in the space between

In the space between I can get lost, I can live.

Space between paper and real, between outdoor and indoor,  between the two faces of a wall, between public and private, between up and down, between mine and yours, between successful or not, between past and present, between conscious and unconscious, between what I am and what I think that I am.

There is always a gap, a space between, between my real and everybody else’s real. There is a gap between what we do and what we wanted to do, it’s not a line, a wall it’s not a line, it has thickness, the space between has thickness,  sometimes so big that you actually live inside and cannot scape. There is gap, it has no point to deny, I want to embrace the gap, the gap makes things interesting. a gap in the professional practice, in the understanding of our job, our life.

Unfolding the space between, discovering it, living in it, enjoying it, feeling confortable in the space between.

The space between cities, between friends, between jobs, between moments, between events, between your eyes and what you look at,  space between thoughts and words, between action and reaction.

I live in the space between

dedicated to a longtime friend.

e.

today is video day. why not 2

I used to go through this station everyday, abit earlier though…. thy not?

This is PEC watching rush hour some months ago.

lost in wanstead

It takes me so long to finish the posts normally, I start and then I stop`, then I take it the next day and it doesn’t make sense anymore, sometimes I have an idea but I don’t know how to express it, sometimes I have a story but I don’t know which way would be the best one to write it. It’s been a week since my firends got lost in Wanstead on the way back home. Funny enough this is my first 2 days weekend in a month and I am sick, but at least I am home, and I am warm and confortable, which brings to my mind my poor friends lost in wanstead.

You feel home because you know the place, you know how thing work, you have memories and feelings attached to it.
You are lost when you are somewhere you don’t know. Knowledge gives you confidence, confidence gives you security, security makes you feel at home.

Some friends came to visit last weekend, on sunday they went out and came back by the Night Bus. At 1.20 am they called they were lost. They were in wanstead. So, technically they were not lost, they knew where they were, but the context was completely unknow for them, therefore they felt lost. They didn’t have the knowledge, not the language, nor the resources to get away from that situation. Then you feel weak, then you feel lost.

It is not only about knowing the place, but also about knowing you, about having experience in similar situations, having resources and abilities, having external useful knowledge is what makes you confortable, about not panicking. Normally when you feel lost, your brain just blocks, is not able to react and bring to the spolight the objective situation and the resources needed to move on, normally you just paralize and drama begins.

This fact of not being able to stop for a moment to think, to forget the rush, the anxiousness, toput feelings aside and think about the actual facts is what leads to a series of bad decisions that make the panic feeling grow. Just call a cab, write down the address, you loose 25 pounds and you are home. Or as they did, take the same bus back, tell the driver the address and get back home at 2.oo am. They left back to Spain at 5.oo am. Tough night.

Today I am off to get an aspirine. Damm it.

miscellaneous II. the long way to the office

normally it takes me 35 min to go from my flat’s door to my desk at the office.
normally I get to the office between 9.3o and 9.45 am
official time to start working 9.oo am
route to the office. Bow road station. district line one stop to Mile end. Change to central line. 2 stops to liverpool street. Walk from liverpool street to old street.

On Monday I tried to get to the office on time. Various reasons for that.

Monday December 1st.
8.25 am. Go out of my building
8.35 am. I took the district line
8.38 am. I jumped onto the central line at MIle End.
As i entered the coach a lady sitting there just fainted. They had to call for medical assistance. Train stop
8.42 am.Decided to take Hammersmith line, so change plattfor and changed to Hammersmith line.
8.50 am. We are stopped at Whitechapel.There is a personill at Monument station, a few stations in front of us, all the trains on that track are stopped
8.54 am Decided to go out to the surface and take the bus
9.oo am I catch the 205 bus that goes directly to my office place. There is a huge traffic jum due to roadworks and Ring Road congestion
9.30 amI reach the office

normal time 35 min. Monday time 1 hour 35 min. And all because for ine day I tried to arrive on time.
Infrastructures and public transports are the element around which the city should be built, and we should find a way to be able to avoid interrumptions due to normal and frequent activity falilures. no?

 

Blogging.

I realised that a lot of times I got a really good idea for a post,or a really good funny thing that just happened to me, but at that moment and even that day I don’t have the time to stop what I am doing and put myself to write the post. so many times I have “unborn” posts, which piss me off, so I have thought that probably talking about architecture and society, or more about ideas than about occurrences would be a better and more interesting idea for the blog. Also I am gonna try to write the quick stuff in twitter, I like the  140 character rule. Let’s see how it goes.

