Dictionary of a Clown Between Two Languages

Essay (n.)

1. A piece of writing produced by over-revving the author’s brain.
2. The yield of an unemployed person’s search for employment.
3. Wasting the A4 paper Dad buys.
4. Making an ass of myself on paper, then submitting it to an international literary magazine.

xxxxSynonyms: waste of time, waste of words.

Idea (n.)

1. Something that only comes to mind while sitting on the toilet.
2. A feature that stops working during exams and crises.
3. An elixir in the hands of government officials, which they refuse to use to end world hunger or, God forbid, even cure their own stupidity.

xxxxSynonym: dilated capillaries in the brain.

Drawing (n.)

1. An art form that, when attempted for this essay, made a five-year-old laugh at me.
2. An inadvertent rendering of my face as the Annabelle doll after swallowing a camel.
3. The only thing my handsome, worthless Crush—a professional graphic designer—is actually capable of doing.

xxxxSynonyms: buffoonery on paper, insulting the faces of God’s creatures.

Clown (n.)

1. Someone whose friend says, “This call for submissions was made for the likes of you,” and who first takes it as an insult, then realizes it was a compliment. (I think?)
2. Someone who, while standing on an auditorium stage, microphone in hand, before four hundred students, teachers, the vice principal, and the principal, says, in reference to the school’s phone ban, “If you bring your phone, hide it in any hole you can find,” and thus discovers she can make people laugh: not with jokes, but with blunder.
3. A cow that thinks its donkey lover is a heavenly feast.

xxxxExample: me, the writer, in love with a boy—The Crush—who is in love with The Rival.

Blunder (n.)

1. A hidden talent discovered through shame (see above).
2. The time I confused suppositories for acetaminophen, and loudly announced. “Oh, I take these every morning!”
3. A government announcement that makes the whole nation laugh… until we realize they are completely serious. E.g., A campaign to fight inflation by asking citizens to “eat less.” (Author’s note: We thought it was a satirical meme, but no, the government actually printed official posters.)

xxxxSynonyms: mass homicide by laughter.

Shit (interj., loanword)

1. The only English curse I learned from films.
2. My reaction when an English speaker whitewashes me, my sister, my mother, and all my ancestors, hangs us on the line to dry, and all I can manage is—this.
3. The ceiling of rage in a second language.

xxxxSynonyms: None; shit is shit.
xxxxIndigenous alternatives: many, but all unprintable.
xxxxPersian equivalent: (censored).

Translation (n.)

1. The process of taking your joke and turning it into something no one understands.
2. A craft that makes history’s great writers—Tolstoy, Hugo, Kafka—roll in their graves, their souls inconsolable.
3. A bridge with Persian on one side and, on the other, guaranteed catastrophe.

xxxxExample: this text.

Magazine (n.)

1. A place in Paris and New York that asks you to be funny in a language in which you can’t even curse properly.
2. A place that doesn’t accept AI-generated work, which is the only thing it’s honest with you about.
3. A place that may publish this text, or may not; either way, Dad will mock me.

xxxxSynonyms: “Oh, Lady Luck,” praying, begging God, asking all one hundred and twenty-four thousand prophets for help.

Dad (n.)

1. ATM card.
2. A bald, mustachioed man who braids my suitors’ hands and feet like hair.
3. A man who kisses the only sister of the son of the brother of my aunt’s uncle every morning.

xxxxSynonym: visa to leave the house.

Prize (n.)

1. A device for getting high—for about five minutes.
2. Something they used to placate us with in school, so we’d forget we were being trained, not taught.
3. A means for the family to show off in front of jealous aunts by marriage.
4. Something that looks better on a shelf than in your hands.
5. Something that only matters to those who didn’t win it.

xxxxAntonym: a slap on the back of the head.

University Entrance Exam (n.)

1. Misery.
2. Misery.
3. Misery.

xxxxSynonyms: a multiple-choice existential crisis—panic attack included; the family’s favorite dinner topic for four years.

Crush (n.)

1. A boy taller than a streetlamp—if he were a handspan taller, his head would hit the throne of God.
2. Someone who, when he learned of my unrequited love, replied with a sneer: “I have a girlfriend, and we’re very happy together.” (Yes, he really said that. And yes, I still loved him. Because I’m a clown in love, I know.)
4. Someone who launched a full psychological war against me on his Instagram, hoping I’d see it and die of jealousy over The Rival. Ha! Instead I eat chips and insert little digs about them in essays I write.

xxxxExample: See below.

Rival (n.)

1. A pretty if naïve girl who believes The Crush—this nervous and paranoid being—could be the man of her life.
2. Someone whom The Crush believes is endowed with 100% natural beauty (if one  ignores the makeup she uses to paint her face red like a beetroot).
3. A girl who—even though I didn’t mention her name in the text, and who is absolutely not named Aylin—might climb through my window with a club and beat me up the moment this essay is published.

xxxxNote: If I survive, I will write my next essay from the ICU.

Laughter (n.)

1. An art form performed with the mouth, producing a unique sound. For example, my uncle-by-marriage sounds like a car trying to start.
2. A spice people sprinkle on their own mouths when giving an order or asking a favor—so the other person feels too embarrassed to say no.
3. Something that presses on you at the worst possible time and place, like a funeral for example.
4. An explosion whose sound defines your personality: dignified, or a buffoon?
5. A cheap, accessible antidote to tragedy, grief, or a broken heart, e.g., the only painkiller I could afford after The Crush chose The Rival.

xxxxSynonyms: accidentally spitting on someone’s face.

Silence (n.)

1.
2.
3.

xxxxSynonym: strangling.

Serotonin (n.)

1. The hormone a depressed clown needs.
2. The only natural resource the government hasn’t figured out how to tax yet. (Give them time.)
3. Do you think jokes are funny? No, no, it’s just this substance running high in your body.

xxxxNote: For more information, refer to your 12th-grade biology textbook, page 50, second paragraph.

DNA (n.)

1. A useless double-stranded rope that ruins everyone.
2. The reason I’m as thin as a lizard, even though—on my nutritionist’s advice—I eat like an elephant.
3. The only thing I understood from three years of biology.

xxxxSynonym: a twisted ladder.

Tragicomedy (n.)

1. When humor doesn’t know what to do with itself; neither do we—laugh? Cry? Or fall into deep reflection?
2. When my father says he loves my sister and me equally—but the cake read: “Happy birthday, sister of my dear daughter!”
3. When two soldiers who are childhood friends are each ordered to kill the other. Or better, when we send drones into the sky to kill more efficiently than we ever could.

xxxxSynonym: pick a war, any will do. 

Homeland (n.)

1. The cradle of ghormeh sabzi, saffron, and carpets.
2. A place where people laugh at their own misery.
3. A place where they drink tea in summer and eat ice cream and faloodeh in winter.

xxxxSynonym: love.

Culture (n.)

1. Something everyone thinks they have, when in fact no one does.
2. The reason “suppositories,” “uncles-by-marriage,” and “124,000 prophets” can sit side by side in one text and no one is surprised.

xxxxSynonyms: heavy baggage, souvenir.

Conclusion (n.)

1. Sewing the head of a piece to its tail.
2. Whitewashing everything you have written.
3. The moment you realize comedy is neither entertainment nor profession, but a way of surviving between two languages and two versions of yourself.

xxxxSynonyms: Curtain fall, the artist bowing to the audience, goodbye.
xxxxP.S. See you soon in the ICU.