Rita Levi-Montalcini

Rita is a role model of mine. She turned 101 years old this year and was born in Torino, Italy, a city I've lived in and adore.
In 1986, Rita was handed a Nobel prize in Medicine for fundamental nerve growth factor research. She's famous for a bunch of other scientific and Medicine related discoveries and also as a woman who has influenced culture and history as we know it. She has done things that movies are made about.
I'm reading her autobiography: "In Praise of Imperfection, My life and Work". The book opens with a chapter about Torino. I relieved sensory memories, emotions, heard sounds that I experienced while living in Torino.
I remember reading an interview she gave when she turned 100 and was still working 10 hour days. The quote that stuck with me is: "My body may do what it wants. I am the mind". Fascinating!
The gal is Jewish and made it alive through Hitler's prosecutions, not only did she continue her work in a lab she rudimentarily put together in her bedroom, but she got a Nobel Prize as well. She became a Senator for life and many universities across the Globe offered her honorary doctoral degrees. I wonder what does it feel like to live one's life with pride? I wonder what does it feel like to be proud of all of one's accomplishments? I wonder what would it be like to be honored without becoming pompous, or diminish one's own merits? I wonder what it is like to accept praise without false modesty or arrogance? I wonder what it may feel like to lift your head high and take in the light? I only know how to lurk in the shadow. I don't know how to be friendly without being clingy, hear praise without wondering what the praising person wants from me, trusting the light enough to walk in it and not be afraid I'll be killed. I want to live in the light. I was born with the light, but people have stolen it from me. I want my light back!

Car Accident

I've been in a car accident and I'll call it a reaffirmation of life. Through my depression I've never been suicidal. If anything, I feel guilty for having survived and wanting to survive. I knew I was depressed because I simply stopped wishing for things. I stopped desiring, wanting, asking, being jealous about things. I would ask myself why did I want to live that badly: the world sucks! There is pain every day and everywhere you look. Eventually I realized that among all this pain, there is beauty. The more pain, actually, the more beauty there is. People are imperfect, but so beautiful. There is beauty everywhere. I remember snorkeling in the Maldives: I witnessed the greatness of God's creation (I am not a religious person, nor do I bother to define myself as an atheist).
However, I often think about death, trying to pick a good way to die, because I am firmly convinced that we choose everything in life, from the way we are born to the way we die. Sometimes these choices are unconscious and a mere consequence of the erosion that heavy feelings create through our psyche. I will describe heavy feelings: guilt, shame, love. I can't settle for any kind of death. Not even a dignified one. I wonder what would really be worth dying for? An idea? Like Socrates or Galileo Galilei chose to die for? Could I do the same? Or would I cowardly change my mind at the last moment? And if I'd ever be so ready to die for an idea, what kind of an idea would it be? Would it benefit humanity, or just myself? Would I be great enough to share my knowledge with others?
Back to my car accident: It gave me a motivation to get angry and get things done. Anger is a delightful force of nature. Everyday, I didn't have time to look and second guess the future, cause I had to deal with some unpleasant aspect of this car accident. Through it all, I just see reaffirmation of life, something to do, to be angry about, to talk about, to connect to other humans about.

Adam Carolla is an Ass.Hole.

