Stuck In the Safety Net

A New Year

2010-03-20T11:51:00.000-07:00

Persian New Year, Nowruz, is upon us, and it seems like a good time to start writing the blog again. Nowruz is a spring festival, a celebration of Nature and fertility. It's thirteen days long and begins at the moment of the spring equinox. Originally a Zoroastrian tradition, it has long been a secular holiday celebrated by Iranians of all religions. It is THE big Iranian holiday, like Christmas and New Year's Eve rolled into one. Family and friends get together, traditional meals are prepared, and children are given money.

At the center of it all is the haft-seen, which consists of seven symbolic items: garlic for health, apples for fertility, wheat grass for rebirth, vinegar for age and patience, and so forth.

Growing up, I was always aware that my parents wanted Nowruz to be as important to me as it had been to them when they were kids. But, alas, it paled in comparison with Christmas, which all my friends celebrated, and which came with better decorations, more copious sweets, and a jolly fat man who gave you presents. Nowruz has a man who brings presents too, but he's a skinny guy in blackface who wears a fez. Yes, you heard me right: his name is Haji Firouz, and he wears blackface. Even as a child, I was aware that this was highly un-PC, not to mention downright creepy.

And yet. I hate to get all trite and treacly on you, but I have to say that as I got older and started to want more of a connection with My Heritage and My People's History and whatnot, Nowruz began to gain more meaning for me. This became even more true after I married a Jewish man and started celebrating Passover and Hanukkah in addition to Christmas; suddenly, I felt like I was celebrating everyone's holidays but my own. And so, I started to make a concerted effort to get into Nowruz, which actually has a pretty neat history and involves some really tasty food (well, tasty to us Persians -- I realize that dill rice and chickpea cookies might not sound that great to the rest of you).

More importantly, though, celebrating Nowruz makes me feel connected to the millions of other Iranians all over the world who are doing the same. Iranian immigrants are in a unique position in many ways -- we are members of a diaspora population and exiles who, in many cases, can't even return to our homeland for a visit. But we're exiles in more ways than one, because the Iran we would want to return to is the
one that existed before the Revolution. That country no longer exists, except in the memories of my parents' and grandparents' generations, and in the imaginations of young Iranians like me. There are dozens of message boards and listservs devoted to swapping stories and photographs of pre-Revolutionary Iran; a YouTube search would probably reveal hundreds of videos mourning the nation that was. The experience of exile, of loss, is seared into the psyche of every Iranian living abroad -- even those of us too young to have experienced the Revolution have absorbed it from our parents. We're all obsessed.

Most years on Nowruz, we turn on the Iranian TV station to watch the countdown, just like we do every year. They show footage of musical performances from the 1960s and 70s, when my parents were young. My father pretends not to be affected, but my mother sits weeping on the couch, wiping her eyes with a balled up Kleenex as my sister and I try to comfort her. Eventually, we start crying too, though we don't know exactly why. I left Iran when I was three; my sister was born here. We are more American than we are Iranian. So I always wonder what, exactly, we're mourning. How can you grieve the loss of something you never had? But then, maybe that's what we're crying about. My mother, for all the trauma she experienced during and after the Revolution, once had Iran; my sister and I never had it at all.

One final word: last June, the world watched as millions of people in Iran took to the streets to risk their lives in the cause of freedom. Well, the world has pretty much stopped watching, but the members of the Green Movement pressed on nonetheless. This week, people all over Tehran defied the government's ban on public Nowruz celebrations by setting off firecrackers and creating bonfires in the streets (the mullahs apparently consider Nowruz un-Islamic -- like Grinches who stole Nowruz, their hearts are two sizes two small). The bravery of the Green Movement has given those of us in the diaspora hope that we will see a free Iran in our lifetimes. That makes this Nowruz different from any we've had before.

Dining Out with My Parents (Or: Why I Am Constantly Apologizing to Waiters)

2009-10-27T21:44:00.000-07:00

Dining out with my parents is nothing if not an adventure. This is because, of all the finicky, high-maintenance diners ever to darken the doorstep of an American eating establishment, my parents are the absolute worst. I'm telling you, these people would give the fussiest, most Macrobiotic diet-obsessed celebrity diva a run for her money

First, there's the issue of deciding where to eat, which in my family often entails the kind of complex, delicate negotiations usually reserved for Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. My mother likes ethnic food -- the cheaper and spicier, the better. My father likes big chains with "nice" (read: generic) ambience and at least one "healthy" dish on the menu (never mind that, after polishing off his Grilled Salmon with Steamed Vegetables, he usually eats everyone else's french fries). I tend to side with Mom; my sister with Dad. My husband, bless him, tries to remain neutral. By the time we decide where to eat, everyone's mad at each other and half the restaurants in town are already closed.

Then there's the fact that, having lived in the suburbs for over twenty years now, both of my parents expect every restaurant to feature enormous portions at wallet-friendly prices. The actual quality of the food is apparently secondary. So, for intance, when we recently ate at a French restaurant with an a la carte menu, they weren't too pleased. ("What do you mean, the potatoes don't come with it?" my mother said, looking at the waiter in shock as he explained that the side dishes would be extra. It was as if he'd told her that her meal didn't come with a plate under it.)

My parents, should they read this, will no doubt reprimand me for making them sound like complete philistines. They will remind me that, in those halcyon days of their youth, when Mohammad Reza Shah was still in power in Iran, they ate at all of Tehran's finest restaurants. "We ate caviar like it was candy," my mother will say. "Have you ever done that?" But that was then, and this is now. Decades of dining at the Cheesecake Factory and the Macaroni Grill have taken their toll.

But that's not all. I mean, if Mom and Dad were just your typical, chain-worshipping suburbanites, that would be fine. Totally manageable. I like the Cheesecake Factory myself. The really trying thing about dining out with them is the way they treat the waitstaff like serfs. I'm not kidding. Basically, they act as if they're pre-revolutionary French aristocrats and the servers are lowly peasants scurrying out of the way of their gold-encrusted carriage.

