Absolute Random Nonsense

One time when playing scrabble in shomal, a player indicated to me that they could make the work quiet or quite with their letters. Fast forward to the summer of 1984 where when coming back from McDonalds without making a purchase of 99 cent chicken McNuggets (due to only having a dollar and not accounting for tax) the person I was with asked me why we were coming back. I told him quiet and then followed it up with quite and kept alternating between the two. Years later I converted the chant into a dance track at a much faster pace for booty shakes.  

Wrestling has always played a significant role in Afsoon Roshanzamir’s life. Being born in Iran in the early 70s, wrestling was and still is the national sport. Her father was a wrestler and always wanted a son to follow in his footsteps. Although  Afsoon , MSPT, ’00, was an only child, her father believed she could do anything a boy could do. His mindset was more progressive from the rest of the country, as men and women didn’t have equal opportunities. Throughout her childhood,  Afsoon ’s father would teach her wrestling moves in their living room, and he would let her win wrestling matches against him while her mom refereed. Afsoon ’s home life was a stark contrast to the outside environment. First, the revolution happened, and women were very limited in what they could do. Then, Iran went to war with its neighboring country, Iraq. This was a very scary time for  Afsoon . She would be relaxing at home, and suddenly a siren would go off – she had to rush to the basement...

In 1989 a program was shown on TV that showed David Copperfield walking through the Great Wall of China. The following day everyone at school was talking about it including Mr. Ghamisi during algebra class. He explained to us that there are certain bacteria that can only exist in 2 dimensions and thus if we picked them up from the surface they are on, moved them through the 3rd dimension, and placed them on a different part of the surface, they would not be able to understand what had happened. He then mentioned David Copperfield was doing the same thing by accessing and traveling through the 4th dimension. Years later I would learn that David Copperfield was a magician.  

Olivia Abtahi is a proud Iranian-Argentinian American. Her debut novel, Perfectly Parvin, was published in 2021, receiving the SCBWI Golden Kite Honor, YALSA Odyssey Honor, and numerous starred reviews. Parvin, the protagonist, is a half-Iranian, 14-year-old girl living in the unsettling years of the Trump administration and has just been dumped by her first boyfriend for being “too much.” She is too loud, too rambunctious, and too Persian. She decides to get a boyfriend and undertakes a change. She begins to act like women in rom coms; she waxes her hair, stops eating hot Cheetos, and smiles more, and talks less.  Perfectly Parvin  tackles a variety of issues, but the most prevalent ones in this novel are portrayed in Abtahi’s efforts to address anti-Iranian sentiment and the pressures of “whitewashing” oneself to fit in.  Abtahi sees herself in Parvin. “Parvin and I are a lot alike, but I think Parvin is so much cooler than I ever was. She puts herself on t...

Every once a while I song gets stuck in my head and I keep replaying it. Having first arrived in the US I still would randomly get songs I knew from Iran playing in my head. About a month or so after my arrival I was playing Sega with a relative and I realized the song now in my head was something I had picked up in the US. The first song on repeat in my head after leaving Iran was Richard Marx's "Keep Coming Back."  

Arian Moayed is an Iranian-American actor, screenwriter, and director. Moayed received two Tony Award nominations for Best Featured Actor in a Play for his performances as an Iraqi gardener in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo (2011) and a domineering husband A Doll's House (2023), and two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his role as slimy private equity investor Stewy Hosseini in HBO's Succession. Arian Moayed was born in Tehran, Iran. His father is a banker by profession. His parents emigrated from Iran in 1986. The family settled in Glenview, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago, when Moayed was five years old.  “For anyone to say, ‘This is how Iranians should be and do — that’s insanity,” Arian says. “I don’t want to tell you how to live in Kansas City. Like, I’m not going to tell Kansas City what barbecue is about.” The Iranians in the cast of Waterwall's Hamlet have been joking, “ Hamlet is so Iranian.” It’s true for us," says Arian. In that first moment when Hamlet ...

Towards the end of the summer, we were informed that in order to enroll in Nikan’s middle school, we were to pass an entrance exam. This would be similar to our previous finals although all questions would be multiple-choice. There wasn’t much studying to do given the vast amount of material that it covered so the best option was to simply go with what we had learned and knew. The morning of the exam I was dropped off rather early and as I stood in the schoolyard scoping out the new environment and the few students- all new - already there, one of them seemed familiar to me. Apparently the feeling was mutual as he looked at me and waved me over. It was Bijan. I hadn’t seen him in about a year but we picked up where we had left off. We talked about all of the people we had known (I told him Hamid was also attending this school to which he responded, “The vomit guy?”) and funny things that had happened to us in the past which in itself completely eased any tension we were feeling prior...

Yasmine Dubois, known professionally as Lafawndah (also known as KUKII) is not like 50 other artists within a one-mile radius. Her music draws from wildly unpredictable influences – devotional songs, ambient electronica, the British singer Sade, Iranian folk music and the films of Robert Altman have each had their moment – and refracts them through her own experimental pop sensibilities. She was born in Paris to an Iranian mother and an Egyptian father. She grew up in Paris and Tehran and is now based in London. Lafawndah’s lyrics are deceptive. Take Town Crier from Tan, which sounds as if it might be about an abusive relationship. In some ways it is, but the relationship is instead between a state and its citizens, inspired by her experience of returning to Iran in 2011 around the time of the Green Movement protests. “I want songs to start with intimacy and then as you listen you begin to understand there is more at play,” she says. “It’s hard to suddenly go into bi...

In Spring of 1993 I took a job working at Jonathon's in UConn's Student Union every Friday night from 6:00pm until closing (around 1:00am). My first night there as I looked over the lines of people waiting for food or just socializing, Richard Marx's "Endless Summer Nights" kept playing in my head. The following week in a similar scene Go West's "King of Wishful Thinking" did the same. One night I noticed a girl being carried around on a guy's back. At first due to their comfortable behavior concerning their surroundings I assumed they were older than me but when I thought about it, I figured that given that I was 21 at the time, the odds of this being true was only 25%.