FERRERO ROCHER - The Best Way to Celebrate.

So at last now, the exams are over, and the world around me feels a little different to how it felt just a few days ago. I've always felt that the world becomes a brighter place when the exams are behind me. Food tastes better, sleep is more restful, and even the smell of paint, fresh bread and perfume, lotion and shampoo in the air makes the day feel even brighter. The textbooks are back in the library where they belong, and the papers are all neatly filed away, where they belong. The bed is made, clothes all laundered and folded away, the exam time messes all cleaned up, and I feel well rested this morning - technically afternoon, but morning for me, since my day only started a few hours ago. Also, the sunshine flowing in through my window makes me feel warmer and just happier in general. A few days ago, the world felt cold, dark and pressurized to the point of being heartless. Adrenaline was pumping, endless papers and pens and highlighters cluttering the room. Dinner forgotten, a minimal effort put into lunch and probably more tea/coffee in me than blood.

Sleepless nights, filled with the worry that the day of the exam may come and the endless chapters would not have been read sufficiently to answer the questions given to me. So I plough on, day and night, undeterred by  sleep, tiredness, headaches or boredom. I have a certain weird way of studying better when I watching a movie or listening to music. It keeps me interested in studying, as opposed to hating the idea of studying altogether. I also have this quirk where, when my brain rejects something, I can't do it. For example, I do drink, but I can only drink when I really want to - none of that bending to peer pressure n stuff. It's the same with studying - when I really have to study, and I don't like what I'm studying, I can try to make myself to study anyway, but that doesn't mean I'm studying as effectively as I can.

Anyway, when it was all finally over, I felt relief like never before - I did manage to sufficiently read what I had to, answered questions (I hope, sufficiently) and the exams, all of them, were finally behind me now. So when finally, all was said and done, it feels like I've been to war and back, all in one piece. That's what exams feel like. Leaves you tired and winded - you need the break after to catch your breath, and the time to actually sleep restfully.

This year, my exams ended on my father's birthday, so I celebrated both occasions with chicken dinner at an Iranian restaurant - chicken kebabs with a skinless boiled tomato, pan rice and chips. That, and a special box of Ferrero Rochers. Ferrero Rocher is pure magic in an even more magical wrapper. It's pure hazelnut/wafer dunked in 'chocolat' - croyez-moi, c'est vraiment magnifique pour les papilles. My taste buds always sing with delight when I 'experience' a Ferrero Rocher, so that was how I chose to celebrate both, my daddy's sixtieth and what could probably be the last set of exams I sit in a very long time. [I study in a different country, not where my parents live.]

Another way was a much-needed long (14 hour) sleep, to make up for the lack of it that I had experienced in almost 2 months. The third way, however, was the best thing I have done in at least 2 years. I bought a book, called "You're Only Human", written by a curious little critter with wisdom and a very interesting sense of humour. Now THAT's a book I will pass on to my children and quite possibly, even my grandchildren.



  

Love and other drugs...

Ever noticed how the stories and movies where there are star-crossed lovers or where there is one who is dying of cancer or some incurable disease tend to be the most genuine? In every other relationship, love tends to not feel like enough - the lovers start out happy and so in love, but that dwindles down eventually, to fighting over budgets and children and who took who for granted - oh and here's the best one ever - whose family is better than whose. Truthfully, family sucks because they are always in your face, always judging, always competing and almost always resenting. Whoever wrote that family is all about love and understanding got it so totally wrong, because there aren't that many families who can even hold a candle to these storybook families, where everyone loved each other, and truly cared for each other.

Anyway, the lovers that do end up spending the rest of their lives together transition from the place where nothing else mattered, into a place where everything else takes precedence over their relationship. It's sad, really, because there are these two people, who have a year, maybe less, to be together before one gets permanently shipped off to land of the dead, while the other haunts the land of the living, a mere shell, with no light or love left to give. These people would have eaten bugs and slugs if they could have had just one more day together, but they don't; and on the other side, people who do actually have what seems like an eternity together, and they bicker and complain every single day.

What life has become is almost all about taking the people and the things you already have for granted, while gaping open mouthed, at a close to not achievable dream. What is it about people that they always want the things they can't have? When they are in love, there is always the worry that she/he might choose someone else over you, so you constantly do new things to keep him/her. Likewise, it takes knowing that he/she will be dead in six months for you to take time off work and take her to Milan, and in general, just spend time with her. It takes the fear of losing someone for you to get close to them. Why must it be that way? Couldn't people be with each other while being genuinely appreciative of and grateful for one another?  Why must people compete? Why is there the constant necessity for one to prove that that they are worth another person's love and appreciation? I really wish that a family dinner would be about catching up with your cousins the way we would catch up with a long lost friend, that genuine sense of love and kinship, where work/achievements are almost seldom talked about because it could have been a difficult year for cousin Ed or Sally while it might have been a truly great year for cousin Seth.

Instead of extending that kind of love, understanding and sensitivity to each other, families turn into a pack of cannibalistic sharks, just waiting for one to weaken, or lose a fin, maybe, to just swoop in and devour every single piece of the injured shark. What's worse, families don't literally kill each other - they prey on the other's spirit, which is a worse form of death. When you go through life, losing faith in humanity, simply because people who live life this way, and still "love their family to bits" are considered normal, there comes this one person, who changes the way you looked at life.

