I promise nothing complete; because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty.
[T]he gods had a habit of going round to atheists' houses and smashing their windows.
--The Colour of Magic, by Terry Pratchett
Translated from wall photos of a friend of a friend on Facebook. I like it, because like many twenty-somethings in Iran, I already feel old.I take up space,
therefore I am.
A celebration,
for the birth of a volume,
for the birth of a lined mind,
for the birth of a striped imagination.
Is this a 27th birthday, or a 1000th birthday?
I feel old.
A ship takes me to the end of the world;
and I fall into a fish tank.
The stupid fish swallows me,
and in its belly, I blow out 27 lit candles.
And again there's darkness.
In the darkness,
I blow out
the blown out candles,
the dead moments,
and the youth gone.
I'm still blowing. I become empty, and emptier.
like a wandering balloon.
When I give my novel as input to this program, I get 4082 words. So how does that compare? Let's see how many words are there in some other works of fiction. To be fair, I take the first 268458 characters of these novels (that's the length of my own novel):import sys
filename = sys.argv[1]
text = unicode("")
with open(filename, "r") as f:
text = f.read().lower()
new = ""
for ch in text:
if ch in "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz ":
new += ch
elif ch == '\n' or ch == '\x0c':
new += ' '
text = new
words = text.split()
u = set(words)
print sorted(u)
print len(u)
My friends used to think that I cheat. Even I sometimes thought that I cheat. What else could it be? Luck? That was one theory, but not a very likely one. Lucky people, apart from me, are only stuff of legends. You hear people saying, my cousin Farsheed, is such a lucky man. Anything he touches becomes gold. He buys a house, and tomorrow real estate prices skyrocket. He sells his house, next thing you know we are in economic depression. But these are legends. If you get to know the said cousin, you will find him a man with great economic sense. He buys and sells not randomly, but calculatingly. Not me. For me, it happened like this. A friend would invite us to play Mensch. We would start by rolling the die, and I was usually the one who got the six first. As the game continued, my friends used to find that I'm likely to get a four, if one their pieces is four fields ahead of mine, and a five if its five fields ahead. Mensch is supposed to be a game of pure chance. No thinking is required. Nothing serious. Just play and enjoy. But when I am involved, everything changes.
That was why I got less and less invitations to play with my friends. They didn't like to play a cheater. At first I tried to explain, that I can't explain why it is happening. “Freak accidents happen,” I used to say. I didn't add that they tend to happen around me a lot more often, and they're usually to my advantage.
They didn't buy it. “You're cheating.” They used to say, “You're not supposed to get a six right at the beginning of the game.” Not that they knew anything about probabilities. They were believers of the Murphy's Law, though they didn't like it when they were always the ones to be the victim of the Law.
But games of chance were not the only reason I got separated from my friends and classmates. At school, teachers only tended to pick me when I was prepared for the topic. It rarely happened that I was not ready and teacher would ask me a question. On the rare occasions that it did happen, I saw triumphant looks in my classmates' eyes.
So, school wasn't at all fun for me. When I started college, it was with a relief to start a new life, with new people that didn't know anything about my freakishness. Probability classes were the worse things in this new life. It was like the lecturer was deliberately taunting me. Dice and coins were always a touchy subject with me. Colored balls were soon added to the list. “There are eight red balls, five green balls, and twelve white balls in a bowl. Blindfolded, you take three balls from the bowl, one at a time and without replacing them. How probable is it that the third one is green?”
When I would see such questions, I was tempted to answer, “It depends on who is taking the balls.”
It was after one particularly nasty Probability class that I decided to quantify me freakishness. I guess that proves that I am a real freak. I took a coin and started to count how many tails I get and how many heads. I flipped the coin two hundred times. 109 heads, 98 tails. Damn it. So how is it supposed to happen? Then I notices two people coming. I couldn't hide what I was doing fast enough. Mohsen was coming towards me, with a huge smile on his face. I had tried to ignore him as much as I could, because he was a betting person. The ideal candidate to blow my new cover as a normal fifty-fifty person. But this time I decided the hell with it. Who cares what these idiots think about me. “I do,” said a small voice in my head, but I ignored it. Apparently he'd been watching me for some time and decided that I really was crazy. Not that it mattered to him. After all, he was crazy too. Beside him, was his annoyingly ever present girlfriend, Sima. I couldn't read the emotion on her face. Was it consent, curiosity, or something else? I couldn't tell.
“So who won? You or you?” said Mohsen, “Doing some lab after class? Deciding if your coin is fair or not?”
