Fall is here. It may be slow in coming, the last breaths of Indian summer maintaining its humid stronghold on New York City, but it is, nonetheless, inevitable. Fall is my favorite season. I am still, and perhaps always will be, a student at heart and so, to me, fall is the season of new beginnings: when new books are bought, new courses are chosen and new people are met. It is a time of suspended promise and anticipation. In France, the beginning of autumn is called la Rentrée, the Return. For The Lattice Group, this fall is both the beginning of a new phase and a kind of return to where we began. After a year of travels and interviews, Vetta and I once again find ourselves in the United States, in New York, in order to continue our fervent proselytizing— albeit in a novel form. No longer living out of suitcases and chasing unsuspecting interview subjects across the cafes of foreign capitals, we are “nesting,” and with nesting comes the unraveling of materials collected, the compiling of lessons learned.

Back in November, I showed up every morning at the law office where I worked, made a few copies… and then stole away to my office and surreptitiously waxed poetic about the interactive community that would, I hoped, become synonymous with the Lattice Group.  In my mind, I was excited about the sharing of stories, the broadening of horizons, the merging of unorthodox ideologies and conventional aspirations into a progressive exchange. The corporate ladder broken and widened into a lattice of refreshed ideas and opportunities (for details, please see “note from the editor,” November 2007).

Something about this whole notion must’ve stuck, because two months later, fired up with lattice-inspired fervor, I quit my job -- and promptly flipped my staid world on its thoroughly unprepared ass.

"Yoko" 

Somewhere in the midst of my morning hate and anxiety, walking on snowy Arbat, I have decided that I will write a book before I’m 25. And since I just turned 24 yesterday, here I am, sitting in front of four gigantic monitors in the centre of Moscow, writing this.  I celebrated the 24th year of furious nothingness in the company of two Russian whores, a bottle of whiskey and a pack of Dunhill cigarettes. I smiled silently at myself, noting my obvious personal progress – usually I celebrated my birthdays alone. Time is leaving us, or me, all the time, and I felt the urge to strip my soul on paper.

Liz Somes

My dad was a trial attorney at first. It challenged him, and he liked it, but after a few years of stressful 80-hour workweeks, a cushy corporate attorneyship began to look really appealing. In 1976, he abandoned the courtroom for a job he ended up hating for 30 years.To compensate, he moonlighted as a stock trader. He would come home from work and, after eating dinner with my mom and brother and me, he’d dive into his piles of Stocks and Commodities magazines, devour the Financial Times, and delight in The Nightly Business Report. TV, golf, buying fancy big barbecues (or whatever dads do for fun) didn’t butter his biscuit like trading did. So, he wasn’t one of the lucky few who could make his passion into a 9-to-5, but he was able to make it a very sizeable part of his life.

Rachel Dunlap

If you happen to be a New Yorker who has undertaken a harried morning commute, the odds are good that you have developed a Commuting Community -- the pocketful of strangers you come to recognize and know, but not know, after weeks of putting yourself onto the same car on the same train at the same time each morning. One’s Commuting Community may consist of positive influences – the underground magazine seller who shouts, “Good morning! So good to see YOU!” with mounting glee throughout the workweek, or the adorable mom and tot combo who eat yogurt and read picture books, while men in business suits wistfully follow along – and negative influences– the terrifying Woman with the Hat who body-slams others away from an empty seat and hisses at them if they come close.

 
Will Martin

Since graduating nearly 6 months ago from one of these said “prestigious liberal arts colleges,” I have technically only made $10.  Actually, it was 30 Argentinean pesos. Though it may not sound like much, I worked hard for that money. Hunched below the vines, filling my dented metal basket just full enough of Malbec grapes to earn the plastic tokens that I would later trade in for cold, hard cash (or, the three dying, oily, time stained ten peso bills, as it were).  During the ten hours of paid work I completed that day, I felt the weight of the “real world” on my shoulders, and it was indeed uncomfortable.

Pamela Tanner Boll

The last two hours, I've spent dawdling at my desk; flipping through children's clothing catalogues, a file of bills, checking on some orders of furniture and dipping into a biography of Anne Sexton-- a housewife, like me with small children, averting madness by writing. And yet, the writing does not help her take care of her children. Can I do both? I read her poem Double Image about her child as a mirror; one that affirms her being and at the same time pulls her in and under. I know that pull, that feeling of nearly breaking in two.

Nura Suleiman

When I was five, I was convinced that I was going to be the future manager of the Plaza Hotel in New York City.  I would have a dog, just like Eloise, who I assumed would, naturally, be my neighbor. Our dogs would have play dates together in Central Park whilst we dined over crumpets and tea, and gossiped about the hottest celebs.  Fast-forward seventeen years later, and here I am, living in an African village, in the middle of nowhere (Bamendjou, Cameroon to be precise), where I occasionally have running water and electricity, my best friend is the five-year-old across the street (whom I swear, when he’s not picking his nose and covered in dirt, is a dead ringer for Will Smith), and though I did have a dog for a brief period, we both got fleas, so, sadly, doggie play dates are a pipe dream of the past.