123 or 456

Here’s the truth. I like subways.

Hurtling through a dank overheated and under ventilated channel like scurrying rats gives me a sense of thrill for no good reason. The person next to me is dressed in full suit – banker garb – that screams senses of power and influence.

I once talked about how I enjoyed walking around proper establishments blasting improper musical niceties from pre-packaged eccentricities called singers. Listening to the caramelized tones of Bocelli as il mare calmo starts rolling of his throat is soothing beyond believe. Brownian motion in my brain just calmly adapts to the pleasant acoustics and I let my arm loosely hang on to the ceiling bars. Cold-recycled air hitting the back of my neck and I’m trapped in an awkward embrace amidst strangers.

This is the end of a small beginning. 10 weeks were once my lifetime. Then they came to be an ever smaller fraction of my ever increasing life. I’m sitting at a desk feeling just as hungry as I felt 2 and half months ago and, I hope, infinitely more prepared to begin taking the world by storm.

Standing at the brink of an interesting new world I write more like a preacher today than I do most days. Memories of Mexican style swimming classes come to mind: a father, hopeful and ecstatic at having a child walks the 5 or 6 year old tike to the edge of the deep end. The tiny little hand grabs his fathers harder and harder as the ominous dark blue seems to grow infinite deeper (Jacuzzis tend to look like Mariana when you’re 3 feet tall). His father looks at his friends and family eating and drinking on the terrace. All the adults know exactly what’s happening, the child’s mom confuses her eyes as she tries to both lock her eyes on her child’s ability to breathe and divert her vision to avoid what is still seen by many as a rite of passage.

Dad kneels and whispers something (hopefully positive) and then, like a captain baptizing a new ship with a bottle of champagne – shoves the kid into the ocean (pool). Screams. Panic. White water. Instincts, survival, tears. Hugs all around and the beginnings of a deep distrust for his fathers ulterior motives for the next 2-3 weeks. I’m not worried, there’ll be ice cream in store tonight.

I’m here to say I love swimming and I’m ready to dive head first like the Amazonians. There’s still a lot to be said about where I will be in 10 years, or in the next 2 weeks for that matters but the yields are dropping and the spreads are tightening.

All I can say is that despite the ozone hole, the undoubtedly impending disaster stemming from economics, religion, politics, greed or general maximum capacity I’m more excited to be alive today for all the possibilities that these sources of friction represent. Here’s a toast to my generation based on those few around me that I call my friends and who I know have the capacity, drive and intellect to overturn a problem – big or small – if only because more so than any other generation before us, we have the most to lose and the most to gain.

Salud.