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I Am Cool Now Posts

It’s April now

I don’t know if I’m doing this right, but I would describe motherhood as being exhausted and in love – all the time. And I’ve always have a questionable relationship with time, but now I see it even more as an abstract concept. My child is growing, hesarta mashala, and my parents are, I don’t want to use the word withering, but their bodies are not able to keep up with the love and spirit they still have.

EDIT: I wrote this in April and never published it, because it was incomplete. But I’m publishing now (August) and picking a random April date to publish it.

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Uh, another update I guess

It’s January 18 already. My goodness. I think my previous post was pre-January 6. A simpler time? No. A complicated time. Now it’s just _more_ complicated.
Our neighbors used to have a blue line flag on their porch, and on January 8 I noticed it wasn’t up anymore. I originally thought they took it down because they realized it was potentially a hate symbol, or at least carried by people full of hate. But now I wonder if they took it down because they needed it for the rally!

If something happens to me suddenly, I need David to know I loved him deeply. Even though we’ve had several arguments these past couple weeks, I’m so lucky to have him. I still listen to love song lyrics and think of David. “Oh, this is love, love, love, love, precious love,” or “You want me, I want you, baby, My sugarboo, I’m levitating.”

Edit: I wrote this on January 18 and never published it, because it was incomplete. Publishing now.

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A New Year (2021)

Hi!

Last year I was so annoyed any time someone sad, “Happy New Year!” It wasn’t a happy one for me, and I understood the people who disliked the holiday season because it reminded them of loss.

This year I was very cautious about saying Happy New Year. Mostly because, as I read on twitter but can’t find the tweet, I think 2021 might show up to the party as as 2020 with a fake mustache.

But the important thing about New Years are that they are the closest thing we have as a way to remind ourselves to re-set. I actually have three New Years I get to celebrate:

The Gregorian New Year (January)
The Persian New Year (March – first day of Spring)
The Jewish New Year (September – Rosh Hashanah)

Up until 2021, I’ve only treated January as a potential re-set or a time to set goals. This is silly, we should be setting goals all the time. I should at least be setting them three times a year. So this is the year I set more goals. I’m going to set goals constantly.

Here are the goals for today in no order:

1) Write a blog post – CHECK
2) Edit 100 files for work – IN PROGRESS
3) Bike at least 30 minutes and do a CORE workout.
4) Love my baby – DUH THIS IS LIKE BREATHING
5) Move the bag of cookies away from my desk – NOT NOW I NEED TO EDIT 100 FILES TODAY, I NEED THE COOKIES

Oh one more thing! I was watching the garbage team empty our bin this morning (with baby, it’s not just a thing I do) and the garbage person hanging off the back of the truck WAS A LADY! YES! We made it, girls! This is not a role I had seen a woman in before. Maybe this will serve as a metaphor for women cleaning up our global mess in the coming year.

Also while emptying the dishwasher one of our plates broke, because my daughter likes to pull them out fast and I wasn’t fast enough getting it out of her hands. I hope this serves as a metaphor for ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

Have a good day.

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New Year Resolution: PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER

This year has been an interesting one, because it started bad and then got worse. I don’t want to list how we were fortunate this year, however, because the last time I wrote about being happy, my dad had a stroke. Am I saying I jinxed us? YES. YES I AM.
Did I cause the worldwide pandemic with that post? No. I’m not a crazy person.

It’s been over a year since my dad had his stroke, and I have learned some things that I want people to know:

1) Get Power of Attorney over your parents while they’re still of sound mind. It’ll make things a lot easier.
2) Find out your parents’s email passwords and phone passwords. When people are in a hospital, and you need to log in to check on the payment status of a bill, double authentication is going to be a nightmare without these things.
3) Medicare is fine, but Medicare Supplemental is necessary and you should get a quality plan while still healthy.
4) Doctors are just guessing a lot of time.

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More Words

She can say “Dada” and “Baba.” “Baba” is Farsi for “Dad.”

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Her First Word

Her first word was really “no.” She says “Na na na na” and waves you off to reject whatever you have offered her that she does not care for. She started this around 10-11 months.

Her second word is “duck.” She whispers it once and does not repeat it. We only know this because we have independently experienced this phenomenon at 14 months and one week.

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It’s November 2020

Hello! It’s November 2020. On October 31st, I did not reach my goal of biking 150 miles in October. I was 15.3 miles short of 150 or something. I was so mad at myself. I vowed to make November better. I vowed to make progress toward an improved me, in November. I also thought, “You don’t care about biking. Who cares if you did not bike 150 miles? But you know what you care about? Writing. You care so much about writing. So you know what your November goal needs to be? To write EVERY DAY. EVERY SINGLE DAY.” These are the thoughts I had on October 31st.

Today is November 2nd, I did not write yesterday. I also did not exercise yesterday.

But I’m here now. Writing.

Writing is a little tricky, because the last time I wrote about being happy, things took a turn for the worse the next day.

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A Real Cookie Monster

I just ate 5 giant spoons of Nutella, and I don’t really know why.

Actually I think I know why. A new bakery opened, and I want to go there, but I can’t because of Covid and work. This bakery has consumed all my thoughts. I cannot stop thinking about how much I want cookies from the bakery. My belly, which when I fold the fat can have a full blown conversation with me, wants these cookies.

I need for the following to happen:

1) Baby sleeps in (this is never going to happen).
2) For me to get up early and be front of line for the cookies, to minimize exposure to people.
3) For the cookies to be ABSOLUTELY AWFUL SO I NEVER CRAVE THEM AGAIN. I need them to be straight up cardboard.

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Emissions Inspection Letter

My car failed emissions inspection today. I had given the car to my parents because we leased another car when we were expecting. The person doing the inspection asked if I had used the car recently, and I shared it had been pretty much un-driven for the past eight months. He said the scanners could not pick up the information, and I need to drive the car 100-200 miles.
“What? Where am I supposed to go?!” I asked, because it’s Covid time. “I’m not planning to go anywhere,” I said. They shrugged and said I had to drive the car.

My dad knows the father of the person who did the inspection, so when I told him about this, he asked me to bring him a pen and paper, so he could write him a letter. He wrote one line in Farsi with some of the best penmanship I’ve seen from him in a very long time. Then I asked him to read to me what he wrote. He shook his head and said that he could not read it. He put the pen down and said he has Alzheimer’s.

He can still remember things, he just can’t remember letters and words. This is aphasia. So I told him he doesn’t have Alzheimer’s, he just has a problem with words. Then I held back tears so he wouldn’t see me cry, because telling stories and writing emails was something my dad did all the time. I did tell him Alzheimer’s would be worse, because if he didn’t remember us or other people or events, things would be even harder.

I got to see my parents today though, so that was good.

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