Fraud.
On my way to work on Sunday I came accross this guy who showed me his arm bleeding and asked for money for a cab. I offer to call an ambulance bu he refused and went away asking more people for money. I felt something was weird with that guy. Well, tuesday I saw the same guy doing the same trick to other people. I though thatn values and respect are in the lowest levels ever.

miscellaneous

This has no sense, I write as I think, but it is not a coherent post / email /anything.

 

- It’s an intense feeling, an intense life. To feel as belonging to nowhere and to everywhere at the same time. Having more and more knowledge about more and more places and at the same time having less and less elements that attach you, hook you to one place, no constrains, no past, just knowledge that gives you freedom.

 

- I need to learn to pilot airplanes. I wanna have a huge warehouse in nowhere, like one hour from NY by plane, and then an office near the airport, in a forgotten area.

 

- I like New York because is naked, I like Madrid because it is ugly, I like Roma because it is honest, I don’t like to fake, I don’t like pretty images, I like truth, simplicity, changing systems

 

- I like being on transit, I like not have to worry about routine life, just to discover, to learn new places, to think, to write, to be free to manage myself, to be able to work on important things.

 

- I feel as if the ideas in my head are coming together and I like that feeling, I

 

- I want to change my life a while, I want to be able to move more, to travel more, to detach myself from the boring job. I want to do more things, to discover more places, I cannot take my job seriously, and sorry I cannot do that anymore

 

- Adriano talking about Rome. Stone by stone my citizens.

 

- A movie worth watching. “Reality bites”.  (Though I don’t like the ending)

- An incredible good book. “New York Trilogy” by Paul Auster.

 

- Going back to Spain, well to Madrid is weird, because I am sleeping at my grandmother’s place, so it is not coming back home, I am not at home, my home is London now, but I feel more and more, that my home is where I am, where my friends are. I like the feeling of having not a permanent home but a moving one. Just a small suitcase, my laptop, and few more things, knowledge of the places.

 

- So here I am in Madrid, I am not home, nor visiting, I am here just for the papers to register to the ARB, and to talk to some friends, but it is weird, nor holidays, nor back home, nor tourist, I don’t know what I am in Madrid.  It is difficult to explain.

 

I am glad to be here so I can actually have nice conversations with some old mates, really long true conversations, so thanks to Baltar, Marian, Beto, Hector, Nai, Laura, Alex, so on…..

 

- Time, probably the key of all these thoughts is time. Having time to do things properly, having time to enjoy everything you do, time not to have to watch your clock every ten minutes because you have the next thing to do, because you are always late, because you always have to do something else and not what you are doing. TIME.

 

- Wasting time, that is the next problem, so you waste your time doing things when they are not due, thinking that travelling is a thing you need to do, but not a thing you like to do, you waste time because you don’t profit from the dead time between things,

 

- A day at home was nice, a day reading, a day watching movies, a day at the computer, and yes, it is holidays.  

 

 

 

 

NY living. Parking

Ok, this is how they do it on the East Village.
Let’s say you have found a very nice parking spot on a “Monday” side. This means that there is suppose to be one side street cleaning on Mondays and Thursdays. Street cleaning is 1hr 30 min and it varies from really early in the morning to noon or one. So what they normally do is you go down to your car at the scheduled time, take your car and park it on the other side of the street in double lane. The guys putting tickets don’t care a shit about the double lane, because they are responsible for having the side that is going to be clean clear. So you just double park, go for a coffee in a terrace nearby and as soon as the machine has passed by you put your car back in your normal position. But you have to do it straight away because people is really quick, you cannot way till the end of the cleaning hour because then you have run out of spots.  Some of my friends don’t agree with this theory but I’ve seen it with my eyes wide open. Actually we had a “Tuesday” spot, but we decided to move the car on Monday. So what we did is that we wait till half an hour before the Monday time is over, took the car, go to a Monday street, took a coffee while in double lane and put immediately back the car into the Monday spot. Then we got a ticket because we were 5 ft away from an hydrant and you are supposed to be 6 ft. Damn it.  I think NYC has so many parking affairs….some say is just for money.

NY living – my apartment’s floor is inclined

So, that’sit. We have rented an apartment here in NYC for 6 days. As we are 3, a 1 bedroom apartment was economically quite cheap for a short termrent. The location is perfect, East Village, just a couple of minutes from houston st and bowery.  The only thing that is a bit weird is that the floor os inclined, but not just a bit, quite a lot, I think the slope would not comply with the 5% maximun slope for people with disabilities (no, just kidding).

