To those who toss the word love, around, please be careful.

Never ignore someone that loves you,

cares about you, 

and misses you.

Because one day you'll wake up from your sleep and realize that you miss the moon while counting the stars. -----but what if you know that you've already lost the moon, and you're not sure how to get it back.  Or if you even should?  Because it was more than counting stars that made the moon lost, so much more; and you knew before that you had the moon and never wanted to give it up in the first place.  But now you're left without the moon, and the stars aren't enough to fill the void for someone that gave so much light in your life.  All I see are pieces of the moon now, never the whole picture.  They say I deserve better, but I don't want better, all I want is you.

You were my moon, the stars, and the vast up and below.  I remember looking up into the sky and seeing the moon, and thinking how comforting it was to know that you and I could be together by seeing the same great big light.  But now that whenever I see the moon, I remember what you told her, how you loved her more than all of the stars in the sky, and all I could think of was, "What was I?"  Now it's just as though I wander through life waiting for something to happen to help pick me up from abandon.

In abandon, I'll hole into a bunker of safety, constructing a wall of protection and force, creating doubt and mistrust to those who could possibly be perfectly good people.  Because of you I can't trust anyone the way I trusted you.  It was a matter of desire and knowing that I loved you, and could never live without you living in the world somehow.

I still count the days since we ended, and stopped talking.

I still remember the date that I met you, November 16, 2009.  

I remember the day you said good-bye, September 19, 2010.

I remember you in Portland, 

I remember you in California.

I remember your smell, your touch, your face, your warmth.

I remember the day you became engaged to her, and the day that I found out that you began seeing her in mid July.

I remember meeting her in June.  That same week we spent so much time together.

I remember stealing kisses from you every time I had to take out the recycling.

I remember sitting with you on the beach staring into the ocean.

I remember the last time I had to say good-bye to you in person; how it was so heartbreakingly sad the next day, because I ached to hold you and see you again. 

I still feel that pain in my heart, like my ribs are being compressed and my heart is going to jump out of my body just so it can be next to you again. 

I remember seeing a project where there were two glowing hearts, and it was for two people in love who were separated....how just holding it and thinking about one another will remind them of their own existence.  I remember crying after I saw it, and couldn't talk for three hours afterward.

I remember being at a wedding, and all I wanted was to have you there.

I hate the middle of July because of what happened.

I hate Halloween and the week before my birthday because I know those are the most heartbreaking.  

I remember when I saw you in the airport, how suddenly I got so scared and felt like running away; but then I saw you and couldn't help but smile and hold you.

I remember sleeping with you and how I wish I could be there next to you all the time.  How those moments when it was just the two of us, I would never trade for any amount of money.  

I still cry when I really think about you.  Do you still think about me?

I think I can say that I've thought about you every single day since I've met you.

I will never forget you.  I will never stop loving you.  I will never not care about you. 

I will never stop you, I will let you go and run.

I will cherish every moment we had, as a sacred thing, left to be in my T.A.Z moment.

Silhouttes and friendship

Identifiably an act.

Taken from Second Edition: The Performance Studies Reader, edited by Henry Bial, these two references within a chapter titled "Performances: Belief in the part one is playing" interested me because of this idea that what people really are, are just a bunch of actors walking around in life's stage or film production.  The idea that we are constantly performing, and the real truth, and question, is when do we ever stop performing, or if we do?  Do we perform for ourselves then?  When you're in your room all by yourself sitting on your couch in a pair of sweatpants and old band t-shirt, are you actually entertaining the observer within you?  Are you saying "Look at me, I'm relaxing in these clothes, because they make me feel like I deserve a break and don't have to care about my appearance to anyone else but myself right now." ?  The reader took these references from Robert Ezra Park's, Race and Culture and also Ibid. (I am not sure what Ibid. actually means, so if there's anyway of letting me know, thanks).

“It is probably no mere historical accident that the word person in its first meaning, is a mask.  It is rather a recognition of the fact that everyone is always and everywhere, more or less consciously, playing a role…it is in these roles that we know each other; it is in these roles that we know ourselves.” ( 62)

“In a sense, and in so far as this mask represents the conception we have formed of ourselves – the role we are striving to live up to – this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be.  In the end, our conception of our role becomes second nature and an integral part of our personality.  We come into the world as individuals, achieve character, and become persons.” ( 62)

This is a constant interest for me, this idea of performing and what a performance means.  Those people who you act differently in front of because you are floored by their own character qualities, are putting on an act of their own even if it isn't immediately apparent.  Performance and identity is one thing that truly interests me, because to put it simply, I believe that all human beings have multiple personalities.  The clinical term Dissociative Identity Disorder for multiple personality disorder is one that is embedded in every single human being on this earth.  The degree of DID that people have is what varies, and creative people are those who are most closely in touch with the DID, but still in control of it.

