From the NYT's Cityroom blog

From my window, I could see about a dozen cops in riot gear on the patio below. Off to their left, a few men stood in the cold without jackets, smoking and looking smugly in the direction of the main attraction: Occupy Wall Street protesters. I thought of the day in March 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq. I’d rode around Los Angeles with an activist art collective and wheatpasted  “It’s a Globe, Not an Empire,” signs on bus stops and mailboxes.  I thought of marching down Hollywood Boulevard in protest of the war, and of going door to door to encourage people to register to vote and vote democrat, vote for John Kerry. (I only lasted one day on the job.) I thought about why I became a teacher, and then a journalist. And then I thought about how I ended up here, on the 15th floor of the World Financial Center, looking down on the protesters.

The presence of OWS protesters was of little surprise. In recent weeks, they’d protested nearby in front of Goldman Sachs in conjunction with West coast ports owned by the financial services behemoth. I’d gone down to Zuccotti Park numerous times after work, just a stone’s throw from my office, to see for myself what the mainstream media had a hard time conveying. Each time, I sheepishly loitered on the edge of the park, half talking to people, half trying to avoid being noticed. I worried I looked boring. Corporate. Obviously not in solidarity with the movement. But in fact I was. Would they heckle me, knowing I came straight from work at an office nearby? I felt like a traitor, but to whom?

A few weeks after Occupy Wall Street protesters got evicted from their makeshift home in Zuccotti Park, they infiltrated  the indoor garden at the World Financial Center, a vast atrium populated by tourists and fake palm trees in addition to WFC employees passing from office to coffee shops and back. On the east side of the atrium, floor-to-ceiling windows look out onto Ground Zero, the 9/11 Memorial and the rapidly rising Freedom Tower, the Hudson River and the state of New Jersey to the west. The WFC is owned by Brookfield Properties, the same company that owns Zuccotti Park, and the same company that requested the swift removal of the protesters.

Though I’d been following the movement, I was unaware that OWS had reason to show up at my door that morning. In fact, I didn’t even realize anything had gone down until after it was already in progress. Apparently, the protesters had entered the building en mass, dancing and chanting around the atrium before being ushered outside by police. By the time I looked out my window, the protest was dying down. Police were lined up against the windows in identical poses, elbows nearly touching, like paper dolls in riot gear. Protesters were huddled in small groups, quiet but intense. An occasional chant or cheer would flare up and then simmer down. I thought for minute, and then I hurriedly left the office and went downstairs.

I’m in no way unique when I say it took me awhile to figure out what I wanted to with my life. But I knew very well what I didn’t want: to sit in front of a desk in a labyrinth-like office building working for a big corporation. I knew I didn’t want to feel disposable. I knew I wanted to use words in some powerful way. I wanted – and I say this with both earnestness and irony – to feel like I was making a difference. I say this only to clarify my intentions, but then again, we all know what they say about good intentions.

I liked going to Zuccotti not because I was for or against anything in particular. In fact, the more I learned about finance and big banks in my job, the more I became convinced that most protesters – most people – didn’t really have a clue what went down in 2008. If they did they’d be furious. I went because there was an energy, and something real was happening, even if nothing tangible could be laid out in clear succinct bullets or demands. I knew that that kind of energy was where life and art happened, not at my desk.

As I walked downstairs, I worried vaguely about losing my job. More than that, I worried about my own sense of judgment. Sure, I’m not the 1 percent. Maybe I didn’t benefit from a broken banking system, but was I just as responsible for maintain the status quo by working for firm that was at fault? I wasn’t revolutionary. I wasn’t willing to take a stand. But here was my chance! I was walking out of my own office! Here I went to take a stand! But if I did – I mean, if the beetle-cops rounded me up — what would happen to my job? Who would pay my rent? On many levels, perhaps I couldn’t afford to protest. Or perhaps I just wasn’t badass enough. I knew that they weren’t really protesting me, per se, but I also couldn’t deny my complicity in helping to perpetuate big banks. But a big bank was hiring, and I needed a job. But what if everyone protested corporate structure? I kept seesawing back and forth.

