February 8th 2012

What It Feels Like To Drown

I drowned once.

There wasn’t a white light, and there wasn’t a tunnel. In fact, it was all purple. Purple, purple, purple… dark and light shades of purple as if I was swimming in a sea of Kool-Aid. Chest ready to explode, I still couldn’t breathe. My stomach rocked up and down, twisting and turning, like I was strapped into a rollercoaster, and all I wanted to do was scream. I kept stretching my mouth wide open over and over again, but I couldn’t make a noise. Everything was silent.

I’ve never felt so helpless.

I was young-ish, at that amazing mid-pubescent phase in the 7th grade where the girls get taller and the boys look increasingly more awkward. I was chubby, had a bowl haircut and a nice set of buck teeth to complement my overbite that was yet to be fixed by the modern marvels of orthodontics. At the time, I wore these killer dragon T-shirts every day with sometimes ornately matching cargo pants with the extra large velcro pockets.

My mom had wisely enrolled me in a local “swim team” at the athletic club (the kind that sort of competes but not really) to get me some much needed exercise and lay the foundation for a solid beach bod that is still yet to materialize. So every Tuesday and Thursday, I’d slip on my jet black speedo just under my slight pudge, tighten my blue Tyr swim goggles and flop around in the pool for an hour and a half with a host of other kids.

We sometimes did what we called “under-waters.” You’d swim as far as you could without coming up for air and inevitably the unofficial goal (especially for the slightly older kids) would be to make it to the end of that 25m indoor pool. I’d done it before, and I knew how it felt for me. By the 3/4 mark, you start struggling. At that point, my chest would start to kind of pump up and down desperately looking for air, but I’d just concentrate, stare forward at that marble plus sign at the end of the pool and push straight to it. You hit the end and explode out of the water gasping for air.

One day after practice, this kid named Cliff dared me to swim a full length of the pool plus a quarter of the way back without breathing (for twenty bucks). I was a couple years older, felt like I had something to prove and quickly agreed without a second thought.

I stretched out at one end of pool and started with a series of deep breaths. I’d basically hyperventilate, take a big gulp of air to fill out my lungs, drop quickly into the water, and push off the back wall as hard as I could. Stroke after stroke, I remember reaching that 3/4 point. It hurt, and I even took in a tiny bit of water, but I was determined. My moves quickened until I slapped the cold cement of the back wall, flipped my body, and launched right back in opposite direction.

The water was especially murky that day. I can recall turning my head around to try and spot the flags that marked my quarter finish line but couldn’t see a thing. There was no way I was going to come up for air a couple feet short of the goal. So, I clenched my teeth, pumped my legs, and pulled with my arms. But then… it stopped.

You know that feeling when you’re being chased by a monster in a dream and all you want to do is wake up? You try to pinch yourself, and you try to yell, but it just doesn’t work.

Everything was purple and I was jerking my body grabbing for air. My stomach jolted left and right, disorienting me. I wanted to scream but nothing would come out.

A line of swim team kids had been watching from the deck. I had swam the full length of the pool plus half the way back when I stopped moving. Cliff eventually dived in to pull me up but wasn’t strong enough to lift me out of the water. The swim coach and my mother nearby quickly walked over to see what the ruckus was, and they would soon fish me out onto the concrete poolside.

My mouth was still tightly clenched shut as if I was gritting my teeth mid-swim. But my mom, who’d been a registered nurse for twenty years, pried my jaw open with two hands thanks to the grip provided by my overbite. She inhaled deeply and gave me two breaths of life.

I started coughing up
the chlorine water.

When I began waking up, I would slip back and forth between the cold cement pool side and that purple hell hole. I woke up screaming and thrashing with a giant burst of adrenaline trying to escape.

An ambulance rushed me to the hospital, and I spent a night being pricked and prodded (still in my wet black speedo) as they drew blood each hour to check my oxygen count. I eventually discovered that I’d lost control of my bodily functions while unconscious, so before that lovely revelation I had spent hours in the hospital bed sitting in my own stew. Talk about adding insult to injury. There was a little bit of worry about brain damage but I was fine, just weak, asthmatic, and a little more cautious in the pool a few weeks later post-recovery.

I think I was too young (and preoccupied with raging hormones) to reflect a lot on what had happened at the time. Things would likely be different now, and I’m sure my family has their own account, but that’s just the way it is. I didn’t exactly emerge with some sky-parting, reinvigorating thirst for life. I didn’t drop everything after getting better (albeit I was in middle school) to go all Ryan Gosling and  confess my undying love to the girl of my dreams. In the rain.

But thinking back, what might be most interesting to me is how it was all my fault, how I managed to keep myself underwater. There wasn’t an accident or a giant rip tide. I just kept swimming until I couldn’t anymore.

