Yaramaz Went Away

It’s a cold-toed Sunday morning and I’m trying to refocus my mild but present headache, which is trying to expand my forehead from inside.  Here are two interviews, one from   and one from  

Interview 1

1. Photographs or paintings?

Photographs. I would like to say paintings so that I can come across as a lot more artsy and intuitive and cultured and all, but I really do prefer photographs.  I spent most of my creative youth trying to convince myself that I ought to like painting (the action) and paintings (the physical manifestations) but it never really clicked.  Some are lovely- I’m a sucker for impressionists- but I reserve my passions for well-taken photos, particularly photos of people. I am a sucker for evocative portraits.

2. What is something you would never try?

This is a toss-up between climbing a mountain (like Everest or suchlike, not something more piddly like a Scottish munro) and eating offal. I have no desire to subject myself to freezing cold, lethal precipices, fierce winds, and scary heights. None of it appeals in the slightest. Nor do organ meats, no matter how they might be prepared. I *heart* Anthony Bourdain but this is where we part ideologies. 

3. Where do you find peace?

I don’t know. I’ve been working on this for years. It’s very elusive. Solitude helps- for the past month I have been very hermitty, spending a lot of time alone in my basement room. That has restored some of the calm I had lost over the past few years. However, even in these moments of calm, my brain is usually reeling with thoughts and frets and gut-tightening anticipation and fear. I suck at living in the moment and savouring the sensations of Now, or lack thereof. I really need to work on this. 

4. What goes through your mind when you first get to a new place?

A very strange combination of terror and impatience and thrill.  I have no idea where I am, quite decontextualized geographically, and this scares the shit out of me.  I have a driving need to figure out my position in the place, and from there I want to see what I can do with it.  

5. What is your favorite game (and why)?

I’m currently hooked on computer backgammon, because it’s so meditative. I’m also a sucker for Scrabble. I try to avoid playing games with other, living people because my Leo moon totally fucks with my sense of competitiveness and I HAVE to win and if I don’t win, I’m gutted (and useless! and fat! and ugly! and unloved!). I don’t actually get excited when I do win, have no real drive to succeed or to be the best,  but for some reason, I can’t lose. Thus, I try to avoid the issue altogether by only playing against virtual opponents.  

Interview 2

1. One of my favourite pastimes in China was to go to the chemists. I loved to explain my symptoms, then the chemist would rummage through the cabinets and press a jar (or bottle, or spray bottle) of something into my hand, and I would take it and be cured. Tell me about your favourite medical experience.

In Ghana, in 1998, I went deaf yet again. This happens annually, if not bi-annually, whenever a certain amount of water somehow makes its way in to my super tiny canals.  I took a tro-tro into Accra with a bag of my seat mate’s chickens on my lap, ears resonating with in-utero tidal noises which blocked out all other noises, even the chickens.  In Accra, I got a taxi to the nearest hospital, which was a big rambling bungalow compound with No Spitting! It Spreads Disease! stickers slapped onto every surface.  After waiting in utero in the palm treed courtyard, I was ushered in to a curtained off area where a lovely big round pillow-bosom’d nurse cradled me in her motherly folds and jammed a syringe into my ear and gently sluiced out the nastiness with warm saline. It was a lovely, surreal experience, not at all unpleasant (unlike the asshole doctor  in Kucukyali at the red crescent hospital in Istanbul who cradled me in his bony arms and jammed the syringe into my ear and rattled it around and admonished me for allowing my ears to get wet then sent me home with my ears only partly opened up and wholly bruised)

2. Camels. Share your opinion.

Beautiful eyes, and a hip gait not unlike Marilyn Monroe’s, and a lovely way to get around on in the sand dunes of Arabia BUT filthy mouths! Nasty temperaments!  I’m partial to camel milk lattes though. 

3. What’s your best story of going through customs?

In Belize. We drove from Mexico to Belize in a mostly-empty chicken bus, just us and a German couple. At the border, the Belizean driver pointed us towards the customs hall and said he’d meet us at the other side (this would be the first and last time in the trip with 6 border crossings where anyone would actually tell us  where to go and what to do). The customs hall was empty, except for the customs agents.  As we stood at the counter, a fellow came up and politely offered to carry our bags to the inspection desk a bit further along so we wouldn’t have to shoulder their weight as we stood dealing with passports. The passport people stamped our passports and welcomed us heartily and sang the praises of our entry to their country and all the great things we would see and do. We asked for a 2 week stay and they gave us three months, just in case. Further along at the inspection desk where our bags had been carefully placed, the inspector asked us if we had anything to declare and we said no, and he thanked us and asked us how our holiday and been so far and wished us a very lovely stay in Belize. We walked out of the hall and our bus driver was waiting for us. He grinned, lit up a second cigarette, and welcomed us to Belize.  

