Meh.

It's been a "meh" sort of day. It only really stands out because I haven't really felt much of anything at all today. Except maybe ennui. A bit of angst, but mostly "meh."

So remember last week when I wrote a story? I was pretty pleased with it. But they're not giving me the money, even though in my humblest of opinions, I think they totally should have. Or to that woman in South Africa. Or the one in Tanzania. Those were fucking good.

I got Special Mention.

The thing about Special Mention, though, is that I would have felt a whole hell of a lot more special if they gave me money with that special mention.

Meh. What are you gonna do?

LE lost another tooth today, right before bed. That's a happysad kind of thing. Which means it's two huge feelings that kind of even out into no feeling. Meh.

Last night was weird, kind of.

And yesterday was the day when everyone drops what they're doing for a minute or two to think about Atatürk, who died at 9.05 on November 10, 1938. I don't know why the hell I was awake at 9.05am on a boy-less Saturday morning, but I was. Some traffic stopped, but not all of it. The minibus yard went eerily silent, though. No power washers or horns or horns with bells or Laz music and even the guy who was banging out a wall with a sledgehammer gave it a rest. Then the high school started blasting the İstiklal Marşı and that was the end of that.

Part of me still isn't used to the personality cult of Atatürk and part of me totally gets it. I have pictures of him in my house and everything. I like the one where he's drinking Turkish coffee, looking a little sad. A couple of weeks ago, we were driving back from Kilyos after some mangal with the in-laws. Cumhuriyet Bayramı was nigh, and my father-in-law was trying to impress the importance of Atatürk on LE, going on about democracy and how he saved us all and a bunch of other stuff LE doesn't really get.

LE said, "Dede, Atatürk is dead."

"Yes," he replied. "But he lives in our hearts."

LE whacked me. "See, mama? I told you."

And the weirdscarycute thing is that he totally had. Lots of times before.

Excuse Me While I Plug Myself

I've been plugging myself a lot lately, and man, are my hands tired.

Ba-da-BOOM!

Anyway, I wrote a story for a contest at Expats Blog. It's an okay story with very few "-ly" adverbs. If I win, they'll give me money which, after some celebratory drinking, I'll add to the Pay Mom and Dad Back For The Divorce fund.

Plug over. It felt fucking good. Not transcendental, but good.

Apocolypse Any Moment Now

The Earthquake, the big one I mean, the one that's coming to kill us all, is something that's been on my mind a lot lately.

Maybe it's the weather. The weather these days is disconcerting. It's not just the unseasonable warmth. It's this weird feeling in the air. A pressure, a moisture, a dark heat like you're in the eye of the hurricane and something is about to break wide open.

The Earthquake came up on Facebook the other day, and my dad commented with something like, "The earthquake for us is kind of like crib death when you were a baby."

Fuck.

I wasn't here for the 1999 earthquake. I visited Turkey for the first time a year after, when people still teared up just thinking about it and their words choked in their throats. They talked about people who had been trapped and made it, and people who hadn't made it. They talked about the smell of corpses that lingered for weeks and shivering in their cars and waiting waiting waiting for news. I was staying on the side of the Marmara near the epicenter, and it was still a rubbled mess, almost impossible to tell what was being built and what had been knocked down. The buildings that were standing reminded me of teeth, a few in a row there like nothing had happened and then a gap where one was missing.

The thing about the Earthquake is that you don't talk about it, not much anyway. It's a back-of-the-mind terror that's always there, but one that will make you crazy if you keep worrying about it. You tell yourself that worrying about the Earthquake all the time is like worrying about getting hit by a bus or getting cancer. It's something that can happen to you at any second and there's fuck all you can do about it.


When I first came here, I like everyone else, practiced a modicum of earthquake safety. Since I lived in a basement flat, I figured getting trapped without water was the only thing I had any control over, so I kept a few large bottles filled with water and a teaspoon of bleach that I refilled regularly. I knew where my passport was. I had a few candles.

Later, when I started living on the upper floors, I figured I would die anyway so why bother getting all freaked out about it?

Good stuff.

The other day, a friend posted this article from the Atlantic. The focus is more on the political and economic quagmire the Earthquake causes here, just by thinking about it and trying to prepare a bit. Here are some fun facts:

"In Istanbul, where I live, politicians are in a race against time, and time is winning by about three years. The vast city is as vulnerable to earthquakes as Los Angeles, but not as prepared. Istanbul is very close to the North Anatolian Fault, which runs beneath the Marmara Sea, and whose most significant break is said to occur every 500 years. The last time the fault broke, the city was ruined. Landmarks collapsed; thousands died; and the city walls, famous for halting invasions, were useless against floodwaters. That quake, nicknamed "the Little Apocalypse," hit in 1509, 503 years ago." 

