I just wanted to note that I am head over heels in love with my husband.
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I am really enjoying my first Philip Roth novel. I will talk more about the book itself once I finish it but this small passage made me think of my friends. As I mentioned before, many of my friends are going through divorces or seperations lately. One of the first ideas that crossed my mind when I read the excerpt was how little we know the people we think we know. This doesn’t just apply to our partners. We have so many people in our lives friends, lovers, even family members whom we think we’re close to. Whom we think we know quite well. Yet, we don’t. Or at least, we might not. I am recently becoming more and more amazed at how easy it is for people to hide parts of their current or past life. We tend to be inherently trusting. We give people the benefit of the doubt. When we meet someone new, we take what they tell us about themselves to be true. We don’t go off and do background searches on people. We don’t double-check their ‘story.’ In my opinion, that’s one of the reasons we get to incredibly shocked and hurt when someone we love turns out to be doing something behind our back. It’s not the jealousy. It’s the lack of intimacy that we felt was there. It’s the fact that there’s a part of this person’s life that we knew absolutely nothing about. The betrayal. The fact that we can’t deny the truth: that we didn’t know this person as well as we thought we did, after all. Which then leads us to wonder what else we don’t know about this person…
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.
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…
I’ve always been curious. About everything. When I was little, I asked questions incessantly. People used to tell my mom to stop answering them but she didn’t. I’m really glad she didn’t because it made me feel like it was okay to ask all the questions I had. I still ask questions. All the time. I don’t worry about looking stupid. I figure I can’t learn unless I ask. That’s always been my principle. I figured everyone to be curious. Some people might be scared or shy and thus not ask but they still wondered. How can anyone look at the sky and not wonder why it’s blue? Why mirrors reflect backwards? How can people drive without knowing how a car works? Almost every kid I meet stacks on the “why?”s so often that I knew it was built into our system. So the question is: Do we get too shy to ask or do we not care? There definitely is a section of people who get “too shy to ask.” They’ve either been shushed or, even worse, humiliated somewhere along the line and decided it’s best to stop asking. They figure if they don’t ask, they can’t be made fun of and they can’t feel stupid. We spend so much time trying to not look stupid that we choose to hide our lack of knowledge instead of taking the opportunity to learn. Which means we stay “stupid”, isn’t that a bit stupid? As much as those people make me sad, the people in the second category make me even sadder. Do people really stop being curious? Last year, when I was teaching, I had kids who had already decided that they were “no good at math” and when we had our math lessons, they would tune out. They weren’t curious why something worked the way it did. They just wanted to know (be told) the right answer and move on to the next problem. Their curiosity had been completely squashed out of existence. I can’t think of anything sadder.
The Big Apple: Thanks to the successful rollout, I get two days off so Jake and I decided to use this time to take a long weekend in New York. We haven’t been back there since we moved out last April so I can’t tell you how excited I am to be going back to the city I love and to see the friend I miss so dearly. I will also make sure to take a ton of pictures and eat bagels while I am there. Driving: I’ve finally managed to drive to work all by myself Monday morning for the first time. For those of you who’ve been following my ineptitude with cars, you know this is a huge achievement for me. I am hoping it’s a sign that I might eventually be able to drive though I might have to move back to the loving arms of New York just to never drive again.
I ended up taking on the project on my own and finishing the design work. I made some changes to our plans and decided to tackle a small portion of the new system first as a test to see if the overall strategy was going to work and to find out any unknown problems with our approach. I spent the last six weeks, cleaning data, writing over 50 scripts and testing like crazy. I thought and rethought our original ideas and cut out all the whistles and bells from the new system, at least for the first rollout. I tried to remember the wise lessons taught in the Mythical Man Month which I hadn’t read since Sophomore Year, college. I had full control over the system and I knew that meant I was also the sole person responsible of its potential downfall. Well, after much hard work, I rolled out the new system last weekend and six of the eight people in the office are using it. (The other two are part of the second phase of the rollout, a much bigger and more involved section which I will start working on this week.) I haven’t rolled out a professional system completely on my own ever before. At school, I had classmates in my group, on Wall Street, I was either a member of or managing a team anywhere from three to 20 people. I’ve coded for myself, for Jake and his family or friends before, but I’ve never designed, coded, tested and rolled out a full system completely on my own before. And I was expecting glitches. Major glitches. I spent several sleepless nights worrying that once I rolled this system out, it would burn and crash causing the rest of my project to get cancelled and me to get fired. Well, Monday came and went. A tiny glitch in one of the sections that’s used only by one user appeared. The other five asked for enhancements not originally planned. (Some were extremely easy and thus coded, others are on my list for after the phase-two rollout.) Tuesday passed. So did Wednesday and Thursday. I went back to working out of my house (I’d decided to work in the office for the first three days just in case disaster struck or the users were confused about how to use the system). As of now, an entire week has passed with all of the users on my system. We haven’t had any glitches besides the one on Monday. The users have been quiet. In the world of software development, quiet users mean happy users. If they are calling you, it is always to complain. I even received some compliments. “It looks so beautiful.” “I can work much faster now” “That’s so awesome.” Magic to my ears. Even if my users don’t, I know that the new system could use a lot more work. I can give you a long list of its flaws. Nonetheless, my users are happy. I had no glitches. I didn’t have to uninstall it. I didn’t bring down any servers. They didn’t lose any clients because of me. It all seems too good to be true. It appears, much to my dismay, that I am a better programmer than I was a teacher.
