by Holly Jahangiri | May 1, 2025
I need to understand why things don’t work. Not that it matters to anyone else, once the “fix” is applied. Break, fix. Break, fix. But why did the thing happen in the first place? Without that crucial piece of knowledge, it’s bound to break again.
Nine Levels of Nested Parentheses
Early in my career, I worked on a system that relied on Boolean expressions to select computer report pages to be printed and distributed to recipients. I was good at it. One time, I managed to craft an inordinately complex statement to capture all the varied pages for a single recipient. It was probably ten lines long. It was, I thought, a thing of beauty. Impeccable logic, all the quotation marks and parentheses were properly opened and closed, and yet…it wouldn’t run. Bombed every time. I had systems engineers and programmer/analysts check and double-check, and all agreed it was perfection. But still…no joy. The thing wouldn’t run. I glared at the mainframe. If I could craft it with my very limited computer science background, that damned machine – big as a small bus – ought to be able to understand it and run it. It just stood there, impassive. The experts all gave me the same completely unsatisfying, but ultimately effective, advice: “Break it into smaller statements.”
None of them could explain to me why. Not a single one of them knew, and they all admitted as much. If I weren’t on a deadline, I’d have beat my head bloody against the side of the mainframe in frustration. Instead, I fumed internally for a decade.
One day, back when I still smoked, I was outside in the break area telling a colleague about this past and useless frustration. If you smoke, you know the real value of standing in the outside break area. You run into colleagues from all parts of the company. You meet people you never would have met, otherwise. You learn more quickly what’s really happening throughout the organization.
An older man approached us, chuckling. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I couldn’t help overhearing you. I think I can tell you exactly what the problem was.”
“Really? Please! Tell me.”
“I used to work for IBM. That operating system only supported nine levels of nested parentheses. I’ll bet you went over the limit.”
“Of course I did. Thank you!”
That’s all I’d needed to hear for ten years. That’s it. Just one logical, accurate explanation. I wouldn’t have protested simplifying the selection statements had anyone told me the parameters in the first place. “I don’t know” is a great answer, an honest answer. But I knew there had to be a better one and surely somebody had to know what it was.
Annoying Line Breaks
My post, Increase Diversity, had a phantom line break. It’s not the first time this has happened on this blog. In the past, I’ve been able to futz around with the posts until the phantom line break was laid to rest for good, but not this time. I asked three WordPress experts and my favorite Support person at my web hosting company, and none of them knew. One finally did figure out a solution but they couldn’t explain to my satisfaction exactly why the solution was necessary since I had only made one teeny-tiny change to my CSS in the past month or more, and it should not have been what it was: a Divi cache issue. There is a very secret, very “advanced,” very hidden place to go to clear it – and that’s all it took. Still makes absolutely no sense to me how any minor change to the CSS, cached or not, could cause phantom line breaks in the middle of a line.
Start the clock on another decade of frustration!
by Holly Jahangiri | Apr 28, 2025
Flesh
We have a running argumentâhe says
the English language has too many words
for the same thing. Not nearly enough,
I say, with an indignant huff. He wants
clarity in an eight-color box of crayons. I
want one hundred twenty-eight
with sixteen shades of âFlesh.â Who decided
âFleshâ was skin like Silly Putty, pinkish
beige, not summergold, or cherry wood,
or native jory soil. Not the blushed clotted cream
of bridal rose or grandmother-gray with silver -
flecks. Not pulsing deep, copper-scented,
iron-oxide red of a bullâs heartblood
spilling from its corded neck as its knees buckle.
