In this hour, stories of starting fresh. Unexpected opportunities, budding relationships, your next home, and a new take. This episode is hosted by Moth Executive Producer, Sarah Austin Jenness. The Moth Radio is produced by The Moth and Jay Allison of Atlantic Public Media. Storytellers: Student Naushin Khan has never had a "good relationship" with chemistry. Kristin Lawlor feels like the only single girl in New York. Mariam Bazeed and their family relocate to Egypt during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Law professor Dave Moran tries his hand at modelling. Aleyne Larner meets a man 20 years her senior. Podcast # 712 To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is the main theme of the episode 'Brand New YOU'?
This is the Moth Radio Hour. I'm Sarah Austin Janess. In this episode, lifelong learning and the pursuit of the unfamiliar. Everything novel and new. We start in Central Park with an unlikely catalyst for change. Pond scum, also known as algal blooms. Notion Kahn shared this story with us as part of a moth education showcase when she was a high school student in New York City.
Here's Notion live at the Moth.
Chapter 2: How did Naushin Khan transform her relationship with chemistry?
Raise your hand if you ever hated your high school science class. Especially chemistry. Yeah. When I was in 10th grade, I also hated my chemistry class. Sitting in the classroom, I used to think, why do I have to learn all these complex chemistry words like oxidation, reduction, spectro something, something. We don't see those words in our environment. There is no connection. We don't use them.
They're pointless. When I turned into 11th grade, I had to take that subject test for chemistry. I was so frustrated because I never had a good relationship with chemistry. But I still had to take it. Sitting in the testing center for three hours, I was so pissed. I don't even remember what the test was about as it just bubbled random answers.
So my sister came to the testing center to pick me up. And when she saw me very gloomy, she decided to take me to the Central Park to give me some therapy to forget the test. When I went to the park, she handed me a camera to take pictures. So I was running around in the park holding a camera, and I saw a lake full of green water. I was like, wow, green water.
I did not know there was green water before. When I saw the water, I wanted to touch it. Then my sister shouted, hey, stupid, do you not see the sign beside the lake that says dangerous? All go blooms. Please don't contact with the water. I was like, wow, this glowing, beautiful water could be that dangerous. It even can give me skin disease. That's unbelievable.
And a few days later, I was accepted to an internship. And the internship was called Sustainable Energy. And I thought I would be learning about planting trees and how to save energy. So I'm excited, and I went to the first day of the internship, and I was shocked. It's all chemistry. I was thinking, oh God, I did not sign up for this.
And my professor gave us an assignment to conduct an experiment and research that would somehow benefit the environment using all chemistry. But because we have to do it, I remembered my day at the Central Park where the water was all dangerous because of harmful algal blooms.
So my team and I decided to conduct some research by collecting those water to see if we can somehow make that water into something that would be beneficial for the environment. After conducting six weeks of research, I realized the words that I used to hate in my chemistry class, like specto something something, now became my favorite word. Because it is spectrophotonometry that
that helped me to turn that harmful algal bloom affected water into biofuel, which would benefit the environment. And this way, we were able to take the harmful substance of the water and turning them into something that would produce less carbon dioxide into the environment and use them as a biofuel to run our cars. I was like, wow. It's all chemistry.
I never even thought chemistry was all around us like that before. I thought to myself, why did I still think in my chemistry class that science is so boring, that there is no connection of chemistry in our environment when there is? We just don't think about it. But hey, it is those oxidation words that gives us invisible ink, which Maybe you know.
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Chapter 3: What did Kristin Lawlor discover about friendships in New York?
Life can change for the good when you least expect it, if you're open to it. We met our next storyteller, Chrissy Lawler, at the Moth Teacher Institute, where educators from around the country share best practices for using personal stories in the classroom. At the end of the workshop, we record the stories from these educators. So, live from the Moth Teacher Institute, here's Chrissy Lawler.
So when I was 28, all of my friends were in relationships. Everything else was great. I had finished grad school. I had my first teaching job. I was exhausted at the end of every day. But then on the weekends, I'm like, all right, I got to blow off some steam. I'm single. I'm ready to mingle. I was the only single girl in New York. So I call up my friends and say, who's coming out tonight?
