A random story.

Three years ago, I lived for almost six months in Turkey. You all know this. You are all rolling your eyes back so far in your head that it exposes the optic nerve. Bite me. You'll see where this parable is going at the end. Aesop I am not.

At the end of my schoolin' at Bilkent Üniversitesi (motto: "No, you can't land your private chopper in the parking lot of Merkez Kampüs on the first day of class), I decided to take billions of lira and take my friend Ahmet to tour the North and Central Aegean. I had one of those rolly suitcases with my earthly goods; Ahmet had a backpack the size of a cat's bladder with a t-shirt and a book about Turkish Marxism. I didn't ask. So, we got on a bus in Ankara's four-story bus station and headed for Çanakkale (clay-pot castle). We "did" Çanakkale and turned our sights to Truva (Troy), where I beheld the blood-soaked plains of Homeric legend. From there, to Bozcaada ("greyish island), an island off the Turkish coast, where we proceeded to get third-degree sunburns because, um, no store on the entire island sold sunscreen. An old woman in one of the bakkal stores told us to "pour Coke" on ourselves and that would act as sunscreen. She was nice and meant well, but uh, no. Then on to Behramkale (Assos), which was famous for being a very secluded and atmospheric retreat for the ancients. Atop the acropolis in Assos, a Doric temple affords a view across the azure Aegean to the Greek island of Lesvos. We stayed at a pension there for TEN DOLLARS A NIGHT. Yes. For two people. Anyway, let's get to the fun part. While eating fresh octopus in a small seaside restaurant, Ahmet's cellphone rang. He looked agitated and when he finished his call, he pushed his mackerel away. I asked Ahmet what was wrong, and he blanched a little. He told me his favorite uncle had died and that he'd have to catch a bus to Adana right then so that he could be a pallbearer for the funeral.

Those of you who know Turkish geography just gasped. Adana is an 18 hour bus ride from Behramkale. Oh yes. So I went with Ahmet to the bus stop, where a braying ass guarded the well for the upper town. He told me that I needed to push on to my next and final stop, Bergama (ancient Pergamum). He told me my Turkish was good enough and that I would be able to find my way easily on the dolmuş. He got on his bus and left for Adana, and for a wild moment I thought: this is gonna be fun. Just me, no schedule, and Anatolia to feast upon. When the bus to Bergama came, I was drunk with power. Three hours later, at nearly midnight, we came around the bend of a very twisted highway and the bus shuddered to a stop. The bus driver announced that this was the stop for Bergama. What I saw was a roadside lokanta (restaurant) that looked like something out of a cheesy Western. The lights of the city brightened the darkened horizon miles and miles away. I asked the man who took my bags off the bus how far it was to Bergama from this "stop." He said that it was about 60 kilometers. I've never been good with conversions, but I think that's like FORTY MILES.

As the bus pulled away, I noticed on the side of the road four shadowy figures, each accented with a lit cigarette bobbing merrily in the dark. Youths. There I was, with a big ugly suitcase on wheels and what I imagined to be a look of resigned panic. The embers began to walk closer to me and I thought: so this is how I am going to die. The only person on the earth who knows where I am is heading to a funeral near the Syrian border. Surely I will be robbed, stabbed and my pathetic remains will be savaged by Kangal hounds and akbabalar (vultures). One of the embers detached from the other three and came close to me. It was a clean-cut young man, smiling broadly. He took an impossibly long drag on his smoke and asked me: "Are you trying to get to Bergama?"

In English.

Yes, I stammered. He took my shoulder and said that they had just called a cab. I could share it with them, if I desired. At that point I would have ridden in the cab of a goat-truck (yep, been there, done that) if it meant not sleeping in the parking lot of the dodgy establishment I saw before me. The taxi came, and the boys all asked me dozens of questions. I had to ask. "So, how did you guys know I spoke English?" The ringleader looked at me and said, "Well, that book you were reading was a clue. Also, you talk in your sleep."

They took me to their fifth member's grandfather's hotel, where I stayed in three star luxury for seven dollars, including breakfast. When I left, I kissed the old man's hand and lifted it to my forehead in the Turkish way of expressing extreme reverence, and he hugged me and told me call him Dede (Grandpa) and that I must come back soon. "Promise", he said, and as I left, he looked a little misty.

I write this story because I got quite a few (personal) responses to my earlier blog about the student who thanked me for helping him. In a way, I think that the reason I enjoy helping the internationals here is because, once upon a time, that was me. Sometime soon, that will be me again.

Nobody does hospitality like the Turks.

Good night, Indiana.

Dom

The thank-you.

Last night whilst supping on Singapore Mei Fun and Hot and Sour soup at Dragon Express with my buddy Nori a man bringing his own dinner to his table stopped and looked at me intently.
I began to wonder if I had a piece of tree fungus hanging off of my goatee, or, worse still, since my sinuses had cleared in the heat of the curried treat, that I had soiled my mustache with snot. He looked familiar, so familiar.

He came up to me, and I braced myself for what he'd say.

"You're Domonic, right?"

I replied that, indeed, I was. He brightened considerably and put down his food at the adjacent table and told me his name. Yes, now I knew who it was. I'd worked this summer like a dog to get this guy a travel document so he could apply for a visa. As was abundantly apparent, it had worked.

"Hey man, the only reason I am here is because of you. You worked really hard for me and I want to thank you very much. "

Fuzziness!

When you work with so many people, it's easy to forget that you make such a big impact on people's lives sometimes. The advice we give, the time we take to make sure people have the best shot that they can at staying and studying here, it all makes a difference. I told him that, indeed, many people gave of themselves so that he could be here. The behind-the-scenes work is what really makes all of it possible. But he knew that I had stayed with him, and kept him in the loop, and he appreciated that greatly. It's not that hard to make yourself realize that helping people who need it can be rewarding. He then said that we had one of the best offices on campus, and that working with us made him feel better about being so far from home.

After all, isn't that why so many of us do this?

One day this summer, one of my "helped" people came to me and brought me real Indian rice pudding. I just about cried. Just when you think that you are making no difference in this world, you are proved wrong. Somewhere on the humid subcontinent, that man and his wife may tell their friends that IU has a great international office, and they may think of sending their children here. How sublime.

Well, off to Ottoman. Sigh.

Have a great one, Indiana.

Dom

Approach. Really.

Lately, I've been noticing something. Simply, for most people, a walk across campus is just that: mild aerobic excercise that brings you from point A to point B through the scenic, and might I add, rather enormous, campus. For me, it's a game.

*glittery lights, sound of gathered audience clapping*

Today, brought to you straight from a soundstage in Burbank, California:

How Many People Will Approach Me Today for Something?

Yes. Today, two perfect strangers walked up to me and asked me for something. One, while walking towards the Union for some grub, a woman and her friend came up to me and asked if I knew how to get to Kirkwood. I told them how ridiculously close they were and sent them on their merry way. Then, about ten minutes ago, while sitting here wondering what I was going to do about my scaly knuckles (dry heat in my home, man), a lovely blonde woman came up to me and put her perfumed hand on my shoulder. Pursing her lips, she leaned down and whispered:

"Do you have a scientific calculator?"

I didn't. She tapped back to her computer sans device and no doubt is wondering just what kind of man I am to not be always carrying a tiny computer capable of doing math that I will never, ever be able to do in real life. Such is the scourge of being a Turkish Studies major. If she had asked how to say "Your mom's a sea cow" in Turkish, I would have been all on it.

Senin annen deniz ineğidir. Just in case you were wondering.

So, it begs the question: what about me makes two, three people a day comfortable enough to approach me for help? Now, I am not one of those guys who would rather project a badass image to the world; sure, I have tattoos and sure, I have killed a man before, but I've done my time and it's all in the past. In my anger management class, which the nice white-clothed people made me take, I learned that people perceive you as you perceive yourself.

Apparently I perceive myself to be rich, possessed of cigarettes and lighters and watch, and knowledgeable about this area and environs. Oh, I have none of those things, believe me.

Is it my look? Maybe if I get that eyebrow piercing I have always dreamed of and start wearing that fun trenchcoat I put in the closet after Columbine and begin to wear my headset and talk to myself in public, this will end.

In a way, I'm weirded right the hell out. This doesn't happen to most people. But I am also rather flattered. People don't think I am packing heat, and that's fun.

Well, I am off to French, which tonight should consist of me attempting to open my wrist veins with a pen and my own teeth. It could be worse. I could be out there, somewhere, in desperate need of a scientific calculator.

Good night, Indiana.

Dom

I was not an ordinary child. I imagine raising me was like raising a forty-year-old man who pooped his pants periodically. At left, you see my true origins: I'm secretly an alien playboy. To the right, me and my fun phone (and my Aunt Cindy). I was calling Beijing to talk to the Minister of Culture and Curation. His line was always so damn busy.  

What I wanna be when I grow up.