I opened the November issue of Playboy magazine and read an article called "We've built a Minimum-Wage Gilded Cage", by Adam Carolla.
The article seems to be an excerpt from his book.
I'm not going to judge Playboy for having published this article, since they're a business and they do it for the money.
But what is Carolla thinking? Does he imagine himself as some sort of a superhero fighting the Villain who is an underpaid and overworked miserable anonymous worker? What kind of crime is Carolla fighting and what powers does he have? Knocking over poor people and cruely reminding them that they should consider themselves lucky to have a job? Is he seriously bashing the underdog? Is he serious when he calls the U.S. Communist? Cause his article is not even remotely funny. Oh, but I forgot: Carolla lacks the humor, he replaced it with the decibels.
This dude takes 2 pages complete with caricatures, to explain how the minimum wage people are Nazies, in the way of his VIPness. He calls them "10 cent an hour people" and wonders how dare they do their job and not roll the red carpet the minute he arrives some place, making him waste precious time he could otherwise spend being a douchebag. What are you going to do next, Adam? Punch a homeless guy in the face because he stinks up the air you breathe? Or save the world like a true super hero; only in your case, you'll take the "10 cent an hour people" (which is the majority of the world population) and arrange them like Dominoes. Kick the first one in the face and laugh when they all fall just like Dominoes. Then plant your superhero flag in their butts and proclaim that territory yours, cause you're edgy like that.
As for the book you wrote, can you even spell? Or did you simply paste your name on yet another ghost writer's work, to follow today's trend of illiterate overrated, talentless "stars"?
Not all of us have laminated VIP passes, Adam. Most of us must work long hours in jobs we hate, so that we can merely put food on our tables. Excuse us if we're a little frustrated and we ruin your day with our pissy attitude. Excuse us, if we don't take time to recognize your douchebagginess as VIP and risk our already meager jobs, in order to accomodate your immediate VIP needs. Did it ever occur to you that people simply don't like you and that would be why they refuse to serve you?
Your headline is: "Being underpaid shouldn't be an invitation to be an asshole". Allow me to disagree. Being poor is a perfect excuse to be an asshole to those like you, who are overpaid for no reason at all. Excuse us if our being underpaid is ruining your mood. We didn't mean to upset your Royal Assholeness, with our poor, depressed and ugly faces.
I would stop reading Playboy, but the magazine redeemed itself a few pages later in the same Novemnber issue, by publishing a very interesting interview with Zach Galifianakis.

New York

New York feels like any old European city. It has a resemblance to London. It also resembles Paris, or Prague, Milano or Geneva, Madrid or Vienna, Stuttgart or Copenhagen.
Any part of the city could introduce one to any worthwhile historical experience one could desire. I don't think any other city in the world compares to that.
Walking on those streets I could smell familiar scents. I stopped on benches in random parks. I talked to people about life. One particular woman, highly educated, talked to me for about 2 hours and we learned we had a lot in common. She was from California and moved to new York for work. She was in therapy, like any self respected New Yorker. She was the survivor of a series of unsuccessful relationships, that left her wondering how much can she indulge in masochistic, self destructive behavior. She had clever insights about entertainment, politics, society and culture. We agreed on the sad fact that we are doomed to figuring out and pay the expenses of the most significant relationship we have in our lives: the one with our parents. This particular fact made me wonder if some people just give up on figuring it out, before they go crazy. Some other people, instead of figuring it out, prefer to complicate matters by building a new family of their own, where they can play out known patterns to exhaustion of selves and other unfortunate souls. This inevitably brings me to wondering: will I ever feel ready to have a family of my own? Or will I continue thinking about how daddy did me wrong until the day I die?
Sometimes I think about having kids. I'm tempted to think about being a better parent than mine were. Some other times, I'm humbled when I see kids throwing tantrums and mothers too exhausted to even care. I fear that I may be the same and give up right then and there the mere fantasy of ever having a family. What if, along the way of being a parent, I would discover I am just like my parents, when I centered my life on being different than they are? That would be another painful humiliation added to those I already lived at their hands.
I like my alone time. I like silence. Kids don't agree with these selfish concepts. Will I be willing to give, give, give forever? Not likely.
I walked on the cobble stone streets in Soho and bought myself a black cashmere sweater. It was raining heavily and I walked inside a Crocs store. They were advertising some new Crocs and they gave me a free pair just for smiling on camera. That made my day. I love New York!

Irony of life

Some have cancer or a lifelong battle with bad relationships; some lose their wealth or the love of their lives; some decide to live a moral life and yet they die without dignity; I had a pedophile father.
In all of these statements there lies the irony of life. We all suffer. We all have something to love, something to lose, something to cry about. Question is: how many of us are lucky enough to know pure happiness? And I'm not talking about sporadic moments of joy we all encounter in daily life. I'm talking about absolute happiness, the feeling of the Gods, the feeling that if you once felt, it'll make worth the sufferance of an entire life time. Some call it divine love, some others call it Nirvana, most people attach an unattainable god like quality to it. Most die before even having a chance to think of it.
As elusive as it may be, this absolute happiness, which, I'm sure, it's not quiet happiness, but something that allows you to feel the entirety of all your emotions at the same time, without antagonisms, in a unifying feeling. Before it, one may feel anger or joy, separately. After it, one may feel anger and joy at the same time, without the normal antagonisms of the two feelings. It has to be kind of like a dyslexic person, who sees chaotic details of a certain reality, but lacks the capacity of synthesis. Yes, this "absolute happiness" must be like a synthesis of all emotions ever lived.
The irony of life may be, at this point, the capacity to logically understand the existence of such "absolute happiness", followed by the incapacity to feel it. Ha-ha!

