Osmanlica = Vefat.

"Ottoman (Turkish) = Death."

I am going to bitch for a second, and you (as captive audience) have but to read.

So, let's conceptualize something fun for you so that you properly feel my anguish. So, let's go to the World of Pretend and say that all of you are area studies people. I sent this 'blog to more than 200 people; wow, that would be a glut of us, eh? Anyway, so you are studying the culture, religion, politics and language of a country you have come to be very passionate about. (Dangling participle: Grammar Police shall soon break down my door and take me in fetters to a dank dungeon for Language Dissidents). So, one day, your mentor tells you:

Hey there! I am offering a class that you must take because if you don't, you will be laughed out of the field, only to end your days unemployed and a broken husk of a human, starving to death in a pay-by-the-hour hotel on the outskirts of a Las Vegas, clutching a bottle of Ripple to your chest pathetically as you weep. They won't find your body for a week.

What choice did you have? None, I assure you. So, register you did. It's a language class, and you're thinking, surely, since I am already taking two other languages simultaneously, this will be a piece of red-velvet cake. What you hadn't anticipated (or, maybe you did but were in denial) was that the language hasn't ever been spoken, is written in an impossibly difficult and fickle character set and only resembles the modern language you are studying about a third of the time, if you get it transliterated correctly; the rest of the time it is TWO other languages you have never studied. Added to this, the only two people with you in the room (no pressure!) are FLUENT NATIVE SPEAKERS of the modern language that the new, foul one became.

I've taken difficult languages before. I study Mandarin Chinese for giggles (more accurately, written Chinese). I took four years of high school Latin, culminating in reading the Latin epic "The Aeneid", the first ten lines of which I still can remember when I am thinking in the grocery store about what I need to be buying.

Arma virumque cano
Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam
Fata profugis
Laviniaque venit litora
Multa illa et quoquet bello passum
*something something* saeve memoris Iunonis ob iram.

Or something like that. There's more, of course. I apologize deeply to Magistra Poolensis, who reads this, for butchering the Latin. It's been six years and considering that I can't remember people's names whom I have met moments before, I think that remembering the vague gist of the sounds and word order after all that time is testament you your skills, Magistra.

Everyone: go hug your favorite teacher right now.

Anyway, so I am totally screwed. Ottoman Turkish is going to be the death of my academic career, and *joy!* he's offering it in the Spring, too, and of course, who will be there? Me. Three languages at the same time for a whole academic year. It's my firm belief that when you learn a new word in a foreign language, you lose one of English. If I become a simpering idiot, just pat me on the head and buy me a plane ticket to Turkey, where I shall live a simple existence selling fish on the Golden Horn. Balıkçı olmayı çok istiyorum.

It's Saturday morning and, if I listen hard enough, I can hear my beard whiskers growing. Tony (my roommate) is gone to play with his rugby team somewhere in another corn state (Illinois, I think), and the house is mine. What I am proposing to myself is this: stay in your jammies. Cook something rank and comforting, put in a mindless movie, perhaps Red Corner. That's the one with Richard Gere as an accused man struggling through the Chinese legal system; it's his big middle finger to China for not allowing him entrance to the country. Yes. He is barred from entering Chinese airspace for being buddy-buddy with the Dalai Lama and constantly telling people how much the PRC bites.

Tonight: tapas and wine at Tutto Bene. Whoo-hoo! But until then, I plan on mentally and physically decomposing in my fancy new apartment with bad movies, comfort food and my warm bed.

Those pointy-shoed Ottoman freaks can't touch me now.

It's my wish that your Saturday will be as restful and delightful. We deserve it.

Dom (Demir)