blog envy

I'm not very satisfied with my blog. Other people's blogs seem, well, cooler. So, in aid of this, I am now going to compose the coolest post ever. Here goes.

First off, you will note this very nice picture, which was done by Rex Hackelberg, and up-and-coming cartoonist whom John Kricfalusi (Ren and Stimpy creator and my recently-elected hero) has taken under his wing. John credits this kid with keeping real cartoony stuff in his heart, and not going for the souless modern Disney-style stuff. I have to agree with John. If you check out John's blog you will see a world of delightful cartoony stuff and the reflections of a man who truly loves cartoons. In fact it's become my favorite thing to read and look at in the past few weeks. I even flirted with the idea of pursuing cartoons as a possible research field. How cool would a PhD in the cultural analysis of cartoons be? But after link-hopping from John K's site, I realized that the world is full of cartoon buffs and though I love cartoons a lot, I KNOW NOTHING.

Anyway- and I hope you are enjoying this extra-cool post- I just thought I would point out one thing about this kid's illustration. Now, don't get me wrong, I think his illustration is lovely, but...



it was even cooler when Chip and Dale were in it.

I will leave you with one more delight culled off John K's website.

I love this.

Now, you make ask, does putting pieces of other blogs which are cool onto my blog make my blog cool?

Yes.

acting with no expectations

Living in Turkey is proving to be an extended lesson in Taoist wisdom. Tao, which to me is a slightly warmer version of Zen, advises above all acceptance, flexibility, and a union with the way things are, rather than trying to force them into what we would like them to be.

This is not my natural way of being but I’ve been practicing for a few years. Before I became a Taoist, however, I am and have always been a person of lists. I like to start a job and complete it, and cross it off. It makes me feel industrious and efficient. But Turkey makes a mockery of my routine. The process of crossing an item off the list has become akin to waiting for an unbearably slow internet connection to stream media content. You watch the bar. You press play. You press pause. You watch the bar. You read "buffering" over and over. You press play and get some incoherent garble. You press pause. You wait.

See, getting something done here doesn't begin with the direct statement of intent of whatever you would like to achieve. It starts with formulas of greeting and welcome, and generally moves on to a glass of tea. The overall atmosphere is not “Let’s get things done” but “Let’s talk about this for a long while, come to no fixed conclusion, and maybe we can talk again some other time.”

I have been trying to book flights for a weekend trip to Istanbul all week. I go to the company's web site and it won't accept my credit card. I know my card is ok, I've used it before with the same company for an online purchase, but for some reason, it just won't work. I mentioned this to a colleague, who advised me that sometimes it doesn’t work, and I should just keep trying. So I did, but to no avail.

I decided to call the airline, which says it's open 24/7, on the English section of its website. I called and was welcomed by a recording, and prompted "For English, press 9." I pressed 9, got a 15 second dose of muzak, was told (in Turkish) to wait, and then looped back to the beginning. I was welcomed, told "for English, press 9," treated to another snippet of a different dead-tune, told to wait, and back to the start again. I tried a variety of responses, ie. pushing different buttons, not pushing any buttons, to escape this mini-samsara, but to no avail.

The next day at work I asked my colleague to call for me. She got through to a real person, explained the situation, and made a reservation for me. The next step, I was told, was to go to a local agent for the airline in order to pay for and collect my ticket. Using your credit or debit card outside of a large company’s internet payment facility requires the physical manifestation of you and the card. Alternatively, under duress, (which I have applied in previous similar situations) they might ask you to fax a copy of your card (which is always illegible), or email a scanned copy of your credit card (great idea!).

So, it happens that last evening I went to see a performance by a Georgian theatre group. The play, which was a quite abstract treatment of “conflict,” and which didn’t seem to impress the audience much, probably due to some very ambiguous scenes of women with headscarves covering their entire heads and faces, ended at about 9.30pm. I mentioned to my friend that I needed to go to a travel agent sometime. Oh, she said, there’s one nearby, let’s go! At 9.30 on a Friday night? you ask. But, yes, the office was open for business. There are no set office hours around here. Shops open and close when they feel like it. If you’re wondering if a certain shop is open, go and check. At last, I thought, the cultural differences are working in my favour!

But it was not to be. After a lot of discussion and explanation, the agent managed to book a reservation for me. I presented my card, but the airline still for some reason would not accept payment. I offered to pay in cash. The agent tried to use the company credit card to book the ticket online, but his card didn’t work either. We all had a good chat about how there must be a problem, we can’t understand it, what bad luck, God knows why this is happening. And I was invited to come back to the office tomorrow to try again. I went home and called my bank, who confirmed that there’s no problem with my card or account, and no record of me trying to use my card.

Incidentally, while I was on hold with my bank, I was waiting for over five minutes, reading an article on the internet, and somehow ended up in a deadzone. After a lot of really great recorded advice about extra services I’m definitely going to try, there was now only silence. Had I been disconnected? I wondered. I tentatively pressed a button. “Recording stopped!” I was told. “To log into your voicemail, press 82.” I don’t know where I was, but I didn’t feel I belonged there. I felt that, like the characters in Being John Malkovich, I had somehow entered some secret zone in the back alleys of corporate infrastructure. So I hung up.

