The Return of the Blog

Ok, I admitted in my last post that I was a bad blogger, but this is getting ridiculous. I haven't written anything since September, and I decided it's either recommit or delete. And well, here I am.

The trouble with me is I don't do what I really want to do. I want to do lots of things: be a great writer, have my own farm, blog regularly, take pictures, bake my own bread, actually bake my own everything (maybe have my own little line of cute cupcakes and cookies - I would love that). Or... you know be an academic, learn Slovak, start painting again, or pick up the banjo. Today I was thinking that instead of continuing to agonize over the decision to start or not to start a PhD (this has been going on for years), I should just become like a serial Master's student. I did one in comparative lit., but what if I do one next in history, then sociology, then philosophy. Or maybe I should do the philosophy first... I have trouble making decisions. Actually my main trouble is I make a decision, tell everyone, and then change my mind. It's just the way I am. As my friends and family have learned. Thus, they take every decision I make with a full tablespoon of salt. And really, it's not that I don't do what I really want to do, because if I really wanted to, I would do it, right? So I must not actually want to do it. What I actually want to do must be this- spending most of my free time reading in bed, listening to music, and cooking. It's not a bad life really.

My sister is mainly responsible for The Return of the Blog. She gave me a wicked pep talk and apparently likes my blog entries- and doesn't think they're just some self-reflective crap. Anyway, I'm going to continue- at least once a week, to launch my observations and neuroses here. And I'm going to try not to worry about if I sound too British or too American. I do feel that I'm getting a little more American the closer we get to moving to New York. Then I'll no doubt be writing lots of posts about New York and London, how they're similar, how their different. I can't wait to be able to do that properly. I reckon I'm sounding rather British at this point. But what if I say hell yeah, moving to the city is going to rock!

Who am I?

Ok, this is definitely self-reflective crap. So I'll go now. Gotta heat up the kale curry I made and prepare to defend the existence of kale curry to meat-eating boyfriend.

i am a bad blogger

Since I last blogged, I have moved to a new level of professionalism in my EFL "career." That is, I can now plan a lesson in five minutes, and basically blag my way through any lesson simply through my charming personality. So I guess you could say I'm a bad blogger, but a better blagger. (This is the kind of humor that flies with foreign language students; I seem to have found my niche).

The weekend was a wicked joint "big 30" blowout with Tilly. All the classic tunes were there, and a great time was had by all, followed by the Sunday of 12 bottles of champagne. What a frivolous and beautiful day, the pinnacle of which was when three middle-aged dudes walked by the pub and sparked a spontaneous cry of approval from our crammed picnic table (crammed with drunk idiots that is). The guys didn't seem to mind, they just gave a little smile and strutted on.

August provided an amazing break in New York, trawling through City, Upstate, and really really Upstate. It was a dream of shopping, riding bikes, swimming in a lake, canoeing, hiking, running through sprinklers in the back yard, BBQ's and babies. I went totally American and experienced a fierce pull towards NYC, all that good pizza, all them crazies, big tough Latina taxi drivers. You gotta love it. Can we cue Gonzo from the Muppet Movie please... Close to my soul, and yet so far away. I'm going to go back there someday.

FYI, That's the New York State coat of Arms. And, I just learned that the State Fossil of NYS is the sea scorpion. If you needed another reason to love it.

I'm back in London

Not quite two weeks back in the big smoke and Trabzon already feels like a distant memory. It's amazing how quickly I reverted back to London life. The five minute stroll to my office in Turkey has been usurped by running for the bus, my glasses of tea are now paper cups with plastic lids, my hours of leisure time are now reduced to the weekend, my olives and cheese have become eggs and beans. I am teaching more for less money, and summertime ended the day I left Trabzon. Through the drizzly film of the 243's windows each morning, cinematically soundtracked by my I-Pod; (I'm currently on a bluegrass binge), I observe rowdy youths, showcase crazies, armies of workers, and battered-looking hipsters who have clearly not been to bed. I am back in a land where construction sites are carefully sealed off from the public and traffic rules are obeyed. In Turkey I got used to navigating moving bulldozers in the middle of pedestrianized streets, and habitually checking for scooters on the sidewalk. Now I find myself back in the banal safety of England. Grey church steeples are matched by a gloomy sky and pub signs swing and creak in gusts of wind. There's a lot of things they don't have in Turkey: chavs for example, or decent graffiti. You wouldn't think I would have missed such things, or laugh when my umbrella gets pulled inside out by the wind. But I did, and I do; it's nice to be back.

self-inflicted

Gosh it's been a while since I blogged. As my time in Turkey draws to a close, (six days to go), I've been plagued by this nagging feeling that I should write a post that will elegantly encapsulate my experiences here on the Eastern reaches of the Black Sea coast. But I can't. The thing is, so many little things have happened, which I want to remember and launch into the blogospehere for all eternity. The said theoretical eternity may bring up complex metaphysical questions, but suffice it too say that I should have written about them as they came along, instead of leaving them all to the last minute. Isn't that always the way with me.