My mom's M.O. is to order a dish, eat the entire thing (we're talking not a crumb left on the plate), and only then tell the waiter that the food "tasted bad" and she doesn't want to pay for it. I've sat in countless restaurants with her, listening to annoyed managers explain that you can't send food back once you've eaten all of it. (Of course, they don't know who they're dealing with. My mother is a master of the old broken-record tactic: she'll reiterate her demands, again and again, until you just can't take it anymore. She always, always wins.)

Then there's my father. When I was a kid, I thought of him as The Good One when it came to restaurants. He was quiet and polite, and he never sent his food back. Then -- and I don't remember when exactly it started to happen -- he began to change. Maybe it was my mother's influence, or maybe he just became crankier and more demanding with age. All I know is that he now seems to pride himself on extracting every ounce of energy from the poor sap whose misfortune it is to be waiting on us that evening. His schtick is a bit more subtle and complicated than my mother's. It goes something like this:

Waiter: Will there be anything else, sir?

Dad: Yes, actually, can I have a glass of water as well?

Waiter [returning with water]: Here you go.

Dad: Thank you. Also, could I please have a napkin?

Waiter [returning with napkin]: Here's your napkin, sir.

Dad: Ah,yes. Thanks. But before you go, could I also have a fork?

Waiter [returning with fork]: Anything else?

Dad: Now that you mention it, I could use an extra plate.

Etc., etc.

As you can see, the object of the game appears to be to have to waiter make as many trips to and from the table as possible. The obvious question, though, is why? Is it just a power trip? Does he like to see people really earning their tips? Is he only able to hold one request in his mind at a time? What? I once asked him about it, but he couldn't give me an answer, and what's more, he appeared to find the question offensive.

"I'm paying for dinner," he said snippily, "so I can order however I want."

The implication being that it was rude and ungrateful of me to question the food-ordering etiquette of the hand that fed me. Or something like that.

Needless to say, I find my parents' restaurant shenanegans a little embarassing. Eating out with them typically entails lots of squirming in my seat and wishing that the ground would open up and swallow me already. I give servers apologetic looks, looks that I hope say, "It's not my fault -- please don't spit in my food!" I over-praise the food, and I thank them profusely when they bring me water or napkins. Also, as much as possible, I try to steer my parents toward Iranian restaurants (where the servers are generally so rude themselves that my parents' behavior seems downright polite by comparison) or else toward eating in.

In the end, though, I guess I'll just have to accept this as one of my family's many quirks. I mean, my parents aren't going to change, nor are they going to stop eating out. So my choices are to A) disown them, or B) deal with it. Since they're pretty nice otherwise and give really good Christmas presents, I've chosen, for the time being, to go with B.

I will tell you this, however: If you happen to work at a restaurant, and a Middle Eastern couple in their early 50s walks in and starts muttering about the prices or asking for extra silverware one piece at a time -- I highly suggest that you put down your notepad, take off your apron and run.

Moving Out

2009-09-19T02:34:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, the hubby and I decided that the time had come to move out of my parents' house. Our initial plan had been to stay until January, but it turned out that we had overlooked several very important factors, including: a) the degree to which my nutty Persian family (complete with a never-ending stream of visiting relatives) would annoy my American husband, and b) the degree to which my husband and I would annoy each other when forced to live together in a single room.

Things came to a head one afternoon in late August, when what would normally have been a casual bickering match over who had misplaced the cell phone charger somehow turned into an enormous, potentially marriage-ending fight that culminated in one of us (I won't say who, but he's the one with a Y chromosome) flinging a porcelain bowl full of spaghetti and meatballs onto the white-carpeted bedroom floor.

It was afterward, while picking cold strands of spaghetti off the carpet, that we turned to each other and simultaneously said, "We need to get the hell out of here." We had no money, of course, but our options were basically to a) kill each other, b) get a divorce or c) move out.
I'm not a violent person, and I wasn't too keen on the idea of becoming a 28-year-old divorcee either -- I felt I was still too young to start wearing a maribou-trimmed dressing gowns and drinking martinis at three in the afternoon. (That, by the way, is the image that automatically pops into my head anytime I hear the word "divorcee." And it actually looks fun. But, like I said, I'm not ready for it just yet. Maybe in a few years.)

So anyway. Thanks to a cash infusion from my in-laws, we were able to start looking for an apartment almost immediately. My parents were upset, of course -- they love nothing more than constant family togetherness, and their reaction to most separations is reminiscent of that scene in My Big Fat Greek Wedding where the father, faced with the prospect of his daughter taking classes at the local community college, begins to weep, shrieking, "Why you want to leave me?!"

In this case however, it took only one mention of the Great Spaghetti-Throwing Incident of 2009 to convince my parents that the move was necessary.

"Maybe you're right," my father said gingerly. "You guys do seem a little...tense."

"And we can help you decorate your new place!" my mother added, with that little gleam she gets in her eye whenever she spots an excuse to buy me stuff.

And so my husband and I set out to find ourselves a little home in the big city. We looked at apartments large and small, nice and not-so-nice, bargain-priced and beyond-our-means. My husband, as is his wont, approached things in an impressively pragmatic and methodical way -- walking slowly around each apartment, inspecting the closets, testing the taps, asking all kinds of intelligent questions about parking, laundry and security deposits. Meanwhile, I spent all my time wandering aimlessly through the various living rooms and kitchens of our potential future homes, trying to decide whether each apartment fulfilled my one and only criterion, which was: Is this apartment conducive to imagining oneself as a glamorous character from some old movie?

It's like when I was a kid and my mom would take me shopping at Macy's or Robinson's. As soon as she turned around, I would run to the china department, find a tea set, and start playing Tea Party. After searching the entire store in a panic, she would find me making small talk with imaginary English ladies while pouring nonexistent tea into seventy-five-dollar Lenox teacups.

