At Long Last!

Well I have to say I feel quite ashamed about my prolonged absence from this blog. But it's also very encouraging to see that even though our posts get sparse sometimes, they keep chugging along! I was reading back a little bit and I love Else's narrations (you give the best speeches) and Sofie's snapshots (more houseblogging please!). So I thought I would contribute with a combination of the two.

I want ed to share that, at long last, I graduated! NYU's graduation was a very funny affair, they held it at Yankee Stadium. My parentscame but they couldn't even see me because there were so many people. I just sat in my seat and drank a milkshake (seriously!) the whole time, no diploma receiving necessary. Here are a couple of pictures my dad took.

(At least they could see Brett...I'm one of the purple dots. Oh also he got a special hipster haircut just for my graduation, he went to a military barber at a very fancy place where you write your name on a chalkboard... I know, I don't get it either!)

(Bill Clinton was our graduation speaker... Wow! Also, I think this is a really nice photo... my dad has been getting really into photography recently and I think he has some serious talent!)

So I guess that's the major update in my life right now, and with that have come some other changes too! I moved into Brett's apartment where we're going to stay for the summer until we move into our own place and I'm very happy here. And last week I started my new job -- precisely one week ago today! So far I like it and the people are really nice. I feel like right now I'm getting into a new rhythm in my life and I like that. Maybe my new rhythm will include morning exercise?

Now I'm getting a little rambly but I also wanted to share that last night I put my little sister onto a plane for LONDON! Where you and Anandita will be reuniting soon. Sofie, I told her to go find you and give you a hug for me. She said she would so I hope she does! She'll be there until August, living with a friend from AC. Here are some pictures of my sister, taken a LONG time ago when I still lived in Queens (but she hasn't changed that much!).

(Isn't she pretty? And don't these photos look kind of 80's?)

Love you both lots and lots!

I've been hanging out with Shane recently

I finished my 4th year on Thursday. Everything handed in and ready, and I'm happy with how it all turned out.

I love to use friends in my images, it gives me an excuse to revisit lovely old photos to find just the right pose, activity or light condition. In this case I have been trawling through photos from mine and Shane's trip to Calcutta, Varanasi and Bodhgaya in 2006. Lovely memories! I thought I'd share some of the resulting images from my design.

India pt 2

So, as some of you might know, this year my relationship with India has taken a bit of a professional turn. I am doing my 4th year diploma project in Agra, city of the wonderful Taj Mahal. Here is a little sketch I did of my project as it stands.



I have three weeks left till portfolio hand in, so now it's all about hard graft and long days with lots of coffee!

The Inner Workings of an Architecture Studio, or, F**K, Only 3 weeks left!

Oh dear. I thought I knew what hard work was, sitting in the MPH studying for my IB exams.

I didn't.

Now, knee deep in things to be done, me and Naomi decided we had to make the best out of the situation. What better to do than set up a studio in my unused livingroom and invite all my best architecture mates for a three week long party?
Liam has announced his arrival, bearing computer, mattress and espresso maker, and me and Names (yeah, I like to call her Names) are already hard at work.

Here are a few glimpses:


My favourite little setup, with the Ant shelf and all our architecture books close at hand. Note the Lidl bags used to transport all our model making scraps from the Real Studio.


The wall is our friend! It contains all our ideas and scrappy sketches.


The wall is not our BEST friend though, that would be UHU glue (the solvent free kind. We don't want to go completely loopy after all.)


When we get bored, we put the TV on. Watching the news for example. We need to know a little bit about what goes on outside these walls! Note also the stock of emergency food (sugar puffs, jaffa cakes, tortilla chips, granola bars and bourbon creams).

But, the most important feature of our studio is this wonderful view, reminding us what NOT TO DESIGN (Notably the gorgeous St Georges Road tower blocks):


Who knew stress could be so much fun!

Musical Retreat pt 2

Hello dear friends, I just thought I'd show you what I have been working on recently - this is not the final drawings, not the final design, but it gives you an idea of what I'm up to. I'm drawing construction drawings at the moment, to hand over to my engineer tomorrow... Happy days!
Hope you guys are having a more interesting Sunday!

