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Monday, October 31, 2011

Black sheep

On Friday, my best male friend got engaged to his girlfriend of five years. My other close male friend became engaged a few months ago.

I'm happy for them... but I can't help feeling a little left behind too, like I'm losing a friend. My girlfriends got married in a wave that came a few years ago, and they're already in the baby-making stage, but it seemed I always had my guy friends to help me feel normal by comparison. Now the guys are getting married too. I realize that is a totally selfish feeling on my part.

Over lunch at Spring Street Natural on a slushy Saturday (snow, this early?), one of my girlfriends consoled me. "But you're totally satisfied. You have a fireman in L.A. who writes you every day, and a guy you sleep with here in New York, and probably a bunch of dates on top of that.Why do you need anything else?"

She was right of course, but I have so many decades of human culture baked into me that I can't shake the notion that Single Woman=Unwanted Woman. Look, I know that isn't the case with me, that it's a million times better to be single right now than to be married and divorced with kids and forever tied to any of the people I had feelings for in the past. I just haven't met the right person yet. That's what I tell myself.

Still, now that my best guy friend is getting married, some sort of alarm just went off inside. I can only hope our friendship doesn't change. That's probably what I'm most anxious about: I don't want to lose my friends just because I'm not following cultural norms at the moment. This isn't about me fearing not getting married and remaining alone. I like my life just fine, probably better than fine. It's a fear about all my friends getting married and leaving me alone.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

Part 6 is up!

Yes, Part 6 is up. By the way, these are just excerpts from much, much longer pieces, just so you know.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Tail end of the party

My parents left for Iran yesterday. They go about once a year, which was always a weird thing when I was growing up. It was one of those inevitable and necessary things that had to happen, but it was always a bad time when one or the other parent had to be gone for an extended period. When my mom's parents were alive, she'd be gone for three-month chunks and I'd forget what she looked like and sounded like until I saw her in the airport again. I hated it when they left while I was growing up. In fact, I think I still hate it. Even though I don't live in the same American city with my parents, I still miss them when they go to Iran. What gets me more though is that I should have gone with them. I should have gone months ago. But my damn papers are still being processed and I'm still just waiting, and soon it will be busy season for me and I won't be able to take time off at all. In the meantime, spring and summer have come and gone, and we're mid-way through fall.

I was always jealous of other kids at graduations and Thanksgivings when their grandparents would come. I probably got to see my grandparents less than ten times in my lifetime because they lived halfway across the world. I used to worry who from my family would even come to my future-wedding since it was just my mom and dad. When I was ten years old, I decided that the solution to that problem would be to get married in Las Vegas. I think I saw a movie about it or something and found out that all you needed was a witness. I've always had a chip on my shoulder about people who got to see their extended family on a regular basis, especially the people who complained about it.

The past few weeks have been pretty normal. I could name all the art galleries and art shows and restaurants and bars I went to, but there's no point. I could talk about this Atlantic article which purports that all of us unmarried successful ladies out there have only "deadbeats" or "playboys" to choose from, but again: There's no point.
"What my mother could envision was a future in which I made my own choices. I don’t think either of us could have predicted what happens when you multiply that sense of agency by an entire generation. But what transpired next lay well beyond the powers of everybody’s imagination: as women have climbed ever higher, men have been falling behind. We’ve arrived at the top of the staircase, finally ready to start our lives, only to discover a cavernous room at the tail end of a party, most of the men gone already, some having never shown up—and those who remain are leering by the cheese table, or are, you know, the ones you don’t want to go out with."
In fact, maybe I'm having an existential crisis. Maybe there were no points at all. And yet, I'm surprisingly... content. Isn't that all we wanted to begin with?

Thursday, October 13, 2011

It's up!

Part 4 of my year of dating Persians is out! (For those that already know the story, I never did get the heart to re-sell the diamond watch. It continues to sit in its pretty little box under my desk where I keep all my self-help books that I don't want people to see on my bookshelf.)

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

What a country!