"Don't you ever go off like that again!" she would say, her eyes filling with tears (whether of relief or of rage, I'll never know -- though I suspect it was both).

"Mommy, meet Mrs. Pringlebottom," I would reply, gesturing to my right. "She is very good friends with the Queen."

I guess I haven't changed that much over the years, because most of the apartment-viewing sessions my husband and I went on unfolded something like this:

Husband (to the landlord): Okay, so the apartment has one parking space and nearby street parking. Sounds good. Is there laundry in the build--

Me: Honey! Look -- we can buy a vintage bar cart to put in that nook there, and that way if we have a party, we can roll it out and make everyone Manhattans!

Husband: Mmmmm. That's great, sweetie. But let's discuss that after I ask about the laundry, shall we?

Me: Laundry. Of course. Right.

Husband (turning back to the landlord): So anyway, is there laundry in the build --

Me: Oh, look honey! Look at the little dressing room. It's soooo cute! We can put lights all around the mirror, just like in the movies!

Husband: (Sigh of resignation.) That's nice, honey.

Eventually, we found a place we both liked, in a good neighborhood, for an astonishingly reasonable price. And while it doesn't have laundry in the building, it does have hardwood floors, a charmingly retro-looking kitchen, and an adorable ironing board that comes down out of the wall, just like Lucy Ricardo's. We moved in last week. I am, as you can imagine, in absolute heaven.

Now the only question remaining is what I should do with this blog. The original idea was to write about moving back home as an adult, and I was worried at first that I wouldn't have anything to write about once I moved out. Luckily, I don't think that'll end up being the case. For one thing, my family is still, and will forever be, way too involved in my life. For another, I'm still unemployed -- a misfortune that luckily provides me with plenty to write about. Plus, I really, really want to keep writing. I've enjoyed this little blog immensely, and I hope you have too.

Of course, if my family suddenly becomes normal and I manage to win the lottery, I might not have much left to talk about. But, for the foreseeable future at least, you can count on me to remain Stuck in the Safety Net.

2009-09-02T13:48:00.000-07:00

Unemployment can be depressing. I try to keep myself busy, but one can only spend so many hours searching Craigslist and emailing resumes. Then there's the novel I'm planning to write -- I keep meaning to start it, but it's hard to concentrate on writing when my financial future is so uncertain.So there are days when I just rattle around the house, eating Cheerios out of the box and wallowing in self-pity.

These are the kinds of days on which I watch old movies.

The thing about me is this: I have an old lady's taste in entertainment. Some people watch reality TV or prime-time drams to unwind; I prefer British sitcoms and classic films of the 1930s and 40s. (I'm like an old lady in other ways too -- for instance, I drink tea, love cats, and know the words to all the jazz standards.)

You can make fun of me if you like, but old movies are seriously underrated. The costumes are more glamorous, the dialogue wittier and the actors more attractive than in any contemporary film. And you rarely have to worry about seeing anything too scary or disturbing (which is good, because I really, really hate stuff that's scary and disturbing). The world of old movies is nothing if not safe and cozy.

Perhaps you're getting ready to point out that this "coziness" came at a price: a heck of a lot of old movies ignored or even perpetuated racism, sexism and other evils. That's true in some cases, but not all. Besides, modern-day films can be offensive too (just think of Bruno, House Bunny, and anything featuring Queen Latifah as the "sassy" black lady). And they don't provide the consolation of seeing glamorous people flit about in evening gowns, swilling martinis and engaging in witty repartee.

Also, I find that there's an old movie to suit almost any of my moods. If I want to have a good cry, there's Random Harvest. If I want to laugh, there's My Favorite Wife or Bringing Up Baby. And if I'm having a really bad day, I might watch a cheery little musical like White Christmas or Meet Me in St. Louis.

One side effect of all this classic movie viewing is that I've gained a wealth of pop culture knowledge that's of no use to me whatsoever unless I decide to participate in trivia night at a local nursing home. For instance, did you know that William Powell and Myrna Loy made fourteen movies together? Or that Tyrone Power died of a heart attack at age 44? I'll bet you didn't. (And I'll bet you didn't care either. But whatever.)

I wonder if, by the time I'm an old lady (and living in Florida with three of my best friends, just like the Golden Girls) overly romantic young women like myself will be mooning over the likes of Cameron Diaz and Matthew McConaughey? Will they sigh in front of their TV sets (or whatever they'll be watching in the future) and say, "That Kim Kardashian -- now she had class. They don't make 'em like her anymore"?

I somehow doubt it.

But anyway. In celebration of my obsession with old movies (and the fact that I just figured out how to include video content in my posts), I present you with the following video, which I recently found on YouTube. It's a tribute to the my favorite fictional couple of all time: Nick and Nora Charles from the Thin Man movies. They are at once incredibly sophisticated and incredibly funny, and I'm completely obsessed with them.

And stay tuned for my next post, which will be about my (crazy-making) search for a new (affordable, non-cockroach-infested) apartment in L.A.

Get Rich Quick

2009-08-23T20:47:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry to report that I have no great money-making ideas. I have no ingenious inventions up my sleeve, no plans for the next great dot-com -- no brilliant schemes of any kind. The few talents I do possess (the ability to hyper-extend my legs, for instance, or a knack for finding really good deals on the clearance rack at Bloomingdale's) are not likely to prove lucrative.

This is okay with me. For the most part, I like being a worker bee. There's coffee to drink, coworkers to talk to, and the comfort of a concrete reason to get out of bed in the morning. Plus, what I really want to do is work for a legal aid clinic or other liberal nonprofit. An environmental organization, or a civil rights organization. Obviously, those are not lucrative places to work.