Anyway, I guess I’ll go back to the travel agent later, maybe have a glass of tea, and if the flight to Istanbul comes to me, I will accept it. If not, I will release it. My heart is open as the sky.

excuses excuses

A lot of things have happened. I haven't updated in a while, and you may have been thinking that I proven to be one more person who starts a blog, and then abandons it when the novelty wears off, contributing to the vast net-fill of junked sites. Well, no! I've just been a little busy that's all.

1. My boyfriend came to visit and we trawled about town and took some day trips to nearby lakes, mountains, and a monastery carved into a mountain. We became minor celebrities wherever we went. See I can pass for a Turk (Turks come from various ethnic stocks due to the historical diversity of the region and the empires; some look Eastern European, some look Asiatic, some look Middle-Eastern), but he cannot. Everywhere we went children stared- actually everyone stared. After the initial shock passed, we were treated to a barrage of questions, smiles and general astonishment at our existence. I have to say I felt a little bit like there wasn't room in this town for the both of us. Now he's gone I'm the most interesting foreigner again. Yeah.

2. I went to see a Macedonian modern dance performance. It's part of a "theatre" festival hosting groups from various bordering countries. No details of the different performances are offered in the program; you just turn up and hope for the best. Seems like I got lucky. These Macedonians weren't actors but proper dancers. The production featured well-chosen costumes, fresh micro-beat and clicky music, and the artful use of a camera to project an aerial view of the dancers behind them. It was refreshing to have some non-Turkish input. Diversity is what I miss most about London. It's nice here but it's something of a mono-cultural deal.

3. I went to my friend's house and she cooked enough food for five people. We had borek (feta cheese pastries), a yogurt with carrot and garlic dip, green beans with olive oil and rice, orange cake, semolina pudding, apple-filled cookies, and glass after glass of tea. The Turks are some of the most hospitable people I've met. If you have a way in, ie. you know one person, all of their friends are instantly your friends, and they kiss you on the cheek (if you are of the same sex) and treat you like an old pal the first time they meet you. There are no separate words for colleague, classmate, flatmate- all the people you associate with who are not in a position of authority or dependence to you, are called friends. And friends get looked after. I have never seen anyone eat or drink anything, even gum, without offering it to the people around them. Even a candy bar will be broken into pieces and shared among five people if need be. The important thing is that everyone is included. My students are all so nice to each other- there is little of the cliquiness of American high school and college culture here. There aren't loads of competing "types;" there is just one perceived type: Turkish.

4. I accidently erased all the music off my I-Pod this evening. And I've realized first-hand what the A in apple really stands for. If you don't have an I-Pod the following is probably a ticket to the depths of dullness, but I just gotta complain about this or I won't be able to go to sleep for the knot of regret in my stomach, which has lately replaced the numbness of denial. See, I opened up I-Tunes and it presented me with an option to automatically update my I-Pod with my I-Tunes library. Without thinking too much about it, it sounded like a good idea, so I said ok. Then, without further warning, it erased everything that was on my I-Pod that wasn't in my library- like 90% of my music. Design flaw you might think. But I'm pretty sure it's a deliberate design trap. People like me, who have (had) perfected their I-Pod, filled it up with all their favorite music, spent countless hours creating playlists and labeling and ordering all the tracks, make Apple no further profit. But poor suckers like me who so easily and without a warning message lose all their music have to start over again. I guess Apple is hoping I will replace my lost music at the I-Tunes music store. Well they can fuck off. And another thing. I have done a little research and found that the newest version of I-Tunes doesn't allow for the automatic update option to be switched off. This ensures two things - that you can't use third-party software like I-pod Rip to get music off your I-Pod and onto a computer where you can share it, and that you risk wiping your I-pod every time you plug it into a computer that doesn't have all the music on it that you have on your I-pod. Well, luckily out of sheer laziness I never updated to version 7, and I never will. So in making one error, I became aware of a second more grave error in time to avoid it. I guess the moral of the story is don't fool around with stuff if you don't actually know what you're doing. But I always operate like that, and even though it leads me to do careless things sometimes, it still feels like a good approach for some reason. I like fooling around with stuff.

5. My computer knows it's in Turkey. Ok, it's probably more accurate to say that some web sites, like google and blogger, know when I open them from Turkey. But I get pleasure from personifying my computer. It makes me feel almost as it there's more than one American in this town. Actually my computer seems more British. Probably because I bought her at PC World. Right. Well I better go to bed. But I just want to add that although blogger knows that I am in Turkey, it doesn't know that I don't speak Turkish very well, so it's just a big pain in the ass when I want to update my blog and everything is in Turkish. Get it right blogger. I'm on my guard with all you blood-sucking, money-grubbing, music-eating companies from now on.

There. That ought to placate the yahbiquette-starved masses for a while.