What if?

 

"She woke up at the screeching sound of her alarm clock. She got dressed, had breakfast, and got in her red little Volkswagen. She checked her hair and makeup on the rear view mirror, something she usually wouldn't have done, but today was special. She took her usual route around town, heading for her office, keeping an eye on the digital clock on the dashboard so that she wouldn't be late on this special day. She saw the green traffic light in the distance with only a few seconds remaining, and she knew she had to get that. She increased the throttle, shifted gear, got on the left lane, and whizzed through the intersection just in time. What she didn't see was the swerving small Prius, which just missed the trunk of her car by a fraction of a second. She got to work on time, the elevator was right there, and headed up to the executive floor! She never would've thought this day would come. She knew her hair and makeup were fine, she confidently strode into the meeting room, and they closed the door after she got in."

Cabin pressure-stablizer? Check. Frontal warp engines? Check. Seatbelts? Check. Jumping to light speed, tearing through the fabric of time…

"She woke up at the screeching sound of her alarm clock. She got dressed, had breakfast, and got in her red little Volkswagen. She checked her hair and makeup on the rear view mirror, something she usually wouldn't have done, but today was special. She took her usual route around town, heading for her office, keeping an eye on the digital clock on the dashboard so that she wouldn't be late on this special day. She saw the green traffic light in the distance with only a few seconds remaining, and decided it wasn't worth it. She would get the next one.  She pressed the brakes, shifted gear, and halted at the intersection. Just as she stole a glance at the rear view mirror to make sure her briefcase was on the back seat, a swerving small Prius came out of the intersection, and crashed into her red little Volkswagen. From that moment on, her day was a day-time nightmare. She had to call the insurance company, had to reason with a clearly hungover guy, got to work late, and by the time she had darted up the stairs to the meeting room because the elevator was stuck on the executive floor, she was tired, sweaty, her hair was all messed up, and the meeting had already started. There goes the good first impression, she thought."

Don't you wonder what your life would have been like if you'd took that job offer in Germany? Or if you'd  bought a house on the suburbs rather than one in the city? Or if you'd eaten cereal for breakfast this morning?

Every second, we make decisions. I decide to write this blog post now rather than going to sleep. You decide to read this blog post, rather than dismissing it as the ramblings of  a teenager and going to the kitchen to get dinner. And every single decision we make changes the course of our lives, whether that change is so drastic that you die in the next three seconds, or you just don't see a specific stranger on the street that day. Wouldn't it be awesome if we could trace back the branches of life and take another road to see how our lives would have turned out? If only we had a TARDIS...

Of course, the idea of parallel universes does have its glitches. If a new universe is created with every decision someone makes, then there would be an infinite number of parallel universes, one for each decision one of us -among the 7.134 billion- makes. And, why shouldn't dogs and cats have parallel universes? What's so special about humans that WE get the parallel universes, and the heavens and the gods?

The countless number of movies made and books written on this issue of parallel universes only strengthen the hollow yet unnecessarily widely supported narcissistic set of mind, putting humans on top of every other species, and accepting -knowing- that we are special... somehow. Still, it would be cool to take up my De Lorean for a trip to another layer of time where, 300 million years ago, some curious fish on a planet called "the Earth" decided to remain in water and hadn't migrated onto land to begin life on land as we know it... What if?

Until Stars Become Reindeers

Plastic pine trees are in high demand.

The mall now has snowflakes and pretty little lights and red and green hanging from its roof.

Red sale signs now decorate the storefronts.

And when you look carefully, you can see the blurs on the frosty windows, left there by the little children of the house who had just left the window side to get some hot cocoa, counting the seconds until the first snowfall, all in sweet anticipation.

Today is the first day of December.

For some, it is the end of a whole year and is a chance to wrap things up; correct their mistakes, fulfill their last wishes.

For some, it is a long-awaited time to finally get out of this disaster of a year, start over; forget.

And for some, like us, it is nothing but a month of stress, challenges and friends, thankfully cut short with a "winter break", concluded by, first Christmas, then new year's eve, only to be followed by more work and more stress.

But there is something about the newly constructed Christmas tree still missing some of its ornaments and the hats people are just starting to wear that brings warmness to my heart and fills it with happiness and expectation. I know that all of this fuss is about pushing people to consume more, in the end, only two days have passed since "Black Friday", a day especially devoted to turning people into raged consumerists who will stop at nothing to get that paper shredder which is on 60 % discount (!). Still, something about the "xmas" songs on the radio and the slightly chilly air makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside - now and until the stars hidden behind the gray clouds turn into reindeers. 

Laws for War (?)

Apparently, you can't torture a prisoner of war. There's a law against it. But you can tear off people's legs, kill thousands of young boys who have yet to experience the things life has to offer, break up families, slaughter dreams, wipe out an entire nation and condemn the next generations to constant pain; and for what?

Just a few thousands of hectares of land. Because someone couldn't be satisfied with what they have. Because someone just couldn't help pulling the trigger.

War is brutal. It is the most horrific thing the human kind has invented and it is nothing but an eerie, twisted game soaked in blood.

But, there are the "War and international humanitarian laws" which regulate it, so it's actually all under control!

"Parties to a conflict and members of their armed forces do not have an unlimited choice of methods and means of warfare. It is prohibited to employ weapons or methods of warfare of a nature to cause unnecessary losses or excessive suffering." So you can slaughter the soldiers fighting for people who don't have blue eyes and fine hair, just not A LOT of them so that their deaths become "unnecessary".

 "Captured combatants are entitled to respect for their lives, dignity, personal rights and convictions." So you can't kill a "combatant" you take as a prisoner, but it's perfectly fine to kill thousands out on the field.

Of course, it is better to have some kind of regulation over an act of almost unlimited destruction than none. Still, even the act of forming "laws for war" confirms the need for wars and accepts that it is somewhat necessary. But wait! These laws also "prevent" civilians from dying and surrendered soldiers from being killed! So they're totally useful!

They would be, if everyone obeyed the laws. When people cannot even obey the simple command of halting at the sight of a red light, you cannot expect them to "follow the rules" when they are after the head of the king who "dominates the land of their ancestors". Sure, they impose some kind of power and create pressure on the people who violate them, but they don't make war a regulated act of  "quarrel". It just seems very ironic to establish laws about the most brutal act of humanity which violates uncountable moral laws. The laws are just like a fence the owner of an expensive house has installed around their property; the owners know it won't keep the burglars out, but it just makes them feel better about themselves when their houses get robbed- or when war brakes out and they retreat to their safe-houses on the skirts of the Alps with their copious amounts of cheese and pocketknives.

As you see, no matter how many frames  of "law" and "rights" and "rules" you fasten around war, it does not make it a painting of poppy fields and happy children running about. The frame just keeps the blood from soaking the gallery's floor where the people in power sit and watch other people fight  -and die- for them.

All You Need Is Love...?

"She walked down the blank streets of the once beautiful metropolitan city. A burden buried beneath her armor for protection from judgement and "hate" kept her from walking any faster. And every time she saw someone begging, a little girl crying, or a homeless person sleeping on the bench, this burden got heavier and heavier; every tear drop of that little girl seemed to elongate her gait, and sink her spirits even more. She looked around the barren walls and lifeless streets, the people walking all by themselves. She thought that living like this was not living at all. Right then, a black unicorn sprouting fire turned around the corner of the street as silence and the un-image of love splattered around the city sunk into the dark night which never seemed to come to an end."

Above is a simple description of a twisted, dark utopia; the possible outcome of the ideas of some "bright" scientists

In the article, The Myth of Universal Love, social theorist Jeremy Rifkin's idea of making the world a better place by making everyone love each other equally is stated and analyzed. The description above is how life in a world where "everyone loved each other equally" and everyone cared equally about anyone else. This idea of equal, universal love seems to be pirated from the scripts of Teletubbies or The Smurfs, and its application will create nothing more than a twisted, dark utopia.

First of all, as it is also stated in the article, if we loved everyone around us equally, that would mean that we would care for everyone equally, which would, in a short period of time, cause our mental state to decline and our minds to malfunction. We just can't produce that much of "oxytocin and opioids". This equal care for everyone would either mean that no one cared about what anyone else was doing, and everyone could do what ever they wanted to, because, who cares, or that everyone cared immensely about what other people-people they've never met or feel no special affection towards- do, and make it their business to keep them happy-all the while hot-wiring their emotional circuits to an irreparable stage.

Also, in this twisted utopia of ours, "love" wouldn't be "love" anymore. Love is a special feeling that is provided by specific things-personal things- and is not standardized like donuts so that you can pass it out and yell "free love for everyone!".

Many pieces of art were created in the name of love. Artists throughout time have shined their love for someone onto their art, and this helped us get where we are right now. The music you hear in elevators, the "Fur Elise", was written by a half-deaf, sloppy man terribly in love with a girl called Elise. Schumann dedicated symphonies which are some of the best pieces of classical music ever written to his true love, Clara Wieck. You don't need to go 300 years back in time to see the effect of love on art: just pick a popular song playing on the radio and there is a great chance that it is written after a heartbreak or a new-found love. The "artwork" we see around the street may bother some people, but the graffiti with love dripping down its sides, the "Jenny ♥ John"s written in clumsy letters, are what remind the denizens of the metropolitan that not everything is about money, power or models created by social theorists.