Like I said, I'm okay with this. And, despite the fact that I wholeheartedly believed as a child that I would be an Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist/Secretary of State by the time I was thirty, I'm learning to come to terms with being a fairly regular Jane.

But my mother, bless her little heart -- she never stops hoping. A hard-working government employee herself, her most cherished dream is that one of her children will Get Rich Quick. She's always telling us stories about average Joes (or Janes) who came up with brilliant business ideas and became millionaires overnight.

I think this obsession comes, in large part, from the fact that my parents are immigrants. They were raised in upper middle class families in Iran -- families who had servants, who shopped at the toniest boutiques, who took frequent trips to Europe.

Then we came to the U.S. Now, from what I understand, those Iranians who emigrated (and thus got their money out of Iran) before the Revolution were generally okay. But we came in 1984, by which time the value of the riyal had plummeted to, like, one cent or something. And so, like many a post-war British aristocrat, we lived in "reduced circumstances." In our case, this meant a series of apartments with ugly brown carpet and cottage cheese ceilings. It meant shopping at Marshall's instead of a nice department store. It meant not having a Lite Bright or a Barbie Dream House. It meant that my parents always looked tired -- tired and worried.

Things did eventually get better. My dad, an architect, moved up at his firm. My mom, who trained as a lawyer in Iran but couldn't practice here, went back to school to become a marriage and family therapist. We upgraded to a condo, and then a small house in Northridge, and finally -- jackpot! -- a McMansion in the suburbs. (Though my parents recently moved back to the Valley to be closer to my dad's job -- which my mom claims brings back bad memories. She literally shudders when she goes anywhere near that old apartment complex.)

So. Hence my mother's obsession with my finances. She learned the hard way that money is security, and she doesn't understand how I can live my life without regard to this very basic fact.

It doesn't help that my father loves to talk about the fabulously wealthy. He follows their doings with fascination. If Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous were still on TV, he would be its number one fan. So, as you can imagine, my parents together are a dangerous combination. A typical conversation goes something like this:

"Do you know my friend So-and-So's cousin So-and-So?" my father says. "The one who was here last weekend? The tall one with the purple shirt?"

"No," I reply.

"He owns a big mansion out in Malibu," he says. (Except that, with my father's accent, it sounds more like, "He owns a beeg man-choon out in Mal-ee-boo.")

"That's interesting," I say.

"Ten acres, with a pool and stables."

"Mmmhmmm."

"And a tennis court."

"How nice."

"He drives a Bentley."

"Good for him."

"And once a year, he and his wife take their yacht out on the Mediterranean."

"Great."

"You know, he owns a garlic factory downtown. That's how he made his money."

"Right."

This is where my mother jumps in."You know," she says, "A lot of people get rich by starting their own business."

This is my cue to attempt a change of subject. I start talking about the average yearly rainfall in South America, or the mating habits of the duck-billed platypus. Anything to distract her. But, alas, it never works.

"Why don't you and your sister start your own business?" she says.

Oh, God. Here we go again. "Like what?" I ask with a sigh of resignation.

She thinks for a moment. "How about a makeup line with all kinds of different, glittery colors?"

"You mean like Hard Candy?"

"Exactly! You know, that was started by two Iranian girls."

"You want us to do that?"

"Why not?"

"Well, for one thing," I say, "someone's already done it."

"Oh -- right," she says, crestfallen. "Right."

Then, a minute later: "How about an internet company? You could sell books online!"

"You mean like Amazon?"

"Oh...right. Amazon. I guess they're already doing the online book thing."

"Yeah, Mom. They are."

For a moment, we're all silent.

"Well," my mom finally says in a bright tone. "I'm sure you'll think of something!"

It reminds me of that South Park episode where the kids discover that tiny gnomes are stealing Tweek's underpants in the middle of the night. When confronted, the gnomes explain that they are businessmen of sorts. Their business plan is as follows:

Phase 1: Collect Underpants

Phase 2: ????

Phase 3: Profit!

This appears to be my mother's undertsanding of business as well. You start some kind of company -- it doesn't matter what -- and poof! Suddenly, you're a millionaire.

If only it were that easy, Mom. I'd be lying on a beach somewhere sipping a daquiri -- or, better yet, sitting in some fabulous New York apartment -- instead of living with you. But if I ever do have a great idea, one I can patent or trade on the stock market, you'll be the first to know. Until then, I'm about as close to making my first million as the Underwear Gnomes were.

But it could be worse. I mean, at least I didn't kill Kenny.

Mr. Barkley Poo-Poo Face

2009-08-03T19:53:00.000-07:00

I've written before about the fact that my parents aren't exactly animal people. Though we begged and pleaded for years when we were kids, my sister and I were never able to convince them to get us a cat or a dog.

Moreover, the pets we did manage to obtain didn't fare very well. There was the small turtle they accidentally killed by leaving it too little water when we went on vacation (I was four; they told me it ran away), and the parakeet my grandfather found belly-up on the floor of the cage one morning (I was six; they told me it he had gotten married and "gone to live with his wife"). In retrospect, it's probably a good thing we didn't get a cat or dog, given that my parents were unable to learn even the most rudimentary facts about pet care.

Then there was Simba, the cat my husband and I had for years, until he died of kidney disease this March. He was the sweetest cat I'd ever met, and in the six years I lived with him, he never once bit or scratched anyone. And yet, my mother lived in mortal fear of him. Whenever she visited our apartment, an absurd game of musical chairs would take place in the living room: she would sit down, Simba would approach her to say hello, she would jump up and change seats, Simba would approach again, she would change seats once more, and so forth. You get the picture.

So when my younger sister, who graduated from college two months ago, moved back home and announced that she wanted a dog, I wasn't exactly surprised to see my parents resisting. A dog would be too much responsibility, they said. It would bark, it would have fleas, and it would make the house smell bad. God forbid, it might even soil their Persian rugs. In short, a dog was out of the question.

