Some things I don't often say...

"The first time I saw you, my heart fell. The second time I saw you, my heart fell. The third time fourth time fifth time and every time since, my heart has fallen.

I stared at her."

"You are the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Your hair, your eyes, your lips, your body that you haven't grown into, the way you walk, smile, laugh, the way your cheeks drop when you're mad or upset, the way you drag your feet when you're tired. Every single thing about you is beautiful.

I stared at her.

When I see you the World stops. It stops and all that exists for me is you and my eyes staring at you. There's nothing else. No noise, no other people, no thoughts or worries, no yesterday, no tomorrow. The World just stops and it is a beautiful place and there is only you. Just you, and my eyes staring at you.

I stared.

When you're gone, the World starts again, and I don't like it as much. I can live in it, but I don't like it. I just walk around in it and wait to see you again and wait for it to stop again. I love it when it stops. It's the best fucking thing I've ever known or ever felt, the best thing, and that, beautiful Girl, is why I stare at you."

— JAMES FREY (A Million Little Pieces)

Rant

I'm late and I don't care. I don't know exactly what I feel right now, but i just don't care whether I'll be able to accomplish my responsibilities or not-- a feeling of indifference (that's the word). I'm tired of being tired. I have the whole 7 days of my week filled with meetings, stuffs to do, errands, and that doesn't include my school stuff yet. Pressure used to make me feel happy, it makes me feel alive. But right now, it seems that my marginal utility is already diminishing. I just wish this is a transient stage, I can't leave everything I have worked hard for behind. When I look back, I just can't believe what i have been doing, and yet i have been enjoying it. Whats happening??! Just a trivia, I have around 10 affiliations, and i'm active in most of it.. I 'll have to leave it here for now, I have to go to a meeting. Ciao.

Is this the sustainable city of the future?

Terreform One, a New York non-profit design group led by 38-year-old architect Mitchell Joachim, offers answers to almost everything to do with cities and sustainability. Its prolific output of ideas includes blimps creeping nose-to-tail around cities, with seats hanging off them just above the ground so that people can jump on and off at will.

The company has designed soft cars, so no one is killed in a car accident ever again, and proposed a way of training trees so that they can be grown to form houses – a theoretically zero-carbon technique. It also wants to put houses on to big trucks, and rebuild America's roads so that they are packed with "intelligent renewable infrastructure", into which the mobile houses can be plugged. This idea is less obviously zero carbon, but the company claims it will "create a truly breathing, interconnected metabolic urbanism".

Terreform One's projects are presented with the imagery long-beloved of futuristic visionaries, with steep perspectives of frictionless cities, super-shiny and super-clean. The language is fervent, breeding neologisms and repeating the word "will" in the manner of preachers foreseeing the rapture.

Terreform One, incidentally, is not to be confused with the company's earlier incarnation, Terreform, which was created by Joachim and his former mentor Michael Sorkin. Sorkin is now bitterly denounced by Joachim for failing to show a co-operative spirit and for selling out by designing a seven-star hotel in China.

Terreform One, which has a 32-strong "advisory board", has been endorsed by the likes of Wired magazine, which in 2008 named Joachim one of "the 15 people the next president should listen to", but for now it leaves many questions unanswered. Its plans seem light on details such as cost and emissions calculations. It's not clear what would happen to its blimps in a high wind, or to the views from upper-floor windows as they passed by in an unending chain, or how easily the old or disabled could hop on and off. Nor how trees could be trained to grow kitchens and sanitary appliances. Joachim says it will take a century or more to shift the way cities are built, which is all well and good – but perhaps the future should also start here.

- Rowan Moore; The Observer, Sunday 4 July 2010

URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jul/04/sustainability-design-cities-future-terreform-one?CMP=twt_iph