Thanksgiving in Istanbul

First of all, happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Thanksgiving was always my favorite non-religious holiday (a close second to Passover), and it was a shame to miss it this year. I don't have any regrets about missing Halloween or my birthday or Saint Patrick's Day or any of those other dumb American holidays - sadly, I won't miss Valentine's Day, as it exists in this country as well. But missing Thanksgiving was more difficult for me. The last couple of years I've gone to Detroit and with the whole extended family I supped on the delicious Thanksgiving sweet potatoes and turkey stuffing I never had growing up, and now that I'm getting used to it I decided to live in another country. Plus I have absolutely no idea how to make these foods.

Originally the plan was to celebrate with a coworker, but she got sick and had to cancel, so I went out with Can and his girlfriend last night for a chicken sandwich and a strawberry mojito in Taksim. It was a good time, and it gave me a moment to be thankful for things.



And isn't that what the holiday is really about? Isn't it important that, at least once a year, we think about all the things in our lives that are wonderful and special, the things that make us excited to wake up every day and make each breath and each heartbeat pay off? For me, Thanksgiving has always been about the joys in my life that I'm lucky to have compared to the many people who don't have that luxury: that I can eat three meals - or more! - each day, that I have a wonderful job and the finances to support myself, that I have a wonderful family and a great group of friends who stick behind me through everything, that I have the ability to write stories and play music, that I'm healthy and young, that I have warm and friendly coworkers, that I'm living in a beautiful place and that I can live in this beautiful place even though it's far away from my home, that my family and friends support my distance.

I could go on and on. But even more profound for me is that I'm forced to think about the people who don't have these things. In this way, Thanksgiving is like Passover, when we're meant to be grateful for our delivery from bondage but recognize that so much of the world is still trapped in slavery and always will be. On Thanksgiving many people do not have the means for a big Turkey dinner with a loving family, or a chicken sandwich in a bar with a kanka (Turkish for blood brother, or dude). Thanksgiving is the time of year for me to forget about how tired I am from work, how distant my friends and family are, or any of my small problems and concentrate on how wonderful my life is.

So I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving, a wonderful meal, and the chance to contemplate the best things in your life. It's really a beautiful experience.

Teacher's Day

Sorry I've been out of contact lately. Last week was a holiday in Turkey, Kurban Bayram, and I was out of town in an undisclosed location (let's just say I'm a step closer to becoming a honest-to-goodness secret agent, and I'm jet-lagged like crazy right now). Kurban Bayram is a religious holiday where the family adopts an animal, usually a cow or a sheep or something like that, and raises it for a week. After growing attached to the animal, a part of the family like a pet, the holiday ends in its sacrifice. From what I've heard, this is meant to add weight to the sacrifice made to God.

I don't want to spend too much time talking about that. I've actually very little clue as to the nuances of Muslim religious practices, and I don't want to pretend anything different.

Anyway, I come back to discover that today is teacher's day in Turkey, one of Atatürk's great gifts to the Turkish Republic. I was given a sunflower, a seashell key-chain, a bag to hold coins, a refrigerator magnet, and lots of kisses and hugs from my beautiful students. It was kind of warming, actually, even if the students thought that their giving thanks to their teachers gave them license to act out in class.

Speaking of giving thanks, happy Thanksgiving, all you Americans out there! I had completely forgotten what is my favorite non-religious holiday (Passover being my ultimate favorite). Tomorrow I hope you all eat well, and please take a moment during your meal to be thankful that you have the opportunity to feast and that there are many people in the world who don't share that good fortune. And be thankful for lots of other things, too, of course.

And this brings me to another point: I've got some comments about the "Plant the Seeds" song and how depressing it was. Honestly I don't expect my readership to like it because it's so electronic; I gotta work with what's available to me. But I'm working on a new song that's going to be a much bigger crowd-pleaser, a cute love song. Keep your eyes and ears peeled!

Where in the world did that idiom come from? I don't want my eyes peeled! Gross!

New Song - Plant The Seeds

My new First Regrets song, Plant The Seeds, is now on the First Regrets MySpace page for your listening pleasure. Because I'm a total klutz and can't figure out how to order the songs on my playlist, you have to scroll to the bottom to find the song. Sorry. I'm working to fıx the problem.

I'm thrilled that I have finally come to the place where I can do something besides thinking about the kids and sleeping!