When I was a little kid, people would ask of my classmates and I what we wanted to be when we grew up. They would respond in the way that most people would expect: veterinarian, nurse, fireman, astronaut, basketball star. Nobody ever said "When I grow up, I wanna be a junkie." Hahahahaha! Remember that lame-ass commercial series? The best was the ballerina who collapsed while doing her pirouette, or whatever the hell that was, with her eyes rolled back in her head, in slow motion with that vaguely Friday the 13th-esque music: ch ch ch ch AH AH AH AH AH.

Anyway, they'd get to me pretty close to last (usually this line of questioning came from our pastor as he read our report cards and handed them out, commenting limply about our performance) because of my last name. When Father Xxxxxx got to my name once, he asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. Without missing a beat, he added dryly "Well, looks like a doctor here." No, it wasn't my science grades (which were always high) or my math grades (which were distinctly not), but my penmanship grades. I have serial-killer notes-pinned-on-a-rapidly-cooling-corpse handwriting, and I embrace that. He thought that was a gas and he slapped his pale white sacristy-living thigh. I looked at him and I said that I wanted to become a scholar of Turkish culture and language and then I sat down.

No, that's not what I said at all. What I said was that I wanted to be a cryptozoologist. He looked at me like I had just defiled a statue of the Virgin Mary with yak feces. "What?", he asked, his glasses pulled down over his nose in a "don't fuss with me or when I have you alone in the annex I'll..." kind of look. I explained that cryptozoologists study animals that live beyond ordinary biology. You know, like the Loch Ness Monster, the Yeti, Bob Saget, you get the point. He put my report card down on his bony lap and looked at me with the kind of pitying look you reserve for when you see frat boys picking nits out of each other's hair. He shook his head and said, "Bitch, you gonna die hungry, mmm-hmm." No, what he said was that, perhaps, I was being hasty. I said that I would think long and hard about what I really wanted to be and sat down with my report card vowing all the way that I would become a cryptozoologist just to piss him off. Yes, that's the day I began my long road to Hell, but I would be damned if someone was going to tell me I couldn't do something, even if he WAS married to the Big J.C.

When I was in high school, I became infatuated with the idea of becoming a marine biologist. I took SCUBA lessons, I listened to "Ay, Calypso" by Bob Denver a lot and began to wear a funny red winter hat and started smoke a pipe and speak with an officious French accent. Then, I found out that Jacques Cousteau's boats went down more than a truck stop whore on smack and that most marine biologists study such stultifyingly boring crap--like plankton, diatoms, marine worms--and the magic went away. Then I went to Italy and Greece, and there, standing on the Acropolis in Athens in the shadow of the Parthenon, I realized that I wanted to study the weirdest thing of all: people. I went on in college to take dozens and dozens of really really bizarre classes in anthropology, my beloved field of study. Yet, when I looked at my transcript the other day from my UMaine years, I noticed that I had taken an aquaculture class my first semester. Subconsciously I had thought that maybe I wanted to check it out, just to make sure that I really didn't want to inseminate sea urchins until my arthritic hands broke into bleeding shards. Aquaculture, by the way, is farming aquatic/marine life for food and use. You all have eaten "farm-raised" salmon, tilapia, catfish, shrimp, or crawfish before, surely. That's where they come from.

As I pause at the threshold of the end of my time here at IU (doing my MA, at least), I am confronted by a dizzying array of options that I had scarcely imagined. Will I stay here and work in my new love, foreign student advising? Will I go on for that Ph.D? If so, in what? Will I buy that one-way ticket to Turkey? Or will I go home and live my life in Maine with that special someone? In my mind, I know the answer. I know which one is the winner, Vanna.

You'll all just have to wait and see.

Good night, Indiana.

Dom

Benim gitmem lazim.

"My leaving is necessary."

For the thousandth time since I came here to Indiana, the "Crossroads of America", I ever-so-briefly smelled something that I can't explain: the sea. I usually write these "encounters" as yet another piece of evidence that I have secretly been huffing model glue whilst sleepwalking. Today, though, it lasted longer than usual, and I'd be lying if I said that I didn't well up a little bit. Of course, I could chalk that up to the fact that I have been as hypersensitive as a high-school cheerleader-princess as of late. But I guess I am just usually able to suppress my homesickness better: it's always there, gnawing at me from the inside like one of those fancy Asian colon parasites.

Sometimes at night, when the house is still and my muscles have all relaxed--in that moment just when you are about to fall completely asleep--I hear the nighttime summer winds sighing through the dark pine forests, redolent with the heat of the day and the high smell of warmed pitch. Under my bare feet I can feel thousands of brittle orange pine needles and the mossy stones on the floor of a forest that may not have seen humanity for years. I can feel the brine lapping at my knees as I look through the turbid North Atlantic for the elusive, prized sand dollar. I can hear the winter winds moaning through the eaves of my house there on Larkin Street, half a block from the mighty Penobscot, one of this nation's last remaining salmon spawning grounds. In the saffron-fades-to-crimson sunset over the Western mountains, I hear the cry of the loon over a mirrored lake while drinking a nightcap. And that smell, always the smell, of the wild Atlantic which is in my very backyard.

December. Eight more weeks.

Going home is always so strange; once there, you have no choice but to confront who you were. What I have always been there is happy. That will do me some good; I feel rather like one of those hideous serpents of doom like you see on the Discovery Channel, and I need to shed my skin.

I really really REALLY need to stop listening to this goddamn Sarah McLachlan crap.

For all of you who wrote to me to find out how I am doing, thanks. I am fine. Tomorrow's blog will be just like before, I promise. Tomorrow you will get to hear the story of how I singlehandedly managed to fend off an army of rabid undead with a can of tuna and a 99 cent Bic Lighter; well, that and my baling hook and the Army-issue flamethrower. Also, how I woke up from a sound slumber this morning and I could speak fluent Khmer. And, who could forget how I managed to teach a feral alleycat how to defecate in a toilet, like you see on TV?

Anyway, there's French to be done, and while I would rather impale myself on a white-picket-fencepost than do it, benim gitmem lazim.

Good night, Indiana.

Dom

The scab.

You know, they say that you get what you deserve. What goes around, comes around.

However, I don't recall knife-raping any retarded nuns.

Look, I know I am no angel. But if I have ever made anyone feel like I feel right now, I would be more than willing to drive to that person's house with flowers and make that person's favorite dinner while apologizing in English, Turkish, Latin and Chinese and then I would write how sorry I was in French and Ottoman.

The scab's been torn off and it hurts like a mothertoucher.

I opened my closet and found my Ouija board exactly like I left it: flung into the corner, where it belongs. I fired up some incense and a chill wind tore through the apartment as I summoned "Frank", who got "all tore up" and forgot to hang his food in a tree and was savaged by a half-ton grizzly.

Me: So, "Frank", tell me about the nature of regret.
"Frank": T...h...e...y...n...e...v...e...r...f...o...u...n...d...m...y...l...i...v...e...r.
Me: So, do you regret going camping? Or do you just regret letting your guard down?
"Frank": Y...e...s.
Me: "Yes", what? Which one? Is what you are saying is that bad things happen to people who don't deserve it? That sometimes you just get the shaft no matter what?
"Frank": A...l...l...o...f...t...h...e...a...b...o...v...e.
Me: Why should I trust people? It only gets me in trouble.
"Frank": Q...u...i...t...c...r...y...i...n...g...y...o...u...g...i....r...l...a...n...d...m...o...v...e...o...n.
Me: I'd be mad at you, but I bet that the process of becoming bear turds really blew.
"Frank": D...a...m...n....s...k...i...p...p...y.

I'd like to be angry. I'd like to be bitter. But in the end, I have come to the conclusion that I have a lot going for me. A great job that I really enjoy. Coworkers, friends and family I would leap onto jagged rocks for. A future. So many don't have that, and I am lucky. But with all that happiness, it makes the effed-up times seem all the more effed-up.

Lower the bar, people! You've all set it too high for me. :) Be mean to me! Make me miserable! Then maybe I won't be surprised at how much some people can make me hurt.

OK, enough of my whining. Off to the bliss of slumber.

Good night, Indiana.

Dom

Standing like a stone on the old plantation...

...rich old man would have never let him in
Good enough to hire, not good enough to marry
When it all happens, nobody wins

While rocking out in my Rainforest Green 2000 Ford Focus this afternoon on the drive home, I got to listen to what has rapidly become third in the three-way tie for my favorite song. I have decided that Bruce Hornsby, and Bruce Hornsby alone, is fit to give social commentary in song. In that song, "The Valley Road", he sings, of course, like an angel: yet, how many of you have listened carefully to the words? None of you, I betcha. It's a song about a small-town abortion. Oh yes.

While no one was lookin' on the old plantation
He took her all the way down the long valley road
They sent her away not too much later
And left him walking down the old valley road
Walk on, walk on alone
Walk on, walk on, walk on alone

Out in the hall they were talking in a whisper
Everybody noticed she was gone awhile
Somebody said she’s gone to her sister’s
But everybody knew what they were talking about

While no one was lookin on the old plantation
He showed her what they do down the long valley road
She came back around like nothing really happened
And left him standing on the old valley road
Walk on, walk on alone
Walk on, walk on, walk on alone


The second favorite song is now his "Across the River", which talks about how much it really reeks to live in small, creepy-conservative towns. Bruce Hornsby: man for the ages, I tell you what.