Then, one day, my sister came home with the 1.5-pound Yorkie puppy she would later name Barkley. [Full disclosure here: She purchased this dog from a breeder rather than adopting from an animal shelter. And yes, I urged her to adopt. Many, many times.]

Anyway, my parents apparently took one look at his beady little eyes and melted.

Actually, that's not true...it was more gradual than that. It took about a day for Barkley to work his charm on my mother, and about a week after that for my dad to warm up to him. But it was stunning nonetheless.

I'll never forget the morning I walked into the living room and found my mother standing over Barkley, clapping and chanting "Hey, Mr. Barkley, Barkley, Barkley/Hey, Mr. Barkley," as if she were a cheerleader and Barkley the star quarterback. Or the night my husband and I came home from dinner to see my father cradling Barkley in his arms and cooing.

"Are we in the right house?" my husband asked, his eyes wide. I was too flabbergasted to reply.

Fast forward a month. Despite my family's somewhat dark history with pets, Barkley appears to be thriving (he had a few frightening run-ins with hypoglycemia, to which Yorkies are highly susceptible, but he's recovered nicely). He spends his days napping in the playpen my sister bought him from Babies R Us, and his evenings racing wildly around the living room, attacking his toys, my grandpa's slippers, and the feet of anyone foolish enough to tempt him with bare toes.

What's more, everyone adores Barkley, and he's even accumulated quite the little collection of nicknames. For instance, my husband calls him "Barkminster Fuller," while my father prefers "Boogandoo," which is the Farsi equivalent of "Stinky."

But my mother has the best nickname of all. Always a fan of scatalogical humor, she has taken to calling him, "Mr. Barkley Poo-Poo Face." She's even worked it into his little theme song: "Hey, Mr. Barkley, Barkley, Barkley/Hey, Mr. Barkley, Poo-Poo Face!"

A star quarterback couldn't ask for more.

Three things I've learned about my parents since moving in with them.

2009-07-11T23:18:00.000-07:00

1. My mother believes that sashimi is supposed to come on top of rice.

Last week, she had sushi delivered from a nearby Japanese restaurant: spicy tuna rolls, miso soup and a jumbo sashimi platter. When my mother opened the styrofoam container of sashimi, she wrinkled her brow.

"Dees is wrong," she said.

"What is?" we asked.

"It's supposed to be on top of rice! This is just raw fish!"

The rest of us exchanged glances. "Mom," I said gently, "Sashimi doesn't come with rice. And it's supposed to be raw."

"But when I order it, it always has rice. This is just fish."

"Maybe you're thinking of nigiri?" my sister said. "Or chirashi?"

"I know what sashimi is," my mother insisted. "It has rice."

"No, it doesn't," we said.

"It does."

"It doesn't."

"It does!"

Poor Mom -- she was so disappointed. She sulked in silence for the rest of the meal, only piping up every now and again to insist that sashimi always comes on top of rice. But I could hear the doubt starting creeping into her voice, and at the end of the meal, she turned to me and said, "Are you sure sashimi doesn't have rice?"

I patted her on the shoulder. "Yeah," I said, "I'm pretty sure."

2. My father loves his Persian rugs even more than I knew.

So my sister moved home from UC Irvine a few weeks ago, and she's getting a Yorkie. My parents promised her that, if she came home instead of getting a job and staying in Irvine, she could have a dog.

Now, when we were little, we spent countless days, months, and years begging for a pet, but my parents think animals are dirty, and they flatly refused. But, apparently, they really, really wanted my sister to move back home after college.

Anyway, my sister did agree to move in, mostly to save money. And I think that, for a while, Mom and Dad were hoping she'd forget about the whole dog thing. But, of course, she didn't. Much to their dismay, she started searching the web for Yorkie breeders the very day she got home.

Still, as the weeks went by, my mother started warming up to the idea a bit. She even looked at the photos the breeder emailed to my sister and said they were "kind of cute."

My father, on the other hand, seems to really regret his promise. He's been particularly worried about the Persian rugs that my parents have in each room of the house. And then, last week, my sister's boyfriend told me this story:

They were sitting in the living room talking about potential dog names, when my father turned to them with a pained look on his face.

"Is this puppy going to poop?" he asked.

"Of course it's going to poop," my sister said. "All animals poop."

"But what about the rugs?"

"Yeah...I've been meaning to talk to you about that. Maybe you should roll them up for a while."

My father looked at her sadly. "But I want to live," he said.

Apparently, to my father, life without his Persian rugs is empty and meaningless. It may be existing, but it's not living.

3. We may be different, but we all like the same TV.

One of the nicest things about moving home has been piling onto the big, cushy living room couches at the end of the day and watching back-to-back reruns of Will & Grace, Frasier and Sex and the City. Apparently, my parents and I have the same taste in TV.

In this great, big, scary world, it's nice to sit with my family, drinking Persian tea and chuckling at Jack and Karen's antics, at Frasier's snobbery, at Charlotte York's bad dates. It's one of things I'll miss the most when my husband and I finally move out of here.

Someone once gave me a greeting card with a quote from Erma Bombeck on it. I found it the other day while digging through a box of old stuff from high school. I've never read anything by Erma Bombeck. but the quote is really lovely:

"The family. We were a strange little band of characters trudging through life sharing diseases and toothpaste, coveting one another's desserts, hiding shampoo, borrowing money, locking each other out of our rooms, inflicting pain and kissing to heal it in the same instant, loving, laughing, defending, and trying to figure out the common thread that bound us all together."

Father's Day, A Diary

2009-06-28T18:07:00.000-07:00

10 a.m. I'm back in high school. It's the day of my Algebra II final, except I somehow forgot we had a final until today, so I didn't study. And now I'm running late. Plus, I can't find the room the test is in. For some reason, they're not holding it in our regular classroom. I'm going to miss it. I'll fail the class. I won't get into college. I'll end up homeless! And...wait. Why is everyone looking at me funny? Am I....no. No! Am I wearing pajamas? How could I be wearing pajamas? This is bad. This is very bad. And now someone is shaking me. Who is that? I'm trying to find the Algebra II final here....

