Que Ricco

2010-02-09T07:17:00.001-08:00

2009-09-04T21:03:00.001-07:00

Got tight last night on absinthe and did knife tricks.

- Hemingway

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

2009-08-30T15:20:00.001-07:00

I love words like phenomenological and sublime. I love concepts like topoi and discussions on priori. More simply, I love days spent in meetings in which these are our subjects. Teased out and transcribed. We animate them with hand gestures over apple-crumble.

At present you need to live the question

2009-08-24T21:58:00.000-07:00

indeed.

candles and soaps

2009-08-24T20:33:00.001-07:00

I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes

Overheard on 30 Rock

2009-08-21T20:30:00.000-07:00

How hilarious is the term "frenemy"

"If there's one thing I've learned, it's keep your friends close and your enemies so close, you're almost kissing."

Agree to Disagree

2009-08-18T10:25:00.000-07:00

Pandora just sent me an email as follows:

You Are Approaching Your Free Listening Limit

We wanted to let you know that you are approaching your monthly free listening limit. Pandora gives you 40 hours of free listening per month.

They graciously offered for that just 99 cents I could be granted unlimited listening for the rest of the month. Obviously I don't care about a dollar, and were there somewhere I could just stuff my loose change into a jar and be done with it then I would gladly give them more of it. They could have all the loose change in my wallet in fact, if only they could come up with a better system. A WHOLE 3.50 IS YOURS PANDORA! You can have it for the cost of the time it would take me to fill out your form with my full name and address, credit card info, billing info, agreeing to terms and conditions, not agreeing to email notification of cool events and offers in my area, etc.

PS- Your music genome algorithm sucks. Next time, don't return 4 Smashing Pumpkins songs on my Radiohead station.

Kummerspeck

2009-08-15T22:28:00.000-07:00

A German noun whose literal translation is "grief bacon" but is used colloquially to mean the excess weight gained from emotional overeating. Apparently I'm the kind of woman who can down a quart of ultra pasteurized whole milk in a sitting.

yummy

2009-08-15T08:53:00.000-07:00

I made my own yogurt (not from scratch.) I bought plain yogurt and added frozen fruit, raspberry preserves and a little cream to thin it out. I must say, even better than that 3 dollar package of Islandic skyr.

That sexy trivet pedestal is Alessi. And it's Sara's. And I totally covet it.

RhinoScripting

2009-08-14T13:20:00.000-07:00

Danny told me there was a script I could lift from theverymany blog that would run a Voronoi diagram (which detects boundaries for "nearest neighbor" condition) on a point cloud. Not true. there is text you can lift and attempt to run, but I didn't get vectors, all I got was heartache.

while not browsing fffound

2009-08-13T16:31:00.001-07:00

I read what was available from Google Books on Simulacra + Simulation, a book by Jean Baudrillard.

Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory - precession of simulacra - it is the map that engenders the territory and if we were to revive the fable today, it would be the territory whose shreds are slowly rotting across the map

overheard on Jon Stewart

2009-08-12T18:59:00.001-07:00

"that's what happens when you have a melting pot- the stew gets darker."

a fervor yet unseen

2009-08-12T18:30:00.000-07:00

I, Kristina Ricco, hereby solemnly swear that I will not check ffffound or Anthropologie for a week. A whole week, starting tomorrow.

imagine...

2009-08-11T17:10:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the greatest blogsphere faux-pas, I forgot to credit. Thanks to Danny who found this while browsing the ever-wonderful Design Within Reach shop

The strangest of phenomena

2009-08-11T15:33:00.000-07:00

My desk faces out the only window in my bedroom and looks nearly straight into the identical looking window of my neighbor (whom I have never met before.) I've been sitting at this desk for hours and have yet to see a single silhouette move past their catatonic eyes. The houses stare blankly back at me, as if they've been empty for years now, their mismatched curtains and patio furniture relics of inhabitants long gone. The sky has been cloudy and latent. I'm pretty sure I'm the only person living in this city anymore.

Roommate wisdom

2009-07-17T17:20:00.000-07:00

A microwave is just so much more practical than a toaster oven, ya know? Like you can't make popcorn in a toaster oven...

-Sara

I <3 my bike.

2009-07-16T09:44:00.000-07:00

Sad. So sad.

Incomplete

2009-07-06T08:17:00.000-07:00

I'm spending my summer as a teaching assistant to the architecture pre-college program. It's easy to forget that students who are 16 have yet to develop a vocabulary beyond SAT requirements and in class I try introduce the difference between an approximation and an abstraction which illicits mostly just blank stares.

The first assignment was an abstracted line drawing, Composition_1. The most common question was "how do I know when it's finished?"

Good question, right? How do you know when something is finished?

Remember Cam'ron?

2009-06-07T15:12:00.000-07:00

What means the world to you?

KR_100

2009-05-29T14:44:00.000-07:00

I haven't had Facebook for about a year now. Which is about as long as I've been living (by choice) with 100 things. This past week, these two conditions of my life converged when a very old friend of mine found me on the internet and sent me an email.

The email exchange was pleasant and topical in the way that people interact after not speaking for the last decade. I've lived over 1/2 my life since the last time this person and I spoke, and this is a bizarre place in my life for our paths to intersect again. I found myself trying to explain things like my limited possessions in a way that a stranger might be able to digest, which is difficult to do because although owning 100 things is a manifestation which is easily identifiable, its genesis is not. And I found myself wondering, why do I live with 100 things?

Why do I live with 100 things:

Well as a basic concept it made sense. I was moving a lot this past year and found myself frequently interacting with those forgotten artifacts that live in the back of closets maybe 2-3 times every six months (where normally a person would interact with these things once every couple years.) Forced to confront an increasing pile of "things I keep but never use" I decided to reassess. When I moved in the beginning of the summer I got rid of 50% of everything I owned. I did this every time I moved that summer and by fall I owned about 100 things. I wrote about this experience extensively in the beginning of this blog. Perhaps driven by OCD, I developed a list of 100 things I thought I needed at the time and decided to live by a numbered list.

There are holes in this I realize. And I've been struggling for the past 2 semesters to help clear up some personal issues I've had. Reading Possessions and the Extended Self by Russell Belk has put me into a bit of a stupor trying to sort through some of these things. I am even further confounded when I try to mentally resolve KR_100.

KR_100 is the documentation of my journey. I have 98 things, a list of these things and the container they all go in. The 98 things are changing fairly regularly and are the subject of a pseudo-artistic, pseudo-phycological interest of a friend of mine who has taken under documenting these changes. This started with a thorough photography session that took individual portraitures of each of the objects (and for kicks, 1 large photo of all the objects together.) This was right as I was leaving for Doha and was a brief snapshot of time. As soon as I got to Doha things were already back in rotation, swapping out sleeveless shirts for black shawls as my needs changed between countries. This presented an issue. To participate in KR_100, my friend needed images of my new things, and a list of things as I was getting rid of them. Even more complicated, there were things that I purchased there and cycled out there, so how do we capture these? This is the most confounding part of my lifestyle: I kept the things I got rid of. I stopped using them, crossed them off my list and made a place in my closet for them. That means when I packed to come home, there were things in my suitcase which I hadn't touched for months, and only kept for the purposes of documentation. And now I'm back to square 1, I have a pile of "things I keep but don't use." This is like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle but for art. My habits have been observed and are now changed. What do I think about that?

