Persian Music

Since my presentation is going to be about Khayyam, an Iranian poet, I think its good for you guys to listen to some Persian music too ...

Anathema - Street Painting

I want to write about two things, first about Anathema, and then about street painting. During the Autoethnography, I realized that I do important things different than before, and I don’t listen to my favorite music to increase my concentration, then to realize the difference, I tried it again, and it worked, all of the Anathema music, make me more concentrated in things that I do, and I love them, as I used to love them 10 years ago. 

Now let’s move to the movie, it movie really amazed me, I have never thought that street painting is this powerful, the images, the depth, popularity. The images were everywhere, nothing has that power, no other instrument is like this, to me it was as strong as TV and advertisements. I loved how most of theme did not seek popularity, and fame, they wanted art for art, for themselves,  this is a pure art, that’s way more enjoyable than when you do it for others, or for money. So I respect Bansky way more than Mr. Brainwash.

But I kind of liked Mr Brainwash too, I don’t want to be too judgmental, so I will write about things that I liked about him. First of all, he had so much passion, I think for success that’s the first and most important thing that you need. His passion for camera was amazing, and the reason too, that’s why he is so attached to it, I always believe that human emotion is a very unique factor of success, it does not work like any other thing, you cannot calculate or measure it, and you can just see the result, which is always amazing, to me Mr. Brainwash had that passion from the beginning, even when he was a child. He was very confident too, although I say he was more passionate, when you are too passionate about something, confident and braveness and … come with it as a combo, none of the other things come with this amazing combo.

He was a perfectionist, the fact that he could not decide which painting on wall till the last minute means that he is too perfectionist, and wants to make the best judgment. This can sometimes harm us, but in this occasion, it didn’t. The fact that he copied everything was again another thing because of his passion, when you are passionate about something; you pay so much attention to every detail of it, that’s what made him a great artist. Although we get bad impression when we hear mimicking, but in reality the first step to learn everything is mimicking, you have to follow others first, then find or make your path. He was a good learner.

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My Language Challenges – Part 4

                So these were my methods, for philosophy and economic class, to wisely/blindly select important material, and then translate them, learn them, and write them into the exams. In there I had to face so many challenges, my language challenges (learning grammar, speaking, listening (hardest part), writing … ), my university challenges, my cultural challenges and … I understood that I have to first focus on my classes, and with this situation I can’t focus on learning Spanish or ..  so I decided that I will improve my Spanish by communicating in the class and society, and put my other energy on the courses that I have.

                There were so many funny and good experiences too, I was the only Iranian over there (in the country there were so many tourists, and European residents, but very very very few Iranians, which I have never seen or heard of ), and the cultural difference was a lot, everything I knew was different over there, it was so much fun too, the regatton, dancing and even the religious people, I was from another world, and they were friendly people, so I learned about all of them. One of the funny experiences was that I went to a friends house, the name of their dog was Pito, and I called him puto several times, then they told me his name is Pito, and puto means bitch .. or once in my English/Spanish pattern making I had a guest, and wanted to say do you want some eggs, but I didn’t know how, so I just said you want some egggos ? And then it became a famous story between us.

                Rather than these, my calculus class, as I knew I got an A without any studying (I have passed the last engineering  math in Iran, before I got out),  so that was fun, and with the translator method, I got 80 in philosophy, and 85 in economy, but the Spanish was even harder than these, for that class I read the book and everything, but where you put the stress in Spanish was the hardest one, which I never learned it that well, even the natives who knew were to put stress on words, they were confused in that section, I don’t know how, but I got 72 on my final, I remember that grade was an average grade in that class, and better than some natives, and with all these being said, my GPA in the first semester was close to 85, and it surprised so many people, even my friends and others who thought that I will definitely fail in those classes. I remember a lady named Stacy (make up name, don’t remember her name) she was making fun of it and saying, the first day you came here you could not even say hola (hello), how could you pass those classes ?! yes after 2 years being there, I passed 62 units and learned reading, writing, speaking and listening in Spanish.

My Language Challenges – Last part

Then when I came to USA, now I have almost forgot English, because I tried to not to speak English to learn Spanish, so again I had a challenge for learning another language, but I was ready, now I knew how to do it, again the first day, I went to college, Diablo valley college and registered for the first semester. They told me to better learn English, get the Speech-120 class, which was a primitive speech class, then I thought let me get one other speech class too, so I got speech 120, and speech 130, as I remember, which then I figured out that the second class was interstate competitions for speech and debates between universities.

Again a new challenge, but I was always amazed with great speakers, people like MLK or Kennedy, so I wanted to try it. In debates I felt like I am full of words, but I could not transform all of thoughts into words, it was a little hard, I remember me and Angelo in the first debate that we participated, we got into finals, and got into 4^th place, it was really funny, because our first hope for final lost in second round, we lost to saint Marys college, they won the competition in that tournament, I was great in answering and re battling, and Angelo was great in structuring things, so we were a perfect team. On the other hand I got twice second place in speech competitions, in a persuasion speech, I had propaganda speech which I got 3^rd in that competition, and I had an informative speech about Iran, which I got into the second place that term.

But these were not the real challenge. Every semester, DVC held a speech night, which best speakers perform, and they are people who have done these kind of activities for years, since high school or .. one of my brilliant friends, Alex Rigali, was in the list of speech giving, but he had problem on that day, so John Haneckak our professor (who was a great personality, mayor of Pleasant hill, and influenced me a lot) , asked me do you want to give your speech tonight about Iran?  You know what was my answer, although I did not go through it, but every challenge is an opportunity, so again I said yes definitely. I had 6 hours to get ready for the speech night, to speak in front of 500 people. I focused on the speech that night, and read it a lot. At the moment of the performance, someone had to introduce me, she said, Kamran is from Iran, and came here six months ago, and is taking speech-120 basic speech class, and English is not his first language, and now he is giving a speech to you guys, I went and it was a great and memorable night. Every challenge is an opportunity to grow, whether you lose or win, it helps you to grow, so take it.