"Honey," my husband croaks from his side of the bed. "Get up. We slept in."

Oh. I was having the math test dream again. I hate that dream.

"Get up. We're going to be late. It's Father's Day."

Oh God, he's right. I sit bolt upright in bed. Oh, my God. It's Father's Day. Shit. Shit shit shit. I look at the clock radio. It's already ten.

"What time are the reservations?" I ask.

"Eleven, I think. But it'll take at least twenty minutes to get there."

I take a deep breath. It's ok. I can do this. I can totally do this, if I can just force myself to get out of bed.

"I'm mad at you, by the way," I growl at as I crawl out from under the covers and feeling like I'm being ripped from the womb. (Not that I remember what that feels like. But you know what I mean.)

"What? Why?"

"Because you made me stay up late."

It's true. It's all his fault. He made me stay up watching back-to-back episodes of Freaks and Geeks, which we discovered a few weeks ago on DVD. It was fun at the time, but now I hate him.

10:05 a.m. I look in the mirror and stifle a scream. What was that line I heard in a movie once? Oh, yeah: "She looks like ten miles of bad road."

I lie down on the couch and slap on the gel-filled eyemask I keep in the fridge for occasions just like this. I'll just sit here for a minute with my eyes closed. The eyemask feels so nice and cool. Just a minute, maybe two. Then I'll get ready.

10:30 a.m. My twenty-one year old sister flounces into the living room looking immaculately groomed, her dark hair glossy and straightened, her eye makeup perfect. She stops in her tracks when she sees me.

"What are you doing?"

"Hmm?"

"We have to leave in ten minutes. We have a reservation, remember? It's Father's Day."

"Oh, shit." I jump off the couch. I had completely forgotten it was Father's Day. I'm a bad daughter. I'm a bad daughter and I look like a puffy-eyed troll. "Okay. I'll get ready."

"What are you, hung over or something?"

"No. I'm just tired. I stayed up last night -- "

"Never mind," she cuts me off. "I don't need to know." She has that "ew, gross" expression on her face, the one she gets whenever she thinks I'm about to share something about my sex life.

"Not because of that, I was just up -- "

"Whatever," she says. "Just get ready." She gives me a withering look, then flounces out, leaving a trail of Juicy Couture perfume in her wake.

11:00 a.m. Because I am late, my family has decided to drive to the restaurant in two cars. Car one will contain my mom, my sister, her boyfriend and my grandfather. Car two will consist of my dad, my husband and me.

"I won't be long," I tell my dad. "And, um, happy Father's Day!"

11:15 a.m. I'm having a wardrobe crisis. Not only am I a puffy-eyed troll, I'm a fat puffy-eyed troll. I need to go shopping. I need to lose weight. Maybe I'll stop eating altogether.

My husband pleads with me. "Just wear something. Anything. Let's just go."

I finally pull on a sundress and some high-heeled sandals, and we sprint for the door.

On the way to the restaurant, I suddenly feel incredibly guilty. How could I be such a brat on Father's Day? This day isn't about me. It's about my poor, generous, hard-working Dad. I feel terrible.

"Dad?" I say sheepishly from the back seat.

"Yes?"

"Sorry."

"That's ok," he says with a big, fake smile.

12:00 p.m. We arrive the San Antonio Winery, a historic L.A. restaurant located near downtown. My mother made the reservations a few days ago. But I can tell from the moment we drive up that my dad isn't going to like it.

The thing is, my parents are both gigantic snobs. They grew up in Iran, which before the Revolution had a pretty stratified social system. Both their families were upper middle class, which meant they wore designer clothes from Europe, ate at lots of nice restaurants, and had numerous servants at their beck and call. Yes, the life of the bourgeoisie was pretty darn good.

Once they came to America, they settled in a suburb of Los Angeles, one with wide avenues, nicely landscaped shopping centers, a Barnes & Noble, and numerous chain restaurants.
The end result is that, when it comes to restaurants, my parents are too unhip and suburban to know where the really great restaurants in the city are, but too apallingly snobby to be okay rubbing elbows with the unwashed masses. Their favorite restaurants are The Cheesecake Factory and any overdecorated, overpriced place that calls itself a "bistro."

And yet, every once in a while, my mom decides to be "adventurous" and drive us all to a hole-in-the-wall Chinese restaurant in Monterey Park, or a divey taqueria in Koreatown. The rest of us tend to like these outings, but my father is invariably horrified.

As we drive up to the San Antonio Winery, I can tell this time is going to be no different. It's located in Northeast L.A., for one. And it's way too casual to pass muster as a "special occasion" restaurant in my dad's eyes. I can already see him glaring at some of the other patrons, who are standing outside in shorts and flip-flops.

12:15 p.m. We're being seated in the dining room, and my father looks like he just sucked on a lemon.

"What's wrong?" my mom asks, her radar going off.

"Nothing," he says.

"You don't like it."

"No, it's....great." He's not doing a very convincing acting job.

"I thought it would be fun. Something different."

"Mmmmhmmm."

My sister and I trade a look. "So what is everyone having?" she says brightly. "The salmon looks good."

But Mom is too quick for us. "What? You guys don't like it either?"

"No!" we say. "We love it. It's great."

"Then what was that look?"

"What look?" we say. "There wasn't a look."

She turns to my sister. "You had a look," she says accusingly. And I have to admit, I'm a little relieved, because I know that I've been spared this time, that my sister has been chosen as the whipping boy.

