Where's the "New Post" Button on this thing?

Dang, been so long I forgot how to write a new post.

It's been a hell of a couple days. Literally. But, I was looking through my old files and there's still some room for inspiration in this soul of mine. Although this is technically about architecture, I think a lot of these things speak to the everyday life, the everyday person, and the dreamer. Stole it from Howard who probably got it from Bruce Mau, but anyway, here it is:

An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth

Written in 1998, the Incomplete Manifesto is an articulation of statements that exemplify Bruce Mau's beliefs, motivations and strategies. It also articulates how the BMD studio works.

1. Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

2. Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you'll never have real growth.

3. Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

5. Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

7. Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.

9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

10. Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

11. Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.

12. Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

13. Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

14. Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

15. Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

16. Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

17. ____________________. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.

18. Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you're separated from the rest of the world.

19. Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.

20. Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.

21. Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.

22. Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

23. Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.

24. Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.

25. Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.

26. Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.

27. Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our "noodle."

28. Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.

29. Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

30. Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between "creatives" and "suits" is what Leonard Cohen calls a 'charming artifact of the past.'

31. Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.

32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

33. Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.

34. Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea -- I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.

35. Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You'll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

36. Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else ... but not words.

37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.

39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces -- what Dr. Seuss calls "the waiting place." Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference -- the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

40. Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.

41. Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I've become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.

42. Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

43. Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can't be free agents if we’re not free.

BOREDOMEeee

Neediness

Hello xanga. It's me again.

So I've been having some fabulous and not-so-fabulous moments during this sweaty summer. But with the good and difficult times, I find myself craving for something, something that feels so missing. And today, I put my finger on the pulse of that something-- being love, people, God. I need people. I need love. I need God.

I've had a happy childhood, but at the same time, I think I was scarred on the aspect of needing others. I distinctly and vividly remember a moment where I felt that my family didn't care about me. A moment where I was being very difficult-- too difficult-- and they kind of gave up on me at that particular time and it crushed me. I carried this personal truth in my heart that no one will ever really care for you fully, and that no one could ever fulfill all your emotional needs. I think that's kind of true, but I twisted the application by just deciding not to ever really need anyone. By being extremely appreciative of those who would go the extra mile to show me some kindness and love, but ridiculing myself for being weak at times and having to depend on others. I thought needing others was a kind of weakness.

But now I embrace that 'weakness.' I'm not superwoman, super Christian, super anything. I need love, and I need people, and God. I need people to tell me that they love me, and I need God to tell me that He loves me. I crave it. I look for it, and when I'm actively searching for it, it seems nigh unlikely to find.

I mean that's why it is like a howling pain when someone you love very much inadvertantly or purposefully hurts you. And it's hard to recover. And the only way of coping is to realize that you are still loved and lovable.

Anyway, so what's my point? I do need people. Yes, elect me Captain Obvious, only let me say that I need others and their love.

Finished this book called Love Walked In by Marisa de los Santos. It's not all that great of a book, but there's this one line that I feel is accurate in its description:

"A real life doesn't mean getting what you want; the achievement, the privilege, too, is knowing what you love. But getting what you love? Having what you love love you back? Oh, my friend, it's miracle: your one tiny life's head-on collision with divinity."

I think I, and anyone else, would be a fool to try to give up on love so easily. And people.

Soooooooo, basically, I am a needy person, and I need people and love and God. I think I said that like 1408032 times in this entry, but that's just because it's true.

So Long

With time comes changes
We've come a long way
Brought together for the purpose to be changed

And I'd never be who
I am today
If you hadn't shown the love you gave to me
In all your ways

Feeling pretty.. nostalgic.

But it's a good feeling, even if I'm not graduating quite yet. Happy for all the 4th years and graduating peepzzz.

Seeya rounddddddd folks

BEEEAacchhHH

So some 4th and 3rd years decided it would be a fun idea to drive for 5 hours to a beach house in Outer Banks owned by Bryan Lin's "uncle" in NC. Had some fun and not-so-fun moments, but all in all it was pretty great.

Some candid moments of the strangely memorable half-week.

Cloudy for the first couple of days we got there. The water was beckoning :) And the weather did get better as the week progressed

Jason and Erika during the whole trip.. quite beautiful actually.

Some more sepia-toned loving as Courtney sleeps on my shoulder (but most of the time she was either shouting something, laughing, dancing, singing, or reading Girl Talk)

Ordering at Dirty Dick's.. the innocent-seeming, cesspool-esque suspect which spawned the stomach/flu virus of my (and several others') demise.. darn you, Dick!

Maria Jeong, my hero of this entire trip, saved me from the perils of ravaging fever and otherwise grief and sadness. This girl, like an angel.. no, no, like Jesus Christ incarnate, came floating into my room when I was so weak and vulnerable and cared for me like I never expected or asked of her. I've only been on two roadtrips with Maria, but she continues to surprise me with her unconventionally caring nature and kindness. Thanks, pal.

You can pretend those people are us :)

Soaking in all the majesticness

Completely unrelated to the beach, the last (and maybe first?) photo of the 2006-2007 apartment at U-heights.

Yummy. Thanks guys, for this meal, and for choosing our apartment to go through all the talks, fights, laughs, and constant CSI-watching.

On another unrelated note, went to DC like, twice, for my sister's visa to Korea. Quite pretty..

And quite frustrating! RAWR! (this is Brenda by the way)

Anyway, life is looking pretty beautiful right now. And, following suit with Brian Mendoza, I've decided to guiltlessly cheat on xanga by opening up a new blog for the sole purpose of writing to a smaller, more intimate community about more of my reflections on shtuff. So join me in making one too! I'd love to read your thoughts. We'll save facebook/xanga for the picturesss.