knots

I read the legend of the Gordian knot when I was about 7 years old. It was about this king who had conquered a lot of territory and in order for him to achieve supreme power, over the entire world, he had to solve the mystery of the Gordian knot. This particular knot was very intricate and no one could ever sort it out. The king got impatient and cut the knot down the middle with his sword. The morale of the story is that things can be achieved in more than one way.
Ever since then I took an interest in patient tasks. I can figure out any knot. I can do those mind bender puzzles and all sort of mind challenging games. Inevitably, I started comparing my emotional life to a knot. And to give it dramatic presence, I compared it to the Gordian knot. I am aware that working through the massive threads of emotion that have been piling up on top of my being abused is kind of like getting lost in a maze. I understand that I need patience to find the one thread that would eventually straighten out my emotional life. And that one thread would be truth, the core of my entire being. I like to envision it as a golden thread, with steel strength, thick enough, but not coarse.
But sometimes, only sometimes, I wish I had a sword.

Back to the grind

My first night home after the sunny vacation in Florida and my mother calls hysterically informing me she didn't hear from me for an entire week and that she was worried something might have happened to me. Funnily enough, before leaving, I spoke to her and let her know I would be on vacation. Does she have no memory, or does she have selective hearing? Either way, it's a sign she doesn't care much about me.
She complained about not having money and about the hardships she must endure. I was very tired and couldn't listen and I cut the conversation short. I dreamt I was locked in a house with her and Father and I was hiding. The house was beautiful, full of antique furniture. At the end of the dream, my Father actually found me and I beat him up with a shovel. Lots of anger towards both my mother and father in this dream.
Today I took care of small chores. I found time to continue reading a guilty pleasure book. It is the "unauthorized" biography of Angelina Jolie, by Andrew Morton. The guy is a good writer. I could see him writing novels of a certain depth. However, he wrote this book about Angelina, and although I am against all this celebrity glorification culture, I couldn't resist buying it. I have insecurities about the way I look, and I blame Angelina for being too beautiful and setting the standards too high. One good look at her naked body in Wanted and I feel awful about my big behind. Also, the mere fact that this biography is "unauthorized", implies it might contain some secret the tabloids left out. "Unauthorized" is from the same category of words such as "rebel", "dangerous", "uncommon", "wild". It fits the public image Angelina herself created, with the help of the media. Angelina is portrayed like a deeply disturbed ex model, an anorexic junkie, with abandonment issues. Andrew Morton took the time to talk to various psychotherapists, to help map out Angelina's erratic behavior. He describes her personality from crib to fame and points out she is a very ambitious girl, with an appetite for destruction. He doesn't say anything new about Angelina, but tries to establish a pattern in her publicly observed behavior, so that us, common folk, the readers, can relate to her. The truth is that Angelina is exceptional. She doesn't fit patterns. Exceptional human beings don't fit patterns. Those who survived traumas and raised above their own condition will always be regarded as "disturbed", but that doesn't take away from the fact that these people inspire generations of people with their life choices. I'm sure that if I personally knew Angelina, I wouldn't like her and I wouldn't be friends with her. We have very different life perspectives. Yet, the fact that I wouldn't like her, doesn't stop me from respecting her.
I should stop reading this book. I'm being caught in the tabloid haze.