I wish I had a more dramatic protest story, one that includes pepper spray, asshole bankers and profound revelations. I’ve come to realize that the movement, at least for me, was (is) more about the dissolution of American mythology than asking for particulars. If you work hard, try hard, and believe even harder, the success, money and two-car garage will follow. It may sound naive, true. But it’s also the narrative that drives people to our shores from all over the world. It’s the stuff that American dreams are made of, and the loss of the the ability to dream is far more heartbreaking than the loss of a job.

I suppose that’s why the movement never gained traction with people for whom this myth has never proved a reality.  It was never true, not really, but now it’s true for even fewer.

When I got outside I surveyed the protesters dressed in normal urban uniforms: jeans, hoodies, messenger bags, Chuck Taylors. I found myself wanting to talk to them: I’m a casualty of Wall Street, too. I wanted to do something meaningful that fulfilled me, but now I’m just doing something to get by. I really wanted them to know that there were probably others like me, legions who had to compromise on their job for the sake of their career. Of course, none of that was verbalized. I spoke with one woman, an aspiring teacher, who had formerly worked in HR and grown tired of writing layoff letters to hundreds of people who needed their jobs to feed their families. She was wearing jeans and makeup, and looked neither radical or in the dirty hippie vein. I guess the point was simply to show up, and that I did.

After I went back up to my office, intermittently watched the scene from above. Eventually I saw an A NYPD van pull up. I saw the crowd disperse and a few protesters being led away in handcuffs. Then I went back to my desk.

I had every intention of writing about Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land, but then I thought the better of preaching to the choir. The New York Times and Bookforum already butchered it, and honestly, I couldn’t get past the Kindle sample. Besides, it’s not really fair to knock a book because my views differ from those of the author. Flanagan did bring up this fabulous little Mystery Date game that looks like the predecessor to my beloved Girl Talk and that’s about all you need to know.

I really bring up Flanagan because I want to talk about Joan Didion again. Flanagan skewered Didion the Atlantic in such a way that felt very pointed, and frankly, not in the fairy dust and unicorns spirit of Girl Land, from what I can gather. And I only bring this up because of this brief snippet of an interview with Didion in the Believer.

In it, Didion talks about writing as performance. I often credit my early acting experiences with instigating my writing career, and so her words rang clear as a bell. No, I never wanted to be a move star. I just wanted to be myself. What I mean is that I was painfully, shamefully shy, and felt most comfortable – or more accurately, most myself – when I was someone else. So if the page is now my stage, then does each measured phrase becomes part of the character who loves to fool you all into thinking I’m more confident and witty and thoughtful than I am? If anything, perhaps feeling uneasy in your own voice makes it easier to slip into someone else’s. No, that’s not it at all. Eventually I discovered Uta Hagan and the irony of acting: the more I “became” someone else, the more I became myself. All along, I was only trying to like my cringeworthy voice.

So in many ways, this blog is a performance. Calling myself a writer is a performance. Every time – every single time – I sit down to write I feel like a fraud, and then sometimes, somehow, I tap into something so honest and real I know it can’t be coming from my phony self. I suppose, in some roundabout way, that’s why I was drawn to acting. It’s easier to express myself while stripped of my own circumstances and safer to channel emotion through fictional scenarios rather than my real life situations. Sitting down to write requires a similar process: as with acting, you rehearse a ton, but when it comes time to perform all the rules go out the window. I stop thinking and simply let myself be. Briefly.

But back to Didion. There was a line from Pluphead that sticks with me about all talent being about subtlety, and I think it’s probably true, especially in Didion’s case. Yes, Ms. Flanagan, Didion’s stance was a pose, and yes, it hinged on Didion’s youth and innocence. But the pose was just a means to an end. The pose is the story, and the story is the conduit for what’s real, which is why writing with blunt force fails to capture slippery truth.

