Sustainability: Architecture and Words

My blog is overdue for a new post, and what better topic than sustainability?

            As I’ve mentioned, the program I’m currently taking at The Evergreen State College is called Sustainability: Reimagining the Built Environment and the Written Word. I’ve missed a lot of class and a couple of assignments but I don’t think I’m failing and I don’t think I’ll fail, I just think I’ve been pretty overwhelmed by the wealth of knowledge available on this topic and all the ideas that come to mind every time I read new text related to what we do in class.

            I have a huge project coming up. I get to design a building or group of buildings, essentially, that meets LEED requirements and may even qualify for the Living Building Challenge. This means I have to do this project with practicality in mind and suggest using absolutely NO new materials. Everything must be recycled and reused.

            I suppose now is a good time to cover a couple of things. First: LEED. What is LEED? I certainly didn’t know what it was before taking this program so I wouldn’t expect you to know it by sight. “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design,” is a “certification program focused primarily on new, commercial-building projects and based upon a points system.” Source.

            Second: The Living Building Challenge. Details, naturally, can be found at their official website. Put simply, the Living Building Challenge seeks to create “regenerative spaces that connect occupants to light, air, food, nature, and community.” When my class took a field trip to Seattle to tour the Bullitt Building, we learned some basics of the Living Building Challenge. To us, it was explained that the building has sensors that detect the amount of air flow through the building and the amount of sunlight filtering through the windows. The Bullitt Building, specifically, has outdoor shades that lower and raise depending on the level of sunlight coming through windows on the building. The sun on the east may cause eastern window shades to lower, while western window shades stay up high to allow the shaded side of the building to get more natural light. Solar panels on the roof provide the majority of energy to the building—in the case of the Bullitt Building, I believe they actually became energy positive many times and thus sold energy to Puget Sound Energy, making money rather than spending it on electricity. Ventilation of the building and plumbing all revolve around sustainability and reuse.

            The Living Building Challenge is far more interesting to me than LEED. While I think that both are great and necessary in today’s world, moving forward, I think the Living Building Challenge is one that all new designs should strive for. It has seven “Petals,” or performance areas, each of which has its own requirements, also known as imperatives. The petals are Place, Water, Energy, Health & Happiness, Materials, Equity, and Beauty. In order for a building to meet the requirements of the Living Building Challenge, they must meet all imperatives of at least 4 Petals.

            This design assignment, reusing materials and applying adaptive reuse to the spaces they want to use for this project, has me thinking of the “Mistake on the Lake,” or the Capitol Center Building, a blight on the landscape standing nine stories high in concrete, steel, and glass. Straight lines, a flat roof, and an earthquake-proof foundation despite sitting on fill in a flood zone. The architecture of the gutted, long-deserted building in the midst of many of Olympia’s public services is ugly not by design, but rather neglect and disrepair and I think that most, if not all of its materials can be taken and used for the new spaces this project seeks to create for artists in Olympia.

            There are many sites with articles covering what locals call the Mistake on the Lake. All of these articles explore a couple of ideas for adaptive reuse of the building, which has been grandfathered into the area that today has a developmental height limit of 35 feet. The Capitol Center Building cannot be added to or expanded due to new architectural codes in the area and many, if not most of the residents in Olympia would rather see the eyesore taken down rather than renovated. The steel and glass standing nine stories high could be taken and used for the artists’ spaces we have been assigned to design.

            New ideas come to my mind every time I read something new about sustainable architecture. Even if I’m reading about old buildings that do not meet new LEED certifications or Living Building requirements, I find ideas coming to mind of how we can use old aesthetics and new methods of design to create beautiful, sustainable architecture that brings people together and makes a place “pop”. I find myself incapable of articulating these ideas to my faculty and often, I even find difficulty transcribing my ideas to my journal. I hope that this blog entry clears up a little space in my head, files away a couple of thoughts that clutter my mind, and allows me to clearly formulate and articulate the ideas I have for this major assignment.

#Winning

My time this week has been spent primarily working on my illustrations. I also did a photoshoot with a friend of mine, so in addition to completing three drawings very recently and inking a new one on top of it, I have photographs to go over, edit, and upload for all to see. I look forward to the process, though it will be time-consuming and I’m not sure how I’ll get ahold of Photoshop in order to do it. I’m proud of the work I’ve accomplished thus far.

