This weekend was beautiful. I was in heaven. God said, "let there be light and happy little girls named Mar" and lo, the sun returned to Seattle and warmed the earth and all was well and right in the world.

 

Bryan (introducing Bryan, one of the law school homies) and I spent yesterday at Green Lake. We went on the pretense of studying, lugging big fat heavy blue books along to back up the farse. I had left the backgammon board at home on purpose; and we did this great snooze button kinda routine with getting to studying. Sit down chat, take out a book. Snack, chat, people watch, open book. Move somewhere where i could sit in the sun and pretend not to be white and Bryan could hide in the shade, open book to the right page this time.....you get the drift. I'm also proud to say that i played catch (with a glove and all) for the first time in what must be over a decade. how lame is that!!  anyways, it only took like 15 minutes to remember how to catch a ball....and another 15 to realize i really do have no aim, throw like a girl, and that i can't do any of it with nails.  After 3 hours and collecting a couple of our friends who randomly turned up at our un-studying sunning session, defeat was admitted and we were off in search of rockin Thai food and a movie (Wanted--which has reawakened my momentarily sleeping need for more tats). I was still warmly hanging out in my tank top at 11 when i finally got home....only to discover (cue ominous, dunh, dunh duhhhhh music......)

 

that my house had become an oven to cook little blonde girls in. 

 

in protest, Court had taken her mattress off her bed, dragged it through the house and out the door onto the porch to sleep. That row of west facing windows---great in winter, apparently not great when the sun comes out (which of course, i had forgotten given the sun's never actually come out here before. okay, that's a little over dramatized, but you get the idea). Anyways, the sight of Court's bed, now relocated to the porch, cracked me up. I'm thinking that if we have more warm weather this month, we might have to pitch a tent out there.

 

Nadi returns today from her adventures in Canada at the Maxwell-is-no-more celebration/memorial/whatever. She flies out tomorrow and i have a week until i head to GA for Jamali and Nori's wedding!!  So, here's to the sun...here's to happy Mar...and here's to not studying and now having to cram 80 pages of reading tonight

An interesting article by a Jewish-Iranian writer...."The Forward", one of America's oldest Jewish daily papers:
 
"Then they came for the Bahá’ís"
http://www.forward.com/articles/13602/
 
If one must master the knowledge that even bigotry is relative and comes in gradations, then I was a premature pupil. I learned this lesson when I was only 10.
 
In 1977, in an eclectic neighborhood in Tehran, my Jewish family lived on a narrow, wooded alley in what was then an upscale area, alongside two other Jewish families and many more Muslims. There was also a Bahai family, the Alavis, next door.
 
By then, I had already intuited that my relatives, in the presence of Muslim friends and neighbors, were somehow less flamboyant creatures, quieter and more measured. But the Alavis, debonair and highly educated, were mere ghosts.
 
Theirs was a corner house on the alley, one of the most beautiful in the neighborhood, and the first to be sold within days in 1979, after the return of the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini. In a neighborhood so closely-knit that even the mailman dispensed pearls of pedagogical wisdom to our parents, the Alavis simply vanished one day.
 
No chance for tears, or promises to keep in touch. Not even a forwarding address. My mother insists they said goodbye to her, but my mother considers inventing happy endings a maternal virtue.
 
American audiences, their eyes brimming with anxiety, often ask me about the condition of Jews living in Iran today. But the hardships they assume to be the burden of the Iranian Jews is really the daily experience of the Bahais.
 
In a 1979 meeting with five of the Iranian Jewish community leaders, Khomeini summarized his position on the local Jews in one of his quintessentially coarse one-liners: "We recognize our Jews as separate from those godless Zionists." The line has served as the regime's position on the Jewish minority ever since. So important were these words that they were painted on the walls of nearly every synagogue and Jewish establishment the day after the ayatollah spoke them.
 
It did not prevent Jews from being relegated to second-class citizenry, nor did it enable them to thrive in post-revolutionary Iran. But it recognized the legitimacy of the Jewish existence in Iran and allowed the community to live on, albeit extremely restrictedly.
 
But it is the Bahai community that has been suffering the bleak fate assumed to be that of the Jews. It is the Bahais who are not recognized by the Iranian constitution. Decades ago, Khomeini branded them, among other unsavory terms, a political sect and not a religion, circuitously defining them as plotters against the regime. Iranian Bahais have been accused of espionage for every major power save the Chinese, and simultaneously so. They are not allowed to worship. Their properties are vandalized. Even their dead know no peace, as their cemeteries are systematically destroyed.
 
Their children cannot attend schools, nor can Bahai academics teach. That is why in 1987, unemployed professors, in an act reminiscent of the Middle Ages, established underground universities to educate the Bahai youth.
 
Last month, six Bahai leaders were arrested. They had already been accustomed to routine weekly harassments and interrogations, which is why some of their wives have taken up sewing blindfolds to keep the guards from forcing dirty ones onto their husbands' eyes. What is most alarming about this particular arrest is that they have not returned home and are being kept incommunicado.
 
What compels me to write these lines is the eerie similarity between this and another historical parallel to which I have been a witness. When the American embassy was seized in Tehran in November 1979, the world took the ayatollah at his word for the egregious act he vehemently supported - that it was solely against America. But for those living in Iran, the hostage taking turned out to be about everything but America.
 
Newspapers were shut down. Political parties were banned. Opposition group members were arrested and their leaders hauled off to stand before firing squads.
 
When it was all said and done, the hostages, despite their great suffering during 444 days of captivity, eventually returned home. But the secular opposition of the regime was practically obliterated, and in perfect silence, too, as all attention was focused on the news from the embassy. 
The current Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has taken a page from Khomeini's book. He rails against Israel. He denies the Holocaust. Through these means he focuses all attention on Jews, and while the world remains perfectly oblivious his men assault the Bahais.
 
Though Ahmadinejad's intentions against Israel are gravely alarming, in immediate terms, the community that is paying the most for his pan-Islamist ambitions is the Bahai. Since Ahmadinejad's election to presidency, there has been a sharp rise in anti-Bahai literature in government-sponsored journals, which has, in turn, led to a rise in gang attacks against the community.
 
That the Bahais shy away, per religious mandate, from advocacy on their own behalf surrounds their predicament with even greater silence. But for those in the West - especially for Jews, who know the lessons of World War II - the plight of the Iranian Bahais is most urgent: It is an act of destruction, not simply promised, but already underway.
 
Roya Hakakian, the author of "Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran" (Crown, 2004), is a recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim fellowship.