crunchy...

whoopty woo! i dare say it's crunch time in rome, kiddies. we have until thursday at [basically] 9am to finish up... so, what am i doing? i'm on the studio 'pooter' [computer = pooter... and you should get your mind out of the gutter... shameful, really... positively shameful i tell you...] instead of frustrating myself. no, really, i just felt like posting because i'm starting to see vibrating lines and such and i really was frightened that i would spill the watercolors i've prepared all over my pages if i didn't walk away for a sec.

so, sorry for the short post this afternoon, but don't fret, i shall post again soon... nugget time! - an ostrich's eye is bigger than it's brain. - don't you feel fortunate to not be an ostrich? i do... mmmm hmmm.

tah tah.

the sleepy ramblings of a frustrated student...

good morning... today will be filled with drawing and analysis, so i thought that i'd get an early start and post... before i get sidetracked and all that good junk... speaking of analysis: after spending almost a week analyzing the form of urban rome, in particular, the evolution of the forum, i've come to a decision about the current practice of academic analysis - it's a bunch of b.s. ... i don't mean that the act of analysis is b.s., just the current manner in which it is executed. i've noticed recently that most people do nothing but set out a piece of trash paper [trace... whatever you want to call it] and draw lines and dots and such without so much as putting a second thought into what it is that they are doing... add to that that they average joe doesn't understand what the hell one is trying to communicate through an analysis diagram, and one has to wonder: is there a better way to do this? one that would make it possible to clarify issues for the designer and make those issues understandable for people outside the profession on architectural design or the field of architectural education to understand the message being conveyed/explored? i am making it my personal mission to find a better way to analyze in my own projects... there absolutely has to be a better way to do it... some way that will actually aide rather than add to frustrations... yeah so there's my early-morning-two-cents.

i probably should have prefaced this post with the fact that i'm still slightly asleep, have only had one cup of coffee so far, and that my studio frustrations kept me awake pretty much all night last night... but now, i guess you’ve been informed...

anyway - on to less boring stuff... maybe... i've been reading a LOT since i've been in rome... i might have mentioned already that if you have the ability to read, you should definitely buy/borrow/check out 'the cheese monkeys' by chip kidd... i've now read it twice [it's a really quick read] and i am absolutely enamored with the book... oh - i also picked up a copy of 'big sur' by jack kerouac - yeah... he writes in an extremely stream of consciousness-type style that's incredibly addictive... it kind of sucks you in - not with drama or anything [well, so far, that is... i'm only about 1/3 of the way through the book], but because you really kind of just want to find out what he'll put down on the page next - like weird sounds, strange, pseudo tangential stories... you should just read it and then you'll understand... not to mention that the story is pretty interesting so far...

ok, i've been on the computer for too long... i have to go finish drawing now... random nugget: the international telephone dialing code for antarctica is 672.
... go call someone... or something...

ciao.

are people for real?

so... i'm officially disgusted with humanity today... story: david, brad and i are on our way to jason and alenya's flat [they're in our class... for those of you who have no idea who i am referring to] and we meet up with kristen and camille [also in our class for this semester - they're with the fulbright college]. as we start down the lungotevere again, we see ahead of us three rather drunk men just sitting down and hanging out on the side of the sidewalk... taking a break, as it were. alright, here's where stuff gets really skin-crawlingly angering... so, these two maggots [i call them maggots, because they don't deserve the privilege to be referred to as human beings...] are walking in front of us... ironicly enough, on their way to temple [i think yesterday was yom kippur]... and one of these assholes kicks the living daylights out of one of the drunk men on the sidewalk... right in the head... - i mean, the sound was so loud, it was almost as if someone had just dropped a brick off of the roof of one of the seven-storey apartment buildings next to us... and these guys just took off running...

i feel like a sad excuse for a person today... because i was so shocked, all i could do was just stand there as these two hoodlums sprinted away and as the poor gentleman who was just assaulted was probably bleeding from the ear.