My favorite song is still "Valerie" by Steve Winwood, which is about drug addiction and suicide. You'd never know it, though: the fancy synthesizer covers up any trace of sadness with the bliss that is really really fantastic 80s music.

I've compiled my favorite songs into three burned CDs; appropriately they are called "Mega Dom." I am mocked incessantly about my choice in music, but I think that what is happening is this: all y'all are hopelessly jealous of how cool I am and how fantastic my taste is. It's true.

It's Friday night, and like many other twenty-something males I am in my pajamas at 9:45 with a pumpkin-spice candle ablaze cradling an ethnography about gender in Turkey while preparing to watch Snow Falling on Cedars. In the semi-darkness my Swedish wall-hanging of Krishna fondling his be-noseringed consort dances in the candlelight, and the light flickers in the eyes of my 70+ masks. One of my Ghanan masks speaks to me in whispers when I turn my lights out; our secret conversations sustain me. My GOD I need a life.

In my computer's CD player is a fun Turkish folk song entitled Urfa'nın Etrafı.

Urfa'nın etrafı dumanlı dağlar aman aman
(Urfa's surroundings are smoky mountains, oh my)
Ciğerim yanıyor yar yar gözlerim ağlar
(My heart is on fire, my love, my eyes are weeping)
Benim zalım derdim cihanı yakar aman aman
(My heartache could set fire to the whole
world, oh my)

Gezme ceylan bu dağlarda seni avlarlar
(Don't go, my love, to these mountains; they will hunt you)
Anaydan babaydan yardan ayrı koyarlar
(From your mother, your father and your lover they will take you)

Urfa dağlarında gezer bir ceylan aman aman
(In Urfa's mountains wanders a gazelle, oh my)
Yavrusunu yitirmiş yar yar alıyor yaman
(Her calf is lost, she weeps piteously)
Yarimin derdine bulunmaz derman aman aman
(In my love's grief no strength can be found, oh my)

Gezme ceylan bu dağlarda seni avlarlar
(Don't go, my love, to these mountains; they will hunt you)
Anaydan babaydan yardan ayrı koyarlar
(From your mother, your father and your lover they will take you)

How uplifting. Also, kinda random. In some parts of the song, "ceylan" is a beloved person, and then in others it's actually, literally what it is: a gazelle. So, if you see a gazelle, and she is weeping, put down that issue of Newsweek and help her find her mothertouching calf so that I can study Turkish folk songs that make some damn sense. Don't get me started on "Sobalarında Kuru Da Meşe." Let's just suffice it to say that I think crack was commonly used in Anatolia as far back as the 1500s.

Well, it's nearly tomorrow and I am going to rest my weary carcass for once this week if it kills me.

Good night, Indiana.

Dom

OK, so I used to be young and cute, apparently.  

Birth control.

Today, while enjoying a fantastic meal (Thai buffet) with one of my favorite Bloomingtonians, I looked up for a moment at a commotion that was coming from the main dining room. My friend and I had, meanwhile, been crammed into a small corner of the restaurant in what I assume would have been a small sunroom. Anyway, a four-year-old blonde child had begun projectile vomiting a la Linda Blair in The Exorcist. Just when I thought he'd finished, that tiny mouth opened and yet more issued forth. With Pad Thai halfway masticated, I swallowed with the kind of difficulty that might be faced with when climbing Pakistan's K2.

The parts that disturbed me verily are thus:

One, the parents were feeding the child highly-spiced be-curried Thai food with sweet milky Thai iced tea and wee Thai donuts. I've met truckers who wouldn't have been able to keep that down for long. Is that child abuse? I mean, come on, give the kid some wet noodles and some milk and he would have been as happy as a hog in swill. I never had that kind of stuff until I could actually recognize what it was, and ask for it, but whatever.

Two, as the parents saw that the child was about to spew, they did nothing about it at all. They merely turned his head so that he would hurl into the very busy dining-room floor and not on their food. Emotionless and distant, they mopped him up with the kind of vigor one reserves for that strange stain you found on the floor of your shower that resembles Mao Zedong's profile. They left without even thanking the poor Thai woman who came out with the special gloves and the mop.

It gives me pause.

Tonight as I left my French class, which I attend as might one who is going to the gas chamber, I walked through the four-block forest that they've kept in the Old Crescent. Ordinarily I skirt around it but I wanted to be in my car, and home, as immediately as humanly possible. Ordinarily the forest is alive with the sounds of animals foraging and the hoots of owls, but tonight it was deadly quiet, like a bad horror movie just before the young scantily-clad coed is about to be gutted like a trout. In a small clearing I saw the flicker of four candles and four hooded (hooded sweatshirts, possibly) figures. For an insane moment I thought I was imagining things, but there they were. They were chanting. With candles. In a language I have never heard. Only in Bloomington would people worship the Hooved One in the Old Crescent forest on a Thursday night. God Bless the Republic.

Good night, Indiana.

Dom

The draft.

Here's a draft of the intro to my short story collection about Turkey. Whaddya think?

Chapter One: You’re Going WHERE?
Late August, 2000: Old Town, Maine

In the bough of a distant pine, a lone cicada droned in its final summer desperation. Gathered together, moistly bemoaning our fates, the vast majority of my mother’s extended family stood in ridiculously hot dress clothes as we awaited the bride and groom ,who surely must have been at the point of death by dessication. It was the hottest day of the entire summer, and by some sort of cosmic joke, it was the one day where I had to be dressed in layers. The church was hot like a crematorium despite the ceiling fans and it wasn’t any better outside. I looked across the mirage-shimmery asphalt of the church parking lot to the distant Stillwater River, and for a lunatic moment I thought about launching myself from the protective huddle and flinging myself, fully clothed, into the frigid water. Instead, I took out the wand and bubble kit that I had been given and dutifully began to blow bubbles. I guess rice was out of the question; pigeons really do ruin everything. My mother was moments away from weeping; a child can sense these things. The heat pressed on us like hearthstones. One of the relatives detached herself from her own nuclear clot and came tapping over to my mother, who rallied a little. They began talking about how lovely the ceremony was and how perfect the bride and groom were together, and other such family-gathering swill. I began to tune out and go to the Happy Place, where there is ice-cream, igloos and rosy-cheeked gnomes making snow-cones for people. Then I noticed that both my mother and the relative had begun glancing at me in the natural pauses of the inane conversation. I tuned in a little. The relative turned to me and looked my up and down like she was sizing a garment. Her perfume, which apparently she had bathed in, was cloying and nearly brought me to the brink of sanity. She winked at me, which hackled the small hairs up and down my spine. I welcomed the chill.

“So”, she began, “your mother tells me that you are going to be going overseas in January.” Her eyes narrowed ever-so-slightly.

Saddened to leave the snow-cone gnomes behind, I told her that yes, indeed, I would be going abroad for my junior spring semester. We talked for a few moments about things like weight restrictions on carry-on luggage, how awful airline food was, and if I needed to get any shots. She told me about how one of her relatives (apparently no relation to me) went to Brazil and waded in a small pond and how ten days later, tiny white worms began to burrow out of her skin. My smile must have been wan; she changed subjects rather hastily. She had failed to ask the most important question of all, and I wondered if my mother had already spilled. If not, it was only a matter of time.

“Oh”, she said while folding her hands and putting them to her chin like a schoolgirl, “your mom didn’t tell me where you were going. Somewhere fun?” Her eyes glittered like the broken glass that littered the parking lot. My mother shot me the “behave” look: I had already convinced a few of my relatives that I was going to Cambodia, the Congo and Iran. I looked at her and told her that I was going to be going to Turkey to study at Bilkent University in Ankara. She looked at me like I was mildly developmentally challenged, and then looked to my mother for confirmation; confirmation and perhaps with not a small amount of accusation for letting me do this insanity. Her face screwed itself into a wrinkly ball of puzzlement as she digested the profundity of what I had said. My mind raced ahead to her next move, which would be to tell me of the horrors that surely awaited me in that Godless land. Sure enough:

“My GOD! But it’s so filthy there! Aren’t they Muslims? I hear they smoke hashish all the time. You can’t drink the water. Haven’t you seen Midnight Express?”

The entire diatribe took less than twenty seconds, during which she did not breathe once. Her naked horror was pitiful. I wanted to tell her that it was good old-fashioned American ignorance that was fueling her fear and revulsion, but my mother, baleful like a Byzantine icon, gritted her teeth ever-so-subtly and begged me with her eyes not to make a scene. After all, chances were good that this particular relative had never left the East Coast, and perhaps even the state. I began to explain that I had chosen Turkey because it was the fusion of my childhood interests–namely, the classical world–and the world of continental Asia, which I had been studying at that point for three years. She would have none of that. She then began to tell me that I would, in all probability, end up being kidnaped and executed, and that my pathetic remains would be paraded through the streets of Ankara (which, when she said it, was “Angola.” ) There was to be no victory for me here, but instead of conceding I told her that, indeed, that’s why *I* was going and not she, as I personally enjoyed the thought of being victimized as such. My mother’s fist clenched ever-so-slightly and I let it go. Mercifully, the drenched happy couple emerged for a photo opportunity and the relative momentarily lost her train of thought in the mad rush to take her four and a half billion pictures.

