Istanbul's Stranger

Escalators And Moving Walkways

2012-02-01T00:32:00.000+02:00

My friends! It's not for standing!

One thing that used to drive me absolutely batshit in Turkey was people's complete failure at being able to use escalators and moving walkways properly. To me, the point of both of these amazing mechanisms is to be able to get where you want to go, only faster. To acomplish this, you walk as the thing is taking you up or down or across or whatever.

But a lot of Turkish people seem to think these marvels of the 20th century are just really fun rides. So they get on them and stand there, then oooff at you if you want to pass by.

I say that it used to drive me batshit not because it doesn't drive me batshit anymore, but because overall, in Istanbul at least, people have gotten a lot better about using moving walkways and escalators to get where they want to go, only faster. Okay, in malls they still kind of suck (and don't even get me started on mall elevators or any other elevators because those still completely fuck me and I hate them), but in places where people tend to want to hustle, like metro stations and airports, the standers know enough to move to one side so the walkers can walk, and people rarely oooff at you. Unless they're busy socializing on there, in which case you're shit out of luck.

Madam! It's not that difficult!

And it hardly ever happens anymore that you almost die because of some stupid woman at the top or bottom of the escalotor freaking out about how to get off the thing. This used to happen a lot, where a woman would screech or a shopping cart or baby carriage would tip over, then everyone behind would calmly walk up or down backwards until 18 or 20 family members and bystanders calmed the poor panicked woman and got her to the safe part of the world where the floor doesn't move, thus clearing the blockage at the exit point.

But this used to happen a lot, especially in Bakırköy, where crazy 1920's World's Fair technologies were just some kind of insane fad to many mall gawkers.

Bloody useful.

LE, for his part, is super well-trained on escalators and moving walkways. Since I don't drive and the stroller was a tremendous inconvenience (except for carrying groceries-- then it rocked), the boy has been walking rather long distances for a child since he was about 2. He can usually go a couple of hours without seriously bitching. Not to say he doesn't bitch because he most certainly does, but much of the bitching is a matter of form rather than an actual problem. His gorgeous perfect little legs are like steel flagpoles, and it really fucking hurts when he kicks me in the face.

Please, sir! Not in the face!

That's my own fault, for teaching him about Bruce Lee, who always eats his vegetables and never bitches.

Still, whether it's because he's almost 5 or because he's Turkish, he's suddenly become fascinated with standing on escalators and moving walkways. Maybe it's because everyone else is doing it. Or maybe it's because he's a kid and it really is a super fun ride.

I remember thinking they were a super fun ride, back in the day when the only moving walkways I ever got to ride were in Las Vegas airport, where we used to go to visit my grandparents.

And yes, I totally showed him how cool it is to walk backwards on the moving walkway. I'm sure that'll bite me in the ass someday, but it was fucking fun so who cares?

A Quick Jaunt South

2012-01-30T17:42:00.000+02:00

Yesterday, LE and I returned from a short trip to Bodrum. He went to his Babaanne's and I came home to a catbox brimming with shit and a house so frigid I went to bed at 8 because I couldn't stand it anymore. This is how I rock and roll when I'm kid-free for a few days. Some other plan is clearly in order.

Walk for me, Johnny.

At least Johnny Walker Red was on sale at the liquor store. So coming back to a snowy mess wasn't a complete bust.

It really looks like this.

Bodrum rocks in the winter. It's a good thing few people realize this, otherwise the plane tickets wouldn't have been so damn cheap. A dear friend of mine from Istanbul moved down there a few months back, so the main reason for going was to see her and let our kids (both around LE's age) raise hell for awhile. Raise hell they did. As soon as we started glowing about how nicely they were getting along, they immediately started bickering and crying a lot.

Cuter in Calvin & Hobbes.

Kids argue about really dumb stuff, seriously.

Mommy's friend.

Nonetheless, we managed to get in plenty of wine and enough grown-up talk to make our jaws seize up, if that sort of thing happened. Which it doesn't except in metaphors and cases of tetanus.

Anyway, their house is gorgeous and cozy, and I totally would have moved in, if they let me. Some houses are pretty because they're pretty. Other houses aren't so pretty but they're nice because they're full of love and good food. This house was both pretty and full of love and good food. So that alone made the visit worth it.

But then there were some things that were just icing on the cake.

Best Things About Bodrum, From Least Best To Most Best:

1) There's no one there except for nice Bodrum people, and our kids could play outside and on the beach. The beach was almost entirely free of broken glass. My kid, predictably, didn't quite get why it's not such a good idea to go in the water when it's 55 degrees outside, but was happy enough with some pants-free beach time. Only one teyze bawled me out for this, kidneys you know, but she was satisfied with my promise that I would give him a bath as soon as we got home.

When the kids got suspiciously quiet for a long time, this is what they were doing.

I was completely amazed!

Normally, when your kid says, "Mama, come see the surprise!" you die inside a little, but sometimes it's actually a great surprise. Just as kids can become more obnoxious when there's more than one kid, they also become cooler in groups and get really great ideas. If only this power could be harnessed somehow. The most important part of this wall in LE's mind was all the little stones buried in holes around the base. I have to point that out, obviously, because how else would you know?

2) Bergamot.

It's not an ugly lemon.

I mean, I know about bergamot from essential oils but I've never had the pleasure of coming into contact with one. Bergamot alone is reason enough to move to the Aegean. I couldn't stop picking them up and smelling them. My friend must have suspected I have a disorder of some sort. I had some of the juice alone and it tasted like grapefruit and sweet lemon and sunshine. Then my friend mixed it with mandarin orange juice and it tasted like sunshine and happiness. Then she served it warm for breakfast and I wanted to cry it was so good.

3) Meeting, in person, Jack Scott and Liam of Perking the Pansies fame. They're just dear. Several times I regretted bringing the kid along because I could have hung out with them over drinks until the sun went down and came back up again. They're way more interesting in person than on the blog, which is saying something because they manage to come off as pretty interesting on the blog too.

I got a signed copy. Hooray!

I'd originally planned to interview Jack and further plug his book for him, but that didn't work out because I suck at asking people questions. It's weird because I always want to know stuff about people but I feel funny asking questions. Also because the kids had some issue or other that needed dealing with every 10 minutes or so. Every 30 seconds if you count LE's repeated fits about not getting to have Sprite with his lunch. Then he broke his glass on accident and got to have Sprite after all, which I should have done in the first place because there was nary a peep from him after that.

Jack broke the ice by asking why BE and I split up. I totally like it when people don't hold back on the good stuff and when they're better at asking questions than I am. But LE was next to me and, though I've been pretty honest with him about the whole divorce thing, he doesn't need to know everything just yet, especially not the stuff about his dad that would either confuse him or that he would report back to BE and Babaanne. So I was pretty reticent about explaining, which isn't like me at all because pretty much anyone who will listen knows every gritty, excruciating detail about the failure of my marriage.

And after a few moments of obligatory shyness and hiding between my legs, LE took to Jack and Liam immediately. The kids even started fighting over them for piggy-back rides. LE's liking strangers on the first meeting hardly ever happens, though I do notice a trend of him having a big soft spot for gay men. Or maybe he just really likes men. Or misses them. Men are definitely more fun, in both of our humble opinions, but for different reasons entirely.

So maybe I feel a little guilty for removing the man in LE's life from our house, okay? Also for enjoying it so damn much.

Yesterday, we left Bodrum with plans to come back during Ramazan when it's cheap, empty, and hot. I can't imagine how it could be a better trip, but I bet it will be.

Nooooooooooooooooo!!!!!

2012-01-24T13:01:00.000+02:00

Well, it happened.

I like the two sad faces on the sidewalk behind.

On the other hand, yesterday there was a firetruck on the street with the crane up, and a crowd of gawpers. I looked all over for a fire and couldn't smell smoke...

Turns out, they were rescuing a cat from a tree. Holy shit! Does that actually happen? Did it ever actually happen outside of Norman Rockwell paintings?

Apparently, it does happen. And for a lousy old street cat, at that. Hooray!

The world seems just a little bit different to me now.

A Fine Day Out: It Was Büyük Ve Güzel

2012-01-19T23:41:00.000+02:00

And temiz. Very, very temiz.

It's super old and cool inside.

So I got in a plan with some friends at work to go to the Çemberlitaş Hamam once the break started. I've never gone because I'd always assumed Çemberlitaş was a tourist trap hamam but my Turkish friend assured me it wasn't and I definitely don't go to the hamam as often as I would like. Hamams rock, seriously. The first time is a little bit scary but you get over it quickly, and then find yourself wondering, "When did I achieve this status in life that I can pay someone to wash the hell out of me?" But even that passes quickly because paying someone to wash the hell of you also rocks.

A good Anatolian woman.

Anyway, the hamam ladies make it less scary because it becomes quickly obvious that the cleaning of a woman's flesh is just a job. They're always built as good Anatolian woman should be, and there's a motherly kindness in the way they touch you or press your skin or pat you when they they want you to turn over. Whatever American body issues I might have quickly turn into worrying that the hamam lady thinks I'm too thin and not nearly enough of a woman. They always smell faintly of onions, which, after 10 years here, is a wonderfully comforting human smell I've come to associate with warm homes and good food and love.

Seriously cool.

And instead of being disgusted with the rolls of grey flesh that come off you, they seem pleased that you're coming out so clean, and even with the work it takes to get you that way. "Güle güle kirlet," is what my cleaner wishes me on her way out the door. "Get it dirty in happiness." It's an approach to cleaning and cleanliness that causes me a bit of cognitive dissonance, but makes me so much happier having other people do my cleaning for me, whether it's my house or my body.

Büyük, güzel, ve temiz. One of my friends is studying from the same beginning Turkish book I started with, and at first, everything is büyük, güzel, ve temiz.

"Nasıl bir restoran?" (How is the restaurant?)
"Büyük bir restoran." (It's a big restaurant.)
"Temiz mi?" (Is it clean?)
"Evet, çok temiz." (Yes, it's very clean.)

Then you get a little more advanced.

"Restoran güzel mi? (Is the restaurant nice?)
"Evet, çok güzel." (Yes, it's very nice.)
"Büyük mü?" (Is it big?)
"Çok büyük değil. Ama çok temiz." (It's not very big. But it's clean.)

Seriously, it wasn't until like Unit 25 anything started being small or dirty or ugly. Which, as much as Istanbul has to offer, left me with a serious handicap for describing my surroundings.

But, Istanbul. Best stay-cation city ever. After the hamam we went to the Kapalı Çarşı to find the guy selling really nice peştemal that I'd found with my folks a couple of weeks ago.

Makes me want to buy stuff.

We had a good wander in there, and got lost on purpose, then we found ourselves, and then we had Turkish coffee. After that, we started hiking, through Mahmutpaşa to the Spice Bazar to Eminönü...

and across Galata Bridge...

... to Pera where we caught the old funicular to Tünel and kept walking.


A very old sage plant. I ate some and it was yummy and sweet.

A very nice church. I broke down and lit a candle for my cousin's family.

A very sad saint.

Along the way we stopped to buy cool stuff.

Some very cool stuff.

Rest assured there's lots of cool stuff to buy. Those wooden spoons are handmade. I fell in love with the ladle first, and then it occurred to me LE would probably eat healthy food he doesn't like with cool wooden spoons, but then I thought I might also like some cool wooden spoons to eat healthy food I don't like, or at least soup, so I got some for me too. The lot of them cost 10 lira. Hooray! It's almost like having a servant spoon carver to go along with my cleaner and the lady who washed the hell out of me.

Rounded off by one more tea on top of the Goethe Institute (too dark by then for photos of the almost redundantly breathtaking view of the place we'd just left), and a big fat dinner at a place that takes Setcards.

Really, does a regular day get much better?

Not often enough, I'd say.

Oh No! Best Snowguy Ever! And A Lamentation!

2012-01-17T22:23:00.000+02:00

So apparently I jumped the gun on the snow post, because a couple of days after it snowed even more snow. For real. This morning everywhere looked like it was covered in frosting and there was no noise and the snow hadn't turned the world to complete shit yet. Unless you were the sort of person that had to be somewhere. Then it it sucked. But not for me. Hah!

Still, I did have to go and buy some bread this morning. And that's when I came upon just about the most delightful thing ever.

I think it's the eyebrows that are killing me.

He's just about curb height, which is still very tiny given the abnormally high curbs around here. I just love love love that someone took the trouble to make this little guy.

Though I'll be sad to see him melting over the next few days. I hope an animal comes to eat his nose before I have to see it wilting in the street for very long.

Welcome to Pessimism Street. I've been Mommy Impatient Face Grouchy Pants the last couple of weeks. And while I don't know why, I know exactly why but I'm not sharing. Still, as soon as I saw the snow last night, I decided I'd be Cool Mom and let LE play hooky from school and instead spend the day playing in the snow.

But of course it didn't work out exactly like that. First, we were super-slow getting out of the house. Next, all the nearby snow was either dirty or otherwise defiled by 9am today. I was thinking of trying to bat my (and LE's) eyelids at whoever is in charge of the fake-grass football pitch nearby and getting him to let us play in their pristine fenced-in snow, but then decided I'm not ready to face up to my waning charms, or worse, there could be a woman there, so I decided to take LE up to campus where there's way more snow, way fewer people, and a lovely friend with two little kids.

Not a fan.

That's right. Because in some cities you have to travel through the snow to find some nice snow for your kid to play in.

Which is just stupid, really. LE is happy with any old snow, even the greyish-brown soggy kind. He doesn't give a shit. But I still felt I needed to overcompensate for my grouchiness and be a Cool Mom, Plus, there are some newly obscured potholes filled with ice water around here I'm just not happy with.

So, I bundled LE the fuck up so much he started pretending he was that kid in Christmas Story who couldn't put his arms down. Then rush rush rush I scurried LE to the minibus, then sit sit sit I got up us to campus, then rush rush rush I walked us up to the lojman, all the while actually STOPPING the child from playing in the fresh, untouched miles of snow so I could get us to our friend's house for the pre-planned Snow Play Time. And getting impatient and grouchy with the poor fellow to boot.

At least ten times on the journey I found myself thinking, "Fuck you, Stranger! When the fuck did you become this fucking person who doesn't let the child just fucking play in the gorgeous perfect snow?" And then I would think, well, I don't want him to get too wet because he'll be cold in 10 minutes and start whining. And I don't want him to get his gloves too wet because once his hands start hurting it's game over. And when did I become this boring, mind-numbingly practical person? If I were four, I'd want to punch me in the face. So all this thinking just made me madder.

But we got up for the Play, and it was nice. And the friend and I talked and bitched and that was also nice. But then, there wasn't even time for goddamned cocoa at the end of it all because I had to change LE's clothes and rush rush rush back home in time to pay the cleaner and let her get out before the roads froze up again.

No cocoa for you! Or anyone!

Not that I even like cocoa, but still. It's the principle. About how I've turned into someone who kind of sucks. Someone who, if I met me 10 years ago I would have wanted to punch in the face. And then I would have said something snarky about how much better of a mommy I would be. Only I wouldn't have said "Mommy" because I didn't suck yet, 10 years ago. Or rather, I did, but it was different.

And I even managed to get us home before the cleaner was finished, giving me the chance to dump the boy at the house and rush rush rush to the market because we'd run out of fruit, and also to the liquor store for a bottle of gin because I'd assumed correctly I'd be unable to live with myself for the rest of the night.

Guess which expensive one I didn't buy?

And even the gin is a matter of boring ass practicality-- it's the cheapest booze available given all the torturous prices AKP has inflicted on us. I no longer bother with wine once I figured out the day by day cost of gin is cheaper. Not drinking, or drinking less aren't options, naturally, so don't even try it.

How fucking lame is that?

The only thing that makes me feel better is imagining my future life as Miss Hannigan, thus excusing both the impatient grouchiness and the gin. I just couldn't manage to find the scene of her actually bathing in the gin.

Still, it's something to look forward to, you know?

It's Snowing Real Snow! For Real!

2012-01-14T17:00:00.000+02:00

Sweet!


Especially since I don't have to leave the house today.

It's fucking cold, but it's kind of pretty.

Perking the Pansies: He's Written A Book, Folks!

2012-01-12T19:05:00.000+02:00

Today I am most pleased to have a guest post from fellow Turkey blogger Jack Scott over at Perking The Pansies, and it's not just because I can't think of anything of my own to write at the moment. Or maybe I have too much and it's just clogged at the gates, who knows?


The book.

I've been hooked on Jack's blog for several months now. It's my first-thing-in-the-morning pleasure, or just-before-sacking-out thrill to read his musings every day, always posted at midnight our time. For a guy who hasn't been here super-long, his perceptions of Turkey and the folks therein are incisive yet loving, with none of the Western imperialism nor the jaded expat-ness one often comes across in yabancı friends. The man can turn a phrase, seriously.

I very much look forward to reading the book, which is getting the kind of sincere and intriguing reviews that make me willing to throw my money at the the Internet.

Though what I really want to know is if I'm more of a semigrey or a VOMIT. Somewhere in the middle I suppose. I never fit into boxes very well.

Anyway, the guest post. It's just about the nicest thing I've seen a Brit ever say about my homeland, and he captures DC spot-on without being snarky:

A youthful Jack. I'd totally do him.

Yankee Tales

I was really pleased when Istanbul's Stranger asked me to guest on her blog as part of my virtual book tour. She’s deliciously witty, calls a spade a spade and her sharp observations about her life in Old Constantinople are a joy to read. She’s American but I think her writing style has a distinctive British, ironic twist. Maybe she was a Brit in a former life. I’m here to plug my book but, as this isn’t Oprah’s Book Club, I thought I’d regale you with tales of my first visit to the good old US of A.

I’ve been to the States four times – to New York, Boston, LA and my first visit was to the District of Columbia at the tender age of 20. I had dallied with a travelling Yank who worked for the Federal Government and was attending a conference in London. He invited me to stay with him in the US, so I did. I had tired of a dull, dead end job as chief pound counter for Habitat in Chelsea and fancied emulating the millions of others who had sought their fortune in the land of opportunity. I saved my pennies, quit my job, booked a one way ticket on Freddy Laker’s Skytrain to New York and off I went. I flew out of the Big Apple and down to Washington DC.

My host got a shock when I called. It seemed his invitation hadn't been entirely genuine; still, he was good enough to let me stay for a few weeks in return for occasional sexual favours. Springtime in Washington is very agreeable - a riot of cherry blossom. The federal heart of the city is laid out in imperial style and built in monumental neo-classical majesty as befits the capital of the most powerful nation in history. The grand design is best appreciated from the top of the Monument, the world’s tallest true obelisk. I did the obligatory tour of the White House and the Capitol and strolled along the Mall popping in and out of the various museums along the way. It struck me how everything was described in the definite article – The White House, The Monument, The Capitol as if no others exist. It’s a sign of a confident young nation with a touch of teenage arrogance.

Gay life in Washington was a world away from recession-ravaged buttoned up Britain with its grubby backstreet gay bars. It's taken London thirty years to catch up. I loved it and it loved me. I was young and handsome with cheekbones that could slice cheese. My hosts lapped me up and I let them. I wowed the randy scamps in Rascals, a popular watering hole and pick up joint for federal employees near Dupont Circle. They seemed to love my accent, along with my uncut assets.

Eventually, I sensed I was overstaying my welcome and my reluctant landlord feared I might claim squatters rights. After several weeks living the American dream, I pined for the old country and flew home on BA. I often wonder what would have become of me if I‘d stayed Stateside?

So now you’ve read about my Yankee tales, why not read about my Turkish tales in my book, Perking the Pansies – Jack and Liam move to Turkey? It’s available in paperback and Kindle on Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com. If you buy it via my website I’ll make a few extra pennies. No pressure.

Thanks for popping by, Jack! It's been my pleasure. Take care, and my very best to you and Liam.

xx
Stranger

Unloading a Whole Bunch of Shit: It's Like A Cheesy TV Show Where I Learn Important Stuff About Life Or Whatever

2012-01-10T22:40:00.063+02:00

I can't decide if I love or hate writing. Sometimes I make writing my bitch and sometimes she makes me her bitch. Sometimes we're each others' bitches and things seem to go okay. Since I don't keep a journal or anything and most of what I write gets published for my dear handful of readers, I try to avoid the writing that's like taking a big huge fucking dump-- that boring, overly personal shit detailing all of my stupid issues.

No, I mean that other boring shit I keep to myself.

But, like a big huge fucking dump, writing doesn't let one alone until one lets it out.

Minus the stomach cramps. Mostly. There has been some stomach cramping lately that's not related to periods or eggs or big huge fucking dumps, making me thing there's something in my head fucking with my stomach.

And no, it's not that either. Concern trolls, kindly piss off please. Because unless I'm the Virgin fucking Mary, it's definitely not that. As much as I might find that cool, getting stricken by the hand of God, or whatever he strikes the abstinent with. I'd rather not know, quite frankly. Explaining the inexplicable baby seems related to my other big hopefear, which is having the Shaolin monks turn up at my doorstep telling me LE is the Chosen One or whatever and the inner turmoil that might ensue when they want to take him away to some temple in the mountains to teach him how to fly and smash bricks with his head. Do you suppose the monks would let me come and hang out near the temple? Would they let me send presents from time to time? It's quite a dilemma.

The way the Virgin Mary thing relates to the Shaolin monks thing is if it were the Catholics on my doorstep instead of the Shaolin monks, that would be totally fucking scary and way worse. The only thing worse than Catholics would be Adnan Oktar minions.

This business about virgin birth and Shaolin monks and the chosen one and Adnan Oktar also goes a long way to explaining why religion doesn't quite work for me.

You see what happens when I start writing shit?

My living room?

Speaking of holidays, ours were grand. Seriously. My mom and dad came here on Christmas Eve day and we had a proper Christmas the way Christmas is meant to be. For me, I mean. Making Christmas in Turkey is challenging, at best, requiring a monumental effort of imagination and tinsel and deliberate self-delusion because Christmas in my atheist planet is way more important than it should be. If it weren't for LE, I wouldn't bother, but making Christmas through his eyes makes the whole thing super cool and totally worth it. And you can believe our house looked like freaking Vegas for a month. If the damn kittens hadn't started chewing through the cords, I'd have left the lights up forever because Christmas lights are great and a fine addition to any decor. Especially ones that do the alternate-y flashing thing.

The damn kittens are another story. They're fucking cute, let me tell you. I'm thinking of making a movie about their antics. You know, because there aren't nearly enough kitten antics on You Tube. But I might not get around to the movie. Just so you know.

It's going a little bit this way from here on out.

Last year, I made the hell out of Christmas. Starting the first week of December, I began going out of my way to thrill LE with Christmas stuff. Decorations, hauled from the US and bought here. Christmas songs. Christmas stories. Incredible lies about Santa, who I swore I'd never lie to LE about but it's way too much fun. Christmas cookies. A digital animated advent calendar. A special night of Christmas tree decoration (sabotaged by BE, who just couldn't manage to leave his tea drinking buddies in time to bring LE home early enough). A special Christmas gift I had made LE wait for since summer to receive (sabotaged by BE's parents, who bought him the same gift a week before Christmas, claiming they'd forgotten I'd asked them several times not to buy it for him but apparently he'd cried in the toy store and goodness knows a child must never cry).

Hooray! Christmas!