You don’t think about that all the time. You don’t think about how going your hardest  in the right direction can sometimes lead you into a hole. And that’s been something to chew on lately.

But don’t worry about me. I’m not afraid of the water. I still wear the color purple. And my mom is still just as badass.

 

Intro image by Shayne Gray

 

December 2nd 2011

Breathing Life Into The Common Camera

One year later...

A year ago today, we reached our fundraising goal for the Common Camera Project in 24 hours. I wrote this piece a few months ago as a short reflection on the whole ordeal.  Thanks to everybody who jumped on board, helped out, assembled cams, spread the word, and provided general cheer. It really shook things up for me, and it’s been a wonderful adventure ever since.

 

There I was, sitting on my living room floor in a circle of highly capable soon-to-be Berkeley grads applying sticker label after sticker label to disposable cameras. We were only half way done, but already on hour five. My lovely roommate and longtime childhood friend, Sean, stood up amidst the carnage of paper bits and child-sized scissors to announce, “Man… Kevin sure is lucky he has friends.”

The Common Camera Project is a social art experiment that’s distributed over 300 disposable cams to be passed from person to person around the world. Each unique “Common Cam” comes in a nifty cardboard box and is labeled with a simple set of instructions:

1. Take a pic of something that inspires you
2. Pass the camera on to someone you trust
3. If you’re last, mail it back to us.

As of today, cameras have been “checked-in” as far as Alaska, Kenya, India, Brazil, Vietnam, Moroco and the Netherlands as well as all across the U.S.

This wasn’t what the project originally looked like to me. For me, it started as a curious question: What would happen if I gave a stranger a disposable cam and told them to take a pic and pass it on? That’s all. It was a silly question–that sounded more like a wedding reception or a photographic disaster waiting to happen–that I sat on, forgot about, and let simmer for over six months before doing anything about it.

What would change is that I eventually took this simple sideproject seriously. I didn’t’ start working on it because someone told me to, or as part of a job, or to find a girlfriend (for the most part). I started Common Cam and roped in some amazing friends because I wanted to create something just because I believed it was meaningful.

I think we search for reasons a lot to rationalize how to expend our efforts. I’ll read this because I need to know it for work or I’ll put this together to make some money. But as of late, I’ve come to believe that some of the most fulfilling experiences emerge from applying that same level of hustle, structure, critical thinking to a personal project just because it naturally sticks with you.

Things changed when I started pulling in my friends. I think it’s when you’re willing to solicit honest feedback, and bring in some relative expertise that your curious question or idea becomes something more.

And in the following months, Common Cam (which wasn’t even the name at the time), would transform to involve a Kickstarter campaign, a website for people to share their story, and a mass-mailing of hundreds of tiny packages at the Post Office. All of this was in large thanks to good people willing to make their mark and badass friends willing to spend a Saturday completing incredibly remedial tasks.

You should ask them, but I don’t think they did it for the free pizza. I think they helped out because they saw something worthwhile. It doesn’t matter if it’s an idea big or small (in fact I think starting smaller is better) as long it resonates with you and you’re willing to take it out of your head and ask someone else about it.

For us, we patiently await the return of most our cameras. Who knows how many we’ll get back, but the project has already given me so much more than I expected, most significantly an intoxicating taste of how it feels to work on something just because it feeds your soul.

I may not have any more cameras to send out right at this moment, but I’ll try my hardest to at least pass along that same infectious feeling to you in the meantime.

 

November 19th 2011

I Like To Meet People I’m Never Going To See Again

Pleasure to meet you.

There’s something magical about talking to someone you’re never going to meet again.

I was boarding this bus getting ready for a return trip from Boston to New York. Settled in my window seat, tucking my water bottle into that crevice between the chair and wall, I childishly spied on my fellow bus-goers as they attempted to fend off other passengers from picking the seat next to them. You know the dance, you place your bag on the aisle seat, spread out your legs an absurd amount, or just blatantly stare people down, shamelessly praying that no one will claim your precious personal space and you may be so lucky to escape victorious without a seat-mate for the ride.

I admit, even I was guilty that day as I placed the box of cheap Chinese food that I planned to eventually gulp down mid-trip directly on the seat next to me. Of course, by no surprise probably the very last woman to hop aboard the Megabus that fateful day miraculously looked around and tersely asked as she gestured towards my Beef and Broccoli, “This seat taken?”

Naturally, I smiled amidst admitting defeat through my teeth and replied with a short, “Of course.” And that was that, we were locked in.

Little did I know, I would soon spend a good lot of the next four hours getting to know Asal, an Iranian girl my age with twice my ambition and 10 times the street smarts, currently serving as Director of Business Development for a luxury fragrance company. She told me about her company, her long commute, her not-so-stimulating MBA program, and that one guy back home who she should probably marry. Hell, I even quickly photoshopped an image for one of her presentations.