12:45 p.m. We have our food now, and we're eating in near-silence. My mom and sister are both scowling. My sister's boyfriend, who's relatively new to the family, looks shell-shocked. My father's lips are still pursed, and my husband practically has a little thought bubble coming out of his head that reads, "I should have married an orphan."

Then I see my grandpa. Here's three things you need to know about my grandpa: (1) He's the cutest little old man in the history of the world. And it's not just me who thinks so. You can ask anyone who's met him; (2) it doesn't take much to make him happy; and (3) he speaks very little English.

He looks up at me from the big piece of French bread he's buttering and grins. "I can eat butter today," he says in Farsi, "because it's a special occasion."

2 p.m. Back at home, things are still tense and quiet. Now, not only are we all pissed, but we're all nursing midday champagne hangovers as well. Everyone has retreated to their various corners of the house -- my father to the living room to watch a nature documentary, my mother to the master bedroom to read, and my sister to her bedroom, no doubt to complain to her friends via text message (I can see it now: "OMG my family sucks they are driving me crazy how about you?").

And yet, there's Grandpa, sitting at the kitchen table, breaking open the bottle of Scotch I bought him for Father's Day.

"That was great," he says. "We should all go out more often."

Watching from Afar

2009-06-21T20:12:00.000-07:00

Later this week, I'll be posting about Father's Day (which was an ordeal, let me tell you). But it's been hard to find time to write lately. In part, I've been blaming it on the fact that I'm studying for the bar exam. But another big part of it is that I've been glued to CNN, YouTube and, most of all, Twitter, for news on the Iranian uprising.

It's funny, because in general, my Iranian identity isn't particularly strong. In a city with the largest Iranian population outside of Iran, I have somehow managed not to have any Iranian friends. My husband is American. And while I speak Farsi, I can't read or write it (so you can imagine how good my grammar is!). I've been to Iran twice, but I was young at the time -- 11 the first time, 13 the second. Aside from eating Iranian food and occasionally listening to Iranian music, I'm pretty much American.

So I think it's interesting that when I see the protesters in Iran getting beaten up on, it affects me emotionally in a way that seeing even the most horrific images from elsewhere does not. I guess that's not so unusual -- the protesters look like me, like my little sister, my cousins, my parents. And I guess, as a human being, I'm hard-wired to feel more empathy for my own tribe. It's just that I tend to forget about my ethnic identity, lying dormant as it usually does, so finding that it's actually so strong has been something of a surprise.

It's also interesting, for once, to watch American television and be able to feel proud of my background. I mean, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad hasn't been the best PR for my peeps, you know? And even before him, what were the images most Americans saw? People in black beating their chests and chanting "death to America." The 1979 hostage crisis. The Ayatollah. That awful Sally Fields movie.

Iranian-Americans have long complained that these images fail to capture the real Iran, in all its modernity, diversity and contradiction. Why, we have lamented, is the media so intent on convincing people that Iranians are a bunch of religious zealots living in some primitive desert nation? Why don't Americans know that Iran has beaches, rain forests and ski resorts? Why don't they ever show the normal people there, the ones who go to work in suits, who wear jeans on the weekends, who text message on their iPhones and watch "The Sopranos" on satellite TV? I think that one major reason there have been so many novels and memoirs written in the past few years by Iranians is that we all feel this burning desire to explain ourselves as a people, to let the English-speaking world know that we're not all that bad.

Well, we've finally gotten our wish, even if the circumstances are awful. For days now, the world has been watching attractive young Iranians in jeans and hip t-shirts, giving the cameras the "peace" sign and using technology to fight for their freedom. It could almost be an Apple commercial.

Hmm. Now I feel guilty for having written that. Who am I to sit here, six thousand miles away, trivializing this while the streets of Tehran run with blood? Uprisings are not pretty or romantic. They're not like Les Miserables (one of my favorite books, and the one I always think of whenever I hear about an uprising or revolution anywhere). I know that. And yet, I find it impossible not to romanticize this one just a little bit, to feel awed and strangely thrilled by the heroism of all those people, so many of them young, and all of them somehow mine, somehow like me. My people.

I'm not going to write much more about this now. But before I go, I'll link to some of my favorite web coverage of the protests, in case anyone's interested:

Andrew Sullivan has pretty much devoted his entire blog, The Daily Dish, to covering the events in Iran. In addition to analysis, he has lots of written first-person accounts, plus photos and video footage.

I hate to link to something so boringly mainstream, but CNN's iReport site has been a great source for photos and footage from Iran.

I love Nico Pitney's blog, Live-blogging the Uprising, which is on The Huffington Post. He has lots of breaking news from Iran, plus analysis from places like the Carnegie Endowment.

If you don't already read the blog BoingBoing, you should! My friend Patrick turned me on to it, and now I'm hooked. They had an especially good post last week about how we can all use the Internet to help the Iranian protesters.

Okay. Later this week, I'll post something light, bright and sparkling about Father's Day. No more trite, angsty, pseudo-philosophical soul-searching. I promise!

Moving Day

2009-06-06T01:10:00.000-07:00

The day of our move was the culmination of a stressful week, during which my husband flew to Maryland to be at his father's bedside during emergency heart surgery, and I was left alone to pack up the apartment and worry. Packing was a daunting task because this wasn't just a regular move -- we were going to be squeezing our entire lives into one small, closetless bedroom of my parents' house. Everything else was going into storage. Eek.

Moving day was insane. There were seemingly thousands of odds and ends that were impossible to pack because they were neither here nor there -- pens and paper clips, hair clips and half-used shampoo, small plastic attachments to various mystery objects. Here's a conversation we had about a hundred times that day:

"Honey, what's this?"

"That? Hmmm. Good question. Oh! Maybe it's the clippy thing that goes with the iPod?"

"Which iPod?"

"The old one."

"Where should I put it?"

(Shrugs.)

"Where IS that iPod anyway?"

(Shrugs.)

"Okay, I'm just going to put this in that box with the printer paper and the half-used shampoo, okay?"