Be ruthless about protecting writing days, i.e., do not cave in to endless requests to have “essential” and “long overdue” meetings on those days. The funny thing is that, although writing has been my actual job for several years now, I still seem to have to fight for time in which to do it. Some people do not seem to grasp that I still have to sit down in peace and write the books, apparently believing that they pop up like mushrooms without my connivance. I must therefore guard the time allotted to writing as a Hungarian Horntail guards its firstborn egg.

J.K. ROWLING

I’ve been practicing yoga on and off for about eight years now, and I don’t plan on stopping anytime soon. I don’t think the amount of time I’ve practiced makes me qualified to write this. In fact, I don’t know that I’m qualified at all. I do, however, know that yoga makes me feel good, open and alive in a way that most things don’t. It is for this reason alone that dwell on the subject.

I stumbled upon yoga quite accidentally in a bare bones studio hidden above the Radio Shack in Santa Monica near my apartment. It wasn’t until I noticed lines slinking around the block and sinewy, lithe and sweaty creatures emerging from a door that could’ve led anywhere that I took notice of the place. Where were they going? And how did they get those bodies?

I tried the class and soon I realized I’d stumbled upon what some consider to be the ground zero of the modern American yoga fad: power yoga with the revered yogi Brian Kest. I’d wake up early on Sundays to religiously attend his epic two-hour classes. Brian would say things like “All we’re doing is touching ourselves in the most loving way possible” and “find that sweet spot between too much and not enough,” and then come around the room and run a finger down a sweaty neck, sometimes mine. It was electrifying – perhaps even a revelation.

I felt unlocked, and surprisingly un-self-conscious of my appearance – unlike at LA Fitness among wandering eyeballs. After all the twisting, binding, bending and reaching, there comes release, and this, the laying on the mat with my limbs splayed and my mind finally still, was the part of yoga I craved.

Dramatic? Perhaps. But consider this: Yoga marks the beginning of a profound shift in the way I viewed my body. It was a shift away from an obsession with food and weight, from working out to be skinny, skinnier and skinniest to moving my body to be strong in both in mind and spirit. (When one realizes they may never, no matter how thin, be happy with ones thighs, one needs something else to aim for.) Yoga, combined with my runs along the beach in Santa Monica, was all I needed. I’d never felt so healthy in my life. I was hooked.

And then I moved. Back to Chicago, to winter, and lots more carbs. Bikram yoga became my personal steam room and sauna. Sure, the intense heat made me feel lightheaded at times and the stench of sweat could be overpowering, but there was a concrete satisfaction in knowing I could generate enough heat to soak my clothes through.Then I moved again, this time to Istanbul, where I did sun salutations to the Bosphorus, and then eventually back to Chicago, where I found another studio yet again.

I’ve stopped for long periods at a time and quickly slipped right back into it. But after reading that article on Sunday, when I went to class and got into my inversion, my mind – which I’d tried so hard to quiet – went into overdrive. Was I putting too much pressure on my neck? Was I distributing my weight correctly? I couldn’t  focus on tweaking my body in a way that would allow me to sink deep into the pose. Depth of posture suddenly equaled fear and pain and harm.  What was going on here?

Yoga, unlike cupcakes or football, is seemingly the perfect fruit. I’d venture to bet that there are many high-stung and highly anxious individuals (I’m raising my hand here) who turn to yoga precisely because we are certifiably un-Zen. I’d also venture that many of these folks are highly conscious about how the smallest nuances can change the impact of a pose. Yoga is a practice of subtly  and strength. It is also a practice of paradox, of being totally controlled and letting go completely. Pushing too hard or too little simply doesn’t work.

When I moved to Brooklyn, the fact that there exists a yoga studio next to my apartment building was a major selling point. I’ve always known that the possibility of injury exists – just like I’m worried each morning that I’ll slip as I sleepwalk my way into the shower or get hit while crossing the street.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that Broad’s cautionary tale was so explosive. Maybe now I’ll proceed with even more caution than I already did. Maybe I’ll worry even less about pushing my body to the limits and really try to hone in on that sweet spot between too much and not enough.  But I would hate for my practice – one of the few things in my life that provides a temporary sense of respite and release – to be dampened by fear.

