Cheering alone around the room.

Suddenly, for a moment, it's clear and sunny. Lab report's writing itself, Matsui got his 100th RBI and my Yanks are sporting a seven nothing lead over the Sox. Base hit center field for center fielder Bernie Williams in the bottom of the second. Eight to zip. If only the twister will hold off till the fifth inning. The Aunty Em gray sky has moved north to over the flags flapping menacingly in Boston. Past ball by Variteck. The runners move up. Cairo gets hit in the butt, a shiner where the sun don't shine, and forces in a run. Nine nothing. No break for the Red Sox on this earth, why should the sky help out?

Welcome Ivan

I woke to the sound of the rain pelting my window. No sweet pitter patter. It's really coming down. The rain hits the roofs like Niagra Falls. The thunder sounds like buildings are falling down. Proof: what there was of a skyline of the city is gone. Harkness is a ghost and City Hall does not exist. In the anarchy, flashes of lightning across all the gray cause epiletic seizures. The fourth floor eye-level leaves thrash back and forth protesting the pouring rain and being hung out to dry, blown by any gusting wind. Whoever's blow-drying her hair down the hall is a little out of it. There's a flood watch out. The hallway is flooded where everyone forgot to close the windows. But the storm is moving off. Now, the sound echoes the fury of the light seven miles later. Four days after the storm's come ashore, this is enough nature's power for me. As if I needed another reason to be thankful I'm not from Florida.

The point.

Monday in lab I spent half hour performing a Diels Alder reaction waiting for my lugubrious purple solution to boil into a bubbling pale ale. While cursing this toil and trouble and hoping for the color change, I talked with the girl at the station next to mine. She was waiting too. Waiting to dutifully get her degree and get married. A horse of a different color from everything I wanted. I couldn't imagine longing only for this metamorphosis, shedding her own name and schooling and emerging an eternal summer butterfly free to bum around and have a family. With medical school you almost couldn't have kids till you were after thirty and that was just so late.

I thought it was late already to go through what we were and arrive no further than Austen. To try one's patience and sanity refluxing reactions, synthesizing salicylic acid, learning allylic hallogenation. After all the hours in labs, all-nighters over orgo textbooks, splicing genes and ideas together in paper. After centuries of cooking dinner, washing clothes and if accomplished sitting in rooms, cutting flowers, speaking French and German, covering screens and I know not what; all she wanted was not benzene but wedding rings.

This education. To raise children. An incredible and dauntingly difficult job, but I couldn't conceive that with all these opportunities, conception and lying around a ritzy apartment were the extent of an ambitious young Yalie's goals. Each to their own, and I guess I want the bread someone else won hard-earned for me. I want my full-fledged citizenship in the world. Not necessarcily moving in high but to be out in society, doing something with the education I am fucking lucky to get.

I walked back by the 5 o'clock light graveyard where Noah Webster, Robert Sherman, and other important men lie. It was one of those afternoons it's not too hot, all you need is a tee-shirt, and I remember this is my favorite season. Running my hand along the fence, looking up at the Law School carved stone beaming its best sun-warmed smile, I thought of the paper and the text that were mine to work and re-work and write. I thought of the problem sets with pages of cryptic stick symbols and arrows and excited electrons catalyzing polymerizations, everything coming together. The world's going to room temperature but besides the library, I'm not going to sit in a room while it happens.

I went to services tonight. I would say I went to Temple, but they were held in the First Summerfield Methodist Church on the corner of College and Elm. The fifteen foot wood cross was covered partially by a cloth with Hebrew painted on it. I walked in late after dinner with Seema and Isabelle and remembering more reasons I'm happy I went to Horace Mann. The sirens fled down College street outside. It was strangely secure, reassurring the melody, the familiar lilt of the prayers chanted in a language I understand only pieces of. A Long Island accent read one of the passages and I lifted my head from the Gates of Repetance to see a fellow Tiyuler who's now apparently and unexpectedly a freshman here. I sat in the back in jeans and enjoyed all the colors everyone wears for Rosh Shashanna, short Stiles Master Schwartz coming in later than I and sitting in front of me, the same translations with ruler instead of king and the voices, reading as one, managing to finish a slight second off from each other. I did not enjoy the bland and flavorless version of me cha mocha, it sucked. No spice. The student cantoring also tried to get too high on Avinu Malkeinu and I actually missed Cantor Botton and conrny Chants of a Lifetime until the last verse when everyone came in and it was redeemed. The Rabbi also had grown up Roman Catholic and converted only to find out she was adopted and her biological parents were Jewish. Her sermon was her life story. She insisted that during these days of remembrance, these days of return (what if I don't want to I argued) we need to remember, to return and to figure out where we were returning to. She intoned it was time for everyone at the same time to ask the big questions alone. Who am I? Where am I from? What am I doing? I'm Samantha from 53 Spring Street above red orange Gatsby's and from Lexington, Lawrance, 2946 on the fourth floor of Stiles, Yale, New Haven, the World, Horace Mann, P.S.3, Playgroup, artists, love, Purchase, Westchester, the Bronx, Queens, Holland, Eastern Europe, the East. I'm writing to you, l'shana tova.

It's live jazzing in my window.

There's a pianist and saxophone player jamming downstairs at La Piazza, the Italian restaurant from which drifts of bacon, garlic, salmon and music waft up four floors in my window and onto my desk. I tossed a red rose down. I'm accompanying the mucisians with a Yankee game and physics problems. Better than before I understand exactly what is involved in the if you want to row straight across a river and the current is moving at so many meters per second too fast, which direction do you point the boat questions. But the textbook forgets important factors. Like what if you're speed is slowed by your four seat being in a bad mood and refusing to pull on her oar hard enough or if you have to correct your course constantly to starboard because your bow seat is too short and her pair partner brings the boat around every stroke. I don't miss being a cox.