            In addition to pressing forward with my artistic endeavors, I feel pride in my ability to research things online and find information on various topics. On Facebook, I provided four reputable sources to back up my claims that families on public assistance are not what have destroyed our economy, but that instead it was the bailing out of the big banks in America that has tanked the economy and caused massive problems. I had a friend who was convinced that the people who abuse drugs while receiving “welfare” are proof that “most people” are lazy, unmotivated, static burdens on society.

            I allowed the topic to be dropped when my friend linked me to a source that provided an argument for drug testing welfare recipients. The same site had the opposing argument as well and I saw it as a moot point; yes, I think people should be tested for drugs for public assistance the same way they are tested if they join the military or get a real job. However, there is existing evidence that proves that drug testing those on public assistance costs much more money than it would save—despite the claims by those who are like my friend that it would somehow save money for state governments. My friend is convinced that the only reason it cost more than it saved was because the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to administer drug tests without reasonable suspicion.

            As far as I’m concerned, I won the debate due to my abundance of source material. I had the stronger argument, better referenced. But my thirst for knowledge was not quenched simply by proving that the big banks are the problem in America. After all, with Bernie Sanders’ campaign for President of the United States, the big-bank bailout is pretty well common knowledge and the only thing I learned was that the bailouts are still ongoing and costing trillions, rather than billions, of dollars. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/mikecollins/2015/07/14/the-big-bank-bailout/#26e9b2a83723)

            Thirsty still for more chances to assert my intellectual superiority over those around me, I went into my online classroom with University of Phoenix and took a look at the week’s discussion questions. Then, like the pretentious asshole I am, I found five different sources and wrote over 400 words, almost in essay format, on the topic at hand. Of course, looking back on it now, it’s difficult to remember, because that was on Monday and each week starts new on Tuesday.

            Overall, I would say that I feel like it’s a good time now for me to use these abilities for the greater good. I can do so by using my blog to my advantage and simply creating a blog entry for an issue I find in America or the world. My blog can be my personal collection of essays.

            Look out, world, here I come.

Successes Week 1

This week has had many small successes. Looking back, I find it is better to look at the things I have done, rather than the things I have not done.

            Too often, I have found myself reminiscing on my day or my week, thinking, I should have done more. Monday was a turning point for me, this week, and I am proud to be able to say, today, on Saturday, that things have gone well, overall.

            This week, I saw my psychiatrist and my therapist, both. I have follow-up appointments with both of them. I returned everything I needed to, to Securitas. These things stand alone as successes for me, because I accomplished them.

            I colored one of my drawings and scanned it, but it came out as a .PDF. Still, the picture is complete and I can now use a library scanner to get a .JPG image to upload to Patreon. It will be my first new drawing posted to Patreon and it stands as the start of my work life as an artist.

            Furthermore, I fed my daughter this week—perhaps not for every meal, but I did contribute—and I contributed to cleaning the house. I also went grocery shopping and organized the refrigerator.

            So, what are my next steps, you might ask? I’ll tell you…

            My first priority is to make sure my phone stops dying in the night, so I can get up before everyone else does in the morning. My next step is to begin an exercise regimen that I complete on a daily basis. I need to do this in the morning before people wake up because when Randy gets a job, it’ll be on me to take care of our daughter without help. Having a morning exercise regimen will begin my day with purpose and success, which lends motivation and leads to movement, rather than sitting around, for me.

            My next priority is to create and foster an environment within my home that will best suit my daughter, who is a young child and deserves to feel respected, independent, and confident in herself. This will be a much more difficult task and that is why it is not my absolute first priority. After all, I must begin my day with purpose and momentum in order to achieve the movement needed to work with my child in my home.

            Already, Persephone shows interest in cleaning. She uses baby wipes to wipe down surfaces; she grabs the broom and tries to sweep with it. She wants a clean and tidy environment that she can manipulate to learn and develop. My resolve is to provide that for her, no matter how difficult it is or how long it takes to achieve the ideal environment.

