PANDEMIC

These are historical times. We are witnessing the devastation that this pandemic has caused all over the world. People everywhere have been effected. Hundreds of thousands of people have died and millions are infected.  Millions of people have lost their jobs or have become homeless.  Places that a large number of people are in close quarters such as prisons, nursing homes, factories, refugee camps they all have been hit hard with the Covid-19 virus.  But wars haven’t stopped, the colossal migration of people from war torn countries hasn’t stopped.  

And somehow life goes on. People still get married, they still have babies.  Politics is being played and misused, elections are being run and people still die from other diseases than Covid-19. 

We have been staying home since mid march. We go out only for food, groceries, medication and gas.  We also order groceries and food from restaurants and it’s delivered. 

Most people are tired of social isolation and they miss human connections.  Some people who have to stay home have started new hobbies.  People have taken up  bicycling, gardening, baking and walking.  

I personally feel lonely, I feel down and listless.  I can’t motivate myself to do anything.  I feel that I am waiting for something to finish or start and then I will start living my life again. Honestly I wasn’t very happy before the pandemic but now its much much worse.

April 8, 2020

Mourning

I want to go to a mountain top and scream

And scream and scream and scream

I want to take a sledge hammer and strike 

The rocks and shatter them all to smithereens 

I want to pull on my hair 

Collapse on the ground

And weep and weep and weep

I want to wrap by body in a black shroud

Get on my knees 

Go from here to the tallest mountain

And cry  and wail and beg for mercy

If there is a God maybe she takes

Pity on us and stops this slaughter

Maybe we need human sacrifices 

Lets round up all the war mongers

The people who have committed crimes against humanity

Weapon makers, tyrants, dictatores

Corrupters, polluters, perverts 

And offer them to this God

My heart is broken 

Our hearts are broken

We are all in mourning 

For the thousands who have perished

To this evil virus 

Same Old Boring Depression

The feeling is not hard to describe, the feeling is hard to live through. The feeling is of despair , emptiness, loneliness . It doesn’t stop, it doesn’t go away, it doesn’t take a break. It clings on like stale cigarette smoke or a nasty food smell that some neighbor is cooking.  This feeling is feeling of depression, when no matter what you do you aren’t feeling joy or any kind of calm or normalcy. 

You think of so many things you could do to make this feeling go away, you attempt somethings but nothing works. You go for a walk and it walks beside you, you take a nap and once you are up it’s still there. You cook and clean and go shopping but you just can’t shake the feeling off. You attempt to read but after every sentence you ask “so what?” no subject seems important. You can’t concentrate so you loose interest in what you’re reading. It binds you with a thousand unseen chains, it wraps itself around your brain, it clouds your vision, it muffles the sounds, it numbs your sense of smell. Every day seems like a cloudy day.  

You feel defeated, you feel tired like you have just moved a mountain. All you want to do is to lay down and not even feel the weight of your own body.  Your head seems too large and heavy, your hands seem unnecessary, your legs are useless. You want to sleep but sleep is not voluntary it doesn’t come when you commend it to. At night when you are in bed you toss and turn and no position is comfortable. You make your neck hurt , your shoulder, your side, your spine, your lower back and not even after making yourself tired to the point of exhaustion sleep doesn’t come.  

Today I cooked dinner, washed dishes, did laundry, folded clothes, changed bed sheets, went out to get paint. I watched the news, a documentary, tried to take a nap.

But all the time that feeling didn’t leave me for one second. 

This is how I feel most days. 

October 16, 2019

Life In America

Sometimes when I’m sitting in my car behind a red light, I marvel at the orderly way life is going on around me. Cars stop at the red light, they continue driving at the green light, pedestrians cross the street at their white light, at least 2 airplanes are in the sky in high altitude and almost daily I see a plane either take off or land due to a local airport.  I see people going around doing their business.  There is nothing exciting going on, its pretty calm and quiet. You hardly ever hear a car horn here. The sky is blue and maybe a few puffy clouds are drifting by. This makes me feel blissful and safe, I’m never afraid for my life nor do I worry about theft of my possessions. I get my mail around the same time every day, the Gardner comes every Thursday and the pool man shows up every Saturday.  

You would think this is utopia, but no, it’s just life in America. 

Because of having Atlantic Ocean in the East and the Pacific Ocean on the west and two friendly neighbors in its North and south borders America is insulated from war, famine, drought violent revolutions, displaced people, and epidemics. Where at the same time there are so many countries at war, there has been blood shed and destruction of whole cities, great number of people have been displaced from their homes and have been forced to leave their country to be safe. 

