I’m not sure how many of you have been following the story of Governor Sanford from South Carolina, but you should be. For those not, he disappeared over the weekend.

Yeah, disappeared. When the media and his staff asked his wife if they had seen him, she told them that “he was writing something and wanted some space to get away from the kids.” All right. Fair enough. Why didn’t he (the governor) or she (his wife) alert his staff to this when he made this decision to bound through the Appalachian Mountains?

So, then the police find the governor’s car, abandoned in an airport parking lot and the insanity gets more insanitier. Check out the timeline here to ensure your head gets thoroughly exploded.

Then, he issues a press conference to tell us “I’ve been unfaithful to my wife…with a dear, dear friend from Argentina.” …yeah. He explains how they met at the bottom of the above linked page.

Be sure to watch these videos as well. He’s like a confused puppy. A confused, stupid puppy that was having an affair with a woman in Argentina and doesn’t know what a segue is.

Honestly, the best part is watching the faces of the people behind him during his press release.

There are a lot of places to get news on the events unfolding in Iran, but I wanted to supply a couple that I’ve found the most forthcoming.

Obviously, twitter has been incredible. I’m following some tapped in folks, all relaying information the second they receive it; I’ll usually retweet was fascinates me.
Aside from using the twitter hash-tag search, twazzup does a fantastic job of aggregating all the pertinent tweets, minute-by-minute.
Another great aggregated source is The Lede from the New York Times. They’ve updating their feed every few minutes with comments, quotes, and information. An excerpt:

As we noted on The Lede last week, a source in Tehran told us that of 20 people surveyed at a large opposition rally in south Tehran last Thursday, not one of them said they had heard about it through Twitter. For all the discussion by bloggers and journalists outside Iran of the way the micro-blogging service has helped to inform the rest of the world about opposition protests over the past two weeks, the tool seems to have been less important inside Iran, where many people have heard about rallies through text messaging on cellphones or simple word of mouth.

Still, since so many bloggers and journalists have been glued to Twitter feeds that appear to be coming from inside Iran, it is interesting to read this analysis by a company called Sysomos, which concluded that, of Iran’s 65 million citizens, “there are now 19,235 Twitter users in Iran, compared with 8,654 in mid-May.”

If you’re looking for some interesting reads from various sites, I’ve been adding links to my del.icio.us stream (found on the bottom right of this page), so watch that as well.

As I sat on the couch putting return address stickers and stamps on RSVP reminders/change of reception venue envelopes and watching the Daily Show’s dissection of the current situation in Iran I was reminded, loudly, that I don’t know my own language. That is to say, the language of my people, Farsi. Seeing as how my mother is from Tehran, Iran I should have some basis of knowledge for the language but I don’t and I’ve begun wondering why that is. Perhaps this pondering is a result of time, that I’m now ready to define the culture of my choosing as I prepare to get married. Before such momentous and life changing events its perfectly natural, the television tells me, for one to reassess where they are in this world and who they are. Here’s what I’ve figured out:

When I was young enough to understand and my mother was tired of listen to me asking questions I was told about Iran. My mother told me stories about living in the city and riding on the handle bars of her friend’s bikes, quickly adding “but don’t do that because a friend of mine got killed doing that”. She told me that she would have to go up to the roof and shovel snow as we drove home from the park one summer in her 1985 Dodge Wagon, saying that they worried the weight would be too much and the snow might crash through, damaging those below. (Aside: I just realized I never asked her if they lived in a house or flat.)

After one of these enchanting stories of the old country I told her I wanted to go there and see where she lived. Now, my mother isn’t a bad person. She doesn’t tell lies for the sake of lying or deceive her children on principal. Its clear now what her intentions were and why she responded the way she did but back then it didn’t make much sense. She responded by tell me that we wouldn’t be going back. She told me that because we are Baha’is the government didn’t like us very much, a fact I had learned years before in a newsreel or conversation I had with someone somewhere, and would not be happy if we arrived in their country. That was why they had to flee, my mother and her family, Tehran and move to Texas. The Revolution taking its firm hold on the country, my grandfather recognized it was time to leave so he packed up my uncle, aunt, and grandmother to meet my mother and other aunt in Arlington, Texas. Of course, the trip wasn’t that simple; there are stories I’ve been told about Turkey and various countries in Europe and Asia they had to stay in for a few months before being granted immigrant status in the US, but that’s a story for a different time. She then told me something that shaped my future view of the country of her birth, that if she returned the government would consider her a whore.