Miami

I love Miami. The oven heat that integrates me and squeezes sweat out of my pores. The green of the piss warm ocean, dotted by algae brought from far away. The sun burned tourists speaking every imaginable language on the face of the Earth. The pretty girls and their colorful bikinis. The jocks and their muscles. The Cuban food served in Art Deco restaurants. The general small beach town feel. I recognize the green of the tropical plants. I belong here, just like I belonged in those endless summer vacations, in Grandma's village. The same smell of day dreaming mixed with boredom, mixed with silence, mixed with plans for a lifetime, mixed with nature.
The first time I came to Miami, I was just out of college. It was a graduation gift from my parents who came along. That was the time when I told my mother about the abuse. She pretended she didn't know about it, although I clearly remember her making references to it throughout my childhood.
The second time I visited Miami, I broke up with a lover. He was a man with one big ego and many small insecurities. I take pride in having refused to sleep with him at our break up.
The third time around in Miami, I was turning 30. I was in the middle of the most depressing, gut churning life crisis. I was coming to terms with the past abuse. I was trying to make sense of my new life and new found truths. I was lost and I slept a lot. My best friend at the time was with me and nursed me like a mother throughout my depression. There wasn't a lot of talking, but all I needed was silence and a presence. I couldn't move. I was like a recovering cancer patient. Every part of my body hurt and my mind was a mine field. I couldn't trust my own thoughts.
I am now in Miami. The heat is still oven like. The nature still smells like vacation and I still give in to making life long plans and I apply myself at being lazy on the beach. Only this time around I am functional. I got together with a dear friend who now lives in Florida. I made some new friends. I even recognized happiness in my thoughts. There still is sadness in me. There still are anger and desperation, but among all these negative feelings, I could see the glimmer of hope. It's as if spears of light pierce through the cracked shell of my old self. I came a long way, but I still wonder if my healing will ever be complete and most of all how will I know, when I'm healed? Will it be like a revelation or a complete turn around? Will it be a state of mind?

The Jedi

The one thing I still cannot accept fully is that I was powerless when the abuse happened. "Powerless" is a word I don't like. It implies humiliation, humbling. I don't like to be humiliated.
I remember times in my life when I overcompensated by controlling a situation to the extent of destruction. Why can't I accept I was a toy, the abuse not being about me, but about my Father? He was playing out his monsters. It wasn't about me. Maybe, if he would have made an effort to know me, he could have liked me. But this kind of thinking got me in trouble numerous times. I tried to make him like me: I've been submissive to him, I rebelled. Nothing worked. He simply couldn't see me. All he could see was his own pain and in the process, he was teaching me that same isolation he was stuck in. He was transfering the monster to me. He taught me to hide, to lye, to build up walls against the world. I am not him. I am not like him. I am not like everybody else either. I am trapped in between two worlds that I cannot master the secrets of. I don't want to be on the dark side. I also don't want to be like everybody else.
Luke, the force is strong with you! Darth Vader is your father. (for those who don't know George Lucas, this is a Star Wars, the Empire Strikes Back, reference). Ironically, just like Darth Vader asked Luke to join him on the Dark side, so my Father asked me to join him in his sin. I remember one time when I shoplifted (I was a teen) and I got caught. The mall security called my Father. He paid the stolen items. He never complained about that incident. He only hugged me. He recognized me as his daughter. For the first time ever, he connected with me and helped me. I followed up that minor rebellion act by becoming a stripper. He never complained about my bad habits. I was more and more doing what he taught me. He was recongnizing his legacy in me. I was destroying my life and the more I was destroying it, the more my Father accepted me. Until, one day, I realized I didn't need this kind of acceptance and love in my life. I survived without it as a child. Now, as a grown up, I could take the chance of becoming a good person. I could train to become a Jedi. But this possibility opened up a whole new endless universe of unknown rules, fear of the unknown. I was illequipped to face it. I did not have enough energy, cause I spent most of it hurting myself and hating the world, I did not have enough courage, cause I was at the end of my survival battle. I could not go back to the bad habits and reverse the epiphany. I could only go forward. Blindly. With no Yoda to guide my steps. With no training other than the truth in my heart, which was so small and disconnected from the rest of me, that I could barely hear its weak voice. No I had to show what I was made of. What was I made of, anyway? What's my basic structure? Am I hero material? Am I a Joe nobody? How should I act? There is no expression of myself until I know who myself is. Will I ever become a Jedi?