as we continued to walk, i couldn't help but wish that i could somehow catch up to those two - i can't even think of a word so foul as to describe them - and beat the living crap out of them with my bag full of wine bottles... just beat them to a pulp... i'm normally not a violent person, nor do i regularly wish ill-will on people, but i wanted something absolutely horrifying to happen to them. truly barbaric. i wanted someone to just pop out of nowhere and bestow the same shameless hatred upon them as they had upon that poor, harmless man. i truly makes me sick to think that i belong the same species as those two cretins. i am truly, deeply disgusted with humanity... i can't believe that people could actually bring themselves to be that hateful and cruel. i'm sorry, but i am still in total shock over the events that took place last night. ... ... ...

i have no fun facts for you today, because i think that if i added one, it might make light of a very serious post. i do apologize for the somber mood of my post today, but i just had to write this stuff down. it just seems so unreal... so completely an utterly impossible for people in this day and age to be so barbaric, so completely devoid of any compassion for their fellow man... although this kind of shit [pardon my language but i can think of no other appropriate term…] really shouldn't surprise me, considering current world events... i just can't believe that this happened right in front of my face... and the worst part about it is that i took no action against the assailants... i did nothing but make sure that the assaulted man was alright. ...

come on now... everyone do the creepy guy shuffle!

hey there girls and boys! so, we got to go to pompeii yesterday... it was really a lot more beautiful than i had expected it to be... i think that it was made even more amazing because the sky was black - it seems that whenever we take a trip, rediculously violent storms decide to come along too - so all of the colors were incredibly vibrant... almost surreal. i forgot to drop off my film, otherwise i would insert a picure so i guess you'll just have to wait until i get my brain back into the practice of remembering to do stuff...

so, we got back from pompeii and all of us were craving american food... i know, i know... we're in the land of first-class cuisine and we want nachos and hamburgers... how stupid... but we decided to go to the hard rock cafe... this is when a wonderful day turns sour for natalie... on the way there, one of the bracellets that i had bought here - a really cool italian snake-chain with bedouin clasps - decided that my wrist was not a really good place for it to be and it fell off somewhere on the long-ass trek from my flat to the hard rock. oh, it doesn't stop there... so we eat our amazingly delicious junk food and decide that it's time for a drink. as we step outside, we realize that it's raining... i, of course, had to be wearing my brand new green suede shoes [that i had just bought on thursday night] and of course, it decides to pour. now my shoes have a lovely dark spot on both of the toes... anyway - so with the rain comes EXTREME cold... and rediculous wind... niether of which any of us was prepared for. so we finally catch our bus [it seems that whenever we need a particular bus, they decide to stop running that line...] and get to the apartment where we immediately throw on jackets and warmer garb and decide that we still want to go have a drink.

so we head to sloppy sam's because they have the cheapest drinks in campo dei fiori and i have a white russian [i was feeling in a sort of 'dude'-type mood last night]. it was lovely except for the bitingly cold gusts of wind and the occasional splatter of rain. a couple of people that brad, david and i had met at the police station last week showed up at the bar and invited us out to a club... i was the only one that went, because everyone else decided to call it an early night... the first club that we went to was closed and the second was absurdly packed... i think that i need to give you guys a little background here: it never fails that when i go to a club, the ONE creepy-ass guy there zeroes in on me in the sea of people and begins to follow me around for the rest of the night... why i thought that this night would be different, i don't know... anyway - i'm dancing with my new-found buddies and enjoying another white russian - yeah, that drink cost way too much, by the way - and of course... creepy guy shuffles his way over to me and begins to try to dance with me... ugh... i slip past him somehow and geet back over to my buddies [yeah, i feel like calling them my 'buddies', so you'll just have to bear with me...] and the guy shuffles over again... this goes on for about half an hour and when i finally decide that i've had my fill of 'weird-smelling-creepy-acting-bad-dancing-no-personal-space' guy, i bid adieu to my buddies and trek home...

so, i guess it's cheers to another strange night in rome... at least they're entertaining in hindsight... bottoms up...

