I generally associate being sick with COLD weather, so why the heck am I sick right now?! I never got sick when I lived at home with my parents, but now that I am in school, I feel like I do at least once every semester. Usually I get sick after a big project, when I haven’t been sleeping for days or taking care of myself, but this time, I got sick on Labor day weekend vacation! So I have been ill for the past three days, which has prevented me from going to work, getting anything done for class, and sleeping peacefully.
Alas, I am going to look at the positive side of being sick and say that it has been a learning experience. I have observed that I go through different phases of being sick, and now that I know what these phases are, I can prevent them in the future.
Phase 1 / The Symptoms – in the first phase, I begin to develop the symptoms of the ailment – a scratchy throat, a hoarse voice, etc. This phase usually lasts about a day. This began on Saturday night. I told Steven my throat hurt after dinner, and we both thought it was from the herbs in the pasta. When I woke up and my throat still hurt, he asked, “Does it only hurt because you are thinking about it?” So, I shut up about it because he thought I was just complaining…
Phase 2 / A World of Hurt – in the second phase, I regret ignoring the symptoms and not doing anything sooner. I am sick and delusional, tired and achy… I can’t get anything done! My nose is so runny, I have to carry a box of kleenex with me where ever I go. When I cough, I feel like my chest is on fire because it is so dry. I have headaches and stomachaches on top of everything else. I can’t smell or taste anything. This phase only lasts as long as you let it last because I discovered the secret of becoming better!
Phase 3 / Drug Yourself Up! – in the third phase, I come to my senses and start taking lots of Sudafed, my little miracle drug. My nose stops running, my chests stops aching, and it becomes possible to sleep at night (although the drugs make me have lots of weird dreams). I don’t feel like I am dying anymore when I cough, and I don’t have to constantly be blowing my noise (which is part of what causes the headaches).
Phase 4 / All Better! – in the final phase, I am taking medicine less and less and am able to start getting work done again. Yay school!
I am worried about what I will do if I get sick in Rome. I can’t even take care of myself in Ames! I would be done for if I didn’t have my Puffs plus lotion tissues and my Sudafed PE! I suppose I will just bring enough with me to last a semester.
Another good thing about being sick now is that it means (hopefully) I will not be sick when I am in Montréal next week. I leave Ames bright and early at 3:30 am next Thursday to go to the Des Moines airport. My flight leaves at 6:15 am, and then we have a layover in Detroit. Those are all the details I have about the trip for now, but frankly, I am amazed to have those. The school generally waits until the day before we actually leave to tell us anything about where we are going, where we are staying, or how we are getting there.
Alejandra and I began to work together on the Médiathèque de Montréal project. We are starting off with programming studies. This building has the largest program we have ever dealt with as students, which is partially why the let us work in teams (also, as my instructor said “two hands and two brains produce more than one”). It requires a library with a holding capacity of 250,000 volumes (with study rooms, carrels, etc.), a large cinema and two smaller cinemas, a gallery, a “new media center”, a youth center, offices, a loading dock, parking, a plaza, and probably a bunch of other things I am forgetting. The total programming requires an area of 10,880 square meters. The site is about 50m x 50m, so it will be a challenge to place the building on the site and fit the damned parking in somewhere.
Which is why we start off by studying programming – you can’t do it all at once! We will be doing simple comparisons between area and volume, but also more complex studies about adjacencies (parts of the program that need to be near each other) and affinities (parts of the program that are alike one another). Doing these studies will help us figure out how the different parts of the program relate to one another, and which parts need a special emphasis on their design, or which parts may be more modular. After we have done these basic studies we will begin to mass together the parts. It may sound boring, but this is what us architecture students like to do! And working with Alejandra is a lot of fun!
I will be finding out whether or not I get the Clovis job tomorrow… I am kind of hoping I won’t, but I will know soon enough.
