I cannot get my childhood out my head in the past couple weeks. Nostalgia is an old acquaintance of mine whose visits are no longer welcome. This time my cousin’s death prompted it to pay me a visit. This clever magician has its distinguished seat at the table of our worst enemies such as worry, greed, hate, dishonesty, and fear among others. This one pretends to be a close friend, one who has only good intentions, but under the elaborate disguise is a ruthless controlling pig with the singular objective of getting in our way of living the current moment to its fullest. I have seen most of the tricks this one plays to trap us in its web. Once captured, it infects our lens through which we see life, the world, and ourselves and causes all kinds of distortions…

The year before my mother passed away, she taught my son a song about a little boy and his toy ship. Every time I hear the song (“Im pokrik navak” here), I remember my childhood. I remember my mother and her words here and there that in hindsight seem to all have had a purpose. She would sometimes make a comment about something that seemed irrelevant or unimportant at the time…

Spring of 1994 was as full of hope as the spring of 1993. I had applied to a few colleges in the US but the question of financial support still remained unresolved.

At school I had a friend whose parents had emigrated from Poland. He used to be in my physics class. During one of the labs he offered to drive if I’d be interested to go check out the international fair in St. Petersburg. A few days later…

A couple nights ago I had a long discussion with my wife about maintaining the Armenian culture. But first, why is it so important to maintain a culture? What is culture anyway? In this context, culture is “the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another.” Many people, unfortunately, never get to experience another culture to its fullest…

The process of learning a foreign language has a number of stages. Each stage seems exciting, new and impossible to overcome. Yet somehow after we internalize the knowledge, a new stage presents itself in due time. I learned the letters and the most basic constructs of the English language in school, but I was not serious about it until my last couple of years…