I have a good reason for not having updated in over a week.
We have spent the last week or so trying to find a way to get out of our current lease. We’ve been wanting to move out of New York for a while and now that there’s no specific obligations tying us down, we thought it would definitely be a waste of money to keep paying our exuberant rent.
It took a bit of creativity and a lot of money, but we broke our lease. We’re leaving in less than two weeks. The minute after we made the decision, we started packing. A week later, we’re still packing and we got a ways to go. We’ve been in our current apartment for seven years. One accumulates quite a bit of crap over that many years. Two accumulate even more.
We’re still trying to figure out between self-moving and a very affordable small moving company in Brooklyn. Finding a balance between insane amount of work and the risk of our life-belongings disappearing forever.
After the next two weeks, the insanity is just beginning. Between now and August, we will: move to Jake’s garage in Boston, buy a car and do all the car work for it, buy a tent and other car-trip stuff, drive to Miami for a wedding, drive to New Orleans/Baton Rouge/Mississippi Delta for sight-seeing, drive to Atlanta for a graduation, do some more sightseeing on the way back to Boston, drive to Pittsburgh for another wedding, come back to New York for Jake to take an exam, fly to the Caymans for eight days, back to New York, go to Turkey for two weeks, back to Boston for a third wedding, and finally, take a month to drive cross country.
We will ideally end up in San Diego where we will rent for a month or so to checkout neighborhoods and find an apartment. Once we settle in, we will move all of our shit from Boston. This is assuming we like San Diego since neither one of us has ever been there.
Hectic? Yep! Fun? We sure plan for it to be! Insane? So what?
I plan to write a script so I can post updates from my Blackberry since we plan to tent it at least two nights out of three. I will definitely post from Boston and most likely from Turkey, too. I don’t know about the Caymans.
In the meantime, we need to finish packing.
Told you I had a good reason.
“I imagine the feelings of two people meeting again after many years. In the past they spent some time together, and therefore they think that they are linked by the same experiences, the same recollections. The same recollections? That’s where the misunderstanding starts: they don’t have the same recollections; each of them retains two or three small scenes from the past, but each has his own; their recollections aren’t similar; they don’t intersect; and even in terms of quantity they are not comparable: one person remembers the other more than he is remembered; first because memory capacity varies among individuals (an explanation that each of them would at least find acceptable), but also (and this is more painful to admit) because they don’t hold the same importance for each other. When Irena saw Josef at the airport, she remembered every detail of their long-ago adventure; Josef remembered nothing. From the very first moment their encounter was based on an unjust and revolting inequality.” – Milan Kundera – Ignorance
I am fascinated by memory.
A few weeks ago I was telling my husband that I am amazed at the amount of information in my brain: Tons of words, in seven languages. Phone numbers of not only current friends but of old friends whom I haven’t even spoken to in ten years. Lyrics to songs I listen to daily and songs I haven’t heard in ages. The syntax for over fifteen computer languages that I’ve coded in. Random formulas from math and statistics classes. Flags and capitals of countries that I studied as a child. The first twenty elements of the periodic table that I was required to memorize in high school. Way too much Ottoman Empire history. Details of thousands of books, magazine articles, short stories I’ve read over the years. How to read music. User ids and passwords to my multiple accounts. Names of thousands of people I’ve met in my lifetime. Details of how a fixed income syndicate is formed and sold. Accounting formulas of every financial instrument. UNIX commands. Street names – of random cities all over the world. Subway stop names all over New York City, Brooklyn and the Bronx.
The list is too long to keep going. It just blows my mind how much information I seem to retain and how much more I can add to my current state without losing what’s already there.
Yet, in fascinating irony, I remember very little of my childhood and only sporadic instances from anything more than three years ago. A theory is that memory that isn’t recalled often tends to fade away. I don’t know if that means it’s still there and if I were to practice remembering it, it would all come back to me. Sort of like riding a bike (though I wouldn’t know since I can’t ride one): the information is all there and never disappears even if it’s not used in a long long time. I hope that to be true because it sort of saddens me to know how little I retain of my past. I guess that’s another reason to keep writing here.
