مناجات

پروردگارا، به تو پناه می آورم از نفسی که سیر نمی شود، از دلی که خاشع نمی گردد، از دانشی که سود نمی دهد، از نمازی که بالا نمی رود و از دعائی که به اچابت نرسد...

Happy birthday to my love!

My terrific wonderful special husband, you mean a world to me.Thank you for all you are doing for me , and thank God for giving you to me on such a special day.
Happy birthday!

I was thinking...

Yesterday I was thinking: last year at these days, my mind was just filled with one issue: Parsa's little surgery (that all the boys pass ,at least in Iran!)! oh.. there were also some other important issues: How many times did he asked for milk today? When was his last colic attack? How many times did he wake up during the night? Is everything ok? Does he feel cold in his room? Am I a good mother?...........

and now..!!!!!!!!!! where am I standing now? and what are my concerns right now?!!!

P.S: All of you who are expecting your babies, will feel like me just in a year!

Why I adore mother Thresa

I love this prayer from this great woman.Just wanted to share it with you:
People are often unreasonable, illogical and self centred; forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ultierior motives; be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous; be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough; give the world the best you've got anyway.
You see, in the final analysis it is between you and God; it was never between you and them anyway.

I feel sad!

When you are thousand miles far from home, when nobody feels any obligation and is free to choose you or not (Because you are too far to blame them!) , when there is 12 hours jet lag, and different weekends, and you are unavailable most of the day, you can easily diffrentiate between the real friends and too busy! ones.
I don't know how God makes some people so nice; they know how great you may feel by hearing their kind voices through the phone or reading their encouraging messages in your mailbox, although, they have never been in a similar situation.
These are the lessons I'm learning gradualy from this journey. However, facing the realities I never doubt in them before, seems to be the most difficut part.Sometimes we lie to ourselves about the quality of a relationship, but we're not ready to change it.Why we spend several hours for choosing our clothing, furniture, foods,..., but not the people we communicate with them? Why we don't respect ourselves by avoiding people who make us feel bad about ourselves?Or Why have we used to see people, spend several hours with them, and just restricting ourselves to the common greetings; if someone doesn't like to know what are you doing in your life, or how do you feel about it, why we are wasting our times this much? ( However i beleive in that sometimes we can be the one who starts a good relationship)
Even if we are afraid of getting alone, we already are! with these types of relationships!

Look at my beautiful son!

Our home is very close to the Golden Gate Park.Father and son often spend a nice time there together.Parsa would be proud of you, my dear Mahmoud, for being so attentive about him.

A piece of paper I'll need in future

During the last weeks before leaving Iran, I had a hard time challenging with myself.I was questioning everything, and I'd lost my confidence about our decision. In one of the darkest days, my mother gave me a piece of paper she chose from an old calendar for me.It meant a world to me at that time, specially because she gave it to me while she was extremely worried about our travel, and I hadn't seen her this sad before.

Now, I look at it everyday before leaving home.Here it comes:

One day Parsa will ask me: why did we come here? and, I will need this piece of paper for reasoning.

Thank you Maman, for always knowing what I need before myself.

My adventures at Kalmanovitz library!

If you'll come to study abroad, please remember the followings regarding the library:

1- You can burrow the journals and bring them home, so don't carry 7 heavy volumes on your hands to the copy room!

2-If you even decided to take copies of them, please remember there is always a trolly to carry them, don't carry them yourself!

3- Please notice that there is not an old kind man who does the copy for you in price of 2.5 cents, the price is much higher , and of course! plus taxes! so please re-evaluate the journal to see do you realy! still want the article? Also you should copy them yourself. Don't surprise everyone by trying to put the journals back in their shelves, you should just leave them in the copy room.


4- You can burrow up to 24 books for a month, so don't hurt yourself with thinking and choosing!

5- If you found out that a book is checked out, don't forget about the book: you can ask the librarian to hold the circulation and the person can't make a renewal!

6- Don't try to check email or update your weblog on the library's computer, it's planned just for search, so you will hear an awful beep!

