My husband likes snow more than I thought. I like that.

Justin Trudeau is 54, and somehow he looks younger every day. A year ago, he looked like someone in their late forties—say, around 49. Now he looks more like someone in their early forties, maybe 41.

I could be wrong. Maybe he actually looks more like someone who’s 39.

He has the whole package: health, good looks, a fit body, good manners, charm, great height, education, a strong personality, and an excellent spirit. He has three children who are all happy by his side, and he’s lived a full, rich life. He’s been successful in his work, and he’s always out in nature.

When he was Prime Minister, he improved many laws and created a more inclusive and balanced society, giving everyone—especially immigrants—a sense of being at home. And even though he comes from old money, wealth, and influence, you always saw a young, smiling guy enjoying life with everyone, not a typical rich British aristocrat with pomp and pretense.

He celebrated all the festivals of immigrants and residents alongside them. He kept track of events happening in the immigrants’ home countries. Many people, especially immigrants, underestimated him and mocked him, accusing him of benefiting from everything. He posted all his tweets and messages in both of Canada’s official languages. And now, his absence is truly felt.

And he is enjoying his life, far from the madding crowd. I don’t agree with his ways… of approaching things fully. I disagree with some, or many. But he is one of a kind.

I like this girl, Janie. She is a detective in Death Valley.

Well, she’s Detective Sergeant Janie Mallowan, a young, ambitious cop in a small South Wales police team, to put it accurately.

Not only is she dedicated to her duties, she is a bit obsessed. Her obsession partly comes from grieving the loss of her best friend. It has turned to a coping mechanism for her mental state. But it is also part of who she is. It’s a fuel, kind of.

She loves to get a promotion, and she would do anything legal, and ethical, to have that come true.

She’s sharp, but flubs social cues, blurts comments, and wears her emotions just enough that she’s relatable instead of polished and dull. That’s actually why Dua Lipa disinterests me (and Taylor Swift, and Justin Bieber, for another reason, and Mariah Kerry, and NSYNC, Jonas Brothers, Cold Play, and many others.)

Her energy is strange, and resonates well with mine. Strange in a good way. I get you, girl.

Her lack of filter and quirky delivery are sources of comedy, which makes her fun to watch. She makes you laugh with her, not at her. She just says things out loud in perfect honety.

She has real pain and ambition — that mix of vulnerability and competence. And as funny as it sounds, John Chapel resonates well with her, as a mentor, father, possibly a little grand father, and a male figure she never had.

That’s why I enjoy that show. It’s not that the storyline is special. It’s Janie.

One of the peculiar things about listening to podcasts while cooking or making crafts is that, because you can’t easily change the episode, you end up listening all the way to the end.

Did you know there’s a website called Murderpedia?! It lists killers, complete with their personal details and the murders they committed.

How do I know this? From an Australian podcast broadcast out of Adelaide. It’s called Weird Crap in Australia.

I thought by “weird crap” it meant stuff that seems strange, new, or interesting to the rest of the world, but is normal for Australians. Like people having kangaroo suits at home and using them to rescue kangaroo babies.

That kind of thinking is what got me listening to this podcast, and now I know things about Australia’s 1960s and 70s serial killers that even Australian documentaries never mentioned.

Where we live, not a single snowflake has fallen in the past two or three days. A few days ago, it snowed for about twenty minutes and then stopped. But there was nothing left in the supermarkets—almost eighty percent of the supplies were gone. All because of a possible storm that might never even come, and yet everything was shutting down.

When I was a child, we would cross roaring rivers through the snow, trudging to school in the midst of it all.

Sometimes the wind passing down by the trailers which traveled to Northern Caucasus and back, would toss us down, but we would get back up and keep going. And all this while we didn’t even have proper shoes or clothes.

People, calm down.

We really lived life to the fullest. Sure, it was full of hardships and torture. Many aspects f it, was unnecessary. But we truly lived a full life. That’s why we are happy, and feel accomplished.

Why does it take so long for a girl to realize “she loved something and didn’t know about it”?

She was busy being reasonable, considerate, self-controlled.

Emotions happen first. Awareness comes later. Sometimes much later. The mind needs distance, loss, or comparison before it finally connects the dots and goes, “Oh. That wasn’t friendship. That was it.”

Wrong moment, wrong circumstances, wrong emotional bandwidth. The feeling exists, but it doesn’t get named until later—sometimes years later.