This habit-rabbit-hole goes deeper still. The final outcome of the project might be a tangible artifact. Right now it lives as digital images, but there might be a time when there is an object of my objects. If, according to Belkin, possessions are extensions of the self, ownership of this generated object is like ownership of me in some way. This actually happens to some degree in the act of gift giving but perhaps that's a post for another time.

To arrive in the place you started and know it for the very first time

2009-05-09T04:25:00.000-07:00

And just like that we're home again.

Well I say just like that because it happened so quickly, not that any part of the return trip was easy. It was a 14 hr return flight after a series of just incredibly full days. It's so good to be home, despite the jet-lag, which you can tell is an issue because I'm writing this at 6 am, which really to me is like 1 pm. This could go on for a couple weeks I hear so if you're an early riser hit me up, because now I'm up with the sun and in bed by grandma standards.

homeless person entourage

2009-04-24T01:45:00.001-07:00

A week ago I posted this photo of Anne ptfo in studio. We're all getting a little punchy here, but I thought maybe you'd enjoy what she gave me in return:

Say what?!

2009-04-24T01:16:00.000-07:00

(Last) Last Day of Classes, how weird. I guess with the possibility of grad school (insh'allah) on the horizon I wasn't as sad about it as I thought I'd be. Plus I'm still doing work, so while it was technically the last day of class I don't really feel any different. To celebrate the end of the semester there was a little party out on the lawn (Cutq) with shwarma and American football. Oh and an inflatable slide. Basically it was carnival, only 1 day long and no alcohol. Awesome

2009-04-20T08:38:00.001-07:00

Thesis is almost over. Just 9 more days...

Namesies

2009-04-20T04:30:00.000-07:00

Samesies

Love to hate it or hate that you love it

2009-04-17T07:11:00.000-07:00

List of Final things to do:

(2) Inward Odyssey papers
(1) Inward Odyssey term paper
Design for People & Planet Poster
Doha publication
Thesis Documentation
Thesis

Sleeping in studio is a common sign of thesis-fatigue.

Not that I'm counting or anything

2009-04-11T04:11:00.000-07:00

But only 26 days until I return to the states!

Mixed feelings abound.
Pecha Kucha Doha round 2 is coming up in the first week of May. Since Samiha and I punked out on presenting at the first round, we are FOR SURE doing it this time (right Samiha?)

Our original plan had been to present in English & Arabic which has the added benefit of decresing the amount of time either of us has to talk on one slide. Which is only 20 seconds, I know, but this is harder than it looks honestly. Suggestions on discussion topics are welcome, actually more than that, suggestions are BEGGED for.

It's the same people

2009-04-05T22:38:00.000-07:00

They never went straight, they just got venture capital

2009-04-02T04:05:00.000-07:00

I'm sure I'm the only person who believed it, but was anybody else excited about the AutoPilot feature gmail offered yesterday as their (cruel) April Fool's joke?

Leave a message after the tone

2009-03-19T23:57:00.000-07:00

From Blog to Travelogue!

For the next few days I'll be traveling around Egypt and Jordan. I'll be back on the 28th so if you need anything from me between now and then, chances are it'll take me a couple days to respond.

Yay!

2009-03-17T04:33:00.000-07:00

It's an economic crisis- yizzerd?!

2009-03-14T06:32:00.000-07:00

FORM FOLLOWS FINANCE

Good. Bad. Ugly.

2009-03-14T01:27:00.001-07:00

Yella (which is a filler word like well then or alrighty) I'm sitting in studio with only 5 days to go 'till spring break, and predictably I have the attention span of a bar of soap. I spend a lot of time, ok most of my time, inertly staring at my computer screen. Sometimes I'm even less productive, and just stare out my window over the tops of what is a growing mountain of folded paper.

These days I've become a super high-maintenence student. I require more than just hand holding, it's full on therapy when crit time comes around. I get caught in these dangerous circuitous loops of questioning and researching, neither of which translate to drawings very well, and I have a large body of knowledge about things that are seemingly unrelated to my project. This is also known as the wikipedia effect. We each have a finite number of brain cells, and I can't even explain to you just how many have been dedicated to thesis-related thinking.

I'm slowly coming to terms with the idea that my thesis will hardly be a resolution, but more just a representation of a line of questioning I've followed. It's probably not even going to be an accurate representation, given the deliverable is a presentation on "tents" and my education here in Qatar has been MUCH MUCH broader than that (to say the least). I am overwhelmed and inspired simultaneously. We'll see

welcome to the UAE & Oman

2009-03-11T14:45:00.000-07:00

damn. that's a big rock.

on a totally different note- my best friend had a BABY! like a living breathing human being! congrats to a beautiful new mommy and her beautiful new family. while i'm chilling out on rocks in the middle east you guys ushered in new life- awesome

out of the wood works

2009-02-28T10:20:00.000-08:00

Arteests in Doha?

I've seen more Mac books and iPhones in this week alone than I have during my 2 months here before this (2 months already?!)

This week was Pecha Kucha and Musharaka. More to follow on both but for the time being, I have a midterm project to generate.

2009-02-25T03:37:00.000-08:00

So what ever happened to Snap!?

Bldg opng

2009-02-22T23:42:00.000-08:00

This is an exercise in perfectly good architecture ruined by lighting. Is it me or does the building look like it has leprosy?

2009-02-21T23:02:00.000-08:00

This is a picture from inside a car as we took a nose dive off the side of a 40 ft dune that's easily at a 30 degree pitch. Duning (or dune bashing) is a popular weekend activity out in Sealine. It's incredibly dangerous (if you check out my flickr I caught a car rolling down one of these things) but I took the trip with some very experienced locals, and although my face was frozen in terror, I had a great time.

A couple years ago this would be the kind of thing I would flatly refuse to do. Obviously dangerous, I probably would have asked to be left at the bottom of the dune, or even more likely, would just have stayed home in the first place. There are those experiences in life that help make you who you are, and sometimes when I'm in a car kareening over a mountain of sand, I'm grateful I'm not so lame anymore.

Lazier than the furniture

2009-02-21T22:32:00.000-08:00

Despite a hard deadline on the first, I took the weekend off to ya know, to do the things that weekends were meant to do. My bathing suit was constantly a bit damp and I am currently a bit sunburned. Finding time to indulge ones self long enough to legitimately relax is v. important. I'm developing a skill for it.

mat bedeesh

2009-02-17T23:09:00.000-08:00

Model Behavior & the usual suspects: Rana on the left, Samiha on the right

So I ask Samiha about Arabic colloquialisms, and what I love about language exchange is what gets lost in translation. I ask her for a phrase equivalent to "don't have a cow," for which we assumed had a similar Arabic phrase "don't lay an egg." I'm so enthusiastic about the phrase that I even use it with my Egyptian professor (who obviously speaks Arabic.)