In 2011, my reading wheelhouse seemed to be death. (Shocker!) I was stuck on work that explored the tension between order and chaos. I found myself enthralled by stories that tapped into either a thrilling life lived on the edge or a life of stability that made perfect sense, in a picket fence sort of way, but verged on suffocating. I mention this because while one can argue about objective quality in art, for the sake of this post I’d like to define “best” not by quality of language or craft, (though many of the pieces mentioned possess top quality style) but by my reading experience. I often judge whether or not a book captures me by how strongly I feel like writing after I’ve read it, and that has just as much to do with my sense of ennui as it does with the quality of the text.

The truth is, for all my yoga-practicing, list-making, straight and narrow behavior, I prefer to live at life’s extremes (perhaps that explains all the douchey guys I date?)  I’m no tastemaker, so take this all with a grain of kosher salt.

BOOKS:

1. Pulphead: Essays
John Jeremiah Sullivan
At first glance, it appears that Sullivan has been blessed with every writer’s wet dream: a bizarre, tumultuous, experience-rich life. Then it becomes clear that Sullivan is a writer’s writer; he can make the ordinary seem extraordinary and the extraordinary ordinary. In essays on everything from Jesus freaks to reality television, he finds hidden meanings that get lost in the fissures of everyday life.

2. Blue Nights
Joan Didion
I hesitate to include Didion’s masterpiece because I‘ve written about it before, and because it received such critical acclaim. All I’ll say is that for many, this has been a really shitty year. This book made me wonder what, really, I was trying to hold onto, and why the heck I just can’t let go.

3. Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles and Speeches
Roberto Bolaño
Okay, full disclosure: I didn’t read the whole thing! I know enough to know that Bolaño writes like no one is listening: his writing has the freedom, playfulness and expansiveness of me singing alone into my hairbrush microphone. He is that rare breed of writer who can riff on almost anything in a seemingly scattered manner, and then, just as you’re about to give up on looking fora a point, kazzam! He whips out a gem of wisdom, and you’re back on the Bolano train.

4. Lost in America
Colby Buzzell
This book epitomizes what’s happening to my generation, in my America, in this moment, better than any fluffy NY Mag trends piece ever could. I can’t really understand why it hasn’t received more publicity. Anyway, Buzzell drives from the East coast to West looking for work. Along the way he encounters people who embody the struggles of our nation with more complexity and depth than anyone interviewed in Zuccotti Park. (Sorry friends.)

5. Griftopia: Bubble machines, Vampire Squids and the Long Con That is Breaking America
Matt Taibbi
I started reading this while Wall Street was being occupied right outside my window. I can now say I know what a credit default swap and why the housing boom went bust. But more importantly, I sort of get why we’re still screwed. Yes, it will make you angrier than you probably already are.

LONGFORM

6. The Long Run – Kindle Single
Mishka Shubaly
Lots of people like to write about how fucked up they once were and how they’ve changed. Shubaly is different. He’s honest enough to admit that recovery doesn’t mean life is any less messy, and that a change in behavior doesn’t mean your demons disappear.This is the story of  a man who goes from being addicted to drugs and alcohol for nearly two decades to being addicted to putting one foot in front of the other. By that I mean he does ultra runs, which sort of sound like voluntary Bataan death marches. They go for scores of miles and make your toenails fall off.

7. The Wave – The New Yorker
Francisco Goldman
Based on facts alone, this may sound like a run-of-the-mill tale of tragedy, heartbreak and loss. It is the story of how Goldman loses his beautiful and vibrant wife in a freak swimming accident off the coast in Mexico.  But the thing about this piece is the way it simmers for so long you almost forget its going burn. This story of loss isn’t a quick shattering, like a mirror breaking. The slow, suspended narrative details the wretched days and moments between the time you known someone you love is going to die and the instant they are gone.