I love the months of December, January, February, and March. I also love November—if it’s somewhere truly cold, like Maine or Canada, or up in the far reaches of Europe around the Baltics, Caucasus, or anywhere with a spirit like the Balkans. Cold air calms my head. It soothes my nerves, and—more importantly—it makes my brain work better. My cheeks turn redder, my face looks lively again, flushed as if I’ve put on makeup; the pale of my skin fills with colour.

I don’t like summer here. I don’t like spring or autumn either. My face gets puffy. I gain weight. You have no idea how hard it was to bring my weight down. Feeling agile in warm weather is almost impossible for me. I get dizzy constantly, my vision goes off, and all I want is to put ice on my head and sleep.

Sea water is good—sure—but we’re not very close to it. I like cold water. Places like Baja California, San Diego, or Hawaii make sense to me only if you go for a week or two every couple of months: swim, cleanse your body in the sea, refresh your skin, enjoy the sun, eat well—and then return home to a cool climate.

We haven’t been to Peru yet, so I don’t know what it’s like. Maybe it’s wonderfully cool. It doesn’t matter that it’s on the equator. What matters is good sun—and cold air.

Another joy of living in cold places like New England, the UK, Argentina, the Baltics, or Canada’s East and West Coasts is that you can actually see the seasons change. And more importantly, you can spend much longer walking outside in nothing more than a light shirt and thin trousers.

The ponds freeze over. River water turns wild at first, then grows quieter, because everything freezes. Sparrows sing less—but still, once or twice a day, they do sing. Everything goes silent. And the mind finally settles.

I’m not a heat person. I like warmth only for romantic trips or work travel. I’ve just started going out in minus five degrees Celsius wearing a T-shirt and light trousers. Yes, it’s cold—but it’s delicious. Afterwards I come home, take a hot shower, put on some cream, and everything is fine.

Even my husband is starting to like cold weather. He says it keeps his brain more alert. Maybe it’s time, in a while, to move north again. Somewhere cosy and lovely in New England. Or further north in California. And then travel—to warm places and cold places around the world.

It’s fun, isn’t it?!

I’m genuinely happy to have made it this far. I can hardly believe I survived—hardly believe I lived long enough to see myself after thirty.

Your thirties are that rare stretch of life where you still have youth and energy, but you also have experience—and wisdom. And when all of those come together, it’s only natural that life feels more beautiful.

Most importantly, in your thirties, the older you get, the fewer wrong crowds you attract. And that, too, is one of its quiet, underrated beauties.

The people in small towns and villages—even in the poorer districts of big cities—have demands far different from the things you hear on social media. Iran is a vast country, and those active online do not speak for it.

I remember Iranian men in their thirties and forties, back when I was poor, sneering at me and assuming I was “spoiled,” trying to get attention. How different they were from me, and from the broader Iranian society. Those men are still single. To them, marriage was nothing more than a contract. Most of them were cowards, and yet, when they encountered someone vulnerable, they were filled with resentment and self-loathing. At the same time, when they saw you defenseless and wanting only to be a good person, they would unleash all their emotional, psychological, and sexual frustrations onto you.

So many times I asked myself, what do I have in common with these people—men and women alike?! Why are we even considered compatriots?! I’m searching for a simple loaf of bread, and all they care about is nose jobs, being monitors, managing others, and pointless studying. So many times I asked myself: why doesn’t an ordinary person like me have enough money to live, while they, overflowing with privilege, leave the country, and yet remain dissatisfied even here? Why are these people always unhappy?!

Iran will not achieve freedom. Not because the people of Iran are unworthy of it, no. Because Iranians abroad—most of them, not all—are a cluster of loud, irritable, entitled creatures, and, more importantly, utterly unprepared. The amount of chaos these people can generate even in a simple protest is boundless.

Iranians in Iran—especially in the big cities—share this trait. But it has worsened among Iranians living abroad. Or perhaps it was those who arrived here in the 1970s, and 80s, from upper-class and aristocratic backgrounds, who laid the foundation for it. These people cannot reach agreement on the smallest matters. They possess no hint of selflessness, and never once have they managed to rally together during protests without clashing among themselves or with their country of origin. Even just reading the news about them makes one’s stomach turn.

And let’s not forget that protests are not a method for changing a system. After fifty years of demonstrations, they should understand that to transform a dictatorial, inefficient, oppressive regime—whose connections to the rest of the world are severed—protests in a modern, first-world country are not the solution.

These people are irritable; every single one wants to be the monitor, and in the same dictatorial manner, they want to reshape everything to their own will. Honestly, give me one reason why these loud, irritable selfish little dictators, abroad, yelling at everybody, deserve to be heard.