In the car on the way to the reception (where, thankfully, there was to be an open bar), I thought to how I had been constructing Turkey in my own mind. What I saw was the minaret-studded skylines of cities that were ancient when the horsemen thundered across Anatolia’s broad plateaux. I saw arid islets rising from azure seas filled with the wary octopus and color-shifting squid and the sunken ruins of dozens of civilizations. I heard the muezzin cry to the faithful from the tiny minaret of a village’s singular mosque in the smoky dusk of a Central Anatolian evening. I felt the red earth of the land of the galloping mare’s head against my cheek. And there, as we passed through darkened pine forests, I could smell that earth. As quickly as I did, it was gone.

What is happening to me?

Today at work, one of my coworkers--one of the new receptionists--came to ask me if reports could be generated that list our current students (the international ones) by country. I said that it was possible, but why? Apparently another well-trusted office was trying to find a student's last name. All they knew was the first name of the student and the country of origin. I asked what the country of origin was, and the first name. You know, for giggles. She told me the student's country--Kazakhstan--and the first name. Within nanoseconds I was writing the student's last name on a Post-It. This particular student's last name is ELEVEN LETTERS LONG, and oh, in Kazakh. The new receptionist looked aghast as I did it, like she was watching a lemur feed on a flyblown carcass. Or maybe it was surprise. I dunno. When all was said and done I thought, my GOD, there are about 3500 internationals here. How in the hell did I remember that? Is it my penchant for the bizarre? Was it just a name that stuck out from the sea of thousands? I think both are true, but I also think that I have flung myself into the abyss of insanity. There is no going back. If I start having those dreams where I am fussing with student's files and I wake up and grope for them in the bed next to me, I will have to see the Nice Lady With The Big Couch again.

I used to think that I would give just about any of my random knowledge up for something "useful", like the ability to do mental math. I may be unstoppable when I play Trivial Pursuit, but in the end I thought that knowledge of the capital of Namibia (Windhöek) or the color of a giraffe's tongue (black) could be sacrificed so that I could add a bloody check up in my head. Now I embrace it. How else could I survive three language's worth of things like learning how to say "I want to buy the fish of my brother Raoul"? Benim kardeşimin balığı almayı istiyorum. Oh yeah. Feel that weird. I got my undergraduate in anthropology, which I love dearly; had I been more "grounded" how could I have lived through classes like "Gender and Anthropology" where every week we watched some disturbing movie about such heartwarming topics as female genital mutilation (female circumcision)? I did my research with be-turbaned South Asians (Sikhs) in Boston and San Francisco, and as I sat in the semidarkness of a langar hall at 7 AM eating curried potatoes and lentils with roti bread and steaming Indian chai surrounded by pictures of deceased Sikh militants grinning with AK-47s strapped to their chests, I thought: now I am home.

I beg you: embrace your inner freak. S/he needs to be let out and petted and appreciated for his/her own worth. After all, they may be far more useful than you think one day.

Good night, Indiana.

Dom

What-the-hell-ever.

Today, as I attempted to remain dry in the Venice that Bloomington has become in these monsoon rains (thanks, civil engineers), I thought about a ridiculous commercial that they show in my hometown of Bangor pretty much every hour, on the hour, just before premium programming. It begins with someone humming:

mm mm mm MMM

There's a crazy Old West sort-of beat to the music, and then the singing begins. It's very obvious that the age-ed male singer of the song is high on roofies and also quite drunk, perhaps on scotch and distilled airline fuel.

We've got the sharpest pencil in town!
We just sit around in the showroom, figgering deals
And whittling that old pencil down!
'Cuz we know if you buy once,
You're gonna be back!
'Cuz when you buy one, you buy two
And that's a fact!
We've got the sharpest pencil in town!

During this, they show the all-male staff of the establishment, doing things like sitting, or standing there productively. At one point, there's a man with what appears to be a Haitian death-machete whittling an obscenely large pencil. The establishment itself is entered into by way of a monumental gateway whose crossbeam is a seventeen-foot-long pencil.

Finally, the owner comes on, and in the enchanting Downeast dialect, he says:

"C'mahn down, neighbahs, the cawfee pot's on."

Now, I have been away from home since July, and I am sure that there has been remarkable innovation since then...well, wait a minute. That same commercial's been on the air since I moved to Maine TEN YEARS AGO. The people get older, and that's about it.

I'll bet you couldn't guess what they are selling if you tried.

*drums fingers on desk, rolls eyes*

Isn't it OBVIOUS? They are selling gigantic RVs! Yes! It's an RV dealership! RVs, which I, if I were to be issued hood-mounted surface-to-air missles on my car, would turn into smoking hulks of white-hot metal.

Every time I see the commercial (which is infrequently, I admit: when I am home it gets turned the moment I hear the hokey music and see that lunatic with the machete) I think to myself: what the &*#$ ? How on EARTH is this commercial possible? It's like the albatross that rests around my neck every time I go home, waiting, ever-so-slightly putrescent, for my horror.

It just goes to show that sometimes things that should make sense go horribly, plane-wreck-in-the-Andes awry.

I asked the Ouija board tonight about the nature of love. I spoke with "Anatole", who got a B- on a Calc final at Harvard and put his hand in his garbage disposal.

Me: So, "Anatole", bet that had to hurt.
"Anatole": G...e...t...t...o...t...h...e...p...o...i...n...t.
Me: You mean, like the pointy thing you made out of your arm? Ok, that was a low blow. So, since you have taken the Big Dirt Nap and now are fairly omniscient, tell me: why even try?
"Anatole": B...e...c...a...u...s...e...p...e...o...p...l...e...a...r...e...
m...a...s...o...c...h...i...s...t...s.
Me: So, get drunk much in the afterlife? Or is that Heavenly Heroin?
"Anatole": S...o...m...e...o...n...e...s...o...m...e...w...h...e...r...e...
w...a...n...t...s... t...o...l...o...v...e...y...o...u.....t...i...l....y...o...u...
d...i...e...a...n...d...t...h...a...t...i...s... w....h....y....y...o...u....t...r...y.
Me: Hmm. You make a good point, dead man. "Hahvahd" did you some good.
"Anatole": M...a...n...t...h...i...s...s...m...a...c...k...i...s...
f...a...n...t...a...s...t...i...c.
Me: Gotcha.

The world's looking brighter, Indiana.

Good night.

Domonic (Demir)

Life goes on.

In the midst of profound loss and abject misery, you realize something about yourself, and life. It comes to you like a clarion bolt from above as you are sitting alone, eating a bowl of Velveeta Shell n'Cheese. You realize that there's a place beyond the pain and the hurt that, despite it all, is a firm place for you to make yourself whole and happy again. It's the part of you that knows, to your very core, that life goes on.

It goes on and on and on, whether you want it to or not. The level of comfort that affords is immeasurable.

"Akbaba", or "vulture" in Turkish. My first Ottoman word, and I nearly flubbed it thinking about that line in the Missy Eliot song "Work It", where she says, and I quote, "...go downtown/ eat it like a vulch-AH."  

Akbaba.

Today in my Ottoman Turkish class (which, yes, I am still enrolled in despite what I feel is profound suckage on my part), we had a little quiz.

Dr. Silay handed me a wipe-board marker (blue, if you really want to know) and etreated me to step to the board. He told me that he was going to tell me a word and I would then transliterate it, etymologize it and then write it in Ottoman Turkish (ie, Arabic on crack). Işık, my one classmate, got "ekmek", which is "bread" in Turkish; also, it means "to sow (seeds)" in the infinitive. I was filled with dread; I was sure he would give me "gürültülü" (noise) or "akciğerbalık"--lungfish--as a fun joke. And by "fun" I mean "making a 24-year-old man weep like a napalm victim." Instead, he gave me "akbaba." I looked at it and thought carefully. "Ak" is "white" and "baba" is "father." White daddy. But when it is together it means, get this, "vulture."

Vulture. My Ottoman professor gave me vulture. A bird of prey that feasts on putrid carrion and whose only defense mechanism is to vomit pureed carcass on attackers. I don't know what to think about that. The question is, should I be thinking about it? Probably not. When prompted to think of random words in Turkish, I usually pull strange ones out--"böcek" and "intihar etmek" and my own last name, which is "gökoğlu"--bug, to commit suicide and son of the heavens, in that order. So maybe vulture was just that: a random regurgitation, and not a statement. Hahahahaha, I think. Anyway, I completely aced it. I wrote my first word in Ottoman. *sound of champagne bottle popping*

I got my voter registration card in the mail today. I am now in full franchise of this election. I am not going to tell you who I am voting for, but I will give you a hint: in a conversation with Brooke the other day, we fantasized about how fun it would be if the Dems released proof that Bush had raped and murdered a thirteen-year-old boy. OK, so that was a little transparent. What the hell. It's my 'blog and if you don't like it, you can, uh, stop reading it. Yeah. That'll teach me.

Yet again today I found myself thinking with some regret that I am not possessed of some creepy mutant power other than my ability to grow vast amounts of nose hair and produce absolute scads of earwax. When I was a kid--aw, hell, that's a lie--SINCE I was a kid I have been really really into comics. While most boys preferred Wolverine and other male badass mutants, me, I was really into Storm. She was so complex and so very powerful. Sure; Wolverine can cut'choo real bad, and Cyclops can blow holes in things with his optic blasts and Colossus can become a man of steel, but Storm, now she can level Los Angeles with a hurricane just because she wants to. Wind, cold, heat, tempests, lightning--it's all hers. Man, she was worshipped as a goddess. That's nifty.

There I go again. When I talk about these characters like they are real people, I need you all to pat me on the head and ask me if I have taken my medicine. No sudden movements.

It's Friday night and I have two Woodchuck Draft Ciders in me, with another couple on the way.
I hope you all have a great night and a fantastic weekend. I know I, for one, deserve it.

Good night, Indiana.

Domonic (Demir)

Supposed former goat-flesh junkie.

It's 8:30 AM and, yet again, I am to be found in the vile cluster, trying desperately not to pass out from lack of sleep and railing against the cloying stench of the "designer imposter" cologne that the gentleman who is sitting next to me bathed in. Additionally, this particular gentleman has brought with him a hyperactive three-year-old and I am moments away from wresting the action figure he is poking me with from his tiny hands.

Me: Hey! It's not nice to stab people with Power Ranger (tm) action figures!
Child: Screw you, you dumb crackah!
Me: What?
Child: What? You gone deaf, too? Shee-it.
Me: Do you want it back now? Are you going to be a big boy?
Child: Mofo, you can cram that thing were the sun ain't be shining.
Me: *reaching for pepper spray*
Child: Don't THINK I don't know what you be doin'. Man, I'll cutchoo. Cutchoo real bad.

Children loathe me. I find it nearly impossible to meet a child who, moments after meeting me, hasn't vomited the contents of their bellies onto me. Further, I don't really know how to talk to small children. I always want to talk to them like they are adults. I guess that's better than that awful baby-talk that everyone feels is appropriate for anything under 18. Yet it leads to complications.

Me: Now, wee one, whomsoever besoiled this garment will verily need to be apprehended and brought to swift, albeit fair, justice.
Child: *sucks on finger*
Me: Arroint ye, rump-fed runion! Speak with veracity and in haste!
Child: I wanna watch Spongebob.

See? It's like that. Movies like "Children of the Corn"--all, like, 19 of them--and "Children Under the Stairs" and "Village of the Damned" creep the everloving crap out of me, because, secretly, I fear the little ankle-biters. What's going on on their peanut-sized brains? Are they thinking about getting a pony for Christmas or of sharpening that machete they found in the hall closet? Of marshmallow-bedecked cereal or of sitting down to feast on your freshly-severed forearm? We just don't know because they don't speak very well. Unsettling.

Well, I have a rather plump book about Islamic jihad that I need to be reading now. Believe you me, I would much rather stay on here and tell you about the time that a child leapt down from a tree and tried to savage me before I subdued it with a baling hook. But that, my friends, is for another day.

Have a great day, Indiana.

Dom (Demir)

This is me, in our nation's capiterr, eating curried goat from a street-vendor. I may not be bright but I have a yen for adventure. PS--this is how I look now. The beard has passed away.  

Yağmur yağar.

"The rain is falling."

Today, after more than a month without liquid from above, the skies wept. In fact, they wept like a delusional sorority girl who didn't get pinned for the big Phi Kap luau as she two-fists pints of Ben & Jerry's Very Vanilla watching Jerry Maguire for the fourth time that day.

Of course, this development a mere day and a half after I used one of those nuclear-powered pressure hose thingies at the Do-It-Yerseff Car Warsh & Snak Shak. I think that in a former life I must have peeled the skin off of squalling infants for giggles.

Today, I was to have gone on a retreat with my coworkers to Brown County for some fun, relaxation and what I assume to be some good ol'fashioned brainstorming about our office and how we can be better, more efficient workers. I was, instead, eating rapidly chilling ramen (the "this was in the net and it started a'screamin' and we clubbed it to death" flavor) and studying for my French exam, which I finished a mere half-hour ago. Being an adult really really REALLY sucks it. If only they knew how much I wanted to go! When they called (from the parking lot, I assume) this morning to see if I could go, I was halfway out the door when I remembered: if you flunk out of school you won't have this job anyway. It was pitiful. I made myself a bowl of ice cream right then, at 8 AM, and returned to my French texts, which I loathed before but now also resented with the fire of a thousand suns.

My roommate has been hurling for the past two hours. There's nothing more pitiful than the sound of him barfing: it sounds so brutal. So I made him his favorite "make me OK" food, which is unset, warm liquid Jello. I mean, I don't fancy drinking warm raspberry-flavored horse-hoof, but far be it from me to pass judgement. It was all I could do this summer with the cicada swarm to not just grab one and cram it, whirring as they do, into my maw. As long as it isn't raw red meat or poultry, organ meat or mayonnaise, I will eat it. When I was a delegate with the Harvard Model United Nations (representing, of course, Turkey), I got the delegation's "Carnivore" award for eating Jamaican jerk-goat, cuttlefish, raw tuna steaks and something I later found out was a game-hen. I was excited about that one: I had thought it was a largish rodent. Reality can be so cruel.

But anyway, for those of you who don't know this by now (and anyone who has ever eaten with me knows this), I LOATHE mayonnaise. Invented by the French to disguise the taste of food that had gone slightly putrid, I find mayo and anything that is made with it to be my kryptonite.
What makes me sad, and more than passingly angry, is that most of the fast food in the US come beslobbered with the vile slime. This is what happens to me when I go to the Booger Fling (tm):

Me: Hi, surly fast-food employee! My, you look shiny today!
FFE: I had to clean the fat vat today. I have first-degree burns on places you couldn't dream of.
Me: That's an image that I will have to re-live during moments of intense pleasure.
FFE: Glad I could be of service.
Me: Speaking of service...
FFE: Oh yeah, do you want fries--or RINGS?--with that?
Me: I haven't ordered anything yet.
FFE: Oh, I am on Ritalin. Can't help it. What deep-fried or microwaved treat do you favor, good sir?
Me: I would like the spicy "chicken" sandwich please. And please, no mayonnaise.

* Like an old Western, the entire establishment stops their activities to watch to see if the drifter-badass is going to blow a hole through the cattle-rustler's no-good carcass. A frail woman near the register pauses with her Double Bypass Burger halfway masticated in her mouth; mixing with her jungle-red lipstick it falls on that fun paper that they cover the tray with to make it more sanitary. In that moment I am glad for those sheets.*

FFE: Uh, what?
Me: No mayo on a spicy chicken sandwich.
FFE: You can't do that.
Me: Yes I can! If it comes with mayo on it I will not pay for it!
FFE: *whispers* Well, what's going to hold the bread to the "chicken?"
Me: Well, maybe you could put ketsup on it.
FFE: *faints*

Summer is always a sad, sad time of year for me. Picnic, in American English, means "an opportunity to devour vast amounts of mayonnaise-drenched "salads", one after the other, each less savory than the last." And there I am, gorging on that one pasta salad that at least one merciful person brought that has Italian salad dressing on it.

Sigh. And no, if you are wondering, Miracle Whip is NOT acceptable, either. *pause as my gorge rises to my throat; it is quickly swallowed*

Anyway, I have Turkish homework and tomorrow just isn't going to be pretty.

Good night, Indiana.

Dom (Demir)

Also, Sandra Day O'Connor is a cassowary. It's so true.  

See, it's true. Dick Cheney is a sea-lamprey. God, it's so lonely being right all the time.  

Happy Anniversary...to me. *Sigh.*

Yes, folks, it's been but a tender month that I have been on this thing, terrifying you with my inner workings. Sure, for you it must feel like an eternity being grilled on a hell-fire spit being basted by imps. I tell you what, though: not since that seal-pup clubbing excursion I went on a couple of years ago in the Canadian pack ice have I had this much fun. I hope you all are getting some kind of amusement out of this; if not, I am, and I am selfish and bizarre enough to maintain this thing for my own pleasure.

Oh, and I love seal-pups. I would never club them. Now, if there was an expedition that rounded up and incinerated sea-lampreys, I would not only lead it but also fund it entirely with the money I make selling junk under the railroad trestle near campus. Sea-lampreys are, quite simply, the most vile, wretched beasts that have ever existed. Them, and hagfish. Seeing picture of them or what they do is enough to make me want to eject my lunch through my nostrils. Go ahead, "Google" "lamprey" and you will see what I am talking about. They are the fanged clowns of the sea. They are the Dick Cheneys of the oceans. Dead, cold eyes. Covered in mucus. Once they attach themselves to you and rasp your skin off, they tie their boneless bodies in knots and tear gory hunks of your flesh off. You heard it here first: Dick Cheney is a sea-lamprey in ill-fitting suits.

