if you want to hop on over to my "things to buy" page. . .

You'll find that I've added "Bostonia" notecards to my shop! A Christmas present for someone perhaps?

Bostonia watercolor: the very long process post

ETA: Crap, I knew I forgot something. You can now purchase this painting as a print, laptop skin, iPhone skin, or iPhone case on Society6.

So here -- after about five days of work -- I present to you, the Bostonia watercolor process post! It is very long, which hopefully will convey to you how annoying the linework was to complete.

more good stuff + things I long for

Good stuff:

I remember reading about this and shuddering. I read somewhere else that mining is no longer considered the most dangerous occupation, but I still think it's a job sent directly from hell.

A model blog filled with . . . model-y stuff. You know, clothes and travel.

What the hell is this? I don't know, but it's kind of entertaining.

A blog, mainly about details and vintage things.

Here are my options at TU Delft. I'm leaning toward Architectural Engineering.

I need to get back with studying Japanese. (Well, and studying Spanish. Dammit, how is it that Elizabeth Gilbert was able to achieve fluency in four months?)

This makes me feel so confident. Barcelona is #1 on the list of places to get pickpocketed. On the up side, Madrid is #3 and Paris is #4, and for the most part I have been doing okay there.

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Things I am longing for.

1. Driving myself on a highway with none too many people with country music on the radio.

2. Oyakodon at the 500 yen place.

3. Naoshima outdoor art.

4. The Christian Science Center plaza.

5. Family Mart [my favorite convenience store in Japan] pastries, noodles, and chicken.

6. Newbury Street.

7. The back alley behind Fenway.

8. The vet clinic, particularly the alley behind it.

9. An English-language public library.

10. Being able to put stuff on my walls.

11. B*Goods, the Shaws on Boylston, the Whole Foods behind Fenway.

12. Making the loop around the Fens, passing by the MFA, and thinking that I could go in any time I felt like it, really.

13. Baking. (Mom, we are going to have to do some negotiation about this when I get back.)

14. Cheese curds. (This one is all Mary Beth's fault.)

15. The Boylston Street Borders and H&M.

I can't really describe my desire for the people I love as a longing at this point. Maybe because I know I can call them up if I really need them. Sure, I crave physical contact like nobody's business, and face-to-face conversation where neither my partner nor I are scrambling for words. But when I miss a place, I can't just call up my favorite street on my cell phone and say, "Hey, how's it going? Can you give me some details about what it feels like to be where you are, just so I don't miss you too much?"

and fun times were had by all

My thesis presentation was yesterday done and went reasonably well. Now I merely have to write the actual thesis. Ha! (Yes, I do have a good bit of it written, but I have a long ways to go before Tuesday.) After that I one final; the next week I go to New York for two days; the week after that I graduate.

Last night I went out with a friend to celebrate at Piattini's, an Italian restaurant on Newbury Street. I even had a glass of wine with dinner -- pinot grigio something something. It was a white wine, not terribly sweet but very pleasant. I fear I am dreadfully ignorant when it comes to alcohol in general.

Today I started making good on my self-promise to do a lot of walking.



This route is about 7.5 miles, according to Google Maps.

Good times. Now I'm trying to iron out my flight to Madrid this summer. Oh boy. . .

you'll never see your little piggie friend again

Just got back from a three-hour walk around Boston. Certainly time well spent; it's gorgeous out today, and the Boston Marathon necessitated some creativity in routing which led me to some places I'd never been before.

This also included a 10-minute stop at Mike's Pastry (man, how I love that bakery) in the North End, where I overdosed on almonds for the week: an almond paste macaroon, a crucanti macaroon (which is covered with crunchy toasted almonds), and a pig-shaped piece of marzipan. It occurred to me as I walked back down Bowdoin street, munching on my bounty, that I should have waited until I got home so I could take pictures of the goods to share here. What, me, have self-control? Nah.

The one difficulty was with the pig. The mold they used made it look so. . . friendly. There's just something weird about eating a friendly pink pig with blue frosting eyes. . .

unreasonably distressing

as an addendum to the last post: Beacon Street fire. I was woken up from a nap by sirens and the sounds of helicopters this afternoon. It kind of freaked me out. I hope no pets were injured -- I trust the news to tell me about the conditions of people, but not necessarily animals, who were in the building.

Apparently this building is a condominium and therefore didn't have to have sprinklers. I find this moderately irritating because my single has no less than four sprinklers -- one over my loft, one under my loft, one over the bookcase by the loft, and one over the desk half doorway. My possessions are in far more danger of being annihilated by water than flames, so far as I can tell. . .

thoughts of the week

In all honesty, this week hasn't brought too many thoughts besides the following: "UNNNNNNNGGGGHGHH AARRRRRRGGGGHHHH PANIC" and "I'm tired. enh. Why am I so tired. . . ? The fact that I am tired worries me."

But. . .

But this weekend. . . yesterday and today I wore a skirt or shorts; it was 70 degrees Fahrenheit and pretty damn gorgeous. Life seems better, even though nothing has changed. (I also took an 8.8 mile walk yesterday, which was the turning point between "I feel miserable" to "gee, I feel pretty good.") I have already walked four or five miles today, and I am planning on going out again.

Now I smell like sweat. This should be horrible. I should be embarrassed. But I realized that I smell different in warm weather than in cold weather, and I have not smelled like warm-weather sweat for seven months. It is novel, in fact. [EDIT: I forgot this is what I smell like when I burn, even slightly. Ain't life bizarre?]