In all of this, my heart burns for the people inside Iran—for those in small towns, villages, and places untouched by constant news cycles and social‑media frenzy—who are left to pay the price for this loud, entitled, self‑absorbed crowd abroad, and for the comfortable, indifferent elite within Iran itself.

Iran is saturated with inequality—social, economic, political, psychological, educational, inequality of access, of opportunity. One reason I despise academia is exactly this: a mass of lost, would‑be dictators, angry at the world for not having become more than they are, yet in practice doing less real work than the people who actually keep society running. They drag defenceless individuals into the system and subject them to relentless psychological and emotional torment.

Those same dissatisfied, irritable, entitled, wealthy, and bitter people come abroad and try to influence the diaspora to get what they want. Meanwhile, Iranians inside Iran are fighting for a simple loaf of bread. Why do you make it seem as if they’re protesting or striking for the son of a dictator who once called himself a king, fled the country repeatedly, and left it to rot?

A man who called himself Shah, who enshrined dictatorship, religion, and religious dictatorship in the country, and then, at the first sign of protest, killed as many ordinary people as he could—and then fled? The people of Iran are hungry. Civil and social freedoms are no longer their primary concern. These people are poor, starving, sleeping in graves—and the state even drags them out of those graves. Street vendors’ belongings are destroyed, they are beaten, and workers aren’t paid their due wages. Dictatorship and corruption have allowed men in power—managers, company heads, department chiefs—to withhold wages even in private settings, and whenever someone demands their rights, they are met with severe punishment. How does this align with the demands of a bunch of entitled freeloaders in Europe and the West, who talk about things that are neither the first nor last priority of the people inside Iran?! When will these rich people in Iran, and Iranians abroad, ever become accountable human beings?

An Iranian whose stomach is full, whether in Iran or abroad, who has everything and just wants to show off in Iran once or twice a year—why should such a person even claim to represent the oppressed people living under dictatorship, stripped of civil and social freedoms, and constantly suppressed inside Iran?!

These people can’t even tolerate each other in a small, empty protest. Everyone wants to be the Shah, the manager, the boss. Why should the world even listen to us?! And yet, the international community has heard Iranians’ voices time and again. What came of it?! Each time, it only left them more exhausted and more bewildered—because Iranians are so selfish and entitled.

I come from a lower‑middle-class background—and I’m a girl. The psychological, emotional, financial, and social pressure I endured—and especially the burden imposed by Iranian men in satisfying their emotional, psychological, and sexual fetishes on me and countless other defenseless girls—was unbearable. A society where proper sexual intimacy barely exists, where sex as a basic need is only possible if you’re wealthy and well-connected, and where the same morals, behaviours, and judgments are carried abroad and become part of its culture—do you really think such a society can achieve freedom?!

When the most basic needs—eating, sleeping, comfort, seeing nature, gathering with others, joy, safety—aren’t guaranteed in that country, and when people carry these same problems abroad and pass them to the next generation, what path to freedom is even possible for those poor souls?!

When basic needs—food, safety, emotional security—aren’t guaranteed, people naturally prioritise themselves. Add decades of propaganda, corruption, and censorship, and you get a society where selfishness, defensiveness, and aggression are common survival tools.

The entitlement, aggression, obsession with status, inability to cooperate—is systemic, generational, and structural, not just “people being bad.”

This flight of Iranians abroad—only to live exactly as they did back home; this selfishness, this resistance to change, this stubborn clinging to beliefs; these little dictators everyone carries inside; this constant use of others as tools, at any cost, to reach their small personal goals; this indifference toward other people and even animals—all of it has actively contributed to Iran becoming worse and worse.

This external locus of control—the belief that nothing is ever their fault and that they are always the victims—has led us to where we are now. And a people who cannot plan together, cannot talk, cannot practise peaceful agreement or disagreement, cannot exercise reason, are a people headed for destruction.

In all of this, my heart aches for Iran’s poor—especially the young, the very young—who are the ones destined to be crushed.

I genuinely miss the person who first told me about life, and state functions.

Who would have seen this day.

Who would have thought that I was gonna say this one day.

I miss the philosophy sessions with him.

The thing is, life can be carried on calmly and with purpose—without constantly putting yourself in the line of unnecessary stress. But sometimes, over the course of several years, these things resurface. Among all the things I’ve forgotten, spending time with that person is one of the few that still drifts back into my mind now and then, especially every spring.

It was a pointless anxiety, a restlessness without cause. There was no need to endure those circumstances. And yet, even in a period that bleak, there were good days too—here and there.

Maybe it’s just the power of nostalia.

That lunatic didn’t teach a thing.