春节序曲

匆匆忙忙之中又一年的岁月飘过去了。在迎接狗年到来的时候，很多对过去的思考让我觉得自己开始慢慢成熟了。希望在新的一年里会有更大的进步！

人好像离家的时间越长就越思乡，就越对家乡的传统文化有无限的怀念。我本不是个喜欢怀旧的人（也许是因为小，根本不知道什么是怀旧吧），但是离开北京有近五年的时间，每到过年的时候我就觉得特别难受，想家。给家里的电话打过了，学校里中国学生的聚会也去过了，但是就是觉得缺了点什么，没有过年的气氛.。我在北京时间大年初一的中午准时打电话给家里，可以听得出电话那边很热闹。奶奶说大家聚在一起正在包饺子，没有我的份，但是给我留了压岁钱。那个电话的通话时间很短，也许是大家都玩的太开心了吧，连爸爸妈妈都是草草说了几句就挂断电话了。我觉得很郁闷，有种被忽略了的感觉。或许他们也在想念我，只是忘记说出来了而已。只要他们开心，我也就无所谓了吧。今年学校的中国学生聚会与往年一样没有计划的进行着。我和大尉去的时候已经没有座位了，等待拿食物的人排了老长的队。所以最后我们只好很扫兴的离开了，去了另一个中餐馆吃了一顿让人心酸的年夜饭。后来在大尉的执意要求下我们返回了聚会现场去看演出，他实在是不想看我在新年第一天就这么郁闷。演出只能说是表演者的自娱自乐，唱歌的人跑调的厉害，像在唱卡拉ok一样，表演乐器的还不如那些北京地铁里卖艺的人们。不过在怎么说，他们还是在庆祝春节，大家开心就好。

恍惚间突然想起小时候在北京过年的情景。除了传统大菜以外，我最想念的是放鞭炮。今年北京解除禁放了，又可以听到二踢脚和挂鞭儿的声音了。我特别喜欢在大年初一的早上出去散布，满地都是鞭炮爆炸以后散落的红色和黄色的纸，像秋天的落叶一样，那种景色只有在中国才找得到。而我什么时候才能再见到它呢？也许要很久很久以后了吧。。。

不罗嗦了，新春快乐，狗年吉祥！

Ramdom

When I read the so-called “random stuff” on others’ blogs, I’m deeply impressed by their thoughts and philosophy about the world. Most of the writings don’t seem to be randomly composed at all. They’re very logical and well organized. But today, I’m going to do the real random writing, with wrong spellings, grammar or whatever, just to spill out the poison in my mind before it makes me too sick.

Chinese New Year is coming right in front of my nose (Well, that’s a Chinese expression. If you don’t understand it, that’s fine. I’m just writing this to myself anyway.) Actually, tomorrow will be the New Year’s Eve. The big family (I’m talking about 20 something people) is getting together at my grandparents’ house and preparing the celebration. But I’m not part of it. It kind of surprised me that I’m not really interested in what they are doing or how fun it would be. I even think calling the family on New Year’s Day is just a duty for me, not that I miss them. After all, I’ve been here for 2 and half year and will be remained here for at least another 2 and half. Many things have been washed away from me by the stream of time. I’ll visit occasionally, but the place is no longer what I can call it home. And I understand this situation is not reversible. Moving to another place to look for better life is not like changing clothes, once you step onto the road, there’s no way to go back, unless you want to give up all you’ve been doing and start from the beginning again.

So, basically, mentally, I feel like a homeless person. I have a place to stay. Actually it’s quite a nice place for an international college student. But this place is like the refugee shelter. I’m only allowed to stay here while I’m in college. What’s comes next after I graduate? Who knows… Maybe some people would say “well, it’s the same with all college students that they’re trying to figure out what kind of life they’ll have”. But you need to understand, it takes so much more effort for a foreigner to survive than a native. I don’t have much choice. Wal-mart is not going to help me to get a working visa or green card. I need to get into a strong design team in a good architecture firm if I want to stay here and built up a stable career. Well, all that is uncertain. My only bet is to do as best as I can in school and train myself to be a good designer (not those crazy ‘carpenters’ you see on TV). I really hate it when I have too much uncertainty and can’t control it. But life is like this. You just got to be smart enough come up with ways to adjust yourself all the time.

My academic work is taking so much of my time, so that my social interaction with people is almost blank. The only people I know are classmates in the architecture school. But few of us are very close friends since everyone is so concentrated on his/her own study. I noticed I started to have emotional problems when I became 21. But I don’t have anyone to talk to except my DWTX. The problem is, DWTX is not a girl… even though he’s willing to help, he wouldn’t understand what I’m going through. I need a female friend that’s about the same age and personality as me to talk to. Well, with my time schedule, I don’t think that’s ever going to happen while I’m in school. But a TV show I watched today kind of made me feel better (Oh my gosh, I just watched TV? For an hour? I can’t believe it!). The show tells stories about four teenage girls who’re figure skating athletes. Their lives are similar to mine. They spend most of their time on the ice. They don’t know anyone else except the skating people. But they keep practicing for the glory under the spotlight. They’re willing to sacrifice anything else for being a good skater. They never know when they’ll trip over during the jumps or when they’ll get a serious injury. They just keep practicing and waiting for the moment to shine on the ice.

So, I think I just need to keep in mind that I want to be a good architect, and keep moving. I will definitely move to the top of that hierarchy someday.

Another Pattern Language

One of my textbooks for Human Context for Design is called "A Pattern Language". It’s basically a guideline for architectural design process (personally, I think it's could be an 'architecture design for dummy' book, except it wouldn't be very useful). So, I'm writing a simple pattern language for my recent life. That's why it's called "Another Pattern Language".

