Condensing two weeks into on post

Since I last wrote I’ve spent most of the last two weeks trying to put together the necessary paperwork for work. Still have one last thing – a tax number – to collect.

I might get a job on the weekends doing TOEFL teaching. Burak set it up. We’ll see.

This weekend – the Bayram holiday weekend – has been eventful. My roommate Ozgur spent most of the last five days at his cousins; he’s back now but out at his brother’s. While at home I’ve been bored, depressed, homesick, nostalgic – the usual. But Thursday evening I went out with a coworker, Rachel, and her gf. Invited Lizette. Met a group of expats mixed with locals at a bar in Istanbul. Went bar hoping with them. Kareoke – sang white wedding. Raki – like licourace (sp?) in vodka. Bad hangover. Met a girl named Laura from the states – Georgia to be exact. She’s got this huge mess of curly hair, the color of which I can quite place – brown but somehow with a light almost reddish tint – and gorgeous amber colored eyes. She’s my age, but been travelling Europe and Asia for quite some time now. First as a nanny in Amsterdam, then hitchhiking around everywhere. She has some amazing stories. On Friday we visited the Princes’ Islands together. The boat ride was calming, the weather was beautiful. We walked around one of the Islands and found this beautiful secluded cliff, where we sat out and waited for the sun to set. Everything was so vibrant, even the algae was the most vibrant green I’ve ever seen. The sunlight here is remarkable, the way it pulls the color out of things. I think the island was mostly naval buildings and barracks. We discovered a little hidden resort house, empty for the season except for a single man walking his dogs. We ate dinner out by the seafront – overpriced. We spend the boat ride home talking about children and Turkish culture. They really baby kids here – up through late adolescents. Children have a very very close connection with their mothers. They are a very touchy people – boys can be seen on the busses with their arms against each other, heads on shoulders. There are always more men out on the street than women. That kind of thing. It was a great, peaceful day – I really needed it after all this stress.

Laura brought up a great point about language and personality. We’ve both noticed that with non-English speaker’s we’re never sure If we’re being understoond. Laura has a dry sense of humor – very sarcastic – and joked (only partially) that she was always already unsure that English speaker’s understood her, let alone people for whom it’s a second language. She said she’d been kind of feeling like she lost her personality around them… like the more she watered down her language the less she felt like herself. I agree. I’ve been feeling the same way… especially when it comes to sarcasm and humor – my adoration of bad puns and especially innuendo is kind of lost on most of the Turks, even the better English speakers like Burak… although sometimes they surprise me. But oftentimes I think that the linguistic alienation really does come along with a measure of loss of personhood, especially personality. Personality must be pretty intimately tied in with our particular relation to our language. Very interesting insight from Laura.

Today I woke up depressed. Tried to sleep for another two hours. Got up at eleven, determined to make something of the day. Took The Red Badge of Courage – borrowed it from Burak for Ozgur to read, for practice with his English – to the seaside to read. It was warm, the sun was blindingly bright, The sky was a crisp blude, and the sea was unusually unruly. Waves smacked up all along the seaside, sending foam and spray galloping against the concrete. The sound was amazing, like the ocean back in Southern California. I remember one little girl running back and forth, trying to outrun the spray; her dad picked her up and pretended to threaten to feed her to the sea.

The rest of the day has been pretty boring and depressing. I wanted to go out and write but find myself a little too worn out to deal with the language barrier a second time today. I want a guitar, bad. I’m worried about money, again.

Money and language continue to feel intimately connected. No wonder lit theorists love Marx. I feel like they both bestow a kind of agency, a way of buying in, access to the social world.