LIFE, IN ROAD SIGNS.

We don’t really understand this, but it’s true that every day is an adventure –sometimes great, sometimes horrible.

One year ago, I was out dancing with my friend Sarah in Washington, D.C. and she felt a lump on her neck and shortly after she was diagnosed with cancer. In one night, her life experience was shaken. We were out dancing and four months later she was receiving chemo treatments in a hospital bed.

And two years ago, I entered a gym in Izmir, Turkey to replenish my body and the manager that I talked to for ten minutes about the price of my membership ended up being my boyfriend for the next year and a half, and I loved him, deeply. I entered the gym to go running on treadmills, but I left believing that there are people who exist in the world who we can trust with every part of our soul and who can believe our flaws are our greatest assets.

And last night I fell asleep in New York, assuming that the sun would rise today and assuming that my heart would continue beating. Now I’m awake and alive, but I don’t know what lies ahead.  

There are ways that the world reminds us of how human we are and the limits of our control: natural disasters, man-made disasters, birth, dreams, the inexplicable force of love, and of course, based on the privilege of what and where and who we are born into many of us feel varying degrees of all of those things. Sometimes I wish we had street signs to show us the magnitude of existence the same way they show us directions, like stop signs that said “STOP & BREATH” or green lights that indicated it was safe to choose another path or one way signs with a disclaimer that we couldn’t really turn back or warning signs that something big and life changing is ahead. Maybe then we could begin to understand that every day really is an adventure.

Now Sarah is in remission. I would like to publicly acknowledge that watching her go through cancer was the single most inspiring journey to witness in my life to date. Instead of letting her illness consume her existence, she decided to let her existence consume her illness and spent the months of treatment living life as it should be lived – knowing that every moment was precious, delicate, and beautiful. She is one of the strongest people I know.

And, my relationship ended, because it had to, because we were far away in so many ways, and because sometimes saying good bye is the only way we can begin to live.

And today my new adventure begins, as it will tomorrow, and until the end of time, and in my head I’m just following the sign that says, “DO NOT PASS”, because I don’t want to a single moment to go by unlived.

ULTIMATE CONFIDENCE.

I admire women who can walk around the locker room naked. 

EXTERNAL LIFE DRIVE.

I was showing pictures to a friend on my computer. The screen froze, faded to blue, and died. Everything I'd saved for the past 5 years was gone.


My hard drive crashed on my first lap top in college, but I wanted to believe that this time my information was indestructible. So, when I came to the realization that I’d lost everything – my photos, my articles, my saved files that marked a moment in time I wanted to save, I didn’t even get upset. I knew there was no point. And when the computer store asked me if I wanted to pay the extra $300 to attempt to recover anything, I said no, because it seemed like too much to trade in for my technological diary.


And then, a miracle happened. I got a call from the computer store saying that, in fact, nothing had been erased, and that my hard drive had not crashed, rather the small internal chord that connects hard drive to computer had a malfunction that they fixed and everything was there.


Relieved, I took my computer back and I opened it up to look at everything I might have lost. I looked at every picture that I forgot that I had – every image of humans who were important enough for me to take their picture. And I looked at every reflection I ever wrote - some that were too personal to ever share, but that I saved for myself.  And looked at all of my music - all the songs that took me to moments I would have otherwise forgot.


And I came to a realization in looking over it all: if we're not searching for the things we're missing, we might never even know they don't exist.


I wish we had an external hard drive for each minute, to save all the things that might change the course of our existence, or to save the things we never knew we lost, especially the people in the universe who we don't see through distance and time and experience.


My computer malfunctioned, and when it was returned to me I was given back life’s records that reminded me of the things I had promised myself to pursue or the things I had to keep to remember all of the stuff in life that I value as important. It gave me back minutes I might have lost, because everything we don't remember becomes nothing and everything we don't see never existed.


Just another reminder to keep searching.

PAINTING LOVE.

If there is no love in the world, we will make a new world, and we will give it walls, and we will furnish it with soft, red interiors, from the inside out. 


[Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer]

SHEDDING OUR SKIN: The Power of Forgiveness

In 2010, the South Bronx was named the poorest district in the entire nation. According to a census at the time, “Thirty-eight percent of the district’s residents, totaling 256,544 people, (were) living below the poverty line; 49 percent of children in the district (were) living in poverty.”

One of my closest friends in New York is a 38-year-old black man who grew up in the South Bronx. He’s a trainer at my gym, and by all comparative measures it would seem as though we have nothing in common. But we’re human, and we laugh a lot, and we like to work out, and we both have light eyes, and we both think that life is beautiful, and that’s enough, because humans don’t have to be alike to love each other.

