Yaramaz Went Away

I am officially a tool of the CIA, acting as an experiment in human germ warfare in an attempt to control the Middle East by way of Istanbul.  *bark bark*  Still keeping D. almost up at night with my bronchial sea lion barks (he can sleep through an earthquake so my barks register as a light tremor).  Confusing the teachers at work with my permutations of unhealthiness- stomach flus and colds and bronchial nonsense each seaguing into the other in a delicate dance of viral interconnectedness. 

Today the skies are bright and blue and freezing cold and my airways are dreading my return out there for my trip out to Maslak for my thrice weekly session with Letafet (who is still lovely).  The new Vodafone, by the way, has Lavazza fresh-roasted coffee machines instead of the old nescafé ones. This is good. I can live with the fresh paint smells choking me if they are mingled with a fine fresh espresso in an easily crushed corrugated plastic cup.

Going home in 2 weeks. Yay. Seriously, yay.

I survived the Emniyet today.  I met Mark at 6:30 this morning in the pouring wet and cold pre dawn by the metro to taxi out to Aksaray for our annual bout of infernal bureaucracy.  Scanned and searched and x rayed by bored boys in uniform missing their tea breaks. Sat on the strangely stylish yet insufficient cream and chartreuse mini sofas against the wall of windows. Rain outside and police officers drinking hot tea in the small bufe beyond.  Tummy rumbling from premature hunger pangs, mouth bitter from sleep and no tea.  We waited an hour and a half, joined by Claire and Yasin, as the crowds in the waiting room grew exponentially. When it seemed as though the walls could contain no more, they opened the gates to the courtyard and started calling out the names on the passports. I was at the back of the throng when I vaguely heard a bellow of Marrriiiiiiaaaaaa Annnnnnnnaaaaaaaaa (repeat thrice) and had to fight my way to the front to claim it and pass through security. I don’t know why the people insist on pushing to the front of huge masses when all names are called in the order received. I was around 7th to arrive and 7th called, but the first several layers of humanity were relative late arrivals with no real reason to be at the front aside from having a better view of a door they can’t exit through until all the others have elbowed past..  

Mark and I crossed the vast courtyard, filled with patriotic statues and openness, and entered the building at the far side (‘A Blok’, was all it read- most austere) and followed the first half dozen up the stairs to a randomly formed queue. Eventually Yasin and Claire caught up before we reached the number-ticket counter. We claimed the first two spots in line for the renewal queue and Yasin (who is the school’s helper for residence permit related things) was ecstatic.  Apparently, normally they end up being mired in the emniyet for hours in queues but this time and the time last year with me, we were first in, first out.  I am like a lucky charm, he kept muttering.  I must come with him everytime. No more 7am starts, 5pm exits! Oh oh, çok iyi, çok mükemmel, ohoh inanmiyorum ya allahallah. 

We were out and drinking tea with the other cops in the smoky büfe by 8:30am. A record.
 

A few things to note in my current state (which would be somewhere around Arkansas):

1. Sisli Pizza Bulls pizza is infinitely better than the Fulya branch. I think it’s the only pizza place in the country that has acknowledged that pizza might actually taste nice if you put some sauce on under the cheese.  And they intuitively understand that when you ask for jalepenos on it, you want more than just a handful of stems and cores embedded in a sauceless crust.

2. Olbas oil, bronchial dilators, Claritin, pomegranate tea and mineral water are the mainstays of my diet at the moment, aside from my brief foray into pizza products and a few gummi bears last night.  I’m barking like a dog, totally unable to breathe through either of my nostrils, bronchial in all my breathing (D. even named one of his recently built Sim cities after me- Bronchial Bollocks).  My intakes of breath are multi dimensional and sculptural in their scope.

3. Watching season 18 of the Simpsons, one by one in bed, is a great way to recover from a 12 hour day at work when you should never have even gone to work in the first place but are the only person around who can do the things that need doing.  I was at my desk, still timetabling for 35, at 9pm last night, having got to work at 9am to help Hayley cover Alexa’s scary advanced grammar workshop. Then the new teacher came for orientation. Then there were oral exams to give. Then there was an endlessly interrupted meeting with an exhausted Banu about timetable changes.  Then I tried to integrate those stupidly complicated changes into my excel program without destroying everything. Then I had to count and recount each teacher’s hours and travel time (hard hard hard when sick and bleary  and they have a lot of 1.5 hour classes), Then I had to create 35 individual timetables separate from the condensed master copy and send each one off in emails with calendar and colour-coding guide and detailed explanations of changes attached. Then I had to coax colour copies out of a reluctant printer and cut out 35 long timetable strips from pages and pages of irregularly shaped strips and put each strip in each teacher’s locker.  Not easy when delirious and barking and coasting on tea and one mandarin.

I’m staying in today.  I’m tired.

After about ten days’ break from my chronic, never ending mélange de illness, I am back on track with something disconcertingly bronchial and feverish. Voice breaking, throat sore, all that fun. Ugh.

Woken at 7am by a sweetly barfy Hayley on the phone, reaching a grand total of three teachers off sick at the last minute. I’d spent yesterday afternoon rushing around to find cover for the first two, using up what I thought were all my spare cover teachers (mornings and evenings are the worst because, well, almost everyone works mornings and evenings) but between 7am and 8am, I somehow managed to cover one more morning and one more evening. I am, I suppose, uber DoS.  Covering classes at a single bound from beneath the weight of two duvets with a snoring D and a snoring Lola flanking me on both sides…and during all my lethally early phone calls, I woke neither of them.