So love is not something at the social theorist's expense to dole out. Sometimes, yes, love is all you need, but equal, universal love and equal care will bring nothing more than suicidal members of society and black, hideous unicorns.

 

Lessons from Fiction

What do we do in our free time?

We watch TV shows.

We watch movies.

We listen to music.

We read books. 

 

But actually, when we listen to music, or watch a movie, we may just be feasting on one of the extensions of a work of literature, with out even knowing it. To all those people who regard studying literature as being useless: try living with out it and see how your life turns into a gray, disgusting bowl of mush.

Literature is everywhere, and what a man poured out onto ink and paper 300 years ago can always be studied and explored further, diving into the wells of the author's state of mind and emotions, newly discovering the lands the author has already conquered. There is always something to learn when you read someone else's writing, whether it's The Republic or a blog post.

Last week, the Turkish government issued a new law stating that the government now has the right to view any of our private chats and listen to our conversations over the phone. One of the newspapers which still, despite the horrendously oppressive government, can actually deliver true and "un-politicized" news, printed the heading "Big Brother Left Innocent". Whether it is the reference a minority newspaper in Turkey makes to a classic work of dystopic fiction to reflect what takes place in the real world, or that George Orwell, way back in 1948 predicted what would happen to the world and wrote a work of "fiction" on it which turns out to be eerily accurate, goes to show what fiction -and literature- are capable of.

Personally, I don't care much about a research being done on how reading literary fiction improves one's ability to detect the state of mind of a person from only their eyes. What I'm interested in is, how literary fiction, or any type of fiction, can help us get along in life and broaden our horizons. When we study these works, we get to know about the time period these books were written in, or about the years they take place in. We get to learn about different cultures and traditions, facts we would otherwise regard as unimportant and facts which we wouldn't search on Google about in our free time.

But these are just the tip of the iceberg.

The most important thing we gain by reading and studying works of fiction is getting to know people and how they react to certain events. We get to know different types of people, and by the end of the book, if the author was skillful enough, we get connected to the characters so tightly that we do not want to let go. We get to know what a grieving father thinks when he acts, we get to know what an assassin feels like when he completes his kill or gets his training, we  know what drives a man looking for vengeance, we know how a poet caught in the webs of a conspiracy against him and trapped inside the strict views and rules of a society feels like.

So reading and studying literary fiction-or any type of fiction, at that- is not a total waste of time as some people may assume it to be. Along with learning about the time periods and circumstances the novels were written/take place in, we also get to know people. And there's nothing wrong with getting to know more about the dominant -and supposedly the most intelligent- species on earth which we live among, compete with, and fall in love with.

Ah, Sweet Dissonance

I, IV, V, I

I, Ic, IV, I

BORING.

These are chord progressions typical of the Baroque and Classical Eras in classical music. These are what the moving bass line is made out of and what the melody is based on in compositions from these eras and there is nothing wrong with them, except the fact that they are terribly boring. With the rise of the Romantic Era, composers could take more liberty in their compositions and "dared" to change these chord progressions, followed by the 20th century musicians who completely denied the sense of key or tonality. Now listening to music from the late Romantic era and the 20th century, the dissonances are something I look forward to, and I like to be surprised by unexpected chords rather than predicting and humming the next chord in my head when I'm listening to a symphony.

To understand what I said in the previous paragraph, you'll need a crash course in music history:

Music originated from Africa, with the use of percussive instruments made out of simply animal skin stretched over a surface.

The first recognized "era" is Medieval music; the most basic element of medieval music were Gregorian Chants, simply, homophonic ("single sound") songs sung by males.

Next comes the Renaissance, where composers started to take these Gregorian chants and popular folk songs and fit them into Masses. Instrumental music gained more importance, but still pieces were not written specifically for instruments. They accompanied the singers in typical dances, an "estampie", for example.

Around the year 1600, the Baroque era is claimed to have started. In architecture, the buildings from the Baroque era have extravagant decorations and sizes; and the music doesn't fall behind in this race of exaggeration. It is the Baroque era which hosted the famous musicians Vivaldi, Bach and Handel. Operas, symphonies, simply instrumental music gained great importance. It was at this time which Bach wrote his pieces for the harpsichord and basically invented the key system we use today: he wrote the Well Tempered Clavier.

Later set as the year of Bach's decease, at 1750, the Classical era commences. The music of the Classical Era pulls away from the extravagance of the music from the Baroque era; it is lighter in texture. For example, there is a main melody line over chordal accompaniment, a moving bass line, referred to as "basso continuo". Also, the use of keys and contrast in music, mainly instrumental music, gained importance. Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn lived and composed in this era.

Then followed the Romantic Era, starting at roughly around 1820. The music from the Romantic Era hosted some unexpected chord changes, it was a revolt against the Classical and Baroque era molds. It put more emphasis on emotion and expression in the music rather than it sounding good or it being expected. With the invention of the "pianoforte", now shortly referred to as the "piano", composers could now use a wider range- both in sound and volume. Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Liszt and Schumann are only a few of the romantic, emotional and expressive composers of the time.

And finally came along 20th century music with its clashing dissonances and a total defiance of previous stereotypes and accepted facts regarding composition, featuring Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Debussy.

 

When substances change phase, their energies, their movements, and their entropy changes. Just like an act of melting or evaporating, as music moves from Gregorian Chants to 20th century, its "entropy", its state of disorder, increases. People start to defy the previous accepted facts about music and they add something more of themselves into it. Every next "movement" or era is an act of defiance against the previous one. The Baroque gave more importance to instrumental music, Mozart managed to get away from the fixed forms and some chord progressions, Chopin focused on emotion rather than proper chord progressions and Stravinsky set off a riot when the Rite of Spring was first performed. Music changes, and for me, it changes for the better.

So after listening to pieces written by late-romantic and 20th century composers, Vivaldi's Four Seasons does not really interest me.  I prefer clashing dissonances and unexpected harmonies over predictable chord progressions and commonplace blocks of "music". I look for and want to hear those dissonances because that is what gives the music its "acid". Yes, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, especially Winter, is very famous and it relaxes you and is a treat for your ears, but it is just that. It doesn't excite you, it doesn't provoke you, it doesn't make you tilt your head, rewind, and think "What did I just listen to?" .

Perhaps an example would help things get clearer.

Take the first chord in Eine Kleine Nachmusik by W. Amadeus Mozart. A G-chord, with the G, B and D all there. Now take the first chord of Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, Part I, "Augurs of Spring", starting from the bottom: Fb, Ab, Cb, G, Bb, Db, Eb; ah, sweet dissonance! I would prefer this intoxicating ring of dissonance, Stravinsky, and  the C and Db in one chord (a semitone apart), over a neat and clear G chord any day.

Faith ...or Belief?

Location: Small town outside Lisbon, Portugal

Time: July 2013

"And there under the roof, was the place where "Our Lady of Fatima" appeared to Lucia, Jacinta and Francisco, the children of the house. Now if you will go there, pray, burn a candle, and have faith, Our Lady will listen to you. Don't forget, this place is very, very special," says the tour guide getting of the air conditioned bus with an "Our Lady of Fatima" super-souvenir-store ticket which offers a gift of a glowing little statue for every 15 euros you spend there in her hand, walking towards, along with many people, the grand church standing at the end and the highest point of a vast, concrete area.

[caption id="attachment_438" align="alignright" width="300"] "Sanctuary of our Lady of Fatima"-Where the first sighting took place. Millions of Christians flock here every year.[/caption]

This is Fatima, the "Sanctuary of Our Lady of Fatima", to be more precise, where, supposedly, Virgin Mary appeared to three little children for the first time in 1917 and first told the children to build a small chapel for her. Later came the "secrets", directed mainly at Lucia, the youngest of the three; "Our Lady of Fatima" told Lucia in one of her apparitions that World War I, which was going on at the time, would end in a year if Lucia, her brother and her cousin prayed to her. And, in fact, World War I ended in 1918, a year after these apparitions began.

Later in her life, after another "secret" from Our Lady of Fatima, stating that Lucia would be the only one to live through her teenage years, was "proven" to be true, Lucia had a dream. In this dream, a bishop dressed in white was tumbling across the market place, and seemed to be in distress; and when there was an assassination attempt at the Pope, also known as the Bishop of Rome, a few days later and he survived a  gun shot wound "which should have killed him", as his doctors put it, he stated that he "became a believer" - along with many, many other people.

Now what stands where Lucia supposedly saw Our Lady of Fatima for the first time, is a poly-carbon room, with a statue inside so deeply embedded behind the bullet-proof glass and the stone walls, risers, and all sorts of assortments, that it is barely visible. And also some three million people who migrate there every year who believe.

 

These people believe in the power of their prayers, and they do not only believe, but they have faith in it. They may believe the story of "Our Lady of Fatima", but they have faith in her when they buy candles in shapes of various body parts which they or someone close to them needs to survive, they have faith in her when they close their eyes tight with tears welling up around the corners and ask for forgiveness, they have faith in her when they travel thousands of miles and walk 100 meters on their knees to the church.

Faith is a subset of belief. Faith entitles power and hope. Belief entitles a set of mind.