You live every moment of your life, right up to that point, in self doubt, and worry, wondering if you were going insane to believe that families were about love - and in comes this one person who makes you realize that if ONE person who is that good can exist, the world couldn't be that bad a place after all. With this person, you truly see the rest of your life. After years of feeling alone and misunderstood, you see this one person who you just met, who, very surprisingly knows you far better than anyone else you ever knew for years ever did. You finally stop feeling like the eternal outcast, and BAM! Life the way you knew it is wheeled off - it's like, the Second Act of the play from this point on. It is the same, but different.

This one person looks at you differently - he/she sees you as a success, as an amazing person, and you transform, from a caterpillar, into a butterfly, and you soar and you soar into the air, and take in the sights and sounds and smells of what was once your world, but now, it looks different to you, because you are up in the air, flying off to see and experience things differently. You feel better, you look better and you magically do better at what you do, because now, you are no longer in doubt - you were right, you weren't insane. You share a relationship with this person that is better than anything you could have experienced with your family. This person shares his/her day with you - the good, the bad and the ugly, and asks about your day, and the two of you seem to never run out of things to talk about. No matter what you do, that person never hates you - he/she gets annoyed from time to time, of course, but you talk about it, and as two responsible adults, you decide on a course of action calmly and are willing to give and take without having to prove to each other that one person knows better than the other.

It is the kind of love where even when you hate each other, you still love each other. This need not be purely reserved for romantic love - it could even be friendship, where this one friend or a group of friends tend to be closer than family to you. The love, understand and care - truly. You could be in your over-sized jumper and bed head with huge nerd glasses, and they would still love you. OR you could be terribly sick, running a fever, with a runny nose, puking 9 ways to Sunday, and they wouldn't run the other way.

That's what I feel love is. It isn't about loving you on your best day. I mean who wouldn't love a person when they are a success, and is so much fun to be around because he/she is happy. It is about holding your hand when you feel utterly hopeless, and things in your life just couldn't get any worse, and just sitting with you, even if they have nothing else to say. It is about genuinely looking in your heart and saying that it's all going to be okay. It's always about the little things. In friendship, in love and in a family, it is never about the big things. It isn't about expensive gifts, and is definitely not about flattering you when you have it all right. It is about sticking around when there is no one else. When others judge you, and swoop in to tear you to bits, love is the one thing that I expect should save you. It is those friends who stand between you and the hungry sharks on your worst day that you need to remember for life, and return the favour, because people like that are in short supply. It is the hungry sharks that lurk in the shadows of every single home and work place.

Like Jamie says in Love and Other Drugs, "You meet thousands of people, but none of them really touch you - and then, you meet this one person, and your life is changed, FOREVER"

Why your life will never be the same again is because this one person is mostly enough for you to finally stop doubting yourself or trying to make yourself not matter. This person reminds you that you are important, that you count. That you aren't a big ninny to be hurt by the things people sometimes say. This person feels angry for you, in the sense that, even you might not feel as bad about what someone said, but what this someone said angers and hurts this one person so much because you matter so much to them. This one person would never have you any other way but yourself, and your true self, that you suppressed so much because people didn't seem to like it, comes out and blossoms into a beautiful plant, and you feel one with yourself at last - you get to finally breathe, and this time, you begin to look radiant and truly happy, that it is contagious. What a difference, really.

Once you experience that, no matter how hard life gets after that, you tend to be in harmony with yourself, because you have finally met your true self, and it becomes an imposition to have to change for any reason. You finally being to count to yourself. That's what all the love songs talk about when they say that their love set them free. There really is no going back from that. It's real, it makes the most sense, actually. It's like this one person held the key to your soul, and has finally released it from its cold, dank prison.

If you talk to most people who have loved, they would tell you how unique the experience actually is. It is so different from what a Mills & Boon novel describes. There is almost no predictable moment when love happens. It hits you when you least expect it, and it is almost never who you expect it to be. Then, there is that initial period where you fear how fast things are going, and you try to fight it as hard as you can. Like I said, you can't choose who you fall in love with, so you might not actually want to fall in love with this person you see because he/she doesn't fit the description of what you are looking for. So you fight it, and fight it, and fight some more. If you're very lucky or stupid or that self-satisfied, the idea of this person that makes you feel as happy, calm, safe and peaceful as this wouldn't feel like an oasis or a breath of fresh air when you're suffocating, but it you are miserable and suffocating from all the falsity in life, this one real thing tends to be too difficult to resist, and you finally admit it to yourself. You are in love.

Even in friendship, it happens where you start out being friends with one person, and end up being best friends with someone completely unexpected. However, in friendship, I like to believe that there is an element of choosing involved. However, you will notice that out of the 10 friends you started out with,  only 2 or 3 stayed.

I believe that friends are the family you choose for yourselves. The idea is to actually let them know it, because, like I said, soulmates and kindred spirits are in short supply. If you want to keep them, love them, genuinely, and let them know it. I mean, life truly is short when you look at it - you have no idea if you will be aware of who you are now in the afterlife, and life as it is, is fleeting. You could get hit by a bus tomorrow or get cancer or just fall down and die - for all you know. So, live, love and be passionate - appreciate everything while you still can. Taking things for granted and just plain nonchalance is unattractive and quite honestly, overrated. However, choose what you care for very carefully, because your 'heart' is made of glass - with the right amount of warmth, it can expand to accommodate more love, but tip it over once or even hold it too tight, and it will shatter into a million pieces. To grow a new 'heart' will take time, so I wouldn't wear my heart on my sleeve if I were you.