Post 3

Economics (In flux, like everything else around me)

I take a dim view* of the word 'citizen', as it implies a certain kind of provinciality and packishness that I intensely dislike and have spent the past two years attempting to distance myself from.  Perhaps a more apt term is 'denizen' - as an iPoly denizen, I find it necessary to define a role for myself that will allow me to keep my identity intact yet allow me to make the socially-required contributions.  I will continue in my role as the President of the writing club.  I also plan to join and be active some of the intellectual societies that sprung up over the summer, as a means of connecting with those who share my interests.

Effective Learner/User of Technology/Communicator

For me, these all tie in together, and it beings with my relationship with technology.  In my world, technology exists solely as a method of one-way communication - the concept of two-way communication, particularly written, is a completely alien, rather frightening idea that honestly I'm not going to be able to accept anytime soon - perhaps because I feel like email and related communications  invade my personal space, which extends to and encompasses my computer.  (All of my important creative thought and a good majority of my intellectual thought winds up on my Mac - this thing is my external hard-drive, my pensive.)

If possible, I would like to experiment with emerging technologies like Goggle Glass and discover if they might be able to help with some of the temporal issues I struggle with that stop me from understanding due dates, and predicting how long it will take me to do things.

Further more, as an effective learner, I will be more proactive about my education, instead of assuming that I will forever be able to skate by on my spongitude, like I pulled with my Econ class, and pretty much every class last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.

In the final category, communication, I will attempt to not put off conversations with people just because it involves talking to someone who isn't myself, even if it involves awkward shortcuts.  So, I will aim to become better at communicating by actually communicating.

*In fact, I take such a dim view of most everything that crosses my path, that, by the time I'm twenty, I will probably have wrinkles from wearing a look of complete skepticism almost 24 hours a day.

Post 2

• #1. https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bw9GMa8TQNUkaDFlTllDelpDMVU/edit?usp=sharing 
• #2. Alla Kazovsky, alla@designedrealestate.com 
• #3. Is it really necessary to be able to design to understand design in the context of material culture? 

#4 & 5:

After taking this class, and doing some reading and observation on my own, I found that the practice of architecture, as it exists in the West today, has values, beliefs, and practices that directly contradict my own. The foremost of these contradictions is architecture's habit of placing vastly more value on the process than on the finished product. I agree, in order to arrive at a product, there is a process.  However, in architecture, the process is all consuming - many of the most prestigious architectural awards can and have been won with a drawing.  Sites dedicated to architecture are filled with Revit drawings instead of actual buildings. I find this outrageous. To make a poor comparison, it would be like someone wining the Pulitzer Prize for an outline, or a having a website dedicated to character notes. 

Amusingly, at least to myself, I'm still interested in architecture, but I now understand better that interest; I'm not so much interested in architecture from a design perspective as from a material culture perspective.  However, I have only some 60-odd years remaining in life, and there are a thousand disciplines I could spend ten thousand lifetimes perfecting.  So I'm going to start with economics, which will give me the best possible skill set.