On Modernity (and lousy furniture design)...

This really is unrelated, but I feel obligated to share this personal story.

This morning as I pulled on my jeans (two legs at a time like all great men) I realized my pocket seemed a little light. Wallet? Check. Pen? Check. Cellphone? Cellphone!? Fortunately this happened on the day I don't have class until 4:00pm so I did have the luxury of time to search. After turning my apartment inside out (which was a mean feat given that all of my studio supplies are here until I move them back to school tomorrow) I began running over the alternatives in my head. I hadn't used the phone for two days so it could have been left at the library or in Givens Hall or at the community center in The Ville (see yesterday's post) or worst of all on the metro bus. I visited both the library and Givens and checked their respective lost and founds... nada.
I came back home and remembered I took the trash out so I dutifully dug through kitchen garbage just in case... nope. All the while I was thinking if I just had a roommate who could call the phone while I walked around looking for it; such are the joys of living alone, but then again no one eats your food either.

Finally I remembered you can send text messages from your phone on the t-mobile website. I fired one off and heard a glorious beep... somewhere in my 743 sf apartment. So armed with a maglight and the laptop I stalked around the apartment playing a high tech version of hot and cold for an eternity. Wasn't modern technology supposed to change us for the better not make life more complicated in the same routine?

For the record the phone was hiding inside the recliner. It is a recliner that has an internal mechanism that drops the back and kicks out the footrest (one of my sweetest pieces of free furniture ever) and on the left side (only!?) a metal rail serves to catch anything that slips through the cracks. I had even picked up and moved the damn thing twice... if any furniture designers are listening please make sure stuff doesn't fall or drops straight through on everything; after all beauty is a byproduct of intelligent function.

In other news I got into John Hoal's studio so I will be using New Orleans as the site for several urban design projects.