fridays

Today was a lot of ups a downs.  If my week was a movie, this morning is the Dark Night of the Soul. Just felt low. And then sat down with JP, the #4 in the office and about my age, and basically pointed out that my lighting designs were banal and generic.

To my defense, I was designing a parking garage, but its still crappy because it's true. The other problem is I was using autoCAD to lay out the lighting. I calc'd the number of foot-candles I wanted on the floor, found a light fixture that I wanted, calcuated the number of fixtures I'd need, and basically deployed them in a grid. And because it's autoCAD, which is designed to be accurate to millimeters, I meticulously spaced each lamp.

In short, I did everything that the lighting consultants was going to do anyway, but without showing and kind of design intention. Or, shorter, I engineered when I should have designed.  One of those days where I really wonder if I should be working in some massive corporate office, where you dont design as much as you produce drawings.

So I ditched CAD, printed off some plans, and started sketching on top of them, and when I had some lighting  ideas, I opened up illustrator and started roughly laying out lights with colors and fills and lines. Illustrator is awesome. If I had only one adobe product, that would be it. It lets me design and lay out ideas much more intuitively and quickly than CAD, which wants to know precisely how close object N is from object P.

It's fishy fridays at the comida corrida stand I frequent, so I brought a shrimp cocktail back to the office for lunch. Good stuff.

Left slightly earlier than usual, and walked to Polanco to pay off the remainder of my dental bill.

Made beans for dinner, shot of mezcal, and then after rain lessened, I caught a train to the centro historico. I met up with Sergio at El Moro, the churros and chocolate cafe, and it was packed. The way to get a table is to stand around inside, hovering around occupied tables until someone leaves. And then the waitress comes around to take your order. Over amazing churros and chocolate, Sergio and I talked about Americans, what I thought was so great about being American, consipiracy theories regarding Snowden, etc. Afterwards, we walked through the Alameda to the metro where we parted ways.

Sometimes I forget what an amazing city this is just to walk around at night. Even after 11, the street vendors disassembling their stalls, bathed in the neon and fluorescent lights, the late night revelers, kids having syrofoam fights, lights in old buildings. The islands of warmth, smell of frying or roasting meat, and bright light of the taco stalls. Taxis, police cars with the red and blue flashing, even the LED glowing toys for sale on the dark squares, like phosphorescent squid washed  up on the beach. There is a surprisingly human scale to this city which is among one of the largest in the world. The sizes of storefronts and porches and overhangs. The way building widths and heights are broken into the scale and speed of the pedestrian.