[Edit #2: Walked a total of 24 miles this weekend. Boo-yah me. The longest portion walked consecutively of that -- 9.3 miles -- is pictured above. . . man I love Boston.]

Thanks to my blog binge on swissmiss this weekend, I found a number of things to think about, which perhaps will follow in a different blog post.

But from the week, sort of:

AIYAIYAI

During the first sermon that I went to at Tokyo Union Church last summer, the pastor said, "God has called us to love the city--"

-- the combination of the weather and certain music on my iPod makes my memory extremely selective. I remember my first sight of Boston proper -- staring down the handsome faces of the Commonwealth Avenue brownstones -- the magnolias dripping pink and white -- freshman year, wandering around Cambridge near the old warehouse building that now houses the MIT Museum before and after the first studio, smelling fake chocolate and mint from the nearby factory -- sophomore year, coming into Boston with the rest of the girls in the third studio, totally exhausted, laughing as the people who took the bus were delayed further and further as we strode out across the bridge; that spring melting into the long summer, getting sunburned as I wandered down Shawmut Street and took pictures, the tanginess of a salmon sandwich eaten at a window seat in the buttery; walking down to the waterfront by the ICA and later with Alyssa, getting soaked through to the skin while we stood pressed against the wall of the Chanel store -- junior year, the night walks, down Boylston at all hours -- camping with Marilyn in the women's lounge during spring break, slowly and solemnly playing chess with the enormous plastic pieces a the children's museum -- now.

I love Boston.

It is not my home -- and I will not be here in ten years -- but I think this is the place that I have, at the very least, started to become an adult -- and I will remember spring in Boston in my store of beautiful things-to-hold --

-- and I hope, I hope hungrily, that I will love another city as much.

pottery land

Life is tiring right now.

I am trying to pound out the last bit of my revised thesis proposal -- surprise, the methodology section! (Also an extra paragraph on heating systems.) I'm definitely skipping 7.02 lecture.

I found this clever blod by way of an architecture friend: 1 design per day. She preferred the "cat hammock coffee table," but the entry that keep coming back to is this one, about kitchenware. I feel ambivalent about the design presented but excited about the possibilities (which maybe could be applied in pottery?) The home page of the designer is here. Interesting duck. I am a little put off by the sex toys (one appears to be attached to a mitten), but interested in the furniture and household objects.

maybe

One of the blogs I read is written by a fellow student at MIT who I know peripherally (as, I'm convinced, she knows virtually the entire campus.)

She posted a video of one of her friends singing Beyoncé's "Halo," with various inducements to watch it. The funny thing is (because we don't so much run in the same circles), I know the girl in the video, because she was my first freshman year roommate.

The funnier thing is, because she was only my roommate for maybe two and a half months before she moved into a different room, seeing her reminds me of a very short, very specific frame of time, the time when I was still discovering MIT, still discovering the people here, when some people who would later become good friends seemed new and strange, and others (who I would later regard differently) seemed marvelous and exciting.

I wrote this during my first month here --

self-awareness

Self-awareness is a game you cannot win.

See this guy. He writes plays that are supposed to upset "p.c. liberals," though he is a liberal himself; he is a self-described racist because he recognizes the total lack of diversity in his upper-class background.

So what?

What does this self-awareness gain him besides some kind of hip edginess? Not only is he an obnoxious bastard, he knows it, too. Great.

It's very hip to be "self-aware," to be patently aware of the ridiculousness of one's own life. And in some ways this kind of self-awareness can save you possible humiliation and can lead to enlightenment about the world you live in and your relation to it.

In some other ways being self-aware strips you of the last of the human dignity that you might have scraped from the dregs. The only thing sadder than a pointless person who does irrelevant things is someone who knows he is pointless and irrelevant. See dude above; although he may not think himself pointless, he clearly believes the battle he is fighting (against presumption, self-congratulation, et cetera) is already lost, at least on his own front. So why bother fighting?

I think sometimes we accidentally end up destroying our own reality when we try to remove all of its illusions; just because it's constructed doesn't mean it's not real. See the Prudential Center vs. a mountain. Just because one is man-made and will doubtless be destroyed before the other does not, for the time it exists, make it less solid, less defining of space.

I will now quote C.S. Lewis because he is brilliant, and because if C.S. Lewis knew what was up then some other people must know too. (We aren't totally doomed as a species.)

"The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to ’see through’ first principles.

If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To ’see through’ all things is the same as not to see.”

Yay Clive Staples.

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I took another walk today nstead of doing work, because I am lazy. I walked up Boylston, around the Boston Common, and back down Beacon. Then I met Mary Beth and walked to Harvard to get frozen yogurt. Life is good, even if I'm not productive.












Can't get the photos to format correctly, so bear with me. * Le sigh. *

why is it

that whenever I end up in the North End, where there are absolutely NO public toilets, I find myself desperately having to go to the bathroom?

Walked 6.5 miles today -- up Boylston Street, around the Boston Common, through Government Center, and into the North End. Then back, obviously. Good walk.

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Whole wheat grain cereal is okay tasty. It's kind of like brown rice. I think I like oatmeal better.

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If I hadn't taken studio last term, I could have taken two -- even three -- biology classes last term, and probably graduated on time with a double major.