All of this, of course, building up to Christmas day itself (sabotaged by BE, who after numerous promises he'd be home for the day, suddenly left for work shortly after the presents had been opened, claiming the whole family would be at the factory that day filling a big order-- he sent me pictures in case I didn't believe him, just sealing my deep-down belief they were all going out of their way to sabotage my one fucking yabancı holiday I care about, oh, and by the way, did you know Christmas is our anniversary?). All this in the face of everyone in Turkey carrying on like Christmas is on New Year's Day and BE's endless comments about how silly it is to make a such fuss over one day.

Nevertheless, I made the hell out of Christmas and I fucking liked it even with all that. Remember the gecekondu gingerbread house?

I remember it.

But BE's leaving for work on Christmas Day kind of killed it for me. It was rather a crushing blow, actually. It's not the reason we're separated now (Hah! See how I just threw that in there?), though obviously it's a brick in the wall. In fact, I just pushed that particular Big Hurt out of my mind, along with a bunch of other ones, and had almost forgotten about it until my mom asked me something a few moths ago that made me remember. It's just that the other Big Hurts were far more significant and pressing.

So this year when I started making Christmas, I was kind of pretending at first. It was a lot of extra work I didn't need because of the crap going on at my job, but I did it nonetheless. By the third week of December I started getting into it, because by then I knew my parents were coming. LE, of course, was completely batshit by December 3rd and Santa is the best disciplinary tool ever. I'll miss it, and might just save it for a big gun if I can trust myself not to abuse it. Then Christmas Eve involved fondue and Christmas morning involved side pork my folks had brought from the States and it was great and normal and easy to feel the way you're supposed to feel on Christmas.

*cue sentimental piano music, or something like at the end of Doogie Howser, M.D.*

By about 10am on Christmas Day, two things had occurred to me. One, was that my parents being here at a time I really needed them and hadn't even realized how much, more or less erased whatever sad black Christmas clouds I had because of last year. Second, because I know my parents can't come here every year to make Christmas normal for me means I'm the fucking grown-up who has to make Christmas normal for LE. In fact, it's all some fucking atheist parable reminding me I'm the one who has to make the whole world normal for LE. Which means, for Christmas at least, I can make it however suits us and we'll do just fine. The possibilities are endless in kind of a fun way. His Christmas will never be my Christmas because of all these damn choices I've made in my life, some of them cool and some of them less so and some of them hardly thought-out at all.

As for the world, I think we'll have to work together on that one. And it's working out okay with us. So far. He's only four, after all.

Progress

2011-12-12T21:35:00.000+02:00

This isn't it.


Give your seat to old people, women with children, and veterans.

Our gentlemen passengers carrying children, should they exist, are kindly requested to stand. Or better yet, they can cease to exist and thereby help us maintain the status quo, through polite signage.

A Big Day Out: Let's Never Speak Of It To The MIL

2011-11-26T23:34:00.081+02:00

So today I packed off the boy to Taksim. It's been ages since we've gone there together. Just to add to the challenge of the whole thing I took us to the Şişhane metro station which I hate because it's way too far underground for my tastes. By the time we reached the third escalator, we were already in a heated argument as to whether it was the second or the third. LE didn't count the second one because he'd wanted to take the stairs. By the time we got to the fifth escalator, we were arguing about whether an uphill moving walkway counted as an escalator.

He was in a mood. So was I.

Last time I was in Şişhane metro station I almost died because a cleaner at the top of the longest escalator suddenly decided to pick something up off the floor with his mop crossing the top of the escalator just as I was about to get off. I did some super quick Bruce Lee move to get around the cleaner and under the mop in a split second and lived to tell the tale.

I told this story to LE and he patiently explained to me that it wasn't a Bruce Lee move at all because Bruce Lee would have jumped over the mop.

So we went to meet our friend outside the metro station and, hooray! A demonstration was just getting ready to march off.

Lucky for us, it was a peace demonstration. Or a gay peace demonstration, judging by the flags. The marchers may or may not have known about the gay rainbow thing, it's hard to say. Much of the language on the peace signs wasn't Turkish, and in fact was in a language I couldn't figure out at all. Maybe it was Basque or something? So some of the subtleties of the demonstration may have been lost on me.

The US Consulate is forever sending out these terrifying emails about how US citizens should avoid demonstrations because they can turn on you at any second. Eminent danger is ongoing. Aside from the embassy warnings, which my MIL would never know about, we were definitely heading into the sort of day she would have a shitfit about. Commoners! Germs! Public transportation! Demonstrations! Taksim is the most dangerous place on earth because once like10 years ago some guys tried to rob FIL but then his cousin showed up and chased them off.

LE didn't give a shit because he'd found a pile of sand on the street.

Don't tell the MIL. Also don't tell her that, after playing in the sand, he gave me his gum to throw away and I said "Put that back in your mouth right now." There are a lot more garbage cans in Taksim than there used to be. That's because there are a lot fewer bombs. But I couldn't see a garbage can around the demonstration and I'll be damned if my kid is the sort of person to throw his trash onto the street.

The demonstration was followed by a parade of peaceful police officers, in full riot gear and carrying all manner of weapons. LE was impressed enough to leave the sand for a few seconds.

Although the cops were kind of scary, the scariest thing is that that's me saying "Yeah," in that video, because LE wanted me to check out a particularly large gun. Yes, it's true. Apparently I've developed a man voice. I had no idea until I saw it on You Tube. Oh well. It was bound to happen.

Thanks to a tip from A Seasonal Cook In Turkey, we were off to the DOBAG carpet sale in the Crimean church down the street. The carpets were astounding. They caused me all manner of stress and consternation because I wanted to be the sort of person who just buys a fucking gorgeous carpet because it's gorgeous and would really bring the room together, but instead I was the sort of person with a kid, an unpaid phone bill, and 173 lira in my bank account. Fortunately, the co-op that made the little carpets that really had me dribbling didn't take credit cards. The credit card is more of a future problem that takes care of current problems, but not all of them. I remember the days when credit cards were for fun.

Even more distracting than my envy and money issues was the fact that this was the first time LE has set foot in a church.

Good thing it was a cool church.

Probably the MIL wouldn't have objected to the church that much. She would have had a good laugh because things like churches and silly yabancı holidays are funny for her. Seriously, one day I would like to walk into a mosque and behave the way I see a lot of young Turkish tourists acting in a church-- being noisy, making jokes about the silly religion, taking pictures of each other pretending to pray... I don't even have any religious feelings to back this up, but there are some things that are just fucking rude. And that might get you beat up if you did them in a mosque.

But the MIL wouldn't have been happy about the big fuzzy cat that lived outside of the church. Or the giant ducks in the garden. I love ducks because they're so hopelessly undignified and they always say the same hilarious thing no matter how they're feeling. LE chased them everywhere and they patiently got away, calmly muttering and sticking together but never panicking.

So it was a good day. Our hands got dirty, we touched animals, and breathed the same air as people we don't know. Then we ate Chinese food. Somehow we all survived, but I think we'll not be talking about the specifics to the MIL. It could kill her. Or make her talk really a lot about boring things.

Either way wouldn't be so good.

It's Boza Season: A Passing Moment of Fleeting Beauty

2011-11-25T23:05:00.000+02:00

Boza, in and of itself is something interesting.

Just follow the link, it's worth it.

When I was pregnant, I was crazy for boza and went through like a bottle a day. In subsequent winters, the madness waned, but I still love the stuff. It reminds me of applesauce, especially with the cinnamon on top. Mind you, there's no applesauce in Turkey, except that which I make myself. Applesauce is something you don't really miss until you have to make it yourself, which isn't that hard, but still. As such, I can't think of boza as a drink, like something you chug from a cup. Instead, I put it in a cup and eat it with a spoon.

I'll pass on the roasted chick peas, but thanks for offering.

It's fucking yummy.

Though I would never eat it with leblebi, with a spoon or otherwise. Leblebi suck. No really, they do. They literally suck all traces of moisture from your mouth and get stuck on the way down when you swallow them. Quite why anyone eats these, I'll never know. I trace it to an old-days lack of Doritos, and I don't even like Doritos. Too fucking orange. And they smell orange but not-orange and I associate them with rooms full of boys and video games and that tube-sock freshness that accumulates.

Posing problems that would cross a rabbi's eyes!

Anyway, one perk of our neighborhood is that there are street vendor folk. They have a proper milkman out here, by which I mean the guy who's like Tevye in Fiddler On The Roof with the big pail and the scoop. I wouldn't ever get milk from that guy because I'm too entrenched in my American food safety issues, but still. It's cool. Just agree with me.

Actually, the other reason I wouldn't ever get milk from that guy is because I'm not sure of the protocol. I don't have the basket on a string to dangle off the balcony, and I gather one is expected to provide one's own milk receptacle. What sort of container might that be? I'm sure mine would be all wrong. And then, how do you know how much it costs? How do you know if he's ripping you off because you're foreign? And anyway, do foreigners often shout off the balcony when the milkman passes by?

So many questions, such deep confusion.

Okay, the street vendors. Tonight I'd just got off the phone with my friend and a sound vibrated through the living room. It was all wrong for ezan and not the right time. But there was something to it. Piercing and haunting. It didn't sound like guys fighting or neighbors keening over some tragedy, as they do sometimes. I swear there were some harmonics being hit there. My spine tingled in a good way and I ran outside to check it out.

Turns out it was the bozacı.

Best sound ever. And for a fleeting moment, life was sweet and beautiful.

Fucking Bunion: A Foray Into Foot Ailments

2011-11-24T23:20:00.000+02:00

Bunion rhymes with onion. It's one of my favorite words in the English language. It's both evocative and hilarious.

Not only does my toe hair sparkle in this light, I've got fucking bunions.

Yet, until today, I didn't know exactly what a bunion is. Of all the billions of things I've looked up on Google, bunion has never been one of them. It's hard to say why that is.

The bunion thing started thus: One of my co-workers just had a minor foot surgery. She's been padding around in one slipper and one shoe. The slipper is pink and a little bit fuzzy. It's really cute, trust me. So I overheard her telling someone it was a corn.

It wasn't that I was trying so hard to listen-- it's this crap open-plan office we've been poured into. The open-plan office (a nice way of saying "fucking cubicle corral") is just one of the many injustices my job has recently foisted upon us, things that have started to make me hate my job a little bit because one of the things I've always liked about my job is that they they don't treat the prep teachers like crap in the hierarchy of shit that everyone clings to so desperately.

Robots don't need air or toilets.

We've suddenly gone from "respected professionals" to inhuman English teach-bots who don't need boring shit like more than two toilets for 50 people or books or planning time or air in their classrooms. I don't mean A/C. I mean air. The kind you breathe and makes you sick in certain forms. The air thing is a boring story involving Turkish construction and fake ventilation systems and 20 people in a tiny room.

Not this kind of corn.

Anyway, I didn't know what a corn is either. All I know is that the knobs on the sides of my feet have been growing and they remind me of corn. So I asked this co-worker about whatever was on her feet and she described it and it sounded all right, bumpy and sore and that was enough for me. Then I asked her if their removal was covered by insurance and she said it was. Then today she wasn't limping anymore, and I was all, "Wow, amazing recovery time! I should be able to fit that minor surgery into my life, which I no longer have because I have to work all the fucking time because the administration just took a big old dump all over us!"

This kind. Fucking ew.

So tonight I looked up "corn" on Google. Turns out a corn is just a really big callous. I have loads of those. If really big callouses are corns, my pinky toes are like 85% corn. If I had them removed, I wouldn't have pinkie toes anymore. I'd have pinkie sprouts.

Then I looked up "bunion." Then I giggled a bit because bunions are funny and rhyme with onions. Then I found out bunions are weird bony growths and not a snap to have off. Since I don't wear high-heeled or crampy shoes, it means my bunions are genetic.

It's cool. My grandma had wonderfully knobby feet. I got her feet. And her weird hands that can do the weird finger locking thing. LE has her creepy thumb that bends all the way backwards. So does my brother. Genetics are cool.

I'm thankful I got my grandmother's feet, bunions and all. There are a lot of other things I'm thankful for, too numerous to mention and anyway, it's my bedtime. I have to get up fucking early to go to work.

Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Teachers' Day.

Dear Universe: An Open Letter

2011-11-18T23:38:00.001+02:00

Dear Universe,

Fuck you. It's not enough you took my cousin, but now you have to burn up the town where I was born?

Look, I know I've not been perfect, but seriously?

Complete lack of love at the moment,

Stranger

P.S. The least you could could do is give a swift kick in the neck to whoever robbed Wayne's car. Because I'm pretty fucking sure you owe me one.

Curses! A Visit To A Bureaucratic Hellhole That Wasn't So Bad

2011-11-16T23:16:00.000+02:00

You can tell from the outside that nothing good will happen in here.

Remember a couple of weeks ago how I was all sucking at life and stuff? Well, the shots in the ass kind of did their job and life went on, apparently not caring whether I sucked at it or not.

Does this cancel out somehow?

In general, I try not to be superstitious, though I avoid obviously dangerous superstition thingies, like walking under ladders (shit really does drop from up there) and opening umbrellas in the house. Okay, the umbrella thing isn't really dangerous, but once when I was about six, I was attempting to demonstrate to my mom how it doesn't bring bad luck to open an umbrella in the house and I opened one and it broke something semi-valuable and I got in trouble so if that isn't bad luck I don't know what is.

But when I was sucking at life I made fun of both the muhtar and SSK and you know what? It has become necessary to go to both of those places. LE's school needs some bit of paper from the muhtar, and this goddamned SSK aktivasiyon business turns out to be real and has to be sorted out in person. So maybe there's something to this overwhelming Turkish belief that our thoughts and words have the power to draw the universe's attention to you, and bring down a load of shit on you if it's about bad things. I'm pretty sure this belief accounts for the lack of public education about earthquake safety and why no one does anything about these shit buildings that keep going up.

Anyway, the muhtar was painless, once I found it. There was a really nice receptionist who looked us up in her computer and discovered we weren't registered. Since the steps required to do that are in my husband's hands, I washed my own hands of the muhtar and LE and I went on our merry way.

As for SSK, it's became some sort of Holy Grail of a thing I got bent on, nay, called upon to Deal With.

Arthur!

Don't ask me why SSK needs to be activated. I pay them money and they do their thing and I thought we were getting along fine until I actually tried to use it a couple of weeks ago. I'm fairly certain this whole aktivasiyon business is just a wee scheme to create work for the good folks down at SSK. I mentioned it to some friends and they were all, "Your school is the one who should to deal with that," so I marched myself down to Human Resources only to be told I have to do it myself. I was told nicely, in any case, which always pleases me in the face of any bad news. They rolled their eyes and started asking each other, "Did you have to do this aktivasiyon thing?" and some said yes and some said no, making me think the random fist of Turkish bureaucracy came crashing down on some people but not on others. And they told me where I have to go to do it, which, as it turns out, is right near a tramway stop so I just thought, "Fuck it. I'm tired of sucking at life, and I'm going to go on down there and activate the hell out of my SSK."

Here's one thing about my life in Turkey. Before I got married, I either a) didn't deal with anything, or b) dealt with it, but it was so horrifyingly problematic I swore never to deal with it again, or c) got a Turkish person to come along with me to tell me what I needed to do. The school where I first worked even had some guys who would come along with us to deal with stuff. We called them the little men, because not one of them was over 5' 3". These guys were security guards or cleaners or something, just the all-around fellows who worked at the school and sometimes cleaned stuff or fixed stuff. Seyfettin Bey was the best of them. He was always kind to us, he wore a charming cap and vest, and he could kick bureaucratic ass like no one's business.

I don't like the look of it.

On a bad day you'd get Creepy Salih or Handy Kemal.

Pink is for girls!

In fact, the little men, aside from their creepiness or handiness, just made the bureaucracy situation even more uncomfortable, because neither the little men nor the people we had to deal with spoke English, so instead of one person barking Turkish at you, there were two. It's not like I ever expected everyone to speak English, but instead of feeling grateful for having some help in whatever nightmare you were dealing with, you felt as though you were making your little man look bad because you couldn't figure out what the hell anyone wanted from you. Plus they would do stuff like propel their foreigner ahead in the line in ways I wasn't quite comfortable with at the time. Nonetheless, it all worked out because I have a tax number, a SSK card, and well before I was married, I had a legal residence/work permit so I could be called upon to turn up for work when the Ministry of Education inspectors came. It took an awful lot more stroking of my ass by Creepy Salih and Handy Kemal than I'm comfortable with, but by golly, it's done.

Then I got married and BE dealt with everything so I was completely off the hook, which is just one reason why my Turkish is so piss poor after almost 10 years here. It's ended up that I'm completely lame at doing anything grown-up here. BE, while quite good at dealing with things that need dealing with is not, shall we say, on the ball about taking care of things and sometimes I want things to get taken care of before next year.

Fast forward to now. I packed up LE, telling him we had to go to one of the worst, most boring places on Earth, worse than the bank even, but that afterwards we'd go somewhere super-cool. He wasn't too keen, having decided his day was was going to be spent watching A Nightmare Before Christmas over and over. He's really into the opening song, and as a result it's been the only earworm I've had for days now. Watching LE dance to it or burst into song from time to time is totally worth it, though, so I'm not really against repeated viewings of this particular film.

But once LE found out all the forms of transportation we'd be enjoying, he warmed up to the idea. Minibus-metro-funicular-tram sounds pretty fucking good when you're four. When we arrived at our desired location an hour and a half later, LE was completely convinced it was all a wonderful adventure. His favorite part was the little red and green lights on the metro sign telling you which stops you've been to. He also likes the signs telling you which things are forbidden, and the metro doors have two-- one telling you not to lean on the doors (lots of naughty people doing that too, by the way) and another with a crossed out hand which I took to mean you shouldn't try to pull the doors open with your hand. LE really wanted to know whose hand it was.

We're orange.

The tramway was even better, with a color-coded sign showing the people you should give your seats to. LE liked the orange one best because it was about him. And because none of these forms of transportation was full of snot-nosed students from my university, there was always someone who gave us a seat.

Guess when the numbers slowed down.

The SSK place had a number system, which was much nicer than the pushing mob scene I had envisioned. We got number 493. The sign said 310. Fuck. I'm never sure what to do in these situations because sometimes a group of numbers flies by really fast and sometimes they take 20 minutes to change. There was a room with nice tables and chairs labeled something like "Employers and SSK holders waiting room." Since it looked ever so much nicer than the other waiting room with no label, I went on in and found us a spot. There wasn't anything on the sign about un-activated SSK-holders being forbidden to enter.

Really, it was the best place to wait.

LE played with his car and I eavesdropped on our fellow waiting room denizens and peeked at the papers they had with them, suddenly worried I should also have a sheaf of papers with me. In an effort to not suck at life, I had actually phoned, yes PHONED on the telephone the SSK place to check what I should bring. I never quite trust information I get on the phone from such places though, so I had brought every form of official document we have, just in case.

The three things that saved us.

Just then, things in the SSK office started going insanely contrary to my expectations. A security guard walked in and started throwing candy around. No, seriously. That actually happened. It's like he could read LE's constant, intense, thrumming "I want candy" brainwave. He made sure LE got extra candy. I gave LE one and saved the rest for emergencies, as I'm wont to do.

So after the car had been broken and repaired a few times, LE moved on to his iPhone games. He found some games in there I didn't even know I have that were pretty fun, but he totally wouldn't share. So that kind of sucked.

Eventually, we had to pee. The security guards directed us to the elevator to get to the toilets upstairs. The elevators only held three people, though, and there were like twelve waiting, so much to LE's tremendous disappointment, we used the stairs. It was one flight so we handled it okay. Upstairs, there were some offices but nothing that looked like a toilet. We wandered around and LE spotted a toilet-y looking place. We went in slowly and suddenly a man materialized saying, "This is the men's room!"

Saw really scared me, because it's real.

There are few things I hate more than walking into the wrong bathroom. But this bathroom didn't even have a bathroom sign, let alone a gender label. I asked if it was written anywhere and the man said "no," so I guess my mistake was cool. He directed us to the correct toilets and it was every bit as awful as I expected, the kind of place where I'm glad there are only squatters because then I don't have to touch anything. LE was delighted because peeing in a squatter is like peeing on the floor. Plus we got to ride the elevator back downstairs so that was another crisis averted.

Back behind the SSK windows was a dank-smelling, closed-up array of businesses I wished were still open-- a bakery, an Internet cafe, and a drycleaner, among other things. If only I could have smashed all those other errands into my SSK visit! But apparently the Turkish economy had other ideas.

I mock your sucky institutions!

So we went outside for awhile. For luck, there was a man out front selling bananas and nuts. I bought some of each. LE raced around and played with his car. Then we started playing football with his car and some other folks joined in. In LE's world, it was shaping up to be an okay day. Despite my freaking out that we might be required to have a sheaf of papers like everyone else, I wasn't minding the day so much either.

Eventually, our number came up. The woman in the office behind the little hole in the window I had to bend down to talk into was looking me up before I even explained our boring problem. She was being really nice, which threw me for a loop. I passed her my phone, where I had my official yabancı number written. That's a number BE came home with and gave me one day, and I was never sure why, but it's really long and it seemed easier just to hand her the phone than to attempt shouting the number through the little hole. She had a smiling and joyful face.

But all she could find was some stuff that ended in 2008. I had no idea what that was all about, because of all the money SSK is getting out of my paycheck every month.

"So?"I asked? "What do I have to do?"

"So?" she said happily, "What do you have to do?"

If Sesame Street had an episode called, "A Visit To SSK," this woman would have been the star. She was that lovely and cheerful, seriously.

The world has a lot to learn from Sesame Street, but the SSK lady already learned it.

"I don't know," I said. "Where is my money going?"

"Look, I'll show you!" and she cheerfully waved me around to the office door to come on in to the sanctified SSK office so I could see her computer. She showed me where I left my old school to have LE, and where my SSK payments had stopped.

"Interesting," I said.

Who could be happy after a day's work here?

"Yes!" she said, like it was the best day ever at 4pm on what must have been a long, hard day for her. "Isn't it?" Then she thought for a moment, and went to punch in the foreigner ID number that was on my phone. Just then, my friend phoned me and the woman was perplexed and horrified. I pushed the red button because that seems to solve most problems and my friend would understand. My foreigner number came right back up because iPhones are fucking cool.

And there on her computer was all the money the government has been taking from me. Turns out I have two SSK accounts. Turns out my school went and set up another one for me without asking if I already had one. Turns out the whole computer revolution in government offices has somehow failed in terms of the whole cross- referencing thing, because you'd think my old account would have come up when they were trying to make the new one.

I kept mum about how this whole thing could be related to the fact that I have two or three official names here, depending on who you ask. The nice Sesame Street lady didn't notice anyway, and I figured it wasn't a good time to bring it up. LE decided now was a good time to play "Hide From Mama At An Inopportune, Stressful Moment," and even though none of his his usual spots (behind the sofa, in the nook behind the table) were available, I could hear him giggling evilly from behind an empty desk. The nice lady directed us to an office upstairs where someone might be able to do something, and LE popped up when he heard the word "elevator." She waved us back to the little hole in the window while she punched more stuff into her computer. When we got the hole, a young man was yelling at her on behalf of a friend who, after waiting a couple of hours had, quite justifiably in this man's mind, nipped out for a pack of cigarettes at the last minute and missed his number.

"Terbiyesizlik yapmayın!" she was saying cheerfully to him as we collected our papers.