i'm going to go draw now... oh, you people should check out 'the international herald tribune' if you're in the mood for a really good newspaper... or if you just need a break from the b.s. on fox news... and now, for your daily nugget: cat's urine glows under a blacklight.

don't you just love random facts?
ciao kiddies...

forum stank...

so, for the past couple of days, i've been traipsing around the roman and imperial fora sketching and photographing beautiful things... my only mistake was wearing flip-flops... yeah, i know, i'm an idiot [and, in the words of chris: "i should wear 'real' shoes..."], so i came home with some pretty funky forum 'stank' on my feet two days in a row... you'd think that maybe i'd learn my lesson the first time, but nope, not me - i guess i just must be the brightest bulb on the tree, huh? anyway...

at the moment, i am faced with the daunting task of analyzing the area of the central archeological park in rome... it's really hard to even get started because the task is so enormous... but c'est la vie and all will be well - i think that i've found the direction that i want to start with and i guess that i'll just let things evolve from there. i'm really excited and nervous about my project for this semester, and i'm extremely anxious to see what i come up with... speaking of the things that i'll come up with: i've made a resolution for this semester and all of the ones that follow... i will finish everything and i will no longer hold myself back... yeah. it might sound stupid, but it's been a really important step for me... as i really seem to enjoy holding myself back... i guess we'll see where i go from here.

i'm off to [hopefully] make some beautiful drawings... more to come in a few days... i'm taking my pictures to be developed, so i should be able to have them back by thursday and scanned/posted by saturday [i would say friday, but we get to go to pompei on friday all day... so, just to be safe, i'm going to go ahead and say saturday for the posting of pictures...]. i hope that all is well with everyone and that you find some time today to cause some trouble of somesort.... catch you kiddies later!

ciao.

one crazy night... welcome to notte bianca in rome!

alright... so last night rome hosted an insane concoction of festivities called 'la notte biaca' or 'white night'... basically i've never seen so many people packed into a city in my life... and i'd like to add the little background info necessary to understand the scope of this comment fully: i've lived in large cities my whole life and have experienced the rediculousness of, say, the fourth of july at the mall in d.c. - yeah, notte bianca makes d.c. look like a tea party! i did get to see cirque du soleil and it was wonderful... it was just a sneek peak, but they're coming here for a full show on the 27th of october... and i'm about to buy tickets for it as soon as i finish this post. anyway... so i almost got squished, several times... as did everyone who was in rome last night... here's a mental picture for all of you kiddies who've been to rome before: so, we're walking down vittorio emanuele II [one of the busiest streets in rome...] and it is litterally a sea of people - no gaps, no relief from the undulation of hundreds of thousands of tiny heads bobbing up and down as people attempt to push and shove their way down the street... via del corso was the exact same way... it was actually kind of amusing, because i was out with a group that included the jolly green giant [aka. jason jackson...] who is a meager 6'4" ... basically a full foot taller than every other person in rome... it was wonderful, because if anyone ever got separated from the group [and trust me, it happened like twice a minute for about two hours], we all just made our ways back to jason, because all of us could see him sticking out above the crowd... tee hee.

after cirque du soleil, we decided that trying to make it down to the forum was impossible [i wanted to photograph the forum at night, but decided that having like 3 million people in the way was probably just going to get overly frustrating...], we made our way to a bar called 'saxofon cafe'... a really expensive, but neat, jazz bar right off of piazza della rotunda... i had a couple of beers and soaked up the relief of being out of the crowds [i honestly think that that bar was the
only space in rome that wasn't just bursting at the seams with people... it was so very nice...

after that, i just walked back home... got distracted in piazza farnese by a wonderfully loud and highly entertaining capuera demonstration complete with drums and a rowdy crew of fighting dancers... it was possitively decadent!

now, i'm going to wrap this baby up, head to the forum, and sketch for about four hours... or until i get kicked out of the forum... much love to you all and i'll post again tomorrow...ttfn!