Lucia had faith in "Our Lady of Fatima" when she sat on her knees in front of her bed before going to sleep and praying that the bombs and the crackling radio broadcasts her parents always listened to nowadays and the death all around and the men disappearing from around her to stop. But whether WWI ended because Lucia believed "Our Lady of Fatima", took her word for it, or because the nations were far past emaciated, is up for discussion.

And the main difference between belief and faith is that belief doesn't require the participation of the single most important bundle of muscle in our body pumping red hot liquid through our veins and into our souls; the heart.

Homeward Bound

"Home is where the heart is."

 

Have you ever been "homesick"?

It's not like any illness you've encountered and fought your way through until now.

Its symptoms are excessive longing for particular things, the blues syndrome, watering eyes, a sense of despair, among many others.

You know you've caught it when you wake up somewhere else in the morning and wish that you were home, wish so hard that you don't want to go to bed again that night without knowing that you will wake up at home.

You know you have it when you get up at night and can't find your way to the kitchen in the dark and something, something deep inside, feels seriously wrong.

You know you have it when you miss the view from your living room window, when you miss the smell of your house, when you miss everything and everyone inside it. And it hurts.

 

Homesickness is nothing pleasant, and its only cure is to GO HOME.

But going home...Ah, that feeling is one of the best ones in the world.

You unlock the door with out even looking at the lock, you swift open the door just enough so that it doesn't hit the shoe stand behind it, you step into your sanctuary, and that feeling of "being home" swoops over you and you're just feeling ecstatic.

Then the smell hits you. The smell you longed for while you were away but you didn't know so. You take off your coat, settle in your place on the couch with the optimal view of the TV yet also the perfect place to enjoy the sound system.

You finally know where everything is (at least most of the time), and you don't feel out of place. You're standing in a room which was formed and developed around you, by you, and for you.

 

Today is the last day of our vacation. Tomorrow, school -the seemingly-endless obstacle-race- begins. Today, lots of people return to their houses with the hope that this year will be better than the last one. Tonight, new year's resolutions will be made. Some will decide to study harder and some will decide to get on the lacrosse team. The familiar feeling of lying in your own bed returns; thinking about what classes you'll have tomorrow, checking if you've done all you've wanted to do that night, and slowly drifting into sleep and into the magical mystical world of dreams only to be awakened by the screaming alarm clock...That noise which snaps you back to reality and annoys you even if you hear it in another context.

Tomorrow morning, at least most of us, we go home. We go back to the building we spend most of our time in in a normal week-day, we go back to the people who we see more than our parents sometimes. We go back to our routine life styles and rituals, and that counts as going home as well.

And school may be opening and our days of freedom (although densely occupied with "summer homework") may be over and a marathon like no other, our senior year, may be beginning, but at least we get to spend it in our own place, with our people, at home.

Sometimes we get bored of the routines and the monotony and just to get away from all of it, but yesterday, today, and tomorrow,  we will always be "homeward bound".

 

 

The World in the Deep Blue

An endless void, a bottomless pit, a deep, dark cavity on the face of earth.

Not so appealing, right?

But when these are filled with the simple compound of hydrogen and oxygen, combined in eternal bond to provide us, humans, with the one thing we cannot do with out, water, they become indispensable.

Oceans, seas, lakes, or puddles on the sidewalk.

Just bodies of water; dents in the crust of earth into which water has rushed in, just naturally obeying the law of gravity, since before it was even established by our fellow apple-struck scientist.

But what makes these puddles so special? What makes one crave for a house on the hills of Hawaii, Miami, Bodrum, or Istanbul? What makes sitting on the balcony of your house overseeing the Atlantic Ocean or the Mediterranean Sea with a glass of aged wine and Stravinsky playing in the background so appealing?

I would place my bet on the fact that water, no matter what form it is in, calms you down. Let it be a tap left open, a rushing waterfall, a calm sea or the raging waves of the ocean, the sound or the sight of water is enough for one to relax and provide serenity.

And then there is actually being in the water rather than listening to it or looking at it.

Being on a boat in the middle of the sea, with no land visible on either side of you, with water and only water surrounding you, is an experience which somehow manages to provide you with a myriad of emotions; fear, loneliness, tranquility, happiness, reality. When you are standing on top of thousands of creatures you never could have imagined would exist, and a thousand other that you don't know about their existence, you snap back to reality. You let go of the magnanimity human kind carries around pridefully on their shoulders, and realize that then and there, you are alone, and you are just a form of life like the hundreds of jelly fish sucking on the body of your precious vessel.

When you actually go ahead and jump into the water from that boat, with the ice-cold water surrounding you in the blink of an eye, slowly cooling you down, stopping you from moving but at the same time urging you to do so, getting wet and cold on purpose never seems so charming, relaxing and plain beautiful to you. Or maybe it's just me.

Then you dive. You dive deep and you dive down, you hold your breath, water rushes into your ears, the only "sound" you hear is the gentle gushing of the water and maybe a distant "pat pat pat" of a small fishing boat. Other wise, you are engulfed in silence. Then, you enter a brave, new world which has nothing in common with the world you're used to living in. Creatures who, unlike you, don't feel the need to huff and puff to hold their breath under water, float beside you; looking for prey, looking for shelter, or just enjoying the water just like you. The rays of sunlight come streaking down and you can actually see the rays, slowly diffusing into the darkness of the depths; where sight ceases and life sprouts. Then you  remember that you are not one of the amazing creatures swimming around you with natural fins and snorkels and goggles. You feel like you should probably surface for air and when you turn around to look up, look at the surface of the water, seeming like a sheet of plastic film from down there, the sun, seeming blurry, and the water around you and the distance seem unreal. And the Sea decides it doesn't want you anymore and acts before you do, pushing you up where you belong.

So despite the grand structures we've built, the great technological advancements we've achieved and the enigmas of nature we've solved here on dry land, there is a whole other world waiting for us down there, out in the pool of salty water beyond us, covering up 3/4's of our "precious" planet, with structures and creatures like we've never seen before. There is a life out there that never ceases to amaze me. There, the "denizens of the deep", carry on their ordinary yet fascinating lives in a world we, the magnificent and intelligent humans, are not, probably one of the rare cases in history, involved in or a part of the plot. Except occasionally making guest appearances as the antagonists.

Little Kids with Giant Hopes

This week, the eleventh graders in our school went to a village school in one of the cities in Turkey. We had the opportunity to improve the conditions of their schools and at least scoop them out of their ordinary, boring lives if only just for two days and help them have the best time of their lives so far.

The experience cannot be shaped into mere words and sentences; it was too different and extraordinary to be reflected truly by letters put together in coherent structures. But I'll do my best.

I know that spending time with fifteen kids and having them do artwork or painting their school or setting up a library in just one elementary school in one village in one city in Turkey in the whole world may not seem as much. It seems that there is much, much more we can do, and that is true. When I reflect back to the time of the day we saw the kids run off to their houses at the end of our last day there, carrying their brilliant pieces of art in their hands and decorated by the jewelry they made for themselves, to return back to what they used to do the very next day, some next to his/her parents to work in the farm, some at home to do the work, and some, actually a minority, coming to a school seeming so empty without us there again the next day; there was so much more that we could do. I thought that this was not enough.

Right then, a little girl who I spent a long time with during the activities came up to me and hugged me, with her incredibly beautiful masterpieces of art hanging around her neck, glimmering in the sunlight.

I remembered how every one of them listened intently when we were describing the new activity.

I remembered the boy in the front row getting the hang of the activity we were doing before we could, and enjoying himself so much that his joy was apparent from his deep, dark, shining eyes.

I remembered how they looked up and thanked me every time I helped them with something.

Then, it seemed like we had done everything we could have. I felt satisfied with the work that we did, because we made children happy. Yes, they may have to work in the fields the next day and those hands which so delicately beaded, drew and cut, may be used to tie knots or weed the garden, and get bruised, cut, and harmed. Yes, the girl who wants to be a doctor when she grows up may be forced to marry a much older guy in the next 10 years and look after kids. But that fire of hope we saw in their eyes, that passion to learn and the happiness they had when they were showered with affection and attention, will never go out. The hands of the incredibly talented boy may  be bruised and his fingers may be damaged, the girl who wanted to become a singer may lose her voice from yelling at the sheep to keep them together, but their will to learn can never be broken. And seeing this and at least having a part in shaping their lives and strengthening their wills, showing them what they could do, what lies beyond the valley in which their own little village was settled in, was more than enough to be satisfied with what we had done.  They are the little, lost kids of our country with giant hopes and even bigger hearts, who are waiting to be found by people like us.

The Secret Superheroes

As we entered Kuğulu Park, one of Ankara's oldest parks and the place where all our generation spent their weekend as small, reckless children throwing food at the beautiful swans from our illustrated fairy tale books and the pigeons, which we had mixed feelings about, the clouds gathered up, up, in the sky, and the first drops of rain began to fall onto the cheerful "protesters".

On the eighth day of the protests, the people were happy as they could ever be, the students singing songs, holding up signs. Not a patch of green was visible on the slopes of Kuğulu Park.

My sanctuary as a child was now the home of many sharing the same ideals and same thoughts, although they were all drastically different.

