I have a lot of stomach troubles as you by now know. If I eat this or that, something can go wrong, and I am frequently nauseated for a spell. I am not feeling well now, though I am better than yesterday, but worse than this morning. I have had doctors investigate this before, to no avail, with no real diagnosis or solution, and the truth is, I know where the problem lies: my stomach hates me.

Years ago we got in a fight, my stomach and I. Even then I knew there would be payback. It wasn’t booze, it wasn’t cigarettes. In architecture school it was pills or coke to get by. Coke frightened me. You could also smash the pills to snort like coke, but snorting was not my, well, speed. The amphetamines (old school uppers, not to be confused with crystal meth) were at least ostensibly medical, could be reasonably prescribed by a doctor. I grew up with doctors! I’d been raised on codeine, after all. The nausea was nothing next to the fear of failing out.

You might say, as they always say, well if you only didn’t leave your work until the last minute. In A-school, as they call it, back before autoCAD and computer simulations, they made sure you couldn’t. You spent an entire semester fiddling with sections and floor plans of a train station, fine-tuned it until you were certain you were the re-incarnation of Frank Lloyd Wright, were ready to pull into the station yourself—at that pinnacle of glory seven days before jury your critic (they’re not called professors, they’re critics) would saunter over to explain how your design had failed from the core of its vision. You weren’t sure what that meant, but you knew you’d been slammed. Because I am slow, it took me three years to realize they had this in the works from the get-go. So with one week to do it, you would receive your new assignment: two plans, two sections, four elevations, a site plan, a site model, a 1/2"-scale model, a 3-D sketch, and bonus if you can throw any other bling together. As if. And this on a building you had to suddenly re-envision.

They let in twice as many as would graduate. We all knew who would win: the one who stayed up the longest.
 
“Charette,” this time is called, because of a French term for the cart that collects your project at deadline, and because an architect is nothing if not pretentious. Hence, a rough estimate of how charette goes:

Day 1:

• Final critic session. Find out how it’s all wrong. Go to bank. Cry. Realize you have $60 in the bank, that you’ll need $32 for basswood, glue, blades, mylar, blueprints, ink, and a new pen tip. Think about spending $3 on bandaids, because the first aid cupboard always runs out of bandaids, but skimp. Skimp also on the extra sheet of mylar and the extra piece of bass wood, because you know you won’t make a mistake.
• Buy a case of soda and some ramen at Target. Buy speed from the dude who hangs out three desks down from your Teaching Assistant. Wait until your T.A. is gone until you ask the dude, but realize only later that your T.A. was just standing at a different drawing table, staring at you the whole while.
  
• Pick up your things at home. Your things could include deodorant, toothpaste, a toothbrush, a hairbrush, contact solution, soap, but they probably just include a CD-player and some music. A lot of music.
• Head to the architecture school, knowing you will not see your cat again for a week. Hope that your roommate actually feeds it.

    White Pills: None.  Peach Pills: None. Diet Cokes: Three.

Day 2:

• You have spent the night drafting floor plans.  Correction, you have spent the night drafting a floor plan, just one, but you feel good because that leaves only ten more things to do in six and a half days, you’ve got time! Except that you’re only really half done with the floor plan. Drawing plants is a bitch. Regret the decision to include the rose garden. Consider leaving the bathrooms out in hopes that the jury never notices.
  
• Start on your model after you accidentally smear ink across the first floor plan. Cut three of your digits; steal five band-aids from the first aid kit, two for later.
• Put two of the bandaids back because your god damn university has an honor code
  

    White Pills: Three.  Peach Pills: None.  Diet Cokes: Eight. Bandaids: three

Day 3:

• Pretend that nobody will notice where you erased the ink and drew over it on the first floor plan. Add another rose bush to cover it up. Start the second floor plan just so that you never have to draw floor plans again.
  
• Basswood’s a bitch, much denser than balsa, and requires you to score it a hundred times for an even slice. Get impatient. Cut your hands four more times building the model, twice through bandaids. Since the first-aid kit is now empty, cover your fingers in toilet paper and masking tape.
  
