by Parisa Aryán

I don’t believe in coincidences. I think that everything happens as a result or a reaction to something else, be it directly or indirectly. I see signs around me and I live my life taking them into account, always trusting my instinct over my logical mind. The few times when I have decided to go with my logical mind, I have invariably made a mistake.

There are some things in life that we do not understand, however hard we try and however open we are to lateral thinking and/or spirituality. Untimely death is one of them. A few weeks ago, I lost one of the people who touched my life most entirely in the shortest time. He was the first man who ever made me feel loved, cared for and desired. I never forgot the importance that this had for me at the time, and then again later, during so many dark moments of my life, when it still brought a smile to my face and filled my heart with hope. His name was Ben.

Years of moving, traveling and life in general made us lose touch at some point, but I was lucky enough to be able to get back in touch with Ben not so long ago. Since then, he started sending me postcards from all the places he traveled to. In the seven years or so during which we didn’t know each other’s whereabouts, I had changed my job three times, had become an actress and had gone through a few (let’s ignore the number) relationships. He, in turn, was now in a serious relationship and had pursued his passion — he was working with and studying howler monkeys, which took him to different parts of the world on a regular basis.

I have known very few people as passionate about their work, about love and about life as Ben was. My small, weak, rather senseless consolation about all this is that when that bullet, aimed for someone else, reached him, he was where he wanted to be, doing what he wanted to do — that he was really and truly alive.

It took me two days to be able to cry his death properly; I think that was the amount of time my heart needed to actually believe that it had happened. Once I started crying, I couldn’t stop for a long time. And then all that was left was my small, weak, rather senseless consolation and the candle I’ve been lighting for him these days. That, and the hope that he will somehow know now how important he was in my life, as I was never able to tell him while he was physically with us.

The other night I was watching a movie and one of the characters was talking about the flight of the hummingbird, about how its wings make an 8-shape. I looked this up on the web and it is certainly true: the wings of the hummingbird make an 8-shape during flight, which provides lift in both directions. The figure 8, as the character in the movie pointed out, represents infinity.

Infinity: that elusive notion that we humans are not capable of comprehending or digesting completely; the notion that nothing in this world, including ourselves, ends, that our souls are immortal, and that we are part of the never-ending loop of the Universe.
The week before Ben died I had received one of his postcards. He had probably sent it a while ago, as it came from Ecuador. He was spending six months there doing some volunteer work and that was where he was shot.

The postcard was a picture of a flying hummingbird. I do not believe in coincidences.

tagged under:travel

by Parisa Aryán

I think that we can all agree that our lives are pretty easy. In this day and age, if your country is not at war, if you are not living in the street eating from the garbage and if you and your loved ones are generally healthy, you can’t really complain — except that sometimes it is so hard not to.

I get up at 7:30 every morning, work for an extremely demanding company, deal with an extremely demanding boss and do an extremely demanding job from 8:30 till 17:30. Then I run (literally) to a rehearsal or a class, finish ridiculously late at night and go back home. By the time I go to bed it is never earlier than 1:00, and the next morning I have to do it all again. Sometimes, I am so tired when I get home, that I just lie on my bed fully clothed and cry for a while. I feel a lot better after that, so I get up. And I get on with my life.

I was deeply, madly, passionately in love with a man who could not or would not love me back in the same way. I had to make a journey to the other side of the world for my heart to catch up with that fact. Once it did, I moved on. However, to this day, there are still mornings when I wake up missing him almost as violently as the first day. When this happens, I concentrate really hard on the report I’m reviewing for work, or on the article I’m writing, or on learning my lines for the play, or on my dance teacher’s instructions, or on how beautiful the sky looks or on stirring my coffee. I concentrate and I wait. And then I just get on with my life. Read the rest of this entry »

by The Baby Boomer

The name
Typically displayed in the position of honor — top shelf center — of any bar that offers it, Remy Martin Louis XIII cognac is affectionately known by restaurant workers as “Louis Treize.”

The bottle
A hand-blown crystal decanter, each one numbered, is a faithful reproduction of a Renaissance original found in 1850 on the site of a 16th-century battle near Cognac. Decorated with fleurs de lis, the symbol of French royalty, the bottle itself sells on eBay for around $90.

