Every snowflake is unique,
The singular result
Of all the environmental agents
Acting around and upon the instant of
Its birth beneath a cloud.

(I take the speaker at their word,
neither knowing the how nor having the will
to dispute such an unqualified assertion.

I set the question aside and accept -
It's all that I am able to do.)

Pushed to the left or the right
On shifting winds that carry
Some aloft rising past others
Fast finding the packed
Ranks of the fallen,

Each one no doubt asserts
The importance of identity
In carving one's own way
In our wintery descent
Through life.

(And yet I will ask
of what possible practical use
is being unique when in the end
they all act the same?)

For those seeking creatitivity

The following article reaffirmed much of what I suspected, and echoed some of what I had heard just this week. I highly recommend it.

WSJ article on creativity.

Enjoy!

I fear my future, for all the best reasons.

A few observations upon concluding a long and not particularly point-ful day:

I was presented this morning with a t-shirt upon which was printed in Turkish "This is what a feminist looks like." One of my more amazing students, (I have had quite a few, and this one is indeed a gem,) approached me yesterday after class and prefaced her speech with, "As you may know, tomorrow is international women's day," and as it turns out, I am a sucker for any request coming from an English language learner that begins with the phrase, "As you may know."

That aside, though, I would have agreed anyway, simply because I am convinced that women's issues are one of the biggest issues of our time, and a number of other issues that we spend a lot of our time whinging about would be best approached by addressing the issue of gender inequity first.

In any case, I was happy to wear the t-shirt, and it did indeed cause at least one or two comments from male students, and it did promote a small bit of dialogue, which I imagine was the intent.

If anyone cares, below are the links to the article and video which we covered in class today, which basically reflects my point of view on this subject, which I think, despite all the noise made about it, is still a secondary issue even in the west, and is REALLY a nearly non-issue in the rest of the world, where it ought to be a front-burner issue.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/sheryl_wudunn_our_century_s_greatest_injustice.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/23/magazine/23Women-t.html?pagewanted=all

Enjoy!

This evening, then, I was scheduled to shoot some pool with one of the professors in the International Relations department. He and I, (his name is Mike, by the way,) have a rare resonance of thought that seems to occur (at least for me,) once in every 5 years. He is one of those rare people who not only happens to spend about 97% of his time talking about topics that are extremely interesting to me simply because that is what is deeply interesting to him, but spends the other 2% of his time apologizing for possibly boring me with his meandering stories backpacking across Africa and motorcycling across India. (The missing 1% is spent ordering beer, for those of you who are anal about math.)

The stories about trying to get across the border of Georgia on the night of the attempted coup against Gorbachev are, of course, interesting, but the fact that all these stories are set in the frame of his relating how he came upon a theory that may utterly upset the current accepted paradigms of International Relations lends it a whole extra dimension.

Incidentally, I may or may not have touched upon the current lady-friend in previous posts - but in any case, when I mentioned Mike's name to her one evening, she did a double-take and said - "Really? You know that guy? He's famous, you know. We all had to read his stuff in grad school." I had no inkling of this, previously. I just thought he was an awfully nice and self-effacing guy who was pretty good at playing pool and had a lot of interesting stories to tell. Just goes to show - you never know who the hell you might be talking to.

So moving on half a step from there - I confided in Mike a year or so ago that I was thinking of changing fields - that English had been great, but I wanted to get into history or IR, and since then he has periodically enquired, and been encouraging me to make the jump, which leaves me asking myself what it is I am waiting for.

I have known for some time that teaching English was not for me. Teaching literature, maybe, but that's not what I am currently doing. I'm teaching the language itself, and while that has been an experience, I am getting somewhat tired of it. And of all the things that call to me, international relations is, depending on the day, in the top 3.

Yet I find myself crippled by a past of (relative) poverty, and a pathetic addiction to the still new creature comforts with which I find myself now surrounded. I spent a number of years with rather little money, and feeling as though my entire future would continue to consist of a constant sense of continual constriction occurring around the area of my metaphorical financial neck. I worried, (and to some extent, out of habit, still do,) about every hamburger and every coffee and every small luxury I for myself purchase.

I saw in front of me a brief chance at a predictable life of growing career security in the US, which I insensibly turned my back on in order to go overseas and pursue learning foreign languages and gaining a broader, more worldly perspective, at which point the financial future question was again brought into sharp relief, as I struggled from month to month to make the stateside payments on time to the student loan behemoth that from a lofty financial perch looked down upon my small, piddling, profit-less life, demanding monthly tribute.

All of which means I am reluctant to now make the pivot to a new stage in my life, because it means deserting the newly attained relative security and financial comfort (I did use the word relative!) that my current job entails, and returning to the grind of being a poor, (though scholarshipped and stipended,) student. I mean, it is only now, for the first time in . . . EVER . . . I finally find myself within sight of the end of my burden of long-term debt - the finish line. If all goes well, within 5 months from today, give or take a week or two, I will be debt free. For the first time in 14 years I will need pay no debt incurred prior to the last 30 days. I will be, again, at ZERO - but not really.