Even more interestingly, when I read the above quote by Kundera, I nodded in agreement. I can easily tell that, for me, not only is it true that two people’s recollections of the same instance vary by the degree of importance they’ve put on it, but they also vary by the amount of distortion they’ve performed on the truth. It appears, I distort my past all the time. I remember events in ways that conveniently explain my actions at the time.
A few months ago, I was rereading a childhood diary because of a school essay I had to write. The entries were from the summer I turned thirteen. I realized that my writings completely mismatched my memories of that summer. While it’s possible that I was distorting my emotions in case someone read my diary, it’s more probable that I stretched the truth over the years to make the situation more melodramatic, and such, a better fit for my “poor me” conversation.
Talk about selective memory.
“Let’s just listen.” – CNN reporter, yesterday as they were replaying the attack
I’ve tried to not mention the war. Not because I don’t have strong feelings about it. Actually, it appears I have strong feelings about everything. This war is complicated for me. I assume it’s complicated for most people unless you are at one extreme end of the issue. Don’t get me wrong; I think all war is bad. War means people will die and, no matter what the cause, people dying is a terrible tragedy. There’s no doubt it my mind about that.
Having all my family in Turkey and living in New York City and being Jewish makes me just about as involved in this war as I can possibly be. To add to the joy, I am unemployed and thus available to watch TV 24/7. I have officially become a CNN-addict. Thanks to the Tivo, not only do I get to watch it when I’m at home, but I get to cache it when I’m not. To be honest, I think I’m suffering from too much thought about the war to be able to sit and put it all into words. I’m not ready, so I shall not.
I will, however, talk about some other, but related, matters:
I am frustrated by the “Real World”, the TV show, attitude CNN is taking towards this war. This isn’t some fucking TV show, it’s real, it’s serious and it’s horrifying. Those are not firecrackers; they are bombs. I don’t appreciate having them suggest that we be quiet and listen as bombs drop all over Iraq. No matter how one feels about whether this war is justified or the right thing or unjustified or the wrong thing, watching it all “unfold” is not a nail-biting suspense thing. It’s making me angry that they are sensationalizing it so much.
I saw my first anti-war rally today. It was an unbelievable experience for me. I don’t know how many people were part of the march but the number was definitely in the thousands. There were men, women, and children. Pretty much all races were represented. Multiple nationalities were present. Several issues were being voiced. Some posters were funny, some clever, some thought-provoking, and some downright scary. Here’s a bunch and I have a ton more here. I couldn’t stop taking pictures.
   
  
  
I remember being in Istanbul during the Gulf War and watching it all unfold on TV. I remember very little about how I felt and I know my daily life wasn’t really interrupted. I am confident that, at least so far, the same is now true for my family back home. But knowing that doesn’t stop me from worrying. When I’m not at home and watching TV, I jump each time the phone rings, worried that it might be my mom with some horrifying news.
I’m sorry I can’t be more eloquent or pithy. All I know right now is that watching a lot of TV is bad for me but watching this many hours of CNN is exponentially more detrimental to my well-being.
Or lack thereof.
“I wasn’t feigning confidence; I really was confident. I was sure that my plan would work and that it would work exactly in this way. Looking back, it seems somewhat astounding that anyone would take me seriously. But at the time I didn’t see any reason for these funders to doubt me.” – Wendy Kopp from one day, all children…
I was thinking more about why the article I mentioned yesterday moved me as much as it did. Besides the rush of reading about someone who just learned all he could about every aspect of a business he was interested in starting, I found another characteristic that I decided is a common aspect among some successful people.
So you want to start your own company? You want to write the Great American Novel? You want to win the Nobel Prize? You want to. You really want to. You can feel it. You can taste it. But you’re also worried. Is it going to work? What if it doesn’t work? What if it’s all just a pipe dream? What if you’re giving up the comfort of daily life and delving into uncharted territory just to find yourself miserable, lonely, and penniless in a few years?
