{"id":29,"date":"2004-02-16T12:13:45","date_gmt":"2004-02-16T19:13:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/?p=29"},"modified":"2004-02-16T12:13:45","modified_gmt":"2004-02-16T19:13:45","slug":"rainy-monday-morning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/2004\/02\/16\/rainy-monday-morning\/","title":{"rendered":"Rainy Monday Morning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wow, two pentaquerys at once, from mifune<\/a> and from odd_dog<\/a>, respectively:<\/p>\n

[If you want your own pentaquery, let me know in comments.]
\n
\n 1. Where do you want to be and what do you see yourself doing 5 years
\n from now? 10 years from now?<\/i>
\nIdeally, I’d like to have some quality journalistic-type job at a newspaper, living in some respectable metropolitan city like SF or NYC. Hopefully within 10 years I’ll be happily married and will have settled in somewhere. <\/p>\n

2. What’s your favorite anecdote from your years of rooming with ?<\/i>
\nHeh. Probably on the day he moved out in May 2001. He was moving out before me, and even though his parents were coming in the morning, he still hadn’t packed a single thing. I meanwhile, had started to put books and other things away even though I wasn’t leaving for another day or so. I had gone out late to a DMB concert the night before and returned pretty late. I crashed and was awoken a few hours later to a large pounding on the door — FBI-style. I rolled over, figuring that David would get it. When the pounding came again, I looked and saw that he wasn’t there. Half-conscious, I nearly tripped over my own boxes of books and swung the door open. There before me stood David’s parents, and this random chick who turned out to be from Switzerland, the daughter of a family friend. His Dad greeted me and shook my hand with a hearty handshake.<\/p>\n

“Where’s David?”<\/p>\n

I looked around the room, rubbing my eyes, still not quite awake yet.<\/p>\n

“I don’t know.”
\n“Is he packed?”
\n“Uhh\u00c9no.”
\n“Well, time to start, then.”<\/p>\n

And the three of them came in, and in no time had found some suitcases and duffels and were just quite literally throwing whatever they could find into them. I offered to help, but it was rebuffed.<\/p>\n

About a half-hour later, David P. shows up eating a muffin.<\/p>\n

“Hi guys,” he said, with a really dumb grin on his face that only he could pull off.<\/p>\n

I laughed, and returned to my computer. They were gone within the hour.<\/p>\n

3. What is one thing that you would change if you could go back in time and do it over?<\/i><\/p>\n

I honestly can’t think of anything.<\/p>\n

4. How much do you remember about that time when Flanken puked in the middle of Mrs. Jacobson’s 2nd grade class?<\/i><\/p>\n

All I remember is that it reeked, probably because we were in an underground class (not as cool as it sounds) and that we had to leave the room. That’s about all.<\/p>\n

5. Why do you keep an LJ?<\/i><\/p>\n

No real reason. It was the “cool thing to do” circa 2001\/2002 and so I jumped on board. Once I discovered RSS feeds and things then it got even cooler, but I am impressed with their interface and ease-of-use.<\/p>\n

(1) You mention that your parents don’t understand what you hope to do with your major, but I would like to know… what is it, generally and specifically, that you hope to do? for others? for yourself?<\/i><\/p>\n

It’s not so much that they don’t understand what I hope to do with my major, it’s just that my Dad doesn’t really believe in interdisciplinary majors (“It doesn’t add up to a body of knowledge.”) and he doesn’t really understand how that relates to journalism, and specifically tech journalism, and doesn’t understand how the journalism field works. I hope to become a journalist, specifically a technology journalist such that I can explain to the general public how various technological developments are changing what people do, how they think, and how they think about what they do. I want other people to get a taste of how cool it really is.<\/p>\n

(2) You, like me, have one of those first names that most Americans pronounce one way but your parents pronounce differently. Do people mispronounce your name a lot? How and in what circumstances would you correct them?<\/i><\/p>\n

Ok, well, in the Farsi language, my name would be pronounced S\u201c-roos — however, I don’t know enough of the IPA to be able to accurately portray the proper pronunciation. The “roos” bit is clipped, and not extended out like we would say in English with a long “oo” sound. I don’t know if that makes sense. The accented first syllable is also clipped, not quite a long “ee” sound either. So my Dad (and all other Farsi speakers) say it the right way. You might hear some of my family (grandparents, Mom, brother) calling me “see-ROOS”, which is a close approximation, however, Anglophones tend to drag the pronunciation of both of these syllables longer than necessary. So around middle school, I guess, I decided that the easiest thing would be to slightly change the sound of the first syllable to “suh” rather than “see”, for the sake of brevity. Now, I introduce myself as “suh-ROOS”, so that’s what people call me — it’s a sort of hybrid between the Anglophone and Persiphone (is that a word?) pronunciations. When people see my name in print, they automatically assume that it’s “CY-russ”, which would make sense, given the spelling. That’s the pronunciation that I go by in restaurants, caf\u017ds, or anyplace where I don’t really care if they mispronounce it — somewhere where I will likely only interact with those people once in my life. <\/p>\n

(3) Your opinion(s) on the Iraq conflict?<\/i>
\nI’m not a pacifist, but I do understand the ramifications of unilateral action by the world’s only superpower, particularly when traveling abroad. Myself and two friends (one who was Canadian and the other American) were traveling through Senegal and into Mali around March 20 2003 when the invasion of Iraq began. We all called ourselves Canadian because we honestly feared what might happen if people knew we were American. That’s just a very palatable example. I think that the war was conducted for the wrong reasons based on faulty intelligence, and that the Hussein regime, as assholish as it might have been, was not an imminent threat to anyone. The WMD argument didn’t pan out (surprise!), and now we’ve turned to a “Hussein was a mass-murdering fuckhead” argument. Ok, that might be true, but that’s not what we said before. I was\/am against the war for the reasons and the way it was carried out. If we had gone to the UN and said “We need intl. legitimacy to take out this dictator because he is a threat to his own people, etc etc”, and provided credible reasoning as to why this needed to happen immediately and could get the Security Council on board and then came up with a truly legitimate international “coalition” (none of this “Coalition of the Willing” bullshit, armed with 10 guys from Nicaragua and one Danish sub) — then I might actually have been for it. <\/p>\n

(4) What do you like best and least about Berkeley life?<\/i>
\nIt’s diversity in lifestyle, its abundance of good food and good people. Oh, and that little place called the University of California. Least? The extremist politics that seem to dominate Sproul Plaza where people shout at each other and make no sense at all.<\/p>\n

(5) Where did you get that kickass hat?<\/i>
\nMelbourne, Australia. It’s an Afghan pakol<\/i>, worn with pride by the Northern Alliance and other Afghan rebels who faught against the Taliban. It was made by Afghan women and sold at a refugee center in Melbourne, where I saw a very powerful play about the plight of refugees in Australia (that’s a whole ‘nuther ball of wax.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wow, two pentaquerys at once, from mifune and from odd_dog, respectively: [If you want your own pentaquery, let me know in comments.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"aside","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-aside","hentry","category-general","post_format-post-format-aside"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4uks-t","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cyrusfarivar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}