Spectacularly Bad Mom, Of Sorts

I don't care for it when people refer to themselves as their pets' parents. And let it be known that before this Incident I'd already started making moves to find a home for Havuç and Spider. They're lovely but I can't deal with them anymore.

Yesterday, having done my job acceptably well and visited the school where I'm suddenly supposed to register LE under this fucked up new law and talked about everything with the vice principal and gotten us home early and done the shopping and given the kid a Popsicle and done a load of laundry and ordered the heavy things from Sarıyer Market and bathed the kid, I was feeling pretty fucking good about everything when I started a second load of laundry and was ready to tackle dinner.

I'd promised the boy sucuk for dinner, which is easy to cook even though our gas isn't hooked up yet but the electric burner is working fine. So we had some time to hang out and watch crap on YouTube.

Havuç was meowing a lot in the bathroom but he's very meow-y so I don't care, usually.

So I went back there to change my clothes and there was an unpleasant rowling sound coming from the washer, with Havuç sitting there looking upset.

PleaseletherbebehindthemachinePleaseletherbebehindthemachinePleaseletherbebehindthemachine...

Nope. I shut the machine off and waited for the magnetic latch to click back open.

It was around then I completely lost it. The cat looked all twisted up and without even touching her I sprang to action, certain some neural column was broken and this was the Worst Thing Ever.

I said a lot of bad words.

I tried to figure out how to deal with this.

I called the vet, who luckily was still open.

Then I dumped the kid at our lovely neighbor's, gave her some money for the grocery delivery that was on its way, left a note on our door for the delivery guys, wrapped the wet cat in a towel and bustled down to the vet. On the way, I saw the delivery guys in their truck and tried to wave them down to tell them which apartment to go to, but obviously I looked insane and they snootily waved me off and drove on.

The cat was fine. In shock, but fine. A swelling in her tail that has since passed and the blood must have come from her nose or mouth because she'd gone through 1 or 2 rather powerful spin cycles. The vet shot her up with something for the shock and again, I was wishing he'd give me some too. He gave her an anti-inflammatory for the tail, too.

It's okay if you think it's a little bit funny. I would too if it hadn't been my fault.

Spider is fine. She took a dump on the kitchen floor so she and Havuç spent the rest of the night in the bathroom. I'm sure Havuç was cool with that because he's been falling in love with Spider a little bit. Snippy snippy time.

Clearly I have no business owning cats.

Grafitti

The best thing about this little bit of graffiti is that Erdoğan's upper lip kind of looks like balls.

Between suddenly wanting to ban abortion and his stupid ideas about education, I despise him a little more than usual.

Thank you, random bar wall artist, for making my day.

I Am Fucking Wonderwoman

The move to the flat downstairs has been impending for several weeks now. First there was this and that and the other thing and I'd planned to move gradually over the course of the last month but that didn't happen. As soon as I saw things weren't happening, I was all like, "Fuck it" and decided to approach the move not with my usual American way of careful planning, but instead with the Turkish way of "Whatever. It'll get done when it gets done and it's gonna suck no matter which way I do it." Which was cool because there was definitely no plan from anyone else involved in the move, either.

Remember last month when I organized all those toys? Well, that has been undone like twice over since then, mostly when LE had his BFF over for a visit and they dragged out every single goddamned toy in the house and threw them everywhere and lined up some of them up across every doorway and down the hall in what they claimed was some sort of cat trap. The cat trap didn't work at all, but it was a good idea in theory.

The cat trap contains only scary toys, like weapons and dogs and dinosaurs.

Then I bribed them with a tiny piece of chocolate apiece to clean the shit up and they totally did it. Hence the toys were cast back into chaos. Anyway.

I'm totally fucking Wonderwoman. Or just wishing maybe.

The move finally came down to this weekend, when I'd done nothing ahead of time except worry a bit and organize the toys. Means I had to pack up the entire house and haul it downstairs inside of three days. And put everything down there in such a way that the movers won't have to kick it all too much out of their way when they're hauling the furniture.

I might be fucking Wonderwoman but I'll be damned if I'm gonna strap the fridge to my back and haul it downstairs.

So yesterday, I tried to get as much stuff into the new house as I could before it got dark. We'll have no electricity, water, gas, or Internet in the new house just yet.

