LOST IN THE SHUFFLE

++ I THINK I'M getting lost in the shuffle.
according to webster's dictionary:
nostalgia is: 1.a bittersweet longing for things, persons, or situations of the past and 2.the condition of being homesick; homesickness.
memory is: 1.the mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experience and 2.the act or an instance of remembering; recollection.

these are two very specific domains of life of which one refers to the humane, compassionate, unique individual emotion while the other refers to the artificial, mechanized, almost manufactured capture of an instance. i'm struggling right now with these as time goes by as i'm not sure what will be nostalgic and what will be merely memory. its almost a figure/ground study or a macro photo where the subject is extremely sharp in focus while the background blurs. i'm not sure what recollections i will have which i carry with me through the rest of my life. from my childhood i remember things which superfically seem to be arbitrary, things which are funny, not necessarily significant and not necessarily watershed moments, but moments which brought a peak in emotion. i remember things such as the mudhole big ebough to stick your leg in, so we did and my friend lost his shoe and we could never find it. somewhere in the ground is a size 6 shoe burried in the ground about 2.5 feet below the surface. i remember playing soccer in my backyard with my brother and two friends and almost passing out and stumbling to the kitchen to eat a banana because i had forgot to eat dinner the night before, breakfast the day of, and lunch the day of. as soon as i ate the banana i regained vision. i remember playing kickball and the ball got stuck up in the tree and we were unable to dislodge it for 6 months when it finalyl fell down completely deflated and permanently deformed. we threw it away, it wasn't a good ball anyway. i remember having a birthday party when i was 6 and my mom popped popcorn the old-fashioned way with the hot air popcorn popper while my dad added the butter and ushered it to 16 of my friends who were all sleeping over while we watched the last starfighter, a movie about the little kid who becomes a starfighter pilot after beating a video game and saves the universe. i don't think mom and dad slept at all that night. i remember going to my grandparents house to pick raspberries and eating them fresh off the vine. my grandmother would always scold us, but only half heartedly. can grandparents ever truly be mad at their grandchildren when they are young? i remember countless summer days when i would go over to steve's house and wake him up in the morning and he would throw a shoe at me to get me to go away. it never worked. we wasted days playing ping pong and two-square and 'conducting experiments' with fire and flammable liquids such as hair spray, fire starter, gasoline, rubbing alcohol, spray paint, and anything which is possible to burn. graphite doesn't, just so you know. i'm unsure what happy things i will remember from these past six years here. it seems like the more i am here the less fun, happy things occupy my mind and the negative aspects cloud my mind. i don't want to remember people and events for the bad things which happenned or the subsequent reactions. i want to remember sleepless slap-happy nights in studio, road trips to sf and san diego and phoenix, burning models, sledding in the snow, chair races down the hallway, formals on fountain square, dressing up to walk across a bridge, camping at red river gorge, jumping off cliffs at red river gorge, and endless smiles from well-worn friends who i've grown and matured with and who know me better than my parents, brother, old school friends and even high school friends. i want nostalgia.. maybe five for fighting says it the best..
..
100 Years

I'm 15 for a moment
Caught in between 10 and 20
And I'm just dreaming
Counting the ways to where you are

I'm 22 for a moment
She feels better than ever
And we're on fire
Making our way back from Mars

15 there's still time for you
Time to buy and time to lose
15, there's never a wish better than this
When you only got 100 years to live

I'm 33 for a moment
Still the man, but you see I'm a they
A kid on the way
A family on my mind

I'm 45 for a moment
The sea is high
And I'm heading into a crisis
Chasing the years of my life

15 there's still time for you
Time to buy, Time to lose yourself
Within a morning star

15 I'm all right with you
15, there's never a wish better than this
When you only got 100 years to live

Half time goes by
Suddenly you’re wise
Another blink of an eye
67 is gone
The sun is getting high
We're moving on...

I'm 99 for a moment
Dying for just another moment
And I'm just dreaming
Counting the ways to where you are

15 there's still time for you
22 I feel her too
33 you’re on your way
Every day's a new day...

