If I haven’t mentioned earlier, my mom came to visit last weekend. Since I am unable to fly, she took the eleven-hour trip from Istanbul to New York. This inability to sit on a plane extends to other annoyances. For example, my back doesn’t allow me to visit a museum with her. I can’t go shopping either. All we could really do outside is eat and go to the movies. Only cause the theater is close to my house and I could return home if needed.
So we went to the movies last night. To be totally honest, it was a stupid movie, but still, I never realized how much we depend on people’s manners. The couple sitting next to me must have confused the dark setting and Jennifer Lopez’s soothing voice (or whiny as the case may be with her) for their own living room. They kept chit chattering and giggling throughout the movie. After a half hour of this maddening whispering, I turned to the guy and asked him to please stay quiet. I normally hate people who do that but it was truly unbearable.
So the couple practically ignores me and within a few minutes, I am fuming. I ask him to please shut up and he says that if I’m not happy I can move somewhere else. Which is when it hit me that there was absolutely nothing I can do. If the guy wanted to be a totally jerk and talk throughout the entire movie, I have no capacity to stop him. If this were a classroom, the teacher would act as the chaperone. In a museum, we have guards. In the library, librarians. But no one in a theater.
If the guy had turned really obnoxious, I probably could have called someone to kick him out, but there is nothing I can do unless the actions are totally out there. Before last night, I never realized how much we rely on people self-policing their manners. The only reason we don’t act rude in public is cause we think we shouldn’t. Amazing how often that is enough.
And I am really glad it is.
Oh and I passed the Japanese test that I took in November, so I rule!
Previously? Heart.
Sunday, my mother and I went to see Sweet November. I’m not going to talk about how the trailers give away everything or about Keanu’s lack of acting ability.
If you’ve seen the movie trailers, you know that Charlize Theron’s character asks Keanu’s character to live with him for one month so she can let him out of the “box” he lives in. She lives a more liberated life and wants to help him achieve the same. Charlize is lovely. People love her, she’s kind, she never works (at least not during the movie) and she does whatever she feels like. As the trailers showed, Charlize’s character is sick. Very sick.
Which, of course, led me to think, how come we only let go when we’ve got no hope of living? Maybe it is just in the movies. But when I think of my life and the people surrounding me, I can’t see one example of someone who truly does what he or she wants to be doing. Most of my acquaintances work too hard, too many hours in a job they don’t like.
When I tell people that I work part-time the first thing most of them say is, “Oh I wish I had that deal.” But they can. Of course they can. At least most of them. But they’re too scared to ask. Just like I’m too scared to go off and live on a farm.
It seems the rewards are only valuable when the risks are not so high. If I know I’m only going to live fie more years, I’d live my life totally differently. I wouldn’t work so hard, I’d probably still program but mostly for myself. I’d stop trying to lose weight. I’d call my friends more often and spend more time getting to know them. I wouldn’t let any criticism get to me. I would travel to Antarctica and pet the penguins. (Well, they wouldn’t bite me if they knew I was going to die, would they?) I would go skydiving.
What would you do if you only had a few years left?
Previously? Blah.
Jake and I went to see Chocolat last night. I’d read the book during Christmas and knew it would make a good Valentine movie.
When I saw Shine a few years ago I thought the very same thing that I thought last night. It’s a shame parents feel the need to impose their choices onto their children. Both extremes of this need bother me. One, as the case was last night, is when the mother feels uncomfortable and decides it’s time to move on regardless of the child’s feelings about the matter. The other, which is sometimes more severe in my opinion, is when the parents live vicariously through their children. Take a mother who wanted to be a ballerina as a child but somehow never got to fulfill that dream, and you can be sure she’s making her kid take ballet classes.
I just hope that when I have children, I will be more considerate of their feelings. I know there are times when things are unavoidable and I know that most parents don’t consciously hurt their children, but I just hope that I will be more aware. Maybe that’s one of the reasons I work hard at not having regrets. I really hope I can raise my kids by paying attention to their own personalities and wants and needs.
The other interesting detail I noticed in the movie was a major change they added into the screenplay version. The Count, who is the mayor of the town in the movie, is the parish priest in the novel. In the book, he’s the only character associated with the church (directly that is, all the other characters do go to church). In the movie version, there is a young parish priest and, if I’m not mistaken the Count helps him out but is not the religious figure himself (the Count is quite religious, but he’s not the priest in the movie). Without giving away too much of the story I’ll say that this young priest is totally different in personality that the Count.