Not kalamata, not sun-ripened fig. Just
Silly Putty-pink.
by Holly Jahangiri | Apr 28, 2025
Help Build a Garden of Wildwords and Inclusive Beauty
Celebrating the Banned & Challenged: First They Came for the Books…
And I was not a book. Then, they went after the words. And I said, “Hah! No you don’t.“
The list of banned words has grown as fast as the list of banned and challenged books. Those loud proponents of free speech – the ones who vociferously accuse “lefties” and “liberals” of trying to take away their First Amendment rights, simply because not everyone is interested in what they have to say, have done their level best to truly squelch free speech. But us “educated elites” (read: folks who can spell and decipher the big words in the US Constitution) have our own solutions – we will enshrine these words in poetry and share them with everyone who wants to read and listen. No, Tommy Tuberville, we poets are not destroying the military by reciting poems aircraft carriers and turning soldiers “woke.” These dudes aren’t exactly shrinking violets. Roosevelt could’ve taken you, Tommy.
You kind of have to laugh when the “Enola Gay” was flagged for removal from governmental websites by the very people who wouldn’t bat an eye at genocide, because it contains the word “gay.” But writers, it turns out, are unafraid of words. We just hone our nibs to a sharper edge – dip them in gall – and refuse to be silenced on the page.
Join in, if you will – see how many of the following words you can work into a poem or a short story. The list has grown since I posted my first challenge to you all – Poetry from Banned Words. Be as subtle, or as bitingly humorous, or as dark and angry as you want to be, while it is still your right to write.
Nearly 200 Naughty Words to Get Your Writing Banned by the Feds (a New York Times article – a gift from me to you).
After you’ve written your own poem, you can submit it here: Winning Writers Submission Manager – Live and Let DEI Anthology (no fee) (the deadline is Thursday, May 1, 2025 5:00 AM) or post your poem or short story link in a comment on my blog, if you would like to!
by Holly Jahangiri | Apr 16, 2025
The following poem is a Dorsimbra, inspired by our recent drive from Omaha, Nebraska, to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and back to Des Moines, Iowa and by Grant Wood’s famous painting, “Young Corn.” Iowa, by the way, was the 50th state my husband and I visited.
Heralding the Feast
So gently sloped, the glacial drift, now green
and yellow, charred, and plowed, awaiting spring
when hungry migratory deer are keen
to taste the offerings the farmer brings.
They follow red-winged blackbirds,
soaring high in search of borers, aphids,
rootworms, corn sap beetlesâ
heralding the feast.
Eternal is the battle, push-and-pull
of rocks and soil, animal and man.
Our history's but a scratch etched on the Earth;
so gently sloped, the glacial drift, now green.
by Holly Jahangiri | Apr 7, 2025
My mother’s portrait used to hang at the top of the stairs at my grandparents’ house. I loved that house; I picked it out when I was just a toddler. But for some reason, I always sensed a hostile presence between the first and second floors. Not malevolent or evil, just angry. Something that didn’t want me crossing from downstairs to upstairs. But only at night, and only between the floors. Nevertheless, I felt sure that my mother’s portrait, overlooking the stairs, would protect me. Not my parents, not my grandparents – though I know they would have. There was just something reassuring about the portrait being there. I called it “Little Mommy.”
My mother died in 2002, and her portrait – “Little Mommy” – now hangs at the top of my own stairs. Feels right.
Ghost Story
Goosebumps and a shudder
coursing down our spines, their
backstories haunt us,
chill us. We imagine agonal moaning,
clanking chains, clattering bones
devoid of flesh. Why are the ghosts
who live in our heads all suffering
torments of the damned? Why
shouldn't they guide the tired
mother's hands as she shapes dough
kneads it, sets it aside to rise?
And why shouldn't ghosts rise, too,
summoned by faint echoes of sense
memory, the scent of baking bread?
Why shouldn't they linger
to amuse the only child
in the guise of an imaginary friend?
Have they merely slipped through time,
one warped dimension to the next?
Perhaps the end we fear is just a bug â
a glitch, reboot, while version
1.0 continues, processed on a parallel
thread of infinite second chances.
Maybe now and then - or maybe not
(and then again) -
the wires cross, enjamb.
That future fate, that death
or worse we fear could simply be
another haunting verse.