7-After a general confusion in the library, don't move so quickly towards th exit door, the device beeps and you should prove you haven't taken anything!

Surge

Surge is the name of our building: our lab is also located inside it.When I first met there, at the top of the hill, sourrended by eucalyptus trees, I was wondering how does it taste to work in such a beautiful forest, and it's really wonderful. Our professor prefered to stay here, while the whole university labs were transfering to the official buidings at another side of the city.It realy helps, when you have the chance of breathing in fresh air and nurturing your mind with beautiful scenec of the nature, specially at the middle of hard work in lab.

I couldn't imagine that I will be this much busy just in a month! I'm working on a paper and also I have many things to do in lab.(But don't worry, I have enough time for all of my friends!!!)

An interesting point about our lab is that all of us are asian, except my professor.We have 2 chineese PhDs, which are lab supervisors; the kind,funny and lovely secretary from Philipines and 2 other fellows.

It's also intersting that here everyone works hard; you can't even let yourself check emails during work hours, and I don't know how, but you can't waste your time anyway.This is the first period of my life in which, when I want to go back home, I just feel I've done enough! everything is ready for you for acting 100% of your potential, and there is no excuse! Automatically you will be ommited from the system if you don't work enough.

Here, I can actually see how an invention comes out to the world: most of the time there are clients, mostly top producers,who want the lab to test their newly developed products, and you can't imagine how exciting it is to be the first one to know about it , rather than seeing it in the patent website after years! It's also fantastic when you meet somebody from US patents office who has come to qualify your professor's invention!

Beleive it or not, all these things happen in this small building!

We are too busy.why?

During this special period of my life, I'm thinking about many things.I'm trying to feel the moments deeply, and figure out how my life is being affected by the changes around me.

Sometimes, I need an ear to hear, specially a friend's one! I try to feel sorry about missing them here;but suddenly I remember that even in Iran I was almost missing them!
It was enough just to think about them one by one and imagine how busy they are! some with the baby, some with job, some with householding, some with classes, some with cooking!, and some with nothing!but it's a routine to say: oh...sorry I was too busy to call you!

Honestly, I was really annoyed, and then hurt, and finally there were many times that I was really dissapointed.

(Maybe, there are some friends who have the same feeling about me, and that could be true!)

The only positive side of the issue for me is that most of the time I don't feel too homesick!the days of loneliness have made me strong!

Anyways, I just wanted to triger a re-think about how we manage our days of lives, with/without thinking about the priorities,with/without thinking about our decision of how to live and considering how it can affect everyone's life.

Feeling indifferent about our environment is becoming a part of us.Let's resist it.

Some good news!

We finally got the apartment.Although a little expensive, but it's neat and nice and close to the UCSF.I will put some photos as soon as possible.Our landlord is a French conservative old man.He really made us mad by being so inconfident about us.Finally, my professor co-signed the lease and even wrote down his SSN and driver's license number to assure him that he would take charge of everything(God bless him!) .Do you think we can find a professor in iran who does the same for his foreign student without knowing anything about her?

And, my special news: Parsa has just started to walk!


Will come back soon.

For my lovely son

My little star, how do you feel these days? what are you thinking about? I'm seeking the answers in your beautiful eyes when they're staring at me.

How do you feel when you wake up and don't find your favorite toys around you in your room?

What do you think of living close to the sea and see the seagulls everyday?

How do you see us these days? Have you ever thought with yourself why they are so strange recently?

What do you think when you see different people: mostly blond, or with narrow eyes, or black ? what do you say to yourself when you see them with their huge black or little fancy dogs?How can you smile to them so kindly when even their language doesn't sound familiar for you?How do you measure and scale love in your little heart?

Don't you miss NANAY with grand ma? Don't you miss hide and seek with grand pa? Don't you miss your chair, your walk'n play, your car seat? don't you miss your first home?

Have you forgotten the past , or you are just pretending so just to make me happy? Are you replacing new things with your old loved ones? How can you do it so kindly and quickly?

How can you be so patient and understanding?How can you have such a great confidence and trust in everything without learning it from me?

I'm just waiting for the day, that great day, that you will chose your own way of life. Now,I can just pray that I would make it easier for you.