I could list about 50 horrible experiences, but this was my lone stand-out happy story. 

4. Do you roll or fold your clothes for packing?

Roll. I actually still can’t fold clothes properly. I should have taken a job at The Gap in high school. 

5. I just got back from a swim at the beach. Do you enjoy the beach?

I do, but I generally don’t like beaches themselves— I hate the crowds of people, the touts, the architectural buildup, the noise. A nice empty beach would do me well, one without the kids coming by to sell me bracelets every three seconds or the guys hustling me for boat trips or the beachfront cafes demanding I come look at menu, ok!  

 In hibernation, with chilled toes and daily pots of tea.  I am sleeping with a juxtaposed paradoxical case of insomnia, holing myself up in my small, cozy basement room, playing MacBook backgammon til 3 am, interspersed with bouts of watching sequences of clusters of Sex and the City episodes. When I finally do sleep, my dreams are full of backgammon strategy moves and fictitious interpersonal traumas.  I like my solitude. I like lying in bed under many duvets with my laptop perched on my second pillow, meditating my way through my tenth match of backgammon against Moon. I’m getting better. 

My flight has been booked, and my visa has been stamped in my passport. I am leaving on the 4th, around noon. It’s a direct flight from Vancouver, about 12 or 13 hours, and I get in at 4:30 the next afternoon.  This is so much better than all flights from Turkey which left at 5am and had an 8 hour European stopover, or the return flights which had the 8 hour stopovers as well after the first 10 hour flight, and finally only landing in Istanbul at midnight, after the taxi fares doubled and the shuttle bus was put away for the night. This is much better.

I have been buying stacks of used books, stocking up for the drought. Books and little tins of chipotle peppers and a jar of tomatilla salsa and my stove top espresso maker and plenty of size 9 shoes and pear-shaped jeans.  After a dozen or so years living Elsewhere, I have slowly learned which absences will come to haunt me after the initial thrill of the move has passed. I’m assembling my portable hard drives, filling them with music and movies and Rodney Yee yoga sessions.   Blouses that fit my shoulders and that are long enough to not show six inches of skin between skirt and shirt. In Turkey, I spent all six years there trying to find one, just one, article of clothing that actually fit me. Turkish legs are shorter, their hips are in their saddlebags, their waists are short, their arms are short and thin, their bras are hard and padded and give no clue as to real breast size.  Only Turkish shoes and socks fit me.  I seriously doubt anything Chinese would come close to covering my frame.  My ego can not risk the threat of having insufficient clothing brought from home, having to venture out and trying to wrestle my sturdy, tall frame into clothes meant for the un-tall and lithe. 

I’m walking every day, partly for the meditation, partly to ease my hermitude, partly to tone up enough not to look like yet another savage gringa.  It’s cold out, windy, and I’ve taken to wearing my lovely old Bulgarian felt hat, the warm, green angora one I got when I went to frigid Sofia and Plovdiv in the winter of Bilgi with Douglas. It is shaped like a film noir dame’s hat, with soft brown feathers around the rim.  It has been very well received here- the stock fellow at the drug store ‘cool hat!’d me, as did two ladies on the Songhees walkway, as did the two Amnesty International canvassers outside the old Eaton Centre, who exclaimed simultaneously, ‘Fabulous hat!’ as I passed.  It’s nice to be in a kind place where one’s 10 leva happy hats are well received.  I like my hat.

The Turkish lira is plummeting again, along with a large proportion of my savings. *sigh*  I hope I’ll be able to save in my next job. My salary will be the same (plus 74 lira per month, according to exchange rates) as it was last year, so am not taking a step down or a step up from my last job in Turkey, and the hours are significantly lighter. I may retain my sanity. I may.

 I went over to my twice-a-year friend Ludo’s house last night for pizza, wine and a movie (‘Before the rain‘), which was a necessary change of perspective for me, as I have been miring myself deep in yet another bout of self-doubt about my choices and dwelling on things that are stupid and irrelevant.  After telling me stories about his bike ride across Canada last summer, he told me about his plan to learn to ride a unicycle and ride that across Canada to raise environmental awareness (‘one man, one wheel, one planet’). His big ideas and minute attention to the important details always give me perspective because I tend to get lost in the big picture and I dwell on all the wrong things. His flatmate Chen cheered my decision to go to Shanghai and Ludo exploded with excitement at regular intervals. I’m doing the right thing, yes. 