            I have the whole summer to work with my child and my home while Randy finds a job. I have the whole summer to get everything together, including my transcripts for The Evergreen State College. Until September, I have the opportunity to greatly improve my health and wellness and develop a system within my home wherein my daughter can freely grow, learn, and develop.

            There is no way I can know at this time whether we will be able to purchase a home or need to rent a house. Either way, I know where we are going and I know what we seek in a living place. There is no way I can know at this time when Persephone will go back to a childcare facility, but knowing that Evergreen has a daycare on-campus sets me at ease because I know I don’t need to spend time during the day searching for just the right place for her to go.

            I’m going back to school. I thought about looking for a job, today, because although I’ve done well this week to remain positive, the voices of mania and anxiety speak to me and tell me that I need to do something that is immediately reasonable and of a regular income. They tell me that Randy will never find a job and I’m the only one who can do what it takes to provide us with the income required to purchase a home in August. This has happened to me so many times I cannot count them, but the difference this time is that I’m aware they’re false thoughts.

            Randy is perfectly capable of finding a job between now and August. However, if he doesn’t, I now recognize that it isn’t the end of the world. If he stays at home, it frees me up this summer to spend a good amount of time at the library, to and from which I can walk. At the library, I can work on my art and my writing to post to Patreon. I can scan my pictures the moment I finish working on them and I can sit in a quiet place and write my heart out until a story emerges.

            Owning a home has been the “end goal” for a while, but it’s time to change that because owning a home is not the end-all, be-all of life and it will not inherently change the way we live. It is much more reasonable for me to set smaller, shorter-term goals and work towards owning a home when it is absolutely possible, even if that means next year or the year after.

            I’ve felt like shit because my peers are buying homes and I feel like I’m behind them. I fail to see, in those moments, my peers who are just like me or worse off. I fail to truly look around myself and notice that I am in a stable place, if not the most ideal, and I have time to get to where I want to be. My greatest revelation on Monday was realizing that I have time.

            So, I’m going to use it.

It Is Time...

The Evergreen State College is the only school I’ve read about and attended that can help me achieve my dreams. It is true that I have true aspirations and I have given them up for other endeavors, including my attempt at becoming a security officer through Securitas.

            Had I been able to stay awake without trouble, I could easily have done the job as transit security. I am a capable woman. I am strong and powerful.

            I choose to take this experience as a lesson. It is one that has taught me that it is time for me to make myself a priority. I am an artist. I enjoy drawing, painting, and writing. I want to make my life about drawing, painting, and writing, and there are things I can do to make money that will not cause me suffocating anxiety.

            The American Heart Association can certify me as a First Aid/CPR/AED trainer and I can make good money training people. I can pay to get a teaching certificate and work as a substitute teacher, though it will behoove me to complete my Bachelor’s Degree. A degree, I can get from The Evergreen State College and I can teach classes related to those that I am taking in school. I am a good teacher; many people have recognized this about me.

            I have a world of potential being wasted by my mental illness, but I cannot lie down and simply stop living—no matter how much my depression holds me down and I want to give up.

            This blog entry may sound determined. It may sound uplifting for me. But, the reality is that just before writing this, I wanted to die. I simply wanted to stop living and give up, fade away into the dust. What saved me was a drink Randy bought for me.

            The drink is designed to reduce stress and I’m surprised—happily so—to say that it works. I will definitely be needing more of them. Or, perhaps I need to get back into taking my St John’s Wort. In reality, if I hadn’t had this drink, I would probably still be in bed, where I spent most of my day today sleeping out of depression.

            This drink has managed to assuage the monster that is depression just enough for me to realize that it is up to me to get up in the morning and fight. Fight for a clean home despite the depression’s crushing weight that usually keeps me from lifting a finger to better my situation. Fight for a healthier, toner body, despite depression’s suffocating ability to keep me in a chair for hours upon hours at a time. Fight for my dreams, which I can follow best at the Evergreen State College. Fight to create—create and post to Patreon works of illustration, writing, and even photography.

            I’ve said it many times: It’s time for me to get up and take my life into my own hands. It’s time for me to stop seeking structure from an outside source. It’s as Lucifer himself said to me: I create my own path in this world and there is no one who can hold my hand for it, for it is my own. Healing is not linear, but I am on a healing path and that is what is most important.

