From The Financial Lives of the Poets by Jess Walter
"A couple of old dorm-floor hits later my brain springs a leak and my life seems to trickle out, as I tell Jamie and Skeet my whole story: how I left a good job as a business reporter two years ago to start an unlikely poetry-and-investment website, how we got buried in the housing collapse just as my senile father moved in, how I scrambled back to my old newspaper job, only to get laid off eight weeks ago. How I got 14 weeks of severance, and six weeks left to find a job… And that’s not even my most pressing deadline: I have all of seven days to liquidate my retirement and pay off a $30,000 balloon payment to the mortgage company, or risk losing our house. And it is this second deadline, I tell the boys, that has given my job search such throat-constricting immediacy, as I worry over thinning want ads, shakily fill out applications, and…how —this part has just occurred to me—I’ve gone and added another stress to a very shitty situation because “Even if I do somehow get a job interview now, they’ll probably make me take a —”
“—drug test!” Skeet yells, and he laughs and I laugh and he laughs and I stop laughing and he keeps laughing."
From My Name Means Fire by Atash Yaghmaian
"It was an exciting time, even for little children. Thousands of people came out daily to show their dissatisfaction with the Shah and his regime. They wanted democracy.I, like so many Iranians, still hold the word “revolution” as somewhat positive—sort of like a parent you want to respect, yet who has let you down in so many ways.
When I think of that time, my heart leaps up with joy, but as I play the years forward, I see only devastation and heartbreak.
In April [1979] Ayatollah Khomeini replaced the shah and declared Iran to be an Islamic Republic. A cloud of fear started to form around everyone I knew. They kept saying their revolution and hope for democracy were “stolen,” and that there was no longer any azadi—the freedom Maman Bozorg used to sing about. People didn’t sing anymore, either, on TV or in the streets."
