ramblings from a frustated soul....

I am not sure, really not sure, even after what, 6 years of going to architecture school if the initial frustation of not knowing where the hell are you going with this, leads to some truly innovative, interesting ideas or are just ringing death knells for the rest of your semester. This time its different, there is a weariness I feel, an exhaustion with the "idea" of what i should be doing. Maybe if my life was more structured, atleast my design program was it might help, if i was told to do this and this and this I would do it.

I don't think so though, I taking classes...and i feel the same weariness there....do you know what is the worst part...when you KNOW you can do better, when you know you should be striving for the best of your ability and you dont care enough to get to that point.

My greatest fear and my strongest inspiration has always been a crippling fear that I am not good enough - my first ventures in uncharted territory are always with hesitant steps that what I am doing isnt what I should be doing...and after the first step its easy, I realise that I can do this, i am not quite as hopeless as I thought I was , and I can be pretty good at this. I have lost that confidence....and I dont know why. I dont know if it was the studio I took last semester and blightly jumped into something I was terribly interested in but had no experience at all, or just a resignation borne out of my advancing age:) or just 4 months of doing absolutely nothing academic.......in that studio I learnt that interest doesnt automatically generate skill, and repeated failures at "getting the point" can just make me give up instead of striving for more...and most importantly I can have a theoretic interest in something and have developed absolutely no interest in the actual working of these theorys. Sounds too complicated to say a simple thought? too bad.... I feel like being obscure.

Thats another game I have liked to play with my diaries...I remember making obscure references to things that have really really upset me, playing a game with myself, - natasha, it feels like the end of the world right now, lets see by next week if you even remember what the hell you were talking about!...and more often that not I never knew what got me so riled up in the first place....theres a profound thought in there someplace....i know there is:)

For all that postulating, what I am doing these days is actually extremely fascinating. Even with my resignation and lack of confidence, I still jump feet first into things I have no idea about...with the confidence that I will pick it along the way....or maybe I just gave up on expecting to do well at all.....anyways, my thesis explores the divide between the real and the virtual....what do we mean by this.....why are we , for example writing web blogs instead of diaries?...only because we can? obviously not...there is this huge shift in our perception of our world happening in front of our eyes, exploding almost...and we are acclimatising to it so fast that we dont even stop to understand what we are doing. It is this new world I am interested in exploring...and what it means for architecture.....am I straying from the topic? no doubt....am i taking on more than I can handle? OF COURSE.....will that lead to miserable failure?...probably...but hell...if i ever thought about what I was doing...i wouldnt be where I am right now...and for all my cribbing I dont regret a moment of what i have done till now....

....so back to this new world....i found this fantastic book by David Weinberger called "Small Pieces Loosely Joined" that talk about these really profound ideas of what the Web means to us as a social structure but in the easiest reading possible. He uses examples we take for granted, like for example me adding a link to his page , without his consent, effectively creating a new "pathway" for people to travel on ....this tiny action of mine, in parallel terms in the real world have huge consequences.....I would be persecuted for creating a back door entrance to his life(his webpage etc.) and the ramifications of creating pathways to connect these differents nodes would be just mindblowing. His perspective is fresh and unusually startlingly resonative with how we think...

more on my extremely fascinating academic life...milenge, break ke baad....