Seriously, where ever this woman finds her source of joy and patience, I need me some of that.

"Gray-faced bureaucrat" on Google images gives us Wayne Newton

So we went upstairs to the other office, nicely veneered compared to the place downstairs and I noticed the toilets were labelled, for gender and otherwise, and waited patiently for a gray-faced elderly bureaucrat to finish doing some bureaucratic thing. While we waited, a man on the phone behind him was engaged in a delicious conversation.

"Madam, if you'd just stop speaking so I can.... yes madam, if you'd just... yes, madam, I understand your name was written as Çetin but it should be Çelik... Madam, if you would just stop speaking now so I can... Look, it's not a problem (tap tap tap on the computer), I've just changed your name to Çelik... Please, madam, stop talking..." I could hear the woman on the phone screeching from where we were standing.

I didn't envy that fellow's job at all. And I realized that perhaps the SSK thing has become decidedly less horrible than it has been in the past, despite everyone's expectations. The gray-faced man sorted out his problem and waved us off to a younger woman over yonder, another Sesame Street cheerful person who wrote out all my SSK numbers on a sheet of paper, totally unfazed by what I feared would be a most confounding problem. "It will take about 2 months to join the accounts. Check the website then, and make sure it's okay."

"Will I have to activate it again?" I wondered.

She looked relieved that I knew what the Internet was. "Most probably!" she said, with a smile.

And with that, we got the fuck out of there.

And since we were on the tram line, I decided to make the most of our day, and let LE learn about his heritage and shit. So we went on down to Sultanahmet and checked out the Yerebatan Sarayı, which is much improved for four-year-olds since I saw it eleven years ago because they've eliminated the colored light show and new-age music but added safety railings along the water's edge. I scored a teacher discount. Since LE doesn't know any better, I acted as the tour guide and pointed out all the fish and made up a whole bunch of crap about battles in regards to the Medusa heads because that's what I imagine about them.

The Romans lost, by the way, because it was about fucking time the Romans lost. Snooty pricks.

Then we had some köfte and soup, and later a sahlep at a tourist tea garden near the mosque. The village tea boys were unable to hide their shock at my half-breed Turkish boy, and they were awfully sweet because it isn't summer and not much is going on for them these days. I let LE run around the courtyard in Sultanahmet mosque and showed him about the chain at one of the entrances, plus there were lots of cats. I stressed the numbers about how old it all was, and it warmed my chilly heart later when I heard him telling his dad and Babaanne how we went to see all the *really old things*. He thought the cats and teaboys were also old, which confused his dad and Babaanne, but whatever.

Our trip to the SSK ended up being a fine day after all, which is about 1,000 times more than I ever expected. So without being overly optimistic, it's possible that I just kicked life in the ass a little bit...

Goodbye, My Cousin

2011-11-15T23:02:00.000+02:00

A couple of days ago, my cousin J.K. got hit by a car and died.

I can think of a lot of things to say about this but I'm not going to because I'm not going to. But I'm definitely thinking them, over and over and over and in different ways. I can't stop thinking about him.

Me and J.K., circa 1976

Goodbye, sweet cousin.

Kurban Bayram: A Bad Day For Some Animals

2011-11-07T22:58:00.001+02:00

Love!

Look, I like animals. I like to anthropomorphize them and give them names and chat with them. For the most part, I try to be their friend.

Love!

On the other hand, I eat meat, and lots of it. I like meat. I like red meat barely cooked and running with blood, slightly purple in the middle. I even like the grosser bits, like fat and gristle and the papery bits on the tops of ribs. I'm an inveterate bone-gnawer.

Yummy, neatly sliced and cooked.

Decidedly un-yummy.

I've sampled Turkish offal like brains and tripe soup and tongue. The brains and tongue were surprisingly delicious, though I was awfully drunk at the time. The soup, well, not my favorite. I was once in an işkembe restaurant and LE needed the toilet and as we were walking back there a toilet-y poo smell hit me and I was thinking, "Oh no, these bathrooms are going to be so gross," already imagining the annoying anxious Mom-gymnastics I was going to have to go through to keep LE or his clothes from touching anything wet or mysteriously colored. It was a fairly decent restaurant and I was wondering why they appeared to have open-pit non-flushing squat toilets. But when we got to the bathroom, they were sparkling clean and on the way down I realized the smell wasn't coming from the toilets. It was coming from the massive, steaming pot of tripe soup under the stairs.

But still. Most meat products I'm cool with, even the yucky ones. I don't even care what must be in hot dogs or sucuk. Whatever, as long as it's yummy. I feel like I'm a complete meat hypocrite because I've never watched the meat get killed, let alone killed some myself and I strongly feel I ought to do that someday, seriously.

Imagine this, but with animal parts and blood.

So last year, I mentioned how my neighbors sacrificed a cow in their garden. Fine. It seemed to make them all so very happy, and it's their business. I was even a little glad the city-wide ban on home animal sacrifices didn't seem to extend to out here. I mentioned it to my in-laws yesterday, and my father in-law started talking about what it used to be like. I suggested that there are far too many people in close quarters for them to all be killing their animals all over. According to him, that wasn't the problem. The problem was that a lot of those people didn't know fuck-all about killing an animal, and they were doing it all wrong, with dull knives or whatever, and there was a problem of sheep and cows with half-cut jugulars running amok spraying gore all over. Plus, you think it's bad how so many idiots leave their trash all over? Imagine those same people with all kinds of animal gore-waste they can't be bothered to dispose of properly. Apparently people used to just leave rivers of blood and piles of steaming guts lying around in the streets for someone else to clean up. When my father-in-law got to the flies in summer, he kind of trailed off and got lost in his memories.

Must witter on about germs!

While he was doing that, the MIL picked up her cue, which was to talk about dirt and germs and sickness. It's pretty much all she thinks about, it would seem. She mentioned the dirt and the sickness. Then she said something like, "Those piles of guts must have had germs or something like that on them because they smelled really bad." Which proves my theory she doesn't have a goddamned idea in the world what a germ is. In MIL's world, germs most certainly lurk in the following places:

1) Air

Fucking deadly in all its forms.

2) Coins and paper money

Filthy lucre! Wash your hands! She really makes LE do this!

3) Places where unpleasant commoners might congregate, like public transportation and public offices

People we don't know carry all manner of filth and illness.

4) Gypsy children

Cute? Hell no! Not even human! They'll kill you for sure!

5) Animals, especially ones in the house

Call me superstitious, but I'm getting a cat soon to keep witches away.

There could be germs here

But piles of offal steaming in the summer sun and crawling with flies? Maybe there might be some germs in that, or something akin to germs, those mystical jinn with no rhyme or reason who wait for us to let our guard down and leave something un-ironed or sweaty so they can kill us all with stuffy noses.

I live in your underpants. Iron me or I'll make your nose run.

Stupid fucking woman.

I just read over my last year's Kurban Bayram post. This year was nothing like it, especially the part where we had a nice, family holiday. This year I tried to have a nice family holiday but that stupid woman's endless under-the-breath carping at me, coupled with my son's endless, embarrassing tantrums he has in their presence, drove me off by 7pm and I came home. I decided I couldn't take it anymore when I was attempting to discipline the boy for not apologizing after accidentally hurting another kid, and stupid MIL just started talking over me in Turkish, telling him that tomorrow they would take him to Bakırköy and buy him toys and candy and I was just all, "Fuck this shit. Fuck you Let you deal with him because this sucks and you're a stupid cow."

Persecuted much?

Whatever goes through her head I wish I knew, because if I could see it I think I would want to shoot it dead and make it shut the fuck up so she would quit driving everyone crazy, especially me.

Here marks the end of a whole lot of charitableness I've been trying to have towards my husband's family.

Their primary goal in life seems to be making me crazy and turning my son into a spoiled idiot with no sense of consequences, honesty, responsibility, or personal accountability. You'd think they would see the error of their ways when they look at their own eldest son lying around on his jobless ass, getting drunk, playing video games and yelling at everyone all the time blaming them for his dumbass problems, but no such luck.

I've been doing this really a lot lately.

Easy, Stranger.

Whoa, there.

Anyway, as for last year's garden sacrifice, I remembered it as a sheep for some reason, but as it turns out, it was also a cow. Interesting how memory does that you.

Let this be a lesson in how completely unreliable my storytelling is. So starting on Saturday, I decided I needed to quit being a meat hypocrite and that I would watch the damn sacrifice this year. I was all geared up. I got up early and everything.

Only I remembered it was a sheep last year. A sheep I could have dealt with. Sheep are stupid and somewhat uninteresting. So I got myself all geared up for a sheep.

May you return to this place, cow.

But instead, when I looked over the balcony in the morning, there was a cow. A wee black and white yearling, shuffling around on a short rope and mooing sadly. He had a little blue halter and he kept licking the railing.

Nope. Couldn't watch. I stayed inside and had breakfast with LE while the neighbors were all shouting down there. Then I did go out for a peek, and saw a river of frothy blood that looked almost fake, and the little cow lying on the ground with his head a few feet away. I was going to take a picture for you but I didn't because I remember exactly what that little cow looked like.

Later, after he was skinned and the butchering had started, I felt a little better because it looked more like meat than a cow. And I have to say, I'm totally impressed my neighbors are able to cleanly slaughter, neatly skin, and butcher a cow with nothing more than the brawn of a few men and some sharp knives. Today, not a trace of it remains.

Still, I had steak for dinner, cooked bloody with lots of salt and fat, and I cleaned my plate.

And I have a whole year now to gear myself up for next year's cutting time. As long as the animal isn't cuter than a cow, like an elephant or a goat, I'll be fine.

If your urge to kill is also failing you this year, allow me to plug an alternative, Heifer Project International.

I went with the flock of geese.

Versatile Blogger: Some Quirky Shit

2011-11-06T23:28:00.000+02:00

So as you know, last week was a pretty bad week as far as weeks go, and I haven't yet mentioned the one good thing that happened, which is that Jack over at Perking The Pansies passed on the Versatile Blogger Award to me. Since I rarely get more than a nod because I've turned up on time, I was pleased as punch! My face was hurting, I smiled so much.

Here's what I'm supposed to do: reveal seven things about myself that make me quirky, then nominate at least five other bloggers for the award.

Quirky

As for the quirky thing, I've never considered myself quirky. Maybe other people do, but I doubt it. Quirky is for people you want to have sex with, like Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally or Ramona Flowers in Scott Pilgrim or Seth Rogan all the time or the Band Camp girl. Quirky is what you say for someone who has issues but their issues are really cute on them.

Adorably quirky.

I'm pretty sure my issues are just issues. I'm pretty sure I'm what a lot of people would call "neurotic." If they were being nice, they might say "intense," but intense is just neurotic with wire-frame glasses and a sense of humor.

Anyway, quirky? No. Quirks? In spades. But they're probably the annoying kind.

Fuck you, Milk. All of you.

1) Milk. I fucking hate it. I hate milk so much it upsets me when I get some on my skin. I don't even like touching a container of cold milk that has condensation on the outside, because the wetness might be milk. The smell makes me gag. As I child, I couldn't even stand any cheese that was white or vanilla ice cream and I can still barely stomach milkshakes and they have to be chocolate with almost no milk in them. Thinking about milk when I'm queasy is an easier way to clear my stomach than sticking two fingers down my throat. I can't even drink anything that looks like milk, or that is called "milk," including coconut milk even though it looks like water. Rakı even takes a bit of psyching myself out until I've had enough that I don't give a shit what it is, as long as there's more.

Having a child that freaking loves milk is either some kind of test or some kind of curse, and he's either extremely good or I'm extremely lucky he's never spilled any in some difficult place, like the sofa. As for breast milk, it tastes like melon and was only horrifying after it had sat in the fridge or freezer and got the milky smell. Otherwise, I was pretty pleased with it most of the time because it was free "Stop Crying" juice. And I like things that are free.

Kind of gross.

2) I can do this with my hand. When I do this, the lower joints are locked this way and I can only bend them by relaxing my hand. When locked, I can wiggle the upper joints. The only use of this skill is impressing people in bars, so yeah. No one's all that impressed, really, but I keep trying because it's all I've got. The locking thing made it almost impossible for me to play the guitar because when I stretched my pinkie finger to the lower strings, it would lock in place and the only way I could undo it was to let go of the neck. Sometimes I could force it to unlock by bending it really hard, but it would hurt a lot and pluck all the strings on the way back.

I am him and he is me.

3) I played violin for about 15 years, off and on but mostly on. I never got very good at it, or at least, not as good as one should be after playing that much. One of my favorite movies is Amadeus because I'm Salieri-- a sullen nobody who deeply appreciates good music and who's possessed with a yearning to make beautiful music, but completely lacks talent and soul. That's me. Listening to me play the violin is an uncomfortable situation for most people at best, because bowed instruments are as unforgiving as the human voice. When someone fucks up on a violin or singing, it rubs you the wrong way painfully and you either feel angry with them for making you listen, or sorry for them for trying so hard and failing. Like singing, the only time I've been good at the violin was when no one was listening, and it was only for a few bars, and once or twice, a whole page. The locking pinkie finger thing was less of a problem on violin, except for certain double stops, but I was never much good at those either, so it was the least of my violin problems.

A girl can dream.

4) Speaking of bad singing singing, after watching a few too many episodes of Glee, I've decided my goal in life before I turn 40 is to be a rock star, preferably in a punk cover band. So if you know of a crappy 80s punk garage band looking for a female lead who can carry a tune but can't sing for shit when people are listening, send them my way so we can make my dream come true. The clock is ticking. It shouldn't take more than quite a bit of Jack Daniels and some false praise to make me a star. I'll swear a lot and even wear fishnets.

They forgot me.

5) My first serious crush was on Peter Pan. The Disney one. It was when I was about LE's age, which I remember because I kept taking my Peter Pan soundtrack record to nursery school for show and tell. Once I realized I wasn't going to wake up as a boy just from hoping really hard, I turned my focus to Peter Pan. More than anything I wanted him to fly into my window with those little green tights and take me off to Never Never Land, a place apparently filled with young boys requiring little more than regular baths and a bit of affection. I fucking hated Wendy. What was did she have that I didn't have, I wondered? Wendy might have been the first girly girl who got the whole being-a-girl thing and really pissed me off because of it. I find the Peter Pan crush significant now not only because it means LE is having secret and intensely real alone feelings I know nothing about, but also because it could explain a lot of serious failures in the course of my love life.

I forgave Mrs. Brisby.

Oh, Watts. Was I jealous of you or Eric Stoltz?

You little tease, I cried when you died.

Getting better with age.

6) My other creepy crushes include Justin, the leader of the revolutionary rats from the cartoon Secret Of N.I.M.H, Oscar Wilde, Dustin Hoffman at any age, Tony Curtis at any age, Mary Stuart Masterson in Some Kind Of Wonderful, Adam Sandler, this one ugly, swarthy minibus driver we have out here, and River Phoenix at any age which isn't creepy, I don't think, except I fell head over heels for him when he was about 10 in The Explorers. Only I was like 12 so it's a little bit creepy. Pam Grier makes my jaw drop, and just Tim Curry's voice turns me to jelly. My abiding adoration for Robert Downey Jr. (even LE goes "mm-mm-mm" and shimmies at the sound of his name and you can be sure we watch a lot of Iron Man around here) continues unabated since my tweens and I'm pretty sure isn't creepy. And if Juliette Lewis would just quit being a Scientologist, she could kick my face in any day.

7) I'm scared of the dark. And driving, which I've never learned how to do. Also long black cords and telephone wires that are thinking about electrocuting me (good thing for fiber optics, most of those fuckers have all moved underground), certain minor keys, ghosts (they could appear out of the dark at any moment and start screaming, all right?), people at parties wearing masks who won't talk, certain small dogs, and dead things. Birds make me really uncomfortable when they look at me.

So I'm supposed to pass this award along to five other bloggers. The blogs I regularly read are, like my friendships, very few but well-loved. And my circle of blogs is, like my friendships, quite narrow. So here goes:

Nomad at A Nomadic View, the most versatile blogger I know and I miss his posts a lot these days. Hope all's well, Joe.

A Seasonal Cook In Turkey, who's saved my sorry ass for dinner more times than I can count. Also, she makes me want to grow up here even more than I already have because life in Turkey looks beautiful from her side of the world (the Asia side, to be exact).

Emre at The Istanbulian, partly because his view of the world is both confounding and interesting, but also because I just want to know what his quirks are.

The Pretzel King, who I love dearly and miss every day, even though (t)he(y) only has two posts and will you just make some more pretzels already? Please?

Turkish Muse, who has a much more interesting life than I do, plus she takes great pictures.

Maryanne at A Totally Impractical Guide To Living In Shanghai, who used to be here but had the big-ass balls to go over there and seems to be getting along just fine.

Thanks for spending time with me today.

Aardvark Precious: The Best Bug Ever

2011-11-03T22:34:00.000+02:00

If all bugs looked like this one, I would like bugs a lot more. Best bug ever, with that long aardvark-y nose. "Aardvark" is a fantastic word one doesn't have nearly enough call to use, so I'm glad this bug gave me the opportunity to think about aardvarks a lot.

Remember this?

What a fucking great animal. It digs! It roots! It lumbers about! And it has a long wiggly nose it's not the least bit embarrassed of! If aardvarks are assholes, I never want to know about it because every day of my life it makes me very happy to know that koala bears are rarely assholes and that they're as dopey and cuddly as they look. Plus they smell like eucalyptus. I was really upset when I found out panda bears have a tendency to be complete dicks.

I assure you there's a direct relationship between those thoughts. Just work with me here.

Seriously, I would have kissed this bug if I hadn't been afraid it would stick to my lips or die of fright. I totally apologized to it for taking its picture, because it didn't really care for that either.

How I Completely Suck At Life, Part II: In Pursuit Of A Shot In The Ass

2011-10-31T23:14:00.000+02:00

So yeah, I meant to write more on this sooner, seeing as it was Part II and everything, but even though some time has passed, I'll just carry on. If you have loads of time on your hands, Part I might explain some things. Or it might not. Whatever. There's only so much I have control over, and apparently, it's not much.

Anyway. When the doctor told me the antibiotics were the injection kind, I had all this other stuff in my head. In this post, we shall take some journeys into my head so you can get an idea of what it's like in there at any given moment. At the time the doctor was telling me I'd have to arrange a bunch of injections for myself, it was looking a little like this:

It might look like this in there.

Maybe we can have English chat time with the doctor someday, what's our schedule like? Child is damn sick and tipping over and we've been at this hospital over an hour. Smells like cigarettes in here. Is Robitussin codeine syrup on that list of prescriptions? Coffee? I like coffee. Poor kid is so sick, this sucks. Get over this disease quickly, eh? Fuck our whole I don't take antibiotics for no reason thingy, it's boring. Is it for real English chat, or does he have ulterior motives? I am repeating back everything the doctor has said to me to make sure I've understood. Injection? How old is this guy, anyway? Maybe we can get the jab on the way out, shouldn't take long. Or tomorrow. The boy wants to go home. Hee, remember that bottle of Robitussin codeine we had that one time? Yes, the child speaks Turkish and English. Say the thing where he speaks Turkish better than I do, it always gets a laugh. Ooh, it's worked again, say Maşallah now. Smile politely and nod. Everything is going to be fine. Is this an adventure or do we suck at life?

Just shut up, fucking Brain.

Honestly, it's nothing but my own fault that I accepted the shot in the ass. I just wasn't paying attention. It was a hard day, all right? And it really troubles me, as I look at what I've written here, that some of the chatter in my head is first person plural. It should be singular, right? Unless my brain is somehow on a different team from me, which is entirely possible.

So I hauled the poor limp boy back to the counter at the front to get our receipt, and remembered there's the loveliest eczane just a few doors down from the hospital, where they actually went to the trouble to decorate the place like an old-fashioned apothecary, with wooden walls and cupboards and high shelves lined with old-fashioned jars labeled in Turkish and French. In my effort to get out of the hospital and through the eczane and back home as quickly as possible, I forgot to wonder why no one was giving me one of those miraculous Turkish antibiotics shots that make you better in like 20 minutes because you're American and haven't overused antibiotics your whole life for every sniffle.

At the eczane, there were stools and a flamboyantly dressed and made-up old lady who kept asking me where the child had gotten cold. I didn't really know how to answer that question because it was weird, but also I didn't want to insult the woman because in any other situation I would have thought she was super cool, like a washed-up silent movie star or something.

Say, why don't we take this party to the fucking eczane?

Besides the decor, the other reason I like this one eczane is because there isn't the usual horde of eczane groupies of both genders who hang out there all day and drink tea and bug customers about their illnesses. Try getting diarrhea or yeast infection medication from one of those places and you'll understand what I mean. The old woman lost interest in me after a few evasive answers, opting instead to talk to the pharmacist about the dangers of various types of air for small children. The pharmacist was taking a really long time to fill our prescriptions, even with me standing over him telling him we don't need this or that one. I found the shelf of painkillers and tried to find that great non-prescription muscle relaxant slash anti-inflammatory I like using when my back is flaring up, but I've forgotten the name.

Stunningly useful.

He led me through our medications one by one, writing the dosages and amounts and special instructions on the boxes, as they do. I have a really hard time with medications in Turkey, actually. The instructions and warnings are written on a separate piece of paper inside the box, and the pharmacist writes more stuff on the box. Nothing useful is written on the bottle or box. This means if the box and medications and instructions become separated from each other, you have no idea what they are or how much to take. Wikipedia doesn't help because Turkish doctors apparently love off-label medicating. Why do we have that 1960s anti-depressant lying around the house? Why, it's a painkiller outlawed as a painkiller in most countries since 1985. Sweet!

Halfway through, he stopped and said in Turkish, "How shall I write this on here?" then in English, "Daily. One. Full," and I gently reminded him I'd been speaking Turkish with him for the last 10 minutes. He looked relieved and carried on.

In front of him, he'd neatly stacked 8 little boxes. "You'll have to have these injected," he said.

"Where...?" I asked.

"In the ass," he replied. Actually, he said "In the hip," but it's funnier when I say "ass." At least I think so, because I'm such a fucking grown-up. Anyway.

"No, I mean, at which place should I have that done?" I asked, feeling ever so proud of myself I'd managed to use a causative verb.

"In the ass," he said, pointing to his hip. He didn't really say "ass" that time either.

"No, I mean, who is going to inject it?"

"Ah, they'll do it at a clinic or a hospital. The clinic at your school will do it"

Fuck you, George Lucas. Seriously.

Smile politely. Nod to the man and repeat all the information back to him. This interaction is going fine. These aren't the droids you're looking for. Stupid George Lucas wrecked the original films and the new ones sucked we waited our whole lives for that, our whole lives! Like 20 years! Holy shit, was it really 20 years? Wait, when did the first movie come out? 1977. We were four. We saw it in the theatre. Right. Okay. We understand the boy's medicine. Hey, that jar up on that shelf says "rezene." Wait, 8 shots? Where the hell am I going to get that done? We know "rezene." Why do we know that? How are we supposed to get this sick child to someplace where we can get the shots? Quick, reject the medicine. Oh, shit, too late he's run the card already. Wait, seriously? The doctor saw this poor sick kid and expects us to trek around further for shots? What is it with men? Don't they notice anything? Greasy dishes, smelly towels. Fuck. Really? We're supposed to load this little boy onto a minibus to go up to school every 12 hours? After bedtime? WTF? Nod and smile, Stranger, nod and smile.