I’ve bought a new stovetop espresso maker to replace the one D. burnt by accident, and got a funky new pair of Mary Janes for work. My reality, Mark III, is shaping up. Again. I just need to remember that change is good. 

basement january
Originally uploaded by koangirl

My borrowed neighborhood wireless has been down for two days, rendering late night posting awkward- nonexistent, really. I can’t be bothered to emerge from my warm basement cell, up into the colder, darker upstairs, even though the computer up there is lovely and fast and not dependent on some stupid neighbor’s inability to set up password protected wifi. It’s back now, re-emerging midway through my nth game of MacBook backgammon, wherein I played Sun, always whupping Moon’s sorry ass, Nick Cave’s Nocturama providing an excellent soundtrack for the slaughter.

For now my Airport bars are up in full force, all 4 increments filled in with bold black at least temporarily. It’s nice to be connected to the outside world.

Slowly starting packing again. Packing is a major theme here this year. I’ve blogged at least twice, extensively, about packing in the past year. My penchant for upheaval demands it. My poor, broken, lovely red suitcase is being used as a display shelf for all the small details that will be packed- my chartreuse teapot, my ergonomically designed ambidextrous Swiss veggie peeler and julienner, my art post cards and Parisian posters that have been hung in every flat since Kayseri, my cousin’s sheep teatowel (now a bit stained from years of use but still nice and big and covered in sheep), my two cookbook notebooks full of recipes I’ve jotted down over the years. Stuff, with more stuff added daily.

Lola’s been nesting in her catbag, the one we flew her over in. It’s sitting on a chair i the living room, all patent leather and rhinestones and hot pink inside padding. She is the queen of bling, napping in a small round furball, interrupting her round naps only with interludes of napping on the cable box or napping on the window shelf above the kitchen sink.

This week is busy with dealing with visas and flights and things that must be done so I can go away and work next month. I interrupted my visa application frenzy to go for coffee with Jenna and Corrinne, Corinne being fresh from months in a meditative monastery, now house sitting in a marvellous house in the uplands, all poured concrete, water-heated floors, floor-to-ceiling walls of glass looking out onto mossy, exposed rock wilderness. We ate dates and drank coffee and almond milk and talked about teaching and cooking and uprooting and settling down.

Tomorrow I’m sending my China visa application off to Vancouver. Ball rolling and all that.

  Inauguration man, to the rescue!

Stayed in pistachio purple-cat-covered pjs all day, drinking coffee and reading Jan Wong’s Beijing Confidential with Lola on the back of the chair, reading over my shoulder.  I seem to have found myself deeply in denial about the calendrical advancement of time- quite convinced to my core that I still have unlimited time left here to just chill, retreat into my warm basement hermitage, read, watch un-banned youtube videos, and occasionally venture out into the surreally calm and quiet city. But the catch is, time actually moves forward in the particular dimensions that I inhabit. And it seems that, well, if this forward motion of time really is happening then I really ought to actually buy a plane ticket to Shanghai and arrange a visa and start sorting through my clothes and documents and such, stockpiling garam masala and ancho chili powder and salsa verde for the months ahead. Must wrap head around concept that, yet again, life will be wholly changed in a few weeks.

Is it wrong and neurotic to feel slightly queasy when you stumble upon some photos posted on Facebook by a friend of a friend and they are of your old flat, the one you worked so very very hard  to make a home and still have great pangs about having left it all behind so callously only a few months ago, and they noted at the bottom of the photos that they were taken in [Girl Who Took Over Your Flat and Called It a Filthy Unlivable Pigsty]’s flat? 

Maybe I’ll feel better once I have a new home. Maybe being in transition makes one more vulnerable to feeling unsettled. I still think of it as MY flat. Seeing it being called HER flat actually feels like a punch in the gut, even though I know it is true and logical and that I am obviously crazy and prone to irrational attachment.  I so suck at Buddhist teachings. Between my penchant for pungent garlic and onions and my clinging to physical objects for emotional comfort, I am a disgrace.

Feeling drained and exhausted but still can’t sleep. I’ve been up til 2 or 3 am for the past several nights, thinking too much. I’m in a very strange state. Much like Arkansas, perhaps, or Utah. Utah is a very strange state.

In this 2001 "lost episode" of Check, Please!, then state senator Barack Obama reviewed Dixie Kitchen and Bait Shop in the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago.