[ascending to mount self upon hand-carved personal cross]

The pathetic carcass of a Code Red Mountain Dew bears mute testimony to yet another night when the only sound in this [increasingly alien-feeling] apartment is my despair rising to a fever-pitch. In front of me is a document written in a script that hasn't been used (in this form) by a living human being for more than three hundred years. Imagine, if you will, taking a sheet of paper; upon this paper, you fling hundreds of nightcrawlers and a handful of Rice-a-Roni. Then, magically!, this is to make sounds that turn into a forgotten and oft-neglected classical language. It's all I can do to try to put my mother's words of wisdom out of my head:

"If you cross your eyes, they'll stick that way."

So, as a good warrior would do, I exposed my neck in abject defeat. Instead of the clarion whistle of a rapidly descending blade meant solely to sever my beleagured head from my cricked-up neck, I got an email from my advisor/mentor, Kemal bey. I'd sent him an email explaining to him three things:

1) I suck.

2) I am only in second year Turkish and I can't possibly understand thirteenth century Turkish documents WRITTEN IN ARABIC if I don't have the proper background script training.

3) Also, I suck.

His email made me mist up a wee. The red bits are where I translated Turk-bits for ye.

Sevgili (Dearest) Demir:

No problem canim (my dear)! I am glad you told me this honestly. From tomorrow on, I will develop a different method just for you. Don't worry about the homework. We will find a method that works for you. If necessary, we will start from the very beginning with a different way. Do not worry, hang in there! Sevgiler (warm wishes), KS

[check one language off my worry list!]

In French tonight, I and two of my other CEUSie compatriots decided: enough is sisterfeckin' enough! So we slaughtered an alley-cat to the Hittite god storm-god Teşup and with its rapidly caking blood we swore to divide and conquer. We are now only going to do a third of the ri-effing-diculous ten pages of translation we get every two days and we'll pool the other 2/3 from the other two people into a finished piece. Also, for the wretched project that we are being held to the flame for-- a fifteen-to-twenty page translation of an article in French about our particular research--I found a book about the Turkish missionization of Central Asia in French! And and AND it is ridiculously easy to read! {ka-CHING!}

[check second language off my worry list!]

Today, before I sent Kemal bey the email detailing how, Ottoman-wise, I am a developmentally-challenged rabid mandrill in heat, he and I decided that our project for the "fun" class that I was to be taking--Turkish Literature in Translation--would instead be--now, brace yourselves!--yet another translation class! Yes! Just what I needed for my collection! That makes one-two-three-FOUR LANGUAGE CLASSES AT THE GRADUATE LEVEL IN ONE SEMESTER. My neurons are committing suicide by seppuku in the tens of thousands each day; my eyes have written me a nasty letter detailing for me what it might be like if they went putrid and leaked out of my skull as protest; my wrists, weary of late-night typing, whisper in the darkness of carpal-tunnel and their mutiny would shudder me verily.

So I got the book--HAHAHAHAHA! THE BOOK!--I am to translate today. The upside to this whole thing: one day, maybe this summer, IU will be able to publish it with our names on the cover. The downside: it's 170 pages long. And in Turkish. It's called "Oğlum, Canım Evladım Memedim: Cezaevınden Memet Fuat'a Mektuplar" by Nazım Hikmet. That means "My Son, my Dearest Precious Mehmet: Letters from Prison to Mehmet Fuat." You see, Nazım bey was a Communist and spent a lot of time in Turkish prisons; he's also Turkey's most revered and esteemed modern poet. This book is a collection of letters he wrote from prison to his child.

His. Child.

So, flipping through it, I danced a wee jig: the Turkish is ri-donc-ulously easy, as it would have had to be for a CHILD TO READ. So: fame! notice! come to thy master! I can do this!

[third language checked off worry list]

As a reward for my good behavior, I'm allowing myself to succumb to the siren-call of my bed. Oh, sweet succor it provides!

[limbs failing; torpor! torpor!]

See you tomorrow, Bloomington.

Demir (Dom)

PS. I chose my Turkish name. Demir, or "iron", sounds rather like "Dom", and my only other choice for similarly sounding names was "Duman", which is "smoke" or "mist." Uh, no. So then I picked my last name as well, much as every Turkish male did in the 1920s. I picked "Gökoğlu", which obliquely references one of my favorite movies of all time, The Last Emperor: it means "son of the heavens" or "son of the sky."

Dom <----- insufferable geek