A DARK ROOM:
messy bed(1) unfolded clothes(2)... in the laundry basket and on the floor dirty socks(3) wood dust and foamcore(4) modeling tools and material(5)...all kinds of junk you can find you can find in my studio is now at home

unorganized desk(6) dusty laptop(7)...works really slow piles of books(8)...new, unread dirty tea mugs(9)

a garbage can(10)...without garbage bag, but full of junks

dusty drafting table(11) dusty lamp with dim light(12) unfinished model(13) more wood dust and foamcore(14) cutting knives(15)...sharp, dangerous; they can peel off any part on your hands drafting pens(16)...most of them are broken; out of ink

a wall with some drafting tape(17)...it says "C loves D" (also "D loves C" backwards) ink marks(18)...from the out-of-ink "sharpie" dusty printer(19).....out of ink too

A GIRL
black eye bags(20) long messy hair(21)...curled and tangled double chin, triple belly and muffin butt(22)...she's still eating chocolate broken back/spine(23) 24 hrs/day is not enough(24) depressed(25) confused(26) tired(27) tired(28) tired(29)...

A QUIET CLASSROOM
a test(30) unfinished answers(31) dead air(32) sleepy(33) boring teachers(34) stupid teachers(35) stupid students(36) unfinished homework(37) more homework(38)

(DWTX: ...and a Dawei sitting unobserved in the corner(39) taking pictures(40)...
CCTX: Wait! I'm not done yet!
CCTX grabs a frying pan and swings it into DWTX's face..."dianggggg"
DWTX-->>pass out)

A DAWEI PILLOW
very comfortable(39) excellent medic and 'C-engineer'(40)...I know that's where I need to go when I feel I'm broken spy-D(41)...sitting unobserved in the corner, taking pictures(42)... my favorite spot(43)...my goal is to make it bald! 'chee-foo, dengdeng'(44)...it's our secrete codes... burned chicken(45)...the point is why the chicken was burned, hei hei hei...

Well, that's about it. The weekend is coming. But I don't think it will be relaxing at all. I've got two projects to do. But this Sunday is Chinese Year. Now matter what happens, I need to celebrate it. Maybe being busy is good in some way, at least I'm not very homesick (actually I should say, I don't have time to be homesick...>.<)

Farewell to the winter break

Monday morning, I woke up with the annoying sound from my alarm clock at 6:50am. "No, please don't tell me it's Monday. It can't be Monday" I threw my hand onto the snooze button and quickly lost my conscious again. 10 mins later, the clock went off again. I turned on the desk lamp to force myself to wake up. It's the first day of school. I need to be in the Japanese class before 8am.

After a nice and long winter break, I'm back to the ugliest building of the entire campus, Lawrence Hall, the School of Architecture. My winter term 2006 started with an early gloomy rainy morning. Over the past month, I got so used to the perfect 1:1 proportion of my sleep/awake schedule (go to bed and around 2 or 3am and wake up about 2 or 3pm). It scares me that my school starts with the Japanese class everyday at 8am. But the good thing is I don't have studio this term, which means I won't be tortured with an 4 hours long class, 3 times a week in the afternoon while I'd only slept for maybe 3-4 hours. I found it's never fun to force my brain to randomly spill out some ideas about what we call it design when it's semi-conscious (maybe even worse). The final decisions always surprise me after I'm done with the projects. For example, in my last studio project of a music center, my concept was to form the circulation into a shape of a treble clef. I absolutely have no idea of why I came up with those funky designs. I wonder if that's why people think many of the modern buildings are ridiculous these days- the architect must have been "designing" them through many of those "semi-conscious" days and nights.

Back to the topic of describing my first week of school, I'd like to introduce my professors this term since I think they're all kind of weird in some way.

My Japanese class teacher, Nishio Sensei, is an old and strict Japanese lady. She looks like...an over cooked sweet potato that has been thrown onto the street and then ran over by a car. What an art! On the first day of school, I heard the rumor about this teacher that she was asked to stop teaching Japanese literature because she gave too much hard times to her students and even made them cried in the class. Hopefully she's not gong to fail me this term.
The second class I had was Renaissance Architecture History. We have a British teacher for this class and everyone is sort of confused by his accent. He's thin and tall. He has black eye bags which make him look like a vampire.
I have two teachers for Human Context for Design. The one I want to mention is the visiting professor from UC Berkley. During his lecture I started to wonder if I went into the wrong classroom of a political science course. His "speech" sounded more like a debate for an election.
The last course was Environmental Control System (ECS). The professor looks like an XL size Albert Einstein, I mean, they have exactly the same hair and moustache style. He is probably the coolest teacher among all the others I have for this term. He knows what he's doing in the class and he controls everything very well.

Alright, so...even though this is only the first week of school, I've already start to see how busy and crazy it's going to be. I started writing this post on Tuesday, and finally got a chance on Monday to finish it. But as I said, no studio means I'm in heaven. I enjoy the time with my DWTX in the library (doesn't that sound so BT?).

Oh, here's another little interesting story for this post: Friday night DWTX and I was invited to a party in Portland. The theme was vampire (like my history teacher...). I've never been to any club like that, so I thought it would be an interesting experience for me to check out. Although DWTX has warned me that there would be weird people doing weird dance, I was still kind of surprised by what I saw. I grabbed my someone's arm really hard so that I would feel I was safe. It was an interesting night but I'm sure I don't want to be somewhere like that again. It's just not my type of 'entertainment'.

We finally got cable in our apartment! We really enjoyed watching 24 on Sunday and Monday night. I always enjoy the "intermission show" provided by DWTX. I won't go into details but he's really cute ^^.

Ok...ok... time to sleep. Good night!