“Everyone knows” is the invocation of the cliche and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it’s the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliche that’s so insufferable. What we know id that, in an uncliched was, nobody knows anything. You can’t know anything. The things you know you don’t know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All that we don’t know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing. – Philip Roth in The Human Stain
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…
When I was younger, I used to travel in a crowd of beautiful women. I don’t know how it happened but all my female friends (and I am not even sure I can call them friends) were drop dead gorgeous and within a few weeks, my self-image managed to wither away to nothing. At the time, I started playing a game where each time I caught myself wishing I had someone else’s something (like hair or eyes or nose or legs) I would force the issue.
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’ve now been writing this site for the better part of four years. I registered the domain in March of 2000 and wrote for two months until I moved over to Blogger and then wouldn’t stop writing. I remember the initial days of looking through other people’s blogs and their links. It took only a few days to notice that everyone linked to the same people and, four years later, it’s no different. Some of the sites have disappeared and there are new popular ones. All in all, we have a list of twenty that’s linked by a majority of the people I visit.
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’ve updated my other places page to include a lot more places. Some of which I’ve read consistently, some of which are brand new to me and might or might not stay on the page. I am actively soliciting other sites. Is there a place you visit that you like? Is there a site you think I might like? If so, please add a comment below and I promise I will give each site a chance. Pretty please?
I’ve been struggling to figure out where I feel like I belong for many years. I used to think I had two homes and that was okay. And then we moved to San Diego and I’ve been feeling confused and out of place ever since. I miss New York City. I miss so many things about the city that I wouldn’t even know where to begin. For the last six months, I’ve been pining for the City and adding to the already long list of reasons why I belong there and not here.
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.
Thanks to my friend Cynthia, I am completely hooked on Air America. Since I live in “not-so-liberal” San Diego, the radio hasn’t made it to my hometown just yet, so the only way I can listen to it is over the net. The biggest downside of this is that if I miss a show in realtime, I miss it. For example, this morning, Jon Stewart was on the O’Franken Factor and by the time I tuned in, I’d already missed the first hour and I missed it again tonight when it was recast. If it were on the radio, I could have recorded it and listened to it later, when I wasn’t busy. Other than that, I’ve had no problem listening to it while working; it doesn’t distract me one bit.
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’m always surprised when I meet people who aren’t curious.
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.
Since last week lacked in updates but not in events, I figured I’d post some of what’s been going on:
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.
This is talent: Dan Schwartz’s photographs in the last issue of 28mm are some of the most creative I’ve ever seen. I keep going back every day to look at them again and again. There’s something about those colors that pulls me in each time.
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.
Turkish Food: Thanks to an article in the San Diego Reader, we found a small cafe in Mission Beach that serves a few Turkish dishes. If you’re into Turkish food, check out Olives. It’s on 805 Santa Clara Place, Mission Beach. If you know of any Turkish restaurants in the San Diego area, please please let me know.
I didn’t write much last week mostly because I’d been working longer and more hectic days than usual. I started at my current job mid-September. I took the job because it would allow me to learn a few new programming languages (or scripting languages as I like to call them) and give me experience in an area I hadn’t previously explored. Well, I also took it because it would pay our rent, but that’s another matter altogether. The guy who hired me promised to teach me all he knew. A little over two months after he hired me, he quit the firm. Leaving me, my position, and my project in a quandary.
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.
Warning: If you haven’t seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind yet and plan to see it, you may not want to read my thoughts on the movie until after you’ve seen it.
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.
I’ve spent the last few weeks thinking about photography and wondering whether I should post bigger pictures on the main page. I wanted to push myself to take more pictures and to get more feedback on them so I can learn to be a better photographer. I also wanted to update my site even on days when I don’t have much to say or I am too busy to post a long entry. So I’ve decided to make the pictures bigger and to post the “story” of the picture, if and when there is one as a comment next to the picture. This way regular visitors can see something new almost daily, and read something new as often as I have something interesting to say. And also, pictures get their own comments so we can differentiate between them and the thoughts.
As always feel free to let me know what you think.
Ever since the Iowa caucuses and the outcomes of the next ten days of primaries, I’ve been wondering why the system of voting for the primaries is the way it is. I know there’s been a trend of many other states moving their dates forward, trying to be one of the ‘influential’ states and there are states that complain about not getting enough attention.
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.
Jake and I spent yesterday in Los Angeles. I am planning to work all weekend, next weekend, so we thought it might be nice to get away at least for a day since I’ll be working for twelve days straight once this weekend is over. We’d visited LA three weeks ago to take photographs and the ride home was so painful that we didn’t want to drive up there again for a while.
This time, we set up brunch and coffee meetings with two of Jake’s friends. One from his high-school years whom he hadn’t seen in nine years and another from college, whom we hadn’t seen or talked to in over four years. We figured between the two get togethers, I’d spend a few hours practicing with my new camera. Since our last experience had taught us that we could spend forever in LA traffic, we decided to pick one spot and spend the few hours there. I read about several different places and settled on Olvera Street which sounded interesting, fun, and full of potential for photography.
We got on the road at 9:00am and made it to Santa Monica in exactly one hour and forty minutes. It was my second time down the boulevard, but Jake’s first so we strolled a bit while I tried to take some pictures. We then met his friend and his friend’s girlfriend for brunch, had great conversation. Charged up and excited, we then strolled down to the beach for some more pictures. I’m not really a lie-on-the-beach type of person but there’s something about the Pacific Coast beaches that I find magical. Maybe it’s how expansive and never-ending they feel. On Friday Jake and I had gone to La Jolla for me to pickup some paperwork from work and spent lunch by the beach and I told him that we should visit a beach at least three times a week. The Santa Monica beach was louder but it still gave me the sense of serenity I enjoy.
We left the beach for the loud and joyful crowd of Olvera street where we spent an hour walking and taking pictures, eating Mexican food, and enjoying the 70-degree weather. Just as we got in the car to drive towards Hollywood, Jake’s friend called to let us know she was finished with her commitment so we met her at the Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard where, of course, I took pictures. We spent the next two hours catching up, laughing, and talking about our careers, lives, marriage, and mutual friends. The way back was as painless as the way up and we made it home in less than two hours. All in all, a truly enjoyable day.
There’s something special about catching up with old friends. No matter how long it’s been since you last saw them, there’s a sense of familiarity that never goes away and allows you to fill years of gaps in a matter of minutes. It leaves you so fulfilled and full of hope and you remember all the things you liked about that person all along and rebuild your faith that this time you won’t fall out of touch.
It was one of those inspiring days.
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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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