sketching's all fun and games until...

sketching's all fun and games until the sky gods decide to hate you and, as they did on tuesday, pelt you with rain drops the size of over-filled water balloons again. all that aside, i spent about 3.5 hours having a blast sketching in the forum this afternoon. it was frustrating but lovely; frustrating because i can no longer sketch like i used to, but lovely because the forum is lovely and i think that i'm getting a little better at the old sketching routine... i just love the fact that i get to do this for a class... it's an assignment that we have to complete by sketching... i love this! if i was back in the studio in the states [sorry to all of you who are in your own little private studio-hell right now], i would be pulling my hair out right about now over some rediculously complicated and [unoptimistically] impossible problem... i love rome... i love it here, i love it here, i love it here!!!

oh - i owe you lovely people a story about my visit to the rome police station yesterday! so... david, brad and i get up at the ass crack of dawn and haul ourselves over to the putrid little police station in piazza del collegio romano [i guess that you can probably tell by now that all did not go well yesterday...]. so the three of us wait in line for 2 hours outside the police station to finally be let in to go wait for another hour upstairs in a stuffy, cramped little hallway. and, halleluyah!! my number finally gets called and i'm really excited because it looks like things are finally starting to look up...

i get into the office [ufficio stranieri] and sit down in front of an incredibly unpleasant woman who immediately starts to argue with me in italian... all i have to say is thank god that i can speak some italian and understand more, otherwise, i think my head would have exploded all over this woman's desk and my trip to italy would have been utterly wasted over a terrible exploding head incident... anyway - she starts in and tells me that some of my paperwork was only valid for two [2] days... now, i want to make something clear here: it had been almost a week since i had received the paperwork she was referring to [the cessione di fabbricato... which, by the way does NOT expire in two days...] and anyway, it was the people from HER office that told me wait to come in yesterday when i would have gladly done it last friday... anyway, i finagle [i have absolutely NO idea how to spell finagle, but you get my drift, so i guess we'll all just have to get over it...] my way out of that and just as i think all is well, she starts fuming about how i'm missing one [count it: one [1]] photocopy out of about 15 [that's right, 15] that i'm supposed to have... so, she throws her little temper tantrem and then she storms out of the room to make the copy. after she returned she finally accepted my paperwork and i was shooed from the room to go wait back in the aforementioned stuffy hallway with the other 40 people there waiting for their permiso [the thing that i went to the police station to get].

i think that just to spite me and my roommates, the office decides that they will no longer wait on anyone OVER an hour BEFORE THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO CLOSE... so brad and david get to go back at 7:30 on a saturday morning instead of getting to go to the beach. anyway, after about an hour, i get called back into the tiny little office filled with the stank of laziness and snobiness to get both of my hands dipped in ink and then pressed onto different sheets of paper in a random fashion for another 15 minutes by some guy who at first seems fairly nice buy then begins to exude a kind of rancid 'holier than thou' aura, if you will... [i truly think that he probably developed that after starting to work in that office, because he seemed like he could have once been a fairly normally nice person...]...

so after about four and a half hours of waiting on my feet, i finally get my permiso. and the worst thing about the whole day is that poor david and brad have to go back to that hellhole on saturday... i feel guilty... like i should go wait with them because it's not right that i have my permiso and they don't...

anyway, i'm off to go try to find an umbrella... as i have been thoroughly soaked twice already today, and i'd like to avoid the third time...

cause some trouble kiddies. ciao!

the rain in rome drops maily on the dome...

so, funny thing happened on my way back from the copy shop today... so, basically it goes like this: it's been cloudy and humid as hell all week... but today it has been slightly less humid, absolutely beautiful and not a cloud to speak of in the sky... so, on my way back from the copy shop with 18 large-format copies and one original map of rome's archaeological sites, it decides to pour... i'm not talking like small little drops... it was like being pelted with water balloons from some sort of semi-automatic shooter... strange, but i love the rain and i had a plastic bag [thank god i asked for one before we left the copy shop] over the drawings, so all is well.