8. I’m Gonna Need You to Fight Me On This: How Violent Sex Helped Ease My PTSD - GOOD magazine
Mac McClelland
Forget about the provocative title for a moment, and consider this: In a psych book, I read about a guy who used to stand in the middle of a busy street in the middle of the night. He’d wait for a car to come zipping along, perhaps with a drunk driver behind the wheel.  Then, the moment before he was about to get flattened, he’d jump out of harm’s way. We do things like this in order to deal with trauma, to try and change the past. Same circumstances, different outcome. People don’t often write this honestly about the brutality inherent in love and healing, and I don’t mean the physical.

9. A Murder Foretold-The New Yorker
David Grann
This twisty story of conspiracy and murder offers a glimpse into political corruption in Guatemala has seeped deep into the psyche of a people. When you read, pay attention. This is one of those intricately reported, layered masterpieces that reads like fiction. I could not put this one done.

The article dubbed the crew of masters degree holding, culture loving, literary-leaning academics who started the site “New York’s literary cubs.” I’ve hesitated to write about the precocious group simply because to be critical of the success and ambition of up-and-coming book nerds a few years my junior makes me sound like a bitter old yenta. “When I was in college, we didn’t even have Facebook or Twitter!”

Though The New Inquiry’s integration of high and low culture isn’t particularly cutting edge, it does bridge the gap, albeit tenuously, between the (self-indulgent) cultural criticism of academia and the variety found in The New Republic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Review of Books. There are no clearly defined rungs on the ladder to writing for such places, and with nepotism and luck playing a large role in such prestigious writing posts, simply paying your dues and keeping your nose to the grindstone doesn’t necessarily get you anywhere. The New Inquiry has managed to stake its claim in the void, and for that I give it, and those who started it, kudos.

So it is not young adults with Ivy League degrees versed in Derrida who feel shut out of the literary establishment because they can’t get paying jobs in publishing that I find suspect. Certainly, it’s a massive, paradigm-shifting letdown to take all the “right” steps and realize that you’ve spent the first 20-odd years of your life climbing a ladder to nowhere. What I am critical of is an article that places these cubs outside of the establishment, when in fact they fall squarely inside of it.

The very idea that making the “right” moves gets you to the right place reveals an underlying sense of entitlement and privilege. It reveals the belief that doing A,B and C makes one deserving of success – a success that should happen swiftly and with ease. I say this only becuase, to an extent, I count myself among them.

Yes, it takes ambition, motivation and disciple to create a magazine of probing inquriy, but let us not forget that on some level, it also takes a little swagger. Labelling what is status quo radical has always been a way to maintain it, and the mainstream has long made idols of supposed counter-cultural heroes who often tend to be more bourgeois than their images may suggest.

Didion with her daughter. From the LA Time's Jacket Copy

In order to do the heavy lifting of reading a Joan Didion book, the brain – and the heart – must be prepared to carry the weight. This is especially true with Blue Nights, Didion’s extended eulogy to her daughter Quintana, who died in 2005.  For this reason I hesitated picking it up immediately; one has to be in the right place to read about death, especially when it’s a mother writing about the death of her only child. I wanted to save Blue Nights, but the Bookforum cover, the NPR interview, the review after interview after review all finally got to me. I had to read it to know what all the fuss was about. I had recently finished the book and started jotting notes for a blog post when I found out about the death of my father’s girlfriend (for lack of a better word), who had lived with us for many years and played a major role in my upbringing. I returned to Chicago before I had the time – no, before I could create the mental space – to flesh these out.

• It is impossible to read Blue Nights without thinking about all the things one has loved and lost.
• Didion lets us see the small cracks in the veneer
• We are constantly shaping and reshaping the stories of our lives to align with the changing visions of ourselves.

In spite of my deliberate decision, I found myself reading the book at the wrong (or perhaps exactly the right?) time. What I was then forced to be reminded of – or rather, what I found myself doing – was what Didion describes: the frantic piecing together of two lives: the one that has been lost, and the altered version of one’s own.

