Skip to main content

Separate Or One?

For over a decade I haven't lived with cable Television.

Since right about the time of moving out of my parent's place to my own apartment in downtown Vancouver, when almost all my paycheck would go to mortgage payments... and the tiny left over to paying for expensive colorful drinks on the nights we'd go clubbing!


And  just when I moved up the ladder high enough to reach the TV knob, I fell for and married my Mr. Urban, a deeply principled man who does not believe in "passive consumption of commercial programs".

OK.

And now, owning a Toddler and all, more and more I believe that not having access to cable is a good thing for our family....

EXCEPT, once a year on OSCAR night.

I start the day cursing the day I bought into the DARN NO TV philosophy.  I fret the whole day, and by mid afternoon, an anxious Mr. Urban says, "Sweetie, next year just get cable for the occasion."

"I Will!", I reply rather brat-ishly, and knowing full well that waiting a whole week for the cable guy to arrive is more painful than missing the Oscars. And that, I'll never go through with!

Thank god for the up to date pictures and news on Google.  So, once again I'll sit in front of my computer in my Oscar-Party gown, sipping Champagne, piecing together the pictures and the stories, while Mr. Urban looks on half bemusedly and half amusedly... 

All jokes aside, here's wishing a good night to all the people in the movie business that made this an especially good year to watch films...  you've brought us hours of joy and we needed it!   

I also want to say a Good Luck and Thank You to the cast and crew of the film A Separation, an Iranian film nominated for an Oscar. 

I guess for now World Politics requires there to be good guys and bad guys around this world of ours.... but my experiences of living as a world citizen has made one thing clear to me, that people are the same the world over.   And different languages, and songs, and foods, and social manners are just fun things to be celebrated and enjoyed.... not to be feared.

A Separation

What touched me the most about  the story of A Separation, was the message that under the veil of politics and religion we all have the same human concerns: love, loss, worry about economic pressures and providing for and protecting our families, and the hope of connecting to one another....

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

FORTY THREE YEARS, SEVEN MONTHS AND FORTY DAYS

My life and the life of every Iranian I know,  is bookended by the Iranian Revolution of 1979. It doesn't matter that I was barely old enough to remember this historic event or that I spent the decades that followed it, far far away from Iran, the Revolution of 1979 is a heavy, tacky, cruel bookend that defines who we used to be, who we are and the recurring nightmares and dreams we’ve had for 43 years.  I can pinpoint with certainty the exact month after which a general feeling of displacement settled like sticky dust all over me, my family, my classroom, my teachers, our closest friends, our home, our city… In the years and decades that followed, I never experienced another event that brought such a magnitude of change to the nucleus of life.   Not in Iran, and definitely not after a whole life lived outside of Iran.  Perhaps only recently, the experience of the Trump years and the Covid-19 pandemic, the significant fear, change and frustration that both events brought to our col

On Donald Trump, Crunchy Bananas and our Children... A "How To" on keeping up Spirits and Sanity

The other morning at breakfast, my four year old looked, yet again somberly, at the breakfast before her.  Despite having enthusiastically selected a hodgepodge of liberally salted hard boiled egg whites on the side of toasted hamburger buns, strawberries and vanilla yogurt and a cup of milk, she still could not bring herself to enjoy her breakfast.  Her face was wrinkled, as was mine with exasperation from yet another failed attempt at assembling a palatable breakfast for my picky eater. This one, she is quite the philosopher.  And before I could ask her why she wasn't eating, she said: "Two Things!"  Holding up two tiny fingers.  "The smells of these foods I picked, don't go with each other! And I wish Donald Trump would magically become Hillary Clinton, and the word (world) would be GREAT again".     Despite our best efforts to protect our children from the anxiety of these times, they are alert and picking up on the mood (and the lingo) in the wor

Safa

I have always loved words.  The way some people love shiny new objects.  As soon as I heard a new word, a word that captured my imagination, my energy, my hundreds of unnamed inner thoughts and feelings, I would latch on to it with fearceness, joy and curiosity.  I have also always been intrigued by how regular old words can be used in an unexpected context and evoke bursts of unexpected feelings in the listener, such as laughter, anticipation or tears.  I would search for those words coming out of the mouths of everyone around me, and mentally catalog them like a dutiful librarian, and await the opportunity to say the words with my own mouth out loud to an audience, or better yet use it in an essay where the teacher could grade it, get a kick out of it, or read it to the whole class.      As a child I always loved the Persian word Safa .   For one thing the word sounds so simple, yet sophisticated and beautiful, and for another, each of my memories of hearing this word is stored in th