On the way to the taxi (A taxi! We have to take a taxi. Can't make the kid walk. Remember to apologize to the driver for going such a short distance, remember in Bakırköy when they wouldn't take us home because it was too close? Point out the sick kid. Use the kid, Stranger, the kid. Holy shit we just dropped 300 lira on medical care and now we're taking a taxi), I started trying to work out how many days it would take to get all the shots in the ass, and where I was going to go to get them done. I cursed the doctor some more, and the Turkish medical system, and the traffic and passersby, just for good measure. Then I cursed myself for stupidly agreeing to all of this because I suck at paying attention and I just wanted to go home.

It's really funny, trust me.

So I decided to hold off on my shots in the ass until the next day. LE and I watched cartoons and I assured him we weren't going to school the next day. I also told him that we'd have to get up early so I could have a shot. I'd decided this was a good time to get him warmed up to the idea of shots, because he's got another round of vaccinations coming up and is more scared of shots than he is of zombies. He was greatly concerned about my shot, so I told him I would be getting it in my butt. I didn't say "ass" this time because he doesn't exactly know that word. He thought that was pretty funny, because he's four and any sentence with "butt" in it is extremely funny. But then he got worried that I might cry. I assured him I wouldn't because I would power through the pain like Bruce Lee. I've been teaching him to power through the pain like Bruce Lee. It doesn't actually work, but believe me, few things are funnier than watching a skinny four year old power through the pain like Bruce Lee.

I messaged a friend of mine to find out if eczanes will give you shots in the ass. I've heard they do, and she confirmed it was true. The one near her house does it, but I bet they don't post it in the window along with the cellulite removers and hair growers. I decided to try the eczane up the street. LE's antibiotics were already working and he was rallying.

Please, my friends. There are nicer places to have tea. Here, for instance.

Bright and early the next morning (well, not super early), I packed up the boy and a box of antibiotics and we went off to the nearby eczane. I'd chosen this one not only for its proximity, but also for its lack of groupies. Turns out I was wrong on the groupies thing. I guess I'd only ever been there in the evening after the groupies had already gone home. I explained my antibiotics thingy to the girl there, but already from the look of her, I was shit out of luck.

In Turkey, there is a certain breed of 18-25 year old skinny, pretty, but-not-too-pretty tight-shirt-wearing girl who is, more often than not, a daughter of the owner, and who is also one of the most useless people on earth. She'll take one look at you and decide she is going to grasp whatever shred of power she has in the world by being as unhelpful as possible.

Nevertheless, ready for my shot in the ass, I powered through the pain.

"Hospital," she said. "You have to get that done at a hospital."

"Really? No one here can do it?"

"Hospital. You have to get that done at a hospital."

"Because look, my child here is sick and we already walked all the way down here, isn't there anywhere else I can get this done?" Again, these are my barbaric wheedling skills. Use the child. Rules mean nothing. Maybe there is another doctor nearby, like maybe one of those abortionists or laser epilation people upstairs who help in cases like these. A dentist even.

Please, sir! Don't go to the eczane!

"Hospital. You have to get that done at a hospital." The groupies stared and stared. What entertainment for a Tuesday morning! One of them stirred sugar into her tea, slowly, so the tinkling of of the spoon on the glass wouldn't cause her to miss one thrilling moment.

"Really? There's no other place?"

"Hospital. You have to get that done at a hospital."

"Can I do it myself? How hard can it be?" Now I'd shown weakness by revealing my Plan B, doing it myself. I mean seriously, hitting the gluteus maximus with a needle? With the help of Google? Child's play, I'm sure! I have a few friends who've given themselves shots in the ass during IVF treatment. It can't be much harder than taking a picture of my tattoo. Junkies manage to shoot up in their veins all the time and this must be way easier. It's not like junkies are rocket scientists or RNs, or even phlebotomists or silly eczane girls.

"Absolutely not. Hospital. You have to get it done at a hospital."

So I gave her my best angry face, and, failing to catch the eye of the proper pharmacist down at the other end of the counter so I could go over this girl's dumbass head, I gave up.

And there was snickering before the door hit my ass on the way out, so I slammed the door. Well, not slammed really. Just I closed it a little louder than necessary. But it popped back open so I slammed it again, a little more carefully this time. They were all staring and snickering and I had no way of knowing if it was because I was foreign with my hilarious Turkish, or because I thought I could get a shot in the ass at the eczane, or because I'd offered to give my own self a shot in the ass, or because they were all just horrible people who completely fucking suck, or because I was making a scene, but suddenly LE remembered he knows a bunch of swear words.

"Fucking people," he said.

I'll be honest here, one of the first things LE ever said was, "People, people, ah, people, fucking people," because you can be sure this is definitely not even close to the first time I've sucked at life and blamed it on everyone else. Plus, to borrow what my grandmother once said while we were watching a Pat Benetar video on MTV, "I'll bet she swears like a sailor."

I felt like crap the whole rest of the day, not only because I was still sick and hadn't gotten my miracle shot, but also because I'm foreign and we don't like making public displays of emotion. I talked to another friend on the phone that night who confirmed eczanes generally don't give people shots in the ass anymore, and she also promised me I don't suck at life by pointing out a whole bunch of ways I don't suck at life. Then she reminded me I could have asked her for help, which I never think to do because I feel like I suck at life even more if I don't try to do everything all by myself all the time. I seem to think I'm some sort of superhero or something. Who am I kidding? Still, it was nice to know she doesn't think I completely suck. I bucked up a little after that.

Then I told this story to my friend at school the next day, the one who told me the eczane near her house gives shots in the ass. And apparently, yes, only some eczanes give you shots in the ass but you have to know which ones. You have to be Turkish to know which ones, I guess. Or at least speak Turkish and have normal, easygoing relationships with the Turkish people around you, which I don't. As much as I'm improving at life in general, I still find interactions in Turkish with people around me, like neighbors and stuff, to be extremely stressful and time-consuming and confusing, plus there's that problem I have of paying attention. But she made me feel a whole lot better, as she often does when I confess having made a public spectacle of myself, by saying that the eczane girl was probably bitchy on purpose because there's something in her home life that is terrible and disturbing. I felt a little bit sorry for the eczane girl, but not much, not that it matters because I'll never set foot in that eczane again. My friend pointed out this isn't very good revenge, since I don't buy that much from them, and suggested we firebomb them instead.

So the next morning after the eczane day, I had to go back to work. I got up extra super bright and early (for real bright and early this time) and got to school and presented them with my my box of antibiotics and politely requested a shot in the ass.

"Do you have your prescription?" she asked me.

Of course not. Of course I didn't think I'd need to bring along the damned little piece of paper I'd needed to get the antibiotics, because how would I have gotten them in the first place without the prescription?

"Not on me," I told her. "Can I bring it tomorrow?"

"We can't give shots without a prescription," she said. "It's the policy."

Oh. A fucking policy. A policy I can work with.

"Please," I said. And I started begging. I used the child who was so sick I couldn't go out for two days and get the shot. I pointed out the stupidity of the doctor who'd prescribed me these. I said the pharmacy had told me to come here. I asked her to call the doctor who's prescribed the medicine. I had a coughing fit for good measure.

"I understand your situation," she said, "but this is our policy. What if you had an allergic reaction or something? We need to have the prescription of file for the insurance..."

Ah. The insurance. Now I knew I had a fighting chance because it wasn't a law. It was something no one gives a fuck about in real life once they're off campus and everyone remembers it's not Stanford.

So I began the same begging rant again. I was fucking tired of failing at life. For once in this goddamned week I was going to make someone do what I wanted. I could see her weakening. I promised her the prescription was on my kitchen counter and I'd bring it the next day. I reminded her that I'm foreign and couldn't possibly know about these kinds of rules about bits of paper. Just give me the shot in the ass already.

"In America," she asked, "Do they let you have antibiotic shots without a prescription?" She looked all triumphant with that one.

"In America," I replied, "Doctors just give you the shot right then. They don't generally give sick people a bunch of medicine and then send them off to find a way to get it injected, especially when they've got sick children with them. And the prescription is attached to the package."

Oops, bad move. She started to act all refuse-y again. I had two weapons left in my arsenal at this point. One was that I was going to march down to the eczane and buy some needles and ask Dr. Google how to give myself the shots. The other was one I hadn't tried yet.

Just give it already.

I started crying. Totally lost it. It was a little bit fake and a little bit not, because I had pretty much had it with doctors and hospitals and sickness and money and the fucking shots in the ass.

And you know what? It worked. And they were even nice to me after that. The next day I had the prescription on me and no one asked for it. The following day I asked the woman if she would like to photocopy it and she was all, "Sigh."

In the room where they gave me the shot in the ass, there was a little sign that said, "We ask that you not insist on getting injections for which you don't have a prescription." If I'd been in a better mood, I would have told that nurse that it was clear she didn't know that much about America because if she did, she would have known she could have just pointed at the sign. I'm American and if it's written on a sign I give up immediately.

So now my ass is like a pincushion and I don't feel too terrifically better sickness-wise.

But I feel a hell of a lot better for having managed to get myself some shots in the ass. I like to think of them as Victory Shots.

Now I need eight of these.

That's the thing. Set the bar very, very low and you'll always manage to impress yourself.

How I Completely Suck At Life, Part I: Further Adventures With Doctors

2011-10-27T22:10:00.000+03:00

This is a tale of how I've been going to an inordinate amount of trouble lately to get a shot in the ass. As is the case with most of my tales where no one can interrupt the telling, this tale goes off down some side streets and gets completely lost, but finds its way in the end. Unfortunately, it probably doesn't have a punchline because most of my stories don't. Or maybe I'll think of one like two years from now. I'm slow like that, which is why this story has to be told in two parts and the shot in the ass doesn't even come until the second part.

Like everyone, there are times when I completely suck at life. It's really easy to blame my suckiness on Turkey because seriously, there are times when Turkey is totally conspiring against me. Of course, I handle these conspiracies better sometimes than others, so it's probably the case that when I suck at life, it's still mostly my fault.

That's because it's safe to say everything is my fault.

Okay, this is India but I'm pretty sure the bank has a guy like this.

Like my bills. I should have joined the 21st century ages ago with everyone else and started paying my bills automatically. But I haven't. Why? Because it's a pain in the ass because this is Turkey. The bank has a way to set it up online which never works. It tells you it's all set up, but then the bill doesn't get paid. So you go to the bank to set it up and they give you a piece of blank paper and a pen and dictate a talimat to you, and you sign it. I don't know what a talimat is exactly, except that it seems to be some sort of formal declaration that you want your bills to be paid automatically. Quite why such a piece of paper needs to be filed somewhere I have no idea, but again, this is Turkey. Byzantium has found its way into the digital age, and it's working, sort of.

Fuck yeah!

Burası Türkiye.

One thing I realized about Turkey the other night when I couldn't sleep is that people say, shruggingly, "This is Turkey" only when something bad or annoying or scary or insanely catch-22ish happens. People in America never do that. We're more inclined to thump our chests and say, "This is America!" when something really great happens and there are fireworks and music and someone has discovered they're free as a bird to do something stupid, like launch themselves headfirst from a giant slingshot into a swamp. Fuck yeah! It's a free country!

It's only one of the differences between Turkey and America, but at 3am it seemed really significant.

Anyway, at the bank you file the talimat and wait for the bill to get paid and it doesn't happen. Then you go back to the bank to find out why, and they tell you it's because there's already a talimat on file at a different bank. They couldn't have possibly told you this before. So you tell them you already filed a talimat at the old bank to cancel the other talimat and they shrug and give that implacable look that says, "This is Turkey. Begone, silly foreigner. If you had the sociolinguistic skills to get around this problem like everyone else does, I'd let you talk me into it, but all this reason and logic bores me. Plus you have an accent and that's just weird. Oh, and we'll be snickering at you before the door hits your ass on the way out."

Your friendly neighborhood muhtar welcomes you.

And that's why I don't pay my bills online. I won't even get into the other problem of the bills being in my husband's name, which is sometimes a problem and sometimes isn't, but in order to solve it, it means both of us taking a day off work and going to the most unspeakable places, shoving pushy people out of our way by the face and stroking the egos of the most appalling desk people who want unimaginable bits of paper, and since I'm pretty sure the muhtar (don't even get me started on the muhtar) won't put me on the registration form because I'm foreign, I have approximately a snowball's chance in hell of ever getting some bills put into my name. But my husband can't be trusted to pay the bills automatically because he doesn't keep track of his bank accounts and they get empty and then the guy comes over for the 10th time to shut off the water or electricity or whatever, looking relieved that it's just that foreigner who doesn't screech at him. We've gotten to be buds, the shutting-off guy and I.

That's what a catch-22 looks like from my side of the world. So now, all my bills are late because LE and I have been sick for the last couple of days. I went to pay them today at the post office at school, but they're on their lunch break during my lunch break and when I ran over there right before my classes started, their system was down. So I got out of work as quick as I could and stopped at home to pick up a prescription that comes up in Part 2 in this story, and rushed down to the bill-paying place that even takes your water bill, which the post office doesn't for some reason. The bill-paying place closes at 6 and I got there 2 minutes to 6-- their clock was the same as mine-- but the woman was all "We're closed" and I started to employ some of my barbaric wheedling skills to make people do what I want, but she said the system shuts down automatically and there was nothing she could do. At least she was nice about it, so I didn't get very mad.

But when I got outside it occurred to me once again that I'm sucking at life a lot these days.

When I'm sick is one of those times I don't handle Turkey problems well. And for the last couple weeks I haven't been sick-sick, just the kind of cloying, snotty sick that isn't enough to get out of work but is just enough to feel crappy and depressed because I fucking hate being sick and consider it a reflection of my weak character. And then there's the cough that has me doubled over by my 4th lesson of the day. That's starting to weigh on me too. My ribs hurt and people are starting to comment.

Naturally, the last thing I do when I'm sick is go to the doctor. No fever, can still breathe, can still do my job, no doctor. Fuck no. But then LE got an ear infection Sunday night. When that happens, there's nothing to do but go to the doctor because he's fevered and his ears hurt and he whimpers all night, generally becoming limp and tragic and cuddly. I'm afraid if I don't get it fixed right away he'll go deaf or the infection will eat his brain.

I am the 99%

Speaking of brains, let it be known that I'm NOT the one who told LE about zombies. I think it was his dad and some fucking video game with shotguns in Bakırköy. But when LE started telling me about zombies I didn't do a very good job of hiding my fear of zombies because when the zombie apocalypse comes, there's fuck all any of us can do about it. He asked me if zombies can run and I just shuddered and said, "Let's hope really hard they can't, sweetheart, because if they can we'll be even more screwed. Running zombies are way worse than regular ones."

So Monday morning I felt especially crappy after a sleepless night, and after breakfast I packed poor LE into a taxi to go to the doctor. I decided while we were there, I'd go to the doctor too. I was hoping for a super-sized bottle of Robitussin codeine cough syrup so I can party when I get better. LE's doctor visit went fine, except the great pediatrician that used to be there wasn't there anymore. And I had to pay full price because I didn't know BE doesn't pay LE's Bağ-Kur anymore until I tried to use it. I didn't want to call BE because he'd tell his mother LE was sick and the last thing I wanted was the litany of different kinds of deadly air I'd failed to protect my son from.

Shit'll fucking kill you.

I mean, I'm sure she's just being caring and stuff and in her crazy world where there're all kinds of air that can kill you, her job is never done. But whenever she starts going on about all the air that made LE sick, what I hear is, "You incompetent boob, it's all your fault it's all your fault, if you weren't such a stupid inattentive foreigner who doesn't protect our sole male heir from every type of air..." Is there any good air, I wonder, holding the phone away from my ear until the nattering is done. Besides the famous air on Tekirdağ, of course, which is probably still cold and changing and moving and all those other things air does that kill the hell out of you.

My doctor visit was full price too. They don't take my private insurance and my SSK is, according to the woman there, not active. Quite why this should be the case I'll never know. I'm paying SSK out of my paycheck. I have a crappy, frayed pink card (pink is for girls, blue is for boys, even the state is enforcing this shit) with my picture stapled to it that I've been carrying around for 10 years. To make it active, she said, I have to go the such-and-such unspeakable place somewhere in Beşiktaş and do this, that, and the other thing. I just gave her my credit card before she finished because it sounded like a miserable way to spend a day off and I'll never get around to doing it, much like setting up my bills to be paid automatically.

Coming for me.

Like the bills not in my name, and the fact that I have two names in Turkey (another boring story), I'm sure the SSK thing will come back to bite me in the ass someday. Fuck it.

The doctor for grown-ups was a lovely, dapper fellow who I'm pretty sure should have retired about 20 years ago. The room was redolent of fresh cigarettes. LE was sort of slumped pink-faced and fat-lipped on the sofa with the fever the ped and I had agreed wasn't high enough to medicate and should just be allowed to do its job (points for the ped!). The doctor tried out some of his English on me.

"Alman mısıniz? Vere are you from? Şikayetiniz nedir? Vat is your compliant, yani, complaint?

So I went along with it and told him everything in Turkish and elementary English. He was delighted, and wondered if I'd be interested in practicing English with him. "Grip!" he pronounced. "You haf de infiluenza."

"Ama hiç ateşim yok. No fever."" I told him. So he got out his stethoscope for a listen. He went to undo the zipper on my cardigan with struck me as oddly intimate and patriarchal, but he wouldn't let me undo it until it got stuck. Then he had a listen to my chest. "Derin bir nefes alin. Deep bireathe." So I did, and I could feel all sorts of gross noises in there. He ordered a chest x-ray, at which point I decided the cigarettes have finally kicked me in the ass and this was the place I was going to find out I was going to die. LE was asleep by now.

My chest x-ray. No, seriously.

So I hauled the poor boy out to the front to pay for the x-ray, and we went to wait by the x-ray room. It turned out that creepy, slightly malodorous man with the massive mustache I'd seen bustling around wasn't an orderly, but instead was the x-ray technician. He told LE he'd have to wait outside and asked me a couple of times if I was pregnant. I propped LE against the wall on a stool and assured him I'd be right back. He didn't care. The creepy man told me I'd have to take off my top and bra. I started getting nervous wondering exactly how much I was going to have to put up with here, and mentally setting the bar for exactly how much I would put up with, but then he remembered to mention some well-used and none-too-clean gowns hanging on the wall.

The x-ray machine was all steampunk, like something out of a nightmare Victorian sanatorium for tuberculars. It was all mercifully quick and professional and the fellow probably wasn't nearly as creepy as the mustache let on, which probably says more about me and my prejudices than anything else.

LE sacked out my lap while we waited for my death sentence. In the waiting room was one of those women who loves to talk about illnesses with everyone else in the waiting room. She had a kid with her who hardly seemed sick at all, but apparently he was very sick and had been getting sick for weeks with a cough and a stuffy nose and she gave him lots of fruit and everything, to no avail. Fortunately, there was another woman there who also liked this kind of conversation and they started talking about all the dangerous kinds of air that can hit you and everyone was happy. They were finishing each others' sentences by the time they got to the part about the air, and it occurred to me that a lot of my problem in Turkish isn't understanding what people say but why the hell they say it. The dapper doctor called me in before the women could attack me about my sick kid.

"Very bad," he said. "Bronchitis. My English has gotten very bad. If you're not busy you should stop by. I'll offer you tea or coffee and we can chat. Do you want to get better quickly or slowly?"

But it looked so tasty and sweet!

After two weeks of being sick, I went for quickly. I knew it would mean antibiotics for a non-bacterial infection, which I usually refuse, but fuck it. After 10 years I've drunk the Kool-Aid and I'll take the generosity with the antibiotics when it suits me. To whoever catches my antibiotic-resistant bug, I'm very, very sorry and I don't usually do this but I really suck at life right now and we all have to draw the line sometime.

Easily distracted.

Between putting off the doctor trying to get me to practice English with him at some later date, and keeping LE from falling over, I completely sucked at life again. Sometimes I'm so focused on making sure the interaction goes well that I fail to pay attention to the content, so I didn't notice the doc was prescribing the kind of antibiotics that need to be injected. I was still excited about the part where he mentioned getting over the sickness quickly, and busy wondering if anything on that long list of prescriptions was going to be fun in a recreational way once I got better. Then he started telling me a recipe for an herbal tea that's good for lungs and that was interesting too. Perhaps it was an indirect way of telling me I shouldn't take all the medicine on that prescription.

And now it's much later than I want it to be, which means I'm sucking at life again because I should have been in bed an hour ago. Stay tuned for the next post, wherein I work really hard to get a shot in the ass.

Eight of them, actually.

The Ugliest Cat In The World

2011-10-20T20:12:00.004+03:00

Lately, the ugliest tomcat in the world has decided to walk us from the trash bin near our house to the one up the street.

He doesn't look like the sort of cat who should be scampering cheerfully alongside a squealing 4 year old. And he definitely doesn't look like the sort of cat who would stand up on his hind legs whoring for a cuddle with the iPhone. He looks like the sort of cat who should be out doing some serious scrapping and kitten-making. He's got these black oily stains that have been there all week, as though he's been rolling in tar and calling it his bitch. His face is a permanent mess of fighting and sticking his head into oily trash carcasses.

He's clearly a tom, all chest-heavy and surly, much like the cat version of the dog in Tom and Jerry.


Imagine if this dog were an orange cat.

And to make it worse, the poor fellow has a touch of smashy-faced Persian in him. Or something. Plus there's the eye thing.

Still, LE and I both like him pretty well.

I totally petted the dirty little bastard today. And I didn't wash my hands after, either. Hah!

Sarıyer Spor

2011-10-19T22:09:00.000+03:00

Suddenly, there are all these football matches, I mean soccer games, at the little stadium behind our house. You know there's going to be a match when, Sunday morning, an Algida umbrella appears and then they start testing the sound system for an hour, first with explosions of the national anthem when they're discovering it's too loud, then intermittent bursts of Shakira and Turkish pop.

Usually the turnout is okay. They let the local fans in first, and then about 20 minutes after kickoff, the other team's fans are allowed in. I guess there must be a history of inter-fan shenanigans, because the ratio of away team fans to cops is about 2 to 1. And usually we know who the away team is, because they bring a banner. A couple of weekends ago it was Eyüp Spor. Then it was a team whose banner just had a slogan I couldn't make sense of, but I'm sure it was very manly and supportive and stuff.

Because the Sarıyer Spor's training field is off the other side of our balcony, I know those guys work their asses off, in all weather, every night after work until around midnight. I mean, I'm assuming they have day jobs, since I'm guessing an illustrious career with Sarıyer Spor doesn't pay the bills unless they all live with their parents and don't pay bills.

Still, this past rainy, freezing Sunday, I don't think I would have felt very good if I had been playing for the away team.

They didn't even have a banner. And I guess the cops decided to knock off for the day.

Student Wisdom

2011-10-14T21:46:00.000+03:00

Today was a rainy Friday after the midterm. Most students didn't bother showing up, as one would expect. The bad class had some catching up to do because they never pay attention and I can't finish anything. The good class, I decided to reward with some Internet cartoons, thanks to The Oatmeal.

Educational cartoons, of course.

It was funny watching it dawn on them that normal-looking English words can go together in thrilling ways, and that the pictures were worth looking at. Stuff like this doesn't happen to them very often, it seems.

Of course, I had to make it all learn-y and shit.