Much of Blue Nights is devoted to an examination of the bizarre way that particular objects take on extreme significance, and how holding onto them is a paltry proxy for the loved one lost. Her jarring incantation throughtout the book about the flowers Quintana wore at her wedding and her school uniform serves a dual purpose: they first give the objects significance, but the repetition, at some point, becomes a chant, sacrificing meaning for cadence, rhythm and the sake of continuity until the objects lose their power. Talking about memories isn’t just about wanting to remember. It’s about remembering hard enough so you can purge them from the system, and maybe (but likely not) forget.

I have often been surprised at the clumsiness with which people handle something has universal as death. After Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking became a seminal book about death, there seemed to be a general awakening about dying. We don’t know how to talk about it! It’s our last cultural taboo, so let’s share all the gory, nasty details of what death smells like and what grief feels like, how it possesses the body with a force unknown.In Blue Nights, Didion practically bludgeons the reader with the fact there is no comfort in the wake of death:

“You have your wonderful memories,” people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone…memories are what you no longer want to remember.

Didion, and perhaps Tim O’Brien, are among the few who get it right about how death changes life: it reignites the desire to do something that matters. Not because of the realization that life is so precious and profound, but precisely because of the difficulty in convincing oneself that there is any meaning at all.

Didion also captures the post-death discombobulation. Grievers often become time travelers by finding blips in the past that lead to entire periods of memories that take on a new chronology, a new role in the narrative, after a death. There is a quote from Magical Thinking that about sums it up:

…yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning.

I don’t know how to slaughter a turkey. I have no clue how to kill a sheep. I’ve never heard the choked bleats of a dying lamb, and I can’t even imagine the process of turning a furry or feathered animal into the various shanks, chops, thighs and breasts of the butcher’s sinewy world. I figure it begins with a quick slit of the throat, but I really don’t like to figure such things at all.

My trip along the Aegean Sea was one I knew I had to make before leaving Turkey. I didn’t plan on going shortlyafter American Thanksgiving and during the Muslim holiday of Eid, or Kurban Bayrami in Turkish – literally the Festival of Sacrifice. It simply worked out that way.

 I was teaching at an international school and living in Istanbul at the time, where it was easy enough to duck into a Starbuck or Gloria Jean’s and imagine I was just across the street from home, instead of around the world. Yet in the midsized village of Selçuk, just an hour’s flight from Istanbul to Izmir and then a short drive south, coffee shops were scarce. Sheep dominated the landscape. Not in sight, but in smell.

Everywhere I looked countless hoofed balls of fluff were corralled into makeshift holding areas along the roadsides. A boy no older than my eleventh grade students was chain smoking and half-heartedly watching a small flock grazing in an empty lot. A rickety pickup truck jam-packed with sheep lumbered along the road in a truck in front of us. Their heads bent low, I thought I saw a few of them lift their eyes toward mine and stare longingly like, um, sheep on their way to the slaughter. Everywhere we traveled the stench of impending death followed us. At least that’s how my Tofurkey-friendly brain interpreted the smell of sheep poop.

When God asked Abraham to sacrifice the thing he loved the most — his son — Abraham willingly obliged. The ritual of killing sheep on Kurban Bayrami stems from this ancient story. We all know how a ram intervened just before the moment of ultimate sacrifice. The Abrahams of today are still sacrificing lambs (I guess rams are going the way of the buffalo?) instead of their beloved Isaacs or Ishmaels. For some, the four-day-festival marks the end of the Hajj, or the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca – though most, at least in Turkey, just spend the vacation at home with loved ones. The Turkish government put a ban on killing animals in public places, such as playgrounds and parks, but sacrifice is still highly visible in many parts of Turkey.

