misery loves company

I don't know if you can read that, but it is a note left on my desk next to the smashed calculator from my last entry- it's a joke about loosing composure...(these kids are a bunch of jokesters) someting that is timely for all of us camped out here in studio day after day, this room with windows that don't open on day after beautiful spring day, spring so much the more glorious after the rainy winter...
the us is about seven at any one time of a group of ten or so who do their work here- we eat together, we nap on the couches in the center of the room in front of each other, we tolerate each other's endless entorage of filthy jokes (us women are outnumbered by more than three times in this studio, and are told to "earmuff it" with some frequency).
We photoshop each other's faces and pin them up on the wall, share a communal stash of beer and snacks, we shoot rubber bands across the room at each other... sometimes it's not as productive as it could be, but all in all we know each other pretty well by now. we help each other, complain to each other, and distract one another enought to make things interesting. I don't think the endless hours of self-enduced work would be tolerable without seven or twelve other miserable bastards in here, all of us taunting and encouraging each other with such vigor.
Believe it or not, it's part of how we work. All of this is what makes a design studio, from whence is somehow come some visionary architecture.