The reason this made such a strong impact on me is that when I read the book, I got a very negative impression of the church and religion in general. Since the Count was the only one (actually in the book, his father plays a much bigger role in this matter as well) who represented the church, his negative personality and anger reflected upon religion, in a way making religious people seem close-minded and hateful. In the movie version, the young priest’s existence took away the relationship between negative personality and religion. I assume the distinction was made consciously and, even though I’m not particularly religious, I applaud the change. I can’t be sure if the writer has anything against the church itself, but I’m confident that some readers could have easily interpreted her book that way.
I don’t appreciate sweeping generalizations of any kind. To say all gypsies are bad is the same as saying all conservative people are narrow-minded. Until you meet every single person in a “category” you can not make judgements a group of people. Every single human being is different and should be given credit as such.
All that from a movie about Chocolate.
Previously? Damn Sheep.
If you’ve been here before, especially lately, you might be aware that I seem to be hostage to severe mood fluctuations lately. Or maybe you have been here before and you’re just not very insightful. Either way, Jake’s had to work a lot lately due to some major changes in his job setup, so I’ve been having a lot of time to myself. Which, considering the aforementioned shifts in emotion, is not a particularly healthy thing.
So today, in an attempt to keep my mind busy, I went through the mp3 archives on my machine and clicked on random songs. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a tune must be worth a thousand memories. With the fist few notes of each song, I was transported somewhere in my past.
During high school, I spent a good three months desperately trying to memorize the dates of the wars the Ottoman Empire won and the agreements that resulted from these bloody messes. While I failed that class twice, I can easily recite you every word of every song I listened to back then. Not just the Turkish ones, either. I can spew out English, Italian, French and any other language, anything but the dates or names of those stupid agreements.
Not only can I remember the words to the songs but I also have specific scenes attached to each and every song. Even the ones I hated. The ones with painful memories. The ones that still make me cry. The ones that make me want to pick up the phone and call a friend with whom I should have kept in touch. (Ironically, I also remember all the phone numbers.) I can tell you where I was when I listened to it. Who I was with and how I felt.
So I decided to conduct an experiment. In an attempt to prove I’m not the only freak who remembers lyrics over historical dates and also to have some fun, I’m collecting evidence. If you care to entertain me and maybe help out restore some of my sanity, send me the title and singer of a song that, within the first ten or twenty seconds, causes scenes to replay before your eyes. I also want to know something about the memory. The amount of detail you choose to share is totally up to you. I’ll put up a page with everyone’s replies, so if you have a web page, make sure to list it in your mail so that I can link to it.
What are you waiting for? Tell me!
Previously? Destruction.
Mmmm. My mommie sent me some marrons glaces. Yummm.
I had my last art class today. We had several student presentations. One girl picked hands as her topic. As she spoke I realized how much we convey through our hands. Some of the things she mentioned were really interesting. For example, how come we put our hand in our mouth when we’re sad? We tend to inadvertently use our hands to symbolize our emotions. Think of when you’re happy or sad or mad or excited. I remember when I took a public speaking class. The hardest part was to figure out what to do with my hands.
We had another presentation about cultures influencing each other. For example, he mentioned how Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon was painted over when he was influenced by African Art. If you look real closely at the woman on the lower right, you can see clear marks of something that was originally there and then erased to be painted over. The idea that Picasso erased his own work and put a darker complexion on the woman on the left and the masks (very much a tradition in African Art) on the two women on the right is quite fascinating.
One of the other students did her project on nudes. Her final image was Magritte’s The Rape. What an amazing painting. Says so much, doesn’t it?
Talking about figuring out what to do with my life, my friend Natalia sent me the following quote from Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. “…we can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come…”
Previously?
If you’ve been reading my log for a while, you’d know that I usually have an excerpt section where I put small passages from books I’ve read or am reading. Lately, due to the volatile nature of my back, I’ve been forgoing that practice but in case you missed it, I wanted to mention that it’s gonna come back real soon. I’m reading again and my back is getting better so I will be able to type soon.
Today’s all about movies. In the last week, I’ve watched The Sixth Sense, X-Men and The Myth of Fingerprints. All of which I found enjoyable and thought provoking.