There are still countries around the world dealing with famine.

America looks great from afar, in movies, music videos, the internet and Google Earth.

But the reality is far from those images. Here are some facts about life in the U.S.A.

• Every day 310 people are shot ,from those 100 die, every day 21children and teens (1-17) are shot and 4 die from gun violence. 

• In 2017  47,173 people in America committed suicide that’s 129 per day on the average. 

• In America 40 million people lived in poverty in 2017, and 41 million people faced huger.

• In 2018 the population of homeless people had reached to 553,000.00 The largest, most populous and glamorous cities have the worst homeless problem. New York City is number one, then Los Angeles, Seattle, San Diego, San Francisco in that order have the largest number of homeless people.

• The American Criminal Justice system was holding 2.3 million people in prisons. 

• Thirty million people in America can’t red or write, that is 14% of the population. 

•   Racism, LGBDQ phobia and discrimination are alive and thriving.  

Of course despite all of these problems I still prefer to live in America.  Always there are large number of people around the country working to solve these problems and find solutions.  Compare to some other countries individuals here have more freedom and rights. 

TICK-TOCK TICK-TOCK TIMES UP

A long long time ago, when I was still reading fairy tales, this one story made such an impression on me that I still remember it. My memory is not as good as it used to be, so if I remember correctly either a step mother or an old witch would lock this girl up in a dark room and give her a large coil of different color yarn and told her to untangle them by color. I have always thought that would be the worst torture or punishment for anyone let alone a little girl.  

Well, this is how I feel about my life sometimes, actually all the time.  I feel I’m holding hundreds of balloons in my hand and I need to keep them but its very difficult to hold on to all of them without letting go of some. I never know which ones I should keep. Should I chose green or the red one? Like someone untrained to defuse a bomb, who isn’t sure which wire to pull, the blue or the red?  I don’t know why I feel this way but I do. Sometimes I feel like my body is being pulled in different directions and its disorienting and painful.  Sometimes I think it has to do with being a woman. Most women could be, at the same time a wife, a mother, a daughter, a daughter in law, a sister, a grandmother, a friend , a nurse, a physiologist, an accountant, a manager,  a cooke  or a  maid.  Think about it, this is how most women's lives are. I’m not talking about balancing a home life and a career, I am talking about having to change your hat three thousand times a day. Well,  maybe not three thousand times but 10 times but it’s still very difficult. 

While joggling  all these roles a woman must also look good, be healthy, be athletic, be engaged, be informed, be able to talk about art and politics.  Yes I know some women can do this with their eyes closed while balancing on one foot and texting, but not me.  

For me, all my roles are important, all the people who are dependent on me are important, keeping a household running in good order is important, being healthy is important, being a good mother and grand mother is important, my self expression is important. But all of these things take time and time is running out tick-tock tick-tock.  And one day you become aware you’r done, you did all you could but the sense of satisfaction is not there, you feel that you failed but it’s too late to go back and fix things.  After living a life of uncertainty and doubt things are clear as to what’s important and what’s not but alas it's too late.  

Dead Love

I didn’t feel like an orphan when my father died, I still had my mother.  Then my mother died and I still didn’t feel like an orphan.  I had my older sisters, my older brother and my younger brother. Some of them were near and some were far, nonetheless I had them all with me at all times. They were woven into my life in such an intricate and complex pattern I felt their presence, warmth and love no matter how alone I was. In my consciousness I would always have them, understood them and love them.  I never thought that anything could change that, no distance or separation, no marriage not even children could tear us apart.  We were an old carpet of shared memories, precious moments, traditions, values and love. 

When you are busy living your life, you don’t recognize and take note of things that are tearing your family apart. You don’t have the time or any reason to suspect any such thing. You don’t notice the loosen threads in the rug, the tiny holes that are visible to the naked eye, you don’t notice all the subtle signs and warnings that are telling you if things continue this way you won’t have a family anymore, you won't have the warm and fuzzy feeling that you feel now towards your family nor would they feel about you. 

And life is passing by, sometimes like a summer breeze and sometimes like a winter blizzard. There are marriages, children, in-laws, divorces, deaths, all that makes life life is happening to all of us. 