It’s almost been a year since we met, and about half-way through our friendship, my friend told me that he had something serious he wanted to share with me. He told me that when he was 18 years old he was a drug dealer and spent the next four years of his life rising in the drug ring in the Bronx and he made a lot of money and he lived a life style of luxury and financial security. But at 22 he shot and killed one of his best friends after the drug world pinned them against each other. The murder sent him to jail for 12 years.

 When he finished telling me the story, I just looked at him for awhile, trying to imagine a person with such an amiable, charmingingly, positive vibe even so much as hurting another person. And I tried to imagine this man sitting in front of me with such a fervor for life locked behind bars for 12 years. And I tried to imagine 12 years in my head – and how long even one minute can seem like when you’re waiting for something - like when you’re waiting in line for a bathroom when you really need to pee after a movie and every person who went to the movie is also in line. And I tried to imagine carrying the weight of the responsibility of another person’s life on my shoulders, and suddenly I wasn’t scared, or shocked, or mad at him – I felt sad for him. Sad that he felt like at the age of 18 he had no other options, and sad that some one died as a result, and sad that the some one was a friend, and sad that my friend missed 12 years of freedom.

And in my moment of feeling sad he said to me, “Don’t feel sorry for me. It was a blessing. Now every day is a blessing and a new chance to start over.”

And it made me think about the power of forgiveness and how badly I wished that people could just shed their mistakes like we do skin after a bad sunburn. And it’s like a sunburn, because even though whatever pain we cause or receive hurts in the beginning, we all deserve new skin – new chances.

It’s strange to conceptualize that all of us only live life once, and that there’s no do-overs, no erasers, no rewind buttons. There’s also no guide to tell us if the decisions we make are the right ones, and as a result, we all make mistakes (if you find one human that hasn’t, please inform me).

And I just stared at this man with one of the kindest hearts I’ve ever known sitting in front of me – a new person – born and reborn – and I ached for all the times I ever chose not to forgive someone, because we can learn to be better, and I got mad about the times I was never given a second chance, even if my heart was in the right place.

I’m sure there are still people in the world who hate my friend for what he did – because we are human, and we do feel deeply, and there’s no way to replace loss in life, but it would be nice if everyone had the opportunity to grow some new skin.

HAPPINESS, DELIVERED.

I wish we could deliver happiness just like we deliver flowers and balloons and cards.

How it Feels to Have a Stroke, Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor

THOUGHTS ON PAPER CUPS & STRINGS.

To you, out there,

I’ve been thinking a lot about you – you became such a huge part of my collective memory. We did so much together. When I run, I think of you. When I close my eyes before I sleep, I think of you. When I hate myself for not being pretty enough, I think of you – and how you told me you’d love me old, young, 200 lbs larger, or through any disaster. When I drink coffee, I think of you. When I dance, I think of you, and that room that we would dance in every night with your favorite electric blue lights that shined just enough to let me see your smile. And then I laugh thinking about how we got yelled at for staying in that room every night too late, because the security man outside felt uncomfortable that I was there since I didn’t work there.  I think of how we built an imaginary future together. It was so detailed that I feel like I lived it in another life. And, I try to think myself out of thinking of you, but it doesn’t work.

And all this thinking makes me wish that we could transmit our thoughts on cups and strings, you know like little kids learn to make in science class, so that every time I think of you, you would know, and then maybe you wouldn’t be so mad at me for thinking that I never thought about you after I left.

And,  it would also be good to have it for friends who exist in different cities and across realities, because sometimes every one is so caught up in what their doing that we don’t have time to pick up a phone and say, “Hello out there, I’m thinking about you” but we are thinking about the people we care about.

Your cup on a string would be so full of my thoughts that it would break and I’d have to send you a new cup every day, or maybe I would attach multiple strings with different thought processes, so that at least all my thoughts wouldn’t run on one wire and become too powerful to serge through at once.  And if there were multiple strings they would be categorized like this: a string for memories, and a string for new possibilities, and a string just to say, “I CARE ABOUT YOU” all the time, and a string for feeling sorry, and also for feeling happy that everything happened.

Even with all the technology in the world, I could never convince you that I thought about you when we weren’t talking, but if you could hold a cup half way across the world with a string attached to it then maybe you’d know that I did and do love you, and that I will continue to think about you until the end of time.

MIRACLES IN MUNDANE.

They sang, and it mattered.

THE TRUTH ABOUT FEELING.

