About Love

Look, I'm not even going to start this post with a snarky comment justifying why I'm taking on a cheesy subject.

I did not Instagram this.

I've been thinking about love a lot lately. And by "lately," I mean over the last several years. I had a lot of time to deconstruct BE's and my relationship. It's entirely possible he and I weren't even having the same relationship. That's not unusual, I think, in people's relationships.

Problems between  BE and I were going on well before I kicked him out. I talked to my parents a lot about it, because we talk about stuff like that and there were also practical considerations involved in the possibility of ending the relationship. We needed to brainstorm, especially after LE was born. One time my mom asked me if I was still in love with BE.

The length of my hesitation before answering was probably the real answer. I was thinking about a lot of stuff at once. I answered something like that I didn't dislike him and I knew we were still okay in a way because I still liked how he smelled.

Because part of love is that, isn't it? Liking a lot how someone smells. It's maybe more on the biological or hormonal side of things, but it's still part of it. I also didn't specifically wish any ill upon BE. That was a kind of love too, feeling loyal to someone.

It's not enough, but it's not nothing.

My mom and dad were also struggling at that time, as people do when confronted with massive life changes. If they were questioning whether or not they were in love with each other, they were keeping it from us. But I bet if you asked either one of them, even after the worst fight, whether they were in love with the other, I bet neither of them would have hesitated for a second.

And my parents aren't the sort of people who give knee-jerk answers with the thing they think we want to hear.

Love and in love and biology and hormones. All of this has been gone over so much in the course of human history that there's hardly any reason to go over it here. People really do like thinking about love a lot and finding extraordinary and mundane ways of expressing it. It's one of the good things about people, good enough that they can be forgiven for all the awful poetry and music.

I remember a scene from the Jimi Hendrix movie Rainbow Bridge where a couple of hippies are making out and the girl goes, "I want you to make love to me," and the guy answers, "You can't make love. Love is." That answer is so appallingly mundane and stupid and unnecessary it's actually one of the things that makes me not want to talk about love.

It's safe to say my love life is a shambles. Or kind of great. Or a hot mess. I've always sucked at romantic love. I'm really good at falling in love. And nursing unrequited love. And finding bad love.

Aren't there ever so many names for the different types of love?

But here's the thing. No matter what happens, I keep believing in love. You know why? It's because I know what love looks like because I grew up in a house where I saw what love looked like every day. I love my parents. My parents love me. They love each other. I love both my brothers and they both love me. They both love each other. They love our parents and our parents love them. All these loves have different faces, but they're all still the good kind.

This kind of thing is rare among expats. There is a small tribe of us who have the privilege of experiencing mutual good love with family, especially parents. We know that home is people that aren't going away no matter how gross or mean or screamy we are, or how far away they are, or how much people change. We are still loved despite our greatest efforts to push it away.

And I'm so lucky to have LE, someone I can shower with love every day. Loving your kids is easy. You don't really have to think about it. But sometimes I think parent love is all the kinds of love rolled into one. It can be in love, or unrequited, or bad love, or love-hate. It can be that weird, huge outside-power love that I'm uncomfortable admitting to feeling because religious people have pretty much taken over all the words about that kind. I'm more comfortable admitting to something like romantic love for my kid, even though people's minds may jump to some sort of creepy incest thing. Don't be an idiot, if that's what you're thinking. I think about LE all the time and imagine holding him and kissing his neck and squeezing his little feet and I fret a little when he's mad at me or when we're not getting along. I take pleasure in finding new things to love about LE, and finding new ways to show him I love him, and to make love an almost-palpable thing that he'll believe in too, no matter what.

Today is my parents' anniversary. Or maybe it was yesterday. I always fuck up the day, but they once told me not to worry about it because their anniversary is their thing, not ours. I expect my parents are often dismayed with my brothers' and my love lives, and they probably think it's their fault somehow because they're parents and that's the sort of thing you blame on yourself. Perhaps also it's easy to overlook all the other really excellent relationships my brothers and I have because there's this one kind of love we're not so good at that sticks out more.

But who knows? Maybe it is their fault for creating such a high standard of love, and for showing us every day how to love well. We believe in it because it is a thing they made and we make and we all know what it is. It's perhaps what love isn't that I'm not so astute at identifying. But I figure it out eventually, and then find new ways to love and be loved and not be loved.

