Being Positive

Yesterday afternoon my husband and me decided to go for a walk by the beach with baby. It was a nice afternoon and Ocean was as beautiful as ever. We talked about every thing and I started complaining about my job and telling him that being on 12th floor very close to top management is making me uncomfortable, especially on Friday afternoon we had a meeting with our boss and she was telling us to keep it as quite as possible and this and that! She is too conservative!

My husband listened to me and said: "Just try to be more positive and grateful, you have very good job. Lots of people envy you because of that. We are healthy, we have a wonderful baby, nice house and we both have good jobs. Why shouldn’t be thankful for that, we should appreciate what we have and enjoy our life as much as we can".His simple words shook me for a second and I thought to myself that he is right; I am not really as much grateful as I should be. I should be more positive and look at the full part of the glass. Nobody has a perfect life but we all can make the best of it. I hope I can stay positive and don't forget theses good thoughts in couple of days and start complaining about something else. I really need to practice on being more positive in my life! I am wondering if this is a cultural problem, when I compare majority of our people and myself to Americans ( I do not have that much experience about Europeans but I think they are happy people too), I see they are a lot more positive and happy than us. They always look for excuses to celebrate and have fun, but in our culture and our country we usually look for excuses to morn and be sad! I think this is one of the reasons that western people in general have better life than us (Eastern people). They are happier and more positive!!!

Amazing book

I have been very lazy to write recently, but I am reading a book that I should talk about it.
A while a go my American co-worker who reads a lot asked me if I had read
Persepolis the biography book written by an Iranian woman. I had not read the book and she lent it to me. It was amazing, the writer starts from when she was a 10-year-old girl and revolution happened (I was five at that time) in Iran and then how war started and she ended up leaving Iran to go to Austria. The second book Persepolis 2 (Which came out on Sep 1st this year) is about her life in Austria and how she ended up coming back to Iran and finally moved to France.

The Amazing thing about this book is, it is written simply with funny pictures, actually pictures are very interesting and show how talented she is. I could relate to it a lot. All places she talks about are real places that I have been. The book has become so popular and has had very good reviews. Another amazing thing about this writer is that she is so honest and brave at the same time, she talks about all her personal private experiences in the book, some thing that at least very few Iranian Would do! Culturally we are always very concern about what people say about us and what people think about us! Most of us especially women do not talk about their sex experiences before marriage at least not in a book or article. We usually hide our mistakes. This book is sort of a cultural revolution to me. By the way the writer's name is Marjan Satrapi and the original book is written in French.

Family issue

I had kind of rough weekend again! It started from Friday afternoon that my husband started the discussion about our son’s sleeping habit these days. Since he has been teething recently I go to his room to comfort him whenever he cries and try to put him in sleep and then go back to our bedroom, he has got used to it now and does not want to go back to his own bed and wants to sleep with me on the ground ( I try to put him back to sleep on the ground and then put him back in bed, actually this was my mom’s idea, so I would not lean over her bed all the time to put him in sleep) any way he was saying that we did the wrong thing and this kid has no discipline and this and that. I got mad at him and said I should wake up at 6:00 am to go to work, how you expect me to act, be awake all night and lean over his bed? My Mom got upset too, she said what ever happens is my fault because I take care of him during the day, you guys think I am spoiling him. Any way my husband left for grocery shopping and now was my Mom’s turn to complain about my husband, I was really angry and yelled (I know that did the right thing) Mom why you always keep complaining about him specially when I am angry, Don’t you think this will affect our marriage, when I am already mad at him and you keep saying negative things about him, this just makes every thing worse. Now she got upset. God it was such a disaster! My brother arrived with his daughter for visiting and my Mom left with them without saying a word. I really do appreciate my mom’s help and I am sure my husband does as well, but the thing is she sometimes just keeps criticizing my husband and does not think that this is not really good for our marriage. I have tried to make her understand several times that I know his faults, every body has faults but be reminded about them all the time is not good for our marriage, but every time she gets upset and says I can never talk to you and this and that.

Any way she left and I called her and tried to explain things for her. My husband called too and apologized and said he did not mean bad and he appreciates her help a lot.