we spent the early morning walking around in the forum [our studio project in rome involves the redesign of the human-interaction with the forum and the readjustment of traffic through the area without erasing the history that is currently evident in alot of the area]. i did two fairly lovely sketches [for me... for someone else, they probably would have been considered trash, but c'est la vie] and a lot of really terrrible ones. i really didn't realize how rusty my hand/eye coordination has become concerning my ability to sketch on the go. it's all good though, because it just gives me more incentive to practice and sketch more so that i can become adept again...

anyway, not much of interest today, but tomorrow, i'm thinking about going to the beach... depending on the weather, whether or not i can find a bathing suit [i apparently forgot to bring one] and on how i feel after i go to the police station tomorrow morning to schedule my apointment to get my permit of stay... it's a terribly long, drawn out process in which americans and anyone else who isn't from europe gets dragged through the proverbial mud until the people who fill out the paperwork decide that you've had enough and then they decide to hand over the necessary documents... i'm really not looking forward to it, as tomorrow would have been my only day to sleep in but instead, i get to haul my tired ass [pardon, but it's a vulgar situation and deserves to be described using vulgarities...] accross town to the police station, get there by 8:15am and wait for anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour and a half for them to open and then wait another 2 hours in line and then see if they'll be nice to me and my roomies and let us either, a] get our permit of stay right then, or b] make our apointment to get the permit sometime when we can actually be there... i guess we'll see...

i'll check you folks later.. i'm going to take a nap... giggidy giggidy. oh yeah.
tah tah

i love the night life...

harro... so, i would have posted yesterday, but i was at the beach [tee hee] soaking up the sun and checking out the incredibly abundant number of people wearing speedos that really shouldn't have been wearing speedos... you know... there are certain body-types [mind you, only about 2] that work in a speedo, everyone else really shouldn't try. blah, so i came home last night with a wonderful tan [considering the depressingly pasty state that i was in before i went to the beach]. a few of the people i went with received pretty hefty burns and are somewhat of a pitiful scarlet color today.

i also found a really great bookshop in trastevere [open door bookshop] and i swear that it will be the death of me. they sell used and new english books and they have a really great selection for such a tiny shop... and the people who run it are staunchly anti-bush... as is the enirety of rome... so i really enjoy shopping there and they like me because i don't like bush. woo. it's going to be a wonderful relationship - me and a lovely bookstore - i will treasure all of my new treasures always.

yesterday evening was my second experience cooking in my shoebox [also known as my flat] and it's a really terrible thing... if i turn on both of the burners [yes, we only have 2] at medium heat, along with the vent, no other lights, chargers or the television can be active or we will short out the apartment. i HATE it. on top of the fact that i have no room in which to work and that it gets so swelteringly hot in there, i cannot bear to think that i have to cook in the dark. ahhh. i think that my roommates and i have decided that we will be an eating-dinner-out kind of group... lunch and breakfast are fine due to the small amount of natural light that filters into our tiny window, but i can't do the whole cooking-blind thing.

ok... so i will leave you with that for now, but more will come. toodles.

the shitith hath hittith the fanith...

so, kiddies... i have a story for you... so take a seat, get comfortable and make sure that your monitor is fully focused...

so - went to visit the landlord yesterday so that brad, david and i could get the necessary paperwork for our permit of stay... apparently, there was some sort of catastrophic miscommunication [and because i'm the 'stupid' american, it's apparently all my fault]... there are, according to the landlord, only supposed to be two, count them: 2 people in our apartment... i guess that me sending them countless emails about there being THREE, count them: 3 people that needed an apartment wasn't enough for them to get the point... i thought that all of the available apartments that they'd clued me in on were fit to accomodate three people... but i accordingly wanted to turn my apartment into some slum dorm... yeah, that's why i spent three months trying to find a nice, semi-affordable apartment in the center of rome... so that i could 'slum it'. arrrrrgggggh. it makes me so angry...

