I'm Not a Terrorist, But I've Played One on TV Read Online Free PDF Page B

working out fine for me. After all, I had escaped the revolution aboard a Pan Am flight, first class no less. In contrast, many of my friends had to escape through Pakistan or Afghanistan, spending years living a transient lifestyle while waiting for a visa to come to the West. Often when I hear these stories I feel guilty, so I try to compensate.
    â€œIt was so tough living across the street from FAO Schwarz when I first moved to America. Just to get to the toys I had to take the elevator down, wait for the light to turn green, and then cross traffic. And my dad typically gave me hundred-dollar bills so I wasalways having to make change. You know how hard that can be on an immigrant who barely knows how to do math in English?”
    Iranians are like Lebanese or Cubans in that we are spread all around the world. Yes, there are millions of Iranians in Iran, but there is also a huge diaspora. When you come from a country that’s had a revolution, or a monthly natural disaster, or simply a great deal of strife, it’s good for your touring career because you are guaranteed to find people from your country wherever you go. If you’re Iranian or Lebanese or Cuban, I advise you to pick up a guitar and learn to sing. Your audience is waiting for you.
    I’ve done shows in Sweden, Norway, Australia, Dubai, Beirut, Canada, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and even Kansas City. There’s always at least one Iranian in every audience. How an Iranian ends up in Kansas City, I’ll never know. Did he get off on the wrong flight? Was he kidnapped? What the hell is he doing in Kansas City? Nine times out of ten it has to do with college. Iranians are big on education, and since the 1950s, they would send their kids abroad to study. Some of the kids made it home to Iran. The unfortunate ones were stranded in Kansas City.
    Happy New . . . WHAT? SPEAK UP!
    Living in a diaspora has its pluses and minuses. One of the biggest minuses as a kid was that every Persian New Year we would have to call our relatives around the world and wish them a happy New Year. This seems like a simple enough task, but there’s a catch. The Persian New Year is not like the Western New Year. In the West, it happens at midnight in each time zone around the world. So come midnight you scream, “Happy New Year!” to the people at your party, you kiss the person next to you, and then you post a messageon Facebook and go to sleep. The Persian New Year is based on the Zoroastrian calendar and indicates the first moment of spring. So the moment occurs at the same time all around the world. Meaning it could occur at 3:26 p.m. in Iran, which would be 3:56 a.m. in California. I know this math seems a bit off, but Tehran is actually eleven and a half hours ahead of California. I don’t know how they were able to split time zones into thirty-minute intervals, or why they would do such a thing. It’s tough enough doing the math when you travel and have to convert money from dollars to Iranian rials. Whenever I travel anywhere outside the United States, I’m very confused for the entire first week. You give someone dollar bills and they give you what feels like Monopoly money. And the conversion is never basic math like 1:5 or 1:10. It’s always 1:3.8675309. When dealing with Iran, you not only have to worry about converting the money, you also have to convert the time into thirty-minute intervals.
    Back to the Persian New Year. Most normal people would let the family sleep and wake up the next morning to make their phone calls. Iranians are not normal. It is customary for younger family members to call older family members. So my dad would be up at 3:56 a.m. calling Iran and yelling into the phone. That’s one thing I’ve never understood. Technology has made so much progress, but anytime you make a call to Iran, it feels like you’re calling a village that just installed its first phone booth that week. To