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A little loony, you say? That’s the falling in I mentioned previously. When I was younger, I used to read every book, no matter how much I liked or hated it. I refused to put it down. A few years ago, I decided life was too short and started a limit of 100 pages. If I was still not into the book by page 100, I was putting it down, no matter who sang its praises. The 100-page limit worked well for me. It relieved me of having to read books that I truly detested and gave me room to get into the books I may not have otherwise enjoyed. I haven’t read a really thick book since the summer of my Freshman year. That summer, I read The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged back to back. 1,800 pages of Ayn Rand is more than any sane person should ever have to endure. But I was on a roll. I devoured the books. Since that summer, I might have read a 400 or 500-page book but nothing in the vicinity the Rand novels. After both my friends Tera and Jenn, who have literary choices that I respect, told me I had to (had to) read I Know This Much is True, Wally Lamb’s second book, I finally stopped fighting myself and bought the book. I had read his first, She’s Come Undone, on a plane ride to London and finished it in my room in London where I cried for way longer that I’d like to admit. I was reluctant to read anything else by Lamb, I wasn’t prepared for the amount of crying 890 pages could bring. My friend Jenn said to force my way through the beginning if I needed to because it was worth it. I reset my 100-page limit to 500. If by page 500, I still wasn’t into it, I would put it down, no matter what Jenn or Tera said. What I wasn’t prepared for was how hard it had become to read a 900-page book since the last time I tried it. Days passed and I read in all my free time but I wasn’t making progress fast enough. My bookmark showed that I wasn’t even a third way through. Was the book simply not captivating enough or had my ability to read dwindled? Well, I fell into the book around page 480. At that point, I barely functioned outside reading the book. I woke up, worked and then read at lunch. I worked some more and then, as soon as my day was over, I read and read until my eyes hurt. After a long week of reading, I have finally finished the novel. I didn’t shed one tear and it was fantastic. Maybe my 100-page rule should vary with the size of the book after all.
I told myself that the rules were such that I wasn’t allowed to take body parts or personality traits and plug them into the rest of me. If I liked someone’s something, I had to completely change places with that person. Not only did I get their whole body, but I got all their personal issues, emotions, family, psychological state of mind, past, living status, job and anything else you can think of. I basically forced myself to choose between me and this random (or in some cases not so random) person. Yeah, I got to have their small nose or blue eyes, but was I ready to also have their eating disorder? How about the disinterested mom? Was I willing to give up all of who I am to look like this person? It was my way of forcing myself to face the fact that people don’t come in pieces. You want a part, you get the whole thing. How do you like them apples? In fifteen years, I’ve never met one person I was willing to change places with. I don’t know if it was the fact that I wasn’t willing to give up certain aspects of who I am of my life or the fact that I tend to favor the known over the unknown. Looking at a woman walking down the street, I can see she has pretty hair or a size-2 figure, but I can’t see what goes on in her head or how much she suffers daily. With me, at least I know what I’m getting. Or maybe I was finally growing to like myself. In a weird way, the game’s done a lot to improve my self-esteem.
I used to think that was a blogger problem. That everyone linked to the same people, etc. Two days ago, I decided that it was really my fault. There are millions of bloggers out there and many of them have never even heard of the list of twenty and do not link to any of the sites. The links they have are also interesting and refreshing new voices that I am delighted to read. Another major change in the last four years has been in “topical” blogging. There are many blogs out there that are centered around a certain interest, philosophy, or area of expertise. These are fantastically interesting to me. Someone’s already doing all the research and showing me the latest and most interesting information on a subject matter. For some reason, I never went out there to look for these sites before but I must say that I absolutely love them. So I’ve spent the last few days looking all over the net and trying to find new sites. I am interested in new voices, thought-provoking entries. I have a varied set of interests: anywhere from art to linguistics to physics to just about anything you can imagine. And of course books and photography.
