm working on, and it's a challenge. I can't imagine using my brain and finite time on earth to do something like trade stocks or sell ads or take photos of famous people or fly charter jets, no matter how capable I was, or how financially rewarding it was. I spent some time teaching myself how to balance personal benefit with that of others in life and work, but I still believe passionately that we owe it to eachother to do right by our communities. We have responsibilities in concentric rings: from within -ourselves- to those close to us, radiating outward to our outermost communities of global proportions. Call your mother, send a card to remind her you love her. Travel less, consume less to remind your fellow global citizens you love them, too.

So here's to you, PS 170. Even if the economy was great, I can't imagine myself taking a resort-design position to make more money and receive the immediate gratification of travel. Your kids are awesome and I feel honored to be given the opportunity to do right by all of you.