Financially I will, at long last, be back to ZERO. But in every other way, it is true, my pockets are now full. I have, over the past 14 years, got my first masters degree. It may not be much, or from a great school, but I have used it exactly as I had planned to - as a stepping stone to a better career, and perhaps a second masters degree. I have, at long last, possibly met my first real friend since university. In fact, I may have met two of them. It is strange for me to say - strange for me to confess - I don't bond with many people - in fact, if I had to list the drawbacks of being so fabulously me, inability to meet people I like would be number 1 - and yet, I suspect that I may have in this city met 2 people, two male friends, I like very much. Also, in the past 14 years I have had the experiences that have allowed me to begin a novel - and I now, for all my relative poverty, feel rich with experiences, and vitality, and interest in life. I can honestly say, despite a FUCKING WRENCING couple of years there, I feel as though for the first time in my life, I am more completely ME than I have been or could have been, at any time in past 20 years - fuckit - my whole life.

My conflict over what to do in the future stems from the fact that I have had, all my life, two competing visions to pursue - two competing ideals of self-creation. (WARNING: NO APOLOGIES WILL BE MADE FOR OVER-ROMANTICIZED BULLSHIT IN THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPH. THE WORD "IDEAL" WAS INTENTIONALLY EMPLOYED TO CAUSE THE READER TO NOT BE OVERLY RELIANT ON A REALISTIC FRAME OF REFERENCE WHEN READING THE FOLLOWING DESCRIPTION.) I have had, throughout most of my life, at least two competing visions of what I should pursue. One was, as they put it in Pulp Fiction, to be "like Cain, in kung-fu. I will simply walk the earth." I recall expressing this sentiment to Stephen, my best friend from high school, as a desire to be leathered from the sun, having only enough possessions to get by, and live humbly, travelling the earth, learning everything I could. The second, other, contradictory ideal I had once was to be a wealthy man, who has the ability, the option, to taste of the best in life, wear the best suits, travel to the best places, stay at the best resorts, dive at the best spots, drink the most liquor, eat the choicest foods, fuck the finest ladies, and converse with the most scintillating intelligentsia. I assume you see the conflict, there.

I nearly joined the merchant marine once. I wanted to travel, and experience life at its most raw.

I currently have a drawer of nothing but scarves. I match them artfully with my shoes and belts. I really have a splendid variety of fashionable shoes these days. I have two different pairs of two-toned wingtips. They are so gorgeous I think I may have inspired an orgasm in girl just by walking past her. Ok - totally fantastically hyperboling - there's not a shred of truth in that - I have yet to even get a single unsolicited comment on my shoes from anyone other than my girlfriend - but that's just cuz they are utter philistines. But even utter philistines can't help commenting on the incredibly sexy coats I wear.

I worked in construction periodically for years - my hands turned into crabby calloused claws - I kept returning to it because it was the best paying job that was hassle-free to come by, and because it kept me fit, and because . . . it suited my fantasy of learning of the roots of life by studying the ways of the down and out and drug-addicted people who populate that particular field.

I go shopping now days for antiques. In particular I favor brass and copperware, and I occasionally pick up the odd bit of ephemera for fun - an old accounting ledger to use as a journal - I'm currently looking for an interesting head of an antique cane to substitute for the boring umbrella handle I currently suffer with.

A couple of times a week, and every Friday, I practice or teach the techniques of physically damaging another person's body, and leaving them in a broken pulp. Common questions involve the advisability of head-butting, and the legality of eye-gouging. In case you were wondering, most of my answers tend to end with utilizing knees to the midsection - not that you asked.

And so I recognize that what began when I was a small child, and first caught my attention as an adolescent, which is to say the dual urge to a life of grit and humility or a life of style and refinement, have thus far compromised, and produced the life I have now - a life of silly, superficial concerns mixed with blood-in-the-teeth immediacy. Yet no matter how much I stare at what has come before, I cannot rid myself of my apprehension of the stages that are yet to come.

I will not hate Starbucks.

I sat myself today in a starbux, across from the door, out of which I could see across the Golden Horn and to the Hagia Sophia which rises on the far side, outlined against the grey sky. The ferries ply the water between me and it, and I sit, and read, and look out across the water and up to the ancient monument, and then back to the working men selling breads or grilled fish on the street, then the tourists that come between us, then back to my book.

Today I am reading, today I am finishing, today I will finish, today I have finished Rousseau's Social Contract. If I had it to do over again, I would read a summary - most of his ideas do not benefit from his wording of them, and in too many places the prejudices peculiar to him and his age shine through too clearly, contrast too vividly with those of our own age to allow my eyes and brain to float by them without noticing.