Some wore their teams' colors.

Some carried slogans stating that people of their religion were standing with everyone else, then, and there.

And some just sat there, with V for Vendetta masks hung around their necks, beer in their hands, holding slogans painted onto paper that I could never have thought of, chatting, waiting. The secret superheroes of this whole resistance; every one of them being Clark Kent's in the day time, taking their exams, going to seminars, attending their lectures, but transforming into superheroes that Turkey needed in the night, with their nerves and stubbornness of steel. They were waiting for it all to begin.

Waiting.

We pushed through the crowd which was now looking for an indoor place because of the rain which decided to come down a little harder. As we walked down Tunalı, the street which Kuğulu Park is located at the end of, we saw them.

They were walking up, towards Kuğulu Park, with their flags, their horns, their whistles, their black and white shirts, their unity, their youth, their passion.

The fan club of one of the major teams in Turkey, Beşiktaş, had come over from Istanbul, hearing of the increasing use of excessive force against the protesters and of the growing protests, to support us. A crowd of nearly 3000 people was walking up to Kuğulu Park. And they were very much welcomed.

[caption id="attachment_426" align="alignright" width="187"] Yes, those are people on the slope there.[/caption]

We went into a restaurant to dry off and eat something for the next thirty minutes. When we got out, all of the people who had gathered in Kuğulu Park had started walking down Tunalı. Destination: Kızılay, the very heart of all protests. We joined them, and walked with them. If under any other circumstance one needed 10000 people to yell out something in unison, or do something together, it couldn't have been done. But last night, everyone acted as if they were one. One for all, all for one was the idea hanging upon Tunali as the crowd marched forward.

Remember the people who were waiting in Kuğulu Park with their beers? They were walking at the front, leading the group, happy to finally belong somewhere.

And the people who were fine with coming out to their balconies and banging pots from there for the past few evenings were on the street too.

The secret superheroes had ripped open their clean dress shirts, and they were coming to the rescue.

Of course, when this enormous group reached Kızılay, the police stood waiting, and dispersed the group using tear gas and pressurized water. The group was physically dispersed, but every one was still together; one heart, one idea.

But that's not important. The groups being dispersed by the outraged police with anger management issues is kind of a given now. The important thing is to see that 10000 people walked to Kızılay with no prior organization, no leader, no commands given. Everyone was there because they wanted to, not because they followed the heads of the bodies of thought that they believed in, not because they were forced to be there by someone else, or something else.

They were there because they wanted to fight.

They were there because they simply could not resist sitting at home while the country was just waking up.

They were there because they wanted to and because they believed in their cause, every one for separate reasons. And when that is the case, everything else ceases to matter.

Change

"Change in all things is sweet." -Aristotle

Several months ago, I wrote a post about how language changes and I supported that change is always, always, good. I received many comments on if the change in language which in a way drags the language closer to extinction or assimilation with the usage of words from different languages is still classified as "good". Well, I say that change, no matter what it is, is always for the better because humans and what we think change every passing second.

Turkey has changed a lot in the span of six days. With one single excessive act of the police on protesters, the whole country has risen, and is still rising. The streets are different now. The streets I used to shop in, Kızılay, Tunalı Hilmi, some of the main shopping districts of Ankara, now have tear gas cans around the sidewalks and slogans splattered across the walls. That coffee shop I used to get ice cream from is now the most hated shop in the district, because it did not allow the protesters running away from the tear gas in. The square in Kızılay, a place I know inch by inch, every shop and every turnabout, is now drained of cars and traffic and is crowded with protesters. The name plate of the clothes shop I used to shop from is barely distinguishable behind the clouds of tear gas.

And perhaps today, one of the most interesting things happened. Our -and I'm afraid I have to say "our", because, in the end, he is the PM of the country we live in even though he regards himself as the PM of only the people who voted for him- PM, a couple of days ago, referred to the protesters, the people searching for their rights and seeking what they deserve, as "looters". The Turkish; "çapulcu".

The sense of humor of the Turkish is quite different from other cultures. Right after the PM's speech just before he "flew (or fled, as you wish) off" to one of his trips, we embraced the word "çapulcu", and now, it has become a verb and a noun in English, at least on the World Wide Web and in our daily language. We use the word "chapulling" now all the time, because, we  are "chapullers", as our PM says.

Our language has changed in one day, with one word fluttering out from between one person's lips. This change reflects the time and its people, as does any change. Years later, when I hear the word "çapulcu", I would be reminded of today and today's circumstances. I would notice how things have changed since today, hopefully, in the good way.

The Kızılay Square or Taksim Square will never be the same again. They will remain as popular tourist attractions and shopping districts, but they will never cease to be the place where thousands of "chapullers" stood up for their rights and fought. The word "çapulcu" will never mean the same thing that it meant seconds before the PM went off his carefully revised prompter speech. And this change, and the change that we will hopefully bring upon our country in the following days, will always help us move forward. We are proud to be, and will stay as, "chapullers"; one who searches and fights for his/her rights, no matter what they might say about us, or what the circumstances may be.

OccupyGezi

"People shouldn't be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people."

When I watched V for Vendetta, read 1984, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World for the first time a couple of years ago, it all seemed too far away. Regular people caught up in the webs of totalitarianism rebelling against them, and, win or lose.

But now it is close, right in front of my doorstep, the sounds of revolution, hate, love, and freedom echoing throughout Ankara, the country, the whole world.

 

It all started with a peaceful protest at Gezi Parkı, one of the last remaining green areas in the center of Istanbul, protesting the Turkish PM's decision to build a shopping mall there, cutting down all the trees. There was a sit-in for three days; the weather seemed to agree with the protesters, the sun shined endlessly, people brought their kids, sang songs, read books to each other. The happiness and the peace in the photos of the first few days of the protest are unmistakable.

But then it all went wrong.

The police attacked the sleeping protesters, doused them with tear gas at five o'clock in the morning. Set their tents on fire. This single action of them fired up the whole nation. It was no longer an issue of cutting down a couple of trees. It was now a rebellion against the totalitarian government who has been ruling us in increasing dictatorship for the last 10 years. It was the breaking point.

And ever since that "raid" on the dormant protesters in Gezi Parkı, people of all ages, races, social groups have been united against one, and have been on the streets. The police continues to use excessive force, but the public will simply not back down. The tear gas they are doused in has become "a must" for them, and the pressurized water, well, now, they embrace it with open arms. These will only make them stronger.

CNN, BBC only tell you about the politic side and the surface of everything. People who are not living in Turkey or have friends here do not see the posts of their friends who joined the protests, them saying that they miss the tear gas, that they are proud to carry their wounds, that they will not give up. An amazing wave of cooperation has spread throughout the Turkish Republic.

Similar to the incidence in Reyhanlı on the 12th of May, there is a ban on the press, and the TV channels cannot air anything regarding the protests. However, the Gezi Parkı media blockage differs from the Reyhanlı media blockage. In Gezi Parkı, there was no media blockage at first. While the incidences sprouted and spread nation-wide, before the PM/sultan banned the media, the news channels showed "Food Trips All Over Turkey" and documentaries about penguins. So the channels chose to ignore this act of their own people. They chose their own job security over broadcasting the truth, if they broadcast anything. And again, it backfired. The whole nation started watching a single news channel which was privately funded and did not have any connections to the government. They managed to unite the nation again, all the while trying to break us apart.

 

Last night, I sat in my bed, awake. There are currently two main centers of protest in Ankara, one of them being a kilometer west of my house, and the other being a kilometer east. I could hear the cars honking as they drove past the protest sites, or just any street. I could hear people on their balconies banging pots and spoons, whistling, trying to harmonize with the slogans and the cries of hate, love and rebellion coming from only a few kilometers away. The city was awake. So were the people.

Today, the protests continue. People continue to communicate through Facebook and Twitter, alerting each other of police groups marching their way or of restaurants or establishments which take in protesters promising them safety and help and then turn them over to the police. We are still on the streets, and we will not give up. No matter how much tear gas we will have to bathe in, no matter how many gallons of water we will get soaked in, we will unite under one ideal; doctors, lawyers, conservatives, communists, students, elders, Fenerbahçe, Galatasaray, Beşiktaş fans. And we will show those people who underestimated us that they should be afraid of us, and that with our hate we harvested against them for the past 10 years, with our love and dedication to the Turkish REPUBLIC, our lust for freedom, revolution running through our veins, and our will stronger than the ones opposing us, we will walk out of this our heads held high and our goals reached.

The Left Hand

In one of his poems, the Turkish poet Orhan Veli said:

"I got drunk,

And I remembered you again;

My left hand,

My unpracticed hand,

My poor hand!"

Although this poem may seem to be written on a whim and not tell of much, it tells the truth.

Today, I tried playing the third movement of the Moonlight Sonata by Beethoven. Towards the middle of this movement, the right and left hands change place; so instead of the usual left hand accompaniment and the right hand singing the melody, now the right hand  sets off with the sixteenth alberti bass accompaniment, and the left hand takes the lead!

Only, it wasn't that easy.

It is expected that people who play the piano and are right-handed to somehow have better use of their left hands compared to other people. Well, that is not entirely true. The piano is actually set for the weakness of the left hand and the strength of the other one (well, except some of Chopin's pieces, maybe). So the pianists actually need to put their left hand in the background, and whether that requires more muscle control or less, is up for discussion.