Robert

Well, Robert was a Puerto Rican born in Brooklyn, heavy set and sweaty, with a kind demeanor and a dark past. Many years ago, I trained his wife for a job. I met him through her and he immediately gave me a tight hug.
We became friends and talked extensively about life and our past experiences. I learned I could rely on him in moments of need, aka when I got stranded at an airport, with nobody to pick me up in the middle of the night.
During one of our conversations, I learned he used to be a gang member, shot twice and yet somehow still alive. He had a witch mother who gave birth to many kids and never looked after them. He's been molested by an uncle at a very young age and his mother woke him up in the middle of the night, grabbed some things and jumped on a bus to LA. His mother, his sister and himself lived on Skid Row for a while, where he learned the rules of the streets. He became a drug user. He did a lot of speed, he prostituted himself for some pocket money, he rhymed and wrote poetry in his spare time. He eventually got married to a woman he bought a house for. He also gave her two kids before he jumped back into drugs and the darkness of his inner monsters.
He met my friend in a Romeo and Juliet kind of love story and started cleaning up his ways, only that he lost himself in the process. He tried to fit in. He tried to cope with reality, but reality is a bitch. He was confused at best. He acknowledged how little he really knew about normality and he indulged in feeling like an outsider. He lived in fear of "gray shadows out to get him".
Every time I saw him, he would hug me just the same, we would talk just the same, yet there was nothing I could say to comfort him. His fear grew exponentially until he couldn't bare it anymore and he would drug himself up to not deal with it.
The last time we talked about darkness, I went to their house. We stayed up late. I complained about my life. I was struggling with accepting some sadness/anger feelings targeting my pedophile father. Robert said something unusual that night. He said: "I'm clairvoyant and I see you are in danger. Something bad will happen to you, you'll be in the hospital. Don't do it! Don't do it."
"Don't do what?" I was thinking. I know my complaints sounded dreary, but I never mentioned doing something to hurt myself, I was just getting it out. I was not even depressed. I was just kind of sad.
A year went by. We saw each other twice more. He was absent and spent.
Last Sunday, I received a phone call from his sister. Robert is dead. Robert killed himself.
It turns out that when he was saying "Don't do it", he was just asking for my help. I just couldn't read him. I couldn't hear him, blinded by my own pain. Could I have helped him in any way? Probably not. Most I can do is listen. And it hurts to witness all this suffering and acknowledge my littleness, my incapacity to help others.

Bollywood Dance

One evening, after eating too much sugar during the day, I've decided it would be wise to go to the gym, before going to sleep. I made a "to do" list in my head, with everything I needed to accomplish on that particular work out session, in order to burn the sugar rush and get some sleep: some upper body weight lifting, followed by half hour intense cardio, etc, etc.
I drove to the gym, found parking immediately (this never happens!). I walked in and showed my gym Id to the front desk, then rushed up the stairs to the weights room. As I walked by the dance room, I peeked through the glass door. My eyes lingered on an incredible spectacle: a group of people jumping around in monkey poses to some exotic rhythm that I couldn't fully hear. Fascinated, I stopped and stared. It must have been 5 minutes of good staring, during which I noticed that every member of that particular group had a smile on their bright, blood engorged, sweaty faces. I couldn't resist and opened the glass doors. It was like walking on the sun. The room was vibrating. The music was Bollywood dance music. I joined in and danced the rest of the class.
I can't remember the last time I've been so happy. I did series of jumps, in which one uses the entire body, just like when you're a kid, and you run everywhere, cause your energy is limitless and a summer day lasts forever. I ran in place, just like I did as a kid as a warm up for ballet classes. My arms flew around me, dragging my back, sides, chest and abs after them. The music sounded cartoonish, fast drums and squeaky voices, singing incomprehensible words.
At the end of the class, we did some yoga moves and the teacher said something like "imagine what would make you happy, imagine what you'd feel like if you had right now, grab it with your hands and hang on to it" (while twisting your body in impossible poses). I know it sounds corny, but I envisioned happiness. I had a little glimpse of that first something, when your heart races and you can't stop smiling and you're giggly and stop wishing for things because you feel like you've got it all. I saw happiness.
Needless to say, after the class, I've abandoned all of my workout plans, went home and showered.