Best whiteboard ever.

Once they realized there was more to be learned here than semicolons (which I assured them at the beginning I despise and have no use for, though The Oatmeal did mention a couple of cases where they might be necessary, should you be the sort of person who likes to list dates, locations, or complicated adjective clauses, which I'm not, you can be sure), they started asking questions.

"Teacher, what is 'knuckles?'"

I showed them the knuckles on my hand. "Isn't that 'fist'?" asked a clever one. I pointed out the difference. A murmur went across the room, and another one said, "There's not a word for that in Turkish." Another one got out his trusty telephone and looked it up, but only found the word for 'joint.' "It's for knees and elbows, too," they explained. I was impressed they knew "knee" and "elbow" in English.

"Okay, " I said. "But what do you say when you see a man with hairy knuckles?"

"Teacher," said one kid, very slowly like I was the dumbest person on Earth, "You don't say anything."

Touché.

Tattoo: A Sordid Tale That I Won't Be Posting On Facebook Because I'm All Professional And Shit

2011-10-13T21:59:00.016+03:00

This is my tattoo.

I'll tell you what, taking a photo of your own almost-40 thigh, in a relatively flattering light, without moving, and not showing any ass, un-groomitage, spider veins, cellulite or assorted other close-up thigh-related unpleasantness is fucking difficult. It took me like 15 tries.

Open letter to my parents:

Dear Mom and Dad,
Remember that one time the boys and I were talking about some bad, dangerous stuff we did when we were teenagers, and you guys shuddered and asked us please to not tell you anymore about the bad, dangerous stuff we did when we were teenagers? Well, this is one of those stories. Seriously. Just take your browser to another page right now and stop reading. Trust me.

Okay, with that disclaimer out of the way, I can tell you this story, the story of when I got my tattoo. I've been thinking about it lately because I've gotten it into my head that I want to get the tattoo fixed up into something proper and grown-up, the sort of thing people pay for. That's because I didn't pay anything for my tattoo, which is part of the story. As for the tattoo, I pretty much got what I paid for. As for the story, well that's something else entirely.

The story starts here.

The 60s: Way Cooler In Pictures

So. After I got kicked out of boarding school, I ended getting to go to this super-sweet, founded-by-hippies private school in San Francisco, just around the corner from the house where Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead all hung out during some fleeting and entirely overrated summer of hippie love and greatness. Tom Wolfe popped by that house while he was researching The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, which I know because I read it and everything I know about the 60s comes from books and the Beatles and Cream and Jimi Hendrix and movies and Donovan and a lot of things I imagined while under the influence of crap I bought on Haight Street when I was in high school.

Awww, bless!

Anyway, one thing about Haight Street at that time (I don't know if it's still the same) is that the region between Golden Gate Park and Divisadero was like some sort of Mecca for every loser and throwback and runaway who thought it was still the 60s, or who thought they could make some money off people who still thought it was the 60s. After Divisadero was a junkie crack zone, and I probably was too green to notice the borders weren't so clearly defined as that. Which meant that when you walked around Haight, people would brush by you muttering "buds doses," and also there was a really fucking great burrito shop down the end of the street. Huge burritos with beans and meat for five bucks. My brother and I used to split one for lunch because I never could finish a whole one.

In the old days, it was just coffee with no fucking pictures.

So there was this cafe we all used to hang out at after school. It was run by some Middle Eastern guys (Jordanian, maybe? There were a lot of Jordanians around for some reason) who would play really loud Middle Eastern music when they felt like clearing everyone out. Otherwise they played good music and we could smoke there without getting caught if we went upstairs (our teachers were always on the prowl for smoking, even on vacations, it was said), and the worst problem was not being able to use the bathroom because of some junkie shooting up or a homeless person conducting a lengthy personal hygiene ritual in there. Then a junkie died and they started a key system for the bathroom, which kept out the junkies but not the homeless. I think this means those Middle Eastern guys were probably nicer than they seemed, because otherwise they mostly shouted a lot.

I just now thought of Louis, the Palestinian who ran the corner store across the street from the cafe. He had an arsenal of terrifying weapons behind the counter. This one friend of mine used to go in there and ask Louis to see his gun or baseball bat or lead pipe, and Louis would go all batshit and shout stuff like "Fire in your ass!" which, in light of Turkish swearing is either way funnier or slightly less funny. Louis was nicer than he seemed, too.

I'm getting to the tattoo now, I promise.

Dear Mom and Dad,
If you've decided, against my helpful advice, to read this up until this point, around now would be a good time to stop.

Would you like to chat?

Upstairs at the cafe, there was a guy called Straight-Jacket who was running his little dimebag business over bottomless cups of strong-as-shit coffee, surrounded by a few street kids who seemed cool to us at the time, and us disposable-income private high school kids hoping to cash in on some of the cool. And also play Othello and work on crossword puzzles and flame the new-fangled coin-op Internet machines where, for a quarter, you could enter an ongoing chat and make fun of all the crazy sexual proclivities expressed therein. The screen was black with green writing. Straight-Jacket would mete out his dimebags to appropriately bedraggled kids not much older or younger than we were, who would go out and join the legions of "buds doses" walkers, and from whom we never bought anything because we knew how pinched the bags got along the way and their doses were usually bunk. In any case, Straight-Jacket never would have let me buy from one of those fuckers anyway. He was very protective, and made sure I got my dimebags properly filled up.

Straight-Jacket was a charismatic, erudite, not-quite-high-school-educated Southerner who aligned himself with the Hell's Angels White Supremacist types. He'd been in prison, which easily amazed me in high school, and he told great stories and was probably completely full of shit most of the time, not that I would have known. Because I know his real name, I Googled him recently and found he's back in the South (okay, Southeast, but whatever), refurbishing classic cars, that he has a young kid, and that he once wrote a rather lengthy and articulate open letter endorsing Obama and the Democrats. I also found out he graduated high school in New Jersey, so I don't really know what that whole uneducated Southern thing was all about.

Straight-Jacket had a tattoo of a spider under his eye. I later worked it out that it originally was a teardrop tattoo, to show he'd killed someone, or at least to make everyone think that. And he took a liking to me, which in my bull-headed innocence that The World was the way I Wanted It To Be, I assumed was a matter of friendship. Also he was twice my age, so I never would have thought of it as Liking anyway.

Dear Readers with short attention spans,

I promise I'm getting to the tattoo part soon, really. I haven't told the tattoo story to very many people. It's not because I'm embarrassed. It's because usually the background of this story is story enough, and I rarely manage to make it to the end. It's a long fucking story from here on out, so you might as well go get a cup of coffee or whatever and just settle in.

One day, I expressed to Straight-Jacket an interest in getting a tattoo of my own. I was a couple weeks short of going off to college in Baltimore at this point, and had already had my navel pierced, so a tattoo was the next logical step, given I wasn't interested in a face pierce and I'd never heard of nipple pierces. And I sure didn't want to go off to college being the one who wasn't fucking cool and sophisticated and knowledgeable about the world and shit. As it turned out I needn't have worried.

Straight-Jacket was more than happy to oblige. He may have even said the word "oblige," which would have thrilled me in a Faulkner-esque kind of way. He knew a guy called Spyder, yes, that's Spyder with a "y," who he knew back from the South or prison or maybe from just down the street in Golden Gate Park. Anyway.

Whee! Altamont!

Spyder was an older Hell's Angels type of guy, sort of a Hell's Angels-meets-hippie-meets-I-don't-actually-have-a-motorcycle-but-I-used-to-have-a-Vincent-Black-Shadow kind of guy, one of those fellows who claims to have been at Altamont when the whole Altamont thing happened. And there were a lot of scruffy-faced guys around the Haight with scaggy girlfriends and leather vests and lots of tattoos claiming they were at Altamont, so who knows? I'm not even sure how I knew about Altamont in the old days before Wikipedia, but I did. Probably it was down to Leroy, the best history teacher ever, who taught us about Altamont as part of the Civil Rights Movement unit. I also learned a lot about the 60s from school. And also the 70s when it was still the 60s.

Hee! Religious humor sucks.

Straight-Jacket and Spyder appeared to be friends on the surface. In fact, one of the reasons it took six hours to get a two-hour tattoo was because those two kept swapping Southerner fish stories. Not actually about fish, mind you, though some of them were indeed about fish. I mean the kinds of stories where one guy tells a long story and the other guy tries to one-up him with an even longer, better story. I heard some good stories that night, and I wish I could remember them.

Which is one reason I feel like I can't tell the tattoo story without making it into a really long fucking story. Some sort of justice has to be done not only to the event itself, but to narratives in general, and the narratives we create for our lives and what it all means.

Deep-down, though, Spyder and Straight-Jacket were frenemies. There's no other way to say it but with a coinage that's not as contemporary as it seems. Spyder had a scaggy girlfriend, or shall I say "Old Lady," just to be down with the vernacular, whom Straight-Jacket coveted. This turned out to be one of several underlying unpleasantnesses that went on throughout the tattoo.

I'm a Water Ox, for what it's worth.

Now, the tattoo itself, I have no idea where I found it. Simple, tribal-style tattoos were just coming into vogue, as were a certain type of Asian tattoos. And, mind you, it was 1991, so Internet for us was limited to my dad's incomprehensible Compuserve and the aforementioned coin-op machines. So somewhere, probably in a book or magazine, I found a picture of a solid-black dragon that I liked, which I traced onto a thin piece of binder paper and carried around in my wallet for awhile, long enough for it to get a bit frayed around the edges. It wasn't so much that dragons had a particular significance in the narrative of my life (though there were one or two incidents involving a lot of weed and long sticks and some vivid imaginings on my part that had occurred well before the tattoo, which I considered "defining" at the time), at least not in terms of dragon-like feelings or Asian horoscopes or anything like that.

Before taking me over to his scary friend Spyder, Straight-Jacket had me meet him at his real house (not the Divisadero squat I'd been to previously) out in Daly City. He offered me a beer, then told me not to drink too much, as it thins the blood and can cause the tattoo ink to bleed out too much. One beer was okay, though, for the road. He assured me any experienced tattoo-getter knows stuff like this, which was a good thing because I'd assumed getting shitfaced was a pre-requisite of tattoo-getting. Also, I wasn't sure how comfortable I was getting shit-faced with Straight-Jacket out in his flat in Daly City.

It's cool, and also not.

Then he went on to rant about how he'd failed the California motorcycle license test because of a question where the correct answer was that a motorcyclist should approach railways at an angle, while any experienced motorcyclist knows you should approach tracks straight on, otherwise you'll crash and die. I'll have to take his word on that one. He'd found the mistake in the book before taking the test, and figured by getting the answer wrong, he'd set the California DMV straight, once and for all. It didn't work. Articulate as he was, he still had a spider tattooed on his face, some missing important teeth, and a rather scrappy, threatening manner overall.

Dear Mom and Dad,

This is the part where we go to a grotty, possibly illegal basement flat in the nether regions of Polk Street. We told you we were staying at someone's house, and that this person's parents were at home. We knew that if you called, this friend's parents would say we were at a movie, as per The Plan. My dear brother and the friend probably actually went off to see the movie, as they were too grossed out by the squalid basement flat, and the inhabitants therein, to stay. Plus, someone else getting a tattoo is really boring and I told them they could go. It might also be worth mentioning that said dear brother and friend started advising against the whole tattoo adventure once they saw the aforementioned flat.

So if you're still reading, now would be an even better time to quit than the time I said before.

I'm the most gullible person on Earth. Just humor me, okay?

In this possibly illegal nether regions of Polk Street flat, Spyder lived with any number of street kids and runaways, both male and female. He said he was taking care of them, and I hope it wasn't just my 18-year-old ingenuousness that wants to believe this is true, because I still kind of believe it was true. There were a lot of kids there, most of them a bit younger than I was at that time, but kids to me now. The rooms were nothing but dirty laundry and clean bedding on the floor. Spyder assured me he didn't take junkies, crackheads, or whores into his house. For some of the kids, girls especially, he found housekeeping/cooking jobs, in houses with single men. So I'm not entirely sure about the whores part. On his tour of the house he pointed out he didn't take any money from the girls, but instead acted as a reference, phone number, and physical address on their resumes, as a first step to getting a proper job. Plus he claimed to beat the shit out of any of the employers who got fresh with the girls, which didn't happen much anyway since most of the employers were old-school Polk Street queens.

Things started to go wrong.

I gave Spyder the dragon picture and, using a piece of carbon paper, he traced it onto my thigh, where I wanted it to be. Somewhat hidden but a little bit sexy, in my 18-year-old might-as-well-have-been-a-virgin way of thinking. However, as he was tracing, there were these Southerner story interludes, plus some other stuff that caused the carbon to shift slightly, and when this huge bearded tattooed leather man asked me if I liked the picture before he started inking it, I just said yes because what the fuck else was I going to do? I started to mention that I wasn't quite sure about how the part that was supposed to be dragon's beard was now well underneath its front legs, and its front legs didn't look like anything, but then they were off telling stories again so I shut the fuck up.

One reason the carbon-tracing of the tattoo got screwed up is that a girl came into the house in tears. She had a stack of Polaroids, and her baby-tee showed fresh jello-y red stretch-marks on her belly. The photographs were of her newborn daughter and the family that had just adopted this baby. The new parents looked shiny and kind, and the baby was beautifully dressed and blissfully sleeping.

Some things don't go as planned.

This crying girl had just then gotten the photos in the mail and had fallen apart. The baby was about 2 weeks old and Spyder made the girl a cup of chamomile tea and sat with her until she'd stopped sobbing. Then this big, gruff leather man reminded her of all the reasons she'd decided to do this, and how happy and well her daughter looked, and how the family would keep in touch with her about her baby, as agreed with the agency. By the time the tea was finished, the girl was smiling.

Bob Fagin. Not all bad but kind of bad.

So either he was an evil Bob Fagin-type of man, or some sort of street world visionary, or I was a very naive little girl getting a tattoo.

Probably the truth was somewhere in the middle of all of that, as it usually is.

After he was done tracing the carbon, Spyder showed me the tattoo gun he'd made himself. Then he took it apart and boiled all the pieces in the teapot. While it was boiling, he assured me he had a sixth sense about people who have AIDS and had never tattooed one of them. Then he and Straight-Jacket started off on the Alabama fish stories again.

At this point, I wondered if my brother and our friend would be returning anytime soon. Two or thee hours had gone by already, enough for the alibi-parents to start wondering, if they hadn't fallen asleep, which they probably had. The alibi-parents didn't really give a fuck what we were up to, so long as no one got arrested and everyone went to school.

Spyder fired up his gun and told me the outline hurts more than then filling-in part, because the needle was thinner and slicier, while the coloring needles are actually four needles across and their vibration numbs the skin somewhat. This turned out to be true. It also turned out to be true that smoking weed would make it hurt more, but that kid with the pipe was just too appealing for any of us to pass up. Plus the homemade gun was, I suppose, a bit slower than a real tattoo gun.

And that line of speed just made me puke. "Toilet's over there, " he said, pointing to a beaded curtain, just as the prickly black lights were appearing in my vision. "I can tell when someone is about to puke." Good call, Spyder. Fortunately, by the time I puked, the outline was just about done and my brother and friend turned up.

"I just did speed," I announced nonchalantly. "And I puked. The weed's in the other room."

You never know.

So I hardly felt the coloring-in part. At one point, it was a little sensitive, and Spyder said it was because he was going over the same area again and again because it kept bleeding out. "You might have to come back for a touch-up," he said. Looking at my tattoo now, I probably should have taken him up on that. He also warned me about picking at the scabs and sun exposure, and he gave me his business card, telling me I should call him if I ever needed anything because he had a good feeling about me. He added something mystical about how our paths would surely cross again someday, when one or the other of us needed it the most. I'm still wondering about that one.

But by the time the scabs were off I was into my second week of higher education in Baltimore, and when I came home for winter break, Spyder and Straight-Jacket were no longer speaking to each other because of a kerfuffle involving Spyder's Old Lady, and the new tattoo of her face on Straight-Jacket's tricep, which Straight-Jacket maintained was for aesthetic purposes because she was so pretty, and nothing to to with any alleged fling.

Then he and Straight-Jacket started off on another story. The speed had made them all the talkier. Spyder called Straight-Jacket a fag. Straight-Jacket said, "If you call me a fag one more time, I'll cut you."

"Fag," said Spyder.

It bled a lot.

Swish went Straight-Jacket's knife, out of nowhere across Spyder's well-inked forearm. Actually, it didn't make a swishing sound at all, but it should have. Blood burbled out of the cut, and filled it, and started dripping. Spyder was creepily calm and silent on the issue and muttered something about getting a poultice. Straight-Jacket wiped the knife on his jeans, closed it, and put it back into his pocket, calling off to Spyder that he'd warned him about calling him a fag one more time. I was worrying that it was after midnight and our alibi must be seriously wearing thin. The fact that there were no cell phones in those days was both a blessing and a curse, though we generally managed to get by with pay phones most of the time, and that was okay. I just hoped a serious argument, or worse, wasn't going to result from this fagcalling-cutting incident.

While Spyder was gone (and he really was making a poultice, by the way, with a stash of herbs he apparently had in the other bathroom, along with some medical tape and cloth bandages), Straight-Jacket wanted to confess something to me.

"I don't just like you as a friend, Stranger. I *Like* you, if you know what I mean." I started to answer with the stock response a teenager has for such awkward moments, but he cut me off. "I know you probably don't think of me like that. You're going off to college and your whole life is ahead of you, better than I can ever do, but I just wanted you to know that from the first time I met you, I thought you were the cutest, prettiest little thing I ever saw."

Okay. I wasn't really sure what to do with that, and I was very, very tired, among other things. And those weren't his exact words, either, but it was something like that. We had a good uncomfortable ten minutes for this conversation.

Then Spyder came back with his arm all wrapped up. Straight-Jacket excused himself for a pee. While he was gone, Spyder said not to mention it to Straight-Jacket, but that he probably should be getting stitches, what with the way the blood had burbled like that the knife had nicked an artery, but he didn't want to fuck up his tattoos with stitches, plus he wanted to finish my tattoo.

Later I found out it wasn't just the Old Lady that had caused the rift between Spyder and Straight-Jacket. It was also the cut, which Straight-Jacket said had healed up just fine, with almost no marring of the tattoos.

After that, there's not much I remember except that the tattoo was eventually finished and bandaged, we all got home safe with no one the wiser, and I went off to college shortly after to start my new life. This life didn't involve becoming a plastic businessman, as I'd feared, so it's a really good thing most 18 year olds don't know jack shit about anything.

And so, dear readers, that is the story of how I got my tattoo. It's a fine tattoo, as far as free tattoos go, save for the bits that bled out and the bits I was never totally happy with. And I like the way it changes shape depending on how I move my leg. I also like how it's mostly secret except in summer.

But most of all, I like the story of how it got there. And now I think, 20 years later, it's time to amend the dear thing in honor of the ever-changing narrative of life and reality, because that's worth something too.

Dear Mom and Dad,

I sincerely hope you haven't read this far. If LE ever tells me a story like this, I'll tell him to shut the fuck up, or I might just drink a pitcher of margaritas and hope he had as much dangerous fun in an ultimately safe and lucky way as I did.

Love,
Your Stranger.

Days Like This

2011-10-12T20:54:00.000+03:00

On days like this, when the boy decides he wants to wear his bee hat to school, I'm pretty sure things can't get much better.

In fact, things can only go downhill from this.

A Crap Lesson: It Goes Something Like This

2011-10-11T23:15:00.001+03:00

It wasn't such a good day.

I have 2 classes, for 2 hours each. One is a group of lovely individuals who turn to complete synergistic shit together in my room. The first class with them was only slightly crappy. The second was one of those lessons that made me think there needs to be a TV series like "The Office," but with teachers. There needs to be a lot of shots of teachers' faces as they become crestfallen. I tried generalized scolding. Then specific scolding. Then humor. A few threats. Then lighthearted shame. Then sarcasm. Sarcasm always fails. Then it turned into an existential crisis with me wondering, "Why am I here? Why do I keep talking? And writing shit on the board?" because they were all so busy chatting and playing with their phones and sleeping and staring at fixed points around my knees. I kept asking questions but even my two go-to girls were busy with some other pressing matters unrelated to anything I give a fuck about.

So I threw them all out. Actually, they wouldn't go, and then they started with the apology bullshit but since there were only 10 minutes left of the lesson and there wasn't anything I could do with them anyway, I just left. And they were all ashamed.

Basically, I treat students like my kid. So this was akin to a time-out-- as much for Mama as for discipline-- "Since you won't stop doing this obnoxious thing, I'm going to withdraw my attention until you cut it out." University students, like 4-year-olds, hate time-outs.

My other class must have had an exam or something that they finished early, because they were all hanging around outside the open door. Ours is a new classroom-- a formerly large classroom cut in half-- and they've yet to install things like ventilation, let alone climate control. 20 people in a 15' x 15' windowless, ductless room then some stupid girl starts painting her nails and they wonder why I go batshit.

The other class was waiting outside quietly, of course. They're the loveliest class ever, despite having the dreaded 3-5pm slot. The worst thing they do, when it's about 2 minutes until the end of the lesson, is rustle a little. So they saw me kick out the previous group and they came into their lesson all skittish and cowering and pale, like they were the ones who had been naughty. I had to reassure them a bit.

After classes, I decided to cover my ass about kicking everyone out. I'm never sure what the official policy is, and after a couple of years at dershane, I'm always nervous about potential customer complaints. So I went straight to my boss and confessed. And you know what he said?

"Good for you!"

Affirmation.

And then he went on to be supportive in a bunch of other ways. So that was cool.

Being a parent has made me an infinitely more patient teacher. It's even made is easier for me to find ways to like the little buggers. But, like parenting, it's a matter of extremes. One thing happens and you think, "Hey, I'm not so bad at this." Then another thing happens and you think, "Who am I kidding? I should be taken out back and shot for my evilness." It's all very fraught. Thank goodness I'm not charged with teaching these kids anything important, like Life Skills or Functional Literacy.

One good class, one bad class (that's not even really that bad, relatively speaking). Every day is a fucking rolling coaster about what sort of person I am.

Four is cool when it's four.

The only good thing is coming home to a four-year-old who acts like a four-year-old who is actually, in fact, four. At least he has an excuse.

Take That, Bitches!

2011-10-06T23:24:00.000+03:00

The lira is appalling these days, but I discovered some money in my US savings account, and look what I did!

Here's how I am wisely using the education I've been in the hole for, for the last 18 years: Instead of sleeping, I'm using MS Paint to deface my loan servicer's webpage with lollipops and rainbows. So as you can see, it was money well spent. All $60,000 of it. Or something like that. Who can keep track of anything over $1,000? When have I ever needed to?

So now I'm locked in a debate with how to reward myself for paying off these fuckers-- new boots or a tattoo?

Oh no, wait. Education is its own reward.

Fuck that. Boots or tattoo?

The EFL Roadshow: A Post In Which I Wax Philosophical About Life And Other Stuff

2011-09-28T22:22:00.002+03:00

So here it is again, a new month (almost) and I'm managing to meet a non-work, non-kid related obligation. I can only manage this because the kid is getting big enough to fetch his own stuff from the kitchen, but it's a wee milestone of sorts nonetheless.