During an otherwise lovely girls night out I meet Sam's long time family friend Shadh, who happens to be a local architect. Shadh and I are trading conversation when we come to the subject of my conversational Arabic. It kinda goes something like this:

Me: "Oh yeah, Samiha and I are even talking about giving a joint Pecha Kucha in English and Arabic"
Shadh: "Oh that sounds fun! What phrases have you learned so far?"
Me: "Little things, you know like yanni, or yellah or haram...or mat bedeesh..."
Mortified Shadh: "WHO TAUGHT YOU MAT BEDEESH" (what doesn't come through in type here is her facial expression which seemed to ask a simultaneous question, do you kiss your mother with that mouth)
Me: "Samiha, it's Arabic for don't lay an egg, you know, like relax"
Shadh: "I hope you didn't repeat that to anybody, it means get your (insert appropriate male anatomy referent) off me."

This is going to be the best 6:40 sec presentation e-v-e-r.

el7amdlelah

2009-02-17T02:05:00.000-08:00

Soccer season ended last night on a good note. It was a great rematch with the now notorious Black Tigers of girl-fight fame. Although I'm a bit exhausted, I'm sad to see the season end, my interaction with the girls was definitely privileged and I've come to appreciate how special they are.

This week has been especially busy with thesising and all, but I managed to eek (does anybody remember that show??) out some time for the Women's Leadership Conference today. It's this lunch that happens once a week where women come together to talk about social issues and their gender implications. Obviously women only. It's led by a professor here, Amal Al-Malki, who in addition to being totally progressive and approachable, is also the youngest woman to ever get her PhD in Qatar. She facilitates along side Darbi who I introduced earlier in the blog as a fellow teammate of mine as well as 2 QueRicco newbies, Jinanne and Rachelle. The conversation today was about Islamic feminism, a phrase which might sound paradoxical if we think of it in the Western context. We talked about what it means to veil- its religious, political and cultural implications- as well as what it means not to. Amal told an interesting story about a Muslim friend of hers who lives in the states and who chose to unveil to avoid confrontation after 9/11. The room was a little divided as to what that choice would mean to them, and Rachelle made a very pertinant allusion to her mothers struggle with intolerance in America as a black woman in the 70's. The readings we did to prepare included The Veil by Pamela Taylor and I highly recommend the chapter, "I just want to be me" if you have some spare time. Our discussions revolved almost solely on the choice to veil or not, which is actually a very tiny aspect of Islamic Feminism but certainly an interesting topic. The veil is now in different stages of outlaw and is in fact, illegal in France, arguing that women who wear the veil are wearing a symbol of oppression, which I agree with in a limited way. Like the fact that women are forced to veil in Saudi is totally oppressive but I think France is oppressive in exactly the same way by not allowing women to veil if they choose to. I would like to emphasize the word choose here because ultimately, it's the womans choice and to them the act is not oppressive, it's freedom. And screw you Turkey for following suit just to get into the EU.

There are soooooo many interesting layers in this discussion that I wish I could animate for you but a) it's very difficult to do so in type and b) I doubt most of you will even read this much of what I write. So for those of you who have managed to get down this far, here's a short video reprieve:

This is Freej, the first 3-D animation series in the Gulf. It follows the daily life of 4 Emirati women (in what can be assumed to be Dubai), the title for which means "neighborhood" in Arabic. You'll notice that the ladies are wearing gold masks which are the ultra-traditional form of the niqaab. Sorry it's not captioned but I think you can still appreciate how awesome it is. In many of the videos the women are interacting with younger generations or expatriates to highlight the extreeme cultural shifting that is happening in the region. We discussed the show in the Mapping Urbanism class I TA for, and the comparison we came up with was the Simpsons.

Sealine

2009-02-14T01:48:00.000-08:00

What's up now, I rode this thing.

Adventures in the desert continue this weekend with a trip out to Al-Wakrah and Sealine. Our excursion to Qatar's west coast was really exciting and I posted a bunch of new photos on Flickr.

Desert Diary

2009-02-11T01:43:00.001-08:00

What a sandy mess. I updated my Flickr page including some images from the sandstorm today.

Retail Therapy

2009-02-09T22:21:00.001-08:00

Welcome to my office! Lets analyze how one might know this was my studio space without me saying it:

All the papers are posted exactly straight with 1/4 " margins
The writing on the wall (the writing on the wall)
Alligator bag + S. Pellegrino
good.is

New shoes!! Self explanatory. Normally I try to avoid the retail impulse, which is honestly impossible here, but these shoes spoke to me. Black patent leather with black velvet bows. How JCrew of the Arabian Peninsula...

Sprachgefuhl

2009-02-06T04:06:00.001-08:00

n. A feeling for language; an instinctive appreciation for words and idioms that are linguistically appropriate. (From the German word sprachgefühl, "language feeling.")

Bindt Ricco

2009-02-06T01:13:00.000-08:00

Bindt means "daughter of" and prefaces your family name. Loosely it means girl but on the back of my jersey it prefaces my family name, printed in crimson and white, Qatar's national colors. I would love to take pictures to show you guys what my team looks like but it's really illegal (as the girls play uncovered.)

Actually, I found out just how illegal it is to take pictures of uncovered girls. Last week my team played Qatar University. It was a physical match but ultimately we won. The best part wasn't winning though- it was the girl fight that erupted shortly thereafter. You read it- girl fight. This was a stands-clearing brawl. A friend of mine on the team blogged on the incident, so rather than write it all out, you can just read what she wrote. Trust me, it's a great story. She and I managed to stay clear of the fist fighting but watching the whole thing was unreal. Since that game the spectators and the players have been sperated and some pretty strict rules regarding contact have been put in place. A bunch of our players got suspended and sadly, without them, we lost our first game yesterday. One of the girls on the team tried to take a picture with her camera phone, which is totally a no no. If kissing in public is punishable by whipping, I don't even want to know what the consequences are here for something that is prohibited by law.

Anyways, the point of this post was to bring to my list of things another new thing tied to my experience here. I now have my soccer kit, in Qatari national colors with my name, Bindt Ricco on the back and I absolutely love it.