Oh, we're going to go to dinner. OK. Sunday nights were the worst. Sunday night is boo night. Oh, we're just gonna, you know, catch a movie on the couch. Okay, so then I was left seeing a movie on my couch alone. So when one of my colleagues organized a Friday happy hour that fall, I was like, let's do this. I'm in. So I'm there. Four, five drinks in.
And I turned to the young man next to me, who's a colleague. And I proclaimed, quite emphatically, that I'm either going to have to learn to knit or read Proust. And he turned to me and said, come over to my place Monday night. my wife will teach you how to knit and make you dinner. And my feminist sensibilities are shook because it's like, is this the future?
Your wife is going to make me dinner and we're going to knit? In my head, I'm like, eh. And what I say is, what can I bring? So on Monday, I'm at their door with a bottle of wine and just from inside the apartment, the smells are delicious and it's warm and it's cozy and lovely and we sit down together and the three of us share an amazing meal. And after dinner,
She sits down with me and starts me off with a scarf. That's the most basic beginning. And she's a very patient teacher. Knit, purl, knit, purl. The needles are clunky. My hands aren't getting it. But she's good with me. She's taking it slow. And she asks me why I chose the yarn colors I did. And I said, well, this is a Harry Potter scarf. LAUGHTER
So then for the next hour, there was some knitting, but a lot of Harry Potter fan love. And so at the end of the evening, she said, come back next Monday. We'll do a little more work on your scarf. And in my mind, I'm like, okay. And what I said was, okay. Okay. So the next Monday I was back, another delicious meal. This time I brought a dessert.
And I had forgotten everything she had taught me the first time. So she's very patiently again showing me how to knit. And I add a couple more inches, knit, purl, knit, purl. She's like, your stitches are kind of loose. The yarn's kind of itchy. And then we start talking about our various experiences teaching English abroad. She had taught in China. I had taught in Chile.
We talked about the places we want to travel, the places we have traveled, and kind of knitting, but mostly talking. So at the end of that night, we didn't have to check in. We just knew we'd be back again for another week. And, you know, this time my stitches were too tight, but, you know... she starts to tell me about how she grew up on the West Coast.
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Chapter 4: How did the Gulf War impact Mariam Bazeed's family?
The year is 1990 and my twin brother and I are six years old. We've repurposed our dining room table into a bomb shelter. Now the reason for this was real. Iraq had actually just invaded Kuwait, and so we were living there.
And my parents told us that if ever we heard rockets sort of come too close to our house, that we should run to the dining room table and get under the wood so that we'd be protected from falling rubble. So we did this a couple of times, like drills, my twin brother and I, for fun. But we weren't really taking this too seriously because literally nothing had ever happened in Kuwait.
Like, except for the discovery of oil. My life proceeded like clockwork there. You know, pick up from school at 3 o'clock, then we go home and have lunch, which always started with clear vegetable soup. and then dishes and then communal family nap time. And it was like my life was so regular that we didn't need an alarm clock to know when it was time to wake up.
So the idea that there would suddenly be like rockets falling on our dining room table, I was like, all right. There's a lot of foreign labor in Kuwait because of the oil money. My family is Egyptian. I'd been born in Kuwait, but that didn't give us citizenship rights there. So our stay there was contingent on someone in my family having a work visa, right? So my parents were discussing this.
What do we do? What do we do? And they decided that my mother would take my twin brother and I back to Egypt, where we were from. and where we spent every summer. And my father would stay in Kuwait during the war to anchor us there. Now, my parents were really strong believers in the resilience of children, which made them really bad communicators.
So they didn't really discuss what the plan was with us. But we packed our stuff up. And with a cooler of food in the backseat of the car, we drove to the border. In 1990, there's 500,000 Kuwaiti nationals living in Kuwait. There's 1.5 million foreign nationals living there. We outnumber them three to one.
So if you can imagine at the border between Kuwait and Iraq, there's this enormous line of cars of families going back either temporarily or permanently to where they were actually from.
And so we drive up, you know, there's a border agent and you have to take everything out of your car and they inspect everything and they have like a little mirror at the end of a stick and they look at the underneath of the car. And so we do all of this. They look at our documents and we load the car back up. And then my dad just doesn't get into the driver's seat. And he says, be good.
Take care of your mother. I'll see you. And he hugs us. And then my mother gets behind the steering wheel. And we're supposed to drive this way. And my father is literally the only person going back into Kuwait, because to review, there's a war on. And there's no public transport going down that way.
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