I like talking to people
I’ll never meet again.

I like talking to people I’ll never meet again. Don’t get me wrong, I also enjoy talking to friends I plan to see often, but there’s something uniquely genuine about a conversation between two people that have no expectation of the future between them. I think we often put a lot of pressure on the people we interact with, and that’s fine. We trade favors, field emotions, and work intimately. We have goals and sometimes you need to meet someone specifically to make something happen. That’s natural, that’s expected, that’s what you do to build depth whether it’s with a business partner, a love interest, or a best pal.

But when you intersect with someone else on a train, you’re isolated with that person for sometimes a hefty amount of time, and I believe you have the magical opportunity to enter a conversation with no agenda but to learn about their life out of pure curiosity. Because soon enough, you will part ways and leave with only what you’ve learned.

 

My boss, friend and mentor, Jerri, started a project called Subway Friends. It involves meeting someone new on the subway every day and handing them a small card with an invitation to a “Subway Friends Get-together” at a public place at the end of the month. Whenever I’m surrounded by unfamiliar people, I think about Jerri talking about her frustration with how a train packed full of folks can be deathly silent, all staring at the floor sheepishly avoiding contact via their iPhones, earbuds, and books.

Who knows where your random encounter might go. You may never get their name, you may trade business cards, you might find the girl of your dreams (part of why I take a lot of buses). But even amidst all that, I still think the majority of the time these serendipitous conversations go one of two ways: either you don’t get past the “how are you” phase or you meet, learn and leave. It’s that simple.

 

Someone did once tell me, “You meet everyone twice,” which, who knows, may be true in a poetic, Lion King Circle of Life, unquantifiable karma sort of way. But whether you’re meeting Asal the 24 year-old fragrance prodigy, Dan the love-struck upcoming sophomore at Rutgers, or that psychology student on the subway reading the book about why men cheat, I think you have the most to gain by not only welcoming but embracing that interaction just for what is, two people getting to know each other.

 

November 13th 2011

The N Line Is The Most Powerful NYC Subway Train Of All Time

It'll blow your mind.

Let’s begin by getting one thing straight, the N line may very well be the most powerful NYC subway train of all time. It jumps from the heart of Brooklyn to Canal St. in Manhattan within a single stop. It zooms past the silly local R train which crawls through downtown Brooklyn and pitifully, painfully drags its sad, screeching metal shell as it lumbers into the city. To put it another way, if Vin Diesel was reincarnated in subway train form, he would probably be the N. And moreover, he would likely smoke the crap out of the other underglowing Honda Civic subway train street racer wannabes.

But on top of all of that and maybe most importantly, the N runs across the Manhattan Bridge above the East River while many other cross-river trains use those underwater magical tunnels I don’t understand.

The view from the N train is beautiful, and I feel like
I’m the only one who notices it.

The view from the N train is beautiful, and I feel like I’m the only one who notices it. It doesn’t matter if it’s day or night, as the train emerges from the labyrinth of dark tunnels, the world peeks in, and for a maybe a minute or so, the hustle of the subway, that I’m-busy-and-need-to-walk-faster mentality, the iPhone-checking, cyclically-caffeinated, eating-lunch-over-your-laptop, too-tired-for-the-gym, I-need-wifi-while-underground, never-get-enough-done weight in your lungs… seems to pause.

I like to sit on the West side of the train. That’s because as you look over your adjacent train-mates the windows of the N frame the Brooklyn Bridge perfectly as it spans the two cities.

I never see anyone else peering out the windows. It’s as if the view is no different than the cracking, gray, moist tunnels that seem to wire the city. I don’t get it.

I’m not sure if my fellow ear-bud wearing passengers look at me thinking, “Man is it this guy’s first time in New York or something? Why’s he gawking out the window as if he just spotted Jay Z?” I’m not sure if it’s indeed a product of just being a 4 month New Yorker, or if I just have a weird engineering fetish for bridges.

But I have to say, I really think those other kids are crazy.

The N line is the most powerful NYC subway train of all time. It quantum leaps you from the Target at Atlantic Terminal to the bottom of the fancy, shmancy SoHo stores in a blink of an eye. It puts the tortoise-paced local R, the Snorlax of Brooklyn-bound subway trains to embarrassing shame. And it takes you over the bridge… over the bridge, out of the depths of the blackhole tunnels where I still childishly ponder if underground people actually live down there. The N train breaks up your day. It stops time. It’s the fucking Stargate of subway cars as it glides along the Manhattan Bridge like a beautiful, metal phoenix-like time portal of public transportation. It takes the world out of context and lets you see. It moves. It pauses. It’s magic. And yet, it’s still just a train.