43 years is a damn long time to be married and still sneak kisses and butt pats when they think we aren't looking. But we were always looking.

Kid Art

I found this drawing while I was futzing around cleaning stuff yesterday. I don't know if it's LE's handiwork or some other kid's, but I think we might be due for a talk about stuff.

I love that guy's mustache.

Bookserf: A Bit Of Awesome

Yeah, yeah, I know. It seems like I've quit the blog. I haven't, really. It's just that when things are going relatively well, there's not much to write about. Not that I'm sulking around and looking for bad things to write about. More that I feel like an insufferable dick when I write about good things. It's too much like image-crafting, and it's hard work.

As though I'm not image-crafting when I write about bad things. It's just that the bad-things image comes more naturally.

One thing is the word "awesome." It's beyond back (back from the 80s, I mean) and it's sunk its claws into me. After the 80s, "awesome" became pretty much limited to the realm of skaters and surfers and tanned adventure people. But then everyone started saying it again. I resisted at first. I tried to affect curmudgeonly annoyance with the return of the word.

But then a friend from high school came to visit with his fiancee. I was kind of nervous about them staying with me because I hadn't seen this guy since around the time he graduated high school 20 years ago. People can change in unpleasant ways. They grow up into other people. The fiancee I'd never met at all.

I've known this guy since we were around 10, and I always liked him well enough even though he was more my younger brother's friend than mine. But we all hung out together in high school, and I'll tell you what, we had some serious life-learning adventures.

He undraped for the picture.

I'm getting to the Bookserf thing, I promise.

And it was great, their visit I mean, and my friend and his fiancee were also great. It was like picking up where we left off only without all the adolescent hangups to tiptoe around. They were the best houseguests ever because it was just normal having them around, like family. Even LE, who's normally pretty shy of strangers, was punching my friend's arm within a minute of meeting them at the bus stop, and already saying, "Look what I can do!" before we'd even gotten through the doors of the ice cream place I'd bribed him with for staying up really late to come meet our friends at the bus stop. The next morning I awoke to find my friend and LE on the floor watching cartoons with LE draped languidly like a cat over his shoulders.

Also they said "awesome" a lot. And it stuck. I can't stop saying it. I can't stop thinking it. But you know what? As the economy is collapsing and the world is maybe coming to an end and each day brings a new dose of uncertainty in ironic, literary proportions (you can choose your author each day-- Orwell? Kafka? Camus? Palahnuik? McCarthy?), believing everything is awesome makes the experience of being alive in Istanbul at this moment, well... awesome.

Whether it's a delusion or a coping strategy or whatever, I don't care. It's working for me.

So, speaking of awesome, I finally met the Bookserf guys. One of them contacted me on FB last year about getting the word out about them on my blog and around my university. I didn't really have time to follow up, though I wanted to, and then there was Gezi, and then I was busy again with work. I haven't had a chance till this week to finally sit down with these guys, borrow a book, and find ways to get the word out.

Bookserf is essentially a book exchange, but with some good twists. You choose the book you want from
their website and leave your contact info under it. Then you arrange to meet the owner of the book (their profiles are on the site), borrow the book, which you give back two weeks later. If you want, you can talk about the book and literature and all the other great stuff there is in the world to talk about.

Most of the books are in English, by the way. And they have for-real good books, not shitty romance novels abandoned by couch-surfers.

If the other book owners are anything like Kerem and Erbil, it's probably worth it to hang out and talk about the book or whatever else. Sometimes I'm completely awed at the people Istanbul unlocks.

Did you see how I just used "awed" there instead of "awesome?" Don't think for a second I don't know what "awesome" meant before it became an overused tool in my quest to make my life a cooler place to live. It's probably part of the reason it works, feeling awed several times a week.

Midday beers, smart guys bursting with ideas, and Kerem lent me a really good book.

I'm pretty sure I need that cool fisheye attachment.

It's things like this, books and talking and all the other good stuff that goes on that I don't write about that make me think the revolution or whatever is going to be okay so long as there are real people and these small acts of subversion. The way things are now, sharing and kindness are subversive. It's awesome.

It's also worth pointing out that these two guys are rocking the mustaches.

And anything that reminds me of this song is good.