Laughter is the Best Medicine

Imagine having to live two lives. Now some people would say that they'd love to do it. It would mean being able to be yourself but be a completely different person in another situation-you could gain acceptance from being a new person if you led two lives. 

Well, according to the people who actually do that, it kinda sucks. In Firoozeh Dumas's essay, "The F Word", an Iranian immigrant who moved to America, trying to be "American" and trying to assimilate was pretty hard. Especially since "With eight letters, including a z, and four syllables, my last name is as difficult and as foreign as my first." So Dumas decides she's going to be called Julie. A nice, Anglo name. Dumas writes this experience in a comical way-her writing style isn't very serious and she writes as if she's speaking. But when you really think about it, what she went through was actually pretty awful. Imagine having to give up part of who you are-because if you accept you who you are, you'll be excluded for the rest of your life. People will look at you differently, they will treat you as if you're an alien. They won't even do something as simple as learning a name!

And yet-Dumas writes about this and actually makes the reader laugh. In my opinion, she's furthering her argument by using humor to show that despite her name, she's just like every other person. She doesn't need to be Julie to be considered human. For example, she talks about a time she was in a waiting room and was called in by the nurse with the name Fritzy Dumbass. It's put into the writing to be funny, but it also shows that hey-this is a real thing that is actually happening. We need to start actually making an attempt to be culturally aware.