You get scared. You want some sort of guarantee. You want someone to tell you whether your sacrifice will be worthwhile. Is it going to work or is it just a pipedream? You’re willing to shake up the status quo but only if the hard work promises to eventually pay off.
Here’s the answer to whether your idea will work: it will, if you think it will.
Sounds trite?
Well, it appears the common trend amongst people, who’ve succeeded when others hadn’t expected them to, is that they didn’t know their goal was unreachable. The guy who started his hedge fund at 18 didn’t realize it was a big deal. He wanted to make money. He found a way and it made a lot of sense. Whoever said that it was hard to start a hedge fund and nearly impossible to sustain success for many years, had obviously not mentioned all this difficulty to this boy.
Same goes for above-quoted Wendy Kopp, who started Teach For America. She said the only reason it succeeded was because she didn’t know it was impossible. She believed in it wholeheartedly. It made perfect sense to her. Why wouldn’t it succeed? She was too naive.
That’s what’s missing in most of us: childlike naivete. We are too practical. We have a long list of reasons why we can’t quit our stable job. Why we can’t pursue a dream. It’s not real after all; it’s just a dream. We toy with the idea of chasing after it each time we drink a lot or have an exceptionally bad day at work. But no more than that. Each year, it becomes even harder to imagine going for it. We’re grown ups now; there’s no room for daydreaming in the real world. We bury the dream and push it lower with every passing year.
I don’t want to speak on behalf of you; I can only speak for myself. Maybe you do chase after your dreams. Maybe you have no dreams. Maybe you’re already living your dream. All I know is that it’s been too long since I’ve even heard that little voice inside of me, let alone considered listening to it. I buried mine so deep that I’m not even sure it’s around anymore.
Maybe it’s time to start drinking.
The weirdest things get me excited lately.
Jake handed me an article about a Harvard student who started a hedge fund out of his dorm room in 1987. I put off reading the article because the subject matter is something I hear about often and care about rarely.
Today at lunch I finally picked up the article and it took all of five lines to hook me in. The article talked about how the student took it upon himself to learn what he needed to and without any education in the field, he created what’s today one of the more profitable hedge funds out there. I have never been a big money person and I even had many moral conflicts with working at an investment bank but this article made me want to start my own hedge fund.
Once I stepped back from the shock of being excited about the preposterous idea of my starting a money-related business, I realized that what got me so animated was reading about someone learning. Learning about math, the finance business and statistics.
It appears I am addicted to learning.
Recently, I told a family friend that I love to learn and the subject matter doesn’t truly matter. Pottery excites me and so does physics. She told me that learning for the sake of learning wasn’t the best choice and that I had to learn with a goal. She said, it doesn’t matter what you choose but you should take pottery classes because you want to learn to make pots not because anything will do.
I thought about her comment for a long time. In all honesty, I don’t think I sign up for a class just because it’s a class. And I don’t like to learn just anything. While there are maybe tons of languages I’d still like to study, I have no intention of learning Hindi, for example. In the right setting, I’m sure I might get to like the idea of learning Hindi and even choose it, but in my current environment, there are enough other languages which peek my interest that I won’t choose Hindi any time soon.
Same goes for musical instruments. When I decided to learn one last year, just any instrument wouldn’t do; it had to be the saxophone. I had two alternatives but I chose the sax because it was my first love.
I don’t just take classes for the sake of learning. I just like learning about a very wide variety of subjects. It excites me to know about art history. It also excites me to know about physics. Statistics. Literature. Psychology. Politics. Math. Just because my interests are wide-ranged doesn’t mean I learn because I want to learn just anything.
I guess it comes down to depth versus breadth. For me, that’s been the age-old problem. Do I pick one love and learn all I can about it or do I explore all but only to a basic level?
I don’t know the answer. Do you?
About four years ago, I decided I wanted to write a novel. I honestly can’t remember where the original idea came from and why I thought it was a good one. Since English isn’t my first language, I decided that my first step should be to perfect my grammar. I scoured the web sites and the bookstores. I read everything I could. I took notes.
