Welcome to Occupied Ruin / the blog of Bryan

Dear friend,

Have you ever read "the perks of being a wallflower" by stephen chbosky? It was really influential to me back in middle school, but that's beside the point. The point is really, that the structure of the book is comprised of a boy, during his freshman year of high school, writing letters to someone anonymous. He tells his life through these letters and works everything in his tumultuous life out through these letters and it ends up being a very meaningful record is his existence at an important transitional point in his life.

That was supposed to take place in 1991. Now, at the end of 2007, I think it's time to revisit that concept. Maybe I can use this blog as a place to write letters about my life. To help myself work out all of the crazy stuff that's going on in my mind and in my family and social life. Now the internet will make it public. Maybe you can learn something about my world and maybe it will put your world in perspective. Or maybe no one will ever read this but it will help me work out my world for myself.

So a little about me. I'm not going to use my real name because I don't want you to know exactly who I am, I don't want you to be able to find me on myspace or facebook, and most of all I don't want my friends finding this blog. I need some anonymity to be able to freely post the innermost churnings of my brain. But I also need it to be public so maybe I can get a little feedback from you.

So, my name is Bryan and I'm a freshman at Princeton but I'm from California. I live in a quad in an old gothic building with 3 pretty boring roommates. More on them and life at school in another post. It's getting really cold out. This is going to be my first real winter and I am not looking forward to enduring the long cold.

I named this blog 'Occupied Ruin' because I am interested in architecture. My dad is an architect and so is by boyfriend. Well, he's still a student. He's a second-year grad student in architecture at Yale. I'll call him Greg here - I don't want to use his real name either because he's 75% closeted and I don't think he would appreciate being outed here. None of his friends at Yale know he's gay. That's so lame (and what am I doing dating a 25 year old???) but we're so good together that I'm going to deal with it, at least for now. I met him in July at Tigerheat, this 18+ gay club in Hollywood. Tigerheat is so not my scene (it's pretty trashy) but there's a decent number of cute boys there and it's really the center of the U21 gay scene in LA, so it's where you could find me every Thursday night since I turned 18. I like Princeton a lot but I've been going up to Yale every other weekend or so to see Greg - I hope I'm not missing out too much on life here. Oh, back to the name of the blog. So there's this really ugly (but neat) building at Yale that the school of architecture was in before but now it's being renovated and they're somewhere else. It's this really amazingly strange brutal concrete thing that was in terrible condition. One time Greg described it to me as it was an "occupied ruin" and I've been fascinated by that phrase ever since. I've heard so much about architecture because of Greg and because of my dad that I kind of want to major in it too. Although then I'd be lame for following in the footsteps of my dad...

Okay, that's enough for tonight. Bye!


Love always,
Bryan