In a separate tangent, though one that will be touched upon at a later time, is one about the T.A.Z.  The temporary autonomous zone, the zone in which utopias happen and cannot be captured and made mainstream, for they would no longer be what they exist as.  Something purely happy and purely enjoyable is what a T.A.Z is.  When you find yourself in a moment of a T.A.Z, you find yourself as you really are, it is a T.A.Z moment of true identity that must be left alone in it's moment.  Moments like these will rise up and happen periodically, so notice them and enjoy them when they do.

Wellness Center, a whole experience.

Hand-rendered image, first level looking West

Wellness Center,  hand-rendered image

Interior view of overnight guest room.

Second interior view of guest room.

High view of overall building, each guest room, has a different view of the presidio.

 The site is in the presidio, the project exploring this idea of what wellness is and what it is to heal.  Deriving from an experiential point of view, what was desired in this project was to think about the dancer, the performer and this idea of performance and movement.  The user, in this space is able to think about how they move, how they see things and how they interact with one another.  By choosing an over-arching form of angles and facets, the user sees movement as well as participates in movement when going from one point in the spa to another.

Second level, restaurant overlooking Golden Gate

Intermediate area of Spa

Identity

Haystack Rock, Cannon Beach, OR

Identity crisis; today it happened, tomorrow it will happen again, and yesterday it happened five times.  What is so fascinating about being someone else? Why are we never comfortable fitting in our own skin in our own personalities forever?   Because it is fun to be someone else, we don’t like who we are or what we do, so when life creates an opportunity to change it, we do.  Elementary school ends, we change, intermediate school we change, high school is over and we really don’t like what we do so we act like another person.  College is over and we once again decide what we don’t want like about ourselves so we once again, make the change.  We act a different part, put on another costume, wear different make-up, live in a different setting and change our identity to live out an aspect of personality that has not lived in the world yet. 

A taste of that bittersweet humor

What if the world were to stand still?

Coming across this image in the daily spread of mass information, makes you stop and think.

It makes you stop, and instead of "stopping," you move, you get an itch from your toes to your head that spreads through the intestines all of the way to the very tips of your fingers. 

What if the world were to stand still?  What if it were to stop and the only thing that made it move were those who wanted to move.  Society seems to be drifting into a form of passiveness.  Of inactivity, of drive, of passion.  Where are those who still want to be somebody?  The media, our education, our society gleams on celebrities, but let those in stardom remain there.  There is a constant negativity of absolute ordinariness, plainness, a celebration of gray.  A celebration of neutral, of carelessness, of heartlessness.  A society based on artificial intelligence.  In the age of technology, we as a society have become robotic, only going through the motions of what life is supposed to be without questioning why, or where.  Why is it that people who want to be extraordinary are frowned upon?  Students are made to feel bad (in some schools) for their success in the classroom.  Why is mediocrity made to be a bad thing?  Wouldn't the economy and the world turn around, if people actually cared?  If they decided to wake up in the morning and say that society is wrong, I can do what i want; I don't need the lack-of-approval for my success. 

Forms of art and design are looked upon this way.  In terms of career and education, being the artist or the designer is frowned upon.  It is not the smarter choice.  But what is interesting is that many people who choose the path of the doctor, engineer, or lawyer, seem to be unhappy in some way.  There is a lack of passion of happiness.  The success of one's career in business and in more formal and "serious" paths of work are the equivalent to what I am calling mediocrity.  A celebration of blah.  

This is why this image says so much more.  It says (to me and my ranting) that happiness doesn't have to come later in life, and it can actually happen right now.  You can be the next ballerina if you told yourself you wanted to be.  If people stop judging (standing) then maybe there will be once again movers in the world.  Movers who don't sit behind desks and sign papers, but real movers, where action reacts from action and words shout volumes.

Interior, view looking of my hybrid cafe design.  The capabilities of changing people's movements with form and their relation to sound.  Made out of copper tubes, the length of each tube controls the sound quality (in terms of volume).  The cafe functions as a cafe but also as a music performance space; the band plays on the second level, or rather on the surface of the tubes and the sounds of their music are more like that of a beautiful after thought to the general cafe user.