Whatever, Asshole; or, Funny Things that Have Happened to Me at NYU

You know, it seems I am becoming a regular old Miss Manners. I am slightly worried about how bitchy and judgmental(1) I seem to be:
- Every time I go into the lower level study area of the library, I remark disapprovingly to myself about the way people leave trash on the desks -- unspeakable, I think! I mean it is sort of a universally basic principle of EVERYTHING to clean up after oneself. Jeez.
- Last night in that lower level study area of the library I certainly did raise an eyebrow at a girl plugging her laptop into the unoccupied plug on my desk without a word to me, then just leaving the computer there with a whispered, "I'm just going to leave this here while it charges." "Okay..." I whispered back, but she was long gone. Of course, it was fine; there was no problem. Her laptop was not in my way and in any case my charger was in Brooklyn (oh absentminded me) so I wasn't going to use the plug anyway. But usually you would expect someone to ask, out of courtesy. I mean I would just never do what she did. It's amazing how much the four little words "Do you mind if..." would have changed my wrathful feelings to the Entitled Laptop Girl.
-Entitled Laptop Girl is right up there on the sneering shock scale with the time I saw a girl in one of the dining halls break off a chunk of one of the cookies on the common plate, and walk away, munching on it happily. The rest of the cookie sat there looking like a rat had munched on it, her greasy little finger prints allover it. Now this is not just disrespectful to everyone else in the cafeteria, it is gross.
-A more overt and funny form of rudeness appeared in my social work class last week, when a girl with a permanently sour expression on her face was bitching to the oh-so-sympathetic teacher (the one who says that there are eight million people in Norway) about the evil New York public school system(2): her desperately unfortunate eight-year-old brother is forced to practice cursive for "like three hours a day," and she did not see any good reason for that. I pointed out that at his age, learning cursive is also about developing motor skills not just learning an archaic style of writing. She cut me off: "Oh, I know. I'm going to school for occupational therapy. Believe me, I know." Excuuuuuuuuse me.

Aaaaagh what is going on here? It's the demise of common courtesy. Bitches.

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(1) This is an interesting word. It has two acceptable spellings! "Judgmental" is the more common one, but "judgemental" is also technically correct according to my dictionary, although the Blogger spell-check disagrees. I use them both, but I have recently started to favor "judgmental", because many people might mistake "judgemental" for a misspelling. Another word with two different spellings that I particularly like is "kerb" -- or should I say "curb"? I think that technically "kerb" is British and "curb" is American, but they are both considered correct over here. I learned this incredulously during a game of Scrabble with my dad. Now I use "kerb" exclusively (even though my Blogger spell-check continues to disagree) because I think it is cool and it is so different from the common spelling that it could not be interpreted as a simple error. Hoho, bringing back the footnotes! Sofie, remember when we got really into footnotes? And how I had like 3000 words of them on my EE?
(2)The NY public school system is, if I may add, one of the best in the country, with an average student:faculty ration of 13:1 as opposed to California's 21:1. These numbers are from my sociology teacher, who actually does check his statistics before broadcasting them.

Viva la revolucion! One tray at a time...

I found this picture on the internet, but it could very well be taken from the downstairs dining hall in NYU's Weinstein residence hall. Every time I visit this all-you-can-eat dining hall, I am absolutely shocked at the amount of food people throw away -- slices of pizza with one bite taken out of them, melting ice cream that's hardly been picked at, hamburgers that have been ever-so- slightly nibbled. It's decadent and disgusting, and I'm truly bewildered by it. Earlier this evening, I went to a discussion on sustainable dining at NYU (part of Footprint Forward); NYU head chef Jeramie Garlick said, if I understood him correctly, that in just one NYU dining hall, students throw away about 300 pounds of food waste daily. Didn't anyone else's mother tell her not to put any more food on her plate than she thought she could eat? If we keep on like this, pretty soon we will be drowning in garbage, wading through half eaten slices of pizza to get to class and slipping on melted ice cream on our way home. Shock, shock! Horror, horror!

Seriously, though, this wastefulness is pretty darn atrocious. So what can we do about it? This weekend at the Real Food Summit, I learned that when they got rid of trays in the all-you-can-eat dining halls at St. Joseph's College, food waste decreased two to three ounces per student! It may not seem like much, but it certainly adds up. It makes sense: when you can only take as much food as you can put on one plate, you will think before going back for seconds, and be more likely to finish all that you take. The water saved by not having to wash the trays is merely the icing on the cake.
It's time for all-you-can-eat NYU dining halls to go tray-less. So simple, so subtle -- and a considerable decrease in wasted food!

I brought it up in the discussion I mentioned earlier, and Jeramie Garlick said that they had actually talked to the NYU about this idea before, but that it had been shot down out of consideration for people with disabilities who might have a hard time without trays. I do not fully understand this, but in any case it's important to take into account. However, I think it's an obstacle that could be pretty easily avoided if there were a few trays available on request behind the counter at the entrance to the dining hall where meal cards are swiped. This way, students who needed trays would be able to use them, and students who didn't wouldn't simply take them out of habit.

