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.

She was talking with her husband and cooking at the same time. Her husband was washing the dishes. After a while, he said, “All your questions start with ‘why.’ It fries the whole CPU of the mind. How does your brain process so much and nothing ever breaks?”

She replied, “I don’t know.”

Her husband protested, “My brain gets tired after two or three of your whys. Answering your questions is hard because processing them takes energy. It’s better to set aside this constant processing.”

She looked at him and said, “Do you think this is a choice? This is my nature. I analyse and process everything, no matter how hard it is.”

Then, as she chopped the onions, she laughed and told him, “Interestingly, other guys—especially engineers—have told me the same thing. That my questions are all whys. That I’m always analysing everything and won’t let go until I fully understand.”

He said, “Others get tired. Their minds give out. It takes high mental power to analyse so much and answer it all.”

She turned to him and said, “Everyone told me that, except one person, who always looked me in the face, smiled, and said, ‘Ask. What do you want to ask?’ And then he answered.”

The man looked at his wife. On her face, he saw grief. “Him?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“You miss him. Don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you like to go back and keep doing what you used to do?”

“No. He is broken. And insane. And selfish.” She kept thinking. “He cannot regulate his life, and his emotions. His brain is unstable. The environment he creates is highly unstable, because he is unpredictable. And humans are not good with unbalanced, unstable environments.”

“He was really good at what he did. I wish he weren’t such a predator.”

“He is. Maybe that’s why I am longing. But he is broken, and I am not able to fix him. And nobody likes him. People smile at him, without spitting you are a f-predator at him.”

“It’s natural. You two are alike. It doesn’t surprise me that your brains process each other so easily. And don’t say that. You liked him, even if no one does. And I do a bit, too.”

After a few minutes, the man said, protesting, again, “But if he lived with you, he’d get tired, too! He would get exhausted and would time you out.”

Men. They are fascinating.

But I don’t think he would do that. He is insane, selfish, abusive, but he would never do that.

I was in the upper-class district of Tehran. It was still a desert, only the locals called it “upper town.” Velenjak was no different from the rougher parts of the city. Walking at night was just as dangerous as strolling downtown or in the lower districts. Its people were crueler than anyone else I had seen in Tehran, and everything was ten, twenty times more expensive, sometimes even more. Yet everyone dreamed of living there. But I hated it. Nothing about that part of the city brought me joy.

On weekends, supposedly expensive cars—worth barely as much as a ten-thousand-dollar car in America—constantly poured in from downtown, the rest of the upper town, and other provinces to Velenjak for skiing. Everyone had a story. “The Shah skied here, or the Shah’s son lost a shoe here for the first time.”

“The Queen struck a pose here, and they photographed her.”

“Actors came here, and when we greeted them, they wouldn’t even look at us. So classy.”

Every story they told was more merciless than the last.

I always thought that if these people emigrated, they would probably change, gain better perspective. But when I went abroad, I realized I was wrong. People don’t change after fourteen or fifteen.

When the bus stopped downtown and we, all of us who had come from the other side of the mountain, got off, my journey was only beginning. I had to take five or six more buses to reach the dormitory. I never had money for a taxi—or even sometimes for the agency fee. I always had to find the cheapest way. The final leg, when I reached a place near the exhibition with an even sillier name than “exhibition,” my strength was gone. That was just the beginning of Velenjak. Cat-sized rats ran through the water channels, sometimes climbing up and slipping under our feet.

I always asked myself: why does this barren, tree-less desert draw so much attention? I still don’t understand. But those people were used to that ownerless desert, as if their standards were set by the lifeless, birdless, tree-less wasteland. While my only goal had been to escape it, and my opinion never changed until the very last moment I spent in that ruined, ownerless city.

Now, years after leaving that desolate wreck, I tell myself: those poor people, what on earth were their hearts tied to? In a world moving toward democracy and modernity, the Shah and the Queen were still the most important to them. And rightly so, they had nothing else to take pride in. A Shah and a Queen who had abandoned them, who had fled multiple times. Poor, ignorant, miserable people.

At nights, I wake up and think of that desert. I think of its people. What are they doing now?

How many of them have been killed?

How many are wounded?

How many are buried under rubble?

How many are under torture?

How many have been hit by bullets and can’t even sway beside the dark walls of abandoned buildings?

I do not love that desert. Not every desert. That desert. That desert frightens me. That desert reminds me of my loneliness, of the days I used to lose finger and toe nails, because of poverty. That desert is worse than anything I have seen.

Yet for a moment, my mind does not stray from imagining the desert.

I’ve woken up in the middle of the night before, too.

My waking is not just today or yesterday. But whenever blood mixes with the sand of that desert, I wake up at night like it’s 6 am.

Imagining those people, running, screaming, advancing with empty hands, tears my heart to pieces. It makes the desert even more terrifying in my mind.

And it makes me hate that desert, even more.