In Iran, a Baha’i marriage is meaningless and “married women” are labeled as whores because they and their “husbands” refused a Muslim marriage, the most prominent of a handful of recognized marriages in a country ruled by and designed around Islam. This became doubly worse as she had “married” an American man. She told me my father might be killed and her imprisoned (I realize now that my father wouldn’t be killed but simply imprisoned also) and possibly forced to marry a Muslim man. That my sister and I (my youngest sister wouldn’t be born for another six years) might be given to a Muslim family and that I would, more than likely, be sent to serve in the military.

This, obviously, scared the shit out of me. “My mom’s not a whore, you ‘mother’s of dogs,’” (translated from Farsi; swears being the only Farsi words I can still recall) I thought aloud, my mother responding nonverbally in a way I now understand as being lost in her own fear. It was that fear that drove the car now and steered the conversation to something, in her mind, more productive like soccer or math, things she loved as a child growing up in Tehran and still clung to. The things that weren’t ruined by the Revolution and her fleeing the country of her birth to live, by her self, and attend college at UT Arlington.

Its a bizarre twist that she will now root for the Iranian soccer team at the World Cup in South Africa. That she will question why I’m booing and cheering on their opposition. It makes perfect sense to me. They and that flag represents the moment in history when my mother instilled fear and loathing for a country based on her own experience.

So that leads us to today where rioters and protesters are using facebook and other social networking sites to coordinate their marches in direct opposition to the edict the government created years ago, under the guise of Islam, to quell unrest. Where a people who love their country so much that they must lash out against the government and policies that have consumed and perverted their culture. And I shouldn’t support violence, I know. I shouldn’t support these or any other actions against a government as their are better, less violent, and more unifying ways of resolving the problems that currently plague Iran, but I can’t help it. I want Iran to be a country I can be proud of. The country of my mother’s birth. The country of my Faith’s birth. I just keep hoping that these protesters can revitalize Iran and return it to its rightful place as a powerhouse of invention and peace instead of oppression and degradation. And if these chants are any indication, my childhood dream of going to Tehran to see where my mother was raised may come true sooner than I thought.

Esm e man, Faroz. Man az Iran hastam.

Its been a while.  A long while.

Since I last wrote I went back to college after a five year hiatus, got engaged, and graduated.  After that has been a bit of a blur.  Wedding planning hasn’t gone as we had hoped – you know, simple and easy – and we’re both trying to figure out what will happen next.  We’re looking at opportunities in various places (D.C., L.A., and Seattle mostly) for after the wedding in hopes that she can enter grad school and I can support her with enough work.  Therein lines the trouble, really.  What am I supposed to do after being in school for 4 months?  Before that I worked for two years at a job where changing addresses in a database for 8 hours a day was life and before that, much of the same.  How am I supposed to support a wife who will be going after her grad degree?  Why, selling my soul, of course.

Over the last month I’ve spent time in Nashville working closely with the SoulPancake awesomeness that is Devon and Golriz, a business lunch proposing a social networking aspect for a website my good friend Josh Elder is developing, many business lunches beginning and developing animated video content for SoulPancake with my good friend Shannon Reddy, meeting with a good friend and artist Henry Warren on a couple projects we’ve been working on for quite some time, and sending a proposal for a 100-page graphic novel to my former place of employ.  Did I also mention planning a wedding?  Oh, my, yes.

