Studio Monkey

Our studio instructors seems to be in a bit of a role reversal. Usually, our studio teacher is one to micromanage and assign tons of extraneous work, and the studio teacher next door has a reputation for not requiring anything or giving any helpful feedback. Lately, however, our teacher's pretty much let us go to it, and the class next door had to study five steel systems and put togather a half inch scale section- which is huge. All we were required to do was write a paragraph describing the main idea of our project. I typed mine up and handed it in. I got it back, and it was covered with red. Only one line was deleted as being to weak theoretically, and the rest was all grammatical and organizational corrections. He, apparently, is a professional editor! (sarcasm) While I am not Escrito the God of Writing, I can construct a grammatically correct, sensible paragraph. He also made two corrections to things that were obviously correct, and I had to battle with him to show him why they were correct. There are some advantages to growing up with a professional copywriter and editor. Anyway, it became the joke of the class- our instructor was looking more at our grammer and less at our ideas. However, he liked my final revision of my paragraph so much he made me read it out loud to the class.

Anyway, later that day, I had my interview with the travel scholarship people. I left the meeting feeling like I'd probably blown the whole thing, but that was the feeling that other three people felt leaving as well. It probably stemmed from the palpable tension in the air- one of the three committee members was the poor guy's mom ( a fact that nobody mentioned to me, but I should have figured it out anyway). So we'll see, but I'm not learning Japanese in the meanwhile. The only good that came of it was after the meeting all my physiological stress symptoms dissapeared. That morning right after I got up, I had a massive headache at the back of my head- a typical tension headache from stress. I took two asprin which didn't help and gallons of water. I felt crappy the entire morning, and nauseated in the early afternoon. I felt better after I'd eaten some lunch, but didn't feel normal again until after the meeting. Well, normal mixed with doubt and dissapointment in my performance. But what a relief it was over. As I don't have work on wednesday night, I joined some friends from studio for a beer and some mexican canapes across the street, which was exactly what I needed.

The restaurant is interesting as it just opened a few days prior. When I first came to ASU, it was Dos Gringos, the original location, sited there for quite a few years and THE watering hole near campus. Its patio was packed every afternoon and night. It was too sucessful, and because it sold way more booze than food, it was reclassified as a bar, and as it was right across from a church, it had to move. So they moved it to a new alcoholic Disneyland MexiLand place on my street. The neighbor of Dos Gringos, Flip-Flops, another kind of mexican cantina, tore down the fence and asssimilated the other building and patio. They failed after less than a year, and new owners ostensibly separated the bars into Daisy/Dukes, one side catering to women, one side to men. This dragged on for about another year, still not getting much business, and over the break, they changed the whole thing again to Mamacita's. New branding, furnature, menu everything. This is was where we ate. I had the carnitas tacos, just a snack, but they were pretty good.

Hit the sack early last night, so I got a good ten hours of sleep at least. Strange dreams though. People in my dreams kept appearing in my room as I slipped from semiconscious to sleep states.