 Here’s where it gets tricky. The holiday is determined according to the lunar calendar, so on the solar calendar it tends to fall at some point after Thanksgiving and before Christmas and Hanukkah. I never gave much thought to these American holidays – all three of which I celebrate – until I spent them abroad for two years in a row. Before moving to Istanbul I was basically a “pescatarian,” and before that a vegetarian, despite my father having a conniption when I decided I needed to buy soymilk and tofu instead of eating like a “normal” person. Ever since reading about how Throeau didn’t want his “body to be a graveyard for dead animals” in Walden, I couldn’t not think about eating meat. Yet somehow eating meat seemed integral to living in Turkey (or was it that I just didn’t want to commit the ultimate insult by refusing someone’s cooking?) so I went back on the beef. Though I’d always had issues with piles of turkys in plastic wrap huddling in freezers everywhere, I suddenly missed them – along with overdosing on pumpkin pie scones and hearing Christmas carols on an endless loop. Because of this, I was eager to feel the impact of tradition, even if it wasn’t my own. 

Before vacation, I’d asked my students about Kurban Bayrami, and they rolled their eyes in that “OMG we’re so not that provincial” way they did whenever I asked about Turkish or Muslim traditions. Not everyone feels it their duty to slaughter, and you don’t have to get blood on your hands to reap the benefits of the ritual, they explained. Lots of people donate to a mosque and have a sheep slaughtered on their behalf.

 The holidays weren’t the only time I grew homesick. If I became oddly nostalgic for America and needed to reconnect with my country by surrounding myself with potato skins, hamburgers and gas-guzzling SUVs, I went to the wealthier, more bourgeois areas where many of my students lived where you could actually find decent sushi and Mexican food.

 I can picture myself chewing on a tasteless, overpriced mozzarella sticks, thinking I’d be better off with a cheap simit bought off the street. At Turkish restaurants, I almost always ordered lentil soup or chicken kebabs and ate lots of bread, avoiding anything I considered gross, such as red meat. I lived a sanitized, American life even while abroad. But I didn’t want things to be the same. That’s why doing the same things in Turkey I did in the States felt socially acceptable yet still slightly ilicit, like taking lots of ketchup and sugar packets from McDonalds. It was like I brought my sterile American-ness, right along with canned cranberry sauce and factory-farmed Butterballs, with me wherever I roamed. I wanted something to force me to live differently. Life should be different here, I told myself. But in most ways, it felt utterly, oppressively the same.

 At any rate, during my week in Seljuk, I managed to avoid watching the life eek out of a sheep thing. Still, a few peripheral sightings stick in my mind. On a walk through a quaint neighborhood to the Seven Sleepers, I turned my head to the left and looked through a narrow opening into a courtyard, where a bloodied sheep with its hooves tethered together hung upside down. I instinctively turned my head before I could really be sure I’d seen what I saw. A stream of polluted water turned out to be blood, the color of the eggplants stacked at the produce, stand running toward the sewer. A man tossing plastic bags of what appeared to be trash into the back of a garbage truck was actually throwing bags filled to the brim with bloodied sheep’s wool spilling through the handles, oddly resembling the cotton used for fake Christmas snow. My brain wasn’t trained to register such images, so I kept transforming them into something familiar. I realized that it was not the death of a sheep but the dying that bothered me.

 I was travelling with a colleague from school, and we stayed with my former boss and her husband, who had retired to the quaint town after teaching in Istanbul for seven years. During the day, we drove down highways that curled like concrete tongues toward the wide mouths of blazing sunsets. I basked in the sun at the Temple of Apollo. I walked through the ruins at Ephesus, the Greek subsumed by the Roman. I craned my neck looking high up to where the ancient city extended before an earthquake reportedly wiped out the entire metropolis. What had once been the second largest city in the entire world was mostly reduced to fragments of its former self. As legend has it, the bacchanalia festivals held here often rose to a fever-pitched frenzy that resulted in human sacrifice.

At some point during that trip, I stopped thinking of slaughter or sacrifice as barbaric. We all do the same thing, just minus the blood and guts, by elevating celebrities to unattainable heights and then cutting them down. We still have our Isaacs and Ishmaels, only we call them by names like Britney and Lindsay and Jessica and Kim. We intentionally topple – by character assassination or by waging media jihad – someone far removed from us so that those who we care about the most will be protected and safe, at least in theory. So I find it odd that my generation has more education, more experience abroad, and more to give than any generation before us, yet we don’t want to give anything up. In fact, we expect everything without ever considering that if we were ever to be at someone else’s mercy, there’s no ram that would intervene on our behalf.