Same Difference

2009-02-03T22:42:00.000-08:00

Check out Lebbeus Woods wax poetic on the ideological role of education (that would be instead of training.) The post is Architecture School 101

Women Folk

2009-01-27T05:54:00.001-08:00

Unbelievably, CMUq has a woman's soccer team! Woman's sports in general are so underground here that it was difficult to find- but I was determined so here I am, playing soccer for the girls team. Last week was our first game and we headed up against Georgetown, a neighboring university at Education City. There is only one sports facility so all the teams play at the same location and share the same locker room. When I showed up to collect my uniform and change, the locker room was already packed with girls. Abayas and scarfs were all over the place collecting in silky black pools on every available counter. Just like in the states girls crowded around the mirrors, pulling their normally covered hair into tight ponytails, excitedly trading stories from class earlier in the day. The girls came from schools all over, some even still in highschool and the atmosphere was exactly the same as it was at home. Girls even gave the same "this bitch is going down" sideways glances. We played our match indoors so that girls could play uncovered and no male spectators were allowed in. I think I expected some amount of reservation or girlieness as during the day the girls trot around in 4 inch heels and more makeup than Ru Paul, but there wasn't a hint of that here. The instant they shed the abaya it was game on and I totally loved it. For the record, we creamed Georgetown, but that wasn't ultimately the most exciting experience. I think I've been incredibly lucky here to be drawn into this reclusive but vibrant community which very very few (and only even women) get to see. I have to say, I've played a lot of soccer in my life, but playing in the company of just women is a totally different experience. I think I even enjoy more than playing in mixed company. For these girls to have to go so far out of their way to play, the event is given a gravity or at least appears to have a genuineness, like a "I do this 100% for my self." The actual game itself wasn't very good although it certainly was aggressive, I think mostly because there is a lack of coaching or even any real practice time, but the cultural experience was phenominal and I'm already looking forward to playing again next week. I hear we're playing VCU which has a reputation as the lesbian team. Lesbian? Really? Here? I am intrigued. If the subject of women sports in conservative cultures is something you'd like to read more about, I'd recommend this article regarding the Iranian men vs. women game. If you thought lesbians were controversial over here, wait 'till you check that one out.

Assalamu 'alykum

2009-01-20T23:13:00.000-08:00

It means peace be upon you and it's how you say hello here. Or you can say MarHaba, or you can say Ahlan wa sahlan, but the first one is my favorite. This morning I learned that Arabic is a semetic language and, at least to me, it sounds a bit like a cross between German and Spanish. Sentences don't use verbs either so if I ask you where you are from your reply would be "I from." I also learned that the word for student is Taalib(boy)/Taaliba(girl). So to say that I am a student I would say "I student" or " 'ana Taabliba."

'Ana taaliba fi Jeamat Carnegie Mellon fi Qatar."

2009-01-18T04:31:00.000-08:00

Images from the corniche. The word Cornish has its etymology in the French phrase route en corniche, meaning road (route) on (en) a rock ledge (corniche). The English word cornice has similar connotations. The cornish here has a see and be seen quality which is odd given nearly all the women are covered. It's also a great example of another perplexing social condition- hand holding. Public displays of affection are illegal here but hand holding skirts that line a bit. Between sexes, (male on female hand holding) is totally frowned upon, but within ones own sex, is totally acceptable- even common place. There were many men walking arm in arm or even hand in hand with fingers laces. Homosexuality is also illegal here but hand holding isn't considered gay. It's just a innocuous display of affection, bromance if you will. But holding a womans hand, well thats ridiculous.

Bleeting Sheep

2009-01-12T06:27:00.000-08:00

Proof that at their core, people are the same everywhere...

Today I was sitting in the student lounge joined by several other young women who are students here. I was sitting at a computer in the cluster tying out my last entry regarding the keffiyeh and could easily hear their conversation just 1 row behind me. I am not particularly nosy but these girls had some pretty salacious gossip and spared no detial between giggling.

There is a popular exchange program where students from CMUq can visit CMUp for free and several of them had. The social reprieve of a semester or summer abroad must have been truly educational and one girl was explaining to the other three how to use the gossip wiki, Juicy Campus.

From behind Niqab they had no shyness about what they read aloud and you would think that for such a conservative culture they might have, although one wouldn't know if they blushed or not at hearing their own brashness. To their credit, there were no boys in the room, and I've come to understand how free the bond between women is without the presence of the opposite sex. So I guess if any of you are interested, there is a new chapter in Juicy Gossip from CMUq, although I don't know how shocking the matieral might be since these interactions seem to only transpire between women.

To scarf or not to scarf

2009-01-11T23:23:00.000-08:00

When we first got here we (being the 6 Course Assistants from CMUpittsburgh) had a brief orientation period which included a session titled "The Culture Shock Model." This being my first time out of the country, I listened closely to try to better understand the experience I was about to have. The model, which is shaped like a U, is a visualization of the range of feelings one might experience while studying abroad. The first phase is known as the "honeymoon" and like all things new and exciting, it is marked by extreme enthusiasm and a lust for your new environment. I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Doha might not fit the typical culture shock model, if it's even possible to characterize experiences like that, but I certainly am enjoying it. The move here was ultimately much easier than I originally thought and for the most part, adjusting to my new life has been smooth sailing. In fact, life here is surprisingly western with a few small exceptions and for the most part, I haven't felt self aware of my white/femaleness in a place that is largely neither white nor female.

That is not to say my experience has been totally without incident. On my birthday a couple days ago there was a rally here on campus regarding the Isreali-Palestine conflict and Her Highness, Sheikah Mosa, came to speak. As an American in an Arab country these days, I might have felt unsafe in the situation, but given the context, that the queen was speaking and that it was within the doors of my campus, I attended. This probably had to have been one of the most unique experiences I could have had because I was priveledged to safely watch something from a side of the fence that I might never have been able to observe it from. The message of Her Highness' speach and the over arching theme of the rally, was the importence of education as a weapon against weapons and I couldn't have agreed more.

Nearly the entire population of women who were in attendence were wearing the abaya (the long black overgarment) or some version of the hijab (the collective term for these garments) and some even in Niqaab (the head covering that conceals the face). Because it is not my religion, I am never required to wear them although being in a sea of people who are, one might feel suddenly compelled to do so. Perhaps even more pressuring were the keffiyehs that everybody was wearing, which is the image at top. A keffiyeh is a scarf that can be worn a number of ways, in turban style as a head wrap, bunched as a scarf or even just draped around the shoulders. Urban Outfitters used to sell them (and again I would insert a discussion of authenticity here) until somebody called to their attentention that the significance of the garment is its check pattern which has come to represent Palestine (although it is not its flag) and wearing the pattern is to show Palestinian solidarity. These were passed out at the rally, and every, I mean everybody wore them. This includes the other handful of white people I knew to be American who are also teaching elsewhere on campus.

The Isreali-Palestinain conflict is something that I understand merely on the periphery, which I think is better than most Americans can claim. As an American, I appreciate the civil liberty of dissention and that even though my country is at war, even though we have national policies that the rest of the world is aware of, my right to disagree is protected. The guard handed me the Keffiyeh but it ultimately didn't feel right, even if my views were in line with that. I slipped it in my purse and I sat in the back of the room quietly, skirting a delicate line as an American looking on to the GCC zeitgeist.

So now I have this scarf. It's folded neatly in my closet and is the first addition in a long time to the things I own. At the end of last semester, even after everything was photographed, there was a significant amount of shuffling. I got rid of all my hangars, a bowl I loved very much, my sheets which I had since high school and an orange lamp my mom bought me when I first came to college. Some of these things were replaced with new things before I even got on the plane. I'm sure I'll collect other objects before I leave here too, but this keffiyeh, a gift from the Qatari government to those participating in the rally that was hosted at my new school on my 24th birthday, this is something I think I'll have for forever.

fine & gay like coco sorbet

2009-01-05T04:28:00.000-08:00

tah-dah! Doha.