I dare you not to think that the next time you see him on TV. He's a lamprey, and Sandra Day O'Connor is some sort of large, flightless bird like an emu or a cassowary or a rhea. It's true.

A recent phenomenon has me puzzled and intrigued. By "intrigued" I mean "my skin crawls like it is being trodden upon by hundreds of spiders that are large enough to be wearing the pelts of small mammals." Now, devoted readers, surely you have noticed this, and I am not just huffing too much model-glue: on hundreds, nay, THOUSANDS of cars and trucks (can't forget minivans, too) in Monroe County, Indiana, there are magnetic "issue ribbons" affixed to the bumper. Most appear, at this point, to be yellow ribbons or flag-colored emblazoned with some strongly-worded command or patriotic catchphrase. For example, "The Power of Pride" or "Bring Them Home" or "United We Stand" or *shudder* "These Colors Don't Run." Also "Better Dead than Red" and "Osama is a transvestite." What's bizarre is how they are detachable. If you've shelled out the $4.50 for the fun ribbon, are you really going to feel any less strongly about your issue in a few months? I can think of some fun new ones that, if I saw them, I would festoon my car entirely. Feast.

Gray and pebbly: Leprosy awareness.
Pinkish fading to gray: Pork, the other white meat awareness.
Orangish: Fake tan awareness.
Greenish-brown: Post-nasal drip awareness.

Now, I have to give the pink ribbons their dues: breast cancer awareness is paramount. That's not a joking matter in the least.

I've used far too much bleach in my wash and I can smell the chlorine-ness all the way in my room. My underwear will fear me now, as was my plan. Shape up and be white or I will Clorox you into submission. It's like the spray bottle full of tepid water (or is it??) that I keep at the Front Desk to keep hysterical students at bay. Just one shake of that bottle and they behave themselves just fine.

I have French to study, and I want to do it about as much as I want to spelunk into Mount St. Helens right now. Being vaporized by liquid-hot magma or learn how to conjugate the pluperfect tense? Decisions decisions.

Good night, Indiana.

Dom (Demir)

The Tell-Tale Husk.

The steady whum-whum-whum of the machine as it launders the filth off my clothes is hypnotic; couple that with the soundtrack of Kundun (Phillip Glass, minimalist virtuoso, using Tibetan instruments and chanting monks) and I am ready to enter an altered state. It's 11 and the sun hasn't even made the slightest attempt to exist; looks like yet another foul, gray day.

Fan-bloody-tastic.

I was awakened this morning (sensing a theme? being inappropriately awakened?) by the sound of a high-school football game, or scrimmage, or something. I know this not because of the roar of the fans; nay, it's because of the Voice Of God commentator. He's not very good.

Number...uh...forty....uh....nine? Oh, that's a seven! Number forty seven with a... damn, what the hell did he just do? Ah, number... uh...forty nine..NO! Number forty seven...

Me. Want. Hurt. Him. Bad.

As I lay in bed under my fleecy blanket, attempting to resume my slumber, visions like sugarplums danced in my head. None were sweet, though. In the heat of an African noon, poachers hacked the tusks out of a dead elephant. Somewhere in the Arctic, a rusty Japanese vessel launched a grenade-tipped harpoon into a whale. Beyond a Bosnian hill-town, a small boy playing in the forest stumbles upon the top of a human skull buried in a shallow grave. In a small Indian village, a woman is drugged and convinced that she needs to allow herself to be consumed in her husband's funeral pyre whilst still alive.

It's the husk. It rattles in my chest like the wind as it passes through pine trees, devoid of human sentiment. I need a kitten or something. Something's gotta give here.

So, I am going to do some damage control.

1) Chinese food. As a self-proclaimed Chinese food expert and connoisseur, I am always on the ready to feast. I will go to Bloomington's best Chinese place, Great Wall, and gorge myself into near-oblivion.

2) Book store excursion. Nothing makes me happier than going and making large, seemingly unecessary purchases at the bookstore of my choice.

3) Cleaning my home. Ok, so that's a weird one. But when I clean, and I get done, and my home gleams like Oprah Winfrey's teeth, I feel damn good about myself.

4) Random naps.

If there is any justice in the world, my charity battery will be, at least partially, charged. I will then be able to return to the world of kindly people and not have to worry about, you know, being a tool.

Light incense or a candle to whomever moves your cosmos and wish me luck.

I remain,

Domonic (Demir)

This is what Indiana looks like. Of course, thunderstorms and rainbows are not a daily occurrence.  

Gone.

Today, I was awakened by a knock at my door. Thinking that my roommate had locked himself out, I flung myself out of bed and, partially nekkid and crusty from a night's slumber, I peeked through the peep-hole.

A man with hoses snaking around his body peered through, trying to get a glimpse (no doubt) of my hairy ape-man body. Much more slowly than I usually grasp things, I realized that it was the carpet-shampooer dude, who had come to remove the crime-scene stains that I had called about. These stains had appeared, like the face of the Virgin Mary on a yam of a Central American peasant, from our rug several weeks back, and rather than my roommate and I speculating about who had been slaughtering livestock in the living room again, I just made a maintenance call. I threw my bathrobe on and let the man in. He looked around my apartment and smiled. "You guys are college kids, aren't you?"

I think that, at that moment, I lost it. No, not my mental faculties: those I lost long ago. No, it was my last shred of human charity. OK, what about my apartment made a man I had known for mere moments think that two college guys live in it? I mean, granted, the exhausted keg that we use as our "kitchen table" and the posters of naked chicks plastered to our walls with Scotch tape and chewing gum might have been a clue. No, I keep a clean, odor free and (I feel) fairly sophisticatedly decorated abode. We only have to bomb for roaches twice a month now and I haven't killed a kitten-sized silverfish in absolute weeks. I could hear my own heart beating in my ears; normally the robust pounding of that, my greatest muscle, it was now the sound of autumnal wind passing through a gleaned field. My heart has turned into a husk. It was only a matter of time. I told him that yes, we were both students, but that we were both nontraditional: I, as a grad student, and Tony, as a 27 year-old bachelor's degree-seeking junior. His eyes raised at that one, and I told him how Tony had been in the Navy and then had served as a policeman in Memphis. In that instant, the shampoo-dude realized two things:

1) The bearded one has a crescent-emblazoned, five-foot-long flag hanging in his room; he's only moments away from taking out his scimitar and slicing my Hoosier head off my pimply neck whilst shouting "Allahu akbar."

2) The tall Aryan one could probably blow the top of my skull off from 800 yards away like he was tying his boots.

He shampooed the rug in silence and left, warning me through my screen door that I shouldn't walk on the rug for a couple hours. I have never seen anyone coil that much hose so quickly.

Then, I got an email from my coworker/partner in crime/good friend Brooke, who is one of my most devoted readers. She sent me an email that had been a response to a rather heart-warming, and indeed, important email that our office sent to all of our internationals. Basically, the responder stated that s/he didn't care about the email, and that s/he would be much happier if we would (instead of sending nice emails) fix his/her bursar bill instead so that s/he could "finally pay the correct amount" s/he owed. (Like all of those non-gendered pronouns?)

I responded to this to Brooke at her (obviously) personal email address:

I hope XXXXX enjoys being sodomized by Asiatic elephants sans lubrication; that's what (pronoun) is going to be getting a lot when (pronoun) goes straight to hell. You should respond to (pronoun) and tell (pronoun) that (pronoun) is a goat-blowing mandrill-raping pile of weasel sperm.

It was then that I realized that I had truly lost my charity. Now I can make jokes without fear; hey, how about this one!

How are the Taliban and Mother Theresa similar? The beards.

SEE? What is wrong with me? Mother Theresa was an angel and needs merely one more miracle to be attributed to her name to be canonized! I would have loved to have met her before she went straight to heaven! I know now what's happening:

Curled up in my skull like a napping kitten, my unborn twin--possessed of a nervous system and a spine and several poorly formed teeth--has finally asserted his independence from my altar-boy p.c. love-everyone optimism. Whispering with breath that smells like overcooked pasta, he tells me that my reign is over. There is no Domonic, there is only... only... Demonic. Yes. Demonic Potato.

Hide your children, take your elderly off the street, and for the love of the weeping baby Jesus in the manger, lock up your livestock.

I remain (for the time being),

Domonic (Demir)

These are a few of my favorite things.

Behold.