So that’s why I worry about being more concerned with having a story to tell than actually wanting to live it in the first place.

 The day after the day of sacrifice, there were still plenty of sheep roaming free. I sort of felt like hugging them. Another year written in the book of life, kids! My vacation ended, and I returned to Istanbul to finish out the semester, where I continued to go to Starbucks, and even TGI Fridays on occasion. Though I didn’t know what was next, I knew there would be more pilgrimages to places unknown, if only so that I could be thankful for having returned. 

\

 \

Do you consider yourself an Ikea Swedish meatballs or Ikea cinnamon buns kind of person? This is the question I pondered during a much-anticipated pilgrimage to the home furnishings behemoth in Red Hook for the second installment of a weekend game I sometimes like to play called Decorating My Apartment Makes Me Feel Like A Real Adult.  After 3 months of living in our new place and an initial splurge on key household items like knives and chairs, my roommate and I decided it was time to get non-essentials like cookie sheets and mason jars to keep legumes, spices and other organic substances fresh. (I’m neither into Swedish meatballs or cinnamon buns, but I am the kind of person who wants to partake in the gingerbread house building contest in the kid’s play area).

I really try to avoid Ikea, so I beat myself up the entire time I was there. My internal monologue went something like this: “How predictable. How generic and lacking in inspiration or creativity. Didn’t I want my apartment – my space – to be cobbled together with various tchotchkes that reflect the complex kaleidoscope that is my soul? What about all the crap I’d accumulated during my travels, and was I not dedicated to shopping at small, locally owned businesses? Well, my gorgeous ceramic bowls from Turkey broke in transit, and all the nostalgic objects that I once felt defined me quickly turned to meaningless clutter when I had to haphazardly clear them out of my father’s home. As for trying to buy locally, perhaps the wood in Park Slope coffee tables is actually made of Swarovski crystals and valrhona chocolate. The local cheap stuff turned out not to be very cheap.

Soon this monologue died down as I walked in a trance-like state though the furniture jungle. You know what? Ikea products are just so pretty!  Plus, after moving countless times, I really felt like I want to settle (and by that I mean stay in one place for at least a year). Like it or not, part of committing to a  place is buying stuff for said place, stuff that isn’t totally disposable that you can’t wait to sell on Craigslist for a fraction of the price.

But back to the story. So a scowling woman walks into Ikea, and suddenly she is woozy with the overwhelming  urge for turquoise mixing bowls and new bath towels and a pink heart-shaped rug in the children’s section that has no place in her grown-woman apartment and a snuggly throw for watching movies on the couch and those round pastel lampshades that look like Chinese lanterns and the most adorable little snowflake cupcake holders  for the cupcakes she never actually bakes and and while she’s at it she might as well get the matching snowflake apron and potholder, right?  Oh yeah, and then there’s the coffee table she came for.

Here’s the thing: it takes a lot of disposable income to curate a unique style all ones own.  In the meantime, somewhere between totally broke and spending my disposable income on having Nate Berkus pimp my crib, there’s Ikea. Or maybe I can still get away with defining my originality by tearing pages out of magazines and putting them up on my wall in some kind of collage-y pastiche sort of thing….? Um, I didn’t think so either.

So now there’s this funky lamp and coffee table in my living room, plus the turquoise mixing bowls et al populating my kitchen. Maybe I’m just another sterile yuppie lacking in authenticity and a fully-defined self-concept. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it. Can’t I buy a 3-drawer dresser so my socks and t-shirts don’t have to live like orphans on the bottom of my closet floor without having it instigate an existential crisis?

One more thing. You know how some people say they start sleeping on one side of the bed or parking on one side of the garage to literally make space for someone new? It’s the whole if “you build it they will come theory.” I sort of feel that way about preparing my apartment not for another person, but for my own life.