i like seeing cities slip behind clouds like bed covers, i like reading the shore jag and the rivers bend like graffiti lines, and when i’m so high up, i like staring at the still ocean, trace its waves like the grooves of a 12" vinyl record, and wonder if this record is what's keeping the world spinning.
i live in california again after a year in hong kong. hong kong was beautiful, and coming home was the hardest and the easiest thing to do. i loved my job out there, loved the feeling of building something, and i was part of some great teams on some very cool projects.
but sometimes you have to choose between the form and the formless, between what you can see and what you can’t. when i'm in a situation like that, i've learned to go where i can’t see and trust what i don’t yet know. i don't like to be vague: but that’s why i came back. i was pulled really, but i don’t know by what yet.
not many people know this about me: i studied architecture and city planning at uc berkeley. maybe i was a bit of an outsider in the program (i only have a handful of close friends in the department). i loved architecture academically (ohh... the sketching, the all-nighters, the theory, the flame throwers...), but what i loved in life pulled me towards organizations and student groups like APASD, Theatre Rice, Poetry for the People, Southeast Asian Student Coalition, Students for Hip Hop... i wasn’t joining all the clubs to fill a resume or be mister popular or anything like that, it’s just that in order to accomplish the things i really believed i needed to immerse myself in the people from those student groups, learn and grow with them, and maybe even build something together.
it was a gut instinct, and i found families there, and i am very thankful to all of them. thank you for laughing with me, for trusting and holding me accountable, for listening, for dancing and freestyling and daring me, for staying up all night with me if i needed someone there. really, thank you, whatever i do in this life i don’t want to let you down. some of the people i’m thinking about, i probably might not ever see again, and i’m not trying to be deep or anything, but i guess that’s life, you were there for me and i was there for you for that key moment, and that was that. our back was got and that’s all we need to know.
for the next month or so, we’ll do something different here on this blog. there's going to be a small look-back at some of the work i was part of from 2001 – 2006 (mostly arch/design/film.) it’s just to help me get things together before i begin a new life cycle (grad school in film or architecture next year.) it begins at 2001, when i first started doing theatre and architecture in the Bay Area (really, at the pushing of jimmy and kathy respectively), and it ends at 2006, after a year of experimenting and learning in hong kong.
i sometimes believe that in the things i do, the opposite can also true. any object/building/place has the potential to be something else. break it, stretch it, bend it, snap it, glue it. we just have to find the potential, dig for the metaphor, and keep moving.