I don’t watch horror movies. The last time I saw one, I was ten and my parents were divorced. I was in my father’s house and my sister’s friend was watching Happy Birthday To Me. I maybe saw three scenes but they were enough to give me nightmares for the next ten years. So I decided it wasn’t a good idea for me to watch horror and I haven’t watched a movie since. That’s why I didn’t see The Sixth Sense when it came out on theater. Little did I know that it really wasn’t horror at all. Several months later, I made a friend explain the entire plot (including the major twist at the end) to me cause I knew I’d never see the movie and I was tired of hearing how awesome the ending was. Two weeks ago I convinced Jake to rent the DVD and we sat to watch it during the day (just in case it was scarier than people claimed). I knew the ending so I was watching for flaws and Jake was watching as a first time viewer. The movie was awesome and worth watching for both of us. For those of you who have seen it, the only potential flaw I saw was that Bruce’s character’s wife is cold at the end of the movie and the director claims that it’s only cold when there are angry spirits around. Otherwise, all details were perfectly consistent. I loved how they used the red color as a symbol to represent the link between this world and the other and how beautifully they crafted each scene such that once you knew the ending you could go back and watch the entire movie again and not feel cheated. The neat thing about their twist was that it was the kind that allowed you to make such a choice. In Fight Club, once you learned the huge twist at the end, you couldn’t go back and look for clues. In the book you could have but in the movie there was no way. That’s only cause of the nature of the twist itself. Anyhow, if you still haven’t seen The Sixth Sense, I totally recommend it and can say that it definitely wasn’t a horror movie even though the music stresses you out the entire time.
X-men is another movie I resisted seeing in the theater but for a different reason. I figured it would be a waste of 20 bucks. And it would have been. While I enjoyed the movie a lot, I don’t know that it was worth seeing in the theater. The effects were fantastic and there was somewhat of a plot and it kept my interest the whole time. So if you are into those kind of movies, X-men is much better than the usual quality.
I must say my first fascination with The Myth of Fingerprints was the name. What a neat title for a movie! Jake refused to see it in the theater so I had to wait till my TiVo picked it as a recommendation. I know that this movie was a small budget, not hyped movie but I really enjoyed it. I thought the setting was beautiful, the cinematography was awesome and the some of the acting was amazing. Both Noah Wyle and Julianne Moore performed very well and the story was interesting to me. I’ve written before about how thanksgiving seems to be a time when most families get together and fight and this movie is exactly about that. It’s the thanksgiving holiday of a dysfunctional family. It made me think a lot about why people have the hang ups that they do and how much we get influenced by our family members. I also wondered about my values and limits. Would I be able to stand up to my parents if I knew they did something wrong? In my case, I believe the answer would be yes cause I have a very communicative family and we have mutual respect, but there are so many families where the kids will never be able to go against their parents. Even when they are adults. The movie highlights some of these issues and it’s executed beautifully. I’m glad I finally got the chance to see it.
What was the last movie you saw that made you think?
Previously?
I would like to have put a passage today but unless the stages of the pregnancy during the first and second trimesters are your area of interest, I can’t imagine you’ll enjoy what I post. I’ve been doing research for my novel. Between that and the unbearable hours of Japanese, I didn’t actually have time to read a book. I’ve figured out that my biggest problem with this test is vocabulary. If you don’t know what a word means, it’s impossible to figure what preposition to use with it. The really frustrating thing is that I have no idea how to study for that. No matter how many words I memorize, there will be more on the exam.
We watched Raising Arizona two nights ago. I know it’s supposed to be one the greatest movies. I must tell you, I thought the movie is okay but it certainly wasn’t anything amazing. The acting was fine but the story was stupid. I’m sorry but I just didn’t get it.
On the other hand, The 400 Blows, or with its original name, Les Quatre cents coups, was wonderful. It’s about a 12-year-old boy who is very mischievous to compensate for the terrible life he has at home. The movie made me think a lot about my family and how lucky I was to have parents who actually cared about me and paid attention to my life and feelings. It made me take a moment to thank them for being as amazing as they’ve been.
I love the recent HP ads about how amazon changed the way people shop. The one with the donut store where they talk about other people who enjoy the same type of donut is my favorite. I also like how they have many varieties. It stops them from getting boring and overplayed.
So Bush, as expected, won. Tho, again as expected, we’re nowhere near the end. We’ve got about two more weeks before the absolute deadline comes and I wonder who will actually decide the next president of the United States. Sorry I keep talking about it but it totally fascinates me.
By this time next week, I will be done with my Japanese exam and will officially be in a one-month vacation from classes. Yeay!
Before?
I saw Bounce last night. If you haven’t seen this movie and plan to, you might not want to read on. I don’t think there are any major spoilers coming up but I can’t be sure so I thought I’d warn you anyhow. A quick peek at imdb will let you know that it’s about an advertising agent, Buddy, who gives his first class plane ticket to another passenger to do him a favor (and he wants to hook up with another traveler who’s stuck in an airport hotel for the night). The plane crashes and everyone dies. (All this is in the preview, so no spoilers) Buddy goes through some personal crisis and then start looking for the other passenger’s wife and family to subtly help them. As you might be able to guess, they fall in love, etc, etc.