Also, today, November 10, was the 72-year anniversary of Atatürk's death. At 9:05, the minute he died, the school gathered for a moment of contemplation and listened to ambulance sirens to symbolize the loss. Then we sang the national anthem.

From what I hear, all of Turkey stops for a minute at 9:05 on November 10. My friends at the school say that you can see people stopped in the middle of the street, cars abandoned on the Bosporus Bridge with their drivers standing outside in thought and mourning. Taksim comes to a standstill. For one minute all 80 million or so people in Turkey freeze in time to remember this one man.


The Bosporus Bridge

It's hard to describe both how awesome the feeling is and how confusing. All of this focus concentrated on a single person seems to stand against my American values, and yet it's still so moving. All the students brought flowers to lay under his statue in the yard, and everyone wore stıckers with his likeness on them. Maybe because I know from personal experience how hard it is to get everyone in this school to do the same thing, or maybe I've linked this unifying feeling to the group-building experiences I had at Obama rallies, but there is something very powerful about a huge group of people acting in unison like that.

Laundry Language

I just found out that I've been doing my laundry with a bathroom cleaning formula, not detergent.

Whoops.

The worst part is I was using that "detergent" because it was the same product I used in Florence for 5 months.

It's things like this that make living in a foreign country a real adventure!

P.S. As soon as my internet connection is more stable, you can go to my First Regrets Myspace pafe to listen to a new song: Plant The Seeds.

Taksim One Week Later

Yesterday me and my friend Hazal had dinner in Taksim. We met by the square, where a week ago a suicide bomber blew himself up, injuring 32 people. It happened to be in the week I couldn't muster the energy to drag myself to Taksim, even though I wanted to see my friends.



Being back in Taksim after the incident, you'd have a hard time telling anything happened besides the police barricade, which was somehow less noticeable than the ever-abundant crowds. And once we got off the square and onto the main street, it was as crowded and happening as I'd ever seen it.

Life goes on.


Hazal

Giants and Conservatives

Good news and bad news (again):

Good news: Now that there's so much distance between me and San Francisco that I can't watch baseball, the Giants go ahead and win the World Series. Good thing I'm not a big baseball fan or I'd be really disappointed I missed it all. Instead, I got a lot of pleasure in knowing how badly they destroyed George W. Bush's old team, especially in the game where Bush and his father threw the opening pitch in Texas only to lose 4-0 to the Giants' rookie pitcher. Plus Giants updates became a major part of the sports unit for my 5th graders. Cool!

Bad news: I really shouldn't complain about the election results seeing as I didn't vote, but in my defense it was impossible to obtain an absentee ballot - a lot to do with the time it takes to apply and the crappy Turkish mailing system. I'm actually pissed off about this: You'd think that a September request would give me enough time to get what I need in the mail, but by the time the application was available all my Turkish friends said it would be wishful thinking to mail 3 items back and forth (the application, the ballot to me, then the filled out ballot) in 2 months. I'm sure there was a way to make it happen, and I'm just making excuses. I'm not proud of not voting. I actually hate myself a little for it. But this was the first time I've ever not had the simple choice of voting or not voting; to vote I would have needed to make a ridiculous effort just to get a ballot into my hands.

And Alameda County election officials reading this: how about some online absentee ballot applications? And if they exist already, don't hide them! Trust me, I looked, and I got frustrated after an hour or so of fruitless searching. I've had better luck Googling Spanish language sources from 1920.

That said, this election was very important, even for this self-pitying non-voter. I didn't expect it to be as bad as it was, honestly. There was a huge move to the right country wide, even if Darth Vader-endorsed people such as Meg Whitman and Sharon Angle didn't end up winning. The Democrats lost 60 seats overall, and nearly both houses. Considering how right-wing the country is already it's amazing that we can go even more right; just to throw it out there, Obama would be considered a moderate conservative in almost any other country, while people in America have somehow been convinced he's a flaming liberal without realizing that flaming liberals feel betrayed by him ("betrayed" as if he ever claimed to be liberal). I've always said he was a moderate, not a left-wing progressive, and we shouldn't expect him to change the world by a liberal's image. Now that it's come true, how come everyone's so surprised and disappointed in him?

And crazy Sharon Angle won 45% of the Nevada vote, we were actually kind of close to having that nut job in office.

For more info about the political shape of the country I call home, check out my friend Isaac Hale's blog, Power to the Pundits. Last I checked he hasn't updated since the election, but he should be soon. He knows way more about all the wild campaigning that's been going on since my absence.

Of course the bad news is so much longer than the good news.