I bought myself a red skirt yesterday - an outrageously red one. Outrageous in a gypsy kind of way, so I have to get used to it before I can wear it outside. For now, I'm totally happy to wear it at home.

I think I bought this skirt because I'm reading about Iran right now. I do love bright colors; I love to be surrounded by them more than I love to wear them, but, in any case, it's terrible to know that there are people out there who are deprived of a simple pleasure like that...

Here's what Azar Nafisi writes:

Manna had once written about a pair of pink socks for which she was reprimanded by the Muslim Students' Association. When she complained to a favorite professor, he started teasing her about how she had already ensnared and trapped her man, Nima, and did not need the pink socks to entrap him further.

[...]

I wonder if right now, at this moment, I were to turn to the people sitting next to me in this café in a country that is not Iran and talk to them about life in Tehran, how they would react. Would they condemn the totures, the executions and the extreme acts of aggression? I think they would. But what about the acts of transgression on our ordinary lives, like the desire to wear pink socks?