The back story
My best friend’s brother was a bartender in a popular restaurant in a tourist area of Boston. We would go there on weekend nights and could drink all night for the price of one beer. Dave and I would wait until a waitress came up to the bar with her order, and then, in a loud enough voice to be overheard, say “I’ll have a Louis Treize stinger.” It invariably got an incredulous look from the waitress, as no one would EVER order Louis Treize other than straight up. Read the rest of this entry »

by Parisa Aryán

The coming of a New Year is all about planning. During the last week of December, virtually all we do is ponder the coming year: what we think will happen, what we know will happen, what we want to happen. There is such a massive projection of our individual and collective hopes, fears and desires, that it is no wonder that half the friends I talked to just before Christmas were on the verge of an anxiety attack. And people still ask me why I don’t like these holidays.

Until very recently, I was all about planning. I planned all the time, even when I didn’t know I was doing it. And I was not the only one. We all plan because we need to feel that we have our lives under control, that we are going somewhere, that we haven’t been brought into this world as part of some cosmic joke. But what if that, exactly, is the cosmic joke?

Here’s a frightening thought: I have a nagging feeling that we may be going through life trying to find out where we are going, only to realize after we leave this world that we were already there. Yes, this is it. We are here. Now. And our “job” while we are here is not to achieve excellence at what we do, or to bring children into this world, or to have a successful relationship with someone; our job is to live.

With this thought in mind, I didn’t make any resolutions this year. In fact, I had decided against resolutions quite a while before New Year’s Eve. I decided to give it a go and just do my “job.” No plans, no projections, no building of future case scenarios: just being in the moment, at every moment. I call this “my little unplan.” Read the rest of this entry »

by Zoe Benedict

I am allergic to Christmas trees. I do not mean that I am allergic to pine trees and trying to make it seem more dramatic — I have spent ample time in the Northwestern United States and have thus disproven that theory. I am allergic to the process by which the pine tree is cut down, rammed into a corner of the living room, supported by a small dish of water with legs, and left to die a slow, needle-by-needle death. I have old pictures of myself in front of the tree on Christmas day, carting my Baby Wets-a-Lot around in my new Fisher Price grocery cart, with tears streaming down my Ring-Around-the-Rosy cheeks. Not that I liken my discomfort to the plague, but a small, miserable child surrounded by brand new toys is no cause for joy.

It was not until my parents divorced and we moved to a smaller home that my mother caved in and bought a fake tree, the logic being that in a larger house there was more opportunity to avoid the tree whereas in our new less spacious quarters there was not much opportunity to avoid anything. I also think my 5’-1” mother lacking her 6’-1” tree counterpart had something to do with it — I can’t quite imagine her getting the thing to stand upright on her own. This was also when we got rid of tinsel. It was a chore to clean up, always getting caught in the wheel of the vacuum — our old house had had wooden floors we could sweep it from. In short, this is when Christmas became efficient, painless and ugly. Read the rest of this entry »

by Kelly Ramundo

I’m applying for a job with Barack Obama. President-elect Soon-to-Be (not soon enough!) President Barack Obama, that is. I just filled out the application and I will be lying in wait for approximately the next “few months,” which is what the application kindly informs you is the amount of time it will take to wade through the avalanche of on-line solicitations. Obama, if I don’t pick up, I was probably on the metro and I’ll hit you back. No really, call me!!

In all seriousness, I have never been a big fan of applications. Trying to quantify your professional worth as something that can be expressed in bullet points and kept down to one page. Making the unimportant sound weighty but not overdoing it. Compensating for a lack of PhDs with “real-life experiences.” To be honest, Obama’s 10-step version of the process leaves much to be desired. Similar to his no-bullshit attitude since being voted into office — passing up the Caribbean vacations with the family-elect to get knee-deep in administration-building and apocalypse-prepping — the Team Change application is a no-nonsense affair. What is your name? Where did you go to school? What are your degrees? Yes, the entire application process leaves no space for tactical rhetoric, witty self-promotion, or the kind of self-deprecating modesty that allows your future employer to see that your defects are really assets, and that you have no defects so to speak of. (Except, of course, being a real work horse. But there’s nothing you can do about that right? It’s in your blood. Sigh, sigh. Chuckle, chuckle.)
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by Jacki Lewin

It had been almost four days since I’d eaten; even more amazingly, I had abstained from coffee and alcohol as well. Shouldn’t I have been having visions, speaking to the gods, or at least ravenously howling at the moon?