Well ahl beez a muhn-keys unkle

2008-12-31T07:31:00.000-08:00

Credit where credit is due: This image, as well as the everythingiown banner at the top of the page are courtesy of Pablo, my thesis adviser.

It's been a while since I posted something that wasn't just a status update, but now that I've been in one place for more than 3 days I'm getting back to normal thought process beyond travel survival mode.

In my last post I mentioned an imaging process that I thought was called tilt angle which is actually tilt-shift. It's based on the Scheimpflug principle, which wikipedia says is a geometric rule that describes the orientation of the plane of focus of an optical system (such as a camera) when the lens plane is not parallel to the image plane.

The effect can be cheated by using the Lens Blur filter in Photoshop (Filter>Blur>Lens Blur). Here is what the image I took a few days ago would look like using that type of lens. This is a cheated version but after looking at some other examples on the interwebs I don't think I can tell the difference between real and fake anyways (especially when the output is toy looking.)

This inability to discern between real and fake, for me, is a larger issue actually. As with most things in my life, my opinion is pretty bi-polar and actually when reviewed in full, doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

"Authenticity" is difficult because in some aspects of my life "fake" is a non issue. Recently a discussion on the merits of brownies baked from of box versus scratch revealed that I actually can't tell the difference (unless they are being directly compared) and am equally satisfied by both. 2% versus whole? No idea. Natural or silicon? Don't even want to know. But knock off couture is almost personally offensive and don't even get me started on the word facade...

A Non-writer's writer's block

2008-12-29T06:51:00.000-08:00

Proof that the sun set is the same everywhere. Taken from a Brooklyn rooftop. This would have made for a pretty sick tilt-angle opportunity but I have no idea how that works.

Adventure to Coney Island! It was 65 degrees out and the grey skies in the distance are a cold front creeping in. The wind along the boardwalk made a low whistling noise as it sucked air through the spoked teeth of the ferris wheel. Beaks to wind the gulls just hung in the air, floating more than flying which made the whole scene look like it was on pause. All of Coney Island seems like it's on pause actually, barely breathing life at all as it waits for the wrecking ball threatened every year which never comes. This year though, this is the year.

Actually I suck at writing. Re-reading that last passage I actually laughed out loud to myself. While I was home my brother and I talked about writing a book together, maybe because we think we could make money, maybe because we think it'd be cathartic. Shrug, but either way I know I'm not cut out for that, rereading this garbage is only proof, I can't even believe it you made it this far down the page already...

2008-12-26T17:46:00.000-08:00

Nicolas and Kelsey enjoy some raisins a la Go Diego on the floor. This isn't where Ricco's normally eat although you might not guess that from some of these other images...

After a catalog-inspired Christmas at my Uncle's I now introduce you to the house I grew up in, which is where my brother currently lives with his lovely mujere, Paola (hola, Paola!) I stayed with them last night and Paola was gracious enough to come with my brother to pick me up because as you can see, my brother's car is out of commission. We are sure if it exploded from a recall part or if it got torched but when he woke up in the morning, it and the grass around it, were extra-crispy. This is after a week that included a dog fight and a drug raid but that's really neither here nor there.

So Christmas sorta fell by the wayside in this branch of the family tree, and since my mom is Buddhist and doesn't celebrate the holiday, the evening of the 25th was pretty quiet. My brother, Paola and I sat on the front porch and got drunk in hammocks. Given the ambiance of a toasted car now sitting on its spokes, the scene, albeit Christmas night, didn't seem entirely inappropriate.

To you and yours

2008-12-25T14:45:00.000-08:00

This is the backyard. Or a Pottery Barn catalog. Really it's both, we should send in a submission or something.
Christmas day with the Ricco/Zampieri's! It was a b-e-a-utiful day so we were able to keep the party outside for the most of it. Pictured here (starting from furthest away moving counter clockwise): Marth, Eileen, Nora & Sebastian, Aldo, Maria, baby Aldo, Nicolas and Alex! Not pictured: big Alex, and Anthony (the Uncle not the brother.) So that's 2 Aldo's, 2 Alex's and 2 Anthony's. One would think we were vain or unoriginal or just ran out of names...
Eileen is also 8 mon. preggers so sometime soon will run into this naming situation again.

A beautiful sunset after a beautiful day. I ran around in shorts and a t-shirt the whole time, and while it was comfortable, I've realized what a sickly shade of pale I've become. A week in Miami hasn't even begun to fix this yet either...guess I'll get enough of that soon.

Mas 'mas! (More Christmas)

2008-12-24T19:22:00.000-08:00

Meet Alex! One of 4 two year old cousins I have. His dad (also an Alex) is pictured in the back ground. Apparently both enjoy Corona- Cerveza mas fina! Alex (the little one) got shwasted and let me tell you, drunk toddlers are hilarious. Don't think I condone this, but I know something is funny when I see it.

Nicolas (also a baby cousin) got a Jeep for Christmas. I would like to point out that I'm 24 and I've never owned a car. The injustice of Christmas is overwhelming. My Aunt Martha (his mom) is also pictured here, getting the ride of her life. He's not quite old enough to command hand-eye-foot coordination so steering and gas were sort of intermittent tasks.

Bread, raisins , apples, celery, onion and a bunch of other stuff you wouldn't normally eat together. Mash it up and serve as stuffing.

Christmas Eve-eve

2008-12-23T17:48:00.000-08:00

Camping & Mountain Biking

2008-12-23T15:17:00.001-08:00

My mom talked me into this.

Refrigerated wine coolers and beer by the can. Extra points to anybody who knows what Wild Rose is...

This is the convenience store, Ohm. You can buy pipes, porn and booze and is apparently run by toddlers.

My tent! Practice for the desert...

Oatmeal Pecan Chocolate Chunk Cookies

2008-12-23T15:10:00.000-08:00

I make these for Christmas every year, but like fries are to katsup, its really just an excuse to use the KitchenAid. You can find the recipe here: yummy.

2008-12-15T08:32:00.000-08:00

nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-

nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh...

BOS-TON!

A weekend full of random things. Feverishly finishing CMEC work, An Alan Braxe show, and 12 hours in Boston!

This was my first legitimate trip to Boston and I think I did all the stuff that typically goes on the checklist for people visiting a new place.

Eat the local food- Clam Chow-dah, check

Look like a tourist- camera in hand, check

Loose something important- my week pass for the metro, and at one point my mittens, check check

All bases covered!

2008-12-13T11:49:00.000-08:00

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet
Till earth and sky stand presently at God's great judgment seat;
But there is neither East nor West, border nor breed nor birth
When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth.

She's goin' the distance...

2008-12-11T15:39:00.000-08:00

current loaction: brooklyn comma space new york.

currently doing: not much of anything. some reading, some exploring but mostly just sleeping.