Sometimes I can feel the realities of the world straining on my shoulders, and it's all too much for me. The good and the bad -- the beauty of human kindness and how many colors exist in everything and the ugliness of unrelenting hatred and the greyness that spews out of that.  

And, lately it seems that there are a lot of people who feel helpless in a world where so much is happening. I find myself in conversations with friends who watch news stories and then get sad by the things they can’t do to help all the people in the world who are feeling pain. Or, I get an e-mail with a sad story in it, about some human, in the midst of Botswana who is sick and the person who sent it to me will write something like, “I read this every day and try to figure out how I can change this.” Or, I sit with someone watching the news about Libya and she throws her arms up in the air and says, “This is all too much now.” Or, I hear something in my office about a trip someone has been on to some place in the former Soviet Union where people deal with the struggles of poverty every day and they tell me that they’re moved and they wish they could do more.

And then I think about those same people in day-to-day life and how they treat people that are right in front of them. I think about how the same guy who sends me sad stories about people from Botswana is the same person who deserted a girl he loved at a bus station when she came to visit him on a free weekend, because he got too drunk to be mindful of the time she was coming in, and I think about how the same gal who is suddenly overwhelmed by Libya, just told me how ugly some girl was walking down the streets who she doesn’t even know, and about how the person who saw poverty in the Soviet Union never even stops to acknowledge the homeless man begging on the streets. And, I think about all the people who want to change the universe, but they forget how to love and give and support the people they interact with every day.

I am just like them.  I’ve done things I regret, made choices I shouldn’t have, hurt people I love, judged wrongly. I’m flawed, and we’re all human. But I like to believe in the power of little moments of kindness and positivity. I like to believe that maybe if I just smile once at a stranger, I can alleviate a little bit of pain that the world is having.

I like to believe that if every person who existed in the world invested more care in the people around them, then every one, every where would be happy. Maybe we can’t fly across the universe; or maybe we don’t have the money to give to organizations; or maybe we can’t perform surgery that will fix diseases; or maybe we can’t build walls strong enough to prevent oceans from consuming land or floors sturdy enough to stay intact when the earth shakes; but we can hold doors for people. We can be there for our friends when they’re hurting, and we can put band aids on people who fall, and we can learn how to smile at people who don’t look like us (have you ever stared at people and noticed how different we ALL really look?).  

And maybe, slowly, we don’t have to feel helpless, knowing that the world really is ours and that our actions are far more powerful than we ever knew they could be.

(Photo credit: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, Georgia, FSU 2011).

BODY ENVY.

These two ladies were hangin' out at the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts. I thought about how they were chosen to stand as models for people every day in one of the cultural epicenters of the world, and how every day they were admired. And I looked at their naked, full, curvy, bodies, and I wished that people in real life with those bodies could be valued just the same.

MUSICAL HIGHWAYS.

Isn’t it crazy how music has the power to take us to different moments in our lives? Today, as I was waiting for the bus in the snow, I was listening to a song that took me to a different country and re-introduced me to a moment where I was lusting after a guy that eventually broke my heart (he was the only one who ever did that to my heart, other times, I think I did that to myself in breaking other peoples hearts).

And, then it took me on a run – the longest run of my life – where I played the song on repeat for nearly an hour and a half, because I was so high from the guy who broke my heart giving me the song and telling me that it reminded him of me.

The song never made me sad. The heart break past, and then I carried it with me to new moments and new travel and new adventure. So, when I listened to the song this morning it was like traveling through a series of moments in my past in a 2 minute and 25 second span.

And I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be amazing if songs could really take people on adventures through different space and time? What if we could use songs to lift people out of hard situations, so that if someone was suffering after an earth quake we could play them a song that would transport them into all the happy memories they ever had? And that way they could know that one day they could be whole again – that as long as they stayed hopeful they could feel joy again. 

(Image from: http://www.pennymindflower.com/)

On the Radio, Regina Spektor

THIS IS HOW IT WORKS:
You're young until you're not
you love until you don't,
you try until you can't.
You laugh until you cry,
you cry until you laugh
and everyone must breathe
until their dying breath.


No, this is how it works:
you peer inside yourself
you take the things you like
and try to love the things you took
and then you take that love you made
and stick it into some -
someone else's heart,
pumping someone else's blood.

And walking arm in arm,
you hope it don't get harmed,
but even if it does you'll just do it all again.

TAXI WISHES.