The EFL Roadshow this month is being hosted by Ted, at Ted's TEFL Newbie. The topic is "Succeeding Abroad." Here's my answer:

I wish I knew. I don't know a damn thing about succeeding anywhere. Mostly all I know is I've made a lot of mistakes, mistakes I would have made even if I read someone's blog telling me not to make those mistakes.

But what the hell. Mistakes are half the fun, sometimes. Other times they just suck.

The fact that I'm still abroad, and have been so for 10 years come February, isn't really so much that I've succeeded abroad. It's just that I'm still abroad because I'm still abroad. Bit of a tautology there, sorry. See the subtitle of my blog if you have any questions about that, and apologies to Anne Tyler, which I should have done a long time ago.

Remember this? I do.

I guess the fact that I'm still abroad really means I haven't failed yet at being abroad, so I guess that's saying something. Failing at being abroad would mean, I guess, going back home with my tail between my legs.

Bad dog!

And I hate failing. Maybe that's why I'm still abroad, because going home would be some sort of failure. But it isn't just that. I've been here so long I can no longer envision a life at home. I don't even know what people are talking about half the time over there. And I've developed some really bad manners, like jaywalking in one of the most pedestrian-friendly places on earth and pushing people out of my way and cutting in line. Oh, and also sometimes at home I forget that everyone speaks English so I can't say whatever I want. LE says whatever he wants too, but he sort of can get away with it for now because he's little.

What could it be?

Plus now I have all this business I have to take care of over here that will probably take forever, but that's a long story that I won't get into right now. I assure you it's deeply unpleasant, and I hope one day to exploit the lowdown of my latest miseries for your entertainment and edification.

So. Succeeding at being abroad. Here are a few things to ensure you won't go running back home within a few weeks:

Feel free to leave your job if it sucks. The Stayers all get pissed off at people who do runners, but in a lot of cases there's not much shame in doing a runner, especially if you've got something better set up on the sly. It's not always easy determining if a job is any good by phone or Skype interview, particularly if it's your first time abroad.

Don't mentally change how much things cost into dollars, or whatever your valuable home currency is. It usually makes things seem cheaper than they are, if you're getting paid in local currency. Your money will last longer this way.

You'll get good at existential crises.

In most teaching jobs, it's better not to think too much about how pointless you actually are in the grand scheme of things, in terms of integrity and grades and educational standards and stuff like that. It's worth mulling about it once or twice a year in a delicious existential crisis, but otherwise, carry on and do the best you can, operating in an imaginary Shangri-La of ideals where the administration Cares and the students Want To Learn. If you let the existential crisis get you down, you'll get really depressed and fail at being abroad, and it won't be long before your co-workers don't want to listen to your bitching anymore. They're working too hard to keep the veil over their eyes. And that takes a lot of effort.


Sucks everywhere.

Don't keep banging on about how everything is done at home. We all know the way everything is done at home is great and organized and transparent and fair. We remember it and we liked it so much we all left home. Nonetheless, everyone in your host country has managed to get by just fine, often for centuries, without your input. No one is going to change entire systems because of you, no matter how sensible and right you are.

Trust me, it rocks.

Eat the street food. Sure, you might get the runs a few times, but that just toughens up your Western bowels weakened by too damn much hygiene and strictly enforced, incorruptible food safety laws. Okay, sometimes street food makes you really fucking sick, but that could happen anywhere. Street food rocks.

Snuggly like this, but in a bad way.

Remember when you were at home and something was frustrating or annoying, how you blamed it on this or that or the other thing, or maybe even on your own damn self? Well, that applies abroad too, and there are lots of things to blame. If you blame the foreign country and the people in it for everything that pisses you off (and I assure you, it's really, really easy to do that), it causes that problem to compound upon itself, and every new problem snuggles into the old ones, and it just makes everything suck a whole lot worse. I only know this because I've made this mistake ever so many times, seriously.

Seriously, cut it out.

You're making me this guy.

Note to you youthful Americans fresh off the plane: It's not a fucking question. Just quit fucking talking that way all the time. It's so annoying you wouldn't believe it. And I know I'm old, but I'm not that fucking old. Just some things send me straight to Andy Rooney country and that's one of them.

Here's a teaching tip for teaching abroad: Think about your standards and ethics and stick to them for a few weeks. The lower the bar. Then lower it some more. Then lower it way lower than you ever thought possible, find the humor in it, and suddenly you'll find that everything is working out fine. Also, your students will probably still think you're the strictest and meanest and most unreasonable teacher ever, so that's okay too.

Here's a bit of wisdom that maybe only hit me after having a kid, because when a beloved colleague said it to me when I was fresh off the plane, I was all, "Yeah, sure, whatever." This is it, and it gets me through the day often enough: Find a way to love your students. Most of them, at least. And I don't mean loving someone's haircut or belt. You have to love them a little bit for real, for it to work. Of course, there are always a few it's never gonna happen, but let it just be a few.

And whenever things get really, really fucking bad, spend a moment to think how much worse they can be and see if that makes you feel any better. Sometimes it does and sometimes it just makes you mad, but it's worth a shot.

This kid is escaping the Chinese across the Himalayas in Chucks, so quit yer bitchin'.

And that's enough goddamn pretending to be smart for the day. Thanks for reading.

The Sad Man

2011-09-21T21:52:00.000+03:00

The Sad Man rode the minibus to school with us almost every morning of summer school. On the first day, he took a seat next to us. It was the only empty seat that morning.

The fact that I feel compelled to mention that it was the only empty seat is indicative of my having been in Turkey for so long. It's not often that older men sit next to women on the minibus, particularly not working-class men like the Sad Man. Often men like the Sad Man remain standing if the only empty seat is next to a woman. I can think of some reasons why this might be, but they're probably mostly wrong.

The Sad Man chucked LE on the cheek and smiled at him a few times, but otherwise didn't pay us much attention. LE stared and stared.

The next morning, the sad man was waiting with two other men about his age. One of them was missing most of one hand. LE pointed, and I reminded him it's not nice to point, but he wasn't pointing at the man with the hand. "But Mama, look!" he said. "It's the Sad Man."

"Still," I said. "Only kids who don't know any better point. It might make people sad."

"But he's already sad. See?" And see how I'm already struggling in arguments with a four-and-a-half year old? He had me there.

"You might make him sadder." I just have to get the last word, don't I?

"Why's he so sad?" LE doesn't give a shit about rhetoric.

The next day, LE remembered not to point at the Sad Man. Instead, he went for a more subtle approach, whispering, "Mama!" then gesturing with his head and eyebrows towards the Sad Man. Watching a little guy like LE trying to be subtle is one of the best things I've seen in a long time. And he's never once said anything about the man with one finger and a thumb, even though that fellow does whatever he can with both hands to get a giggle out of LE, including peek-a-boo.

The Sad Man indeed looks very sad. He has a kind face, but almost clownishly sad in a way a child would pick up on. It turns out he's a groundskeeper on campus. I snuck a photo of him the other day to show LE when he was feeling grouchy after school, because stuff like that makes him feel better. I think the Sad Man caught me at it, but just smiled sadly and went about his work. I was prepared to tell him exactly why I was taking the photo, but he didn't ask.

LE has a book about a lovely zookeeper called A Sick Day For Amos McGee. The resemblance between the Sad Man and Amos McGee isn't lost on me.

Vehbi Bey, And A Cool Chance Encounter

2011-09-18T00:45:00.001+03:00

We don't always play nice.

I know I've totally sucked on the posting thing recently. I was all cool about it for a couple of months there, and then I started sucking at it. I suppose it has to do with some sort of interpersonal breakdown between my brain and me. I think the ability to post is wrapped up in a feeling that whatever I'm thinking is super-great and worth putting on paper. Or virtual paper. Whatever. It's just that my brain and I have been having some thoughts lately that totally aren't worth posting. Or maybe they're worth posting, but they're decidedly uncool in a too-much-about-me kind of way, plus there are real-world issues that one must contend with when one is a fake sort of artist, instead of a real artist who can bleed one's heart all over the place and not care about the real world implications.

By "one," I mean me, in case that wasn't clear.

It's a nice fucking pool, seriously.

Okay then. The post. Over the summer, I've been bringing LE up to my school to swim in the fabulous pool. Actually, the pool isn't particularly special, but for Turkey it's fabulous because it's exclusive (university employees and students), not very crowded, clean (a big thing here for public pools, where you're likely to pick up pink-eye or some unspeakable weeping face fungi), and above all, free. Such a pool most places in Istanbul would cost a minimum of 40 YTL to get into for the day, plus you'd still have to contend with all the assholes and crowds, even on "woman day," usually midweek when the women and kids get in cheap and damsız (not having a woman with you) isn't allowed. And better than the part about being free, our university-issued Setcards let us buy beer and French fries for fake Setcard money. So it's a win-win situation all around.

Kid brains are funny.

One day, I decided to show LE where I work. I mean, he's been to the office before, which he's only mildly thrilled by. Sometimes people give him candy and he gets to play with the water dispenser. Otherwise, he doesn't give a shit, and he's kind of put off by all these grown-ups who know who he is, but he has no idea who they are. He can't quite get his head around my being a teacher because, duh, I'm Mama. He's made a few connections about his going to school and my going to school, though. He knows who all my naughty students are because I tell him about them, and he expects a full rundown every day. But then he refers to his school friends as his students and tells me about the naughty things they did during the day so I think he doesn't quite get it. Or rather, he gets it in his way.

But I decided to take him to my classroom and show him what went on there. I sat him down at one of the desks and I stood up front and said, "Speak English!" and then instructed him that he was to say, "No!" which he did. Then I told him to dance, and he said, "No!" So I told him to sing a song and he said "No!" Then we switched roles and he got to be the teacher. He told me to do stuff, and I said, "No!" Then I bitched in Turkish and said "yaaa" a lot and he thought that was really funny. Sadly, my best audience these days is my boy.

It didn't improve the situation of him understanding my job, but it was a very good game.

Then I took him to visit Vehbi Bey. Vehbi Bey hangs out in one of the courtyards, rain or shine. He's lovely, sitting cross-legged on a stone bench in the middle of one of the courtyards.

Not totally comfortable with Vehbi Bey.

When we got to Vehbi Bey, I told LE to go ahead and sit in his lap. LE recoiled, all, "Hell, no, I'm not about to sit in that strange man's lap." Vehbi Bey is very lifelike, you see. So I tapped on Vehbi's knee and head, and then poked him in the eye so LE could see he wasn't real. Tentatively, at my coaxing, LE reached up and honked his nose. I got him on Vehbi Bey's lap for the picture, but you can see by the way LE is holding his arms he still wasn't entirely sure about Vehbi Bey.

Anyway, I took this picture ages ago. In fact, that's the only reason for the borderline-boring paragraph about my state of mind at the beginning of this post. I meant to post the picture ages ago, but then I decided I suck.

And then today, there was a small but extraordinary event that existed outside of my suckiness. We were giving our second TOEFL of the day (not at all extraordinary, but bear with me here), and I was supposed to be the supervisor. Just as we started the exam, we realized the supervisor script wasn't in the box. So I winged it with a tiny-print smaller than this and let's remember my eyes are pushing 40 photocopy of the script that was supposed to be there. Fortunately, none of the kids were returning students so it didn't impact on the deadly seriousness of the TOEFL that we attempt to impart. They were so busy trying to make a good first impression they didn't know any better.

We're most of us just doing our damndest.

It reminded me of when LE was first born and I was a complete spaz-mom, but then I realized he had no frame of reference of how moms are supposed to be, which made me feel a little better about being such a spaz and not even knowing how to pick up a newborn without breaking it.

The man is....

By the way, fucking TOEFL. The suckiest thing about today's TOEFL, aside from TOEFL itself, was that Pee Wee's Big Adventure was on TV this morning and I had to miss it because of fucking TOEFL. And then, this afternoon on the listening, TOEFL tested my ability not to snicker with a lecture on sperm whales. There I was reading shit on the Internet, and then I'm all "WTF, did that TOEFL guy just say sperm?!" and then the TOEFL guy said something about big heads and humpback whales at which point I completely failed the snicker test because I'm such a fucking grown-up.

But knowing I'd be unable to ad-lib the rest of the script I've read and heard at least 10 times but never paid the least bit of attention to, I decided I should go and fetch another supervisor packet. Really, it was just an excuse to get back outside the room that still reeked of the morning's returning student fear-sweat so strongly you could smell it from 3 feet outside the closed door of the room. I admit it started off as a sexy boy-smell, but then went sharply downhill during the morning's listening which, sadly, had nothing to do with sperm whales.

On my way back, I bumped into a couple of tourists. Now, I'm used to bumping into tourists in my life, but not often at school. I liked these tourists immediately because the woman asked me if I spoke English, rather than just assuming I spoke English. Linguistic imperialism pisses me off. I was so impressed I didn't even tell her I speak brilliant and perfect English. She wondered why there were so many Americans around this place. I started to give her a brief explanation of our good founder's America fetish, motioning to Vehbi Bey behind me, and the man said, "I made that statue. That's why we came here," at which point I'm pretty sure I gushed a bit because I was ever so thrilled to bump into the person who made the statue, and then made his way up to the school to see where it ended up. How cool is that?

They were really nice people. In fact, a lot of the reason I'm posting about this is because I hope they somehow read this and accept my sincere apologies for being in a bit of a rush to get back to the exam I was supposed to be in charge of. Not that the new students were unruly or anything. Or that the other four proctors in the room wouldn't have been able to handle 11 angelic new students. It's just that I had the shitty script we're supposed to read.

So I gave the nice folks directions back into town. And I told them about how LE was a little bit afraid of the lifelike Vehbi Bey, but then honked his nose. And I do hope they enjoy the rest of their journey. I was dead curious about other statues around the world that gentleman had made. And I'm such a dork I wanted to know if he did the sculpting or the casting or both, but I didn't think to ask until it was too late.

May all our lives be as such, with Mickey the Hot Criminal in them.

So that, and Pee-Wee's Big Adventure kind of made my day. And I sincerely hope I can quit being such a sucky poster sometime soon because everything I do seems like more of an adventure than it actually is, if I can actually manage to write about it.

Instructions Not Included, Or, How I Made Ikea My Bitch (Again)

2011-09-16T22:46:00.001+03:00

Here's one thing I like about Ikea.

Wait, actually there are lots of things I like about Ikea, but this is the one I'm talking about right now.

One thing I like about Ikea is when you build Ikea stuff, it's like playing with giant Tinker Toys and you have to get it right or the thing won't work. Unlike Tinker Toys, however, there's no room for creativity and learning, plus the instructions and parts are more or less idiot-proof.

Mostly. Sometimes I think Ikea should come with levels of difficulty. Video games have levels of difficulty. So do Legos and Erector Sets, if memory serves me correctly. I mean, shit, even vibrators come with levels of difficulty. I don't even know what the fuck that means for vibrators, but I sure as hell know I'm not going to present myself at the register with a Level One vibrator when the Level Six one is right there, taunting me with all of its world-knowledge and experience.

Some things make no damn sense.

Quit thinking about vibrators. I'm spinning a tale of how I've just done battle with Ikea and won.

An example of Ikea Level One would be the Lack end table.

Please note how I don't tidy up before taking pictures of stuff in my house.

Screw legs on. Turn over. Done! You have a table!

I should admit, however, that the Lack end table has, in fact, made me its bitch. That's because Ikea cleverly keeps them at the entrance of the warehouse where you go to collect your stuff. There you are, with your dutifully written list of product numbers, aisle and shelf numbers, and there it is. The Lack! So sleek and simple, and for a mere 35 lira, it's chump change next to the 300 or so I have always racked up by the time I get to the warehouse. One of these days I'm just going to go ahead and get the red one, goddammit.

Our wardrobe, on the other hand, would be an example of, like, Ikea Level Five Hundred Million Billion. That fucker took me all day. One thing I completely suck at is being able to visualize what an object will look like turned in space five times to the right, or what it should look like after having had six things done to it. That shit is keeping my IQ down, I swear.

Also, I'm not very good at hammering nails into a narrow piece of pressboard with a thin piece of cardboard on top and I have to guess at where the edges of the narrow pieces of pressboard are underneath. So, good thing that part is at the back of the wardrobe, because I did some damage. But then I finished the wardrobe and filled it up with our crap and made it my bitch. It pleases me so greatly when I successfully assemble some Ikea thingy and put it to its sleek and efficient use. It's empowering in a sad and idiot-proof kind of way.

Anyway, for about two years I've been lusting after this lamp.

Oh baby.

They no longer had it in orange, but I think white was the better choice, in retrospect. If you wait long enough on Ikea stuff, the price drops eventually. I'm pretty sure I got the last of these lamps, and at a quarter of the price it used to be.

Hah! Step one of making you my bitch, Ikea!

I'm pretty sure this is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

I got some sheets at a quarter of the price too, by waiting like three years. They remind me of this Shaker Tree of Life painting.

So I got the lamp home and discovered the instructions had gone missing. I knew the instructions were there when I bought it because I opened it up to check and count the pieces, seeing as it was the last one and I thought it could have been returned for being faulty somehow. So probably I dropped the instructions somewhere.

Still, I'm a little bit scared of it.

No matter. That's what the Internet is for. I can't say I've made the Internet my bitch (and I never would, for fear it would start holding back on its sweet, sweet information and stupid animal videos), but I do know how to work it.

Like many things in life, it's the apparently simple things that get you. I thought the Fillsta table lamp would be like an Ikea Level Three -- it required a screwdriver, the right-sized light bulb, and a bunch of pleasingly vinyl puzzle-piece-looking bits.

Tell you what, that fucker took me an hour to put together. There were some seriously fiddly moments and I failed to pay enough attention to detail so I originally stuck in some pieces upside down. Secret Ikea level Fifteen that you can only reach with a hack, maybe?

No matter. It's totally worth it. I did battle with Ikea and made it my bitch. Let's have another look, shall we?

Totally worth the trouble.

Dear boots, Will you please be my bitch?

And speaking of things I'm lusting after, I've just learned about these boots.

Shiver! Cream! At first I was all, "No way can I have these boots!" But then I realized that my students loans will be TOTALLY FUCKING PAID OFF in the next month or so, depending on various worldwide economic factors, and that these boots cost only slightly more than the usual monthly payment I've been shelling out for the last 15 years. So maybe I owe myself some sort of boot or leather-related reward for being quite possibly the only American in the world still paying off student loans.

My student loans are probably one of these.

What do you think?

TEFL Interview Tips: Or, When You Probably Shouldn't Take That Job

2011-09-09T21:00:00.003+03:00

Not terrific, TEFL-rrific!

So because I'm this big teaching professional now, I've gotten in on a guest blogging EFL Roadshow thing, hosted this month by Sharon over at TEFL Tips. This month's topic is "TEFL Interview Tips." Honestly, though, I can't really offer anything new about what to do in interviews, and most interviews I've had kind of slipped by in smiling terror where I relied entirely on the poise and articulateness I learned at prep school. I've been asked to participate in giving interviews here and there, but mostly as a secret language assessment agent, so I'm not much help there either. Therefore, I'm taking a different angle. Here I offer some interviews I've had over the years, and how they gave me clues that the job was probably one I was better off not having.

This is a real bakery.

But first, a pointless story. When I was about 17, I applied for a job at a chain called "La Petit Boulangerie," an offshoot of Mrs. Field's Cookies, located in the tourist district of Union Street in San Francisco. I felt pretty cool all looking for a job and shit, like I was some sort of grown-up off to support myself making sandwiches and slinging fast-food baked goods for minimum wage. I can't tell you how many European tourists fooled by the name "La Petit Boulangerie," that I turned away by sending them off to the proper bakery/cafe across the street. Even I got my morning coffee across the street.

The was never a real bakery.

The manager of the store was this creepy little Filipino fellow named, of all things, Rico. It's not really important that he was Filipino except that the Mrs. Field's chains in San Francisco seemed to be run by some sort of Filipino underground. Rico more or less hired me on the spot before I'd even filled out an application, before I'd even made it clear that I was of legal working age. He had busy hands and an oily smile. The hands became increasingly busy during my tenure there, until I turned on Rico with a salami knife pointed at his dick and told him to get his fucking hands off me.

Korean BBQ can make anything yummy.

Then I got mono, as you do in senior year of high school-- nothing to do with Rico, mind you. It turned into some sort of thing like hepatitis, which you're free to Google and assure yourself it isn't the needle-y or bodily fluids-sharing-y sort of hep. I was out for about 6 weeks, and when I came back, Rico was gone, replaced by a lovely Korean man called Dennis. All the new employees were Korean too, who, like their Filipino predecessors, had a good laugh at me because I'd never (knowingly) eaten dog. And despite myself, the Korean and Filipino recipes for dog sounded pretty fucking yummy. Anyway.

There almost wasn't sexual harassment in those days.

Several months later, after I wasn't working there anymore, I ran into one of the women from the Union Street shop, working at a much less desirable location on the outer reaches of Geary Street. She was the one Rico was forever holding up in my face as the better worker because she knew how to skimp on the lunch meats and clean the stains out of the coffee pots. She was also the one who was more adept than I at wiggling out of his hands before they even got there. She told me she'd opened a sexual harassment claim against Rico, at which point the Filipino overlords moved her out to the shitty Geary place, and moved Rico elsewhere (but presumably somewhere more central) with an admonishment to leave the girls alone. She was toying with the idea of opening a lawsuit, but it was clear to us both that the cards were stacked against her. If I hadn't once worked at La Petit Boulangerie, I never would have known she gave me double portions of meat on my sandwich.

Not always a good thing.

Which leads me to TEFL Interview Tip Number One: If you go into the interview feeling pretty much like you're hired just for turning up, it's probably not a very good job. The one job abroad I got this way sucked. The interview was purely a formality, all smiles and sunshine and cups of coffee and when can you start? It turned out all they really wanted me for was to sit in the canteen looking pretty. When potential students came by, they brought them into the canteen where I was sitting trying to solve Turkish crossword puzzles, the director saying "Look, we have foreign teachers here!" at which point I would smile and wave or whatever.

Then they got me on placement testing which was a farce, because the only criteria for placement was, "When do you want your class to be?" This meant that my weekend class was a hodgepodge of students and levels, from a strong upper-int Romanian tween, to two brilliant and motivated intermediate covered girls who had to miss at least an hour of the lesson for prayers, to two useless forever zero-beginner businessmen just out of prison for white-collar crimes, who, after 2 months of lessons and endless hair-pulling canteen hours, remained unable to construct or understand the simplest sentences and couldn't recall words such as "house" and "cup."

The weeknight classes were so bad they actually posed a moral dilemma for me, because the students were middle-class people coming after a long day at work and paying good money for it. The school was selling itself as a purveyor of some sort of language-learning technology called "Quartet." Quartet was a system that used computers for the four skills, with little videos and gap-fill games, and a proper lesson once or twice a week to reinforce it all.

Stupid technology.

The problem with Quartet wasn't just that the pirated textbooks kept falling apart. It was also that the textbooks had really egregious errors, like a picture of shorts with the word "lamp" underneath. And the computer part, which the school insisted I use no matter what, was just embarrassing. In every lesson, some vital part of the system would fail for at least half the students. On one computer, the headphones would work, but not the microphone. On another, the other way around. Another would have a broken screen, while two more would be unable to connect to the server, or the student's password would keep getting forgotten no matter how many times he reset it. There were always a couple of machines that couldn't access their hard drives. Whenever I went to the guy known as the Tech Guy, he was all, "meh," like I was being a foreign idiot for expecting him to do something tech-like with this crap. The so-called technology lessons were mostly spent screwing around with the various technological bits, and to this day, I still don't really trust using any sort of technology in the classroom. Even board markers and photocopies I'm not totally comfortable with unless I have a few backup options.

