Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Run

Fair city, footed in the ashes of autumn,

(Breath)

The moon has been beggared of its fearfulness

As the nights stain the afternoons.


A woman paces the newly long shadows -

Afflicted. She has an erosion of capacity.

Don't we all?

Pedestrians to the world watch as she screams

Of anarchy, lies, and broken tea cups,

While students to her disorder torch coffee shops with

The oppressive heat of conjecture. Silly children.


Like fog, their bias spills out and condenses on the cool cement and

An endless motorcade slips them quietly by,

Boasting ten thousand flashes of epileptic mayhem -

A gross of laborers, idling far from their berths,

Grapple with the trafficked fumes of impatience.


The brief day has need of strength -

An erosion of complacency.

A moment of endlessness.

Anything -

Fair city, burning for winter.

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

5 Year Update. By Demand.

Harvard has asked for yet another skullcap-output. It won't get graded though so I might actually DO this one. It's the first of the last series of essays they'll email, poke, and pester us about in 5 year intervals for the rest of our lives. The collective group I'm referring to is the class of 2005. The lives I'm referring to are the earth-bound spans of time that begin relatively without exception between 1982 and 1984- and which will all end like suicide sprints on a rugby pitch over-laid onto a soccer field, with the ghost of football markings from freshman week when the recruits took over the entire grassy knoll. Fifteen hundred sprint lines to touch and 120 yards to fit them in.

I'm supposed to write an essay. A 5 year essay. What have I done in 5 years that I want to let my classmates (nay, the WORLD!) know about?

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*pant pant pant*

Here's the bare bones of it: After Boston, I spent a few months in DC, moved to the Mission in San Francisco for 1 year of my life almost to the day, and then flew back to New York to sample Midtown, the Upper East Side, Brooklyn and now the West Village.

Adding Muscle (aka, the source of all revelry: money-procurement): I worked in an operating room for my (vacation from life) year in San Francisco. I wore scrubs to work, I washed blood for autologous transfusions, I ran through the halls of the ICU while priming IVs as surgeons performed cardiac massage on post-operative surgical patients and barked orders over their shoulders to me and my cohorts, who were also running. In shoe coverings. Not the easiest thing in the world and a heck of an inner thigh workout. I decided there was no way in hell that I would want to be a doctor. So I took up healthcare consulting at Accenture and spent 1.5 years on the road (really.) before deciding to settle down and look for a job in Manhattan. As these 5 year update emails roll in, I find myself attempting to be a strategy consultant for the pharma industry at a boutique firm (Insight Strategy Advisors) in Manhattan and not only am I a huge fan of this sentence, but I'm going to try and stick with it for a while longer as I figure out what's next in this grid o' procurement...

And the life of the matter: I still have all my moving parts despite a stint on the U-23 National Rugby Team. My family is healthy and stateside after some bouts with the UK, Africa and MRI machines. My friends are thriving and scattered but they seem to rotate through NYC just frequently enough for me to feel like it really IS the epicenter of the universe. My heart is trucking along smoothly and shiny rocks and tiny toes will undoubtedly make an appearance before the next 5 year installment gets jotted down (in a blog. The day after Maine screwed up that gay marriage law). Now if only I was legally allowed to get married... There must be SOMEONE in this class that can fix that!!!

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And that's my update. I think. What else have I done in the last 5 years? Chase girls, drink beer, learn stuff, develop plantar fasciitis, acquire a gorgeous dish set, meet the authors of the xkcd series, invest in a non-profit, own a vespa, discover whiskey, switch careers, check myself into the ER for fluids, relinquish whiskey, switch coasts, run a 10K, get stoned for the dawn of 2009, run up gigantic phone bills, hate girl, love girl, hate girl, love girl, find friends, continue to suck at Beirut, keep friends regardless, sell a vespa, lose a hundred battles, yoyo diet, quit rugby, learn flip cup, win a few key wars, hate girl, looove girl, learn MORE stuff, develop an obnoxious need to cloud compute the inanity of my life via blog... grow up?...

nahhhhh. I still order whiskey on occasion.