Empty Set

Clear city I ran through this morning. Its patriotic quietude under clouds represented the vacation day of Yale, commerce and movie crew. First run in a week where cameramen, gaffers and teamsters did not crowd the sidewalks. No extras milling around dressed in a hundred shades of brown and fifties cars in pastels. Actors frozen on corners in 6 am sunlight and old army uniforms. My route did not have to weave around blocked off streets, a motorcycle chase down College, Elm into Sterling Library (sacrilege). No hoards of fans trying to catch a glimpse of Harrison Ford. Indiana Jones has been filming in the city the past week. It's been celebratory with traffic honking for miles, hoards of aimless angry high school students getting into fights with Paramount employees when roaming is interrupted by a scene. Yet thoroughly lovely with old cars on old campus, strangers gawking at Buick's together and finding themselves in conversation, Starbucks dressed up as an old pub advertising fresh oysters and ten cent drafts. A block of Chapel Street windows have been dressed up, gone into costume for the movie or taken up a disguise so that there's now an old-fashioned barber shop, boot black's, and Woolworth's with a golden dancer rocking horse outside where there used to be nondescript modern stores. The fashions in the clothing shop windows have gone retro, by about 60 years. People stare at the stage set and pose for pictures. But for today the set of the movie and the city is deserted. No one's at the mike this set though music plays on.

I relearned how to run this morning. Up on Prospect, in the third 500, third mile. I set my heel down, pushed off my toe, lengthened my stride. And suddenly my legs were doing the work instead of being dragged along by my body bent forward, bent on getting somewhere. My lungs stopped seizing and I remembered there was technique not just will to going the distance. Around Park Street, there was a woman with five bags, loud green jacket, purple skirt, bright red shoes. She shuffled along. And she was wearing a plastic tiara. I wanted to tell her I had one just like it. I wanted to argue one didn't have to be crazy to wear it, hoping she had some place she was taking her bags, some where to go. As I passed the church on Elm, the bells began reciting the hour. Running away from it, each toll got softer, faded into a gentler reminder with distance. Still they chimed, Oh let not time deceive you, you cannot conquer time. Then they stopped, I turned the corner of my block and sprinted home.

Self-Sufficiency

Well, they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night. We drove down to see Bob Dylan play Atlantic City yesterday. 207 miles from New Haven to the end of Jersey. Left the lab early and it was all going okay until the Cross Bronx Expressway stopped. As we crawled across the Bronx, I read the Unbearable Lightness of Being out loud. It took 10 minutes to pass under Dyre Ave, the heavy traffic dire. Then an accidental detour in New Jersey cost us half an hour. So it was not until 8:30 that we were driving across the causeway into the strange coast. The tickets said the show started at 8. Tilting my head out the window, I saw giant windmills, sentinels to the city. Then the casinos. Caesars, Borgata, Trump Plaza, Trump Marina, Trump Taj Mahal. The causeway spit us into an unnecessarily large neon sign and an equally imposing Nike swoosh. It felt like we were entering a different planet. One that smelled like sewage. Hardly time to process before parking and running through the casino, past automatons at slot machines, capitalism lost its logic, and into a mostly middle-aged crowd facing a stage where Bob Dylan and a band with too many pieces played. To relief, the usher said Dylan'd only come on 15 minutes before. And then despite the ridiculousness of the place and realizing the harmlessness of the drunk, old fans, the music mattered and the 6 hour drive didn't. I got caught up in the sound of words spit out, the conciseness of hands on keyboard, and the reinvention. He played Shelter from the Storm as a ballad. The melody of Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again was woven into another tune, and I didn't know Blowing in the Wind until the middle of the first verse. Something to see favorite songs, familiar lyrics warped so that they were almost unrecognizable. The new-old creations were not bad, but an intimation of what time does. As we walked out fire-works erupted over the ocean. We drove off to the stereo singing, Well now, everything dies, baby, that's a fact, but maybe everything that dies someday comes back. Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty, and meet me tonight in Atlantic City.

Aaron left for North Carolina this afternoon, and I thought how difficult it is to be on ones own after having lost the habit. Yet how necessary that one self should suffice. These two weeks I am relearning existence as an individual, good practice for Paris. Paradoxically, the blog reappears. Because it is too hard to exist only as one, I am writing towards people. Or more importantly, writing merely towards words owned in the world.

