Optimism, Darkly

"... all governments can rule only as long as they receive replenishment of the needed sources of their power from the cooperation, submission, and obedience of the population and the institutions of the society. Political defiance, unlike violence, is uniquely suited to severing those sources of power."

Gene Sharp

"Yalancı,"posted on Facebook by Sistemin Kölesi Olmayın, 4 May, 7:45pm.

Trying My Hand At Vegetative Propagation

It's a fancy name for poking leaves into some soil to see if any of them will take and grow roots. These are African violets, so the outlook is good. At least, they're not dead yet so that's good.

Sophomoric Cross-Linguistic Humor

It gets me every time.

Just grow up already, Stranger.

I would totally go to that cafe.

Crap I Found In the Snacks Cupboard

Sometimes I take photos intending to post something about them, then I never get around to it. A whole bunch of posts totally died when the old computer got stolen. Fortunately, we've got a snacks cupboard. I've been trying to clean it out lately, as there are some snacks in there I'm pretty sure are from Bayram 2 years ago.

First, a stray candy bar.


Or should I say Stray? The bottle cap is there for scale. It lived up to its name by tasting foul (I'm now thinking of the super smelly dog that lives on our street). Actually, the dog is quite nice but suddenly very stinky. We want to pet him and he wants to be pet but seriously, he's nauseating and I think he must have a festering skin disease somewhere. Poor guy. I noticed he got a new collar recently (he's the kind of street dog people look after because he's so nice), but no one seems to be sorting out the smell. Even if I knew what to do with a sick dog, I don't want to get too close.

The only reason I ate the candy bar was because it was a candy bar and it was there.


This one, with photo effects added by LE, is more fitting. I'd prefer dead, thank you very much.

Though perhaps an alive Stray could be trained to do tricks, it's hard to say. I just hope there's never a candy bar called Stowaway. I think it would bother me to find a Stowaway in my cupboard. There are some pizza crackers in there already making me very uncomfortable.

Yet, it's hard to express my joy at finding the Beeman's.

That's right. It's Pepto-Bismol flavored gum I brought back from the States last year and I freaking love it. Worryingly enough, it's still soft.

And that's all I'll be sharing of my cupboard today. I'll leave the rest up to your imagination. If it helps, I'll mention there's something in there that got buried way at the back. It might be those brown dried apricots that are supposed to be natural. Or it could be regular dried apricots. Or it could not be apricots at all. They made me think of this prose poem, by Carolyn Forché (1978):

The Colonel

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

Rest In Peace, Virtual Friend: Or, What Modern Angst Tastes Like

Recently, a guy I know died.

At least, that's sort of how to say it. This man, who was by all accounts a really good guy, is someone I only "knew" online. So, more of an acquaintance, really, except not even that because I never actually met him.

His real name was Damian (or Damien, the spelling isn't consistent), and he was an Istanbul expat old-timer, here since the mid-80s when apparently Istanbul was some sort of expat English teacher adventure haven, because there weren't many language schools then. For expats plying my particular trade, especially those of us who have been here for the long haul, Istanbul is a very small world. Everyone knows everyone else, or knows of everyone, and of course there's all the shagging. So I know a lot of people who had met Damian. Hell, it's more than likely our paths crossed in real life, but I can't say for sure and it's likely I wouldn't remember it anyway.


I learned he was ill online, from Damian himself. I learned about the progression of his cancer from another friend I've mentioned on here before, a gentleman I've been swapping books with over the last several years, when he stops off in Istanbul on his way from Saudi Arabia to Bulgaria, and who, coincidentally, has also met up with Damian a few times on his travels. Then I learned Damian had died, from a co-worker who know him from back in the day. So that's what I mean by small world.


I never imagined I'd be the sort of person to have fake online friends. For awhile though, most of my interactions with other foreigners seemed to be through the Internet, and mostly though the Turkey jobs forum at Dave's ESL Cafe. At that time, I was the only foreigner in my department, and I was newly married living out in the sticks. I came to think of Dave's as the yabancı forum because that's also how I referred to it to BE. BE was uncomfortable, to say the least, about my having interactions with online yabancıs, but he was even more against my having interactions with real-life yabancıs so him shutting up about the online thing was what he called "compromise."