Some Kind of Update?

I had micro-body contouring in June, this year. I spent nearly $10,000, which isn’t necessarily information that every person would share with the world, but it’s a big part of the story and probably a big part of what’s wrong with me, now. I thought that if I could have the fat sucked out of my body, I would feel better about myself and I would become more active and thus lose even more weight and finally have the body I’ve been wanting for the past few years. I was right, to an extent. Directly following the surgery, my soreness had me motivated to be more active. I was unaware of the results of the procedure, as yet, but I knew what I was supposed to do to maximize the positive results, and I did everything in my power to do them. Or, so I thought. Now, months later, the swelling is still going down in my lower abdomen. My doctor was more aggressive with my lower abdomen than with my upper abdomen, leaving me with a weird belly pouch that looks even worse than the rounded belly I had beforehand. My before and after pictures are like night and day, but when I looked at them, my eyes didn’t register the differences, at first. It occurs to me more and more, lately, that I don’t know what is and isn’t within my power or control. I don’t know what it takes for me to be giving 100%, or any other percentage. It occurs to me now that I might simply be putting relatively little effort into anything, anymore. It’s hard to exert effort when nothing is interesting, but when I feel well enough to be productive, I find myself completing nothing more than domestic chores. I feel lost, like a piece of me is missing, the way children sometimes go missing. I feel incomplete, like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle with some of the pieces missing; but it’s not together enough to figure out which pieces have disappeared. Other people fill the hole inside of me because I don’t know how to do it myself. More and more, recently, I find that I am incapable of accomplishing anything without some sort of outside influence. I feel stifled, though I’ve never had more room to breathe. I feel trapped, though I’ve never been freer. I feel like I’m losing myself, though the opportunities for self-discovery have never been more abundant. Words are harder and harder for me to come by and I don't know why. It seems that when I sit down to write, I have to wrack my brain for the vocabulary with which to begin putting pen to paper. Not only that, but it seems as though my grammar is getting worse from lack of practice while my art gets worse from having the wrong kind of teacher. Where are my outlets? Where is my creativity? Where is the wonderful skill I once held so proudly, with which I could weave words together so as to create something so beautiful, I could potentially invoke tears?

Quitting vs. Making Sacrifices

My heart is heavy. How often do you hear a person say those words, these days? I have a fondness for antiquated phrases, including “tickled,” which is used to express delight, glee, and other giddy feelings that frankly make you feel like something is actually tickling your insides. Euphemisms don’t just come out of nowhere, you know. Ah, but I digress. My heart is heavy.

                The weight is displaced and redistributed with the weight of my cat in my lap or my baby in my arms. Still, though, there rests an anvil atop my heart, its weight pressing down but not quite crushing the organ that so diligently pumps blood throughout my body, supplying blood to every last piece of me from my lungs, so close to the heart itself, to the tips of my temperature-temperamental toes. An anvil made not of any kind of metal, but rather formed by the truth of reality and adulthood seems to weigh more than any Acme product and I find myself wondering if I’m truly being honest with myself. Do I feel this weight in my heart because I am realizing now that reality is nothing like what I had hoped I could make of it, or does this weight rest so persistently within my chest because I suffer from depression and I haven’t taken my anti-depressant medication in days, if not a week?

                Why can’t I have it all? Why is it that there is only a finite amount of time in a day, a week, and I am terribly bad at managing it efficiently? This probably sounds very much like I’m complaining, like I’m sitting here whining “Oh, woe is me,” “Poor me,” “Why me?” But the truth is, I wanted to have it all. I wanted to make my life something amazing, something epic, and I wanted to manage things in a way that kept me busy and happy and also making money while I took care of my family. I wanted to have my cake, eat it, and show off to the world how amazing it was. Then, I was slapped with a realization that was just as cold, wet, clammy, and generally unpleasant as a recently-dead fish smacking you across the face when your brother decides it’s a good idea to start a fish fight in the little sailboat your dad took the two of you out in to do some fishing to try bonding as a family.