"Okay."

At six o'clock, we were finally done with the move. We were just subsiding onto the bed in our new bedroom/living room/office, weak with exhaustion and ready for a well-earned power nap, when my father came in.

Walking right over to my husband's side of the bed, he suggested, in all seriousness, that now might be a good time for my husband to mount a bike rack on the garage wall so that he could hang up his bike.

"Huh?"

"Eet eez taking up a lot of espace," my dad said in his thick Iranian accent. (An interesting note on Iranians -- they have trouble with certain consonant combinations, such that "space" becomes "espace" and "brush" becomes "berush." I've never figured out why this is, but it makes their accents really funny.) "You want me to do it right now?" my husband asked.

"Yes. If you can."

Now, note that this is a large house. With a large garage -- two cars' worth of large. Half of it houses my dad's car, but the other half is occupied by a mountain of crap: boxes, knick-knacks, old artwork, furniture that will never be used. By contrast, my husband's bike was taking up at most a one-by-five foot area. But clearly, for some reason, this was killing my father. Slowly sapping his will to live.

To be fair, we were taking up a bit more room than we had originally intended. My clothes, books and desk had ended up in one of the guest bedrooms, which I had convinced my mother to let me use as a study of sorts when we didn't have guests sleeping over (which, let's face it, would be most of the time).

"No problem, bacheh," she had said, using one of her many Farsi endearments for me, the equivalent of "kiddo" in English. But that was before she saw all the boxes piled high in the middle of her beautifully appointed guest room, shedding dust right onto the expensive Persian rug.

"It just looks like this because I haven't unpacked it all yet," I said, seeing the panic in her eyes.

"Of course!" she said. "Of course it does. Don't worry about it at all. It's fine. Everything's just fine."

"Are you sure?" I asked, eyeing the beads of sweat on her forehead.

"Of course!" she replied a little hysterically. "No problem!"

I'm not sure what she did after she left my room, but I kind of imagine her going back to her bedroom to pop a Xanax. Or sneaking into the liquor cabinet for a quick swig of vodka. Something like that.

But going back to the bike conversation...

"So, do you think you could move the bike?" my father asked.

I looked at my husband. He appeared to be speechless.

"Um, Dad?" I said. "Could he maybe do it later? We're both kind of tired right now."

"Well...okay," he replied reluctantly, the way a kidney patient might if asked to wait just a little longer for that transplant. He hovered for a second or two more, then seemed to give up, sensing that the battle was lost. He walked to the bedroom door and started closing it behind him.

At the last minute he turned around. "There are two boxes in there too," he said with one last, lingering, disapproving look. "Maybe you can move those into the storage unit tomorrow."

As the door clicked shut, my husband and I looked at each other, digesting our new reality. It was going to be a long, long stay.

--P

Eek! I live with my parents!

2009-06-01T19:56:00.000-07:00

Okay. Let's begin at the beginning...

Once upon a time, I went to law school, met a great guy, dated him, fell in love, got married, and graduated. In that order. He proceeded to work at a rewarding public interest job that barely covered his student loan payments, while I worked as a legal journalist and then as a public policy analyst (both jobs I loved, but not exactly lucrative).

All this time, my husband and I were slowly racking up a small mountain of credit card debt. You see, after rent, student loan payments, car loan payments, car insurance, and food, there wasn't much money left over for anything fun. So, little by little, we started charging things -- lunches with coworkers, drinks at the local bars, dinners out, clothes for me, a guitar for him, an iPhone for each of us. Before we knew it, we owed quite a chunk of change, and at interest rates that would make any reasonable person break into a cold sweat. We promptly cut up our credit cards (okay, we didn't actually cut them up, but we put them away) and vowed to become coupon cutting, brown bag lunch eating paragons of frugality.

But, for now, we were a bit overextended. So when I decided to change jobs, we realized that there was only one way we could afford to give me the breathing room I needed to look for something else. And that was to move in with my parents. That's right. You heard me. We decided to leave our adorable apartment in the adorable Los Feliz Village neighborhood of L.A. and move in with my parents. Who live in the San Fernando Valley, no less. (For anyone reading this who's not from L.A., the San Fernando Valley is the Valley, the one you saw in Mallrats and heard tell of in Clueless. It is not a cool place to live. But more on that later.)

This would have been a big enough decision if my family were your run-of-the-mill American clan, the kind where Mom bakes and Dad plays golf and no one gets all up in your beeswax. But my parents are Iranian-American. As such, they are warm, hospitable and make really great food. They're also loud, demanding and, it has to be said, more than a little nosy. Suffice it to say, they're not exactly like the people in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," but they're pretty close.

Now, before you tell me I'm a whiny, ungrateful brat who should be glad to have someplace to go when there are children starving in Africa (or, frankly, right here in the US of A), let me just say that I am actually extremely grateful. I know I'm lucky to have two living parents who have both the means and the kindness of heart to take me in. And I know that there is a bright side to moving back home -- in my case, a swimming pool, air conditioning, and my mother's Persian crispy rice.

And yet, I'm writing this blog. Why? For several reasons. First of all, I really need to vent, to as many people as possible, before I lose my mind. Also, I really like making our friends laugh (we need the validation, okay?) and I'm hoping to be able to do that from time to time. Finally, I've heard a lot of news stories lately about adult children moving back home (like the one in the New York Times that inspired the title of this blog) and I'm hoping that some of them will find the blog, introduce themselves, and proceed to commiserate with us.

So, in the coming days, weeks and months, I'll be regaling you, my cherished readers, with posts on a variety of fascinating topics, including:

1. My father's obsession with home security;
2. My mother's obsession with fish oil supplements;
3. Why Valley restaurants suck; and
4. How I accidentally broke the toilet in the guest bathroom.

This is going to be fun! So stay tuned...

Your Humble Servant,

--P