So we boast about being the "superior species", but we can't even use one of our hands when a cheetah has no preference over whether it should kill with its left or right claw.

I think the reason why Beethoven and Chopin have included the left hand dominantly in their pieces is, first of all, they are composers from the romantic era, so they could do almost anything and get away with it (I mean, the man put a choir into a symphony!), but most importantly, that they wanted to do something different. When you want to play a Chopin piece, a waltz, a mazurka, or a nocturne, you need to practice the left hand separately, get it set, and then add the beautiful right hand melody and embellishments.

Our left hand seems useless sometimes. We may regard it as a vulnerability against other animals or creatures, or we may simply see it as a weak limb, liability. However, when it comes to real life, we definitely  need it and we actually use it more than we think. If we took out the left hand from any piano piece, the melody and the chords would still be there, yes, but it just would not sound right. Our left hand is like the double bass in an orchestra or a bass guitar in a band; you don't notice it when it is there, but when it is gone, you miss it and the music feels empty.

That is, if you are right-handed. If you are a leftie, well, that's a whole other story.

Knock Knock

Avoid the black cat!

Salt over the left shoulder.

Knock on wood.

Rabbit's foot.

Wear the evil eye.

There, all set to go!

All of these actions are things we do every day in order to set our lives on track. When we see a black cat, we expect our day to go terribly wrong. When we pass under a ladder, we live through the day frightened of what may happen.

These superstitions are nothing more than stupid beliefs we cling on to in order to have an "external force" act on our lives, change its current projectile and destination. We think that wearing an evil eye will protect us from a car crash, so we drive more recklessly. And when we don't actually crash into the back of a truck, we think it is because of the "eye".

When we see an owl on the sedge of our balcony, we expect someone to die in the following 24 hours. At least that's the way things work in Turkey.

If we have a rabbit's foot around our necks, well, then, we will ace the physics test!

But actually all of this is caused by logical fallacies. We only notice that there was an owl on our balcony if someone dies that day and we assume a causality. We can always perform poorly at an exam, but that one single time you may not be wearing your evil eye, and, again, we do the best thing humans do, the thing we are all professionals at; we assume. So these traditions are born by your very own mind tricking you. Like every false, hollow, seemingly-useful-but-really-not-worth-a-dime thing on our planet today,superstitions, too, are created only by humans.  They are all things humanity sticks onto to be able to blame something else for what happens to them. Superstitions exist for the same reasons that religion exists for. All these false beliefs are built on the same, selfish, arrogant idea: something went wrong? blame it on someone else.

So, we do knock on wood when we see a very pretty baby, or when someone mentions something horrible happening to another person. I personally do not believe that me knocking on the aged furniture at our house, not even real wood, probably, would delay the Reaper and turn him the wrong way at the intersection just down the road from our home, but my grandma does, and she tells me to do so, insistingly.

Even the most skeptical person on the face of earth, the scientists at CERN or the astronauts in the space shuttle looking down on our blue marble, has an instance of doubt when a black cat walks across the road right in front of them, or when a mirror shatters into a thousand pieces in their apartments.

So when I take the IB exams next year, I won't depend on an evil eye to protect me or a knock on the table to get me a 7. But, just to be safe, I still will wear my blue necklace, be careful around mirrors for the couple of weeks before the exams, pull my hair if I see a black cat on the street while waiting for the bus, and knock on the wood if anyone mentions failing the test or getting a bad grade, because you never know. Someday, those guys at CERN or USC Research Team may just announce that knocking on wood increases your intelligence and awareness.

 

N/A

On the day of mothers last week, a day mothers all around the world are supposed to be showered with love and affection and kindness, two trucks loaded with explosives exploded in Reyhanlı, a province in Hatay, one of the 81 cities in Turkey.

It was initially announced that 45 people passed away.

Then the numbers started increasing, the day on our calenders was painted blood red; but also deep, dark black.

And then, the press was banned from reporting anything that happened or is happening in Reyhanlı. Censorship reared its ugly head.

While the whole country was waiting for the announcement of a national mourning, that very night, two of the countries best and most popular -and also arch rival- teams played a soccer game. And the game wasn't even that important because one of the teams had already declared their championship. Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr were all engulfed by status updates supporting their teams. Only a couple cared about the increasing body count in Reyhanlı.

Three days later, university students protested what happened in Reyhanlı and the government's lack of interest in it. They were doused with tear gas, beaten by the police. They sat on the highway connecting two major parts of Ankara. They were wounded, first by the incidence, then by the ignorant and brutal cops. They were armed only by their hate towards terrorism and their love for their country. Nothing else. Yet they were attacked like they were the ones who killed those now-100 people in Reyhanlı; and the irony is that, the people really responsible for that were not being tried to be discovered, apparently, they weren't as dangerous as these university students.

And now, Turkey has forgotten. Like every event which happens, let it be something good or something bad, it is discussed in news programs, barber shops, market registers and streets one day, and in the next, it is forgotten. The government is desperately trying to change the agenda by trying to pass a law regarding the consumption of alcohol in restaurants in Turkey, and the media gladly took the bait.

But this time around, this procedure was catalyzed. We were forced to forget, or rather, we were not reminded. The newspapers, the evening, morning news broadcasts could not mention anything about this event. I don't think they would want to, anyway. Forgive and forget, right?

Tomorrow is the 19th of May which is the National Youth and Sports Day in Turkey. That day in 1919, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk set foot on land in the heart of Anatolia, and began the war for national independence, the resistance was afoot. Later, in 1938, Atatürk rewarded this special day to the youth of Turkey to whom he tied all of his hopes to. And suddenly, the government which did not bother to declare national mourning on the day of the event and sent its president to the USA to discuss some "critical" matters with Barack Obama while the president's country was soaked with the blood of innocent people, terror and fright, decided to cancel the celebrations of Youth and Sports Day because of the incidence in Reyhanlı. In the time we need to get together as a country and celebrate, unite, stand behind our country and democracy and everything that Atatürk trusted us, the youth of Turkey, with, we cannot. We are not allowed to.

I've blamed everything on the government of Turkey in my post here, but do not be mistaken, the people under the goverment, us, need to get half the blame. The day of the Boston bombings, most of my friends wrote condolence messages, RIP's on their precious Facebook Timelines, for three dead and 246 injured halfway across the world, but when that bloody Sunday rushed in, I saw nothing; nothing on my news feed, it wasn't talked about in Twitter, the same friends who "wished patience" to the injured ones in Boston posted "congratz" messages for their team for the soccer game that night. Of course what happened in Boston was horrible and it should not happen ever again and we are all sorry about it, but when an event of similar sort happens in your country with two hundred times the death toll, you should be able to be sorry about it as well, if not more. You should care about the dead people and the orphan children in Turkey as much as you did about the people in the US, if not more. You should, we should, because it is our country, our people.

Ignorance is being forced into our brains right now, and even though some people, like those university students or the people who organized this protest walk to the parliament building which will take place tomorrow are resisting against it, the media, the important people of the country, its celebrities, its athletes, are not. In fact, most people are not. And now, a week has passed, and still there are bodies being taken out from under the wreckage, the debris, at first by the people themselves because the government did not send any help, and everyone has already forgotten. Maybe not totally erased from their brains, maybe there is still a crumb of care and sorrow somewhere in their hearts when they are at their brunch on the side of the Bosporus with their friends and family.

All I can say is that, they cannot make everyone forget about it, about their mistakes, about their ignorance. Even if they ban the media and not allow congressman into the province, some of us will simply not forget. At least, we will try not to, and stay true to our nation and our values we fought so hard for only a hundred years ago. To every children who has lost their parents on that Sunday, to every mother who has lost her son, to every bride who lost her groom, to every sister who has lost her brother, I present my deepest condolences.

;

Names to Fit

On Friday, I did not wake up at 6:30 in the morning to get dressed up and go to school to "learn" and "have fun", really to be tested all the time. Instead, I woke up at 7:40, with butterflies fluttering in my stomach, my fingers waiting anxiously to embrace my piano for the final time before we got in a cab in the rainy, humid morning to take place in a piano contest.

Each grade was assigned a specific piece before hand, ours was a Kuhlau Sonata, and we got to pick another piece, which could be anything at all... as long as it did not exceed three minutes.

We got there a little early, and sat in the cafeteria of the relatively small school. While my mom and I were waiting for my name to be called, students would come and go, some there for the very same competition, with their sheet music in their hands, some with their fathers making them follow him around, some in haste, trying to get copies of the criteria before he/she got called in. And there were some who came with their teachers. This was the last day of the competition, so it was grades 10, 11 and 12 for piano and guitar, and most of these competitors had their valued tutors and "supporting" parents with them. Their tutors were giving them advice, speaking to them with such hurtful ambition and speed, speaking the way a boxing coach speaks to his athlete, telling him how to beat up his opponent so badly that he faints, just before the bell authorizing violence chimes among the halls of gambling, ambition, and money. The parents on the other hand, were a whole new kind. Some sat by, chatting with their children, as my own mother did, actually, she played a game on the iPad while I studied for my French test,  while some were worse than the tutors; parents instructing their children, and their children frantically practicing the hard passages of their pieces on the plastic coffee table they sat in.  One father was dressed up in a suit, his son also dressed up in a black shirt with black suit pants and black, shiny shoes, lead his son around the cafeteria. The boy didn't look up.