• Your hands are mitts waterproofed in masking tape: now is the perfect time to bend the basswood for the roof.  This requires you to dip it into water, repeatedly, bend slightly, dip again, slowly, slowly, curving it over a period of hours. Try to ignore the bastard who’s asking “how wet you’re getting that wood.” Accidentally break your last 3/4 width strip. Say out loud, “I need big wood."
• After the crunchy dude goes by and loudly pontificates on how taking stimulants is like dosing on steroids, crush a peach pill in his herbal tea. You need a guinea pig on the peach ones anyway, and you’re probably doing him a favor.

    White Pills: Three.  Peach Pills: Two.  Diet Cokes: Seven. Band-aids: (none, but half a roll of industrial toilet paper)

Day 4:

• You have to buy another basswood strip and you know this. But put it off and instead finish two elevations. That’s two drawings in one day! Feel like a superstar. You’re going to make it!
• Think about starting the site plan.
• Finish the 3-D sketch just because that’s the fun, non-drafting pretty part. Spend way too long on it because its fun.
  
• After three days of making a meal out of the Gordito Fun Pak, you have drained the candy dispenser of its best dinner option. Unfortunately, nobody has thought to bring a hot cooker for ramen, and the coffee warmer won’t do. For dinner, animal crackers.

    White Pills: Five.  Peach Pills: Four.  Diet Cokes: Seventeen.

Day 5:

• Start the site model using remaining scraps of wood. Cut through the masking tape and remove part of finger, bandage again in toilet paper, in towels, in masking tape. Run to the bathroom, discover that the single girl’s stall is out of paper. Run into the boy’s bathroom, discover that the men have twelve urinals and six stalls. As a critic has once told you, women were never meant to become architects.
  
• The sections will be easy! Start on them enthusiastically but then whack ink across with your mummified hand. Run to five stores to find mylar and wood. Find the mylar, the basswood is sold out.
• There are no more animal crackers, and everybody realizes by now that they probably won’t finish everything. Agree to all go together to the Mexican restaurant. Forget that you don’t have any money. Swear that you’re all about business, that you’re going to go in quick and get out quick. Three hours later, honestly forget to pay the tab.

    White Pills: Three.  Peach Pills: Seven.  Diet Cokes: Twelve. Tequila Shots: Four

Day 6:

• Fall asleep for an hour and a half beneath your drawing table. Be sure to do this during the hour your critic comes by to make sure you “have what it takes."
  
• Try to glue shavings of wood together to complete the roof.
  
• Finish the sections! Forget that you never finished one of the floor plans. Spend the night finishing half of your elevations. Consider redoing the train station as a sphere so that you only need two elevations.

    White Pills: Zero.  Peach Pills: Fourteen.  Diet Cokes: None, the machine is out.

Day 7:

• Finish the site model. Realize as you try to fit it into the larger site model that you have planned it such that the narrow end of the station faces the track and the long end (where the platform is) lets out into a forest. Hide the site model in the trash and hope that when jury time comes the critics won’t notice this error.
• 12 NOON: Charette is over. Quit and go home. Lie in bed and wonder what beds are for, until the boyfriend comes back, at which point he says, “Hey, have you showered lately?"
  

When jury arrives, your mini-model with the glued-together pieces of wood gets flattened beneath the foot of an angry visiting critic. Another screams that your shirt is an insult to Le Corbusier. “Do you really want this?” the third asks. “You’re not acting like you want it bad enough. You’re going to have to sweat for it, to bleed. Are you willing to bleed for this, Lady Penelope?” Lift up your arms to show them. Victory! “Don’t be ridiculous, that’s just klutzy. Well, the building’s vaguely functional anyway. At least you didn’t totally fuck it up."

Jury over! Take a seat. Come to a realization: they never caught on that your station platform looks out on to trees, a creek bed, and a bear cave. You imagine the train pulling up to your station. You imagine four hundred architecture professors swinging their suitcases off the overhead racks, stains in the pits of their linen shirts after a long hot ride. They swear as they struggle to hold the car doors ajar, trudge through car after car after car to get to the one train door that opens. They step down from the train, march single-file onto your station platform, where they uniformly agree: it’s neither logical nor workable, but it’s a curious and bold statement about the dysfunction of bourgeous life, n’est-ce pas? A single coat of pink paint and, that girl, she might have something!

Ah well, share your college war stories.