Whoops, that just started getting ugly and I don't want to talk about it anymore.

I went on the Turkey jobs forum at Dave's ESL Cafe in the first place to post a warning about a previous place of employment who was recruiting for my replacement, a cowboy outfit that's either now out of business or has been through so many names since then it doesn't matter. Damien, a regular on the forum, was the first to reply to my post, something nice along the lines of, “That really sucks, hope things are going better for you now.”


And it was going better in some ways but not in others. But I read around the forum a bit, and there was a nice banter between the regulars around there, plus lots of useful information like where to find bacon or your SSK payments. And there was an ongoing thread about EastEnders that I could always rely on for backstories. Also I had a lot of free time on my hands at work, and apparently everyone else did too. At times, it felt like the forum was the only place where I could speak normal, un-graded, real English with delicious slang and inferences and everything.

Eventually, all the chatty regulars got expelled from Dave's after a wave of heavy-handed moderation in which they were probably trying to stop chattiness and in-groupiness, plus there was an awful lot of talk all over the international jobs forums about schools that completely sucked but which were sponsoring ads on the site. So another good guy from there became David Vincent and started his own international jobs forum and ELT website, to where the Dave's exiles have since migrated.

Forums are interesting. I mean, how people behave on them is interesting. There's nothing like the Internet to bring out someone's closeted asshole so I tend to avoid most forums, especially those dominated by people who revel in their cleverness and erudite sentences, and teenagers, who are like that anyway. On the other hand, a nice forum where people are nice is okay. On Dave's, there was a fellow who was our local asshole type, except after while it became apparent he wasn't really an asshole, just a guy who liked to be one online. He had a bone to pick with a particularly obnoxious school and his incisive disdain for Turkey was a source of amusement for me as I was entering the throes of belated culture shock. This was also all back before I cottoned on to the idea of having a blog, and the forum was where most of my writing ended up. In a way, it served more or less the same purpose.

And I did make actual human friends through the forum. Not only was there my book trading friend, but there was another woman, Yaramaz, who's now in China.

A third woman ended up being one of my dearest friends here. I was lucky enough to get pregnant three months after her, so now we get to be fellow expat intercultural marriage moms of bilingual kids roughly the same age, in addition to all the other great stuff I love about her.

But Damian, I never managed to meet. As an online personality, he came off as kind and intelligently funny. He never really said anything mean about anyone, except maybe some stuff about football and EastEnders. He piped into potential battles to defuse their nastiness. My theory about Internet personalities is that, while someone who comes off as an asshole is either truly an asshole or a closet asshole, someone who comes off as decent is probably decent in real life.

And anyway, anyone who knew Damian in real life says he was lovely, and a wonderful teacher, so apparently there really wasn't any online pretension there.

I knew about his cancer for awhile. It got better, then bad again, then okay, then very, very bad. As it got worse, he went back home. Then my book friend told me how bad it had really gotten, which I'd suspected anyway because Damian had grown silent in Forumland and that wasn't really like him.

And now he's gone, and I'm not really sure how I'm supposed to feel because I never knew him for real. I mean, I know how I feel but I don't know what to call it so I figured I ought to write something about him just to make him a little more real and say goodbye.





Goodbye DMB. You are much missed and I hope Internet vibes somehow can reach the ones we've lost because everyone is saying really nice things about you, and it's not just out of a sense of obligation to the dead.


I also hope you never become a zombie, especially a running one, because that would be really scary.

Rest in Peace.

Stranger

Doctor Update

A helpful commenter on a very old post pointed me to a useful website for multi-lingual doctors in Istanbul. I figured it deserved a bump.

www.doctorsofistanbul.com

Good luck!


My luck since that post has improved somewhat with doctors, which could be either because of experience or from relaxing a bit, but I sure have managed to land on a few decent, reasonably-priced ones over the years who are sincerely happy when someone starts requesting alternatives to antibiotics. Turns out a lot of the antibiotics thing is pressure from the customers, I mean patients, who want nothing less than powerful medicine for their money, and will just shop elsewhere if the doc doesn't deliver. It's very last century. The part of the last century before I was born, I mean.

