Between the lines

I know I have been very quite. If one reads my blog from the beginning till now, there is a “happy” phase, a “sad” phase and a “quite” phase. My life is not on the right track currently but I don’t know how to fix it.

I feel so helpless.

Some good things happened in the last month though. I went to one of my dearest friends wedding in Brazil. I had a nice get together with my old friends from Brown and I spent 10 days without thinking about work. Well, almost … In the last few days, my worries came back to hunt me. I will write more about my trip later. Right now there is another urgency.

I meant to write about this for a long time, but I postponed deliberately wishing that I will  be proven wrong. I am scared at how human kind can adapt to every situation. How things become “normal”, so that we can live and survive. Some times of course that is what we need to do, but other times it is scary. Probably this is how my dissatisfaction with my life has become a chronic fact rather than something to take care of. We become helpless and continue the same path rather than doing something.

Back to the point …

I move my fingers on my keyboard every time one of Hossein’s friends raises the alarm, despite the fact that my blog is quite low impact. He has been in detention in Iran for more than 100 days now. No one can tell where he is, why he is arrested and what will be his charges. As I have been told, his family is waiting.

Everyone is waiting.

What do you do in such a situation? This is the problem with “renormalization”: the news is not hot anymore. The page on facebook dedicated to his liberation cause is not very active and a blog with similar aim in Persian has stopped being updated for more than a month. Then again, what do you write about when there is nothing happening? I think it is quite boring and inefficient if everyday we write about the amount of days that Hossein has been in prison and complain about why no one is writing about his condition. There is no point in accusing each other, we need to combine our forces.

While writing these lines, I just came up with an idea. What if everyday one or two of Hossein’s friends write something about him, a memory for example, and send it to one of these blogs, which should be linked to other highly read sites (iranian.com, balatarin, etc). I don’t think it will be that hard to find about 50-100 people who would like to take part in this movement. This way we will keep the light on. We will remind ourselves and others that he is in trouble and we have not forgotten him. I encourage both English and Persian posts. I insist, this is no time to point fingers. We should help a person in need.

This might be a lame idea and it might not help him in a “direct” way, but in an indirect way readers will know that he needs help. We should not let such situations become “normal”. He is in anything but a normal situation.

I personally haven’t been Hossein’s friend for a long time. But we met under an original circumstance and we became close very soon. Later he and his lovely girlfriend were one of my favorite couples in Paris. I still frequent many of the places that he and I went and talked for hours about our visions of Iran and the world around us. Every time I happen to be in one of those places, my heart aches. I miss him and I worry for him.

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Something is happening but I don’t know how to explain it. I feel that I am calming down drastically without actively trying to. Things that were bugging me for a long time now come to surface and I clear them out one by one. It is a nice feeling.

The first issue was my age. Since I was in grad school, I started feeling old compared to my classmates. Later, this annoying feeling got even more pronounced, since I am the absolute oldest postdoc in my workplace (second runner up, one year younger and then several ones 2-3 years younger). For this reason, first I always hid my age from younger ones, who call anyone over 30 “very old”, and secondly, I agonized about my job prospects with respect to my age. After all, who would like to hire a 36 year old postdoc, when they can hire a 30 year old one? I don’t know the answer, but I can not change my age. A revolution happened in me one night at a party when very casually I told to a much younger colleague, who by the way had tried to find out my age using several tricks such as “How old were you when the Chernobyl disaster happened?“, that I was 5 years older than him. His eyes jumped out of his scull … I was relieved. Suddenly I didn’t care anymore.

That problem solved, I moved on to the next bug! My job. My constant struggle with myself about my capacity as a researcher. I am my worst enemy. I want to prove that I am not good at what I do, and that I am useless to do anything else. So, one day I asked myself: “Then what, what is your solution?”. That is when it clicked. I really don’t think I am bad, I honestly think I can do something positive and I have some knowledge that can be useful. So, I should just focus on that, not to think too much about failures and move froward. If it doesn’t work, I will find another solution.

Third more personal issue was my relationship with my friends. During last year, I have brushed aside three of my friends. Now I am so good at it that I know when it is coming. First I feel irritated, I try to convince myself that it is not important. Then after few months or a year, I cannot take it anymore. I “snob” them as they say and leave them in an uncomfortable situation. If they don’t ask, I never give an explanation.