1) Divine retribution. One day I went to the grocery store to get some bagels, and perchance, some fancy flavored schmear. Two items. As I was walking to the only cash register open at that ungoldy time of morning, a woman with two grocery carts (one which she pushed herself; the other pushed by a surly child who surely would have preferred death by anaconda than be there) raced to be in front of me and cut me in line. The cashier shot me a look filled with sympathy and compassion as he began to scan. The woman argued with the price of nearly every object (including, ahem, some rather interesting feminine hygiene products) and then, when the cashier was just about to put his carpal-tunnel wristguard on, she issued forth a pile of coupons that had a gravitational pull. Dutifully the teenage cashier scanned each coupon, alerting the woman to the fact that she had saved a grand total of $4. Yes, $4. She took out her credit card and the cashier swiped it. He swiped it again. He picked up a phone and made a hushed two minute phone call, and then took out scissors and cut the woman's card, right there, in front of me. The entire ordeal took more than twenty minutes. I could have checked out 20 times in that span of time. Believe what you will, but I took it as a sign from something somewhere that the wicked are punished.

2) Sordid stories. Just when you think your life is bizarre, talk to your friends. Granted, everyone has friends who are just plain dull--perfect lives, perfect spouses, house with picket fence and 2.14 children--but for every one of those friends, you have probably five who watch reruns of ER stripped down to their underwear while eating box after box of Fruity Pebbles and dialing one-nine hundred-numbers. Random amusement that awaits your harvest.

3) Random miracles. Indiana University, like many other colleges and universities in this great nation, suffers from a dread, incurable illness: there just isn't any parking space to be had. When I lived in the dorm (Eigenmann Hall, affectionately called Eigetraz by those who dwell on her 14 malarial floors), I maybe used my car once a week to sup at the local Chinese restaurant . Otherwise I walked. Now that I live two miles from campus, I have had to invoke The Hooved One with goat-sacrifice to get a parking permit to begin with, and THEN once I got it, finding a place any time after 8 AM is like trying to give yourself hernia surgery with only scotch as anesthetic. Yesterday I was pulling past the place I usually park in (at, you know, 7:45) at TEN THIRTY and lo, there was a spot and--here's the part you won't believe--nobody was circling for it. I drove into it and sat there, stunned. It was a two minute walk to work and my classes, and there it was, all empty. The divine ecstasy I felt began to fill my car with the scent of flowers, a la Teresa of Avila.

4) Pumpkin things. I have a problem, bordering on fetish territory, with things that smell and taste like pumpkin and pumpkin spice. I have no idea why this is. Two years ago I was the same way with coconuts. I bet Freud would have a field day with that one.

5) Vengeance. Hammurabi and Draco of Athens were on to something. Growing up with two very strange, very large families was "interesting." My grandfather on my mother's side was one of 13 and my grandfather on my father's side is one of... damn, I forget. One side is Irish, the other, Italian-- you get the picture. Competition for attention was paramount. I became enculturated to feel that when someone screws you over, why, screw them over back. Compassion is for those who intend to be prey. The world is a vampire, after all.

One of those things was not like the other! One of those things just wasn't the same! One of those things was not like the other... can you guess before my song is done? Can you guess before...my...song...is...done?

One of those is only partially true. I think those who know me well will know which one it is.

It's true: I only kinda like pumpkin.

Muahahahahahaha.

Good night, Indiana.

Domonic (Demir)

Politics. Don't read if easily offended.

One of the things I enjoy about election years (and yes, I have only been eligible to participate in two, thank-you-very-much) is the creativeness that springs forth slamming the candidates. While walking to Sycamore Hall to get buggered in Turkish class (Monday was exam day... sigh) while drinking my imperialist coffee--a grande pumpkin spice latte with whipped cream, if you must know--I saw no less than nine sidewalk-chalk etchings on the ground. Some had nothing to do with the election except obliquely--one was a chalk outline of a man with x's for eyes, and it said "Coke kills." Next to it someone scrawled "Bush drinks Coke." Under the man was a website that tells the world that Coke kills union leaders in Columbia. Whatever. The murder rate is 66 per 1,000 people in Columbia, which is 11 TIMES that of the U.S. I don't think Coke is helping anything, as imperialist and evil as it is. (As I write, my morning Coke sloshes about in my belly menacingly).

However, some were much more direct. One said "The road to Hell is paved with Republikkkans." Interesting. Yet another said "Bush fellates goats." Well, it didn't say "fellates", but I am too kind to put the real word. Ok, what the hell. It said "Bush blows goats." There. Ya happy? Yet another said that "Kerry has more positions than a Thai whore." The last said "Vote Green, you pathetic SUV owners." Hmm.

I've written some of them down for posterity. After all, when I find out who is writing them, I can easily blackmail them for all they are worth when they get that fancy internship with that huge conglomo-megacorporation or super-conservative lawfirm.

Off to my doom.

Allahaismarladik,

Dom (Demir)

The first of autumn.

Last night, Indiana experienced her first freeze of the season. My Midwestern friends and "family" all expressed to me that I should turn my heat up and put extra blankets on the bed so that I didn't "freeze to death" in the night.

It's all I could do not to guffaw.

When I got home, my apartment was so warm that random wooden objects were smoldering, mere moments from bursting into flame. My Ohioan roommate had put not one but two extra blankets on his Rhode Island-sized bed. Before retiring, he knocked on my door to tell me that I ought to get into my flannel pajamas and break out my comforter. I smiled and said that I would entertain the idea, and he trundled off to his own little sauna. As I listened to him pour water over the coals he had burning in the wee metal grill set up next to his bed, I thought about the first winter I spent in Maine, ten years ago. A newscaster was standing on the tarmac of Bangor International's runway and had a thermos full of boiling water. When he poured it out, it was ice before it hit the ground. That's because, and here's the fun part, it was -87 with the windchill. I come from a place where they routinely come on the radio and TV and tell you to bring in pets and just not go outside, lest they find your pathetic remains flash-frozen in the spring thaw. To be fair, they also tell you to bring in your cats and small dogs so that they don't get ravaged by fishers (small arboreal weasels) when they go on a rampage. Can you imagine? Finding your cat's ear in your yard and knowing that it had been slaughtered and consumed by weasels? Anyway, needless to say I am a little more tolerant of the chill than most of my Hoosier kindred. I'll probably be wearing short sleeves and my little red fleece vest until the snow flies. That gets me into trouble sometimes. Last year an older woman walked up to me while I was schlepping from class to work. She took my shoulder and looked into my eyes and said, in a voice one reserves for pets who have defecated on a silk Persian carpet, the deaf and the foreign:

"PUT ON SOME CLOTHES! "

Then she left to go back to her bog, or the sea-grotto she sprang forth from. If anything, it made me want to strip to my skivvies and roll around in some leaves. I wouldn't do that to the public, though: they've outlawed whaling, so far as I know. Well, I guess some rusty Japanese and Finnish trawlers still patrol the Arctic, and of course, native Canadians and Americans can harvest what they will. If I go missing, check Nunavut: I bet dozens of Inuit will be gnawing on my mukduk (blubber) for weeks.

It's dusk, and the bats are coming out in what I imagine will be one of their last nocturnal bug-eating orgies of the season. After the cicadas this summer, you'd think they'd all be the size of kaiser rolls by now. I think bats are wee angels. Bats, and chipmunks. If I could have minions, I would choose them. Just think: by air and by land, hundreds of tiny mammals would smite mine enemies. I would be their beastmaster. Oh yes. It's only a matter of time before I teach myself their languages and control the continental United States, all of which will bow to my precious angels. It would be like "The Birds" and "Dawn of the Dead" meshed together. Oh how glorious.

Well, I have to go to French class and "learn", by which I mean "yawn a lot and look at my watch 450 times." Taking one for the team; that's me.

All the best for a night both restful and peaceful.

Domonic (Demir)

Charlotte Church is my lover.

OK, eww. I can't believe I wrote that. It's wrong on so very many levels. One, she is a little girl. Two...well, uh, you know. *twiddles thumbs*

It's Monday night and already I can feel the noose of this week tightening around my tender, albeit manly, neck. I've filled my belly (soup straight out of the can, leftover breadsticks and some apple cider that I think may have turned the bend into something one might find in a bathroom still) and I just finished my French homework, which was like having a feral raccoon claw its way out of my entrails. Maybe that was the soup and the breadsticks and the cider. My roommate is off being studious somewhere; he's in a bioanthropology class and hasn't yet remembered that, uh, I got a degree in anthropology and could probably be of use to him. Oh, not that I hold that against him; more time, indeed, for me to screw around on here, being utterly transparent and random. Anyway, I, with closed eyes, randomly chose a CD from my rack and it happens to be one of my instrumental movie soundtracks. I am now being wooed by James Horner (of Titanic soundtrack fame...or notoriety?) and Charlotte Church on this, the soundtrack of A Beautiful Mind. I have dozens of these soundtracks. I used to wonder why I was so drawn to them, but then I thought:

It's because you are a bug-eating, flannel-wearing Turkish-speaking freak.

I took out my Ouija board ("Jim" and I are no longer on speaking terms; he thought I made him look too much like the moron he is, or more rightly, was) and asked of it:

Great, all-knowing Ouija: how is it that Paris Hilton has not yet de-evolved into a sac of fashionably pink protoplasm? Also, why is it that I collect instrumental movie soundtracks?

My fingers trembled on the little movy-aroundy thing and a clap of thunder caromed across the corn-encrusted plains. The room filled with the smell of cat-litter and that nasty fish smell that soaks into your clothes whenever you go to a Vietnamese grocery store. Nuoc mam, my ass.