We are now resting on the living room kilim, Lola in her warmest place (my belly), me just finished a huge and lovely tea.  I will slowly drag myself to the shower and slowly drag myself to work. I figure that since I’ve actually been working since 7am solid, I can go at a lumbering snail’s pace. More tea.

All my Vodafone classes were cancelled this week because the new building in Maslak has no meeting rooms. This is the new building they had been announcing their imminent move to since last April when i was out at Ikitelli full time.  For the last few weeks I’ve been commuting out to Ikitelli three times a week to teach my lawyer, which leaves the school essentially directorless for approximately 12-15 hours a week (depending on the highly erratic travel time).  Last week, between my classes with Aylin at Pirelli and my classes at Vodafone and a handful of never ending journeys in between, green at the gills with car sickness and taking the longest routes possible (involuntarily), I never really actually did anything directorish between Tuesday and Thursday. I mostly just sat in rattletrap old cars going around in circles through decrepit industrial zones. 

Had more but different vivid flashbacks this morning in between phone calls to teachers.  It’s becoming very odd and omnipresent.

I’ve tried to pay my bills online yet again, because I am nowhere near a relevant bank during working hours.  GarantiOnline is adamant that I do not in fact owe 21.50ytl on my phone bill (even though I have a letter that says otherwise) and so won’t let me pay it; they also insist that  my very overdue Beda electric bill’s tesisat number should have 8 digits when in fact the printout from the metre reader only gave me 5 digits.  I’ve tried every other combination of numbers on the bill and nothing works.

If I have no phone or electricity next week, I will know for certain why.

It’s rainy and grey and I am covered in pomegranate juice, seeping bloodily into the Lola-scratch ridges pn my fingertips (which are healing nicely, thank you, with no cat scratch fever to speak of).  I have little scarlet fisheggy seeds tumbling all over my desk as I peel open the rind. My weekly timetable is spattered as well, with about three teachers’ schedules looking like murder scene refugees.  It’s lovely to have a relatively calm day after weeks of chaos and illness and a dearth of pomegranates.  Only two panicked phone calls before 8:30am and only three emails containing impossible situations in my work inbox. Lola woke me at 7:30 by slowly and meticulously pushing D.’s things off the dresser.

Assorted coins *clink clink clink*

*meow*

Assorted bank cards *plup plup plup*

*meow!*

Sunglasses *clunk*

And so on, all the while glaring at me from above as she carefully edged the items to the edge and then over.

*Breakfast! Now!*

*clunk clunk plink*

It’s like having a small, furry, wholly mobile psychopathic baby. 

At least I am not still ill this week.  Between the phone calls and emails and Lola, I’d be on the verge of a nervous breakdown again if I were. I’ve been on that precipice a few too many times in the past few months.  It’s been an odd season, truly- somewhere between complete contentment and borderline losing it.  My multisensory flashbacks are continuing unabated, though they have moved on from the Arabian desert ones from back in September.  Now I am in various seasons of Kayseri, of Erenköy, of Harbiye, in my travels here and there, in jobs and flats long gone. The odd thing is, I keep flashing on their moments of calm, their joyful interactions, their moments of joy and contentment and feeling quite all right. I’m trying to remember whether these flashes are delusional or if I really did have those moments of complete and utter sanity and clarity and balance.  I flash on my living room in Erenköy, the one with the huge window overlooking the garden, and I ragingly miss my comfy ancient uncleanable white sofa and that huge dark wood diningroom table looking out at the garden and the rose bushes and the illusion that I felt completely at ease at that point. Or I think of wandering around Kadköy on a rainy day off, somewhere between Karga and the fish market and I feel a flash of sadness, feeling instinctively that at that point I still had hope and optimism (but don’t I now??). Or on the bus between Kayseri and Göreme in the snow in deep winter with my ears full of Selda Bacan and Karde Türküler, feeling so at peace with the landscape and the mood and the sky.  Or in my funky tiny kitchen in Harbiye, making penne arabiata with music blaring and Lola climbing the walls.

The thing is,  I know things were imperfect in these times and places, that they don’t and can’t represent moments of clarity and calm now lost and that I am not in a place without hope or optimism. But in these flashes, I irrationally sense that something is lost.  In my non-flash moments (out with people, in chilling with D., right now, for instance), I am fine and calm and hopeful. I wish I knew why my subconscious is trying to confuse me.

The cat is meditating at the end of the bed; red thai curry shredded chicken-rice soup in simmering in the kitchen; my lips are stained red and stinging from the citric acid of a lovely huge fresh pomegranate from the fruit and veggie boys up the street. Rule of life to abide by: when you have fever-burnt lips from a week of illness, try not to eat a whole pomegranate in one sitting. It hurts.  And my Mac’s white keyboard and my chartreuse duvet are both spotted with bloodstains of pomegranate juice that burst out when I split open the parts. Even the fingertips of my left hand that Lola sliced open are juice stained.  The cat is still white and black, no red to mar her furry oysterness.

Work is fine, work is calm (though every morning at least one person has called in sick, requiring me to field calls and arrange cover from beneath my cozy blankets). I’ve been stuck doing a lot of oral testing because the fellow who was meant to be on duty is the one who has been gone two days. But it’s fine and fascinating because slowly slowly I’ve been oral testing a whole Iraqi Kurdish family who have been coming in in spurts of nephew and daughter and father and aunt and extended others milling in reception. They all speak at least four other languages, which seriously rocks my world.  I like meeting people who can laugh in five languages.