I claim that this blog is about Space, Beer and Architecture, and so far it's been long (relatively speaking) on space, short on architecture, and beer has been non-existent (from the blog, not my life, there it's doing A-okay). I'll get to to beer later on because for now I need to focus on architecture for a while. You see, I'm an architect by training (and in the eyes of my home state) and that's what my day is basically full of, despite the fact that my head is often off in space. The problem is, I let myself get distracted by space way too much and my time daydreaming about what could be happening (but isn't) is keeping me from being good at what I need to be doing on a daily basis - being an architect.
The reason I mention this today of all days is that I had a personnel review at work. It wasn't hugely, overwhelmingly awesome - which is totally understandable because my performance in the last 2 years (since my last review) hasn't been great. I show up and I do my job, but there have been mistakes - big mistakes, mistakes that cost the firm money, and more than my share of those. I've been working for this firm for five and a half years, and to be honest, most of that time I've behaved like an employee, a clockpuncher (as my boss put it) if you will. On one level, maybe my bosses are OK with that, except that clockpunching doesn't bring job security (rightly so these days) in their eyes. They're not firing me, no they made it clear that I'm still with them (we've had layoffs) because they like me and they think I do an OK job, but they expect me to do better. They feel as if they've invested a lot of time and energy in me (not to mention cash on some of my screw-ups) and maybe they aren't getting a good payback on that.
Now, I assume all of you reading this have jobs with bosses but maybe some of them are just jobs or employment, and others might be careers or The Thing You Said You'd Do When You Were Young. Architecture for me wasn't always The Thing for me when I was young. My childhood had a pretty clear career path: Firefighter, Astronaut, Architect. Not atypical for an American male I'll admit, but for me architecture came by accident - high school was a weird time and when I figured out that astronauts weren't like airline pilots (I'll explain that later if you don't get it) I didn't know what I'd do with my life. At 14 this wasn't a big deal, but it did account for about 1.5 years of high school. After that a girlfriend and a random assignment in an excellent class suggested that maybe I should be an architect.
I dove into that with relish (and ketchup?) and didn't look back for nearly 6 years. Hell, maybe it was 10 or 12 to get me where I am today. I'm a licensed architect who has been going through the motions for a while. I've been trying to do my best all along, but what they don't teach you in school is that your day-to-day work is actually a gamble of other peoples money, and my best hasn't been good enough. I like to think my best has been mediocre for a reason, that I've been waiting for the perfect, morally awesome project to come along for me to fully bloom on, but that's not the truth.
I haven't been taking full advantage of the opportunities that I've been given, I haven't lived up to my potential. One of my bosses today suggested that I don't have the fire in my belly. I don't want him to be right - I've had the fire before, I had it nearly every day of school, and I want to breathe that fire again.
But, and there's always a but, school didn't tell me what it was really like to be an architect. School taught me how be to hero architect that may not really exist. School didn't teach me to deal with people who want to take the easy way, the cheap way, the people who have the money but don't want to spend it - the contractor who "doesn't do it that way", or the lazy sub-contractor who doesn't want to do it your way. These things wear at you and make you forget that you once had a fire inside you, that you want to make something amazing, that maybe you can make something better than what you were given - that you can be a capital-A Architect! Because back in the day that's what you were, and goddammit, people still get wide-eyed when you tell them that you're an Architect, and you want to make sure that you earn that awe.
I may not be curing cancer, but I am trying to make our surroundings better - I am an Architect, and I've forgotten what that means, but I intend to discover it again - to feel that fire again - and this is where I'll be writing about it.
(The image above is the front of a t-shirt that Ryan North of www.qwantz.com (Dinosaur Comics) made. It breaks my heart every goddamn time I see it, but it seems appropriate here, and so you should go buy it. Or just read his comic - it's awesome.)
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