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?
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The election is still not over, and it’s getting messier by the minute. I don’t even know when it’s gonna end but I can already tell it’s gonna be a total mess. The ending will be interesting, possibly devastating and definitely disputed.
One of the reasons I love living in New York City is cause you can hail cabs here. I’m used to being able to go out in the street, stick out my arm and have a yellow one stop right in front of me. When I moved from Istanbul to Pittsburgh, that was one of the things I missed most. In Pittsburgh, you call a cab and start praying for it to show. Anyhow, back to New York. The thing that baffles me is how few people know the simple taxi system. All cabs in New York use the same strategy to symbolize whether they are free or not. If the sign on top of the cab is not lit, it’s Occupied. If it’s totally lit, it’s Off Duty and if the mid section is lit, it’s Available. When hailing for a cab, all you need to do is look for the cabs whose middle light is on. How complicated is that? (And if my explanation sounds complicated, it’s only cause I suck at explaining not cause it’s actually confusing.) It took me all of a day or two to figure this out. For some reason, New York is full of people who have not. It really baffles me.
Thank God it’s Friday. This week has been long and draining so I am really glad it’s over. I’m tired of coming home with a whole set of ideas on what I need to do and how I’m going to get it all done and ending up on the couch, unable to move. I’m planning to use this weekend to recharge. And accomplish the millions of things on my list.
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My referrer logs aren’t usually that interesting. With the exception of this. I would like you to note that I am number One! Any ideas on what that symbolizes? Heh.
Everyone’s talking about voting. It’s all over the Fray ( you can even read my little comment) and all over MetaFilter. I know there are many people who are sick of all this talk, but I am still totally obsessed. I can’t think of anything else. I have MetaFilter and CNN up on my screens at work and I keep refreshing to get the most recent updates. Kinda freaky, I know, but I can’t stop myself. I promise to go back to normal as soon as Gore wins. Heh.
So much to do and so little time. I’m still feeling overwhelmed about this weekend. Trying to get my arms around all the Japanese I need to master in the next three weeks. I also need to produce some literary sounding scenes for my novel class on Monday. This one will go to the entire class so they can critique it, so it needs to be extra good. Let alone all the TiVo catching up I’m gonna have to do. Argh.
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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.
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He’s almost winning! Heh. Heh.
Thanks to Stewart I tracked down the double issue of The New Yorker and I am so glad I did. I don’t know why I suddenly became so fascinated with politics, but here I am yelling at my TV while Jake’s surfing the net. Maybe it is cause I can’t vote.
One of the articles in the New Yorker, titled The Word Lab, is about what language the candidates use and how they get selected. It has quite a few interesting points. For the article, they created a focus group and one of the things they discussed was death tax. People’s opinion of the amount you’re allowed to pass on after you die was a lot more than people had originally guessed. But even after the facts were given, almost none of the participants changed their opinion on whether to abolish to tax or not. “The point here was that if you introduce a subject using language that will produce a strong opinion no subsequent information will get people to change their minds.”
Another thing they did during the focus group was to make them put these five words in order of what matters most in their life. The list was opportunity, community, responsibility, accountability, and society. (I listed them in the same order as the magazine) What would be your order?
I gotta go back and yell at my TV some more.
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Today’s class day, making it a day of several thoughts. Let’s start with the art class. Let’s talk nudity. We spent a while discussing paintings that make you want to look away. How different cultures react to nudity is interesting. How do you feel when looking at a nude piece? Does it help if the piece was by a really famous artist? What if you’re in a gallery where you don’t know anyone, does that change whether you look at it or not? Does it change how long you loot at it for? What if you’re at the gallery with a lot of friends? What if these friends are artists? What if the painting is merely a close-up of a woman’s crotch? Makes you think? So I hope.
We also talked about perception. We looked at this wooden African piece where a woman sat kneeled. On top of her is a male figure. Many of us, who have been raised in a semi-Western culture, immediately assumed this to be a subservient position. Actually, in this example, the woman symbolized the woman as the higher being, the main cause of support. She’s the source of power. Isn’t it interesting how much we assume?
Did I mention that there is no equivalent of “bless you” in Japanese? I have an issue with that. It’s so weird to me that a society that places so much importance on being formal and correct and polite has no word for ‘bless you’. Talk about cultural differences….
Tomorrow is vote-day. Please vote. I can’t but if you can, please do. It makes a huge deal of difference, especially this time.
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Today was a little better than yesterday. I slept for over 12 hours and woke up rested, only to feel tired within three hours. I don’t know if the computer and studying is tiring my eyes but I keep having headaches. I hope that isn’t a side-effect of the Laser operation.
I wrote the entire outline of my novel today. Twenty chapters of three acts each. Considering the two main characters and beginning of the story had been in my mind for several months, it was neat to see whether I could form an entire book’s worth of a story out of it. I think I can. I hope I can. I really love this story and I am quite attached to these people. I want to do this one. I want to do it right. May the Muses help me out.
Derek says writing a book is hard. I couldn’t agree more.
I did spend some chunk of time studying for my Japanese test as well. Not as much as I would have liked to, but enough to not give up on this exam, yet. I just hope my brain holds up.