Accordingly, the doctor the in-laws take LE to whenever he has a cough or a sniffle loads him up on at least four kinds of medicine every time. There's always one super-powerful, multi-spectrum antibiotic in there, or other signs of bizarre overkill, like Ventolin for a mild cough or Zyrtec for a stuffy nose. He knows better than to send fretful grandparents home empty-handed. Plus, he always gives LE a lollipop, so it's all good in his book. He loves going to the doctor and all the attention and candy it entails. The medicines pile up in our cupboard because it's the getting them that makes everyone happy, not the using them. I can just give them away, so that's fine.

And it's just possible I've cracked the doctor thing somewhat since I wrote that old post. I humbly offer you these tricks.

Hospital Trick Number One: Unless you really want some serious treatment and lots of tests, avoid hospitals with shiny front foyers that look like hotels. Stick with the middle-of-the-road hospitals that are a couple steps up from state but quite a few steps down from Acibadem or American Hospital. If you have private health insurance, don't mention it until things start looking costly. Despite that one ENT at Medi-Life who wanted to give me the laser surgery for a deviated septum I didn't know I had (he knew I had private health, and my husband wasn't with me, more on that later), other doctors there were fine. In particular, there was one pediatrician who was absolutely thrilled I didn't want to give LE another round of antibiotics for a recurrent ear infection. He ordered a blood test for white blood cell count first. LE didn't care for the finger-pricking, not one bit, not even when he got to have chips afterwards, but at least when the antibiotics were advisable I felt much better about the whole thing because I'd been informed and treated like a relatively intelligent individual. The doctor even thanked me for asking, and said he was fed up with people insisting on antibiotics.

Aren't Pictures Neat?

Which brings me to Hospital Trick Number Two: If you can wait until the weekend or an off-time and you don't need a specialist, try an emergency room. Those docs are usually quite good, and most hospitals are pretty empty. They'll treat you and leave the follow-up in your court. The emergency room isn't always best for babies, as some emergency room docs aren't comfortable with the very little ones (at least they'll tell you though!), but for most grown-ups it's just fine. When I had swine flu, they just gave me a shot of powerful fever reducer (Tylenol wasn't working at that point and the fever was reaching 105F) and sent me on my way with a relaxing cough suppressant I was happy to have. At a middle-of-the-road hospital, a trip to the emergency room plus treatment rarely runs more than 50 TL.

Loving the new Blogger editor for pictures...

Then there's Hospital Trick Number Three: Take your Turkish spouse, or if you're not married, bring an opposite-sex Turk to pretend to be your spouse (preferably someone that's good at negotiating, and make sure ahead of time you're on the same page about tests and stuff). This seems to stop them from going overboard to impress you with their expensive machines that go ping! and also, it helps with the language barrier. I'm not sure why a Turkish spouse seems to be more effective than a Turkish friend at stopping unnecessary costs, but it is.

The language barrier is another problem, which brings me to Hospital Trick Number Four: If a doctor sells him or herself as foreign language-speaking, you can expect to add about 200 TL to the bill because their offices are in parts of town where the parking is a gouge might cost you a day's salary, if you can find any. In any case, a lot of doctors actually speak quite decent English, but they're not very confident about using it. I think one reason is that they're uncomfortable with the way a second language shifts the power balance between doctor and patient. They're used to being the very best of the best, and it's not easy feeling stupid muddling through a foreign language with a native speaker. It isn't just for pedagogical reasons that I refuse to use Turkish with students, so I kind of get that. But if you figure out the doc speaks some English you can at least negotiate the language thing a little by showing yourself as stupid in Turkish and then meet in the middle somewhere.

So there you are, then. Thanks again to the commenter for the link. And while I'm at it, I re-read another comment on there from a doctor taking me to task for saying crappy things about doctors. The longer I've been here, the more I see how right she is, and I'm not sure if it's me that's changed or the world around me (probably a bit of both), but the whole doctor thing seems a helluva lot better than it used to be.

Pure Unbridled Joy

It probably looks a little like this: