OF MICE AND MEN

This is obviously written by Jeremiah:

Today I'm trying to make sense of this tangled mess (photo above); and realizing that this is not at all what I imagined I'd be doing when as a freshman in architecture school I was given my first ten-times-photocopied version of Colin Rowe's essay 'Literal and Phenomenal transparency'. I've come a long way from a professor's adage that my work "sort of potentially begins to create a seminal juxtaposition of forms" to an ironworker foreman leaving a construction trailer with the omen that "If those bolts don't line up with their holes, I'ma come back and crack somebody's *** head." The realization that I had previously planned to do/become something different actually makes me happy I didn't follow up with some of those plans. Here is a partial list of plans I previously held that make me glad I was sidetracked by better things:

*Work for and then become a world famous architect: I've seen these people; They have hollow eyes and pointy black shoes.

*Ride my bicycle to California: I was twelve

*Animation and computer graphics: this was an actual two year detour

*Become a professor: Again - the pointy shoes

*Art school: thank you interviewer at Pratt for saying my portfolio "didn't show the type of promise we look for in a candidate"

*Marry a girl from Chiapas: This would inevitably have led to my joining the communist party to show my solidarity with indigeonous farmers. Glad I didn't - even though I would look good dressed in all white with a red scarf.

*I applied to grad school at Harvard: Denied. With reinforced inferiority complex I can now fit in with other cornell alumni. I still have an arglye sweater at the back of my closet though that I now only bring out around Christmastime.

*When I was 14 Some friends and I jumped on a slow moving train(Luca and James: Please never do this) We were going to stay on and see where it took us, but decided to hop off and go home: We were hungry

*Become a chef: the restaurant where I used to work went out of business 15 years ago and I still talk about it incessently.

*Photographer for the national geographic magazine (only us explorers can belong): I would probably be taking pictures of high school sporting events by now if went this route.

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I'm sure there are others I can't think of right now. What had you planned to do that you're now glad you didn't?

This kind of reminds me of the line from a Robert Burns poem that says:

The best laid schemes o' mice an' men/ Gang aft agley

(The best-laid plans of mice and men/often go awry)

Which you'll recognize as the inspiration for the Stienbeck book "Of Mice and Men" which you were supposed to read in tenth grade but didn't. Or the Hamlet speech you had to memorize but didn't understand:

thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,

And enterprises of great pith and moment

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the name of action