One day long after loosing both my parents, having relationship disasters with all my siblings, their husband or wives and their children, long after I stopped my relationship with a brother and sister, after loosing my older brother, long after that, one day I felt orphaned. It crushed me like an iceberg, I suddenly felt utterly alone. I had no one, no parents, no brothers or sisters.  That was the day my love died and I knew I would never have what I had lost. 

In a large family things tend to get out of hand, people become extremely emotional. Little jabs and insults brushed away in real time become infected sores.  Large and small insults and injuries are never properly dealt with so they fester. Everyone has their share of problems and misfortunes to deal with. People become selfish and self centered. Sometimes people change radically so even family members can’t recognize them.  There is so much blame that everyone shares a good deal. I don’t think a team of psychologists and psychiatrists could help a large family with such old problems, such complex relationships or strong personalities. 

So after I realized that I’m completely alone and I no longer have a real family it became time to decide if I’m going to continue pretending, or drop all pretexts and just cut all ties?

I don’t know, I will think long and hard before I decide, but it’s very difficult to be in this predicament. 

Random Memories, Baking Bread

When I was a child and lived in a small town in Iran, a few times a year my mom would hire two Iranian women who were bread bakers.  In our courtyard we had a special room just for that purpose. In one corner of the room there was an earth oven for baking the bread. Above the oven on the ceiling there was an opening for the smoke to escape. 
The earth oven was very common all over Iran and possibly other Middle Eastern countries for baking the flat bread called Lavash both in Armenian and in Farsi (the  language that Iranians speak). 

The women would arrive late afternoon wearing their long black chadores or hijab the garment that Muslim woman were required to wear.  As children we didn't talk to them and I probably didn't speak Farsi well enough yet. But we were in awe because making bread was an arduous and time consuming job. They would make a massive amount of dough in a large ceramic tub and cover it with layers of tablecloth. The bread had to "sleep" overnight and rise to be ready to be backed the next morning.  

By the time we woke up they were already hard at work.  They would take a mound of dough and put it on a round low table and flatten it with their wooden rolling pins and make the circle larger and larger. Then they would switch their rolling pins and pick up the long and slender rolling pin to make their large circle much thiner.  They did this by trowing the large dough through the air several times much like what is done to a pizza dough.  When they had reached the desired thickness or in this instance thinness they would drape the thin dough on a round fat pillow and would bend down into the hot oven and slap the dough on the oven wall.  

The wood burning earth oven had to be started very early in the morning and the flames had to have died down leaving only the red and orange embers.  After they slapped the dough inside the oven they had to watch it closely because it didn't take long for the dough to bubble up and bake to a golden colored bread. If they didn't remove it on time it would drop to the bottom of the oven and be ruined which happened sometimes.  

My sisters, cousins and I would be sitting on the age of all the table clothes that were covering the floor and we would watch them do all those things in wonderment. The women would throw the hot flat breads on the table clothes surrounding them when they pulled the bread out of the oven with a metal hook.  We were not allowed to touch or eat the bread until they were totally finished but that was very hard to do because the freshly baked bread smelled amazing.  They would only allow us to eat the ones that had fallen to the bottom of the oven and were partially burnt. We didn't't mind at all because the bread still smelled and tasted wonderful. 

Backing the bread would take all day so my mother would serve the ladies lunch and tea. At the end of the day beside paying them she would also give them some of the bread that they had baked so diligently. By then all the flat bread were cooled down and dry so my mother would pile them on top of each other wrap them in tablecloths and store them in earthen vats She would share the bread with my uncle's family and a cousins's family who lived near us. 

This is one sweet memory from my childhood. 

Withering

         December 2018                January 2002

I exfoliated my face,  applied a fine moisturizer, applied green coverup to stabilize the red spots, I used yellow coverup to banish under eye blues, I used lavender coverup for yellowish skin. Then I contoured my face using brown makeup for around my face and under my cheekbones and to slenderize my nose. I tried to make my eyes smoky yet bright by applying eye shadows.  I used a generous amount of mascara to lengthen my lashes.  Last but not least I lined my lips with a colored pencil that matched my lip color. I chose a natural color lipstick and applied and blotted and reapplied.  I checked my whole face again in a mirror that magnifies 10 times for any mistakes or stray lash.  To me I looked fine much better than without makeup. But then I took a few selfies and the harsh reality become apparent.  

I just looked like an older version of myself with a lot of makeup. Nothing but nothing will bring my youthful beauty back. When I was young I didn’t believe I was pretty but looking at old photos I see that I was wrong. 

Well Maybe in another life I will appreciate what I have.