I don’t think too often about having left Istanbul to live in the United States. I love Istanbul and I am proud to be Turkish but I always knew that I didn’t belong there. There were many variables which limited my life and choices extensively when I lived in Istanbul. While Pittsburgh wasn’t the easiest city to get used to after Istanbul, the college environment kept me busy and entertained. However, moving to New York fit like a glove. The pace of the city is very similar to Istanbul and I already knew many people from either Carnegie Mellon or Istanbul. Within weeks, I also made a group of friends from work. Everything in the city felt like second nature to me; I didn’t have to go through an adjustment period. The subway was extremely easy to navigate, even for a navigational moron like me. Finding like-minded people was never a problem and, thankfully, neither was money. Before the Teach For America insanity, I had arranged to reduce my Wall Street job a part-time arrangement for two years. I went to work Wednesday through Friday and volunteered on Mondays and Tuesdays. Betweeen the bookstore and NYSD I made friends outside the technical and financial industry. I took classes at NYU, the New School, and other smaller schools all over the city. At one point, I was taking eight classes, volunteering in four different places, and doing my regular job. That was the winter I got engaged and made Vice President. It was also the winter I decided to quit my job and do something more purposeful with my life. Thanks to those two years, I took full advantage of being in New York. I went to book readings, to the opera, to plays, to movies, to art shows, and many museums. I made new friends and walked all over the city. During the soul-wrenching months Jake and I fantasized about leaving the city. We were tired of the insane lifestyle we lived. We were both miserable at work. We had had a long, rainy, and dark winter. I wanted a house. At least a bigger apartment with a normal bathroom and a normal kitchen. I wanted to travel more and see the United States. I wanted babies. I wanted a yard. I didn’t even know what I wanted, I just wanted out of New York. I was tired. I was worn out. I was ready to move on to a different life. Try something else. Anything else. We were excited to leave New York. We paid a lot of money to get out of our lease. We had long goodbyes with friends. We packed up seven years of accumulated junk into 70+ boxes and moved it all to Boston. We bought a car and drove all around the country. We hadn’t taken a real vacation in seven years, besides the honeymoon. We took four months off. We drove from Boston to Florida, Florida to Atlanta, to New Orleans, through the Blue Ridge Parkway. We went to the Cayman Islands and went diving for the first time. We vacationed in the South of Turkey with my family to celebrate my dad’s sixtieth birthday. We came back to Boston and drove all over the midwest and the west coast for the next five weeks. We saw over thirty states. We had the best summer of my life. We picked the new city we were going to live in randomly from the map and came here and found an apartment and a job. We settled in. We officially had a new home. A new chapter in our lives. Everything should have been great. We did all that we wanted to and more. We were able to find a job to sustain the new life we wanted to start. We have a real kitchen and two real bathrooms. We have pools, hot tubs, movie theater, and gyms. Free cooking lessons. Free pilates and yoga. Life is much more relaxed and we live minutes from the most beautiful beaches in the country. Yet, I miss New York. Yet, it doesn’t feel like home here. I was really worried that five days in New York would make my homesickness so strong that I wouldn’t want to come back. And it did. For the first two days, all I could think of was moving back there. I loved the subway. I loved the streets. The people. The diversity. I simply belonged there. And then the weather turned bad. It poured and poured. I went down to my old job and visited some of my friends. I saw the life they live. I saw the sacrifices they make to earn the money they earn. I remembered the reasons I wanted to leave. I remembered the downsides of being in the city. Suddenly, my intense yearning to be back became more like a fondness for a place I love. A place that will forever be in my heart. A place I will return to time after time. A place that will forever feel like home. But a life I am no longer willing to live.
Well, the sun stayed up and we went down to the Embarcadero. It turns out the trees were magnificent and I took several hundred shots. When we came home, I found the site and realized we missed two of the thirty “trees” and that some of my pictures got corrupted. Some turned out way too blurry either due to too much movement or bad photography skills. All of which means I’ll have to go back down there and take some more shots soon. Here are the ones I’ve taken so far. Feel free to let me know which ones you like more and which ones you think I should reshoot. (Yes, I do know that they could all be better.) The installation reminded me of the cows that had taken over New York a few years ago. Since they were spread all over town, every now and then we’d run into a neat one and stop to take notice. The trees here are right next to each other which makes it more and less pleasant at the same time. I guess it’s more reasonable this way in San Diego since it’s much less of a pedestrian city than New York. Well, I am off to New York in a few hours. Will try to update from there.
Most of the programs are interesting, provocative, funny and informative. However, there were several instances during the Randi Rhodes Show that I thought she was being obnoxious and I didn’t appreciate that she hung up on several people while they were still talking. Just because there are ranting people on the other side doesn’t mean we have to rant as well. I feel like it’s important to stay dignified, especially in the presence of rudeness. Leaving for New York tomorrow! (where I can listen to Air America on the actual radio) I have mixed emotions. Part of me hopes that I realize I don’t miss it as much as I do. We’ll see… |
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