Tonight I had dinner with some new friends. They are an old couple who teach in the same department at the university- urban planning - and throughout dinner their smiles and carefully measured words, and appealingly open-ended questions- "What is America like?" - made me want to volunteer to be their adopted granddaughter. The Professor invited me to dinner to say thank you for editing some papers for him. I must admit I expected it to be a boring duty-driven evening, but it turned out to be very pleasant. A little glimpse of them, a little promise of an unlikely friendship, and then the kind of slightly awkward goodbye that comes from the unspoken fact that we will not see each other again, nor keep in touch, nor even make empty gestures about keeping in touch. The Professor's wife held my hand warmly, and fretted about it being cold. (The Turks have a deep-seated fear of catching cold - drafts and chills of all forms are carefully avoided - to the point that people will not open windows more than a crack on a suffocatingly hot bus). I told her I was fine, and she told me to go straight in and warm up. Such a lovely caring nature is typical of the Turks; I will miss being treated so well when I get back to England- where affection appears to be shown through insults. Right?

Last weekend I went to Sinop with a colleague, her daughter, her mother, her aunt, and a bunch of pensioners on a packed and rowdy bus. It was, as I expected, both interesting and trying. (At several points I was made to dance in the aisle of the moving bus, and at one point a microphone was proffered with the instruction to sing "a foreign song.") These Black Sea Turks are so enthusiastic and fun-loving it's amazing - they get up to all kinds of embarrassing and crazy antics, and without alcohol! I don't really relish group tours but I didn't want to miss the chance to see more of the Black Sea. Sinop is one of the longest continually inhabited cities on the coast, about half-way between Istanbul and Trabzon. And there were a lot of strange sights to behold. We toured the famous Sinop prison, which was not that interesting to me and rather scary. But what made it worthwhile was the surrounding fortifications, walls built by the Seljuk Turks incorporating Greek ruins. You could literally see classical pillars sliced up like carrots and laid into the walls. No one seemed that interested in this part, but I was haunted by the sense of so much history built on top of and cannibalizing itself through the ages. You get that feeling a lot in Turkey.

In Trabzon, in fact, I am eerily conscious of the weight of its history, which remains for the most part invisible. This is an ancient settlement, and yet almost everything, apart from a handful of mosques and a caravansary, looks to have been built in the past fifty years. Trabzon is truthfully not very attractive. Fighting for ground between the mountains and the Black Sea, the architecture is almost all of the 1960's-style block variety. But I am haunted by the idea that it was a different place 100 years ago, different not only in the appearance of its buildings, but with different people and a different culture. Until the aftermath of WWI and the formation of the Turkish Republic, this whole region was a Pontic Greek stronghold - descendants of Byzantine Greeks who never left- and now, due to deeply contested historic events, read "relocations" and "population exchanges", almost all of them are gone. The thing that makes the history of this region so haunting is that no one talks about it. The people around here don't seem to want to reflect on the past. Many old buildings were destroyed to make way for six and seven-story apartment blocks, which seem out-of-place in a city of about 200,000. The main area of town has some half-dead Ottoman wooden houses whose days appear to be numbered, and, out of sight, hidden, there remain some crumbling ruins of Byzantine churches, Greek villas, and Orthodox monasteries, which almost none of the locals know or care about, which aren't mentioned in any tour guides, and which I, annoyingly, haven't been that successful in finding. I've read that one of the monasteries in the hills above the city is currently in use as a barn, but if you ask the farmer nicely, he might remove the hay and let you see the frescoes.

In any case, I have that predictable feeling that I haven't made the best use of my time here, that there's more to see that I've missed. So I'll be spending Saturday visiting mosques that used to be churches that may have been temples before that, and gulping down the last glasses for who knows how long, of fragrant black tea grown not fifty miles away.

heroic goats save the South

Another reason to celebrate my favorite animal...

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.