I have, however, made a list of the books that I will read over the next few years, and having made such a goal, absent a compelling reason to change, I will stick with it. After all - were it not for this list, and my semi-irrational devotion to it, I would not have begun reading John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, which by chance made me aware of a thinker whose ideas are not so close to my own as to be redundant, nor so far as to provoke outrage, thus falling in that fertile middle ground where I find my own conceptions of things questioned and alternatives proposed, all of which is couched in language that is clear, and easy to read. It does, however, suffer the same fault as Rousseau, in that it displays its prejudices and assumptions toward Christian and Western society a bit too clearly to escape notice by the western reader.

In looking through the glass door at the Hagia Sophia outside, the contrast between the white letters "STARBUCKS COFFEE" stenciled upon the glass, and the towering antiquity seen through it gave me pause - a moment suspended between the modern and the ancient, between the quotidian, even crass, and the sublime.

Now for fact: I chide myself slightly for coming into starbucks. In this environment of mood music and furniture identical to 57 other locations in a 20 block radius, I ask myself why I came here, of all places here, to this safety base of American/globalized aesthetic and cheap commercial presentation. I asked myself this question in earnest as I paused from my book, and for better or worse I found my answer.

I came here for the value for my money. The fact is that I can buy here for one lira more a larger amount of quite pleasant coffee than anywhere else, while accessing free internet. Thus, I do not see equivalent value in going to a more "authentic" locale. I ask value for my money - and my time: in flavor and taste, in amount, in not being disturbed by overly-friendly intruders-into my moment. One may question my tastes or my misanthropy, but my tastes being what they are, I shall no longer apologize for patronizing a global enterprise simply because it is a global enterprise.

Having articulated my requirements, I no longer see a disharmony between the elements. As much as I appreciate the ageless beauty of the Hagia Sophia, and turn my eyes that direction when I wish for a tiny jolt of awe, and similarly enjoy the serious subject matter of eternal questions of governance at which Rousseau all too ponderously tilts; just so, are not coffee and comfort and solitude of equal value to these? And why should I treat with distaste that which in truth I love, except that I am aping not just the values of others, but worse, an unarticulated impression of the values of others?

A Christmas to Remember

It has to be said, again and again, if for no other reason than how fucking true it is, that there is nothing in life that I can think of which could compare to waking up on a weekend morning to find oneself wrapped round in the arms of a lover. The warmth, the closeness, the drowsiness, all the kindly characteristics of a morning's bed, plus all the cuddling potential and earthy delight of another body and smiling face to see in the beginnings of your day.

How much more so if the day in question be Christmas, and Christmas be a day you don't despise. As for me, I do despise Christmas, normally, but for one reason or another this Christmas left me feeling minorly . . . Christmasy.

On Christmas eve I and Oyku went out to dinner with a small gathering of work friends of mine, and we had a lovely dinner-and-drinks time of it. The atmosphere was great, the people were awesome, the food was fantastic . . . the only thing that could have been improved upon might be the prices, and I am only recently mature enough to realize that if all the other factors are fine, 'twould be idiocy to ruin such a rare time with worry concerning pecuniary particulars.

We even had a bit of salacious gossip to talk about, given that the night before last had been a workplace holiday party which resulted in a largish number of tipsy people corralled on a bus home at midnight, during which trip someone in the front, (thank heavens not from our department,) vomited all over himself, and then passed out (classy!!) after covering his vomit-covered self with his suit jacket, (true class = sparing others the sight of your vomit, by sacrificing your suit jacket to it,) and a simultaneously-conducted minor dispute over the degree to which it is socially acceptable for drunken middle-aged gay men who suffer from Aspergers to repeatedly make sexualized comments (and noises) to straight Turkish men 20 years their junior in front of their wives, (and a bus-load of their colleagues.)

As it happened, I was the one who asked the man in question if perhaps he was being obnoxious. He acknowledged that he was indeed being obnoxious, but then, as drunk people often do, decided to double-down on the situation, and loudly enquired why it was that straight men liked to see lesbians when watching porn, but not gays, as two vaginas together was ok, but seeing two cocks together was not. I expressed the view that our personal-porn preferences didn't really require discussion in front of a busload of our colleagues. This did not, however, serve to dissuade him, as he continued to rail against the injustice of it, and how intolerant people "need to realize this is the 21st century!"

He then told me I was known as a Don Juan, and asked why it was that if I saw a girl, I might tell her she had nice breasts, but he couldn't tell a boy he found him attractive. I was briefly at a loss for how to respond to any of this, belatedly realizing that I was apparently ill-informed of work-place mores in the 21st century, and had been displaying far too much restraint in neglecting to comment freely on the breasts of the young ladies around me. Feeling some shame at how out-of-touch I seem to have become, I could only muster the pathetic answer that He would have to excuse me, as I for one simply didn't feel comfortable commenting on a woman's breasts until at least the fourth email. This brought some snickers from the assembled gallery, and I overheard a comment from one colleague that they were glad to finally learn the accepted time to bring that up.

