Yesterday, Soung, Kim and I met at Enid’s for brunch. The three of us are Penn State Graphic Design alumni. It had been nearly 4 years since I last saw Kim. Even though I don’t see her very often, she’s the type of person I feel privileged to know.

Kim works for a massive cellular phone company. Currently, she is heading up a new office in Sao Paolo, Brazil, flying back and forth between Brooklyn and there. She works within the user interface department, striving to make these electronics put to our ear every day easier to use.

Half way through our meal, she began to explain how much trouble she has separating work from life. She’s finding the task downright impossible to manage.

Thousands of people do this every day and I can’t no matter how hard I try.

After we finished eating we took a walk through Mccarren Park. We talked about the difference between our modern day problems and the problems we knew in college. I’m not sure if it’s the way she said it, or what she said. Perhaps it was all due to context, either way Kim said something that stuck with me.

I keep the New York Times on my desk and when a vendor insists on having their logo on our cell phone and I start to get worked up something small because they’re getting worked up over something small, I’ll look over at the paper and read that 40,000 people died in Pakistan.

It was at that moment, the mid-day sun shown brightly through the leaves and pressed hard against my skin. The air moved in around us to get closer to the thought. It held on steadily to the words, and carried them without the aide of wires, satellites, or records. And I stood there, interfering. I stood there without much purpose or meaning, an obstacle whose only real purpose was to get in the way.