Thanks a fucking lot, Ağaoğlu.

"There is no feasible evacuation plan, and green spaces that could be used for disaster relief are being steadily consumed by development projects. The issue is not the safety of the houses, but the number of them. Irfanoglu expressed similar worries at the end of our conversation, after a barrage of his own alarming facts had worked him up emotionally: "Nobody knows what's going to happen, but if there is any strong shaking in Istanbul you should get out. Because if you survive the earthquake, it would be very difficult to get out. It's our worst nightmare. Sometimes I look at the news and I just hope there's nothing about an Istanbul earthquake." Yaltirak was more succinct: "They want Pompeii to grow."  "

Unofficially, there are close to 20 million people in Istanbul. When the Earthquake comes, it's not inconceivable that the final death toll will be in the millions. Three million? Five? Seven? What's that going to feel like?

I don't even have the right outfit.

After I read this article, I watched part of the first season of Walking Dead. It wasn't such a good idea. I've always thought that in any sort of apocalyptic nightmare, I'd prefer to be one of the ones who gets killed right at the beginning rather than go through the whole survivalist thing just to die in the end anyway.

That night as I was dozing off, I thought about what I would do if the Earthquake happened right then. The water bottle was almost empty, I had 20 lira in my wallet and LE was across town at his grandparents'.

I am just one of millions of people barely keeping on top of life, forgetting to go to the bank and unable to find a convenient time to wait for the water guy.

A friend of mine once met a Japanese earthquake expert who came to tour Istanbul and evaluate the situation here. The expert's advice? "Buy lime, and lots of it."

When you look across the hundreds of thousands of rooftops and windows in Istanbul and think about each life that's happening inside all those houses, each bit of drama, sickness, joy, TV-watching, angst, sneaking a wank, boiling rice, brushing hair, ennui, arguments, looking for a pen, waiting for phone calls and on and on and on and on...

It makes me feel like pitching my tent in nihilism country or clinging desperately to every little piece of it. I can't tell which one.

So with that, give me something to look forward to and say something nice about my blog here at Expat Blogs because apparently they're keeping track.

Wrong! Bad!

Over Bayram, the in-laws and I took the kid to the playing place at some mall. The experience was endured by all except the kid, who clearly had no idea the play place at the mall is one of the suckiest places on Earth.

This was my take-away. And also a headache.

Look, I get why #1 and #3 are inadvisable things to do with a mallet, but saying #2 can cause injuries is a bit extreme. Does it also cause hairy palms and blindness?

Oh, wait. On closer inspection, I see it's just telling you not to hit your foot with the mallet. You know why? Because that would be fucking stupid. Come to think of it, if you did the 3rd one, you would pretty much deserve to have that happen to you.

Please, my friends. Treat your mallets with care and wisdom. For goodness sakes, don't do it wrong.

You can be sure there was a passel of young males of all ages who found a whole host of other ways to use the mallet wrong in about 5 seconds. It was like the mallet was asking for it, just for being a mallet in the play place at some mall over Bayram.

Fucking Famous As Shit!

First, check out the new badge from Expats Blog!

Then forgive me for what's to follow!

I'll never be rich beyond my wildest dreams, but at least I'm not these folks.

So from time to time, I get an email about how my blog is so great and could I just add this widget or banner or thingie or whatever to my site and then through some unlikely convoluted Internet mechanism, someone might heft a few cents or pence my way. I usually ignore them, because most of the time the emails are spammy or over-general about discount travel or selling stuff I don't give a shit about, like fashionable tables or trench coats.

Insecurity is Fun!

But sometimes, it's a real thing that people send me emails about, where they want to give me some credit about doing whatever it is I do. And they offer me a cool badge and for about 5 seconds I feel a little better than I usually do. After that 5 seconds is up, I start wondering to myself, "Why did they choose me? How did they find me? What's wrong? Is there really no one else they could have chosen?" because whenever someone thinks I've done something good, I assume it's either because a) I've come in third in a two-horse race, or b) they want me to give them money for some sort of vanity prize, or c) my parents have gotten to them, and either guilted them into making me think I'm cool, or paid them to make me think I'm normal.

I blame her.