Some heavy stuff.

In case you're wondering why I'm fucking Wonderwoman, it's not just because she's hot. It's because I carried all this shit downstairs yesterday.

Some fucking stuff.

Some stuff in the new bathroom.

The kitchen is done, plus some more fucking stuff.

Ok, the cleaner carried some dishes down. But then she wanted to go home and I didn't blame her. Somewhere in the middle of hauling shit I got really glad I wasn't moving upstairs. Or somewhere far, like across the street.

The kitchen is finished and the cupboards are neatly filled.

At some point, moving takes over your entire brain. All your crap just becomes shit you have to move, and you're thinking about how and when the moving of that particular useless piece of crap is going to take place. You look your stuff and wonder where it came from and why you have it, and maybe could it just go to the curb? A friend of mine is moving now too, which not only means we can't help each other move, it also means we can discuss at length our moving-related woes. His problem was eggs. I realized eggs are one of my problems too. Why the fuck did we buy eggs when we have to move? I decided to have eggs for lunch because who the fuck wants to screw around with moving eggs?

Fortunately, even an unplanned move makes it so there are essential things left in my house. In my case, it was a dishwasher full of dirty dishes that allowed me to cook and eat eggs with utensils and a pan. And salt. Salt is something you should always move last. Also toilet paper.

I'd got partway through cooking eggs when I realized there was no spatula. I started digging around the kitchen looking for a viable alternative, like two forks. Lucky for me, there was a spatula in the dishwasher and I was pretty sure the moving gods were smiling on me.

Spatula is the arm of the gods!

At some point yesterday, a fucking cat (I suspect Havuç) dragged one of my favorite wool sweaters out of the closet and chewed a hole in the arm. Fucking cats. That's the third sweater they've killed. I still kind of hate them a little bit. Why the wool sweaters, cats, why?

But then I realized I didn't have to  move the sweater so I forgot about it pretty fast.

Cats are no help with moving.

Get a job, fucking cat!

The cats have been a constant source of despair and angst lately. I'm wondering what the hell I'm going to do with them when I go out of town for a month, plus they're fuckers who chew things up and get into everything and destroy things wantonly and without purpose. They're crawling on me constantly, or trying to. But then Spider does something cute like standing up to be pet and I realized I could cover the chairs they've murdered with pillowcases and I feel like I might be able to keep them a little while longer.

Get out of my face, cat!

The cats are causing me to question some larger commitment issues I've been thinking about lately. Like maybe one reason my marriage failed was because I was thinking all along I could dump it off at this cat farm in Zekeriyaköy I've heard of.

I'm fucking tired from being Wonderwoman, all right? So it's totally okay if I mix metaphors.

And just for that I'm going to leave out a whole bunch of other juicy shit I've been thinking about and doing lately, so hah! Aside my from the move, my life has been extremely fucking cool. You can't even imagine. So there.

After the spatula incident, it became clear the gods of moving were smiling on me. It was like "Ask and you shall receive" all day today. For example, I found a cupboard full of small fragile things and I was all, "Jeez, I wish I had a small box to put all these things into," and then I reached into the next cupboard and found an empty shoebox with an even smaller empty shoebox inside of it and was like, "Fuck yeah!" It was like I had reached moving Nirvana.

And you were wondering why I have so much stuff. It's because I've saved some stuff from past moves that might come in handy for future moves. I've also saved a bunch of other crap in case I might need it someday. Thanks, Past Tense Stranger!

I also have all this Atatürk stuff. I've made a pile of my ex's stuff on the living room floor, which I plan to tell him to take tomorrow or I'll leave it out for the gypsies. I couldn't bring myself to put all the Atatürk stuff in with his crap. Not just because he'd get all insulted or something. Also because I feel like if I have Atatürk stuff around the house, people might think we're normal, LE and I. It's a clever ruse. And secretly, our Atatürk kitsch has camp value for me. Heh.

We still need this one.

Anyway, today I counted my trips down and up the stairs. 55. That's right. 55. Granted a lot of it was light stuff like lamps and plants, but still. 55. Calves are a bit sore, but my ass feels like you could bounce a penny off it.

The heavy shit, plus a whole bunch of other shit.

Added to this pile of shit, too.