So this is my new plan. This is my new revolution. Maybe it is petty and insignificant, but is important to start small. Next stop: ANARCHY.

Norwegian College of Fishery Science

This branch of my university amazes me. It has been a new experience for me to meet people with a burning interest in fish. This was previously not a part of my horizon. Last night I was at a party arranged by ”The Norwegian College of Fishery Science” and this Sunday is very much marked by the fact that I had a little much to drink there. So I am afraid that will also mark this post. But I’ll do my best. I shall now tell you some incoherent stories related to the Norwegian College of Fishery Science.

Earlier this fall me and my friend Sigrid joined ”fjellgruppa” – the mountain group, and went hiking in Indre Troms. It was stunningly beautiful. Two of our fellow hikers on this trip studied deseases of fish (at the Norwegian School of Fishery Science). I don’t think their whole degree was only about this matter, but I got the impression that this was the main thing. One of them was a Swedish girl who came as an exchange student to study this in Tromsø because they are experts on this here. So I asked her what in heavens name got her interested in fish and more spcifically their diseases? She answered: ”Jag vil bara at döm skal mä bra liksom! Jag vil inte at fisken skal mä illa.” which means: ”I just want them to be okay! I don’t want the fish to feel bad.” I found this very charming, and I think about this often. She had a fishing pole with her on the trip.

Funny thing about the Norwegian College of Fishery Science is that it is full of African students. I don’t know the number but they are so many. They come all the way form Africa to educate them selves about fish. Which makes sense since fishing is an important industry in coastal African countries.

Norwegian College of Fishery Science is the prettiest building on my campus. It looks a bit like a ship and inside there is an artificial waterfall. I take my economics classes here (all economics courses are run by the Norwegian College of Fishery Science, so to be a student there doesn’t necessarily involve studying fish so much). So this weekend some enthusiastic students initiated a spectacular party. They put up posters of all over advertising ”FÆST!” which means, ”PARTY!” in the funny northern Norwegian dialect. The menu looked amazing so Sigrid, her friend Hannah from home who were visiting and I could do nothing but show up. Full of expectations we came there, with our nice big box of white wine in one hand and pleny of prejudgies about what kind of people we would meet this evening in the other. We entered the building and saw that (even though we were an hour late) there were approximately twenty guests there and the atmosphere a little pressured. We met a cute welcoming committee that insisted that we drink their welcoming drink, which was homemade licqour. A good start. We helped our selves at the buffet, which had all sorts of fish, and shellfish and other heavenly dishes. Even whale! It was delicious. After a few minutes two gentlemen kindly asked if they could sit down at out table and so they did. They didn't really meet with my pre-made picuture of the geeky ’Norwegian College of Fishery Science’-student, since one of them was a trash-metal musician. A little disappointed that the picture had been spoiled we decided foster the geeky atmosphere our selves, and invited the others of join us in a maritime drinking game. The game was in the form where one person makes a statement and the others say whether they believe this statement or not. Usually this tends to evolve around sex and such things that the youth like to talk about, but we confined the scope to things concerning the ocean. Examples of statements were “I am a fish” and “The fishes’ inner wish is to evolve to be come a panda”. This went on for some hours. At the end we all held hands and danced around in a circle to the tunes of Bruce Springsteen. Even though the organizers came by all the tables every fifteen minutes with nostalgic complaints such as: “Dænne fæsten e en fiasko, det kom jo ingen mænneska. Å, fæst på fiskerihøyskolen for noen år sia: da var det liv! Da kom det hundrevis av menneska!”, which means “This party is a fiasco, no people came. Oh, party at Norwegian College of Fishery Science a few years ago: that was something different. Then hundreds of people came!”, it was a memorable evening.

i need help

well, i don't really NEED help, but i do want help.
in uni, this whole term is dedicated to studying an activity, involving around 10 people. we are going to make cubist paintings, collages, video montages and digital representations of this activity, and after christmas, our two terms are dedicated to designing a building to house the activity. it seems that most of my class want to do some form of dancing, because it should be an activity with a distinct pattern that we can make diagrams of and eventually draw in plans and sections. AND it should be an activity that we are interested in, because after all we will be spending half a year studying it. which does sound really interesting, but you know, i don't feel up to drawing salsa dancing every day.
AND, it can not be a sport, because sport arenas are too big for the scope of the project, so there's volleyball out the window.
i need your creative input on this one! i was thinking about kathakali dancing, which i think would be pretty cool, but how on earth will i find a kathakali group in glasgow?
hmm.
input?
quick?