Much like the skeptical "so how do you get your protein" as a vegetarian, I get a lot of questions that are meant more like statements of disbelief when people talk to me about this 100 things thing. This week all of these things were photographed as part of this ongoing project that I've committed myself to, whereby changes to my list of 100 things are chronicled in these composited photos of all the items. I got a chance to see everything all together during this process, and even I was surprised at how little it looked liked. It all fits in 1 backpack, a small tote and 1 28" suitcase which weighs exactly 50 lbs (it got weighed when I checked it at the airport). And, as an interesting aside, I weight almost 3 times more than everything, but I'm not sure how I feel about that.

The weather here has been a bit dismal but it's better than taking finals.

2008-12-07T20:31:00.000-08:00

The Grind

2008-12-04T02:19:00.001-08:00

Some hand-wavy diagram shit. This needs help, in just so many ways. Help I'm not prepared to give it at 5:30 in the morning when the plotter just ate 2 more sheets of incredibly expensive paper, which isn't even the real issue given I'm now down to 3 full sheets to print with only 2 uneaten pieces left. Do you have Arches Text weave I could borrow?

the little train that could

2008-12-03T15:39:00.000-08:00

More test plotting! Here we have some phasing diagrams.

oh yeah.

The feel good drag

2008-12-02T20:35:00.000-08:00

My first test plot of my last deadline. Tile 1 of 10.

I covered my desk in butcher paper and wrote out my schedule every day until I leave. This is me, literally counting the days. 20 mins till Wednesday and I've already Xed out Tuesday. This shit is better than an advent calendar.

Things I am not thankful for

2008-12-02T14:41:00.000-08:00

You can't have sweet without the bitter. So here it is, the antithesis of my post a couple days ago, a list of things, that if they were not inanimate to begin with, I would have killed myself by now...

1. cup of noodles soup
2. sunrises
3. the sound of fluorescent bulbs
4. the flickering strobe of the light above me right now
5. whatever smell that is in studio right now
6. even the thought of opening illustrator

this will get longer as the night goes on. feel free to contribute, although I'm sure I'll fill this out by my deadline on Friday...

2008-11-29T23:57:00.000-08:00

And I like the way you express yourself too, y'know, it's pithy yet degenerate

2008-11-28T08:52:00.000-08:00

"as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

2008-11-27T16:20:00.000-08:00

1. broken in topsiders
2. brand new stockings
3. Chanel #5
4. Nicolas
5. the perfect shuffle playlist
6. avocados
7. tan lines
8. architect glasses
9. 18% grey
10. touching down @ JFK
11. AI pattern fills
12. pen tool
13. clever portmanteaus
14. &
15. TAL
16. bitter chocolate
17. arches text weave
18. fresh manicure
19. rainy afternoons
20. cashmerino
21. the coast
22. tomato basil & risotto soup from WF
23. 17/0/100/0
24. acqua panna
25. containers
26. Lists
27. Statistics textbooks
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.

Cranberry sauce + Redbull = Tummy Ache

2008-11-27T15:52:00.000-08:00

Here is to good food with good company. This year, albeit stressful, has given me MUCH to be thankful for (including the lovely Thanksgiving dinner I just stuffed my face with at Carmee's house.) And since I'm writing this to you from studio, and Biggie is keeping me company, I'll let him hold down ze outtro:

A T-bone steak, cheese eggs, and Welches grape
Conversate for a few, cause in a few, we gon' do
What we came to do, ain't that right boo?

( truuuue)

TAH-DAH

2008-11-26T21:00:00.000-08:00

100 things.

This has been true for a while, but reading over my blog I realized I never posted a photograph.

So yeah- not much to look at but I guess that's the point.

Can't stop here, this is bat country

2008-11-26T17:42:00.000-08:00

Out of the hedges and into the woods.

So finals week is upon me. I know what you're thinking, you're thinking- it's Thanksgiving, this is vacation. Hell no. That's what they want you to think. But it's just a trick meant to lull you into some tryptophan-induced haze. And while you're basking in food coma, BAM! They hit you with a deadline 5 days after you get back. But- haha suckahs, jokes on you! I stayed here for break! This is my finals week! I WIN!!! HAHAHAHAHA

I mean really I obviously don't think that staying here over break means I win- it's just what I tell myself so that I sleep sometimes instead of guilting myself into staying in studio all night. I'm making it better by listening to lots of Radiohead and perusing Visual Complexity. Which is actually both inspiring and defeating.

2008-11-22T19:15:00.000-08:00

This guy performed his own appendectomy. I'd do that shit with a spoon at that point if I thought it would get me out of studio right now.

2008-11-15T10:00:00.001-08:00

He was a Crazy Poet—the Chinese refer to him as the "ghostly genius"—who rode his donkey all day and wrote scattered lines that he tossed into a bag. At night, he emptied out the bag and put the lines together as poems, which he threw into another bag and forgot.

In mansion and Benz's

2008-11-14T12:29:00.000-08:00

Applying force over a distance, cause that equals work.

I'm the mad hatter

2008-11-03T17:34:00.001-08:00

and this is wonderland.

This is a return to the basics.

The OG IB

2008-10-30T23:15:00.000-07:00

Truth be told, I kinda hate Halloween. I like the idea, but I hate the event. Maybe I would complain less about the situation if I thought I could pull off sexy bumble bee better. Usually I spend the evening hossing the candy meant for trick-or-treaters with more enthusiasm for costuming, but not this year!

This year I'm doin' it up tongue-n-cheek chic as Fannie Mae. I just wanted to document the effort it takes to look adorable yet witty in an understated way in something that ultimately needs to also survive a night of dancing.

Step 1: Laser Cut acrylic name plate.
This was the most intensive step. This is Brush script Medium at 240pts. I used Illustrator to create outlines of the type so I could use them like a vector. Ungroup all the characters, rekern them so that everything touches (if it's a cutout it has to be continuous) and then trim all the overlaps. Rejoin so it's 1 vector curve again. Import into Rhino to export as a file type that can be read by the laser cutter.

It took 2 passes with the laser cutter to fully release the letters (at 37 minutes a per pass.) But this is what the piece looked like fresh out of the bed.

I dropped my nameplate somewhere between the bed and our um, spray booth. This is Andrew by the way, life long studio friend and fellow DFAB enthusiast. Midas touch that shit!

While we were killing time between rounds of spraypaint, we played with a robot. You haven't experienced CMU until you've played with a robot at 2 am.

Its 12,000 lbs and can cut ANY material. It looks like some modern day torture device, or maybe a dentist chair. Maybe those aren't different.

Um, yeah I don't know. We were inhaling a lot of that aerosol. Mostly on accident.

Finished product, yizzerd?! We did dollar signs just to add to the ridiculousness of it all.

Honestly the craft on this thing is so intense, I wish I could wear it year round. Maybe I will... if all those mamacita-rita's at the mall can pull these things off, I'm not sure why I can't.

|sneak attack|

2008-10-27T02:22:00.001-07:00

oh hey.

Yeesh

2008-10-27T01:54:00.001-07:00

Presentation for a random Monday in studio. Hooray for overachieving when it doesn't count.

This is a souk in Doha. If you can read size like .0001 font I wrote about it on my presentation board. It's sorta like, the whole concept.