I wish I had more to report. Work has been very dramatic lately, but ultimately good for me. My romantic life continues to be in the "it's complicated" category. I have gained two pounds, mostly from eating out at restaurants too much. And I spend too much on giltgroupe.com. So... nothing new in other words.

My dad came to visit last Sunday (he works in Jersey sometimes, so he was close by) because he wanted "to see what was going on with the Occupy Wall Street thing." You have to understand that my father went through the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and his youth will always be imbued with the excitement of revolution. Anything that smacks of it makes him excited. Of course, the result of the Iranian Revolution totally jaded my father (and many Iranians). He thought that the revolution was a good thing, but then--since the protesters had no leader or agenda--it got hijacked by religious fundamentalists and the state of Iran got even worse than it was pre-Revolution. If you know anything about history, that's always what tends to happen with revolutions. So, now, my father saw what seemed like a repeat of what he'd witnessed in his late 20s and he had to come to New York City to see what was going on. He hoped it would be different. That this time, it would work.

We walked South along Broadway arguing with each other. "This could turn into something," he said. "Now the U.S. government will listen to the people."

I am contrary with him, so I said, "No it won't. It's just a bunch of dirty hippies who have nothing better to do." I cringed a little bit. I sounded like a Republican. "Nothing will change. We're finished. They have no agenda. They don't know what they want. There is not a single respectable person down there. They spend more time making puppets."

We argued like this all the way down to Zuccotti Park. I was disappointed to be right. You could hear hippie drums from a block away. The park where everyone had gathered looked like a homeless encampment or the aftermath of Burning Man. Garbage was strewn everywhere; the stink of marijuana filled the air. Tarps covered parts of the ground where unwashed people took naps or begged for money. Cops stood around staring in bewilderment at the scene. Everyone's signs said something different. There was a table marked with "Press" where several people hovered with BlackBerries. And, everywhere, there were people like us just gawking, taking pictures with video-cameras and cell-phones in hand. Some kind of exploitative evangelist screamed something, hungry for attention.



My dad pushed his way through the crowd to a water jug where he poured himself a cup of water and exclaimed with magnanimity, "Can you believe this water is free?" He shook his head, proud of something, "Somebody is paying for this water. What a country!" He took a dollar out of his pocket and put it in the communal donation box. I complained bitterly that I wanted to leave, but he insisted he wanted to hang out a bit and walk around more. We walked through the melee, stopping occasionally so he could take pictures. "If this happened in Iran, all these people would be arrested and shot by now," he said. "What a country!" I shook my head and rolled my eyes, a portrait of another generation.

Friday, October 7, 2011

Arab Spring on Wall Street?

The "Occupy Wall Street" rallies (and accompanying brutality against protesters) have been getting undue media attention in Iran. I suppose the Iranian government is doing that on purpose to deflect criticism of the way they handled thier own uprisings after their botched presidential election. That's why this article about Iranian student uprisings in support of Occupy Wall Street is so fascinating:
The protesters [in Iran] shouted “Down with America”, “Down with Israel”, “Liberal Democracy is finished” and “Confronting Islam is the Last Nail in the US Coffin.” They also set the US flag alight at the end of their peaceful march.
The last time Iranians chanted "Down with America" and burned an American flag was during the whole American hostage crisis when the Iranian people themselves actually hated America. This time is different. They are chanting "Down with America" in seeming solidarity with protesters in America. They see the American protesters as extensions of the protesters in the Arab Spring--as extensions of their own community.

It's a strange predicament... While the Iranian government certainly doesn't want to encourage its people to follow the Arab Spring against their own government, I'm sure they are allowing this particular protest to occur with gleeful satisfaction. I do wish the rhetoric wasn't "America" though, and that Iranian protesters weren't linking this to anti-Jewish sentiment. Iranians more than anyone else should understand how offensive (and erroneous!) it is to talk about "Iranians" and "Iran" as if the people and the government are one. In the same way, I highly doubt "Occupy Wall Street" is about hating America--it's actually about having faith in America, and wanting to make things better. You don't yell "Down with America" to people who are fighting for America.