It appears good grammar doesn’t make you a good writer.
I moved on to the writing books. I researched what people recommended. You name it, I read it. From the cheesy, encouraging to the step-by-step, practical. I spent my free minutes devouring the books, trying to motivate myself. I read so much that I had no time to write.
It appears reading books on writing doesn’t make you a good writer, either.
I then joined a few online writing groups. I signed up for some of the classes. I wrote my first paragraph. I posted it online and waited anxiously for other people’s feedback. I reread my paragraph hundreds of times. I refreshed the screen at least ten times a minute. I analyzed the reviews. If they said good words, I figured they must be unqualified to judge fiction. If the words were harsher, I was convinced those people were the people to trust.
Somehow, self-deprecation didn’t work, either.
I chose a few of my closest, most productive, most determined writing buddies and we started a small novel-writing team. I was scheduled to be in Japan for work and I had my nights and weekends to myself. If all this free time didn’t do it, nothing would. We each followed the same steps and promised to post about a chapter a week. It started with good intentions. Out of the six of us, only two people actually finished their novel in those six months.
Time wasn’t the problem.
Defeated, I signed up for a real-life course at NYU. I also decided to start fresh and worked on my second novel during the course. If my first one never got completed, that was okay. That one was not good anyhow. The course was three months long and I wrote what I had to for each assignment. Not a word more, not a word less. In reading my writing, my teacher didn’t cry out “Wow, where have you been all these years?” but she also wouldn’t tell me how much I sucked so I’d be put out of my misery.
The published teacher or the “real” writing class didn’t do the trick.
So I stopped writing. I put the novels aside. I didn’t have time. I just wasn’t good at writing and that was that. It was pointless to pursue something that just wasn’t meant to be. I put it out of my mind.
Or so I thought.
Two days after I quit, I woke up with thoughts of my third novel. An idea that had come to me whilst I was writing the second one. I dreamt about the new book three days in a row. I went back to my old writing and realized I’d written over 40,000 words on my first novel and at least half of that on my second one. Neither of them are enough for a novel and most of the writing does truly suck. But it all comes down to one fact: I want to do it. I like to write and it makes me happy. So I needed to find a way to keep writing fiction. And two days ago it hit me: Maybe I could stop thinking that I sucked and actually sit and write everyday. Maybe the little voice in my head was doing more damage than all the bad critics in the world. Maybe it didn’t matter how bad I was as long as I did write and had a good time.
Just maybe.
He used to be my teacher.
When I was seventeen, I asked a friend of a friend of my best friend to give me lessons in Italian. I’d always wanted to learn and when I met the guy and found out that he taught Italian professionally, I figured it must be fate.
I convinced him to come to my house every Sunday and promised to pay in return. We started out as barely acquaintances but ended up friends. He actually became one of my favorite people to spend time with. As it happens with people who leave the country and live elsewhere, we lost touch completely. I thought about him over the years and even asked around but I couldn’t get a straight answer and life interfered.
Until last week.
As I’m going through my emails, I hit d to delete a series of twenty spam messages. Something makes me go back and open this one email with an Italian subject. In the last three years that karenika has been around, a few people have sent me emails in Italian so I figure maybe the email isn’t spam. And, indeed, it isn’t.
It’s my teacher from eleven years ago. It’s my friend. It turns out he went to the same school as my mother and they run into each other at a reunion and my mom recognizes him and walks up to him to ask him if he knew someone named Karen.
Small world, eh?
So he writes me an email and I am ecstatic. Since I am lazy and have a hundred unanswered emails, I take two days to write back and then anxiously wait for his reply. It doesn’t come for about two days and the whole time I’m thinking that maybe I was too overbearing. Maybe I expressed too much excitement over finding my old friend. Maybe he read something in my site and thinks I’m insane. Maybe I said something that he interpreted as rude. Maybe he changed his mind about reacquainting.
Today, I finally get an email from him and his first sentence is, “And you replied. I was worried you’d say, where the fuck did this guy come from?”
