Halloween: Way After The Fact

At least I made a cool FB profile.

You know what I did? I completely forgot to do the Halloween post. I realized it the other day when I discovered a bunch of Halloween photos in my phone. Lame.

There have been a whole lot of Halloweens that have gone by since I've been here. Mostly they go by with an "Oh, shit, today's Halloween. Moving on."

But the fact is, I've always kind of missed Halloween. Halloween captures the unsettling autumnal goodness of fall way more than Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is cool and all as a precursor to Christmas, but since it doesn't have a fixed day, there have been times I didn't even know it was Thanksgiving until my parents or Facebook told me.

But Halloween has a real, proper date. Also Halloween is Nevada Day. Growing up in Nevada, I always thought Halloween was a bank holiday and day-off-school day. It totally should be.

Also, speaking of Nevada, this week was the one year anniversary of when my cousin died.

Dang.

We got to do Halloween one year in the States, when LE was a boy-toddler. He was a dragon. I can't find the pictures anywhere, which is making me worried they were in the stolen computer. But they could just be on some disc somewhere.

Otherwise, Halloween hasn't been much more than symbolic. But then LE got wind of the candy possibilities and costumes. I blame Calliou for that. I fucking hate Calliou and I'm so glad the boy is pretty much over him.

So last year I McGuyvered the kid up in a sort of cowboy costume and we went trick-or-treating up at the lojman of my school. It was fun for the kids and sucky for the grown-ups because most of the kids up there are spoiled shits and their grownups weren't with them and no one had bothered to teach them that Halloween isn't a screaming bum-rush for fists full of candy.

When I describe Halloween to Turkish people, most of them liken it to the Şeker Bayramı of the not-so-old days. But around the time I was working at Fatih University, it got decided that it's not Şeker Bayramı anymore. It's Ramazan Bayramı, and it's serious and no one gets to have candy from strangers. But in the not-so-old days, kids would go door-to-door wishing people happy Bayram and doing the hand-kiss thing and people would give them candy.

I know this is true because in my early years here, kids would come to my door and I didn't know why. Mostly I figured they were there to torment me somehow. And by the time the kids turned up, I already wasn't opening the door because of the creepy guys with drums who came round aggressively asking for money for banging their drums to wake people up for sahur. Often enough, I was just getting home at that time so the drums were just there to tell me I was getting home close to sunrise, which I knew anyway.

It used to be way cool.

An even older generation likens the "trick" part of trick-or-treat to the Hıdırellez of the way-old days before I got here. But that's been co-opted into another sort of we-don't-talk-about-that-so-much-anymore non-holiday, just as much of the candy-giving of Şeker Bayramı has been corralled into Bayram Parkı and Bayram Şenliği, where you often have to pay money just to get in. There are way more cops at the Hıdırellez "events."

Everything is fine now. Just look away. Nothing to see here.

But in the not-so-old days before the drums got banned most places in the city and Şeker Bayramı was Şeker Bayramı and booze wasn't taxed at 300%, people didn't pretend so much to respect religious shit that pissed them off. And now it's Ramazan Bayramı, just as it always has been, and soon enough we're to be at war with Eastasia, just as we always have been.

And here I was all worried about a silly old earthquake.

Son of a bitch.

Anyway, Halloween! Yay! It's fun and happy and one of those times when we yabancı get to band together and do our thing. This year, the woman that normally organizes the lojman Halloween thingy got fed up with the mean girls and shitty kids and the "Is this soap organic?" parents, so she didn't get things together this year, which I think was a wise move on her part.

So this year, we took the kids up to the yabancı-ridden sector of Zekeriyaköy. There are actually two parts to Zekeriyaköy-- the köy part with wandering fowl and skinny dogs and close-together houses with small yards interspersed with dusty bakkals. Then there's Zenginköy, the other part up on the hill with the expanding outdoor mall and the new villas with big yards and broad, smooth streets and servants' quarters. The street dogs are well-fed and vaccinated and neutered, there aren't any chickens, most everyone speaks English. That's where we go for our pork and smelly cheeses.

And they do Halloween up there. The businesses put out balloons to show they're giving candy. The site director has a map of houses doing the same. There are little kids in costumes and teenagers in costumes and grown-ups in costumes making the rounds. Merriment abounds. Many of the grownups are settled into places that sell wine and cheese, wondering where their kids have gotten to.

So it was different than Halloween like I'm used to, but also the same. Normal somehow, because sometimes if you want to find the "normal" in Istanbul, you have to find the money people. No matter. One day, I hope to be one of the people having wine and cheese, wondering where my kid has gotten to but knowing he's just fine. Even if the wine has a 1,000% tax on it. It'll totally be worth it.

Guess which one's mine?

Then after that, we went to a Halloween party. Turns out a lot of other people I know are into doing Halloween up right. The week before, a friend and I got all crafty and made decorations and a pinata. We also learned that the cool kırtasiye near my house not only has pirate copies of our textbooks before we even officially know the publishers have fucked up yet again, but also cool stuff like glitter and crepe paper and colored pipe cleaners.

The pinata rocked.

So that was cool. The party was kid-friendly, which meant it was exactly like our grown-up parties, but there was also a bowl of punch and games for the kids. The crafty friend had gotten even more crafty around her house, so there was also a super-cool ghost that lit up and cotton spider webs. I kind of refuse to do the costume thing because I'm a dick like that, but I did wear orange tights and a green skirt. I would never wear those in real life so it sort of counts. But most everyone else had cobbled together some sort of costume with the stuff they could find, or had lying around the house.

And LE got to party with the grown ups. He's good at parties. Plus he ate nothing but candy for hours on end-- so much I was afraid he would puke, but he didn't, which was good.

Brave enough to hold the pinata up while kids swung a stick at it.

Scrabbling for candy like 3rd world beggar kids.

Children start getting blurry when there's lots of sugar.

Likes sticking his face in water.

Halloween. It has to be done next year, too, and for however many years we end up here. It's one of those things that makes being a yabancı so much easier. And way more fun.

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!