I think I haven't mentioned this particular unfounded paranoia of mine, which has nothing to do with my parents and everything to do with my own personal crazy. Starting when I was about 8 and I saw this Vegas hypnotist on TV, I became convinced that my life wasn't real, and that I was in fact miming my every waking act in front of my 2nd grade class while they laughed, and at some point in my life our guest-speaker hypnotist was going to snap me out of the trance and I would be returned to 2nd grade, my life unlived and pretend. I would be left to deal with the playground jeers of my classmates who'd watched me miming taking dumps and masturbating and goodness knows what else.

I blame him.

Entering adolescence, I mostly abandoned the hypnotist thing in favor of the camera forever pointed on my bedroom and bathroom, making movies of me doing stuff for my peers to snicker at. Not that I've completely given up on the fear (hope?) that I might be returned to 2nd grade to start my life over again. Given that this camera issue was way pre-Internet, I suppose the peer-sharing aspect would have had to involve a lot of VHS tapes.

Stupid body.

And then I got my period. I was 12. It was a bit early, but not too abnormally so. For some reason, no one I knew ever talked about periods except my mother and some people who taught us about sex ed and ovaries and stuff. The whole thing was cloaked in crushing, unbearable mystery-shame. I could never bring myself to ask our PE teacher or school nurse for much-needed feminine hygiene items whenever that came up, because I was convinced I was the only person this was happening to. Any evidence to the contrary was because my parents, in their desire to protect me from the humiliation, had paid off the world and engineered hint-dropping, such as Judy Blume books and feminine hygiene advertising, to make me think it was normal that this fucking god-awful thing was happening to me.

Welcome to the shitrealm of my ridiculous First World insecurities.

Anyway, if you don't want to punch me in the neck after that whole unrelated mess, please take a second of your time to notice the cool new badge from ExpatsBlog. They found me somehow. At the moment I'm just trying to feel good and not suspicious. Apparently, I also have to plug myself (hee! plug myself!) a bit and get readers to write something here about how I'm great and not a complete fuckup loser.

Even if you're just my mom and dad using various socks, I'd be ever so pleased.

Thanks for putting up with me.

It's not about him. It's about me.

Nothing Out Of The Ordinary

I'm not sure if it's the constant argument I'm having with my brain (shut up, Brain!) or just the fact that pretty much absolutely nothing of post-able interest is going on in my life right now that I haven't managed to write anything in awhile.

What a fucking sentence! Let me just read that again and decide if it's cool or if I want to punch myself in the neck.

I'm cool with it. The sentence stays. Also, if I take it out, this sentence I'm writing right now won't make any sense, so I'm pretty much stuck in.

So maybe it's the approach of Kurban Bayramı that got me thinking about animals. For one thing, everywhere I go has been awash in kittens lately. The neighbor took in an abandoned litter of 4 about a month ago and recently released them into the garden, where they frolicked merrily and got underfoot unnervingly. The kids loved them and you could scoop them all up at once and have an armful of kittens.

I was fine with them living outside.

They're for real.

On campus, the friendly, randy male everyone likes, the one who gets to come to class sometimes, fathered his second litter. He may have fathered a 3rd by one of his daughters from the first litter. They are all impossibly cute. The recent thunderstorm apparently caused them to scatter in terror, but if that's the worst thing to happen to any animals in this blog post, they should be counting themselves very, very lucky right now. Even if they are wet.

The thunderstorm, by the way, is continuing to be fucking fabulous.

Anyway, the neighbor found another litter of 3 too-small kittens that maybe were orphaned or maybe abandoned because they were sick. They needed bottle-feeding, except then they all got the shits and they smelled gross and had goopy eyes. They howled constantly and she was up every couple of hours feeding them and, even though animals are nice and cute and stuff, I daresay she took that whole thing a bit far. Then they started dying one by one and since I don't hear them howling right now, I assume they didn't make it.

The other morning, I saw one of the healthy released kittens dead in the street. I haven't seen any of the others since then. I couldn't tell if it was car-dead or killed-by-another-animal-dead, but I kind of feel like sending Spider and Havuç to the cat farm was an okay idea, if anything because I don't have to know if they're dead or not, or see the blood coming out of their mouths. Except for the washing machine thing, but that was different.

Speaking of dead, White Dog. White Dog! Remember him? I do. He's been around since we moved here. He was a good dog, the kind that walked you home at night and didn't ask for food and chased all the other dogs away. Anyway, for a half year or so, he hadn't been well. He'd been walking for awhile like the hip dysplasia was getting the best of him, and he'd clearly lost his mojo. For 2 weeks, all he did was sleep in a decreasing pile of construction sand.

