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!