but i guess all works out for now... i was able to negotiate a tenative agreement with them... basically, if we keep the place clean and hide the extra matress, all will be well [that is, unless the owner of the apartment shows up and throws a fit...].

blah, anyway, i have to go to studio... first day... woo hoo... i will write more later. hopefully no more explosive situations...

ciao babies...

miss me?

so, i am so incredibly sorry that i haven't posted in such a long time... it takes approximately 30 minutes to get to the internet cafe in piaza barberini... and by the time we get done walking around, the last thing on anyone's mind is the internet... blah.

so, anyway... david (the other roommate...) finally showed up on sunday night (school started on monday) and scared the crap out of me... we literally bumped into him in piaza farnese (i thought he was some drunk guy... and low and behold, it's david... yeah, i was so excited to see him...). so now our apartment is crowded, but we got an extra matress the other day (there's a matress store right around the corner from my apartment...who would have guessed?) and things seem to be working out fine...

the class did a walking tour of the area around the studio today, and i finally got to see caravaggio's 'the calling of st. matthew'... yeah. the church that it is in is just around the corner from the pantheon and the inside is really quite lovely... and hudled there quietly in the back is a masterpiece waiting to jump out and say 'boo.' the lighting in the chapel was really lovely and tied and 'made' all three of the paintings in the niche...the calling of st. matthew, st. matthew writing the gospel, and the martyrdom of st. matthew... all that before an espresso this morning... yeah, i most definitely filled three pages (front and back) in my sketchbook this morning...

tomorrow, alenya and i are going to go walking around the city... i just want to see everything. i still just cannot get over how incredibly large everything is... particularly the pantheon. i can't help but smile every time i walk past 'her' - the building seems to surprise me everytime i come around the corner... god. it is just so lovely and large and cold (which has been particularly enjoyable for the past few blisteringly hot days) and inviting. i have to deem the pantheon and castel sant'angelo my favorite buildings in rome, so far.

brad, david and i did run into a local in piaza farnese last night (we were sitting on one of the fountains, having some gelatto)... he was so incredibly nice and showed us around where we live, showed us the cheap places to get beer, the great places to get food and wine, the local hang-outs (as we're getting a little tired of the rediculous crowds of tourists in campo dei fiori after 9:30 every night), and some really incredible places to sit and sketch... one in particular that i will photograph and show to all of my loyal readers... it's a breath-taking little niche in the city that looks like something out of a renoir painting... it will be posted soon, i promise...

i think that this is going to be all for tonight, kiddies... oh - before i make my rediculously long trek home, everyone should read 'the cheese monkeys' by chip kidd... it will rock your socks off... yeah, so here's your long-awaited nugget (this is dedicated to all of those people who have been to rome...):

a major prohibitionist group, the women’s christian temperance union (wctu) taught as "scientific fact" that the majority of beer drinkers die from dropsie

the wctu suggested that school teachers put half of a calf’s brain in an empty jar into which alcohol should be poured. as the color of the brain turned from pink to gray, pupils were to be warned that a drink of alcohol would do the same to their brains.

mmm... yummy.

long days...

so, the capitoline museum (specifically palazzo dei conservatori) has a really great photography exhibit from august sander... founder of 'modern' portrait photography... pretty groovy stuff if you ask me...

other than that, brad and i slept until about 3 this afternoon after litterally walking our asses off for the past 4 days... put it this way, yesterday: so we leave our apartment at 81 via in caterina, right around the corner from palazzo farnese(and i guess this will only be significant for those of you who have been to rome, or who can find a detailed map...) we walk to sait peter's, walk all over the inside of saint peter's, go to the vatican museum, see everything but the egyptian galleries, walk clear across town to the campidoglio walk around the palazzo dei conservatori (at four stories of gallery space, it's no trifle, i assure you...) and then walk clear across town back to our apartment... needless to say, it was a pretty exhausting day...

now, we're just waiting to hear from everyone from our class that has arrived in rome... so i guess there will be more to come...