Last year, when I was first thinking of getting divorced for real, I went to my co-worker who had just finished an ugly divorce and who had kids not much older than LE. I'd meant to ask her about stuff I should be looking for that would tell me my kid might not be handling it. Instead, she became a fireball of support that I could do this thing and we ended up talking about what shits our husbands had been. Another friend hooked me up with my lawyer and if it weren't for certain people like these friends, I never would have been able to even envision getting divorced. They'll never know exactly the extent of my gratitude.

On Facebook the other night, I mentioned enjoying the smell of my armpits after moving by myself all day, and the divorced co-worker reminded me how many more times I would be saying "by myself" and how it would keep feeling cooler and I'll be damned if she wasn't totally right.

Bathroom full of more shit I moved by myself.

More shit in the kitchen I moved by myself today.

A million wall hangings I moved by myself.

Plants too.

And a lamp.

So probably after I finish writing this post it's gonna take me like 10 minutes to drag my sorry stiff ass out of this chair and into the kitchen for a muscle relaxant and then into the bed for another big day. Brown burly fellows are going to haul the furniture for me to the new flat, and put it in its place.

Somewhere in all of this I need a plumber and an electrician. Plus LE has to get registered for school, a whole 'nother can of worms.

And because I didn't organize any of my stuff-- I even took some full trash cans down there, thinking of my aunt and her military moving stories-- unpacking it all will take like a year or so.

Because I'm doing it all by myself.

Fucking Wonderwoman. Thank you very much.

Finally, Some Damned Recognition

Go, me!

It's rare that I get proper recognition for this little blog project of mine.

But remember last week or so when that Internations Top Expat Blog badge appeared in the sidebar? I do, because I put it there. It's a real thing, that badge. And the post I wrote for them is up, complete with a picture of me because I know you've all been dying to know what I look like.

Those of you who don't already know me, that is.

Internations Featured Blog. Check me out!

Bread: A Vignette

Love me! I love you!

In Turkey, it's a sin to waste bread or throw bread out or in other way abuse bread. Lots of people won't even throw away crumbs they've just swept off the table. They put them on the sill or toss them out of the window for the birds to eat.

Yesterday, a taxi driver stopped his car in the middle of the street and got out. I wondered why he was doing that, as it was raining a little and drivers usually wait in the car for someone to come out of the house.

And then I saw a sad, damp loaf of bread lying in the middle of the street. The driver picked it up and rested it gently on a nearby ledge. Then he got back into his taxi and drove away.

That is all.

Turkish Words Used As Sound Effects In Primitive Cartoons: Part II

"Yağ" means both "fat" and oil. The "g" is silent, for those not in the know.

"Yani" is a word I love in Turkish because it's ever so useful. It can be a filler, to mean like "so" in English, marking the fact that you're trailing off at the end of the sentence, or you can use it in the middle to mean, "I mean...," which insures that your interlocutor will continue listening without getting bored while you fish in your yabancı way for something to say. My tattoo guy remarked that yabancı say "yani" way too much, to which I replied that foreigners who learned English by immersion tend to say "fuck" way too much, in the wrong places in sentences.

And I'm not one to talk but I know what I mean. You can also reply to what someone says with "yani" to mean, "What you said is what I meant to say but your way is just as much or more agreeable." It all depends on the intonation.

"Yan" means "side" and can be used in a variety of grammatically challenging ways that don't translate at all. It doesn't stop my students from trying, though. 

Turkish is very complicated.

"Nar" means pomegranate and it's just a cool-sounding word. A month or so back, my friend and I made homemade grenadine and used it in a drink dubbed the Nartini but he's totally the one who thought of that name.

Nartini!

"Yayaya" never ceases to amuse me. It means "to pedestrians" and it appears on street signs that say "Yayaya yol ver," meaning "give way to pedestrians." But it doesn't matter because people generally ignore these signs, except me, apparently.

I like "hadi" because it's one of those words, in certain uses, that exactly matches English. By itself, it means the same as "come on," in the sense of "Hurry up!" and also "Oh, right" (said sarcastically) or "You're shitting me" (without the "shit" connotation) and "Seriously? Is that the best you can do?" It take some other meanings in conjunction with other words, but it's pretty easy to figure out.

"Ye! Ye! Ye!" means "Eat! Eat! Eat!" I suppose the uses of that re-triplicated thing are fairly obvious.

