Necessary People

“Some of you were lessons, some of you were poetry, and all of you were necessary. Either way, you gave me a story to tell. No royalties will be issued. Wishing you all the best (but mostly therapy).” Cara Alwill

By: Gabriela Yareliz

I can hear Fergie’s Big Girls Don’t Cry being blasted by my neighbor. She has the best taste in music. I swear we would be friends.

I think often about the paths that cross in this life. There are the friends, family, acquaintances. (Like, where is that girl who loved fairies and fantasy novels in high school? Or the girl in jr. high who would pick at her eyebrows until they were all gone?) This reflection was amplified as I read Cara Alwill’s latest book.

We reflect on how things started and how things ended. We think about whether we were right about people from the beginning. We wonder if people did their best by us and vice versa.

That saying that says people do the best they can is delusional. It’s something we say to mask reality. I don’t believe that. Some people are really trashy. I have seen people purposefully give zero effort.

For example, yesterday marked the end of an era for Sam Rosen and the NY Rangers. The Rangers won the President’s Trophy last year, and this year, they were one of the worst teams (with the team intact at the beginning of the season— same people). They didn’t do their best. They gave up. (Exception of the fourth line). People do this in life all the time. They settle for mediocrity.

This whole web of stories and lives shapes us. It softens us or hardens us. Sometimes, it’s more of an automated choice, a dangerous seeking of the familiar, and a method of survival. Survival never justifies anything, though.

I feel like we move through life slowly making decisions that either bring us more into alignment or more out of alignment. Alignment with what, you may ask? With our values. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what you profess. What matters is whether your life matches those ideas. We either do the hard thing or we start desensitizing ourselves to who we want to be and fall short. We are always moving in some direction; we are seldom truly stuck.

In the end, we keep making choices and rubbing elbows with people. Some we want to stay with; others we need to escape. Even the ones we leave behind teach us something about the world or our simple act of leaving builds the person we are. And little by little, our stories unfold. Our characters keep evolving.

We keep writing the pages until we reach the last one.

Ricky

By: Gabriela Yareliz

I typically avoid tourists. Most New Yorkers do. We don’t have time for slow walkers or people who take up the entire walkway with their tour group.

Today, I was walking through an area that attracts a high volume of tourists. Central Park. As I was walking, some food cart was blasting Ricky Martin. Naturally, I turned my head because I love Ricky. I named my TI-83 calculator after him.

Next to the food cart was this tiny little girl. She was dancing with abandon and having a blast in her own little world. I could tell she loves Ricky, too.

I smiled big. I wondered— when was the last time when you and I danced with abandon, just having fun? Maybe, it’s time to blast some Ricky.

A Starbucks Monolgoue

“You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it.” Jeff Bezos

By: Gabriela Yareliz

I stopped at Starbucks this morning for a boost of energy; matcha. I felt a lot of desperate energy from the staff.

Businesses— they lose their soul through rapid expansion, technological advances, being sold, having a change of leadership, losing what made them unique to begin with, etc., etc.

My husband and I talk about this all the time. He tells me about what Starbucks used to be like in a more golden era for NYC.

Now, businesses like Starbucks are trying to go back in time. They are whipping out Sharpies, and the barista who was cursing you out under her breath hands you a cup that has “Enjoy!” scribbled on it. You ask her for a straw, and you feel the judgment. Sadly, when it comes to Starbucks, I am invested in its success, and at the same time, I am not sure it can succeed.

I don’t know if everything that is lost can be found.

I think what is missing is authenticity. Before, you would walk in, and you were completely ignored while baristas whispered inside jokes while the blenders ran. They would finish your drink and let it sit on some back counter you couldn’t reach, and you would (patiently) wait 15 minutes until someone gave you the time of day, so you could politely ask (while seething), “Is that mine?” Then, you taste the drink, and it tastes like water or pure milk (not what you ordered). After enough of these experiences, you swear off the morning anger like any rational person would. You don’t step foot in there for a good few months.

And now, after ages, you venture back in and every barista is lined up like a scene from The Sound of Music, giving a coordinated “Good morning!”

It’s giving desperate. I am not sure what it will take to fix this, but we still feel far.

About three months ago, I got a spinach wrap, and they wrote in Sharpie, “Be better than you were yesterday.” I laughed. I almost turned around and told them to do the same.

Different

“If you want something different, you are going to have to do something different.”Jack Canfield

By: Gabriela Yareliz

This may be one of the hardest lessons life offers us. Hard because ‘different’ requires courage. It requires risk. It often requires uncertainty and the unknown. It requires sitting down and doing the hard work of trying to map something out.

But when we decide to venture out— anything can happen. And that is where the magic and adventure lies.

In the Dark

“Ironically, though light can be scarce at night, the darkness can often bring clarity.” Richard Christensen

By: Gabriela Yareliz

We often talk about the clarity light brings us. We rarely talk about the clarity found in darkness.

The truth is, some of the darkest moments in life clarify things for us. We see things not as we wish them to be, but as they really are. Jonah found his clarity in the darkness of the belly of the big fish.

Have you ever walked down a street or area at night, and it looks different than it did during the day and vice versa? Sometimes, it’s not even about clarity but perspective. It’s not better or worse— just different.

A wide open field when the sun is rising and the fog is low is different than the same field at night with the moonlight. All redemption carries some darkness. Joy comes in the morning. But there is no morning without the preceding night.