Now I am thinking may be I should put my son in day care earlier than I thought, may be it is not really such a good idea to have parents or in laws more than one month at your place when you are married. Always something comes up and after a while it is hard to control every thing. The funny thing is my brother just called me and said you should rent an apartment for our Mom (she has a house in Iran and stays here 6 months per year but this time stayed longer because of my son) so she can take care of your son and there won’t be any problem any more. I told him you live in this country, you know it will cost me at least $2000 per month to rent a place for her and provide every thing, do you think I am that rich?? Any way the bottom line is some times you see that your own blood family really don’t understand you and your situation so how you expect others to understand it??

Young generation in Iran

My best friend's cousin who is a very beautiful 18 years old girl has come from Iran to go to college here. She is born in US and has been back and forth to Iran, but lived there the last 4 years. She has very interesting and at the same time sad stories about the young generations in Iran which my friend and me were shocked by hearing them.

She was telling us that in lots of parties they pass around extessi pills in a tray like they are passing pastry or candy, I had heard things similar like young people use drugs in parties or so but passing it like candy is beyond our imaginations. When me and my friend used to live in Iran (she came to US earlier than me, 8 years ago) we were party girls, we had boy friends and used to go to parties but we never took part in any party that there was any kind of drug, usually Alcohol was served but drug never, may be there were some guys feeling too cool and used it before coming to the party but there, I never saw one, of course even at that time (about 5-10 years ago that we were used to party a lot) there were parties with drug and stuff in it but it was not common, If you were from a good family and hang around with normal people, maximum was alcohol. Even here in US I have never been in a party that people pass around drugs!!

Another interesting or disgusting thing she was saying was that there are lots of gay and lesbian in Iran these days, she was swearing that when ever she went to a public pool a woman would approach her. MY god I never knew any lesbian when I used to live in Iran! Where the society is going? To the deepest level of hell?

I truly feel so sorry for these young people, specially young girls because women are more fragile and vulnerable in our society because of all sorts of limitations. I wish I could tell to all those young people that don't ruin your life and this is not the way to fight with this dirty system, this is what they want, so they can keep you quiet and bring you down more and more every day!!

Long weekend

It was a 3 days long weekend, because yesterday was Labor day in US. Even Labor Day is different here, in most of the countries in the world
They celebrate first day of May as Labor Day and here is the first Monday of September. I think American like to be different and in this way they always have a long weekend as Labor Day weekend that is more convenient for people. Any way I was looking forward to it but it was not as fun as I expected, thanks to my son who is teething now and wakes up at least two times a night I could not sleep well on Friday night. I was cranky on Saturday morning and then I had a fight with my husband on a stupid thing, sometimes he becomes very unreasonable! So the Saturday was ruined and Sunday was So-So, I wasted some time to go to the Mall (Shopping center) and buy nothing, and at night my husband's friend pushed us to go to an Iranian show by Parviz Kardan, the show was not really good and it was too long,
When we got home it was almost 1:00 am and now my son was up in my Mom's arm and did not want to go back to sleep. I had a hard time putting him back to sleep again. On Monday morning I woke up tired but decided not to be cranky! I always envy people that can just sleep 4-5 hours and still feel fresh and happy. If I sleep less than 7-8 hours (when I was single it was 9-10 hours) I really feel tired. We were invited to my friends house for an early dinner, going to their house is about 1 hour and 15 minutes trip, the traffic was so bad and it took us about 2 hours to get there and I was already regretting to accept her invitation on such a day!!
The weekend that I looked forward to it ended at 11:00 pm and I felt it was too short and was not that fun! Next time I should plan it better.

wishing for vacation!

I was at work at 7:00 pm this morning very sleepy and wishing that I could take two weeks off. Just go to a nice resort on the beach lie down in front of sun, read a good book
Do some fun sport activities, get massage every day, eat good foods and have nice cold drinks. But with the little devil/angel (my one year old son) it is impossible. Even if I go to any vacation I should run after him all the time!
Having kids totally changes a person’s life style. You cannot even go to bathroom with peace of mind, unless he is sleeping!! I love him so much and adore him a lot, I really do enjoy him and he is so so precious to me but having kid is taught. I think being a parent is a full time job that you never get retired from, of course if you want to be a good parent!!!