Finally, I was called up, along with fifteen other students, and they took us up a floor, where we continued to wait.

When I had four or five people remaining to go before me, we started talking to each other. I sat next to two very, very different people.

One of them could not afford to but a piano, so she had a keyboard at home on which she would practice the passages and parts of pieces, and then she would play her pieces on the piano at her school every day.

The other one's name was Idil, named after the famous Turkish pianist Idil Biret. Her parents bought her a piano when she was born. She played the piano since she was 4-5 years old; but she hated it. She told us that she did not enjoy it at all and that "she did not have anything to do with it." I had the opportunity to listen to both of my new friends. The first girl played quite well, but you could tell she could use a little bit more practice. The second one, Idil, could not play very well, it was as if she was sight reading the pre-determined repertoire right there, and, it was not that hard to sight read. The jury stopped her at the middle of her first piece, asking her to commence with her second piece which she chose. She came out of the room, happy that it was over, while I went in the room, excited to see the piano, the people, and to cross something off my bucket-list.

And today is mother's day. A day only for the most patient -well, most of the time- , most loving, most encouraging creatures on the face of earth. They are indeed special, all parents are, but when they try to change the course of their children's lives, when they try to make their lives into the life they've always wanted to have but couldn't, they become more ambitious, almost to a degree which could hurt their children... But sometimes, they do help them, some become great pianists, great doctors because of their parents' push, but some always look up to their parents, not in the good way, and to everyone around them, walk with their heads down, always trying to live up to their name, while they fail to realize for their whole lives that it is their names who should fit them, not the other way around.

Murphy's Law? Maybe.

Yesterday, I performed at a concert. And until the moment I got up on the stage (I was the last to go, by the way), I practically lived the statement "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong".

The concert was organized by my piano teacher and she wanted her students to give a concert. She asked me if I would play in it. I said, "Gladly!". She asked me if I had anything to do that Tuesday night, May 7th. I thought about it for a while, and the date rang the bell: math exam, Ding! Luckily, the test was on Tuesday, so I didn't have any studying to do that night. Anyway. She told me that the rehearsal would be at 18:00. I told her that I come from school around 17:00 and I could easily make it... Haha.

So Tuesday came rolling, I took the painfully hard calculus exam, and was excited the whole day for the concert that night. I got on the bus, and because of the people who took the bus that day, I  realized that I would be dropped off 3rd from the last.

But that was just the beginning.

The road we normally take was unusually and incredibly crowded and a jogging turtle could have passed us for a while there.

When it was finally my turn to get dropped off, the bus driver "forgot" I was in the bus and missed the turn which lead to my street. I had to ride along in the bus until he dropped off the remaining three people.

I finally got home, ate some stuff so fast I couldn't taste it, fixed myself an outfit, splashed on some makeup, and we were getting in a cab at 18:10.

Oh, what's that?

Some people tried to take charge and are running around yelling shallow slogans with banners in their hands, so the police closed off a street.

Some genius city planner decided to work on the asphalt in one of the main arteries at the place I was going to, so bye-bye free flowing traffic!

It took us 30 minutes to go somewhere we would've gone in 10 minutes any other day.

Now, I don't want to commit any logical fallacies or anything, but, if all of these weren't Murphy's Laws alive in flesh and blood, what were they?

Of course, I would not notice the jammed traffic every other day when I did not have a concert to get to.

I would not care so much if the bus driver had forgotten to drop me off any other day. So maybe, just because today I had somewhere and some event I had to get to, because I searched for misfortunes all along the way, I noticed these stuff.

Nonetheless, something, maybe a decision I made or maybe the fluttering of a butterfly's wings on the top of a skyscraper in Shanghai caused me to be late to that concert. I don't know what was at work that day, but that chaotic afternoon was far from normal... Murphy's Law? Maybe.

Drunk From the Wine of Power

When we say kings, queens and monarchy, we immediately think of sword fights, public executions, men in tights with music playing in the background with parallel fifths and fourths, a fat, arrogant man sitting on a throne surrounded by gold looted from conquered cities. We think that those days of kings and queens are in the past.

However, they have never been so close to us.

Once one of the most powerful nations now drowning in its own economic slump powered by unnecessary inflation, the U.K., in fact, has a queen as their leader.

Today was Queen's Day (actually to be King's Day from now on because the current queen has left the throne for his son), a special day in the Netherlands to celebrate the birthday of their queen and the previous queens.

So, opposing contrary belief and our conditioning, kings and queens do play an important role in our society.

And you could argue about what's wrong with that. The glitch in this system is that nobody wants to give up their supreme and unquestioned power; moreover, everyone wants to obtain that power. Because when you're the king or the queen of a nation, you are at the top, you don't take orders from anyone; only mere suggestions posed at "your grace", and, well, if you don't like their suggestions, Off with their heads! OK, maybe not necessarily decapitation in 2013, but you get the gist.

The honorable and right thing to do is to give up the throne when you've had enough time under the limelight and enough glory to carry on with you, to pass on the throne to your descendants to let them rule the country for a while, not to cling on to it until you can barely walk and until your son gets to the age you should have left the throne at.

But again, being drunk from the wine of power is irresistible, and the wine is just too, too sweet to give up.

Symphony of a Thousand

On Tuesday, we went to listen to Mahler's Eighth Symphony, more commonly known as the "Symphony of a Thousand."

The story is that Mahler originally wrote this symphony for a thousand people to perform it, but it was only done once with a thousand people on the night of its premiere in 1910, Munich.

The one we went to was "only" four hundred people on stage; one orchestra (which had two harps, so imagine the size) and three choirs, plus the soloists standing at the front and some part of the brass section in one of the aisles between the seats of the audience because they couldn't fit on the stage.

Still, it was no different than a quartet who's been together for twenty years playing their favorite piece; everything was right, and even in that chaos and in that heap of people, instruments and stands, nothing stood out and everyone managed to listen to each other.

Of course, the conductor played a big part in all of this "staying together" and synchronization.

But the most important thing to do when you're performing with an orchestra, especially with a 300-people one, is to listen to every single instrument and voice. Looking at the director, in my opinion, comes later.

The most amazing thing I observed at one point midst the screeching dissonances, chromatic notes and "themes" to be heard once and never again, was how the huge violin section could pull off such an awesome crescendo; it sounded like one person was playing the whole thing. Playing the right notes and the rhythms is something, but doing a perfect crescendo in unison is another.

The Symphony of a Thousand by Mahler, put together by the Bilkent Symphony Orchestra and three choirs, was surely an amazing experience, one that I would be terribly sorry to miss. Once again, I realized how actually listening to people make the music there and then, with little flukes and perfect nuances is much, much, much more different than downloading the piece from torrents.com and listening to it with cheap headphones.

The Quiet Prodigy

He was born in a small village in Warsaw, in 1810.

He was the second child and the only son of Justyna and Nicholas.

His first piano teacher was his big sister, and he gave his first concert at the age of seven.

He traveled to Paris, hoping he would stumble upon more opportunities as an aspiring musician, with a handful of his native soil in his pocket, in 1830.

But he was gone for good, because the rebellious Poland army was pulverized by the large and powerful Russian army, just a couple of weeks after his departure from Poland. Coming back home, returning to his homeland was, henceforth, not possible.

His lover broke up with him by writing a novel in which the female character (symbolizing herself) left the male character (our musician) for someone else, and sending our musician the novel.

He gave little less than 30 concerts in his short-spanned life. He was not a big-hit back then, as he "failed to fill the concert hall"; he was too quiet.

Compared to Liszt's and Berlioz's mighty compositions spilling over with fortissimo's and hammered chords, he was simply too soft for the audience in Paris.

His life was ended prematurely by a demanding disease, most probably tuberculosis.

This man is Frederic Chopin.

Most of his works are for the solo piano, and he is my all-time favorite composer.

Why, you ask?

It's because of the feelings inside his pieces, locked in tightly by the staves and the written, simple notes, waiting to be released by an understanding and passionate pianist.

Every single time I play his Nocturne No. 20 in C-Sharp major, I find something different in it, another feeling, another thought.

And every time I listen to this incredible piece of work, it takes me to a different place, stirs up different memories, different emotions.

His piece called Adieu, a waltz in A-Flat Major for the piano, conveys the emotions of farewells and goodbyes and departures better than any painting I've seen or any novel I've read. It is hard to keep your eyes from brimming with tears, to stay standing behind the sand bar the waves of memory build up in your mind. It is hard not to feel, it is hard not to live the music.

Frederic Chopin, the quiet, emotional, master of the Romantic Era, quite different from his fellow composer friends, manages to prove everyone who thinks that music can only express so much wrong. Now, if you will listen to his waltz L'Adieu, you will understand what I mean. The silent prodigy makes up for the lack of volume in his pieces with overflowing feeling and just simple, plain, beauty.

