Dogged

Today was a good day. Well at least as good as any holiday can be when you still have to go to class.

It was a good day because I woke up without my alarm, was very productive and felt positive about the entire experience. Sadly enough, all three of those criteria are not met concurrently, very often.

I was productive in my studio pursuits but also in that I finally emailed Jim Williamson, my studio professor and academic adviser, and told him that I wanted to meet to discuss some difficulties I was having in the transition to a new discipline. When he came into studio today he patted me on the back and asked if I was wanted to talk then. I was a bit caught off guard and didn't have the list of questions I was planning to prepare, but agreed anyway. He took a look around at everyone's drawings and then we went for a walk.

It was great to confess the problems I was having with architecture and have him answer me with some real practical advice. After talking for a while about the discipline, he gave some advice that breaks down like this....

1. Time Management. Don't underestimate this and the better you become at managing your time the better you will do as an architecture student and as an architect.
2. Do not model yourself on other architecture students (i.e. rarely are the late nights truly neccessary) and do not compare your ideas to theirs.
3. People from the sciences do very well in architecture because they are comfortable with trial and error. The worst thing you can do is allow yourself to be paralyzed by the possibilities. Proceed forward at all costs.
4. Architecture is unique in that you have to be able to switch back and forth between the procedural and the unsystematic. For this reason the people who have the hardest time switching are usually artists and English majors.

Some of these may seem quite obvious and you might think, wow I could have told you that, but his authority and experience in the matter gave great weight to his comments.

Anyways, I ended the day with greater confidence than I have had in a while and as I walked home I daydreamed about how cool it would be to have a dog waiting for me. That would at least be an excuse to leave the studio on time every day...

But then,
I got to thinking of how small my apartment is. Suddenly dream dog was half as big as I would have liked. That is not so bad, Evan has a cool little dog. Maybe I could even teach it to use a litter box...

But then,
I thought that I would be gone so often that I would need to get two dogs to keep each other company. Suddenly my daydreamed dog turned into two dogs, each a quarter the size of original. More importantly it would be double the hassle, double the difficultly persuading my landlord and double the dog-poop. Plus I would have to come up with two clever dog names and good luck keeping track of two puppies, no matter how adorable...

I think I will just stick with my plant.