The only reason I've been writing so many entries lately is that I use the internet to procrastinate. Actually, it is only one of my many procrastination tools. The others are wine, movies, talking to roommates, cleaning things I would never clean normally, reading the newspaper with great concentration, washing dishes, redecorating my room, staring into space, going grocery shopping when I don't need anything, and becoming extremely interested in academic things that just happen to have nothing to do with my impending papers. Despite all that, I've managed to read a lot about architecture. My conclusion: Modern architecture and postmodern architecture both started as revolutionary avant-garde movements with social purposes, which quickly became assimilated into consumer culture, big business, and capitalism, and ultimately became tools of the man with no life of their own, while causing the degeneration of our cities and suburbs into lifeless wastelands. the end. Long live strip malls!

"Architecture or revolution. Revolution can be avoided" -Le Corbusier.

I'm starting to get in the christmas spirit, I listened to the Nutcracker twice yesterday. Despite that my family is not religious at all, we always celebrated christmas vigorously when I was little. Digression: (I was brought up an atheist: my parents never told me about god, the first I heard of religion or god was from my preschool friends. I remember sitting on my porch when I was 5 trying to decide if I believed in god, and deciding that it would be comforting but that I just didn't. I think you need to introduce ideas like that early or they don't make sense [I know I was 5 because we moved out of that house when I was 5]. When I asked my parents about the world and how it worked, my mother, who has a Ph.D. in physics, told me about the big bang and space and the planets, and my dad told me about evolution. The idea of infinite space bothered me and I would try to comprehend something beyond the universe but it hurt my brain.

My parents created a little utopia in which to raise me, their �ber-child. Early photos show me lying on a baby blanket playing with a rubik's cube that my dad kept forcing me to play with [seriously]. He taught me to play chess when I was 6, there are pictures of me playing it with his friend, who is drinking diet-rite and has an 80s haircut. The rules of utopia included: no TV, no movies [old movies were ok, like marx brothers and alfred hitchcock. Once my dad grudgingly took me to a carebears movie, but that may have been the only exception], no pop culture of any kind [I remember his venomous comments about "Michael Jackson" and "Madonna", I had no idea who he was talking about], no video games, no fast food, and no desserts [I loved school events where they fed me cookies, I blame my parents for my love of sweets]. We ate health food; I have fond memories of plain yogurt with wheat-germ, and carob cookies. I would go running with my dad, and if I made it around the track I got a graham cracker, the closest to a dessert I was allowed. We only listened to classical music, along with jazz or anything else old, no rock or anything on the radio [when I discovered radio in 6th grade, I was overwhelmed by all the stations and kinds of strange music]. One of my strongest memories is my dad telling me that if I watched TV, my brain would turn into oatmeal. Oatmeal.

At the time, I didn't know what I was missing [I still don't, mostly. I have large chunks missing from my cultural unconscious]. My parents made up for it by being completely insane all the time, we had a lot of fun. They have a hard time with restraint in any sense, they accumulated things like books, movies, appliances, hobbies, and random objects, until our house was bursting--piles of books, civil war artifacts, gyroscopes, musical instruments, things my relatives sent from Thailand, strange vegetables, geodesic domes my dad built out of toothpicks, and Scientific Americans starting from 1970. We had our own way of doing everything in utopia, most of it was extremely silly. And as my father's brain-child, I was constantly subjected to strange experiments and conditioning projects on my developing mind, which would make me a multi-talented genius. The flip side was that I was not to make the same mistakes he'd made--not focusing on one thing, and not knowing what to do after college. From as soon as I could understand english (not an exaggeration at all), the college selection process started, and soon after came the career selection process. Obviously, that part wasn't so successful.

When I tell people I wasn't allowed to watch TV, their reaction is "what did you do?". I read books. Lots of them. And I made crafty things, drew pictures, made clothes for my dolls, climbed trees, and other strange hobbies that I won't elaborate. When people find out I didn't watch movies, they start listing all their favorite movies and have a heart attack when I say I haven't seen any of them. I only started watching current movies in high school, with my friends. Actually, all of my parents' utopian dreams started to fall apart as my brother got older. A true pop culture junkie, he would not stand for the no TV, no video games, no ice cream rules, and it all gradually broke down. But by that time it was too late for me-- I was a proto-marxist with strange ideas in my head.)