Screaming into the Void

from happiness at my discovery midst surfing web while I should be writing the last 5 pages of my senior essay: Andy's back. The Yankees have signed Andrew Eugene Pettitte for a one-year $16 million contract. Tears of joy.

Resurrection, a Christmas Miracle

I know resurrection is his Easter themed gig, but this blog's being reborn a season early, reborn before the birth of the infant child. (Besides "every finding is a refinding," Freud, I bet, would agree every birth is a rebirth.) For a moment at least. To reflect on religion. And I've decided it's not about love or kindness or any of that. It's about difference. Isolation. Separating yourself into an identity. All those wheat from chafe images. Not an original thought. Merely one that's bound to hit you hard on the head lighting a menorah in a room while Katie and Erin sing other holiday songs and decorate angel and conifer-shaped cookies. Christians make me feel Jewish, meaning religion must be about contrast. Like on and off-center retinal bipolar cells, few things make me identify so strongly with any group as Christmas carols.

In dull triumphant news: I've turned in 60 pages of writing since Monday and wrote my wrist off for a final this afternoon. Only 25 more for Monday and I'm a second semester senior. After the agony of three seminar papers, that's got to be a good thing, right?

"Crickets mean it ain't a city,"

I remind Aaron. We are lying in the grass of the green continuing a standing debate. Having just ran the annual New Haven labor day road race, he thinks he has new insight from his flight across 12.5 miles of this town. But I can hear crickets from my 4th floor apartment at night.

The apartment is prettyfuckingsweet, as Dave Leiberman would say, all one word justlikethat, like e.e. cummings shooting Buffalo Bill's clay pigeons. It's on Park street, right across from Pierson's green shuttered bricks between colonial windows. From living room, you look out across the college's roofs, the slate atop the cabaret. Towards the theater swathed in Yale's favorite new garment, construction, and the obligatorily ugly corrogated-cardboard Architecture building. Towards the sunlit stone of the college art gallery. Past Dwight Hall, the penis pinnacles of Phelps gate, and Old Campus. In the near distance the Taft apartments, downtown New Haven. "Downtown" uttered with irony, of course. Looming in the middle distance of the canvas of our view is my favorite, Harkness Tower, eery ghostbuster green as always at night. Comfortingly saying I'm home, at Yale.

The apartment itself is devastatingly huge for two people. Everyone who comes in says so, and I am kinda amazed. I walk around dazed after my Stiles single, no common room days. I go from kitchen, to long living and dining room, down the infinite hallway. Katie's room, bathroom, my room, drawing room. The first night back a week ago I half freaked out when I realized how much it was to clean and that it was all ours. It didn't help that Katie and Erin returned home from BAR, wildly giddy after a night out to a place I'm underage for, with spirits I was unprepared for after a weekend of all our own world in Maine. But Erin moved into her dorm room last Wednesday. And so far living with Katie is prettyfuckingperfect.

For the moment I'm relieved to be under 21. It's a repreive. An excuse for why I can't go out with my friends that doesn't hurt their feelings. Last year they didn't go to so many bars, clubs, but junior year, everyone wasn't old enough except me. For now I'm enjoying evenings starting at senior events with everyone, sticking around hours till some move on to somewheres they card, then heading home to the apartment, or hanging out at the Hall house with a different kind of crowd. During day I've been trying to throw together a woeful Fulbright application. Reading new neuroscience articles, I've never felt so dim witted, but the project's shaping up with help from a British scientist at the Salpêtrière in Paris who I'm hoping on every superstition I don't believe in to work for, but don't have more than a few paragraphs for. A proposal has to happen by September 11th. When the grant's due.

I've also been exploring. Something about living off campus makes Yale expand. Charles or Boyle, Avogadro, one of those Ideal Gas Law scientists must have come up with a law about it. To describe this phenomena of freedom. How there's more life living outide of dorms. We entertain at the apartment. The boys bring friends and food. And there are more streets, more shops. I'm getting to see the college campus in context. Not bad by juxtaposition with this non-city, not bad at all.