No, not unlike my other forays into asceticism, this one had merely left me bored and impatient – yet, interestingly, not particularly hungry. Perhaps I should have forged on; I could probably have kept it up for a week. The truth is, I missed chewing and swallowing and I couldn’t wait to rejoin the ranks of the bon vivants.

In an effort to give my body a moment of rest between the twin gluttonies of Thanksgiving and Christmas, I spent a long weekend with the Master Cleanse fast. You know the one: salt water for breakfast, lemon juice and maple syrup elixir for all other meals. Though my stated goal for this non-adventure was detoxification, as the days passed, the motivation to continue stemmed more from the aesthetic rewards of fasting. I looked and felt lighter and found myself admiring my flatter stomach in the mirror more often than I’d like to admit. Perhaps I was fooling myself; why would anyone give up eating for any reason other than to lose weight? Or, more likely, this was just another example of my impatience; I was anxious for tangible results. Read the rest of this entry »

by Parisa Aryán

You know how sometimes you’ll be watching a movie or a TV show and you’ll feel really connected to one of the characters or one of the storylines? You’ll recognize yourself in them and feel that you are not the only one in the world going through a certain thing and that will make you feel better. The success of TV shows like Sex and the City and Grey’s Anatomy is based precisely on this very fact. That’s why we keep watching them, searching for ourselves in every new episode.

But the truth is that life is not like movies and TV shows. Because in movies and TV shows, when the character has lost all hope, when things could not go any worse, something always happens to make it all better. The woman says “there are no real men left in the world” and just as she is walking out of the bar where she’s been drinking her blues away, a real man suddenly shows up and, coincidentally, he is going to start working in her office the very next day: yes, fiction can be a wonderful thing. Read the rest of this entry »

by Emily Johnson

An N train had just come and gone. My boyfriend and I were the only ones left on the platform, waiting for a Q. Not a good sign. Well, not exactly alone. With us were two others with a stroller. In the game of roulette that is late–night subway waiting, it is a general rule that if someone else is waiting, you’re okay. Most lines whittle down on weekends, so the three or four yellow lines — N Q R and W — are now just the N and maybe the Q, which we were betting on.

A slight digression must be allowed here, for a little background. There are a few hard and fast rules you learn about the subway (not to mention the late night subway schedule, which carries with it strictures more unforgiving than the Catholic Church’s). Number one is: Take the train that comes, or, if you are of an idiomatic turn of mind: A train in the station is worth two in the tunnel. Now this rule always depends on where you are going, how fast you have to get there, and what hard facts you have about the particular line you’re riding. But late at night, this information is both more pertinent and harder to come by, and wily are its possible side effects. Like one wrong number in an equation, its influence is compounded in all subsequent derivations. And after ten o’clock p.m., this little home truth outweighs almost any other. The trains are basically all fucked up anyway, so as long as you are going in the right general direction, you are better off riding than waiting. Read the rest of this entry »

by Parisa Aryán

As human beings living in a modern society, we go through many types of journeys in our lifetimes. Some journeys are physical and others are spiritual. Some are easy and others are difficult. Some are very long and others happen in the space of hours, minutes, even seconds. I define “journey” as anything that takes you to another place or another level, anything that changes you, that shakes your insides and teaches you something new about who you really are.

I had the experience of a journey a couple of months ago, when I traveled to Vietnam. Before I left, I had ideas, hopes and fears about a very specific emotional issue that I would undoubtedly solve while I was there. But it never crossed my mind that, quite independently of that issue, my trip was going to be such a journey of discovery of love (in the broadest, most essential sense of the term), life and myself. My trip changed me, it reacquainted me with myself and it reminded me of who I really am. It changed my outlook on life and my attitude towards it. And, for the first time in a long, long while, I saw things clearly and found my own capacity for real joy.
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