I know it is horrible. Looking back in my “friendship history” I have done it maybe to 6-7 people. So, maybe the fact that 3 of them happened last year is a bit alarming, but well I am again in a new environment trying to make new friends. I honestly don’t want to hurt anyone. And till now I didn’t know what was the matter. The fact that after a while I don’t want to hang out with some of my friends is very normal and natural. People drift apart, or they find out that they were never on the same boat. Or, very plainly they hurt you. There is nothing wrong in changing friends or the level of friendship, what is wrong in my case is that I do it after I am completely frustrated. In most cases that I have observed, people do the “separation” gradually so that it feels natural to both parties. You make plans less and less, share less and less and after a while no one feels the gap.

This realization for me was a serious relief. For a while I was concerned that I am suffering from a pathological disorder where I just find excuses to get irritated and react irrationally towards my friends. But I think the only problem is that I don’t express enough my disagreements on time and I need to relearn to do it subtly.

That is it for now. The few days in the end of the year that I had to be by myself, I figured out a lot of things.

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Every year we wish a “happy” new year to each other. We hope that the coming year will be “better” and recently we have started to wish for a “peaceful” year. Is any of it happening?

How is today, the first of January 2009, different than yesterday? And what should happen to make it better? Our world is drowning and we are trying to survive or are blindly happy!

Yesterday, I was alone in my chic Parisian apartment. I didn’t have any close friends to celebrate with and I was not in the mood to pretend to be happy with bunch of strangers. I drank a bottle of wine, I spoke to my friend for two hours and went out at midnight to see what is the surprise firework for this year. There was nothing. Eiffel tower was lit as every night, people were there with their bottles of champagne, taking pictures and kissing each other. I return home after one hour. It was a sober celebration, even in Paris.

At home, I opened the TV and watch few pictures from the burning of Gaza strip; the so called response to “protect” Israeli civilians. I don’t know how this is going to protect anyone. It’s disgusting how the reports only talk about the rockets that come from Hamas, as if these people are sick to send missiles for fun. Its a truth that the two parties are not equal in power, and the weak one is obliged to “bark” so that the big one listens. No one talks about the Israeli blockade of Gaza strip for months and months. What kind of life is it to live in your homeland and be on the mercy of another country to let food and gas and electricity and etc. to come into your country? Tell me, how can the western world be so quick to condemn Russia for attacking Georgia and now, they ask Israel to give a two day, two day, ceasefire and Israel has the balls to refuse! And then we say, “Ok, feel free to do whatever you want, you’re the boss”. Of course, the joke of our world, the UN gives orders that the attacks should stop, that once and for all the Palestinian state should be created, and that the parties should stop aggression. Who is to listen?

Like most of you, I sent plenty of New Year wishes. We do it by habit and by necessity to wish for something better. In our little worlds, we need to create happiness and joy. It’s human nature, if we loose hope that would be the end of our lives. Let’s hope that people will come to their senses, that the violence and poverty in the world will diminish and that we will learn to respect each other.

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It’s Christmas time. For few years now, or maybe for many years, I really don’t get excited about it. Each year has a different reason though. I am not saying that I don’t like it, but I am not looking forward to it. I love the decorations, I love the shopping, and I love the dinners with family and friends. But what makes me sick to my stomach this year in particular is to know that while we spend quite a bit of money on gifts that may never be used, while we cook expensive food that we turn to sh*t the next day, and while we fuss about the alcohol we are going to drink, some people are sleeping in the chilly streets and dying in their urine soaked sleeping bags. And I will confess, I have done all of the above. I am a hypocrite.

I grew up with The little match girl and I always wondered how can such a story be real. Now I know, I see it everyday in the street corners. People like you and I who were once professionals, with a decent salary and a bag of dreams end up in the streets because “the economy is in crisis”. We hear about them, we see them and the worst part is that we don’t know what to do. I know this hurts me. I know seeing people in every f*cking corner of the street depresses me and I know I want to help, but I am not sure how. Definitely my doing experiments on some imaginary model system for cells is not going to help these people. I don’t even earn enough money to help financially.

But I am thinking about somethings for the future. One thing that is helpful from my six years of PhD is that you first have to identify the problem and then do some research to to find a solution. I finally found out that unconsciously I get very bothered by seeing the socially marginated people. Now it is time to work on it.

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