I was then queried pugnaciously on how I would react if a gay man came up and flirted with me, at which point a gay colleague from the back spoke up to say that he flirted with me nearly daily, and would recommend it. I said I thought everyone had the right to flirt, but that perhaps flirting ought to begin with some nice comments about John Hurt's performance in "Krapp's Last Tape," or something about Andrew Lloyd Webber, or have you read any of so-and-so. I mean - must we jump immediately to making small moaning noises and commenting on the skin-tone of our intended fun-bun? I mean, a little bit of taste, subtlety, and class might let one play the flirt-fun game a lot longer and . . . more effectively . . . than overtly sexualized comments directed toward someone who you had met 3 times before, in the presence of his wife.

In any case - the bus having arrived at my neighborhood, I took my leave and with my friend and companion to the dinner, (a certain Finbar - a fine Irish-American lad,)wandered up the hill and home.

The next day, in a fit of uncertainty regarding how the previous evening had occurred, I apologized to a couple of the nearest spectators, if I had in any way caused them discomfort. They responded that A. it was fun, B. it was a bit weird, but maybe necessary, C. they didn't enjoy it, but I only said what everyone else was thinking. So I felt . . . relieved.

I found out two days later at the Christmas eve dinner that after I exited the bus he began more vigorously voicing negative viewpoints of my self and character, until one of those nearby told him that to say such things now was cowardly, and they didn't want to hear any more about it, and such things should be said to a person's face, not in their absence. I still don't know precisely what was said, as I only ascertained that nothing had been said that would possibly impact on me professionally - I was assured it was all of a personal and subjective nature, and so found myself quite happy to let it all go.

So, after catching up on gossip, and a smashing Christmas eve dinner, and good conversation, followed by a good sleep, I woke in Oyku's arms. After a good half-hour of drifting to the edge of sleep and back again, I wormed from under her arm and out of bed, and went to the kitchen and made coffee. Then I opened the trap door in the ceiling that leads through to the roof. Taking a red fleece blanket, I plucked some red fibers, and rubbed them into the wood grain along the edge of the trapdoor opening till they hung down like a small patch of fine red hairs. I then took a boot and wet the sole so that, pressing it down on the table beneath the trapdoor it left a distinct print. Then I took Oyku's present, and hid it under the leaves of the largest potted plant, which is the size of a small tree.

I woke her with urgency, telling her this had never happened before, and to come quickly. I showed her where someone had broken into the house, and left red fibers there - which must have meant they were wearing a red jacket, and there was even a bootprint! She opined in amazement that we must call the police, and I agreed, but then I gasped in surprise to discover that . . . the intruder had left a present for her. A look of uncomprehension possibly unmatched in modern times was soon followed by a smile of epic proportions and big hugs.

After unwrapping the present, we went back to bed and watched Baz Luhrman's "Romeo and Juliet." It is a movie I am fond of - more for stylistic reasons than anything literary - though I do enjoy the turns of certain phrases.

That afternoon we went to a piano concert in the grand bazaar, and mocked the piano-player's grandiose gestures to the crowd, and had a lovely time amongst the mountains of free snacks they were handing out - it was a cold day, and a lovely one. I don't know of another Christmas I have enjoyed quite as much as this one.

This scrooge, this Christmas, says "Bah-Hah!" And may God bless us, each and every one.

The fraying of the soul

Frankly, for all my wahooting about how utterly fucking lovely my fucking life is, I must also say that on some winter days I find myself followed by a vague sense of dread – a feeling that something is pending im and I won’t know what until it whomps me. Like maybe my job is about to be pulled out from under me due to my own fantastically audacious ineptitude, or my bank account is going to run dry, or the police . . . fuck, I don’t know. I just feel some days as though something is waiting in the wings for me and will descend on my head and all I’ll be able to say is . . . “I really should have seen that coming.”

Perhaps it is winter. Perhaps it is the antidepressants fucking with me. Perhaps it is . . . the sense that something is slowly grinding on in my soul till one day I will find a hole that will fray from the inside till only tatters are left to go down to the grave with.

It’s like tooth decay, but less painful an ache – and on most days I don’t even know or care or am less aware of what it is that lies inside along the length of my soul’s spine.

I no longer wear a harness on my heart, and my mind aches for it at times, especially when the lather rises and foam gathers along the edge of the saddle for the endless running and running that my mind must do after all that it sees and the desires it needs and for that I don’t trust it because this horse will itself kill in running as it has no more sense than that.