 

Survivor

The thing I do most Saturday, Sunday and Monday nights is to watch the TV show Survivor. What the basically is that they drop 20 volunteers on an island and let them starve, while they dangle food in front of them to motivate them to play several games requiring condition, concentration and coordination.

Although the morals of this competition is questionable, it is surely fun to watch and is very exciting.

The goal in this competition is pretty clear; survival. Although they start out as teams, it all comes down to individuals and who appeals to the public the most, because, I don't know about the other formats of the competition, but in Turkey, who goes and who stays is determined by the votes of the audience.

This competition seems fit for the Turkish audience, thanks to all the drama and the sadness, but I guess there is always an audience ready for emotional exploitation in every nation.

In the end, it entertains the common audience (one of them being myself), but I'm watching the show of survival, limited food, almost no shelter and loneliness with a bowl of strawberries in front of me and my iPad and family next to me. It may not be so "entertaining" to someone who has bought the TV they're watching the show in by giving up eating red meat for three months. Just saying.

Books

The doors swung open, creaking creepily, and there I was. The smell was overwhelming; an incredible medley of the smell of paper, dust and ink. Rows, shelves, spread all over the place, as far as you could see. Signs indicating where specific genres are placed, and that feeling, that feeling you get when you see the sign you're looking for, the genre you read all the time and start walking towards it, is nonexchangeable. Then you come across the shelves and shelves of the thing you're looking for, so many of them that you don't know where to begin. You feel happy and excited to go through all of them. You pick one that catches your eye, flip to the back, glance, then flutter the pages, and the smell hits you again, and you know you have to buy that. You are anxious to get home and start it, bend the cover neatly for the first time, crease the spine, "en premier", read the opening paragraph and get introduced to the world that lies beyond the neatly designed cover. And the moment you open the cover, pass through the copyrights, the short intro by the editor, sometimes, the table of contents, and reach the first line, read it, and comprehend it, you have been introduced into a whole, new world. A make-believe one, maybe, but just as real as the life you're living when you drop down the book.

The actions, feelings and senses I described above can be related to one, single object: books.

Books can never be replaced, not by "e-books", not by Kindles, not by PDF's, now by "audio books". They have their own special place in our hearts, well, at least in mine, and are probably one of the greatest inventions of man kind.

It was a big mistake of mine to download Stephen King's novel, It, which is nearly 10 cm thick in paperback, to read it on the Kindle. Sure, you can easily find the definition of a word, don't need to keep a bookmark, and don't need to haul the brick-like book around with you, but these advantages of the Kindle do not make up for the real-deal; paperback books.

Seeing the percentage you've read at the bottom of the screen of the Kindle is not the same as turning the book sideways and flipping the pages to see how long you've got to go.

Just shutting down the Kindle without marking your place is not the same as putting your "bookmark"- very seldom a real bookmark though, most commonly a receipt from a store, a note paper with numbers scribbled onto it, numbers which have now lost their meaning to you, maybe, if you come across one, a Post-It note, or just the ripped corner of a piece of paper-and skimming through the next couple of pages to see where the chapter ends.

Most importantly, holding the Kindle in your hand, so light and thin, is not the same as holding a paperback book, with the shadows of the pages on the left cast upon the pages on the right.

Electronic devices have replaced many everyday objects in our lives today, from scales to stock markets, but there is one thing they will never be able to replace: real, paperback or hardcover books which you can flip through the pages, actually turn the pages, feel them, and be caressed by the soft wind they generate and be mesmerized by their smell which takes you back down "memory-lane".

 

Walking Down the Hallway

Thursday was Poem in Your Pocket Day.

So, we went around reading poems to random people in our school, you know, just to make their day a little different than the previous one or the next one.

Here are the responses I got after I read my poem to different people:

"Wow!"

"Very deep, very meaningful."

"Good."

"OK..?"

My poem was Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley:

I met a traveler from an antique land 
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, 
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, 
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; 
And on the pedestal these words appear: 
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: 
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” 
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay 
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare 
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Yes, I read this beautiful poem and the answer I got was "OK..?". I guess people didn't really understand it because they could not read it over and over again, underline the rhyme scheme, dig out the connotations of the words, identifying literary tools, alliterations, symbols, like we usually do when we have a poem at hand. We plunge so deep into the stanzas, deep into the lines, deep into the words and deep into the letters, that we forget what the poet and the poem is really trying to say. We say that the capital M in the word "ye Mighty" reflects the poet's beliefs and puts an emphasis on the word, while, simply, it shows how the great Egyptian king, Ozymandias, lived his life trying to compete with a so-called divine being. It shows how desperate he is for power, it shows his ambitions - and how now "nothing beside remains"...

But that's what happens in real life. Unless we have a task we have accomplish using the piece of art, we simply glance at it, pass our eyes over it, hear it for a few seconds and return to our business. When I play the piano at my house, my family usually listens to me and compliments or criticizes my playing, but yesterday, I probably played a Chopin Nocturne the best I've ever had for the past 4 years I've been playing it, but when I finished the piece, with the two C-Sharps, 5 octaves apart, softly humming and slowly disappearing into the silence, no one said anything. They were busy playing games on their computers or cleaning up the kitchen.

We usually don't have to analyze a piece of music we hear in everyday life and determine its musical, structural and contextual features.

We usually don't need to write an essay on "how the poet conveys his thoughts and feelings..." when we come across a piece of literature; a sonnet, a Haiku, a slice of prose...

We usually don't need to publish a two-page review on an artwork we pass by when we walk around the hallways of our school.

So, we don't care about them.

But we should.

We should listen to that piece of music like it is the last thing we are going to hear, we should read that piece of literature like it is the first thing we ever read, we should "see" that paintings, not just look, but actually "see", like that is the last thing we will ever see. We should appreciate life's beauties, one of which is called art, at whenever possible, not when it is Poem in Your Pocket Day, not when you have to write a 350 word essay, not when you have to post a blog post by Friday night about it, not matter what. Because, life is walking down a hallway with paintings on the walls, music playing in the background and people talking to you, and if you don't stop and "hear", don't listen, and "look", don't see, you might as well be walking in a desert, with no food or water.

 

Imagining Some Fear

"...Ben walked slowly away, his heart a thudding drum in his chest. Yes, he was sweating; he could feel it trickling down from his forehead, his armpits, matting the hair on his chest. He looked up and saw Pennywise the Clown standing at the top of the lefthand staircase, looking down at him. His face was white with greasepaint. His mouth bled lipstick in a killer's grin. There were empty sockets where his eyes should have been. He held a bunch of balloons in one hand and a book in the other. Not he, Ben thought. It. I am standing here in the middle of the Derry Public Library's  rotunda on a late-spring afternoon in 1985, I am a grown man, and I am face to face with my childhood's greatest nightmare. I am face to face with It. 'Come on up, Ben,' Pennywise called down. 'I won't hurt you. I've got a book for you! A book . . . and a balloon! Come on up!"

This exquisite passage you just read is by Stephen King, the great author of horror novels, and is from his fiction work, It.

As I read this passage for the first time, in bed, with the lights turned low at late in the night, with the house creepily living on around me with no intention of falling asleep, I felt the same as Ben Hanscom. The sweat, the fear, the anxiety, the horror; and this was all thanks to the incredibly vivid descriptions by Stephen King, fruits of his teeming imagination.

Without King's imagination, there would be no horror in that passage. I would not start to look at clowns as I've never done before. I wouldn't close my eyes and see Pennywise the Clown, probably completely different from what King had in mind when he wrote that passage. Because as I read the passage, I blend that description with my own imagination, and create something totally different. Still horrifying, but in another way; horrifying for me.

This is why I believe it is safe to agree with the greatest mystery writer of all time, the inventor of the logical, arrogant, neat, socially-awkward "consultant" Sherlock Holmes; Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, on his saying,"when there is no imagination, there is no horror."

We cannot be afraid of something that does not exist in our minds.

Can a 3-year-old be afraid of a nuclear war starting, or an earthquake?

They are more likely to be horrified by the idea of slimy, forever-famished, hideous creatures, "monsters", I believe that's what they call them, hiding under their beds, sneakily waiting until they fall asleep, into the deep and wondrous world of dreams, and just linger their arms over the edge...

The moment we think of something, it spurs into life, instantaneously, and, unfortunately, you cannot hit "delete".

What the monster in It does is that it reads the minds of the children and takes the form of the thing they're most afraid of. The thing they imagined would harm them. The thing they think is hiding in their closet. For Ben, it was a mummy. For Eddie Kaspbarak, it was a werewolf.

Shakespeare wrote, in his play A Midsummer Night's Dream, that a lunatic, a lover and a poet all have different imaginations and comprehend the world differently; while the lover sees "a gypsy as the world's most beautiful woman", the madmen sees "hell" and "devils", all the while the poet "shapes" what he sees into immortal words, seeing something to write about in "airy nothing". And all of these people, with their crazy imaginations colossally different from each other, can easily perceive a "bush" as "a bear" in the night, by "imagining some fear".

Without our imaginations, we wouldn't have anything to be afraid of; we would not have a great machine behind our wondering eyes, restlessly imagining and recording things; spawning horrible thoughts, scary animals, worst-case-scenarios. King "imagines some fear" of his own, and puts them on paper masterfully, allowing us to "imagine" some horror for ourselves; people who read the passage in the beginning of this blog post fear completely different things. Now that you've read the passage, and imagined your own fear,  it's up to you to decide whether you are the lunatic, the lover, or the poet.