I smile. I giggle. I laugh.
Paranoia must live in all of us.
My mother in law testified before the senate in DC yesterday. Thanks to my brother in law, I convinced my lovely husband to take the day off, hop in a car and drive to DC for the day.
My last trip to DC was on my birthday a few years ago. We spent a weekend in the very warm city and visited the memorials and parks. At the time, I had a fever of 100 and some so most of what I remember from the two days isn’t very pleasant. I remember people being slow and taking literally minutes to answer a simple question or getting a simple item from a store. I came home, all frustrated and thankful that I lived in New York City. I belonged in the city. I am one of those people who get in a city cab and ask the cabbie to please drive faster. Many friends have tried to talk up the benefits of Washington DC since that trip, but I’ll admit I was close-minded and kept insisting it wasn’t a place I could ever inhabit.
My husband and I drove up after his workday on Tuesday and, despite what people had said, made it to DC in about three and a half hours. We found and checked into our fancy hotel just miles from the Capitol and the White House. My mother in law was putting the finishing touches on her speech. While eating the room service, she explained the crux of the legislation that she was testifying about. We talked about how laws are made and how long it takes from inception to a fully approved state. As someone who has never taken any politics or government courses and pretty clueless on the subject matter in general, I found the conversation fascinating. I was amazed that with all the necessary approvals, any work got accomplished at all.
The next morning, we went to the hearing, which turned out to be pretty popular. The two of us and my brother in law were lucky enough to get reserved seating. All in all, ten different senators showed up for the hearing and at parts the discussion got very heated. I found the entire scene fascinating and felt patriotic (even though I am still quite a few years away from qualifying for citizenship). I was mostly fascinated about how accessible all these discussions were and how an ordinary person could simply walk in , given they showed up early enough to get a seat.
After the testimonies and lunch, the two of us walked over to the Supreme Court building where we had a quick and very interesting lecture on the history of the Supreme Court and how the hearings work. Two interesting tidbits I learned: you don’t have to be a lawyer to become a supreme court judge and the judges work half a year, half a month, half a day. The intern who gave the tour explained that the public could come in and see any trial, given they showed up early enough and were willing to wait in line.
To finish our tour, we went back to the Capitol and got passes from our senator so we could enter the Senate Chambers. When we walked into the chambers, a senator was talking about a specific procedure for abortion, which made the papers today. The first thought that went through my mind, as I sat in the room was that if I lived in DC and was unemployed, I could come here and listen all day long.
I’m not sure what excited me so much about the experience of sitting in the hearing and in the chamber. I guess I liked that I saw history being made, first hand. I know CSPAN airs these all day long and even in Turkey we can watch the Parliament on TV, but I’d never actually been in the room where the events occurred. I’m not even sure I can in Turkey. I find it really incredible that I can in the US.
I’m not sure my overall opinions on DC have changed but I certainly saw a different side of the city this time. At least now I have an idea of what I could do with my free time if we did move there.
Today’s the two-week mark since I’ve quit.
With the exception of really good friends and my husband, who know better, people have been asking me what I plan to do next. Are you going back to computers? Wall Street? Are you really planning to move? Where? Once we open the topic, questions don’t end.
Of all the things I got back in my life in the last two weeks, two matter the most: time with people I love and time to read. I’ve spent several multi-hour conversations with friends in other cities and have had the privilege of spending face-to-face time with friends whom I hadn’t seen since last May. I’ve also been reading incessantly. I read four books since I’ve quit and am in the process of reading three more. Last week, I devoured {the} Hours in a day and remembered why I need reading in my life.
Something I didn’t foresee was how quickly the days would pass even when I don’t have a job to swallow three quarters of my day. It seems I have something to do every single day. Not only that but I keep an overgrowing list of things to-do that I add to more often than I erase from. At this rate, I may not be free until the end of the summer.
My email account, even though I spent several hours cleaning it last week, still has 55 unanswered emails. My computer is full of pictures I have been meaning to post. Book excerpts I mean to write. Phone calls I mean to make.