On the other hand one good thing is that has little/no furniture, so I am using the floor again and I really like that, I like to recover the use of the floor level, like sitting on cushions and so on, kinda mix between japanese and arab.

Aboutthe city, it is just awesome, one of those place you are meant to be in. Temporary Waterfall installation is so, so. The one under the Brooklyn bridge is perfect, really cool, the others are Ok, but nothing spectaculatr, overall, worth seeing.

Yesterday I did one thing I never thought possible, I walked the whole day, no metro, no bus, just walking, from 14th street to battery park. Who said NYC was too much? I find its scale perfect, not overwhelming, it is just dense, but density in the good way.

pressure / running out of time

Nothing better than having the clock ticking really close to your ear. It looks is the only way I can do things, I don’t know why but I feel that if I do things in advance I am stupid, or I am missing something.
Maeybe if I have plenty of time I get distracted on details and do not focus on the important things, but when I am down the strech I can pull out just the basic needs, deliver them and forget the rest, or maybe I am just lazy, or maybe is because I have worked on Sunday.

Anyhow, I am leaving on Friday for 3 weeks and I still have so many things to do. Clock ticking.

On the other hand it looks that some other people cannot make decisions in time, even if the meeting and the presentation has been set up a month ago, and decide to go for a model 14 hours before the meeting. At least it is singular.

Whatever 5 and countin’.

what a day (and a half)

Definitively things never happen alone and everything gets packed in my life, but I must say I love it.
Yesterday nothing really happened but it was one of those funny days. 
_I saw a girl wearing a tiger-striped orange patter dyed into her hair, nothing fake, nothing for a party, it was her everyday look. 
_ I saw a black guy reading a book about Obama, it looks like you can write a book without having to say anything, or a biography when you have done nothing yet and you are on your forties. 
_Is it going to be any black person not voting for Obama next November? 
(I know I just earned millions of enemies, but I think positive discrimination is still a way of discrimination, so race should not affect one way neither the other)
_I saw some kids riding on a bike making jokes about me because of my leather jacket. I laugh too, there were funny. And actually it was funnier later because they were showing on TV Terminator with his leather jacket, the joke was about that
_I proof to myself again that I love the last minute thing. I did cleaning yesterday at 1 am and this morning at 7 am just ready before my friends are coming to visit. No need to mention the they are not going to notice it. But I do like to have some kind of pressure or deadline to force myself to do things. I am so much more efficient.
_I fixed my plumbering  problem at midnight with a nails cutter and a screwdriver, so proud of myself.
_I found out that Greyhound buses suck. They don’t sell electronic tickets, wtf, who the hell still doesn’t have e-ticketing, helloooo!!!!! we are in 2008. SO Greyhound sucks. Though I still have to use them, so please sell me the ticket when I go to the station. Thanks
_I realized that we don’t know the definition of Parcel Boundary. (Post about  this issue to follow)
_I got notice that we are presenting the project one working day before it happens.
_I learnt that Sagitarians want to take over the world.
_I wll be doing a competition about something that has not even been planned.

_whatever,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJPFSNu_QNs

Pinky: “Gee Brain, what do you want to do tonight?”
The Brain: “The same thing we do every night, Pinky—try to take over the world.”

my days off are gone

I haven’t worked since Friday. I took Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday off due to the huge amount of hours, weekends, nights that we have put into the office. It is what they officially call “days in lieu” (note. when the hell is English going to have their own words for everything and not import fancy french or Spanish words to name things that are nasty but that if you say them in french is nicer?)

So tomorrow I am back at the office. but, hey, wait a second,  was this a holiday??? NOOOOO. It was my normal evening, weekend time that I didn’t have, all condensed in these 3 days. It was nice, yeah, sure, but it is not something extraordinary, just my normal hours out of the office. It was nothing extraordinary, check I did deep cleaning in my apartment on Monday, I put 3 laundries because I literally ran out of clean clothes,  I reorganize my kitchen, my laptop, my life. I went to buy some clothes on Sunday (second time since I arrived in London, and god I needed some new T-shirts). I cooked again, I have almost forgotten it, I am writing on my blog, etc, etc…..  so what about having real holidays, no just time out of the office to be able to catch up with my life.

It is been a while since I decided not to have a normal life, I am fine with it, but one thing is not to have a normal life, and a very different thing is to consider some time off as an extraordinary holiday time. things are going wroooong