Nights can be quieter, more solitary, but also, absolutely illuminating. Suddenly, we can see the same thing differently. Life is like that. Life lets us see both.

Ideas for NYC: Open Letter #2

By: Gabriela Yareliz

Dear Eric Adams (Mayor):

Public things require courteous and considerate users. Absent that, they are destroyed. Public libraries (which we should talk about because funding is being cut, and they barely function pre-cut), public pools, public parks— but let’s talk about public transport. Public transport is the pool everyone is peeing in.

People are out of control. You will be walking up the stairs to get to another platform and someone passes gas in your face, and you have no where to turn while choking. There is the eternal problem of dancers on crowded trains using grip polls as strip polls, and a patron almost getting kicked in the face. Also, no one needs to touch a poll that was between someone’s butt cheeks. Certain turnstiles steal your money and don’t let you in. Certain stations steal your money because a train never even comes, violating the whole function and promise of public transport. Then, there are the people who don’t even pay and jump the ‘stile. No. It’s basic, you pay for service rendered. A bus shouldn’t have to announce “Fare Required.” Either you pay or you don’t get on. If the average person can afford drugs or coffee, they can afford bus/train fare.

There is the man at the station who thinks the perfect time to bring his skeleton doll out to dance is when trains arrive and the whole area is swarming with people like an ant pile that has just been stepped into. Like, dude, dance when there aren’t millions of people trying to get to their next train before it disappears in the tunnel, not to be seen again for the next half hour because of delays.

There is the unhoused person that people fear, so everyone is crowded on top of each other at one tiny end of the train to avoid his swirling pee. Then, the sleeper who decides they should sprawl out on a whole section of seats because God knows what they were doing last night. God forbid you say something and get stabbed.

There are the people who start getting on the train without letting people off. Canal Street is notorious for this. People get swept away by a mob, pushed back into the train they were trying to exit, flailing, screaming and shoving. This is every day, bro.

Yesterday, I was almost hit in the face with multiple skateboards, because God forbid these bros actually use them on the street. (Shouldn’t the skateboard be used to avoid the underground hellscape?!) And then, there is the person annoyed that you sat next to them in the one empty seat, and they fake cough to pretend they are sick so you won’t sit down. Joke is on them because I am not afraid. And if they are sick, stay home. Basic courtesy.

People lack consideration. It should be required if you will use a public good, otherwise, you destroy it for everyone else who is literally paying for the service. (This isn’t free like the library). Sleeping people should be told to sleep at home, unhoused should be sheltered, sick should be told to stay home until they stop coughing up a lung, skateboarders to the streets, the selfish need to learn to share. The blind and impatient need to see that yes, this person needs space to get off the train, they aren’t Casper.

If you can’t play nice, you shouldn’t be allowed to play.

Maybe, we should have metro cards that you must sign on the back with a Code of Conduct. And you take some sort of oath like a Girl Scout. Clearly, the little “Don’t be an asshole” banners in the trains are ignored and illegible because of graffiti. (If you are an artist— do your art off the train).

The trains and stations are hell with a haiku on the wall that I am forced to read because I am smashed against the haiku wall because I am apparently invisible.

Code of Conduct signature cards, with financial penalties if you violate. Think about it. The transport hell is getting old.

Mario Joseph

By: Gabriela Yareliz

Today, I cried when I heard of the passing of Mario Joseph.

Mario was a Haitian human rights attorney that I worked extensively with through BAI for my asylum cases. It was a thrill to meet him in-person at the Center for Constitutional Rights Social Justice Conference in summer of 2014, after so many hours on the phone through crazy late nights and wild cases dealing with life or death situations.

He was exactly who I had perceived him to be, an incredible person. A man who carried himself and the legal profession with so much dignity and integrity.

The world lost a fighter and incredible human. Rest in glory, Mario Joseph. The world will feel your absence.

Mario Joseph’s bio here (source):

Mario Joseph, Av., has co-managed or man­aged the Bureau des Avocats Internationaux in Haitisince 1996, and has prac­ticed human rights and crim­i­nal law since 1993. The New York Times called him Haiti’s most respected human rights lawyer. He spear­headed the pros­e­cu­tion of the Raboteau Mas­sacre trial in 2000, one of the most sig­nif­i­cant human rights cases any­where in the West­ern Hemi­sphere. He has rep­re­sented dozens of jailed polit­i­cal pris­on­ers, in Hait­ian courts and in com­plaints before the Inter-American Com­mis­sion on Human Rights. In 2009, he received the Judith Lee Stronach Human Rights Award from the Cen­ter for Jus­tice & Account­abil­ity and the Kather­ine and George Alexan­der Human Rights Prize from the Uni­ver­sity of Santa Clara Law School. He has tes­ti­fied as an expert on Hait­ian crim­i­nal pro­ce­dure before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and in U.S. courts, and served on the Hait­ian government’s Law Reform Commission.

Mr. Joseph is also an edu­ca­tor, and a grad­u­ate of Haiti’s Teach­ers’ Col­lege. He has exten­sive expe­ri­ence teach­ing human rights and legal issues to grass­roots advo­cacy orga­ni­za­tions, human rights groups and vic­tims’ orga­ni­za­tions. He appears fre­quently on tele­vi­sion and radio in Haiti to explain legal issues. He speaks Hait­ian Cre­ole, French and English.