Absolute Random Nonsense

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A few paragraphs into "A New Persian Empire," the prefatory essay of her new collection Brown Album, Porochista Khakpour writes: "Since 9/11, we have been living in a winter of discontent after more than three decades of discontentment." Much of the work of Brown Album is about articulating those stories of brown America that are being simultaneously lived beside, and erased from, mainstream work concerned with equating Americanness with whiteness such as The White Album. Khakpour's work is correction and visibility: about centering the brownness that has been erased from this literary cultural analysis — and accompanying conversations. There is a refreshing anger, at times, in these pages and rightfully so. Khakpour's anger is directed at erasure, at misogyny and racism, at anti-Muslim and anti-Iranian policies, at healthcare inequalities stemming in large part from environmental racism. "I loved this country," writes Khakpour. "I accepted it...

Midway through the fall semester along with my dad we went to Sharif University. As I stood outside the engineering department my dad entered and spoke with a few of the faculty and staff inside. When he finally emerged he told me, “They say you can make up the work that you have missed and that while it’s possible that you could catch up but they find it unlikely. So try it for a bit and if it seems like you can't handle it drop the courses and start from scratch next semester." And so that’s what I did. Much of the makeup work essentially consisted of me reading up on the previous material covered with the exception of English in which the professor had me translate parts of a book. There were several former classmates at the university as well that made my transition back into school a little easier. In addition to Zamiri from high school, and Shahrestani and Seyedanmalek from middle school whom I had already bumped into during orientation, I also came across Sharifasgari a...

David Halimi grew up Jewish in Tehran, watching Bonanza. He now produces rodeos in Northern California and owns a bar modeled on Cheers. At 73, Halimi is known around Chico as the man behind a Western wear store stocked with thousands of cowboy boots, a rodeo circuit that draws bull riders from across the region, and a U-shaped bar where locals joke about who might be the town’s version of Norm. Less obvious — but no less central — is that he is also a longtime synagogue president, a Hillel board leader, and a professor who teaches business analytics at the local university. Asked how an Iranian Jew learned the rhythms of the American West, Halimi doesn’t mystify it. “I’m a quick learner,” he said. For Halimi, the distance between Iran and Chico is not just geographic. It is the distance between a life shaped by instability — he grew up in Iran in the aftermath of a coup — and one he has spent decades deliberately building. Halimi didn’t arrive in America looking for a job. He arrived ...

One night towards the end of summer Ardi, Kamyar and I were hanging out with some other friends from the neighborhood. We gradually got bored and as some of us were single and others weren’t able to get in touch with their girlfriends, we started asking around if anyone knew any girls that we could hang out with. As we continued asking around, we came across a kid from Sixth Street who always acted as if he was a big-time player with connections although he rarely delivered on his promises. One time in a similar situation we asked if anyone had any movies, porno or otherwise, and he pulled us aside and asked what type and how many we were interested in, implying that for the right price he would gave us access to his vast collection of movies. He told us that he knew a girl, a professional as he referred to her, and he could have her come by Kamyar's empty apartment around 7:00pm. As far as the cost he said she should be ok with 100 tomans but if she gave us a hard time about it to...

Saeid Zeiaei and his wife Hadija Faraji became U.S. citizens last year. They have two young children born in the United States. Even though all four members are American citizens now, and they are embracing American culture, the family continues to preserve their Iranian heritage, too. Zeiaei ended up in West Virginia because his parents had friends there. That made his dad feel better about sending him so far away. Zeiaei says what little the Iranian media says about Americans isn't good, and when he got here, he discovered the misperceptions cut both ways. Fellow students would ask if his dad had an oil field. They figured that was the only way he could afford to go to school in the U.S. "Or they were asking, like, do you guys, everyone have a car there, because every time we saw a movie, they portrayed people either walking bare feet in desert or everything's in chaos. And that's the only impression they got from that country."

“Honey never goes bad, no matter how old it is.” A clear indication of Thomas’s arrival. Thomas had some type of fascination with useless facts that he insisted on sharing with others before anything else could be said. He claimed he just would pick up such minor details after reading a much more general article. Kurt never doubted him; he knew Thomas had an astonishing memory for things that he considered interesting. “Hey Thomas, how’d your interview go?” “Pretty good. I think I got the job.” “Great. What kind of job is it?” Thomas hesitated for a second. “I’ll be doing custodial work.” No, he’s not a janitor. He’s not even a custodian. He simply does custodial work. Perhaps that was the best way of making his new job sound respectable. So who cared anyway? It wasn’t about respect, it was simply about making a living.

Growing up in a Persian-Jewish family on Long Island, NY, Zach Yadegari, 18, never wanted to go to college. After all, why would he need to? Cal AI, the calorie-tracking app he co-founded, blossomed into a $30 million empire before he could even submit applications, so it’s safe to say he was doing just fine. “After Cal AI started taking off, it confirmed it. I was like, ‘Okay, clearly, you don’t need college to be successful.’ My parents finally saw the vision,” Yadegari previously told Fortune. The coding prodigy is a longtime entrepreneur, teaching himself to code when he was just 7 years old. By age 10, he was charging $30 an hour for lessons to people who wanted to learn the skill. By the time high school arrived, he had created a gaming website called “Totally Science”, which enabled his peers to play unblocked video games online with no download or registration required. The venture brought in his first six figures. Yadegari eventually had a change of heart about college, a...

One of the texts in our book was an article about psychiatry. Before reading it, Mr. Sadeghi gave us a bit of background regarding the history of psychiatry and that it did not only apply to humans but that animal psychiatry was a complete field of its own. He stressed that we did not need to learn what he was explaining but rather was doing so as he felt psychiatry was something that would interest us and that we would enjoy having a casual conversation about it. Perhaps he was wrong about the level of interest in the topic. Or it could have been that since it was the last period of the day we were all tired and inattentive. In any case as Mr. Sadeghi continued with his talks, many of us also began talking amongst ourselves, prompting Mr. Sadeghi to hush us repeatedly. After doing so a number of times he finally lost his patience and slammed his book on the bench in front of him. “This material isn’t even in your book. I’m doing this because I thought you would like it and I’m going o...

Dr. Fardad Fateri built Irvine-based International Education Corp. into one of the largest systems of postsecondary career education in North America. "When I first started teaching at a university in the late 1980s, I loved it! I knew then that I had discovered my purpose. "Then, when I became an administrator, I realized that higher education has a problem: it has a one-track focus in preparing students. Students in traditional academia do well by reading, writing and learning theories, but many people don’t learn that way—they learn visually or by hands-on training. Traditional American education was missing this key aspect. There was a complete void of training in vocational education using a structured and disciplined methodology. "I went to our dean and asked, “Why don’t we offer full-term vocational training to prepare students for entry-level jobs in high-demand verticals like healthcare?” He said, “No, that’s not what we do, and the faculty senate would never al...