15 there's still time for you
Time to buy and time to choose
Hey 15, there's never a wish better than this
When you only got 100 years to live.
++

WORST GAME NIGHT EVER

++ TONIGHT WAS THE worst game night ever. while waiting for lisa to show up, we decided to play scattegories, which is always a good game, for those who have an extended vocabulary or when the letter you are suppossed to start the word with isn't the letter K. seriously, there aren't that many words that start with K anyway. and to try to think of them on a time limit with categories. nearly impossible. next was boggle. this lasted a whole turn. combined, five of us had 21 words. john had 22 by himself. stupid left-handed people see things in a completely different realm than the rest of us. last game we tried was trivial pursuit, except the game was from 1980 or some really really far back year .. (1980, wasn't that the year i was born?) .. so all the questions were of pop culture before our time or before we cared about pop culture .. (how much of pop culture do we care about now?) .. so after deciding that everyone playing by themselves was going to be too hard, we paired up into three groups of pairs. which didn't help either. everyone missed almost every question, so we started playing any answer gets a pie. brad and nick got easy questions and won, while foley and john quit after four turns. game night lasted half an hour and eeveryone left with bruised egos of being stupid. 4 months away from a masters degree and we are belittled by board games which defy our limited made up architecture vocabulary such as 'crit' and 'datum', oh wait, thats not a made up word, although in my project it might as well be, board games which defy our limited capacity to find 3 and 4 letter words from a jumble of letters visually connected, and board games which defy our limited knowledge of 1980's pop culture. lot of good these two degrees do us.
..
oh more soccer terms here. ++

SOCCER AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

++ SPEAKING SOCCER AS a second language be a whole other dialect of english. for one, everyone starts playing soccer and we feel the need to say everything twice. it's never just a "good job" or a "nice pass". its more like "good job, good job" or "nice pass, nice pass". second, we don't use first names when speaking soccer. last names only. and if you can't think of their last name, either don't talk at all or call them by their nickname such as, "hey foley" or equally acceptable is "hey cripple" or "hey asshole." another example would be, "hey rouse" or equally acceptable is "hey poonuts." we also like to think we are unique and above the american english language, so we say sentances like, "don't forget to take your boots out of your kit bag and wear the black kit before the match, that way when we are playing futbol on the pitch, we'll all know you are on our team."
..
playing the ball weakside - either kick the ball to the opposite field or pass it around so it gets there.
what you see - look up while you have the ball so you can pass it to the open man or dribble.
play goalside - stand between the offensive player and the goal.
pick up a man - get back on defense and mark a man.
mark a man - shadow a player and don't let them get the ball.
drop the ball - pass the ball behind you. someone on your team is there.
man on - someone on the other team is behind you, so be careful with the ball.
square left or square right - pass the ball 90 degrees to your right or left. someone on your team is there.
shoot - shoot the ball.
have a ball - shoot the ball.
through ball - pass the ball between the defenders into the open space behind them.
offside - a foul. there are not two defenders in front of you before your team passed the ball to you.

and all this means nothing unless you are winning. and even then i guess it really doesn't matter, now that i think about it. hm. soccer players speak meaningless jibberish. interesting.. ++

ITS MY BIRTHDAY

++ IT'S MY BIRTHDAY.
they tell me i'm starting to get old and that its time to grow up and take on responsibility.
they tell me i'm not fun to be around, because i sulk to much and i'm mean and selfish.
they tell me i'm running away from my problems.
they tell me i'm 24 today.
i know i will grow old, but always be young at heart.
i know i can be un-fun to be around, but i know i need to take care of myself first.
i know i am not running, but closing this chapter and beginning the next chapter of my life.
i know i'm 24 today.
happy birthday to me.
happy birthday to me.
happy birthday to me-ee.
happy birthday to me.
..
the only thing i asked for, for my brithday was a snowy day. yay, i got my wish!
..
jessicalee67: happy birthday!
futbolke: have a good b-day!!!
adelaidedawn: many happy returns of the day.
moesh1400: Happy Birthday JAY!!!!! I hope you have a LOVELY day!
ramentang2: :-DHappy Birthday Young'in
++

MIDTERM REVIEW AND SOCCER

++ MIDTERM REVIEW FOR studio today produced a lot of nothing. after six years of school, i know what i need to do to get it done. i know what drawings i should have. i know what studies and iterations i need to do in order to get at what i want to get at. i understand the process through which i have to endure and the things to observe in order to make progress in my project. i just have to do it. so a half hour of pin-up time with two professors is of little use to me, unless they are critiquing specifically the things i have pinned up. i know what needs to be done. i actually probably could have told you before i even pinned up, what they were going to say to me and what they were going to tell me i need to do. oh well. next time.

i drove to fairborn tonight to play an indoor soccer game at 11pm. ha. actually, i drove a 2 hour round trip to play 15 minutes of soccer. which all said and done added up to about 3.5 hours, no wait, almost 4 hours to play 15 minutes. and yet it was worth it. matt came with me and i think he had an alright time. most of the players on the team were old high school friends, which was nice to see them all again. its always nice to see old friends who i don't talk to much anymore. .. even if they all suck at soccer. and yet they had more fun than my team which plays. although it could have been because they lost 17-1 tonight and they knew they had no chance from the very beginning. .. or maybe its because its an improvement from last week when they lost 19-1 or an improvement from the weekend before that when they lost 24-0. but yet it was worth it.