complexity and contradiction?

i had an epiphany today in the shower. i need to stop thinking about myself and start thinking about myself.

i will explain that later. it reminded me of the alchemist, which i ironically had a dream about last night, in which i gave it to one of my professors. anyway, in the book, the alchemist says that everything is one thing only. i always liked that idea, but never really understood how it could be. i am a non linear thinker, and architecture school trains you to think out side the box, and look for complexity. complexity is something that is more than one thing, right? one thing would be singularity, and singularity is simplistic, right? maybe not so...

dictionary.com describes it as something that is the opposite of independence, and that complication is the opposite of simplicity. (let it here be known the difference between simple and simplistic)

so how can something that is complex be at once one thing and many things? this is the contradiction, but only on the surface. back to what i said earlier about shifting the focus from myself to myself. i have been thinking about my life and work as something extremely complicated, all the while calling it complex. by definition, it was not complex, because i was approaching every task and responsibility and whim and desire as independent foci that had to be juggled, scheduled, ignored, rescheduled, etc etc. my life was a series of linear singularities. just this morning i was thinking, "i want to write all this down. i want coffee, so i should go to the cafe, sit down and write for an hour." but then i realized what i was thinking about. that was a classification into hierarchies of time.

this is getting a little convoluted. basically, all things in my life are one thing only...my life. i am always me, and i am always trying to accomplish things. i can think of myself in different contexts of existence, or i can think of those things in the context of me. all things must happen at once, and all things are one thing only. they are simply a complex system, all dependent, even if exclusive.

complexity and contradiction. multiple contradictory things can occupy the same time, space, mind, life, experience, need, execution. i am complex. my contradictory needs are not complicated, they are one. that makes me feel so much more free to do everything, and be overwhelmed by nothing

jenny wu installation

this installation was designed by one of my professors

this new blog

i am starting this blog as part of a grand experiment of recording my thoughts and progress, and give others a chance to get a snapshot of what i am doing and respond in kind. i discovered that i can post to this blog right from my iPhone, and i can even post pictures i take on my iPhone straight to this blog (which, incidentally is how the first three posts found their way here).

yay babers!

stoked to go back to the city for the first time since I moved in aug!

my newest model

this thing is gnarly. I now have to draw sections of it...8 sections.
ouch