anybody seen my baby?

my blog is on again and i can post random -actually not so random, pretty special- pictures of my home, specifically, the top of my microwave! this should be taken as an indicator that there are totally harmless blogs out there, too! (take mine, for instance) what's going to happen to that other blog now, the one that's a little sister to this? (sagiti.wordpress.com)

It was magical this morning. I could have taken so many pictures, if I had my camera with me. Not only because it was beautiful but also because I’m leaving and I want to take pieces of this world with me. Photographs make good mementos. My favorite color combination these days is a pairing of a really dark, bluish purple (the color of mountains in the distance) and a faded yellow (think wheat fields, or weakened sunlight). I wish I could decorate a room using the best representations of the memories of these two colors in my mind. The most recent memory comes from a road trip to Denizli in my uncle’s car. The rest is a deeply ingrained repetition of seeing those fields and mountains on other road trips within the Agean region over and over again –and not recognizing how beautiful it is until you leave and come back -, and even looking out the window of our house –that I always have dreams of, when my dreams visit the past-. I want to get out of here, I don't want to get out of her...

I just finished reading Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart. Not only was it refreshing to take a break from reading about Western ways of Western people, but it also offered a change of pace in language with sparing but precise wording. Mr Achebe's non-dramatic, unsurprised, and almost matter-of-factly stating of facts and events encourages the reader to get involved in the story, even though what is being narrated for the most part is the daily comings, goings, traditions, religion, and worldview of the African clan we are reading about. Even when somebody is killed, Mr Achebe doesn't make a big deal out of it when most writers would choose to invest the all-human empathy that death, or dramatic events in general, seems to evoke in the audience, and therefore guarantee engagement. And that serene attitude is preserved even at the end of the book, where we are made to imagine that everything we have read so far is going to be crammed into a paragraph in a Western guy's ...

it occured to me very late, as in, around these days, that when i was growing up, the buttons of household appliances -stereos, tv and video remote controls, telephones- were labeled in english. even before i spoke english, play, stop, rewind (rew), record (rec), fast forward (ffwd) were part of my vocabulary - even though i didn't know what some of them stood for. for instance, take ffwd. Unless you're familiar with the term 'fast forward', you are never going to be able to decipher this one. and when you have to tell someone to press that button, what do you say? or the speaker phone button on our old telephone. that one confused everyone in the family. but we didn't realize this. it was a given that these appliances weren't made in turkey, and therefore they couldn't be in turkish. and even if they were made in turkey, there was a good chance they were being exported as well (you don't really think that far when you're 10, but you get the point),...

after i post my little collage-work that has bits from images of cloudy skies, doug asked me to write about how my day was. like he hasn't listened to me blow my nose into all qualities of tissue paper all day - toilet paper, paper towel, starbucks napkin... you name it and i'll blow it [that is, my nose]. i hadn't been sick for a while, maybe a year. and then the added imprisonment factor of not being able to run on a weekend, just 2 weeks before the 15k, this has been hard on me. but not being able to breathe is the worst. it's unbelievable how much we take life for granted. and how much of life we take for granted. then come to appreciate the blessing called uninterrupted breathing when you go down with the flu. so here i am, hoping and praying for a night that i can breathe.. so i can sleep. i'm sure doug is praying for the same thing too. as in marriage two become one. you're no more strangers in the night, you wake up your husband in all that nose-blowing ...