                It was all an illusion. The idea that I could juggle three full-time jobs and maintain happiness and sanity as well as order and whatever else you can think of was as illusionary as seeing an oasis in the middle of the desert when you’re dying of thirst and haven’t had water any time in recent memory. Only, for me, that mirage was shattered suddenly by the appearance of a small, yellow envelope from the Olympia Municipal Court, fining me for parking too long in a roadside parking space whose meter would only allot me two hours at a time. According to the slip of paper inside this crucial yellow envelope, it was not only the meter, but the space itself, which held a two-hour limit, and I had surpassed that time. It wasn’t the first time, either. In my mind’s eye, this yellow envelope fell upon a pile of yellow envelopes, collected over the course of perhaps two months, at most, and used as an effigy of sorrow and misery at the fact that I could not catch a break with parking in the city!

                I was accepted into a 90-day trial period as a tattoo intern. I was going to learn all there is to know about tattooing, the industry, the art styles, famous artists who have paved the way and pivoted change in the history of tattooing. Then, during my internship, I was going to start college and go to school for a fine arts’ degree. During these two endeavors, I also planned to be able to take care of my growing baby often enough that my husband could get his homework done for his own college classes. With the appearance of this final parking ticket was sparked a discussion with my husband about how many parking tickets I’ve accrued and, ultimately, how I’m going to be able to juggle my time between an internship, being a full-time student, and still managing to be a wife and mother at home. I can’t do it. I won’t be able to do it.

                When this realization hit me, as a train without brakes might hit anything in its path should it suddenly be derailed, I knew that I had to give up on something and there was only one thing that sucked money out and gave nothing monetary in return. That was my internship.

                I was scheduled through the weekend and had all intentions of completing that time—before I ended up sick with chest and sinus congestion and felt too much like death to go in for my last two days. Being an intern to become a tattoo artist required me to drive 35 minutes nearly every day, pay for parking in a city that increasingly seemed to have it out for me, and help take care of a tattoo shop wherein I was not allowed to touch actual tattooing equipment (yet) and most of the time, it was dead, so I sat around doing my drawing assignments and wondering how the hell I was going to come up with another 2,500 words to add to my essay about Old School style tattooing. Yes, it was stressful, but there was more to it.

                The requirements were strict and sometimes seemed overwhelming, but I spent my days doing the one thing I have always, always loved to do: Drawing. I was allowed to go half an hour away from home to spend time in a friendly shop where the artists only do custom work, the walls are decorated with paintings for sale by local artists, the Internet connection was pretty reliable, and there wasn’t a whole lot I had to do aside from drawing and writing. It was perfect for me. I loved it.

                Almost immediately after giving up the apprenticeship (internship—fucking state pedantics), I felt a kind of relief. It was as if a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Suddenly, I had all the time in the world between now and when I start college and I could use it to get the house cleaned up the way I want (since I clearly couldn’t rely on my husband to do any of it right), take care of my baby and let Randy get his schoolwork done, get laundry done, and cook every so often. I didn’t have to worry about the gas I was using during my 35-minutes-each-way commute. I didn’t have to worry about whether or not the parking meter would expire or if I was parked too long in a space, anymore. I no longer needed to keep a shop clean in which I contributed almost nothing to the mess—even though cleaning the shop was never, not even once, a weighted point in the consideration of whether or not I could keep up the internship.

                People say that sacrifices have to be made in life. Have I made a sacrifice? Have I sacrificed my internship in order to give the other things in my life more meaning? Have I sacrificed the internship in order to be a better wife and mother and, soon, student? Or, have I quit on something that made me happy? Have I quit on something that would have made me a living no matter where I was?

                My heart is heavy. I miss the routine. I miss getting up for the day and choosing something nice and classy to wear to “work”. I miss being in the tattoo shop/art gallery. I miss having drawing assignments, because the gods know that unless someone gives me an idea these days, I can’t draw for shit.

                Indeed, my heart is heavy. But I think that most of the weight making up the anvil resting within my chest actually comes from the idea that the instant I said I couldn’t do it, I was replaced. I thought that my time in the shop mattered. I thought I was making meaningful relationships and I felt as though I mattered, at least a little bit. Then, while I was emailing the owner, she asked me to effectively show the ropes to the new intern. So, am I caught up over the semantics of whether I’ve quit or made a sacrifice, or does the weight in my heart come from a feeling of betrayal?