p i p e d r e a m

The Upside of being a girl So lately, I have been into FRAN LEBOWITZ   talks and interviews. I purchased her book "The Fran Lebowitz Reader" a year after finishing her Netflix series "Pretend it's a City". I just never hear someone who talks and thinks like that [I clearly love her but I wanted to stay calm] [below are a few text transcripts of some of her interviews/speaking that I really like. And I just wanted to remember some of them. Because life moving so fast one of these days, I can get back to these notes that will lead me to re-listen / re-watch them whenever I wanted to relax on some laughs and perspectives.] Spotify podcast called >> "It's a Long Story" << by Sydney Opera House station on Spotify. Total 42:34 minutes interviewed by Edwina Throsby   Q : Are you a feminist?  A: I never really thought of myself that way, because I never really think of myself as a person who agrees with that many people, you know. I live in th...

This lovely small house stands almost like a silent spectator to the sound of kids playing every other afternoon. When visiting the old existing house at the beginning of the project, I know that a humble and raw design will be a great addition to such a serene neighborhood.  The client, a young couple, was imagining their first house to be renovated as a growing house. Space-efficient, and budget-wise, but structurally able to be expanded in the future. A thoughtful owner and the amount of time and energy they put into this house construction helped me a lot to understand and put every idea into the visual design. I came to understand that the smaller the scoop, the more intimate practice they require. We focus more on the utility and structure addition in order to accommodate new service functions on the layout. A small addition of a concrete slab is a must as a service area. I once read a description about White House, a home design by Kai Liu, a Shanghai-based architect, about ...

To quote Charles Dickens,  “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, (and yes it wasn't originally Taylor Swift's lyric). That sentence is probably what I will tell my grandnieces to describe this crazy-odd era of a second-wave pandemic. It's been a while since the last time I write on this blog so a 'reality is the last thing I wanted to write about. Let's write about pleasant things like a movie review and that scientific proof of music can be a painkiller. Interesting enough? *Disclaimer: spoiler alert I finally watch Kodachrome after this movie file sits long enough in my folder to the point I forgot the excitement I have when I was looking for it. Kodachrome is this one color film by Kodak which discontinued after about seventy years of use in the analog photography market. This movie follows a story of a young man who reluctantly joins his father's trip to Kansas to develop his last Kodachrome roll films before the process is permanently unavai...

No, it is not a post about food recipes. {sorry to disappoint you, my non-existent reader}... Just this morning I had a revolution on how to cook savory oatmeal as one of the few new things that I welcome in my life, other than, a new house and hair color. Today's marked as the first month of living in a new house with a completely different layout and environment. I don't know why I'm making such a big deal about it, but I did cry myself to sleep every day a week before moving out of my old house, my childhood home. I spent almost all my life at the said shelter and it holds many memories of beloved deceased family members, that I realized, once the house deconstructs by the new owner, the moments will be buried for good in the ground. Maybe, God, Himself wanted to slap me in the face for my confusing act. For months, even years, I will pray for a new better life, for a chance to start over for my family and me. Nevertheless, when the days come, I cry because deep down it ...

Blogging is one of the ways to calming my mind. It is 10.00 PM and I'm in my bedroom with a glass of coffee stare blankly into my laptop screen looking for interesting things to write. I said in the beginning that blogging is a way to calming my mind, well, drinking coffee is also another way. In fact, I have this unfinished post for almost three weeks now. I still remember why I wanted to write this particular blog post with the title of domestic happiness. But I got lazy? maybe sleepy? or stuck? that I ended up just wrote the title and close the page altogether. Weeks ago, my mom and I went for a walk to buy a broomstick in this old grocery store in our neighborhood. The shop's owner is an old man with a pretty interesting character. This old man has a custom to always share his belief and view about God with me and my mom. A simple broomstick or other cleaning tools shopping could turn into a deep ideology sharing moment pretty quickly. No kidding. I said sharing while in fa...

I'm kinda into the cognitive type personality theory recently, and the extraverted/introverted epitome has me hooked. There are two major functions inside one's brain that distinguish their character and how a person differs from one another, and those are sometimes, a root of different perspectives, opinions, and values that humans hold. Those two are perceiving and judging function. I'm not gonna dive deep into the definition and theory for all the functions which you can easily search and read by yourself all-over the internet. But I surely thinking over and over about the extraverted and introverted feeling that falls into the judging function category, and how it works on world condition right now. The extraverted feeling is how we make a decision based on the external value that will affect other people. Introverted feeling is making the decision based on our personal value and how it will affect ourselves. So I'm willing to address this current global dilemma...

“Walkers are 'practitioners of the city,' for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibilities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities" A qoute by Rebecca Solnit which I found as an opening paragraph of one of the short story inside the book, Tales of Two Cities: The best and worst times in today's New York. I'm half way finish reading this book and I wanted to say that I'm in love with all of the opening stories. It feel like I share the same feeling and perspectives with some of the authors of the book.  People are the atom of the city and whether we're realize it or not, we depend our daily mechanism of move around from one place to another in the city by system that are already there. Arranged by city planner, government policies, execute by local authorities, and lived by us. The atom. A city can be monstrously ugly or enchantingly beautiful depends on what kind of glass...