Let me get to my point. At one point Abby, the wife, tells her best friend that she doesn’t want to be with Buddy she’d be with him cause her husband died and she doesn’t want to be doing that. Her friend, quite wisely, says, “Whether it’s Buddy now or another man one year later, you’ll be with him cause Greg died.” To me, that was one of the most brilliant lines of the movie, cause while her friend was totally right, I’d never thought about it that way. It made me realize how shortsighted I’d been.
The movie sparked up a lot of interesting thoughts in me about how every single choice we make affects our life. Most importantly, the choices we don’t make do, too. The path we decide not to travel and the options we pass on. Every single thing we do and don’t do has a bearing not only on our lives but possibly on many other people’s as well. Kinda freaky when you think about it…
My friend, Steven, emphasized a sad fact about my personality, recently, when we talked about my upcoming Japanese exam.
He asked, “So, what happens if you fail this exam?”
“Nothing.”
“So what happens if you pass?”
“Nothing.”
Talk about self-inflicted stress…
Before?
Just finished watching Frequency. If you can get past the unbelievable parts, it’s a neat story. It’s like a long Early Edition episode with lots of twists and turns. Overall, a good Friday night movie. It does bring up some interesting thoughts about what would happen if you had the ability to change your past. Would you?
Too tired to have pithy thoughts tonight. I think I am going to go to bed so I can get up and get some work done tomorrow.
I have some strong opinions about what weblogs are and are not but I will have to save them until I have time to sit down and type legibly. Let me just say that no one is allowed to tell you what you can or should put on your web page. It’s yours dammit. You get to decide all of its contents.
Before?
Last night, Jake and I watched Hoosiers. A movie about coaching with Gene Hackman in the lead role. If you’re into sports movies, this is a true classic. It’s well acted both by Hackman and Dennis Hopper. It talks a lot about how close minded people are in small towns, a major reason I like living in the big city.
I spent the entire day writing my novel, literally. I started at 10am and wrote all the way till 5pm. It was draining but I wrote the most important chapter. I figure if I can write this chapter, I can write this book. So I think I can say that the day was successful. Yeay.
We also watched Microcosmos an amazing movie about insects. If you like animals as much as I do, you can’t miss this movie. I first saw it with my mother in London and I was so awestruck by it that I’ve been recommending it ever since. It’s truly a work of art. Trust me, you’ll love it.
I was talking to a friend the other day about the elections and he mentioned how different life would have turned out if Nixon hadn’t conceded in 1960. What would that have meant about Vietnam? Could Kennedy possibly still be alive if he hadn’t been president?
Before?
Apologies for not having a book excerpt today, it’s slightly past midnight and I just got home. I am really tired so you’ll have to just have my thoughts for today.
My excuse? I went to the Opera baby! Not just any opera, it was Carmen, the queen of operas. I’d seen Carmen many years ago in Turkey and loved it. It’s a great opera to bring first-timers to since so many of the songs will sound familiar. Anyhow, it was magnificent and I’m glad I went.
If you ever wondered where the ideas for soap operas came from, here’s the culprit. When I was little, we never had subtitles in the opera. I would read the story and try to guess the point I was at. Three years ago, when I went to see my first Met Opera, La Traviata, I got to actually follow the story line by line for the first time. I bawled. I cried so hard that people were staring. Operas are so sad and they’re always about love. But the pace of the change of emotion is almost hilariously fast. There’s a scene where Don Jose says, “I will never leave you, Carmen. I will never leave you. All right, you win, I’m leaving.” All in one breath. We watch these operas with awe and excitement and yet we laugh at the soaps? Sure sounds inconsistent to me.
I stayed up till 2am last night. I heard Florida called for Gore, I heard it taken back. Jake woke me up at 3am, telling me that Bush won. I woke up at 6 to find out that Bush hadn’t won, yet. This year’s election is a historical one in so many ways that it was the perfect year to get obsessed with politics. This year, it all comes down to a single state. It possibly even comes down to the international absentee ballots in that state. We have a First Lady senator, a possible equality in the senate, a senator winning posthumously, and a case where the popular vote might be different than the electoral one. Too many incredible statistics all in one. How can you possibly not care? I’m just pissed I didn’t get to vote.
Before?
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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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