My first meeting with my professor

First of all, please accept my apology for my bad English; I started to write this post in farsi, but since our keyboard is not labled with the persian letters, and I don't know their places, it seemed to take a day for me to write a paragraph.I know I might have syntax errors, and am not expert in writing essays in an appropriate way, but beleive me I don't have any other choice.May this place would be a practice area for my English writing to be improved.

Anyway, I can't wait to tell you about my magical monday.It was just a dream coming true!Can you imagine? Let me explain from the begining:

You have started a very difficult thesis, which 2 persons have quitted it before you and the professor suggests it to you, and because you want to become a very scientific person! in future, you accept it.But after just 3 months you understand everything is much more complicated than you ever thought and even your professor doesn't know how to make it up.You start to search and search; gradually knowing someone from anotherside of the world, through his papers and books, learn how to solve your problems based on his proposed techniques, and after 2 years of hardwork and miserable days! finally you come up with an acceptable result.From those years, your field and the path of your scientific life changes and you just see that you are so involved in this field, that you can upscale your experiences throughout factories and you continue and continue...everytime get a book that you are intersted in its topic , the editor is that person...you look at the page just after the cover, and see :edited by... ...., Department of...., ...., San Francisco...and you just go so deeply through your dreams and whisper:"what would happen if I could just spend a day in his lab?" and just return from the sweet dream that you think is too good to happen foryou..


And last monday, I saw him just in his house, in fornt of his huge library, telling me :"Hey, you are a remarkable woman; you finally conqured every obstacle and now you are here.I'm here to help you and you are working just for yourself...let's first have a coffe form Mr. Starbocks and then I will show you the lab...But don't rush, you should first find a suitable home; I know it's not more difficult than getting visa from Mr. Bush!"



Going for your biggest dream, is not easy.I say it's so so hard.You should lose and miss many things , many many dear and lovely things, you should be prepared for everything unexpected, you should conquer your fears from unknowns, you should just put your foot in a dark room.....But I'm here to tell you: IT'S WORTH!Let your dream determines your path of life at least once..as said by a writer: Dream is not born in your mind, without a power inside you to make it a reality.(this is my own translation!)

San Francisco: As beautiful as you have heard

Before coming, I heard that SF is among the only cities in US which has characteristic style, and now I figure out it's true.If I want to upload beautiful photos for the blog, I should take photos of all of the houses which have fantastic architectures and are carefuly decorated with flower boxes.As the city expects thanksgiving holidays, you can find pumpkins in different sizes in front of each house;even behind the windows of some houses you may see paintings of the kids wich say:happy halloween! I'm waiting to see what is Halloween that we have heard a lot and don't know about!When there is a ceremony which we don't have in Iran, it seems interesting, but of course, it might be hard to celebrate an Iranian ocasion here alone!

This is a photo of Fishermen's Wharf while we were boarding old historical ships and after that Parsa had his delicious famous Ghirardeli ice cream there.I'm excited that Parsa is experiencing his first events mostly here : first board on ship, first ice cream, first bus riding, ...I can't wait to see he's walking, it's going to be late, hurry up my son!

Kazem

Kazem is the boy who used to deliver the grocery shopping to our home when we were in Iran.During shopping from grocery market of Safeway , I was thinking of him and thinking of how we used to buy different vegetables in large amounts without even thinking about money!It was so funny this morning : we could just take potatos, tomatos and carrots, even celeries by number and be worried about the prices!many things seem to be different, the funny point is that the facts which were easier in Iran, are much more complicated here , and the others which were so horrible in Iran are not a big issue here! The nostalgia is being started!!

Just arrived!

Here is going to be a special place for me, since I'm going to share my feelings, perceptions and thoughts with my dearest ones, during these years of being far from home.Everything is just started from yesterday , when we ( me, mahmoud and Parsa) arrived to San Francisco, the city , I dreamed to come to, from years ago.I prefer to write in Farsi, which is the language of my feelings, but I have some problems with the font currently.So please expect to see the posts both in English and persian. I'll come back soon.