Finance 350 - a class not to take

                This week was crazy; I had to learn finance in 3-4 days, which was really a hard thing. I remember last week that Nick was doing everything with calculator and getting all the results, and I did not understand a which really surprised me how fast he learned, so I asked him, hey dude, how come you are so comfortable with this calculators, he said that me and Ali have failed this class twice. That was 2 days before the exam, and that was when I realized that I m screwed, and I cant sleep for two days in order to pass this class.
               So I started from that day, studied all the night, and then tomorrow, I studied with a group, we all knew how to solve one of the problems, and we helped each other, me Alma, and Kevin and etc. I was the only one who had another class, Eng 414, so I came to the class and I was really worried about the test, I knew studying as a group, was my only chance, so I asked Paul, and he gave me permission, he is one of the best professors I have ever had, very understanding, helpful, and he teaches you without harassing you.
        
               So I left, and we studied all the night, for the first time I stayed at SFSU till 12am! Then in the morning, the BART accident happened, and I had to drive, I was driving for four hours from East Bay to SFSU, the good part was that it was so slow, that during those four hours, I started to study all the previous exams and etc, I solved them like 100 times :D.

              Then I got the result, the average was 71, and I got 91, top grade in the class, usually I don't care about top grade or.. but this time since it was a big challenged, it really felt good, I got higher than most of the people who thought me how to solve problems, although I felt bad a little bad about it too...

My Language Challenges – Part 3

My first week was done, there are so many problems, I was thinking how can I solve them one by one? So I categorized them, philosophy and economy, category one. Calculus, no category, and Spanish, category II. My first lesson from the first week was that I cannot use ways that I normally used, or other people use to get successful, for example I can’t rely on class at all, because I don’t understand anything, and I am the only one with that problem, So whatever my solution is, its not in the classroom. And believe me, one of the worst thing in the world is being somewhere that you don’t understand anything, its really hard.

 Then I thought my only and best option is to learn and understand the material (in a way which I did not know yet), and then put them in my own words on the exams, this is the best I could do. The hardest part of these situations is that you have to rely on methods, and things that you have never tried, and you have no idea their successful rate, you just have to think, decide and try, that was exactly what I did, without any doubt. Then I needed a solid source to rely on, and understand the material, the professors were very helpful and nice, some were speaking English, but that was not an option, they were not my private tutor, so I had to find another way. I decided to only rely on the books, and read the books. But how can I understand those books? I don’t remember what the options were or if there were any feasible (not stupid) option, but after a while I found translators (which was not common at all 5-6 years ago), the only good translator I found was Elmundo.es. So I had to type the entire book in the translator to English, then understand it, and then translate it into the exams.  The problem was that again it was too time consuming. So I had to find a way to reduce the load of typing material.

When I say these, I really have to thank my background as an Iranian, we always try to better things, and learn better and faster way, in school or work or .. Sometimes it’s not a good thing, but in there it really helped me. When I study, I have learned to study the important points from the book, even in Iran, so I don’t waste my time, but in Honduras, and Spanish it was different, how can I understand key points when it’s in another language? I know the answer, you just have to trust your gut, and I did, like always ..

Iran documentary - Motivation - Last Part - 3

With those experiences I understood that the thing that I have to target is ignorance, the problem is misinformation or bad information, nothing else. But now that I had the information, how could I do that?! I still was not sure until I got a statistic class, which was all maths, but my professor, who was a great one, was very innovative, he made us to produce a video for our final project. Since I was a programmer in Iran, learning how to work with a new computer programs was not hard at all, and it was motivating. So I made my first video for him, it was easy and not that bad.

At the same time that I was learning to produce videos, I was searching and browsing in internet to learn more about Iran, what I got from that, and from TV, was that most of the videos and TV programs and news about Iran were all negative. And the main sources of information for so many people are those, so to change their ideas I had to target that. In those days, YouTube was growing and getting popular, but most of clips about Iran again were negative. So now I had the information, I had the knowledge, and I had the proper means of communication to transform those realities. 

I knew it’s a very hard thing to do, and to manage, where should I begin? What is the structure? What should I put in it and etc? As always I trusted the information that I gathered from people I have seen, and of course I trusted my gut. To find the best structure of it, I checked out useful sites that inform us about countries, for example Wikipedia, it is very useful, and the structure is great, so I decided to structure my videos close to the structure of Wikipedia. I put introduction, culture, and unique things (extra information that cannot be in Culture nor in Introduction). But something was missing, yes I had to talk about nowadays of Iran too, so I named the last part :”today of Iran”, which unlike the other parts, were presenting mostly photos of Iranians nowadays, and the cities and etc, rather than information. In all of those parts I found Iranian music to complement those information, to make the video more friendly and interesting.

So first I had to find the raw and useful data, photos and music, I found over thousands of photos, and a great deal of information and music. First, I complied the information mostly based on the wrong ideas about Iran, and then based on that information; I found the proper photos, and music. These all took me almost a year, and the last part which was the easiest part was producing the video, which took me almost 5-6 months.  In all of those time, I was very energetic and thoughtful, I made all of them from scratch, I saw some people cried over it, some were very proud, and some ashamed, those strong emotions showed me that I made the right choice.