An novel idea I’ve had for three years has come back to haunt me. I promised a friend that I’d help code his site. I want to learn Python. I’m thinking of installing Linux on my laptop so I can play with it. I want to take more pictures, especially of New York, which I plan to leave real soon. I want to visit all the City’s museums; especially its quirky ones. I want to go to the opera, to see plays. I want to go to see the movies that only New York’s theaters show.
Maybe I’m filling up my time because I don’t know the answer to “What’s Next?” or maybe I’m not ready to think about it because I have so many other things I want to do. I don’t know if it’s the chicken or the egg.
I do know that the question is at the back of my mind. I do know that I don’t want to settle. I know that I was passionate about the cause of TFA, regardless of how it all turned out. I know that I want to feel that passion for the next move I make. That I want to live my life passionately. That I want the kind of job I’d be proud and thrilled to have. I know that it may not be possible. But maybe it is. I’m certainly going to try.
I also know that I’m not ready to answer the question just yet.
I’ve been meaning to write for quite some time.
Putting it off is so much easier than doing it. Partly because putting it off means I don’t have to start taking responsibility for my life, the one I will be creating from scratch, just yet. Partly because I’m still enjoying the honeymoon period. Partly because I’m scared to face the guilt that I’m sure will come but has refused to appear so far. Partly because I’m still getting used to feeling this way and I am worried it might not last if I start talking about it. Partly because I’ve decided to live my life again.
The fact is, I enjoy my site. I’ve always enjoyed writing here and having a place where I can publicly dump my thoughts. I know that writing things here puts them in the world forever and, as opposed to old diaries, I won’t necessarily be able to tear these pages.
But I like the truth in that. I like that I can’t go back and act like something never happened. I like that I can’t deny I felt a certain way at a certain time. That something wasn’t a choice when it was.
I don’t believe in regret. Never have. I’ve only had one event in my life that I consistently regretted for fifteen years and I just let go of it a week ago. (It felt so good!) This is not to say that I haven’t been sad or frustrated by the choices I made. It’s just that I always thought about my choices at length and never made them haphazardly. Thus, I was always secure in the knowledge that my steps were the best ones to take for my state of mind at that time. Regretting something after the fact is useless especially since there’s almost no way to change it. Having these pages stored in a digital format where anyone can dig them up at anytime forces me to call myself on my tendencies to slip into the world of denial. It stops me from saying “Oh, I never wanted to do that any way.” It gives others the proof to say, “Bullshit.”
I quit my job. Exactly a week ago.
I quit the job that I believed in with all my heart. The job I didn’t want to admit hating. The job that wasn’t right for me from the very beginning. The job that I wasn’t really even trying to do well. I still believe in the message. I am still amazed by the people who do it every day, despite its difficulties. I respect their choices and their ability.
Most amazingly, I didn’t quit it for something better. I didn’t quit it for more money. I didn’t quit it for more flexible time. I didn’t quit it because it was boring. I didn’t quit it because I plan to get pregnant.
I simply quit for me.
Okay, just so you can see the manic depressiveness of my job, I had a great day today. Not with the class mind you, but with one of my students after school. It’s a long story and it’s already midnight so I am going to go to bed but the choice to quit, for me, is nor here yet. It comes and goes. One moment, I am completely prepared to quit and the next I want to be there for the kids. I love the kids. More coming really soon, I promise.
To those of you who’ve been commenting, I just want you to know that I am reading them and they mean the world to me and they are affecting my day to day life and my moment to moment thoughts. I will respond to the comments and I am so glad you are taking the time to give me your thoughts, opinions, and empathy. Thank you. 🙂
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projects for twenty twenty-six
projects for twenty twenty-five
projects for twenty twenty-four
projects for twenty twenty-three
projects for twenty twenty-two
projects for twenty twenty-one
projects for twenty nineteen
projects for twenty eighteen
projects from twenty seventeen
monthly projects from previous years
some of my previous projects
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