Self-confidence is a weird thing, everyone who lacks it thinks that she is the only one who does so. (I am tired of using the politically correct she or he thing. Since I am female, I am using she. If you’re male, please adjust accordingly. Thanks.) I look at some people and feel like they must be amazingly happy. I see this person who looks stunning, has a great job, wonderful boyfriend and friends who seem to love her. I think to myself that this person must feel delighted with her life. And then I find out that she, too, doubts herself and feels insecure and my jaw drops. I wish I could find a way to cure self-doubt. It’s such a crippling sensation and it seems that no one is spared. If you know the secret to how not to be insecure, please share with me.
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My Japanese exam is only four weeks away and I am so going to flunk it. I bought two books last week to prepare and the more I study, the more I realize how little I know. The thing is, it’s self-inflicted pain so I can’t even whine. While I am too tired to study as much as I’m going to have to, I’m also too masochistic to give it up. I’ve come so close, I can’t give up now. And I sure as hell am not willing to fail. So the only alternative is to bust my ass.
It’s times like these that make me reconsider my willingness to go back to school.
I wish I could tell you something pithy about today but I spent the entire day studying Japanese, desperately trying to come up with an outline for my novel and mostly running away from both chores by watching a week’s worth of TiVo. I’m sure tomorrow won’t be shockingly different.
I did see Charlie’s Angels last night and loved it. It was funny. It was witty. It was silly. It was fun. It was the perfect Friday night movie.
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I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art tonight, for the first time ever. I’ve been to The Frick Museum several times and I love the collection there, but I’d never been to the mother of all museums before. And I’ve lived in New York for 4 years. The thing is, now I wish I’d never gone. The museum is so enormous and amazing and now that I know that (I mean I always ‘knew’ that but now I’ve actually seen how expansive it is)I can’t stop myself from dying to go back. I have to see all of it. Awful.
I went to the museum with my class and we looked at several pieces. We surrounded a painting and played a game called the Delayed Judgement Activity. In this activity, you reserve all of your judgement and make objective statements about the piece. For example, “This woman looks happy” is subjective while “This painting has four women and a man” is objective. So we went around three times and tried making our statements as objective as possible. The neat thing about the activity is that it’s a group-activity. One person makes a statement and we all ponder whether that’s really objective or not. This process causes each observer to notice things that she or he hadn’t paid attention to before the exercise. The painting, therefore, completely transforms right before your eyes. It’s really magical.
By the way, the practice of separating objective from subjective is really difficult and requires a personal effort, especially when talking about an artistic object.
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I was going to link to a neat link on MetaFilter about how penguins fall backwards as they watch planes flying over them, but, for some reason, MetaFilter seems to be down. That’s a major bummer on so many levels!
Are you nice to people? When was the last time you were rude to someone? It’s really amazing how some people don’t realize the importance of being nice to everyone. I’m not talking about kissing butt or faking it, but genuine cordiality. There is no reason to not be kind to everyone. It’s so interesting to me how something that goes around comes around. The person you’re mean to might be at the other end of an interview or might become a client. I just don’t understand what causes people to be rude. To me, it makes perfect sense to try and be nice to everyone. When someone is nice to me, especially when they have no reason to be, it so makes my day and I love the idea of doing that for someone else. Wouldn’t you?
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Before I forget, Rabbit, Rabbit.
I brought my camera home to take pictures of my nephews, family and friends. I also promised a friend, I’d take pictures of Turkey for him. To make sure I couldn’t fulfill any of my promises, my camera broke. On top of that, the few pictures I did take were taken with the lowest quality and came out quite shitty. After I sent my camera to Kodak (who, btw, has the greatest customer service ever!) I got it back just this week. As I looked through the pictures yesterday, I was pleased to find this little gem.
Levent took this picture of both of us. I remember that day clearly. We met to take a short walk and it was the day after my Laser operation, which is why I’m wearing sunglasses. We got ice cream from Gunes (which means ‘sun’) which is the best ice cream I’ve ever had. And we walked down the seaside, taking pictures of the bridges and the sailboats by the sea. The sun was setting as we chatted about our lives. He just became a doctor and started working at a hospital and I had major changes in my life since we last saw each other, so we had a lot of catching up to do. Levent was my first boyfriend and he’s the only ex I’m actually on speaking terms with (long story) and we’ve known each other for over 12 years. Actually we’ve been best friends for that long. There’s something to be said for the few people who’ve meant so much to you for such a long time.
Love you, Levent, and I miss you!
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Goody Links
Can you summarize the last year in twenty words or fewer?
Thoughts
The weird thing about being sick is that I can never seem to remember the time when I wasn’t. As soon as I get sick, it feels like I will always be sick. I feel hopeless and miserable and each time I try to recall how I felt without the sickness, I can’t seem to. Maybe it’s just me, but it happens to me every time. It’s one of the major reasons I hate getting sick. The sore throat, chess pain, incessant sneezing, fever and nausea are some others.
Happy Halloween! This is the first time in my life that I’m giving out candy. Last year, I was at my friend Laura’s house for Halloween and it was the first time I carved pumpkins. Since I never gave candy out before I wanted to go all out. I bought full-size bars and lots of them and then I got worried and bought some snack sized ones as well, just in case too many kids showed up. I just hope the kids come to get it or my diet will become toast!
I was trying to link a picture of my plate of candies but I can’t get the image to be small enough, so it’ll have to wait.
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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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