Around ten o'clock I wander down to the green, through sweaty 5K finishers and kid inflatable carnival castle jumpers and long beer-line millers. A middle-aged garage band plays "Ophelia." Today the top half of the green is drowning in an unlikely mix of odors. Free Atticus bread for the hungry runners, cheap beer, sweat, popcorn and the overly sanitized smell of porta-potties. It's a festival. Complete with families, strollers, tents and amusements. Down by the finish line the air is clearer although people are crowded along the sides of Temple Street to see the single-file spaced out runners come in. At the end of 20K I am surprised at the sprinting. Aaron, 228th, looks exhausted. His rubber band legs collapse in the Lower Green grass. I hand him water. He stretches. We talk about the town.

Where I Am

and where I will be until August 19th, after the MCAT, in case you were wondering: lab, in the hood cutting open the ventral side of a live fish to manipulate the animal's own circulatory system (by inserting a tube in the very small three chambered, still pumping heart) to fix the brain with paraformaldehyde; lab, in the dark room bent over 60 micron thin slices of fish brain breathing in alpha-bungarotoxin and other unappealing antibodies and exotic chemicals; lab, on the confocal microscope which is just as cool as it sounds; the library at Einstein, studying with Jeffrey for the test I'd rather not name; behind closed doors, like the Tom Jones song, on weekends; and constantly, in my favorite place. In Paris. Figuratively. Figure it out. But I won't tell you about it because poets already have better than I could. In other words, the blog is busy. It misses you although the world is too full to talk about. So, see you on the flip side. Where frivolity recommences.

The World Cup

is contagious. I’ve caught a bit of an infection hanging around with someone sick on soccer. I also work in a lab with two Germans, a married couple, Thomas and Heike, who exult in their country’s profession of friendship. And as I walked out of the Kennedy Center this evening, I met a grad student from Trinidad proud of her country’s tie. She was waving goodbye to Alex who works in the lab next to mine and is alternately affectionate and mean, argumentative and a good teacher. He wears his pesas pinned under his yamacha. Perhaps so they don’t sway in front of the microscope when he bends over the objective. Or perhaps his objective is to blend in. Not much trouble around here at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, affiliate of Yeshiva University. It’s less of a surprise to see a religious scientist around here, a Drummond character who could take up the Bible and Darwin’s Origin of Species, weigh one in each hand and then place them together side by side in the last scene of Inherit the Wind. Einstein, who believed in God and relativity, hangs in every building. At least one portrait or bust. Omnipresent. Big brother or the deity of the place, he watches from beneath crazy hair promising the security of science and the speed of light and the laws of physics are the same in all reference frames.

So as we walk out under a framed Einstein, Michelle from Trinidad calls after Alex from Brooklyn, “Don’t pick up any old ladies on the way home,” which is exactly who I think his hat is meant to attract, and we head down to the Eastchester towers where she also lives, of course. After talking for five minutes she offers to loan us a microwave for the summer and I realize what a cult of a community this place is where everyone exists to do research or go to med school and everyone understands that but see each other in the same gym and smile in the elevators and are good neighbors. As we cross the courtyard, which is actually almost pretty with blue sky between the tall, reassuring structures of 1925, 1935 and 1945 Eastchester Avenue, I see Superman. Who is also an M.D./pH.D. across the hall on the 4th floor of the neuroscience building and my last summer crush. He is playing catch with a small boy. He says hi as I walk by and the boy calls, “Daddy.” Clark Kent has a kid. Should have known. He’s from Utah. Oh well. Pales in comparison to afternoon world cup heartbreak. But besides helpless hours when the USA was losing to a country that should have stayed in a Kundera novel, it’s been a decent day. Better than decent. From early gym morning to now, coming back from library after getting along well with Jeffrey, the name I’ve given my Kaplan MCAT review book. Jeffrey is fond of Samantha. Samantha is fond of Jeffrey. We didn’t start out on the right foot, the book got the name because I didn’t like it, but we had a good time tonight. Jeffrey and I are going to hang out all summer in my modest monk-like time in the Bronx spent between experiments (I get to slice rat brains tomorrow) and running in the gym and studying med students, studying to be a med student in the library and applying myself to things for the year after and waiting for weekends in Manhattan lying around in Central Park on a picnic blanket with dim sum and Bob Dylan and buckets of moonbeams in my hand. But Monday was not bad, for a weekday, the farthest from Friday. I cooked dinner. And it was good.