This is a perspective where I ghosted in the original planes I used to make this honey comb shape. Then I chopped the honey comb in half (known as a section) with this sweet magenta plane I've made here. Then I cut the section plane with the ghosted surface so you can get a better idea of how it's a sloping terrain. And then, and then, oh wait no, that was all of it.

MY VERY FIRST SCRIPT!
A script is sort of this routine that you give your model so you tell it if this, then that. It can fill in tedious things like copies or arrays, but if you make them do complicated tasks, they become tedious themselves. But whatever, now I belong to a 1337 group of archies who do this sorta thing. This might be the first and last time for me though.

So yeah- you're all like, where the hell has she been all week, but before you go there, I'd like to point out Exhibits A-D as seen above. I've been rocking out in studio, making honeycombs all over Larimer. Yeah, it's EXACTLY what they needed. Oh yeah and I also spent my time carving a pumpkin.
I hung out at Cindy's house on Saturday. She made awesome noodle soup and we caved this dude. He looks a little special but we love him anyways.

No one on the corner got swagga like us

2008-10-12T14:05:00.000-07:00

MIA is quite pregnant. Am I the only one who didn't know this?

Anyways- I haven't posted in a week but it feels like longer because I spent a significant amount of it in NYC (where time moves faster than in Pittsburgh.) I went on a whim with Christian (which is sorta the way we do everything) and although I had a lot of reservations about how going to NY without accommodations would play out, it couldn't have been better.

Day 1: Trip to MoMA to see what all the fab hype is about.

2008-10-07T17:41:00.000-07:00

Care to guess which desk is mine?

Cotton Candy

2008-10-05T20:29:00.000-07:00

Typically I post sunset photos of the Cathedral to the right, but it was brought to my attention that you can't click on them to enlarge the image. I take all of the photos that are posted (unless otherwise noted) and unless they're in B+W, they haven't been altered. As in, this is really what the sky looks like, craaaaaaazy....

Stair porn

2008-10-05T20:22:00.000-07:00

I have some drawings of these stairs from when we had to take drawing class in 2nd year. Taking a picture is more effective.

This is my walk to studio. If it looks daunting that's because it is. Imagine the weight of knowing you're about to sit there for 11 hours without moving.

There's a lot of time to kill in class.

2008-10-05T20:10:00.000-07:00

So I knit.

I finished my other scarf! I gave it to one of my residents and it's so nice to see somebody else walking around enjoying my work! This is the new one I started. Note, it is also grey. In fact, If you look in the background you can see my knitting basket of yarn. A veritable rainbow of grey. If you have a request, and/or like the color grey, I'm a machine. This time I added teal stripes to the end. Preppy chic.

2008-10-02T21:11:00.000-07:00

2008-10-02T20:54:00.001-07:00

I'm not even kidding

2008-10-02T20:15:00.000-07:00

This is the most ridiculous CL post I've ever seen. Ever.

Credit where credit is due

2008-09-30T19:19:00.001-07:00

I didn't draw this diagram, I just exemplify it. This came from Alex who got it from SwissMiss who got it from somebody else. I'm sorry somebody else, the internet was too vast to find you today.

Ever evolving

2008-09-30T10:39:00.001-07:00

Thesis prep works sorta backwards where we start by writing 1,000 words first and then pare it down to 50 words. Right now I'm at 100 (it's come a long way since that crazy rambling statement I first made.)

Qatar's population is growing at twice the world rate. The country is rapidly approaching 1 million residents living in area just under 4,500 square miles which means that urban density issues are eminent. Oil and gas have made Qatar the highest per-capita income country in the world however less than 8% of the local population is represented by Qatari nationals. The dramatic raise in the growth rate is almost completely generated by a population that is transient. The ebb and flow of population around fossil fuels will create an architecture that will swell to capacity and will become rapidly vacant when dependency on the resource evaporates as new fuel technologies become prevalent. How can the architecture of Doha anticipate deflation and begin to re-inhabit these spaces in a way that is respectful of an ever evolving economy?

So I sent this mess to Carmee, who was kind enough to wave her magic editorial wand over it, and now this is what I have:

Qatar has the highest per-capita income in the world based on its oil and gas production, and its population is developing at twice the world rate. The country is faced with imminent urban density issues as its population is rapidly approaching one million residents inhabiting an area just under 4,500 square miles. However, less than 8% of the population is comprised of Qatari nationals. Thus, the dramatic increase in the population is largely attributable to transient residents.

The ebb and flow of population around fossil fuels will create an architecture that will swell to capacity, but will become rapidly vacant when dependency on the resources evaporate as new fuel technologies become prevalent. How can the architecture of Doha anticipate deflation and begin to re-inhabit these spaces in a way that is respectful of an ever evolving economy?

Almost makes me sound smart, doesn't it?

How can you sleep when there is all this data you can map??!?!

2008-09-28T22:05:00.000-07:00

Blogpulse is a website that tracks blog trends. Sorta like Google Trends tracking searches. Crazy huh?

I am a woman obsessed. Last week in class (Paradigms of Architectural Research) we had a speaker, Lucio, from the statistics department who came in to talk about data mining. It was as if the clouds opened up and God himself spoke to me. I could barely hear the sound of Lucio's voice over the sound of the angels singing, but oh I heard him.

So there are a number of aspects that interest me regarding data mining, but visualization has been the past 24 hours of my life, so lets start there.

This week in class (Contemporary Middle Eastern Cities) we are studying Tehran, Iran. I was feeling frustrating about creating the visual response (I am usually really stuck about what to map) so I listened to NPR while I was killing time on the internets, that's what it's called now isn't it? Anyways, I was listening to Fresh Air who was focusing on the Iranian presidential speech given by Ahmadinejad and which was interpreted by a man who holds both American as well as Iranian citizenship. This is like, nearly impossible now, but he is a reporter who has agreed to do these often controversial speech translations in trade for the right to write about it. He blogs too, which is where the insanity begins. This is a pretty deep rabbit hole so let me know if any of this goes over your head:

Turns out there is a HUGE population of bloggers in Iran. In fact, it's the third largest nation of bloggers. How is this? Well according to the TimesOnline article, "weblogistan," or so the Persian blog culture is dubbed by us western bloggers, is comprised of a population that is over 90% literate, over 70% of which is under the age of 30. From this we understand that they are mostly young and mostly readers. According to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society (whazzap Harvard?!) given the repressive media environment in Iran today, blogs may represent the most open public communications platform for political discourse. The peer-to-peer architecture of the blogosphere is more resistant to capture or control by the state than the older, hub and spoke architecture of the mass media model. This is a map that they put together of the overall content of the 700,000-something Persian blogs out there:

I spent the weekend reading these blogs which run the gamut of subject and depth. There is the inane, the brave, the heartfelt, the insightful, the everyday. “My blog is a blank page,” writes one young Iranian blogger. “Sometimes I stretch out on this page in the nude . . . now and again I hide behind it. Occasionally I dance on it.” That may not sound like a call to arms, but in a country where the music is dying it may be the harbinger of revolution. So what else can be mapped?

