i once had beautiful photos in the car.
beautiful photos.

تولدت مبارک

عشقم
what to say except that all my roads lead to you
all my love
all my warmest, dearest, wishes
جان دلم

ـ گل تو

The most striking visuals in Game of Thrones are of the north: tiny black flecks in fields of white, labouring slowly, painfully into the unfeeling deep; the quiet cracking of the ice; the bright blindness of the sudden storm, the shadows grey and muffled against the shifting silver walls; the cold, tight skin; the steam of breath mingled with the sharp air; the hard lungs in the dense, wet silence...

Welkom!

Hello, lone reader in the Netherlands.

on evolution

i used to spend my time in (civilized, room-to-sit) transit with the news, with my thoughts, with my notes and writings. when i started driving it was music. when i couldn't--when it was impossible to--listen, it was news, interviews, analysis.

now, jostled, crushed, sandwiched between elbows, shoulders, coffee cups, i'm developing a mild personality disorder. i both read and listen. my big headphones are space-invaders, but they're on. the volume isn't high, but it isn't worried-about-annoying-people low. my phone is usually out. my purse is too big. sometimes i'll take a seat, even if i don't really need it.

it's not me. but there's no other way.

Nausea, as soon as I read the first few lines. Raging, rigid waves of self-doubt followed by actual nausea, vertigo, watching the stanza swirl, distort with the ever-widening distance between it and me. I will never write like this. I can never write like this. Who am I but a silly little girl who plays at art..

It's not just this. It's not just this that prevents me from reading my own medium. It's that my body rebels. It's that I wept on the way to Copenhagen, with Alice Major in one hand and New Yorker poetry in the other. It's that I weep now, in transit, as they shoot darts in my eyes.

f's phrase of the month: you eat like a child and a grandpa at the same time

your feet in the sand. your feet in the water. in the soil. in the grass. slipped deep into mounds of water-worn pebbles. your feet on the hot wood of your rooftop. your feet held. caressed. your feet in the couch cushions. in the air. your curled toes digging, pushing, eager...

تولدت مبارک

warmest wishes, happiest birthdays

to our loveliest boy
and to our baby, now 11

عشق شوری در نهاد ما نهاد
جان ما در بوته سودا نهاد

how my heart collapsed with the memory: a dear, dear friend, who taught me to read in Persian, writing out the lyrics so i could follow along.. chosen for its beauty, its slow pace, and Eftekhari's excellent enunciation

hearing it suddenly, all these years later.. the trembling in my bones

It was Will who noticed the striking image: row upon row of stones in varying shades of grey/black, stern and hard against the sunlight and the heat.

Since flowers are not a Jewish tradition, little towers of rock perched precariously on those hard edges, casting long shadows over the newly turned soil...

Hello, 3:00 a.m. reader.
I do hope you're overseas.

When I was young, only the fat books mattered. In bookstores, I gravitated towards the thickest volumes, the highest page count--understandable, I think, after a childhood spent with Dickens, Dumas, and "collected works" (Conan Doyle, London, Poe). 

Now, I find myself attracted to the most elegant slivers--the books between books--with their needle-sharp eloquence, and their pointed prose, and their quick destruction.

f's phrase of the month--in response to my suspicions that the "gatecrashing messages" from Putin's annual Q&A were the result of somebody's failure to screen:

That poor somebody is going to accidentally fall from somewhere or get food poisoning or contract some sort of patriotic disease...

مَرْحَباً

Hello, lone reader in Lebanon.

on serendipity

i don't care much for Gibran, but this beauty has echoed throughout my life since high school:

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
- Gibran Khalil Gibran, "On Joy and Sorrow," The Prophet (1923)

while this is by no means a unique concept, i was pleased to notice an interesting similarity (and inversion) in Blake:

Under every grief and pine 
Runs a joy with silken twine 
- William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence" (1863)

it appeared quite by chance.

... how lovely, then, to discover that parallels have, indeed, been drawn between the two.

... i've had it up to here with my waterfall of screw-ups today

i accidentally killed a spider this morning, and the nausea didn't wear off until i got to work. honestly, even thinking about it now makes me shake...

i can't even imagine
i can't even imagine

عزیزانم، در کنار همیم

.... all the terrible news i couldn't bring myself to write about--Kabul, Manchester, London--and now this... now Tehran.

it's been eight hours since i started writing, and the words are still out of reach.. floating somewhere in a swamp of grief and worry

Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind. 

-- Virginia Woolf, Orlando

the first time i became aware of socio-economic difference (in grade six, when i realized that i went to a private school and that fees for new immigrants were subsidized by the Jewish community--but that my rich classmates, judging by their blank faces, had never known such need)

the first (and only time) i've been called the equivalent of "a dirty Jew" (by a Russian on ICQ messenger--for having declined, i think, to send a photo)

the time i became hyper-aware of my own pretense (the day of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, which meant nothing to me, but which, i felt, should have--and which earned a solemn entry in my diary)

the first time i disappointed​ an adult who was not one of my parents (my high school English/literature teacher, who couldn't control her face when her model student told her she was going to university for computer science)

the time i became aware of having been bullied (in adulthood, while wondering about my discomfort regarding a certain classmate)

the time i felt the needle's sting (not more than a few months ago, upon learning that my sister had no memory of something that had always stood out to me--judging by her reaction at the time--as a moment of great selfishness on my part and of great disappointment on hers)