The movy-aroundy thing began to lurch across the board. I was then introduced to "Harold", who apparently had ticked off a Tong member enough to have ended up as the "#7 Specierr", Chicken Chop Suey, in a dimly-lit Canal Street restuarant.

"Harold": S...o...m...e...b...i...g...f...a...t...t...o...u...r...i...s...t...l...a...d...y...a...t...e...m...e.
Me: Ok, enough of your problems, "Harold." Tell me what I want and I will let you reminisce about passing through the colon of a porcine New Jerseyan who wore a fanny pack in Manhattan.
"Harold": I...h...a...t...e...y...o...u...s...o...b...a...d.
Me: Stuff it. Now tell me the truth.
"Harold": I...t...i...s...b...e...c...a...u...s...e...y...o...u...a...r...e...a...b...i...g...g...i...r...l.
Me: Now "Harold", play nice. It's not my fault you ended up smothered in soy sauce.
"Harold": W...e...e...p...i...n...g.

"Harold" went on to tell me that I enjoyed instrumental movie soundtracks because I enjoy having my emotions manipulated. I think he has a point. Movie soundtracks are meant to enhance the film, and in doing so, they often become dramatic self-entities. Now, we're not talking about tripe like the soundtrack to Miss Congeniality or other such rubbish; nay, Schindler's List and other such ilk. One of my favorites is Beyond Rangoon, which manages to capture not only a Burmese feel but also the profound sadness of the current geopolitical situation. It's really something. Now, if you are a good boy or girl, I have made two mixes of my favorite instrumental movie soundtrack songs, and I could probably be persuaded to send you them.

Hahahaha, like any of you care. It's just me, alone, supporting the instrumental movie soundtrack industry. Yes, just me! You fools wouldn't know a good movie soundtrack if it were a rabid mandrill rending your flesh asunder from your bones!

Ooooh, my meds just wore off. *glugging sound as water is taken with two small, purplish pills*

Anyway, I am going now to the world of Dreamy Happy Places, where tonight I hope to not have the dream about being drafted into the Army and being sent to Iraq to be beheaded again.

Oh, and PS, "Harold" says that Paris Hilton hasn't reverted to her ancestral form because of all the plastic surgery. He said that a 9.2 Richter earthquake, whose epicenter was her "bungalow" in Beverly Hills, wouldn't stand a chance in doing anything more than turning her into a giant piece of Tupperware. What a hussy.

Goodnight, Indiana, and to my people, flung as you are like stars in the clear night sky across this country and the world. I miss you all.

Domonic (Demir)

Mısır.

Turkish: Corn. Also, strangely, Egypt. As the breadbasket of the ancient world, the word for that country came into many languages as having something to do with grain. We got "Egypt" from the Greeks and Romans, who called the Nile-washed lands from Alexandria south to the Nubian cataracts "Aegyptus." It's strange, incidentally, how country names in English almost never have any semblance to the name that the, you know, actual residents use. China is "Zhong guo", or "The Middle Kingdom." India is "Bharat." Japan is "Nihongo." Greece is "Ellas." And my beloved Turkey's name is just a bastardization of "Türk iye", "land of the Turk."

Whoa, where the hell did that crap come from?

So yeah, anyway, corn. Today whilst purchasing several overpriced books at Borders for my Glorification of Jihad class (you are right if you were betting that this class is a really uplifting and certainly never depressing examination of wonderous beauty), I saw a fun book in the "Local Interest" section. It was a pictoral guide to, get this, Indiana's cornfields. It was called "Corn Country." In vivid color, the book travelled from the industrial north to the hilly (hahahaha) south of the "Crossroads of America" state. I was drawn to it and spent more than a half-hour paging through it, rapt. No, I am not being sarcastic. When I titled this here 'blog, I knew that the majority of my audience would not be drawn from the Midwest, and in the traditions of Orientalism and the anthropological "otherness" that often captivates human minds, I thought: well, there is no corn in Maine. Or New Jersey. (Well, there is some there. But, uh, the rest of the state is more concerned with petrochemical refining and being envious of New York). Or North Carolina. Or Italy, Turkey, the Netherlands, China and Vietnam--my far-flung friends. The truth is, the longer I am here, dancing out here in the corn, the more Indiana, and further, the Midwest, grows on me. It's something that I would have never thought for myself. When I first felt it setting in, I was filled with the same icy dread that I imagine patrician Romans felt when they were trundled off in their litters to the Black Sea town of Tomi, filled as it was with other Romans living in governmentally-secured exile. That lasted for about two weeks (aw, come on, Hoosier readers! It was 102 degrees when I got here! Also, flat! Did I mention hot?).

That seems like an eternity ago, though in reality it was but a tender year past. Now, as I drive through the fragrant fields redolent with the fresh smell of earth and the pithy smell of the waving grain, I roll down my window and take it all in. The sky is so big here. I tried to tell Tony (my Midwestern roommate) how strange it still is for me to be able to see so much sky, and to see the horizon like I can here. I've lived in a state that is more than 90% forested for more than a decade. Here, I feel like the sky is going to drop on me: what's holding it up? More than that, I have fallen in love with the Republic of Bloomington and her minions. I find myself thinking how I could see myself living here, in Indiana, for quite some time. My heart beats to the sound of the icy Atlantic crashing on a rock-bound shore 900 miles away, but a small part of me thinks that, just maybe, I've found my place here in the heartland.

Well, at least I am hoping so. Man, how long does a Ph.D. take to get? I'll be the big three-oh before I finish, methinks. *shudder*

Tonight's post is dedicated to the Hoosiers I have come to know and love and who have proven to me time and time again that I made a really, really good choice to come here.

Good night, Indiana.

Domonic (Demir)

Celebrity.

Today, as I loitered outside Goodbody Hall listening to a voicemail on my cellphone (oh, how the mighty have fallen), I felt a tap on my shoulder. Suppressing the part of me that remembers living in the shadow of New York City and the larger part of me that got stomped a lot (see previous post), I turned around while fingering my car keys in my pocket so I could get stabby. An international student stood there, lighting his Camel. He got lit up, took an impossibly long drag, and smiled. The smile quickly faded and, as he was flicking ash on his Abercrombie jeans, he looked like he was screwing up the courage to do something. The keys were hot in my Italian hand and reassuring. "So", I say, "Is there something I can do for you?" He smiled again through the smoke and said:

"Yeah. I wanna know how I can apply the OPT."

For the overwhelming majority of you who read this, that makes no sense whatsoever. For those of you who work in the Office of International Services, though, I bet the small hairs stood up on your neck as, I have been told, happens when you are about to be smote hardcore by a thunderbolt. (Aside: would that be "smitten?" "Smitten" sounds like something that happens on playgrounds when little Susie got back your note where you had checked "yes" next to the question "Do you like me? Check 'yes' or 'no'. OK, so that never happened to me. Whatever.)

OPT is, for the rest of you, a way that a certain kind of student (F-1, if you care) can stay for a year in the U.S. after s/he finishes an academic program to work in his/her field of study.

So, whatever. I looked at him and he looked intently back, as if he expected that I would be able to pull the forms out of my saffron bookbag and send them to Nebraska right there. Delicateness, I thought, delicateness. I smiled broadly and told him that I was not working at that particular time, and that he could come to our office any time during our regular business hours to ask about how to apply for the OPT. In fact, I pressed: I bet they are open right now! It's only 2 PM! He thought for a moment and brutally crushed his cigarette into the earth, leaving only a cork-colored smear where there had previously been dying grass.

"So, what you are saying is that you won't help me."

I was taken aback for a moment. As an anthropologist who has studied dozens, if not hundreds, of cultures and peoples through four years of an education, I am nevertheless shocked every once in a while at how much of a clash there can be sometimes. In this case, this gentleman knew I had the goods, and saw my refusal to help (then) to be my unwillingness to share. I saw it as me, not on the clock, trying to get to class as a student like him, thinking longingly of eating one of those huge stuffed hot pretzels that they sell in the Union. My blood pressure rose ever-so-slightly at the insult and I quickly went to the happy candy-and-unicorn-riding place. I explained to him that yes, I was an employee, but I was also a student who had an existence (pathetic as it is) outside work. "Whatever", he said, and walked away, lighting up again.

This has happened before. In the OIS we trade horror-stories of being in supermarkets, bookstores, restaurants, on the street, and being approached by students who recognize us. I've only been there a year and it's happened to me four times already--in the Wal*Mart, in the Kroger, in my old dorm, and now, in front of Goodbody Hall. The day will come when I am in line buying something embarrassing, like glow-in-the-dark condoms or People Magazine, and it will happen again. It's only a matter of time.

It's Friday night and I just ordered a pizza from Aver's that has, and I am not kidding, potatoes, bacon and gorgonzola cheese on it. Inuits on their yearly migration into the Great Lakes will row a skin-vessel to Bloomington and end my days with a harpoon.

Until tomorrow, I remain,

Dom (fatty) Potorti, aka Demir