Now, within that rambling mess did I find a way to make money?  Maybe, but not for quite some time.  Where does that leave me?  I’m looking for work and will probably need to take on a temp position or two in the coming months to ensure maximum (dubious, I know) monetary influx.  Its not what I want but that’s really not a factor at this point.  I’m getting married.  And she’s completely amazing and supportive of my comic writing and various ridiculous sketches.  The reality I’ve faced, however, is that those ventures only get me so far and I’ll need something else to supplement us until the real money (its out there somewhere I’m told) and acclaim (its out there somewhere I’m told) finds its way to my eager-to-spend bank accounts.

So that’s that.  Tomorrow, I’ll be adding another item to my previous listing by meeting with friend and incredible artist Luthando Mazibuko for the day to begin planning and plotting out a graphic novel we’re both excited to be working on.  Who knows?  I don’t.  Give us money.  We’re mostly competent.

Bye bye for now.  Be sure to check back frequently as things have begun to settle and I’ll be posting more often.

Apparently there were some problems with SoulPancake earlier today.  Those problems have been resolved.

Slap your spirit on that skillet, folks!

Truly this time away from my webpage has given me the fresh eyes needed to craft a thought provoking website…I’m tired and busy.

Sure, I haven’t been writing much.  Sure, I haven’t been able to to even think about this page one bit.  Sure, I went through Spring Break claiming that I would write “at least two posts” over the week and didn’t…well, what are you going to do.

In the mean time, y’all need to jump on over to SoulPancake if you haven’t already.  Whatever free time I have, away from planning the wedding and being tackled by my class work, has been spent on that there site.  I’m the Challenges Editor over there and have been dealing with the launch, regular conference calls, and the editorial and creative process day in and day out.  Hooray.

Well, that’s all I can muster at this moment.  I need to get back to this here class work.  Assuredly I’ll get back into the swing of writing regular posts as soon as the dust of everything settles, if that happens.

Welcome back, you say?  Thank you.  Thank you.

Today, we’re a day closer to whenever we’re able to launch SoulPancake.  There have been so many set backs and mandatory adjustments made to our scheduled layout it’s difficult for me to update our progress without sounding like a tease.  It’s all right, however; because, this will all be over soon.

We’re seeing a drastic increase in the building of content lately as each contributor posts, edits, and prepares their Features, Challenges, and Life’s Questions.  As I’m the czar of the Challenges department, it’s been my job to amass, first, a feel for what kinds of challenges we desire and their tone, and, second, pump ‘em out.  Currently, I have a good 4, maybe 5 ready for the launch and another 20 sitting around, gestating in their amneotic fluids suspended state of thought and creativity.  It’s been an incredible experience creating for this site.  Being part of something so broad in scope yet uniform in idea that it really touches me to have been considered to work on it.  This thing is going to be big, and I really hope you all get the chance to sink your teeth in and chew what we’re serving for days and days.

Work week:
I’ll try to update you all on what I’m doing more often this week, so this is not to suggest that you’re getting one post to explain what’s going on this work week.
The sheer mass of class work begun in earnest as we approach our Spring Break, so there will be much studying and much exam and paper writing.  Hooray?  Sure, I guess.
Continued development of SoulPancake means creating new content types and having between 10 and 20 challenges ready to go by our launch (which we’re told will be this month, and hopefully still coincide with Oprah’s Soul Series interview of Rainn) and in the hopes that once things get going we’ll have enough to feed you all without falling behind.  Reallly the site’s about it’s users, so we want to make sure we have a lot for you up there.
I’ll be meeting with our Editor-in-Chief later tonight to get a feel for each other and create some kind of plan and uniform voice for the Challenges section; which is super exciting.
Work on the graphic novel has been kicked into a new gear as I spend a lot more time solidifying the ideas and outlining everything that will happen now that I’ve spend a great deal editing and adjusting it.  The current direction is much different from where I originally thought I’d be going, but think it’ll be much more cohesive and interesting a story now that things have been established.
Last, but most importantly for me, the Baha’i Fast has begun today and I’m really hoping the extra time in the day can be dedicated to work in whatever form.