Then I noticed White Dog was gone. Figuring he didn't have another winter left in him, I clung to the tiniest shred of hope someone had had him put down. Which is sort of what happened, but not exactly. Turns out some fuckhead dickass neighbor called the Belediye to complain about the dogs lying around in the street. So the dog catcher came round and collected White Dog, Black Dog, and Zeytin, an exhuberant new lab-ish young dog that needs to learn some fucking manners. Some neighbors took responsibility for Black Dog and Zeytin and got them back. They tried to get White Dog back too, but since they weren't his real owners, they couldn't. Quite how the Belediye determines whether someone is a real owner or not of a street dog I'll never know. So White Dog got the Big Sleep.

I don't believe in Heaven, so this will have to do.

I just hope they were nice to him in the process. He was a good dog.

And then, of course, there's Kurban Bayramı. Like last year, I was kind of gearing myself up again this year to go and watch the sacrificing. Except I just found out last week that LE will be staying with me over the Bayram because BE is going to be with Cengiz Amca's family down on the Aegean Coast. So that's my excuse this year for not watching the killing. I keep telling myself this.

Might be a bit much for the wee fellow.

No, really. Not having been exposed much to animal death as the Circle of Life, the boy might not admire the cultural edification of slaughter and butchering as much as I would, theoretically. Lots of cognitive dissonance to deal with there. I asked him the other day if he wanted to go watch the sacrifice, and he was all, "But hurting animals is bad."

So that's it. I'm afraid a bit of sacrificing might make the boy a vegetarian and then I'll be stuck cooking vegetarian food for the remainder of the time he lives with me.

Imagine this person tells you he only wants to eat vegetables because hurting animals is wrong. Do you say "Eat yer fucking meat and shut it?" Really?

Maybe we'll go watch next year, when he's all grown up.

P.S. Check out what happened today!

It's momentous!

Guilt Orchid Orphans

Remember my orchid? And how I was gonna find the special dirt for it and everything? Well, I found the special dirt and it wasn't that hard. The florist also gave LE a bunch of daisies that was on its last legs, then he gave him another one to give to me.

Nice stuff like that just happens here. A lot, actually.

Anyway, I got to thinking about the orchid, now that it is with child.

Except apparently orchid babies are called keikis. It's cute they have a special name.

So this orchid. I never would have bought an orchid myself. The last one I had, one my mom gave me like 20 years ago, died slowly for no apparent reason and I felt awful for killing such a delicate thing.

But this orchid even had an unfortunate providence to begin with. Shortly after BE and I split up, like a week after I kicked him out of the house, he came by while I was at work (he had a key for awhile), and left me a diamond ring, an orchid, and some red rose petals scattered on the floor and around the orchid.

Guilty guilty guilty. Guilty for making him feel bad. Wait, what?

Well, you know how it is.

Also guilty for not wanting any of that stuff. Guilty for being mad at him all over again for not knowing that I wouldn't want that stuff. Guilty for feeling sad for whoever had told him that might be a good way to win me back, and for not being the sort of person who could be made happy by jewelry and flowers and romantic gestures, however belated and surreal. Guilty for being annoyed that I would have to clean up the rose petals.

I gave him the ring back. And then I felt guilty that I was now saddled with the care of an orchid that was completely innocent and had nothing to do with any of this.

So I asked my mom how to deal with the thing, and found a reasonable spot for it to live, and carried on like that.

And it didn't die. Then it grew. A smashed cigarette box holds the pot up straight in the bowl because it grew so much it couldn't stand up by itself and I had to MacGuyver it a little. When my mom was here for Christmas, she showed me where to prune it, so I did. And this year at the beginning of summer it flowered again.

For some reason, the orchid doesn't hate me. I don't hate it either. It just makes me feel kind of bad. Not that I blame the orchid.

After it flowered, it started having babies. There are two of them. I snipped one of them off and stuck it in the potting mix I bought from Mustafa the Florist. The other one, I'm waiting for the flower to drop before planting it.

And I have a sinking feeling the Guilt Orchid's babies are going to take. I'm not sure what to do with them. Usually I give my flower babies to my mother-in-law, but this seems inappropriate somehow. I offered one to a friend who knows the Guilt Orchid's life story, but he's afraid of killing the baby. So I'm a bit stuck on this one.

Making peace with the orchid.

Also it's hard to decide what all the orchid means, at this point. A symbol of lingering guilt? Or does it mean something cheesy about a new life and getting by against the odds or whatever?

Maybe it's just a flower that's been genetically modified to survive a houseplant spaz like me.

Anyway, want a baby orchid that may be a really good omen, or a really bad one, or no sort of omen at all?