This is an inside joke. Hah!!

Tattoo: It's Way Less Sordid This Time

Even though I liked my tattoo, I had been thinking for some time it was time to get it fixed up. Seeing as how I'm a grown-up and all.

Well, I finally did it. And it's finally finished, after 4 trips to Taksim to get it worked on.

The new tattoo was nothing like the first time I got a tattoo. This guy Ruhsel has a real studio and it's clean and comfortable. He was recommended by two friends. He's very professional and does a good job. I totally recommend him.

So anyway, here it is, in stages. It was damn hard to take pictures of these.

 Here's the original, in case you've forgotten.

What I liked about this whole process was that I described the original to Ruhsel and told him what I wanted, and he just took it from there. He was working on a guy's chest at the time, with the guy's girlfriend or whatever squealing nearby.

He asked me if I wanted the tree because I love trees or because I thought it would cover the dragon well. I had to think about that for a second. I mean, trees are nice and everything and I love them in the abstract because they give us air and shade and stuff. I've even hugged a few trees and that was fun. But really, I just like organic forms like trees and veins and water and leaves and cells. But I couldn't do all this in Turkish at that particular moment, so I just said, "Both."

So he sent me in to check out some pictures he had on his computer. While I was there, this British guy came in and said something incomprehensible to the woman who has recently set up shop there. Except she totally understood him. He'd asked, in really appalling English, "How much for a tattoo?" I know that as a descriptivist I'm not supposed to be all judgmental about various dialects, but perhaps I just thought the guy was a dick. She and Ruhsel conferred on the price and it was high for some picture of lips he wanted, and he left. It turned out the woman was a Cypriot, which was why she could deal with that guy's English.

I found some tree bits I liked-- trunks and roots and leaves and branches-- and got their email and also went on my way.

I also emailed some photos of some other trees I'd found, plus the original, and turned up exactly on time for my appointment, and I'm wont to do. Ruhsel just started drawing on my leg and it was cool.

This first bit of inking took the longest. But another thing I discovered I liked about getting a tattoo was the other people coming wanting tattoos and what they wanted. A pair of bankers turned up in button-down shirts wanting the massive tigers or whatever across their chests fixed up. Ruhsel even asked my permission if it was okay for them to come in while he was working on me, even though I was wearing sweatpants and was totally modestly covered except for the top of my leg. Some other women came in wanting feathers. Actually, a surprising number of women came in over the 4 appointments wanting feathers. Another guy came in with his girlfriend wanting, across his back, an angel holding a baby. Because the photo he'd brought had a name and some dates on it, close-together dates, I really wanted to tell him the picture was from a guy whose baby had died, but I didn't have the heart or guts to do it. Those two were clearly on their own trip.

This part didn't take too long. Another thing that was cool about getting a tattoo in Turkey was that Ruhsel's wife has recently had a baby. Their son was about a month old at the time I was getting the work done. So most of the time for tattoo-getting, we were talking about babies and nursing and the cool things babies do and how they make their mamas' lives difficult and how they're extremely confusing and terrifying and cute. Not exactly the tattoo conversation I'd expect, but pleasant nonetheless.

This part didn't take long either. Pardon my ass. By this time, it was getting increasingly difficult to take photos by myself in the mirror without including my ass. I'd been thinking purple flowers but Ruhsel thought it would be too dark and in retrospect, I agree with him. In any case, it was a good choice because when LE saw the pink flowers, he thought he might like to have a tattoo. I told him about the needles and he became decidedly less keen.

The finished deal. I had a friend take this picture.

One thing among many things that I like about this tattoo is that the tree looks (to me) like a woman turning into a tree. Like Daphne had herself turned into a tree (Daphne- Defne- laurel tree) to escape getting raped by Apollo.

Like sometimes you have to turn yourself into something else to get out of something you don't want. Ruhsel liked the story, though he didn't see the picture so much. But that was okay.

And so there it ends. My second tattoo story is way more grown-up than the first, and it was just as much fun in a whole different way. Maybe because it wasn't nearly as scary.

Black Sea Tattoo

İstiklal Caddesi No. 165 Kat 1 Beyoğlu

0212 252 8055

(It's just past Galatasaray Lisesi, next to House Cafe, so, easy to find too!)