Well, I guess that’s that for now.  I probably missed something and will attempt to remedy that tonight or tomorrow or whenever I get the chance.  Anyway, I’m still pretty tired and need to get ready for the day…also, to reread this and make sure I don’t sound like a rambling idiot.  …Oh, yep, I do.

Take care, folks!

So, yes, I was gone for a while there.  And for this, I’m truly sorry…sort of.

It’s been a crazy few weeks .  There’s been SoulPancake set backs and visits to Chicago and the spending of the majority of my time doing class work. This will all lead up, joyfully, to Spring Break, which is fast approaching.

Speaking of Fast, the Baha’i Fast begins on sunrise Monday and concludes the night of the 20th of May.  19 days of fasting from sun rise to sunset.  No food or drink.  This should be interesting, especially with the whole school thing.  Regardless, I’m pretty excited to give it a try and hope that I’m able to cleanse myself spiritually and get back to life as it should be.  Refocused, re-purposed, and rested as my Spring Break runs from May 13th through the 22.  I’m sure I’ll be posting quite a bit more during that time in an effort to catalogue the process and ramble endlessly about how I just want a sip of tea or giant bottle of water.  What can I say, I’m a complainer.

Anyway, that’s all I have for now.  It’s late, I’m tired, and I’m beginning to regret even beginning this post…oh well.  More pertinent info in my next post.  Bye, folks!

As it stands, SoulPancake is my #2 priority right behind this graphic novel, so I feel obligated to give regular reports as to what’s going on with both.

The graphic novel is chugging along slowly, but I’ll have time this weekend, with the added impatience of needing to get at least 10 (comic) pages done by Tuesday, to rip through as much as possible.  The story itself is firming up, characters are clear, and I’m getting ready to send some “sketches” out to LT so that I can get some drawn sketches to post around my desk as motivational tools.  This has been a lot of fun to research and create so far, and I haven’t even done much.  It’s exciting.

The massive delay that were my computer problems have been resolved, and I’m really loving the design and feel of this new MacBooks.  I can feel the future of pages and work forming on it’s keys…or whatever.

As far as SoulPancake is concerned – we will be launching on Sunday, February 22nd.  It is official!  I know you’ve been waiting and have been very patient, but the wait will be over  on the the 22nd.  I’ll be in control of the Challenges section, if you’re wondering where my contributions will be housed, and Heather is going to be figuring out the code to post some of the Challenges and other content from the site onto this page so you can all see it, jump over to SoulPancake.com, and participate.

Holler!

As I sit here, slowly sipping my tea for dramatic effect and thinking about he colors that comprise the sunset or whatever, I realize that SoulPancake.com has not launched.  There is a reason for this, however.  There have been problems.  A great many problems, the most of which is that we’re worried about crashing the site when it launches from all the publicity we’ve been getting.

So, things have been pushed back.  I’ll know for how long we’ll be pushed back on Monday, but I give you this tidbit after our two hour long conference call this afternoon, it will be worth the wait.  The extra time is allowing us to finely sharpen our impliments of your doom/awesome content and the fleshing out of some ideas that we’ve long been ruminating.  This is good, my gentle readers…and Shannon, who does not read or is he gentle.  And you will benefit from it in the long run.

As well, it is of note that Oprah’s Soul Series has pushed back the Rainn Wilson interview episode, sadly, to Monday, February 23rd.  I suppose there some kind of reasoning behind this – perhaps there was just so much damn content/awesome that they didn’t know what to do with themselves – but we’re not privy to it.  Regardless, iTunes will have the interview up on the 23rd.  I swear!  These people are making me look like more of a jerk than I already am, says I.

I’d also like to alert to y’all that you can, in fact, comment on these and other items on this site.  Simply click on “THE COMMENTS” and state your business.

Now, as I realize I left the defuser in this mug too long and my tea is bitter and strong, I’d also like to alert to you about Absolute Radio.  It’s a UK radio station.  It is of the awesome, and have an entire channel (Absolute Xtreme, sadly) dedicated to really great, really new jams.  The Brits know their tunes, folks.  And we should be so lucky as to suck upon their internet radio teet.

END TRANSMISSION!