“What you’ve got to remember is you can fail. Crash and burn. Lose. It’s the most important advice anyone can give you on anything. You have to lose in order to be successful.” (Penn Jillette)
Mm, tasty failure.
Monthly Archive for February, 2007
I’m back from Indonesia, 1.5 days of Jakarta and 3.5 days of Yogyakarta, but alas…
I know I should write about things before I forget them, but The Laze is strong with me. Photos up in a few days!
Aw man, I’m in a country that actually celebrates Chinese Lunar New Year, and my family’s on the wrong side of the frickin’ ocean!
Anyway, I’ve realized that I’m going to have to be a social, old-boy-ish, party-working self-promoting Haashole to succeed in architecture, or pretty much any other field. See, there are 6.6 billion people on this planet, 6,599,999,999 of which are not me. It’s inevitable.
Of course, I don’t how far I my Personality Revolution will go—this might end up being like that time I wanted to learn violin, or Chinese, or all those other things that lasted about 10 minutes. It’s going to be tough, I might have to turn Buddhist or something to cleanse myself of the distasteful fakery.
I suppose I’ll start by imitating Penn Jillette. Yeah, that’s safe.
So, two days ago, the boss assigns me a private gallery project. I went down with my fellow American yesterday to measure the space, which is quite nice: it’s basically a big, double-height, shoebox-shapped loft, exposed ducting, in a brand new building.
This afternoon I went with my boss to meet the client, who turns out to be Singapore’s top plastic surgeon and my boss’s cousin. (He’s in the Taschen plastic surgery book—his name rhymes with “roffles.”) My boss takes off for another meeting and I end up going to the guy’s holiday house, his mom’s house, and his regular house to see his art/furniture collection. I had dinner with his family, then I went to the site, the art dealer next door, and the office. I finally got home at midnight.
I won’t get into details, but basically we the proletariat aren’t even on the same planet. It’s a whole new world, a shiny shiny world of fancy cars, $35,000 paintings, and more networking than all the Internets put together. I almost felt at a disadvantage because I’m not, you know, rich, and so I didn’t have all that useful social breeding. I was saved by my experience with my fairly-wealthy first boss, Anna Nicole Smith’s untimely death, the Grammies, and a book I read two nights ago, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, which is full of conversations with culturally elite advertisers and directors.
Anyway, I’ve realized that being The Architect really isn’t that hard. All sorts of random stuff comes together, from cabinet details to WWTDD.com. It’s tough to remember everyone’s name, but that’s why God & Steve Jobs invented the iPhone.
Now all I have to do is, you know, figure out how to design buildings. It’s friggin’ harder than it looks!
(Oh, and apparently the bacteria behind these zits? In my skin. For life. Fuck.)
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