Here is the aforementioned speech by the Iranian president in a word cloud:

Here the size of the text directly correlates to the number of times the word was said in the speech. This is 300 words (obviously I've omitted common English words like is, and, or, the, but, etc.) This was created using a

But here is the baddest (and by bad I obviously mean good) mapping of them all:

Please ignore how cheesy it is to have this in the shape of Tehran. I'm still working on it. But the point is the content. Using my host, blogspot, I researched blogs that are written from Tehran. Stripping the text from their RSS feed, I generated one HUGE word document. Replacing all the spaces with returns, (which Alex and I spent a large portion of Saturday night doing) I got a HUGE word list. The list got sorted alphabetically and bingo! I was able to use excel to count the number of times the words got repeated. I picked 260 of the words for this display and made the point size of the text, the number of times it was written. Interesting comparisons? They typed the word Obama more than Ahmadinejad. They wrote more about porn than voting. The word "war" was written 69 times. The word movie was written 83 times. Conclusion? Well you can make your own, I have more data around here that I want to map.

Post Script- I learned that the word barf means snow in Farsi. It was the brand name of some laundry detergent which was the subject of a photo blog post. I love when this happens in language.

Head's up

2008-09-28T12:02:00.000-07:00

I've lost my cell phone, so if you've tried to call me and I've not picked up, it's not that I don't like you. I just have no idea where it is.

Post Script- If you call it and somebody does pick up, please tell them they can keep it. I hated having one anyways. If you need me for the next couple days, I suggest emailing me.

JUST BECAUSE

2008-09-25T01:59:00.000-07:00

I'm about to watch the sun rise from my studio. The room is completely empty. It's 5 am.

Why what I do is important

2008-09-24T17:08:00.000-07:00

Model of Larimer. Terrain is hand shapes ply wood with a layer of laser cut pine on top to show the roads. Buildings were cast in resin and then sanded for translucency.

We produced nearly 250 linear feet of drawings. Each sheet is 5' tall and we spanned nearly 50'.

It took me over 25 hours to lay out the maps into presentation sheets with categories, titles and proper explanations. Plotting (printing in archi-speak) alone took another 10 hours.

I'm not an architect but I will be someday.

Things I can't do:
I can't build a building. I can't plan a landscape. I can't renovate, remodel or refurbish it. I can't even demolish it. I can't actually DO anything to your built environment. Yet.

Things I can do:
I can draw a lot of pretty pictures about what is already there. I can tell you about a lot of things you already know. I can make some observations, collect some data and I can give you information. You might think these things are useless but they're powerful tools.

Things I want to do:
I want to empower you to change your community with these tools. I want to give you this vocabulary. I want to inspire you to change your own environment.

Things I'm going to do:
Learn how to write a grant application- you have needs and I have resources. I need to help do more and for now, this is the best I can do.

I want to change something in Larimer. Permanently. The value of being an architect is that what you do, it's very nature, has longevity. My work should outlive me.

The plan: There is a HUGE underground economy in Larimer. People sell food out of their kitchens and run day cares in their living rooms. To people passing through the neighborhood, it feels like a ghost town, but actually it's quite vibrant. The community needs a way to bring their economy to the surface and to make if public. These entrepreneurs are too small to even be eligible for small business status, and actually, couldn't afford to sustain that economically. The neighborhood needs a formal market area. This way, people selling things could pay for a stall at a very low monthly overhead rate, like 20 bucks. This would give the community some centrality and the opportunity for growth. Pittsburgh at large has many community craft fairs, farmer markets etc. which could come in once a month to attract outside money into the area. I want to buy the abandoned school in Larimer from the city. I want to collect volunteers from the area, students and professors to write grants. I want to turn this into their market. For real. Rural Studio and Sam Mockabee did it and so can we. I can't build anything, but I know people who can. I'm not an architect but I will be someday.

I wrote this in a rush after dinner conversation about how feasible this could be. There are a lot of other ideas I have about this, but if you think this is a project you're interested in, let's meet.

I keep making stuff

2008-09-24T10:41:00.001-07:00

This morning I made 2 side stitched journals. I keep going to class and I just keep making stuff.

Peripatetic

2008-09-22T12:27:00.000-07:00

1.	walking or traveling about; itinerant.

2.	(initial capital letter) of or pertaining to Aristotle, who taught philosophy while walking in the Lyceum of ancient Athens.

3.	(initial capital letter) of or pertaining to the Aristotelian school of philosophy.

–noun

4.	a person who walks or travels about.

5.	(initial capital letter) a member of the Aristotelian school.

2008-09-21T17:37:00.000-07:00

This is a tree from when the RA staff went hiking. Suh-weet huh?

Weekly This I believe essay excerpt- Ruth Kamps

Living Life with 'Grace and Elegant treeness'

"We both soak in the sun and the air and are trying our best to live lightly in our worlds. One day in the not-too-distant future she will fall and fertilize the earth, as I will do. It's a consoling thought. We have children and grandchildren that give us the continuation of life. A bit of the divine in the tree and me. I have lost most of my traditional heaven-and-hell beliefs, finding them used conveniently by good people. There is a bit of the divine in the trees and the creatures who reside there. A little wren attacks a large red-bellied woodpecker who is pecking too close to his nest. I am filled with admiration. The transition is complete. There are those who want to give my life more importance than the tree, but I don't believe them. They think there is a special place for me somewhere for eternity, but I don't believe them. I believe my tree and all other living things believe and feel in their particular living ways. I want to work on being as good a human as I am able, just as my tree does her job with grace and elegant treeness."

Kanye [read, Ricco] work out plan

2008-09-21T16:10:00.000-07:00

First things first, shout out to Tom who stopped me in PHI bar to tell me that he reads my blog. Gives me warm and fuzzies man, or maybe that was the gin, but either way I totally appreciate it!

Second. My mom (who is also a reader here) sent me this great email regarding my "super cool girl post." She wanted to go on the record that "[she doesn't] fault people for placing a lot of value on the exterior, as long as the interior person is in balance." Word up mom.

So I'm reading my mom's email and really enjoying these completely stellar observations when BAM! she's attached images to the end of the email from the last time she visited me here. Now I'm never a fan of looking at photos of myself but these seem to be a particular brand of haineous. She just got finished saying all this great stuff about self image that I'm totally confirming aloud as I read but then I get all body conscious at the end when I'm forced to examine myself. WHAT IS THAT?! It's been a little unnerving lately. At the risk of getting all touchy feely on a blog post about things I'm sure you're uninterested in, I want to fix this. Here's my new deal-

Bike Ride for 1 hour- Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. 8 am-9 am

Run for 20 mins - Wednesday and Thursday, 4:30-5:00

Yoga- Thursday 5-6

Sit ups- every damn night before I go to bed. Let's go with 10 for every 100 calories I consumed that day. That sounds normalish no?

Ok, so this is the regimen. Like all routines this works better when other people are involved so if you read this and you're like, that sounds sweet, you should probably join me. I absolutely refuse to change my diet (before you say anything, I know that's asinine) but if you see me with a cookie or something, ask me for it cause I certainly don't need it, and besides, I love sharing.