therapists

Many people go through school and become therapists without having a real understanding of what they're doing. I've looked at the GRE test: doesn't teach you any empathy!
There should be some emotional tests for those who want to become emotional healers. Besides the medical expertise, there should be some sort of evaluation that goes beyond the intellectual capacity and could only be handled by emotionally evolved people.
Working with emotionally scarred people may be heavy on the soul. If you have any feelings at all, it'll mark you. I think it's the same as working with lepers, back in the day, when medicine was just another version of witch craft: if you don't know what you're doing, you'll become a leper yourself.
I tried therapy myself and didn't get much out of it. I felt that 45 minutes per session were not enough for me to express myself in depth. Also, I could not reach my emotional self to be able to tell the therapist exactly what I felt and since I was paying for all this out of my own pocket, it became a rather expensive approach to healing.
Also, I am part of some self help groups, where a bunch of victims of abuse try to make light on what happened to them. These women are ready to regurgitate slogans learned from self help books, at a moment's notice. I am sure that what they read in those books resonated with them, but they just can't put their finger on it and can't name the emotion the reading stirred up. They rush to preaching and what they say sounds more like a mesh of generalities and platitudes, than really personal stuff. Same goes for those women still in therapy: I'm sure it helps them in some way, but they can't really tell how. It is difficult for them to express what they have learned about themselves and their wound during a therapy session. This lack of clarity should be blamed on the therapist. If things were clear for the therapist, things should be clear to the patient. But things can't be clear for the therapist, since the therapist is thinking about dinner while the client spills his guts while sitting on a couch with ugly patterns.
My point is: each client is unique. Each abuse experience has a devastatingly isolating effect. From this perspective of isolation, an abuse victim can heal in her/his own time. No therapy session can measure up this timing. Healing is as personal as inspiration: it comes in waves, it can only be felt by one individual at a time and it is not repeatable. Memories come out of the subconscious when the conscious mind is ready and not a moment earlier. The subconscious doesn't respect a schedule, let alone the therapist's schedule. Healing can only happen in the privacy of one's loneliness. A therapist, at the most, can only soothe some of the effects.
To be Ariadne, one must first know the labyrinth.

the band aid man

You know how sometime you cut your finger and it hurts and you put a bugs bunny band aid on the wound and just because the band aid is there, you feel like your life is going to be OK? The same goes for relationships.
I had a band aid man. He was the Mother Theresa of emotional invalids. His patience took that one step further and made me wonder if he ever had any need, or if he ever lost his temper over anything. His family taught him endurance. They never expressed big emotions. It was not dignified. Repression was the healthiest emotional exercise in their household.
I walked into his life like a hurricane. I had emotions pulling me in every possible direction, with no map. He looked at me, completely fascinated. He stayed with me, trying to secretly mimic emotions he never even knew existed. He started expressing his repressed anger in traffic. He would giggle apologetically immediately afterwards. He was not comfortable with showing emotion, yet that was everything his soul craved for. The craving turned into addiction. The addiction turned into repetitive behavior.
One day, he told me we should get married. Since most of my emotional insights are fairly short sighted when it comes to commitment, I thought about it. I thought about what it would mean us being married. It couldn't possibly change much from what we had up until then. We lived together, in a purple apartment, I liked to call "my purple egg". I did laundry every week, hand washing or soaking the soiled stuff. I cleaned the house with baking soda, which makes for a miracle ecological detergent. I waxed the floors, without ever getting the hang of it, really. I ironed sheets and shirts. I cooked fabulously complicated meals, when I felt inspired and shopped for organic produce at local farmer's markets. Life was bliss in that day by day routine, that somehow establishes a rhythm. My heart tuned to this rhythm and chaos became lighter and easier to navigate. I've decided I was going to have as life goal: to be boring, to take no chances, no risks, just be, in that rhythm that my heart learned. No plans for the future, no master schemes. For once I'd trust life to be in control. But where would "us being married" fit in this picture? Were we already playing married and just needed to seal the deal? Were we two random souls, united for a while? Were we meant to be together? What does "meant to be together" mean? What does it feel like? Would it be fair of me to marry "the band aid man"?

Old life, new life

I have been a stripper for a long time. Before memories of the incest resurfaced, I really enjoyed teasing men for a living. I would get drunk on power and I would make them repeat to me: "You're beautiful". I didn't know why it felt good, until I started remembering all of those times my father and my uncle told me I was ugly and good for nothing, but please men.
The incest hurt twice: once when it happened, the second time when I finally remembered it. I won't count the numerous times I unknowingly hurt myself, as a reenactment of hurts from the past.
I've decided my life can't be just about the incest. I am more than that. I am a human being with small but steady accomplishments. My life is an infinite playground, much like the universe.