I used to know nothing of Hoca.

TEFL Interview Tip Number Two: Your friends can help you get interviews even when jobs aren't posted, but be aware of who your friends know and what everyone's affiliations are so that you know exactly what you're getting into. Friends can hook you up with good jobs, and sometimes, networking with friends is the only way you can ever move around in the expat TEFL world. I ended up in one job through friends that was pretty good, albeit strange and religious, but it's not always like that in a foreign country. I left that job after 2 years, at the end of my pregnancy, but I don't think I would have lasted there more than another year, and it wasn't just the crummy pay or the fact that boys and girls refused to sit next to each other. The canteen Quartet job was also through a friend, a friend who I liked quite well and who hooked me up with a job when I really needed one, so maybe I shouldn't complain. And actually I'm not complaining. It wasn't my friend's fault at all the job turned out to be so crappy, though at some point he was like, "What did you expect? At least you get paid on time," and that was true most of the time. So actually that wasn't a very good TEFL interview tip at all, but maybe it's worth keeping in mind somehow because working in a foreign country can be really fucking weird sometimes.

And now, on to TEFL Interview Tip Number Three: Really strange interviews don't bode well, especially if the school is brand new. By new, I mean that the sockets are mostly still in the walls and it smells of paint. The first job interview I went to in Turkey, it was the spanking brand-newly opened Istanbul branch of the allegedly prestigious TED Ankara. I say "allegedly" because I've had a few TED Ankara graduates who always whinge that they're TED graduates and therefore they shouldn't fail English for the third time around. They whinge in Turkish because after two years of full-time English, they're unable to whinge remotely acceptably in English. Honestly, I don't know where this school gets its reputation, but it's nothing to do with teaching mettle or study skills.

In the TED interview, they gathered around me at a gleaming new table sprinkled with construction dust and grilled me for about an hour. Everything I said, they either acted like I was lying or that I didn't know what I was talking about. I left feeling like shit, thinking "Worst interview ever," wondering who I was kidding with my shiny new MA and fairly limited experience. Two colleagues who'd interviewed for the same job left the interview feeling the same way, despite all the experience under their belts.

A couple weeks later, we all got the same angry calls from a secretary at TED. She was wondering why the hell we hadn't been in yet to sign our contracts. We were all like, "Eh?" and roundly turned down the jobs without even consulting each other, until after the fact, at the bar. Twice the salary, posh housing, and an infinitely more desirable location, and even I had a gut sense about that one. Nothing good can come of such a thing. A couple years down the road I learned the school had failed to keep even one foreign teacher (and there are a lot of desperate losers passing through this city), that the students and their parents were terrors, and that the administration was fully supportive of student/parent terrorism. Goodness knows how they're doing now. Sometimes schools settle in after 10 years or so.

TEFL Interview Tips Number Four: Beware of interviewers who change the game on you halfway through the interview. I once applied for a job at another "prestigious" chain of K-12s. The friend who directed me there was trustworthy, and was working there himself, though at a different branch than the one I interviewed at. I was applying for an opening in their English prep for 11th and 12th graders, and we started off the interview talking about that. It was all going swimmingly.

Yeah. Insist on me teaching small children.

Then the woman asked me how I'd feel about teaching the kindergarteners. I told her I wasn't really interested, but she pressed on. "Oh, but it's such fun! You can do music and drama!" and I said I wasn't really into that kind of thing. "But we really need someone to teach kindergarten, you'll just love it," and I asked if I was interviewing for the older kids or for kindergarten. She wouldn't give me an exactly straight answer about that. So I looked her right in the eye like you're supposed to do in job interviews, and said, "Look. I have no experience teaching children. I have no training for teaching children. I'm not interested in teaching children, and I don't really even like children." Unfazed, she was all, "Come and meet our principal and when can you start?"

So, no.

Job interviews pretty much suck.

It's a wonder anyone lands a decent job or that schools stay in business. But they do. It's just that when you're getting desperate for work and going through the nerve-wracking process of a job interview, all prepared with your big words and professional clothing, suffering the smug stares of the people who already work there, it can be hard to remember you're interviewing them just as much as they're interviewing you, and you should be making sure that, first impressions aside, it's the kind of place you really want to work.

Manning Up: Some Things I Can Deal With, And Some Things I Can't

2011-08-20T21:02:00.000+03:00

You know, I've told my boy a few times to man up and deal with something. I'm not sure what I mean by manning up, in the larger sense. In the short term, it probably means something like, "Hold still and let me take that sliver out of your foot," or "I pretty well understood you're thirsty because it's all you've said for the last 10 minutes. Quit crying and sitting in the sidewalk so we can get home and have some water already."

But when cultures collide, manning up means something else entirely.

I'm not cool with this.

Needless to say, I had nothing to do with this particular purchase. Naturally, the boy loves it because he wants to be a jandarma fireman when he grows up, thus elegantly combining everything his testosterone apparently mandates: police, soldier, and fireman. Plus, think of the vehicles! He actually believes police help people and only shoot bad guys. Whenever I try to explain the moral relativity of what "bad guy" means in real life, he just interrupts me to tell me his butt itches or whatever.

At least he told his babaanne he has it on good authority (mine) that sweating doesn't make you sick.

Still, I regret not buying him that sparkly tutu he wanted. I was afraid they would make fun of him. As soon as his big toenails grow back (an unfortunate accident with a dropped toy box), he's getting another coat of the pink nail polish he made me buy.

On the other hand, here's a bit of manning up I can deal with. This is the kind of manning up that makes the other kind seem okay.

Squish.

Etymological Mythology, And A Tale Of Shit

2011-08-17T20:21:00.000+03:00

This post covers a few things I really like: Etymology, urban legend, learning about crap on the Internet instead of sleeping, and saying the word "shit" a lot.

Yesterday, I received the following e-mail forward concerning the origins of the word "shit."

Happy shit ship!

Manure : In the 16th and 17th centuries, everything had to be transported by ship and it was also before the invention of commercial fertilizers, so large shipments of manure were quite common.

It was shipped dry, because in dry form it weighed a lot less than when wet, but once water (at sea) hit it, not only did it become heavier, but the process of fermentation began again, of which a by product is methane gas of course.. As the stuff was stored below decks in bundles you can see what could (and did) happen. Methane began to build up below decks and the first time someone came below at night with a lantern, BOOM!

Sad shit ship.

Several ships were destroyed in this manner before it was determined just what was happening

After that, the bundles of manure were always stamped with the instruction ' Stow high in transit ' on them, which meant for the sailors to stow it high enough off the lower decks so that any water that came into the hold would not touch this volatile cargo and start the production of methane.

Thus evolved the term ' S.H.I.T ' , (Stow High In Transit) which has come down through the centuries and is in use to this very day.

Isn't that a good story? I desperately wanted it to be true but my Junior Linguist Spider Sense suggested I check Snopes, because they always know about e-mail forwards. Here's what they had to say about shit:

This is shit.

"The word shit entered the modern English language via having been derived from the Old English nouns scite and the Middle Low German schite, both meaning "dung," and the Old English noun scitte, meaning "diarrhea." Our most treasured cuss word has been with us a long time, showing up in written works both as a noun and as a verb as far back as the 14th century.

Scite can trace its roots back to the proto-Germanic root skit-, which brought us the German scheisse, Dutch schijten, Swedish skita, and Danish skide. Skit- comes from the Indo-European root skheid- for "split, divide, separate," thus shit is distantly related to schism and schist."

Complete dork that I am, I liked the second explanation better, even though it didn't come with animated gifs. Coolly enough, it also explains where we get scat (the one meaning animal droppings, not the one people in the old days said to cats and children, and not the one meaning the thing Ella Fitzgerald and Cab Calloway did so well) and scatological.

Which is totally what this post is. Hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

The Stupidest Fish In The World

2011-08-14T22:22:00.000+03:00

We've had Pencil for like 3 years now, but honestly, he's the stupidest fish ever. And all fish are pretty stupid so this is saying a lot.

The first time Pencil managed to get caught in the filter, I thought it was a fluke. Poor guy. I gently extricated him and just felt really, really sorry for him. I'm not sure if fish feel pain, but if they do, it sucks for Pencil. I don't know how long he was caught in there. His tail has never been the same since. It was gone for awhile on one side, and then grew back in flowing tatters.

Sucks, if you're a fish.

The second time he got caught in the filter, I felt sorry for him again. I'd done all I could to prevent a repeat episode, by putting the filter right up against the wall and as close to the bottom as I could. Still, he managed to get stuck in there, by one of his lateral fins this time. He wasn't on there for more than a few hours, but his lateral fin was reduced to a bloody stump. It's pretty sad watching a fish try to swim with only one lateral fin. The whole balance thing is off.

Lucky for Pencil, Whitey Ford isn't the kind of fish who attacks sick roommates or tries to eat their bloody stumps. Whitey Ford has never gotten stuck in the filter even once, which proves that either Whitey Ford is extraordinarily clever for a fish, or that Pencil is extremely stupid.

Also lucky for Pencil, his lateral fin grew back, and it looks almost normal. At least he doesn't swim all cockeyed anymore.

Don't read this. No, wait. You should totally read this

So a few months went by, and then Pencil got stuck in the filter again. He could have been there all day, for all I know. This time, he got stuck by his butt. Stuff appeared to maybe be coming out of him. Have you ever read Haunted by Chuck Palahnuik? And there's the story of Saint Gut-Free, the guy who suffered some unpleasantness from masturbating on a pool filter? Well, don't read it. It's disgusting. Pencil's issue wasn't quite as bad as that, but it made me think of it.

The butt-sticking was just last week, and Pencil has been unwell since. I mean, his butt has shrunk back into place and it's not all bloody and gross anymore, but he sometimes does that upside-down thing and he's been drifting around a new corner an awful lot. At least he eats his food.

Nevertheless, yesterday I discovered him stuck to the filter again, by the tail again. I hardly felt sorry for him at all, just shut off the filter and got him off of there as gently as I could. His tail is in tatters again.

Poor, stupid fish.

Good TV, For Once

2011-08-13T22:44:00.001+03:00

Look, I've almost quit watching TV. Okay, I admit I'm watching me some Sherlock Holmes right now, but only because it has Rupert Everett in it. This is pretty much the only decent TV that's been on in weeks. And technically, it's still a police show. Just way hotter because it's all Victorian and shit. But pretty much the only acceptable TV that's been on Digitürk in the last few months has been police shows. And I'm sick to fucking death of police shows. Even LE is sick to fucking death of them. He doesn't even care anymore that they have guns and they shoot people.

*heart*

He still likes Columbo though. That's my boy! Columbo doesn't seem all that old to me, but it clearly was made back in kinder, gentler days when the TV viewing world was more innocent and gullible. In Columbo, when the murderer decides to move a corpse that's been sitting in his garage for 5 days, and the corpse falls onto his face as he's loading it into the trunk, he doesn't freak out and puke and go "Oh my fucking God holy shit a fucking rotten wet corpse has just fallen on my face!" So maybe that's why LE likes Columbo. It's clear who the good guys and bad guys are, and Columbo may or may not shoot someone at any given time. But he hardly ever does, which makes it extra exciting.

Anyway, one thing I like about Turkey is the completely surprising movies that turn up on TV from time to time. Really, utterly atrocious crap that I absolutely can't turn away from. At 10am, I was treated to none other than 1984's Breakin'.

A dreadful movie by all accounts, but it was Ice-T's film debut (and my, was he little and skinny), plus there are some pretty talented (and surely forgotten) people in here, most notably "Turbo," whose big moment consisted of a fantastic dance with a broom. Fortunately for breakdancing, it has developed quite a bit since 1984.

As though that weren't enough, Breakin' was followed by 1983's Valley Girl.

An even more atrocious movie than Breakin', Valley Girl might at least help explain my whole Nicholas Cage thing. Well, that and Peggy Sue Got Married. Oh, and Raising Arizona. Pretty much anything with Nicholas Cage before Hollywood made the mistake of trying to get him to be a cool tough guy.

Nevertheless, I still plan to cancel Digiturk once the contract is up and begin living life TV free. Except for DVDs, of course. I'm not completely insane.

Sounds: Or, The Minutiae of Ramazan

2011-08-12T23:58:00.014+03:00

I am completely in love with Radiolab, a science-based radio show from NPR. I have all the podcasts saved up, along with This American Life, Car Talk, and Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. All of these together kind of serve the same function as the somewhat newly released Calve peanut butter, which is that they act as a kind of slow-release for the building pressure of homesickness that comes from missing little things. And one thing I totally miss is driving around with my parents listening to NPR.

Radiolab is my favorite, though even though it's never been on during family drives. Every episode contains a million thrilling factoids about how things work and what your brain is up to and the completely chance events that exploded to make the world how it is now. Anyway, seeing as how both the hosts are Oberlin graduates cum professional radio and production guys, they're really interested in sounds, and what sounds do and how they affect us. One of the most pleasing episodes discusses, among other cool things (like how mothers use their voices the same way to talk to their babies no matter what language they speak), is how sound is "touch from a distance." Which it is. The vibrations of sound cause air to touch the cilia in your ear making them move, which sets off a series of reactions and echoes that your brain eventually interprets as something meaningful.

And not to keep going on about babies, but sound is how we touch our babies before they're born. And to totally go on about babies, you want to know something cool? All of us have lived in the bellies of our grandmothers, in a way. That's because egg cells form in the female fetus before birth. So the egg that made you was in your mama while she was still in her mama. Cool, right?

So that's why I like Radiolab. There're all kinds of nifty things to know about the world.

Is it making a sound?

Anyway, sound. I like sound. Isn't that a stupid and vague thing to say? I like smells, too. If I had to choose my favorite sense it would be a tie between smell and sound. But here's one thing I like about sound: A single thing doing something makes a small sound. Hundreds of those things doing something makes a totally different sound, or even a synergistic sound. Like leaves. If you rub two leaves together, they just go "sssht sssht." But thousands of leaves on a tree make the sound of wind. I suppose that wind is completely silent unless it has something to rustle or whistle around on. And even if there were none of that, the only sound it would make is the one of hitting your ears.

Which means that the sound of wind maybe doesn't exist unless someone is there to hear it.

Zen moment.

Chomping coral is what I do best!

Okay, I'm done.

So I really like what happens to sound when it gets repeated by lots of things. For example, once I was snorkeling in Hawaii on a shallow reef. I didn't want to go back on shore and deal with the annoying company there, so I decided to follow this one parrot fish around and see what it got up to. I followed it for a long time, and what it mainly got up to was scraping at the coral with its beaky mouth. Then I realized its beaky mouth was making a tiny, dampened sound on the coral. After that I saw another parrot fish doing the same thing, and I could hear it too. Then I noticed all around were parrot fish scraping on the rocks, hundreds of them, and they were all making the same sound. So under the sound of the water and the waves was the dull echo of all the parrot fish scraping the coral all around me.

Even tasty fish are fucking scary.

And then I realized I had swum out past the edge of the reef where it dropped off sharply and I was suddenly in very deep water. Parrot fish were scraping away below me farther than I could see down. When I looked out I swear there were ominous giant shadows of monstrous giant fish that maybe were something innocuous like tuna, but maybe were some sort of 4 meter predators of parrot fish. So I made my way back, sort of slowly so as not to draw their attention. The fact is, even though I like fish, deep down I'm fucking terrified of being in the water with them, that one may come up from below, or come up next to me and look at me. Or eat me. Or decide to play with me. Whatever. It's scary. I have bad dreams about that fairly often, actually, of being surrounded by malevolent fish, or falling into dirty water I know is full of malevolent fish. Also baby animals multiplying out of control and some of them are dead and some of them can talk.

Okay, then.

Not the worst birds ever.

Another example is once I was standing a safe distance away from a flock of Canada geese. On the one hand, geese suck because sometimes they get inexplicably pissed off and chase after you flapping and hissing, and if there's one thing birds shouldn't do, it's hiss. On the other hand, they're slightly less unnerving than other birds because their eyes are a little less beady and they don't have the awful, jerky movements of chickens or pigeons. They don't turn their heads quite so suddenly, looking at you and not looking at you at the same time.

These particular geese were pecking at the grass. At first I heard the sound of one goose pecking, and then all of them pecking and it was so nice, all thumpy and still. When I pointed this out to the fellow I was dating at the time, he wasn't the least bit interested, which was probably one of many early hints that things weren't going to work out between us, but like many such hints, I let it go and then the relationship took another two years to die an explosive death but it all led to me coming to Turkey in its way, so you can see why the geese were important.

Get it?

You know, I started off this post thinking I didn't really have anything to write about so I was going to talk about Ramazan sounds for a couple of paragraphs and hit "publish" without really getting into it too much. Now look what's happened.

Ramazan in the summer must be a bitch. I'm sure you're not to put those two words together in a sentence, but check it out, I just did.

Seriously, though, you would have to be either really freaking religious or really freaking superstitious to put yourself through this ordeal. And I admit I don't quite know where that distinction between "religious" and "superstitious" lies, but I'm always surprised by who fasts and who doesn't and I make myself crazy wondering why they fast and wishing I had known earlier about that particular predilection because maybe I would have handled certain things differently or if it would have mattered if I did.

Still, I kind of like the Ramazan atmosphere. I like these early weeks of it when it seems to be making everyone happy. The later weeks they start getting a bit frayed and tetchy, but in the beginning there's a celebration feeling around. And I'm guessing this feeling doesn't come so much from religious fervor as it does from the sense of a special once-a-year thing is taking place, a time where people do the same nice things they've always done at these times, and maybe they think back on previous Ramazans and how the steps of their lives are marked in a way. I mean hell, I totally love Christmas even though I don't love Jesus. I even love singing LE Christmas songs, and I relent a little on the "No Jesus" and "God Is Not A Given" policies I otherwise have in my house, because how else would I get to sing LE "Away In A Manger" and "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing?"

Pretend it's the view from my house, okay?

Before the sunset ezan that signals when everyone can break the fast, the tension starts to build. I've liked hearing it in my neighborhood on these quiet clear evenings, when everyone has the windows open. Mothers start screeching for the kids on the street a little more frequently, and there's a crescendo of crashing in all the kitchens. You can even hear the sounds of all the food, plates, and cutlery being laid on tables. Right before the ezan it all goes a little silent, when everyone just sits, poised at their tables. Even most the babies seem to know not to bother crying, and if they do, their mothers just glance at them with tired smiles and assure everyone the baby is fine how it is.

And then the ezan. I don't know if you can feel or hear the collective sigh of relief as everyone chugs a big glass of water, or if I just imagine I can feel that because I know what they must be feeling. After that, there's only murmuring and the chink of metal on plates for awhile, until people start to loosen up and talk more. The cigarettes all get lit around the same time, and the kids explode back onto the street where they will stay until around midnight.

The other night I was out on the balcony and I could hear several neighbors in my building as they started washing dishes after iftar. Naturally all the men were still at the table having manly conversations while the women continued in the massive effort that is iftar, which was serving in my mind as further reiteration of the point that being a woman here kind of sucks.

Not happening near my house.

And then I realized I could hear all the dishes being washed next door too. And across the street. Since the guys in the minibus yard were still relatively quiet, I could hear the dishes being washed a few buildings over. And up the hill behind me. And across to the next street on the other side. I listened some more and I was pretty sure I could even hear dishes being washed way across the valley and up and down the hills over there. It made a pleasant tinkling cacophony with regular crescendos and periods of near quiet, with all the water running and women's voices in the background punctuated by the occasional crashing and laughter. How cool is that, that enough people would be doing something in their houses at exactly the same time that you could hear the music of it? It's a hundred private spaces converging into a single sound.

Anyway, it took a long time to get to where I started with the title, but that's all I have to say about that.

A Thrilling Adventure

2011-08-05T22:39:00.000+03:00

So last weekend LE and I hopped on the city bus to see where it ended.

This village has a big tree in the middle of it, as they all should.

It turned out to be a good idea.

It wasn't a total mystery where the bus ended, not like the time we hopped onto a dolmuş a few months back and ended up in the loveliest little village with a beach. I mean, I knew there would be a beach because the dolmuş sign said "plaj" at the bottom, but I had no idea the drive out would look like Oregon, with rolling hills and trees and different shades of green and the occasional farm and the cutest old farmhouses ever. We wound around through a village that may or may not yet have had the misfortune of being incorporated into Istanbul.

Eventually, LE and I were the only ones on the dolmuş. We got to the end of the line and the driver, a big fellow with an enormous mustache, suddenly noticed us and was like, "Hey what are you doing here? I thought you were getting off in Zekeriyaköy!" Zekeriyaköy is the place where the foriegners usually get off. And I was all, "No, we're going to the beach." And he got all happy about that, perhaps because we weren't some lost foreigners who were his responsibility, but also because I had a kid with me and kids love the beach and he wasn't the sort of fellow who would worry on my behalf that my kid may get cold or dirty on the beach, on an unseasonably chilly day. He pointed us the way, and then he refused me when I offered him the fare for the place we had got to, rather than the place he'd thought we were going to when he took my money.

I'm never quite sure what to do in situations like this, as it seems like "offering the money," or "not offering the money," could both be construed as rude in a myriad of ways, but in the end, I never want to be the one who didn't offer to pay up.

The beach was nice and empty, with lots of sand and very few tarballs. On the way back, the driver, who apparently lived in this village, pulled over the dolmuş a few times to greet passersby and show off the vehicle. Then some women got on the dolmuş and asked him to wait because their friends were still up the road, and he did them one better by backing up the road to fetch their friends. They'd all been out gathering wildflowers. I'm enormously pleased that there are still people in the world who make a day out of going to pick wildflowers. It was an joyful trip back into town, like a party dolmuş with everyone cheerfully telling everyone else off and trying to get LE to say his name or age, and then some little girls figured out I speak Turkish, so it all became the sort of thing you read about in other people's travel journals and it was all fine and good.

But we didn't get any pictures. There's a çeşme along the road I'm dying to take a picture of, but I won't tell you what's written on it because it's better as a surprise.

Last weekend's trip was to another village that was okay in its own way. Back to the tree.

There are only men under this tree.

This is a really freaking nice tree, which is why I just had to post two photos of it. Its shade seemed to pretty much cover the entire downtown of the village. Now look, what I don't know about trees could fill a book, but I'm thinking this must be one of those çınar trees I'm always hearing so much about. So many places here are called Çınaraltı, and whenever you read books about Istanbul, there are always lots of plane trees, a tree type I'd never heard of until I started reading books about Istanbul.

This one rises up out of the concrete and has benches built around it, and the village planners were also kind enough to build the streets and buildings around it too. How could they not? It's truly a magnificent tree.

It was a hot day, and LE and I had traipsed awhile from the bus stop. He was fixating on every display of beach toys we passed, assuming my plan of going to a surprise place meant he was going to get a toy. I was thinking some time spent under this tree would be a good idea, and surely there would be some tea nearby.

But when we got up close I looked around, and realized there were only men under the tree, and near the tree, and in the large tea garden not far from the tree, and in all the businesses and restaurants around the tree. Lots of sons, but not a single daughter, of any age. I counted 2 women in the area-- one in a headscarf scurrying away, and one in her early 20s sitting at a table with like 5 men. And it seemed like all the men were staring at us.