Jake and went to see Charlie Kaufman’s new movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Since I have seen several of Kaufman’s movies and have enjoyed all of them on some level and I’ve also been a longtime fan of Jim Carrey I knew I was likely to enjoy this movie. What I wasn’t prepared for was how much it touched me. Before I went to see it, I already knew the pretext of the movie but I was slightly misguided. All the text I read said that the movie was about two people who were in love and then break up and the woman has the man erased from her memories and he starts to do the same but changes his mind knowing he could have another chance with her since she doesn’t remember him anymore. I think that could also have made a good movie but this movie was slightly, albeit significantly, different. While it’s true that Carey doesn’t want them to erase his memories, they do get erased. All of them. And at the end, both characters are starting over. Neither of them have the memories of the relationship. Besides the beautiful imagery and the touching romance, the most interesting part of the movie is the very end. When both characters find out how they end up after having just re-met (even though, they think they met for the first time) they have a decision to make. “Do you go into a relationship even if you know how badly it ends?” Do you go into it knowing it will end? Knowing you will say mean, hurtful things about each other down the line? Do you do it even when you have evidence it won’t last? I’ve written about changing the past and about selective memory so it shouldn’t surprise you that the questions above might fascinate me. I’ve also been in relationships that didn’t end so beautifully or ones where there was too much pain. People have often assumed that I would have preferred never to have gotten into those relationships. People have even told me I had made a mistake. Knowing the ending, the pain, the anger, the sorrow, would I have chosen not to date the person at all? You might be shocked to know the answer isn’t an easy, “No.” I can’t say that it’s a decided “Yes” either. Despite the ending and the terrible moments, there also were euphoric moments. There was kindness, joy, laughter, and love. There was learning and growing. Even if I may know how the relationship ended, I wouldn’t know what kind of person I would be had I chosen a different path. And I guess I always opt to take the known over the unknown. At least this way, I can come up with a plan. I also think that besides forgetting unpleasant moments in our lives, we have a lot of faith in our ability to not make them reoccur. We fool ourselves into thinking we can change people. We can change situations. We can break habits. Given the chance to do it over again, we can make it work. The ending made me wonder whether they chose to be together despite the fact that they knew it wouldn’t work or because they decided it would be different this time around (more of the former, I think). It’s amazing how many of us make the same mistakes over and over again. What if I knew my marriage would end badly? What if I knew all the terrible fights to come? Would I choose to never get married? Would I get out of the relationship now? What if I had forty years of bliss and wonderful memories with my husband and then two years of terrible fights in the end? What’s the point at which it’s best to have never gotten involved? How many bad memories does it take to make the good ones worth erasing? I guess I don’t have the answers, just more questions. Maybe that’s why we don’t know the future and why we don’t get the choice.
As always feel free to let me know what you think.
My questions is: Why do any of the states get to vote before others? How come we don’t all vote on the same day across all states like we do for the Presidential election. I’m not bothered that states like Iowa and New Hampshire get so much political attention. I am much more upset about how strongly they affect the race itself. There were nine presidential candidates before the Iowa caucuses. On the day Jake got to vote in California, we were down to four. I feel that no one or two or seven states should have enough power to change the entire race before the other 43 have even had a chance to participate. If all states voted on the same day, I am confident the results could have been different. Maybe we wouldn’t even have Kerry as the candidate. Dean would have never made that speech (or at least it would have been too late to have an effect), Clark would have been an option. I feel that if the primaries were treated like a serious, country-wide election, they should be all on the same day and shouldn’t have as much local concentration as they do. The election is not about a candidate who is serving Iowa or Alaska or Alabama. This is a presidential candidate. This person will serve the entire country. This person needs to concentrate on the whole country and the whole country should get the option of voting for the candidate they want in the White House. It isn’t fair that the early states got to choose between nine and others didn’t. In my eyes, this affects the entire balance of the election. What about all those people who voted for Kerry or Lieberman, would they have voted for someone else if the two weren’t a choice. Of course, they would have. Would the results have been different? Maybe or maybe not. The fact is, we will never know. |
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