Last night I got into a taxi with an Ethiopian cab driver. His name was Desta – happiness.  Desta was forced to flee Ethiopia in 1983 nearly 10 years after his idle Haile Selassie's reign came to an end, when a Soviet-backed-Marxist-Communist military junta, the "Derg" led by Megistu Haile Mariam, disposed him, and established a one-party communist state called the People's Democratic Republic of Ethiopia. He fled to Sudan for 2 years, where he worked for a human rights organization, that later sponsored his citizenship in the U.S.

30 years later, he was steering the wheel of the cab I entered randomly, to get me to a hotel in Los Angeles, California. His greatest wish for the new year: a chance to live in Ethiopia with the rest of his family again.

The People’s Democratic Republic of Ethiopia party failed. Desta’s gone back there four times since he originally left, but the insecurity of jobs there scares him, so he continues here, driving each day to pay the bills. 

Last week in New York I met Carlos, who was a full-time student at Queens College in New York, but drove a taxi to support his mom’s diabetes medicine. He was in a computer-engineering program, and his IQ clearly surpassed my own… I can’t even do basic addition without using my fingers.  He’s thinkin’ about getting engaged to his girlfriend soon, but wanted to have a stable job so he could provide anything she dreamed of.

A year and a half ago in Washington, D.C. I met a taxi drivin' musician named Willie who taught me more about Jazz than I had ever learned in my life. He played me John Coltrane and told me that anyone who tried to play his songs was bound to be disappointed, because his talent couldn’t be replicated, especially since he never followed the music anyway. And then he went off about Louis Armstrong, Freddie Hubbard, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Herbie Hancock. And told me that he once played with saxophonist Grover Washington, Jr. He said all he wanted to do was play jazz, all day and all night.  

I’ve met many taxi drivers, who in my opinion, constitute the most brave and/or talented human beings I’ve encountered in my life. I wish there was a way to grant Taxi Driver Wishes, so that after a certain amount of driving or kindness all taxi drivers could get whatever they want.Then Desta could go back to Ethiopia, and Carlos could find a job that would allow him to give the woman he loves anything in the world, and Willie could play jazz all day. They deserve it.  

THIS IS HOME.

HOME IS WHEREVER I'M WITH YOU.

EMOTIONAL METAPHORS.

What if emotions appeared like metaphors?

I could be with my best friends in the universe and sunflowers could pop-up around me, because I would be thinking “being with you is like sitting in a bed of sunflowers all day”.

Or  I could sit with my dad in the kitchen and all of a sudden he would be in a super hero costume, because sometimes I think of my dad as a super hero, because he's really smart, and courageous, and selfless.

Or hearts would have popped out of my throat when I broke the heart of someone I really loved, but knew that a future wasn't possible with, because the entire time it felt like my heart was flying through my throat.

Or every time I stare at the stars I could shrink to the size of an ant realizing just how tiny and insignificant I am in comparison to the big-wide-universe.

Or  I could feel the clouds on my feet every time I accomplish something huge, because it always feels like walking on air.

Or the next time I'm walking happily down the street with someone I really like, I might think to myself,  "Wow I feel like we’re dancing in an empty hall with this song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0Yh_tfyU8A playing in the background and then it would magically start playing and we'd be in the center of a dance floor dancing alone. 


It would be  really great if emotions showed up with their metaphors, because then we could show people how we really feel instead of just depending on words to express ourselves. Some people aren't really that great with words but they do feel a lot - those people should have the same ability to express themselves as anyone

But I guess it’s a good thing that emotions don’t appear as metaphors, because then people wouldn’t have to use their imaginations as much and metaphors would disappear, because nothing would be like anything, everything just would be.


(ohoto: http://www.realbollywood.com/news/2010/10/dance-india-dance-returns-time-couples.html)

Alices Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Caroll

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see? 

POSITIVE PROFANITIES.

Sometimes when I’m walking down the streets and I hear people yelling profanities at each other, I get really sad. I wonder who decided that “F*** YOU!”, or “THAT DOESN’T MEAN SH**”, or “SHE’S SUCH A B****” were going to take shape in negative and insulting ways.

Wouldn’t it be awesome if there were positive profanities? That way instead of all those mean, loud, explosive, statements, people could express beautiful thoughts in the form of nice, loud, explosive statements.

Then if I thought someone was being ridiculously nice, I could be like “YOU KNOW WHAT, FLIZ YOU!” And in rap songs when a guy wanted to get romantic with a girl, he could be like, “DANG, YOU’RE SO CUTE, I JUST WANT TO FLIZ YOU.” Or if someone let you take their seat in the bus you could be like, “WOW, YONK YOU”. 

And, if positive profanities existed, I think that a lot more people would be smiling, because they could sound really hilarious.

(picture from: http://john.sixlives.sg/)