Look, I still pretty much really like living in Turkey. But, on a hot day when you find a shady spot and realize it's yet another freaking Man Place, and all the men are staring, well, it kind of sucks. Big time. Especially when I'm not sure why they're staring. Do I have a stain on my shirt? Is it my boobs? Is it because I'm blonde and foreign? Or maybe because my kid is so damned cute? Maybe it's just because I'm not from these parts. It's enough to make one want to cross one's arms over one's chest and scurry out of there, like the headscarf lady was doing, because standing tall and proud to be yourself and a fellow human is definitely not the thing to do in such a situation. I've been here long enough to have figured that out, at least.

But it also occurred to me that the prevalence of men could have been Ramazan-related, because this was on the Sunday before Ramazan started. Maybe the women were at home doing some big Ramazan preparation thing. There was definitely a holiday celebration feeling in the air. And an awful lot of imams, and imams-in-training. We saw like 3 carloads of imams go by, so it could just be that we came on a bad day, woman-wise, and in fact there was just some sort of religious doing afoot that got past me entirely.

Anyway, LE lately seems to be directing much of his linguistic abilities towards bitching. And whining. When he's not telling me about some nice thought in his head, or some little idea he's had, he's btiching and whining. So by the time we actually reached the tree (it was only a 5-minute walk from the bus stop, mind you) he had informed me in the whiniest of voices that he was hot, sweaty, hungry, thirsty, and tired. Oh, and the minor owie on his knee where he'd scraped it a couple days before, not even enough to bleed, was apparently devastatingly painful and in need of a bandage. He also wondered why there were so many men everywhere, so at least that shows my influence has worn off onto the little mite somehow.

To distract him, I gave him the phone and told him to take some pictures.

Not bad...


Action shot!

Of course, LE takes pictures of the stuff he really likes the most.

Cars!

Chips!

I can pretend it's the strawberries, but it totally isn't.

I made him quit taking pictures when we got to all the men, because I didn't feel like drawing any more attention to ourselves. So when we went down some stairs and there was a young bull walking by, he still had ahold of the phone and wouldn't give it up because he was so thrilled about the bull. Daily farm life sightings in the street have not inured him to the coolness of seeing farm life in the street.

Then, the best part.

The kids standing around laughing at the dog were freaked out that LE was taking a picture.

A dog that had cornered a cat and was barking at it, but too afraid to come near. The four-year-old world order has had enough Tom and Jerry in it to know that a dog being afraid of a cat is extremely silly. It kind of blew his mind. When you're four and you see a dog being afraid of a cat, it probably suddenly seems like the world has been turned upside down and anything is possible.

LE was still going on about the dog when I spotted a restaurant that had women in it, so we went there. And they had calamari and balık köftesi, one of the yummiest köftes known to man, plus there was cheese inside so all in all it was a pretty good day that turned out to be a thrilling adventure.

The Very Bad Bug

2011-08-04T21:10:00.000+03:00

Okay, so I've shared my feelings on bugs I have issues with. Included in the list were dead bugs, black shiny bugs, bugs with creepy legs, and bugs larger than a lentil. That being said, I felt I ought to post my open letter to Mother Nature, following a bug sighting the other day. I was too scared of it to hold my thumb up next to it and give you a sense of scale, but it was about the size of my thumb.

The swarm of ants doesn't show up in the photo as much as I'd like, but LE found the whole thing both thrilling and terrifying, which I think is a nice feeling to have in certain situations.

I definitely didn't kill it. It must have made a crunching sound.

Dear Mother Nature,

I'm normally not someone who wishes ill on your creations (except the really awful ones, like flesh-eating bacteria and those parasitic fish that swim up your pee), but seriously, were the pincers necessary? Would this bug not have been terrifying enough to any living creature, both within and outside of its weight class, even without the pincers?

And the fact that its wings look perfectly usable, well, I can't get over the feeling that you're totally fucking with us sometimes.

With sincere apologies about the enormous American carbon footprint-- I really didn't know until it was too late!

Stranger.

"Disney" Toys Are "Lots Of Fun"

2011-07-31T23:00:00.002+03:00

Even though my kid has this preternatural, non-literate ability to recognize the things he wants me to buy for him, the subtleties of this one were lost on him. I suppose my wanting to take a picture of this one might have tipped him off.

You have to be really savvy to catch the fake.

The shop owners were also curious why I was taking pictures of it, like I might be some sort of korsan toy agent. Given today's anti-piracy climate, I suppose it was a fair guess. Either that, or it's just fucking weird to take pictures of hilarious things that I can't explain in Turkish why I think they're so hilarious. Also, since the poor kid has been to the dentist 3 times in the last 2 weeks (an ongoing issue with temporary fillings and treatments my spoiled foreign brain can't grasp, especially when they're applied to my 4 year old without Novocaine), the toy store guys probably think he's the most spoiled brat on earth, and I'm the shit mommy that's doing it to him.

It doesn't tell you how to fish. I checked. It may still be a good friend though.

As though I don't feel like a shit enough mommy because of the teeth thing.

In the end, I talked him into getting this toy. It's not just because of the cool Chinglish. It's because I'll be damned if I spend any of the money I earned in the trenches on even yet still more Bakugan crap, which requires dealing with by me all the time and then breaks within a few days. Let his dad buy him that shit.

There's Chinese garbage and there's Chinese garbage, and I prefer the garbage that's cheap, money-wise. Even better if it's funny.

Oh, Ew! Or, Crap I Found Under My Sofa

2011-07-30T22:59:00.002+03:00

Fucking ew! Laceball!

Remember that time I thought LE had eaten all the meatballs I gave him for dinner?

Of course you don't. That's because I save this kind of mundane shit for Facebook, though I don't actually post it there either. In fact, I generally keep the boring details of my thrilling life to myself, in order to make my life appear more thrilling to the people I imagine are watching me on the Internet. It's all about being conscious of one's audience. Whether or not said audience exists is irrelevant to the construct.

Anyway, you know what this crap I found under my sofa is?

That's right. It's the shell of a meatball that's been eaten to lace by ants. By the time I found it, it was dried out to the point of being something other than meat, with a few lackluster and disappointed-looking ants creeping around on it, plus some hair and some dust. Given how much I've been cooking lately, which is not much at all, I judged the laceball to be about 2 weeks old.

And you know what I did with it after I took the picture? That's right, I knocked it back under the sofa with whatever implement I'd used to get it out of there in the first place. You think I'd touch that shit? And hold it in my hand all the way to the garbage? Hah! I pay people to do that kind of thing for me, because I'm so fucking fabulous. And also lazy. And also creeped out by laceballs under my sofa. They deserve basically the same strategy as cockroaches, which is to be moved to somewhere I can't see them. Then it's kind of like they aren't even there at all.

Lurking.

Terror Scaffolding! An Adventure In Safety

2011-07-29T12:24:00.000+03:00

You see that little door underneath the scaffolding? That's the door to my office. Up on the scaffolding they have stuff like mallets and drills and claw hammers, plus some rather well-worn and rickety-looking uneven planks for the guys to walk around on, precariously balanced across the scaffolding bars. The guy on the ground usually gets a hard hat. The guy up top gets a safety belt that isn't attached to anything.

As if working in the summer weren't bad enough, with all these unwilling and fed-up kids, we now have to walk under the terror scaffolding several times a day. When you're coming in to the office, the guy on the ground sometimes yells at the guy up top to stop doing whatever debris-dropping activity he might be working on. Going out though, there's nothing to do but be quick!


For our safety, there's some old plywood with rusty nails sticking out	.

Today they've started drilling the wall. Bits of cement, large and small, drop to the ground and explode. Fortunately, they installed some safety panelling over the door.

There's also that extra scaffolding bar across the door for hitting your head on, in case the falling cement misses you. The other door has some "do not cross" tape across it, so I don't know if the tape or the bar implies more danger. Tell you what, though. I'm having lunch at my desk today. Breadsticks and hazelnuts.

At least the workers are a bit of eye-candy. Otherwise, I don't know what I'd do.

Carry on as usual, I suppose.

A Trip To The Pazar: Short Film By LE

2011-07-28T22:18:00.000+03:00

I've already gotten a notice from YouTube that MÜYAP owns the music, so this little achievement of mine may be short-lived.

Dear MÜYAP,

Please don't sue me.

Love,
Stranger

WTF Is It? Thoughts On Bugs

2011-07-27T19:02:00.002+03:00

There has been an influx of wildlife in my house recently. For example, the other day I spotted a little lizard, which ran under the bed. I was all, "Note to self: Capture lizard and show it to LE before it dies." And then I forgot to undertake the capturing project, so I do hope the little fellow made it out all right, preferably closing the way it came in, whatever that was.

I'm okay with you, little fella.

Reptiles, I'm cool with. I rather like them. I wish we had chameleons or geckos or something. Geckos are nice. You can hear their little sucky feet tapping around at night. Chameleons are super-cool with the stretchy fast tongues and mood-ring camouflage skin and all.

So far, we haven't had any birds in this house. Birds, I hate. There's something terribly wrong with reptilian features on a feathered creature. The feathers say, "Touch me, stroke me, I'm cute and soft," but then the eyes and skin say, "I'm a fucking reptile with staring, cold terror eyes and deeply unsettling pink skin and I'd as soon peck your eyes out than let you touch my lovely soft feathers."

Get the fuck away from me, bird!

At least reptiles are truthful. They say, "I'm cold-blooded. Do what you want with that, and let me be."

I have mixed feelings about bugs. On one hand, I do hate to be all girly and "Eek!" about bugs, but you know what? A lot of bugs are fucking scary, with creepy fucking legs and scuttling behaviors. So I've narrowed down my bug issues to those that I Can and Can't deal with:

Bugs I Can Deal With:

Completely un-scary and cute.

1) Bugs that I know for sure don't bite or sting. I love bees in theory but I don't want them on me.
2) Baby bugs that are very small. Very, very small.
3) Exceptions: Daddy-long legs and mosquito-eaters. I don't mind them a bit, except when you try to release them back into the wild, they can break. It upsets me terribly when I let one go and find a piece of leg in my hand after.

Bugs I Can't Deal With:
1) Bugs that are larger than a green lentil. That's about my limit. Sowbugs are cute and all, but there's a dead one on the floor now I'm not dealing with because it's the size of a jellybean. Also, see # 2, below.
2) Dead bugs. I fucking hate them because sometimes they come back to life.
3) Black bugs, unless they are extremely small.
4) Bugs with creepy legs. The creepiness of the legs seems related to size, but it's worth mentioning.
5) Shiny bugs, with the exception of very small, shiny, non-black beetles that I think are pretty.
6) Bugs with hair.
7) Bugs that might make any audible sound, crunching or otherwise, if you kill them.
8) Bugs that appear in groups larger than 3. Newborn spiders taking flight a la Charlotte's Web are fine, though, as long as they are outside and aren't on me.
9) Bugs that are on me by surprise. One of the worst bug encounters I ever had was a huge dead black beetle a little bigger than a piece of okra, that stuck to my shoulder while swimming in the sea in Mallorca. I looked at my shoulder and bah! It was right fucking there in my face!
10) Bugs that scuttle.

My approach to cockroaches (yes, they don't bite, but they're big and black and shiny with creepy legs so I hate them) is to stomp near them so they run away to somewhere I can't see them. That's my approach with most bugs actually. Just go where I can't see you and I'll leave you alone. I do, however, tend to remove large spiders, at arm's length with a cup and paper or something, with lots of girly "ew!" noises. I like spiders, even the ones I can't deal with, but I don't want them having 10 billion fucking babies in my house. Also, they eat biting bugs so I feel bad even if I wreck one of their webs.

This morning, there was this bug in my house:

And actually, I tried to move it outside but it scuttled under some drawers, and anyway, LE was pissed off at me because I used his book to try to scoop it up. So it started off as an okay-ish bug that I could halfway deal with at arm's length-- too big to touch, biting status unknown, but its legs were feathery rather than creepy. Only then it scuttled so it was definitely Not Okay.

WTF is this bug? And is it lurking under the drawers right now, looking at me? Or having babies?

Shit.

Kid X-Ray

2011-07-21T18:03:00.000+03:00

LE has had 3 x-rays in his life. The first, taken after he stood up in a chair backwards and fell over headwise into the cupboard with an unpleasantly cracky thumping sound, was my favorite because you could see his not-yet-grown-in teeth lurking under his gums.

Also baby skulls are bulbous and funny.

The second was after a mishap involving a gazebo and a nose-high marble shelf that was exactly foreshortened to invisibility from LE's height at the time. I don't know where that x-ray is, but I feel like we should have kept it. It was the most expensive x-ray ever, taken at the ill-advised, shiny hotel-like Medicana hospital because I didn't yet know about the great deals over at Medi-Life.

I couldn't figure out how to get a good photo of LE's first head x-ray. Fortunately, his dentist has some super-cool dentist software that allows him to take digital, email-able jpg x-rays. I know all about the software because I got the dentist to talk about it once, instead of forcing him to make open-mouth conversation about Turkey with me.

My tiny, MS Paint ode to Allie Brosh, who hasn't posted in ages. Come back, Allie! I've been reading old posts just to make my face hurt and my eyes water painfully with laugh tears! I promise to buy your book if you'll just come back! I'll buy more than one! I'll come to Bend so you can sign all of them! I won't make fun of your dog! Maybe a little!

Naturally, I was thrilled with the x-rays. After the dentist had pointed out the cavities and I had cringed with shame for about a second, I wanted to know all about the other teeth, to which the dentist was cheerfully obliging because he's the kind of dentist who genuinely loves his work and can't hide his pleasure when others express an interest. That's the other reason I know so much about the software, whose development process I can't help wondering about. There's an entire industry that's a mystery to me-- medical tools and technology. I'll bet there are conferences and brochures involved, too.

Anyway, those are indeed his Big Boy Teeth forming under there. And I had NO FREAKING IDEA there was such a thing as 6-year molars or 12-year molars, but check them out, there they are!

Most of the time it seems like I manage to learn something every day. But some things I learn are astoundingly way fucking cooler than other things, even if I come by them in a really bad way.

White Dread

2011-07-19T20:19:00.001+03:00

In case you ever wondered what happens to a husky-ish dog who is never brushed, it looks a little like White Dog:

Remind me never,ever to have a long-haired dog around the house. Cleaning up all that hair, bit by bit as summer wears on, must be a Sisyphean task. White dog looks like he's lost about 10 pounds, all of it fluffy, floaty white hair.

This picture doesn't show the dreads as well, but I like it better because White Dog totally posed and smiled for the camera.

In the background, one of the neighbors was shouting, "Don't be scared! Don't be scared! They're okay dogs." LE kept his distance from the dogs because to him, they're massive and he doesn't like being licked in the face. Nor would I, I suppose, if I had a similar face-dog tongue ratio. I said, "I know they're nice. I'm just taking a picture," to which he replied, "*blink blink*" and walked away, because some things, no matter how normal they seem to me, just don't register with a lot of people.

Black dog, by the way, was there too. She (formally he, because I'm a little slow) now approaches cautiously and sniffs a proffered hand almost in shame. She's that kind of scared that makes me nervous, no matter how nice a dog is. Her wounds appear to have healed, even the one on her eye, but gone are the happy wiggles and exuberant head cuddles.

So it's either a happy or unhappy ending, depending on how you look at it and what mood you happen to be in at the time.

*EDIT* 21 July: Someone gave White Dog a haircut! He's svelte and dread-free!

I'm Covered In Either Ghosts Or Aliens

2011-07-15T12:35:00.001+03:00

Here's a really weird picture LE took of me last week. I think he did it with one of the Instamatic effects, though I'm not sure which one.

Apparently it's the effect that makes the ghosts show.

Isn't that creepy? I have no idea what that light around my hands is, and that definitely looks like a malevolent face on my chest. It's also weird how my arm looks like it has blurry tattoos on it.

Eek! The worst part is that whatever it is, it's on me! Crap!

Thrilling Developments

2011-07-14T12:35:00.000+03:00

Whenever I come back from the US, I'm always shocked when my plants didn't die. Especially this time, since I wasn't entirely confident BE would bother to water, let alone follow the nit-picky instructions I left on each plant.

Remember those African violet leaves I stuck in dirt a couple of months ago? Check them out!


Hooray! I can't believe it worked!

This other plant is something I just thought was some sort of border grass, and I only bought it to fill out an ivy pot. I re-potted it when the ivy decided it didn't want a roommate anymore. But look!

After 3 years, it suddenly has tiny little flowers!

This other plant is getting massive and it keeps sprouting these weird little alien babies that turn into new plants. It also sends leaves off to the sides. When I get around to it, I'm going to have to figure out how to cut off the babies and replant them.

Cool!

Istanbul Spor: A Trip To The Pazar

2011-07-13T17:09:00.000+03:00

Note to self: Next time I feel guilty about not exercising, I should just remember how often I buy a bunch of crap and haul it home on foot. Since our house had almost no food in it, today was perhaps a little more than usual. Also, the pazar is just really cool.

Today's haul, cunningly arranged.

I admit I'm a bit sore, though it's hard to tell if it's from this, or from traveling and hauling shit around airports and in and out of cars, or both. And it looks like I'm definitely cooking tonight.

Back In The 'Bull: 2011

2011-07-13T09:24:00.000+03:00

It's fucking hot. The airport was crowded (a small haci flight with their endless checked plastic bottles of holy water, dazed walking patterns and holier-than-thou pushing style, plus a flight from either Iran or Iraq, which has a special passport control area wherein like a thousand people comprise a heaving, shoving mass about 10 feet square, with assorted children and burquas flitting around the edges, in a giant space that could easily accommodate them if they believed in the queue) but we breezed through so fast we beat BE and MIL to the greeting area.

I accomplished this partly by cheating, where I abused LE's citizenship status by getting us into the citizen passport check (around 7 people waiting) instead of the foreigner passport check (around 50,000 people waiting). The officer kept tossing our documents back to us disdainfully, which I took personally, especially because LE has just gotten tall enough to peek over the top of the counter and any small, cute part of him is usually enough to melt the coldest officer heart. But as soon as we passed, the officer started yelling at another guy that he'd been waiting an hour for his break, so then it was okay and I felt better. At least he didn't tell me to fuck off because he needed a piss and a cigarette.

All here!

The other part that made it so quick was out of my hands: this was the first trip in 3 years where none, yes, NONE of my bags went missing. Last year, all of them went missing. In previous years, it was just some of them, but missing bags means waiting hopefully at the carousel for up to an hour and a half, and eventually coming to accept that none of the bags that keep coming around will be mine.

If there is a large crowd waiting for bags, it doesn't mean yours will come eventually. It means everyone's bags are lost and you'd better freaking hurry up to the Havaş lost luggage office, skipping the line waiting politely outside the window and muscling your way in to cheerfully grab a passing worker to sort things out. You have to get into the office before everyone else realizes they have to actually go into the office (the window is just a structural feint or distraction, as no worker ever goes near there). The worker is always happy to deal with a cheerful foreigner rather than attempt to help the increasingly angry and bigoted crowd of foreigners in the window. Sometimes, if I've made a foreign friend while waiting for baggage, I'll get him/her sorted out while I'm at it.

Anyway, lost bags have become so much a part of the Turkey entry routine that it was a bit of a shock getting through without it. And all the foreign friends I made while getting bags also got their bags, so I didn't have to worry about leaving anyone in the lurch.

I hasten to add that the Turks are not in the least at fault for the lost baggage. They're super-champs about finding stuff and delivering it to your door with a smile (though they do dick you around quite a bit until they have the bags where they can see them so it's pointless to call). The worst lost bag delay I ever had on the Turkey side was when it dumped a foot of snow and their home delivery trucks couldn't get through, but even then, they phoned several times with weather-based ETAs. It's the foreign airlines, in particular Delta (who are quick to blame it on KLM and Air France) and United (who always blame it on Lufthansa). The apparent purpose of so-called "partner airlines" is to create the ability to blame fiascoes on the other airline. British Airways also loses stuff too, but that tends to be more of a Heathrow problem than BA's. Anyway.

I get to pull my head out of traveling for now. Time for Back In The 'Bull 2011 Highlights and Lowlights:

Lowlights:
1) Our toilet was leaking.
2) The kombi wasn't working.
3) BE was a complete dick.
4) BE had drunk all my gin, which explains some of the drunk-dials to my folks' house.

Highlights:

Bummer.

1) I get to learn some toilet-repair vocabulary with the plumber. Usually, I'm okay with toilet repair, but this is a new one (out the bottom, onto the floor). Also, the toilet was doing this when we moved in, but as broken things tend to do, it wouldn't perform the leak when the plumber was there so he pronounced the toilet fine. Up till now it's been intermittent enough to be fine, but any toilet leak is never fine because you never know if it's poop water or tank water all over the floor.

2) As for the kombi, I wanted a cold shower anyway. Maybe I would have liked to ease into the coldness a bit more but it was still breathtakingly refreshing.

3) Despite being a dick the whole ride from his parents' house to ours, BE still did most of the shit-work of hauling the four giant bags up four flights of stairs. Neither the plants nor the fish are dead. Sometimes I'm inclined to think BE's really a nice guy on the inside and only a dick on the outside. It's a fine difference, but worth mentioning. And man, am I glad he didn't leave me to haul the bags myself because I might have died. Especially because I was already teeth-grindingly upset about the dickishness on the car-ride over. And also borderline insane from the 20-hour trip and not having slept at all during said trip.

4) The gin problem was easily remedied. Plus I have a duty-free Grand Marnier nightcap awaiting me for the next few months. Ha!

I'll teach you to break, bitch!

5) And I fixed the fuck out of the kombi. After phoning BE to get the number for the plumber and ask if he knew any kombi secrets, I felt like I was being some shitty and helpless female, especially because I was still so relieved he helped get the bags up the stairs. So I got call him back, all, "Hey, I fixed the fuck out of the kombi." I just left out the part where I hadn't figured out how to turn the gas back on the first time I'd called (for some inexplicable reason, BE had shut off both the kombi and the gas, and the only reason I'd mentioned the kombi to him on the phone was because I thought he might know where the reset button is, like on my past problematic kombis). But also there was a flashing red button that I fixed by holding it down till it stopped flashing. Hah!

Anyway, it's nice to see our house and air it out, and find nothing has gone wrong except there are a few scary dead bugs lying around.

Ick.

As for the heat, I'll just have to suffer. And our arrival home has coincided nicely with pazar day, which means I get to go do something fun, plus get some food in here because I felt rather like a bachelor with my dinner of cheese, bread, and olives last night.

I Completely Fucking Suck: A Family Heirloom

2011-07-11T00:55:00.000+03:00

Last night, I broke the family heirloom 1000 Pipers scotch shot glass.


It had to happen sometime, but why did it have to be me?

I was drying it, and it slipped out of my hand and fell onto the counter top and broke. At least I cut my hand a little bit while cleaning it up, because I freaking deserve it.

The Family Heirloom Shot Glass wasn't just special because it's the only thing we have remaining from my grandfather's bar toys, which arguably makes it very important. It wasn't just special because we've always had it.

What made the Family Heirloom Shot Glass special was that it held shots about half an ounce larger than a normal shot glass.

Goodbye, dear shot glass. Don't tell mom.

And my brothers are going to fucking kill me.