Time for Summer

The sun glistened upon the beautiful landscape of Antalya, the Mediterranean Sea shimmering under the sun's tentative rays, the sand on the beaches sparkling here and there, and, finally, the first customers of the year, the hotel owners, the bellboys, spilling out onto the streets and beaches, ready, ready for some hot weather, ready for a big bowl of summer.

The trees are now not bare, not frozen solid from the harsh winter, but are embellished with leaves of green and flowers of all colors.

These are the times in which we need to turn on the AC.

These are the times in which we walk on the other side of the street to walk in the shadows of the cumbersome buildings.

These are the times in which we don't carry the burden of coats, scarfs, hats, and heavy boots.

One whole year has passed since the apple tree in our backyard last blossomed. One year of fun, stress, sadness, one year which only remains in our minds as memories, memories, memories, otherwise completely disappeared, gone with the wind. Now we have another spring, another start at the best times to go to school, to go outside, to take a walk, another chance to do things differently this time. A new season, a new beginning.

The time of ice cream, the time of sitting on the grass under the sun, the time of late sunsets, the time of beautiful fruits, the time of sand, sea, sun and everything good, the time for relaxing, being happy, and simply enjoying life to its fullest has come; the time for summer finally arrived.

Scales & Sonatas

"Hello, what part of the test would you like to take first?"

"The scales and arpeggios, please"

"Very well then, would you play an E Major scale, contrary motion, 4 octaves, followed by an F # Major scale, hands a third apart, four octaves."

The British examiner sat in a wooden, antique desk at the corner of the room, with sheets of paper in front of him; blank forms waiting to be filled up either with positive remarks of "good musicianship" or remarks of "failure". The pointy insulation material which covered the room's walls made the not-so-small exam room look like a dungeon. The piano was clearly new, the keys had a peculiar touch to them: they have not yet faced great pianists, intent accompanists, challenging, finger-blurring Liszt pieces, touchy Chopin pieces in which they were touched with delicacy as much as emotion... A hard, fresh piano; the hardest to play on. 

On Tuesday, I took the ABRSM piano exam for the first time. I had prepared my pieces as well as I could have with all the time I had left after the excessive time that IB requires was spent of lab reports and studying. The aural test was a "no worry" one, I was pretty confident in my ear for music, that probably comes with playing the piano for 13 years. The part which worried me the most was the "Scales and Arpeggios" part. Every applicant who wants to take the Grade 7 piano test had to memorize 60-something scales and arpeggios, from a scale in F# Major, which has 6 sharps, and the most number of sharps one can have is seven, to diminished sevenths starting from A, both hands, four octaves.

Somehow, this test managed to make me have to play the piano and do it without enjoying it. I used to practice the piano because I had fun doing it, but when preparing for this test, I dreaded each minute of practice. Yes, playing scales improves a pianist's skills a lot, but when you're not doing something because you enjoy it, I don't think there is any point in doing it. I think that playing 40 scales from memory, allegro, with both hands or separately, is just a way of fitting art into forms, molding music to a shape in which it can be criticized...by numbers.

I played a Gershwin piece, one of Tchaikovsky's Months, and one Beethoven Sonata.

I am also preparing for a piano competition, and I need to learn a Kuhlau Sonata.

Hey!

Sonatas!

The most boring forms of music for the piano, at least for me. Pearls of the classical era. Twists, trills, clean, expected, totally predictable chord progressions, clear dynamic markings, and the left hand working like a machine. Every kind of test for the piano involves a sonata, because the sonata itself is "grade-able". There is not a way for you to show yourself through it, no emotions, no room for interpretation, every one plays the sonata exactly the same way. This way, it is easier for the examiners to give grades to the pianist, based solely upon how you play the stuff that is written in front of you on the piano, exactly like it is written. They judge you on similarity, not individuality.

These kinds of exams and strict, demanding teachers and parents make the little pianists believe that the only thing to play on the piano are boring, mechanical pieces.

They make them believe that they have to play exactly what is written in front of them.

They make them believe that you cannot enjoy playing classical music.

They don't tell them that you can play the rock songs you listen to everyday on the piano, or that you can change the pieces you play, interpret them yourself, even if it is a sonata or a nocturne.

They don't tell them you can actually enjoy classical music, both listening to it, and playing it on the piano.

Fitting music into standards and rubrics and forms is the worst way to decide how good a person is in playing that instrument. Because of this insane compulsion of humans to measure everything and prove they're the best in that subject, they are killing the joy of playing classical music, by reducing the colorful, wondrous, melodic, beautiful and incredibly varied world of classical music which could be played on the piano, into simple, arid scales & sonatas.

 

 

Opportunity Cost

One of the most basics concepts in economics is the concept of "opportunity cost". An opportunity cost is a cost you pay when you do something instead of another, and this "cost" is not always, actually most of the time is not, a monetary value. For example, they're selling my favorite cereal in the grocery store near my house, store A, at a higher price than the grocery store on the other side of town, store B, let's say two dollars more. The opportunity cost of not going to store B is two dollars, but the amount of time and gasoline I would waste if I had gone there, which are the opportunity costs of going to store B, are greater costs than two dollars. So, instead, I prefer buying the cereal and give two dollars more than usual.

This problem of opportunity costs comes from the very problem of economics and the reason why a science called economics exists: scarcity. When there are limited resources, and unlimited wants.

Opportunity costs are everywhere in life, and we face them every, single, day.

To park the car in a very, very, small gap in front of the house and spend 15 minutes trying to do it, or to park it 4 meters up the street easily, and walk the way?

The most typical example in economics; to produce 20 tons of butter and 10 million guns, or to produce 5 tons of butter and 40 million guns?(here, the opportunity cost of producing 1 ton of butter is half a million guns).

The reason I have not been writing blog posts for the past six days, I have not been able to play the piano or the guitar, I have not been able to watch the new episode of Supernatural, is, simply, that the opportunity cost of doing these is very, very, big.

Economics tells us and teaches us how the real world works and functions. Not just markets and GDP's and how to lower unemployment rates, but what to do, how to do it, and to do it at what cost. Basically, we answer two of the three basic questions of economics, what to produce and how to produce, in our everyday lives, trying to allocate our own resources as efficiently as we can. Maybe I am not a factory and land owner, and I don't decide, to increase production, let's say, whether to buy 50 million dollars worth more capital and reduce my labor force, or to keep my capital the same and purchase more labor. But what I do, and what everyone does every day is the exact same thing. My "limited resource" is my time, from when I get home from school until I go to bed, my "unlimited wants" are to play the piano, to write blog posts, to watch TV, but also to do my homework and study for the physics test, and the way I allocate may resources is through being organized and trying, although most of the time not succeeding in, time management.

Just to get the concept of opportunity cost clear, here is a thing which happened to me four days ago: It was a Tuesday night, and I had a physics test the next day, but I could also play the guitar and sing at the Art Show hosted at our school, for an hour that night. The opportunity cost of playing the guitar was perhaps and hour of studying physics or an hour of rest, but the satisfaction and the utility I would get from playing the guitar and singing in the Art Show with my friends, would be much, much more valuable than an hour of studying physics. So, I decided to go to the Art Show and study physics when I come back, and thinking back to that Tuesday night, and the test I faced on Wednesday now, I know for certain that I made the right decision, no matter what grade I may get from the test.

I Want My Hour Back

60 minutes, 3600 seconds,

I lost my hour,

I want my hour,

Give it back.

 

Today, I lost an hour because of the summer time application; "Better utilization of the day hours!"

An hour I would have perhaps used to study for the physics exam on Wednesday.

An hour I would have perhaps used to finish The Shire Theme arrangement for the piano I've been working on for two weeks-more like planning to work on for two weeks.

An hour I would have perhaps used to SLEEP.

And where has it gone?

Just thrown away into the space, the endless void beyond the stars we see at night?

Time does that to you. It confuses you, it creates problems we really don't need right now.

Time passes. Only it passes slower when I'm in math class, and faster when I'm in physics or music. Or it doesn't really "pass" when we're asleep. We close our eyes, it is dark, we open them, it is day, and the only crumbs of memory we have are dreams, flashing, vivid pictures, which are seconds long. What happened to the rest of the time?

Time travel is another issue of concern. If it was invented in the future, we would have known by now, because a man in a space suit with six fingers on each of his hand would've stumbled into the middle of the Walmart claiming he is from the future.  One of my favorite movie series is Back to the Future, in which whatever Marty does affects his life in the future, as he tries to get back to it.

They cannot really explain how time works, and how it seems to take FOREVER for the video game to load, but it seems like it has only been 10 minutes since you've started playing it, when in reality it has been five hours. And today, I lost an hour of sleep, fun and doing homework (funny how those two words ended up together). I literally lost it. Now it is 12:52 PM, and I need to get started on studying history, studying the events of the time past, studying the events which might have happened right where I'm sitting right now, the battle of Sakarya, the establishment of the first parliament in Ankara... Same place, different people, different times. It is just like another layer, another world...

Just to confuse you a little more, before I get back to the present and the future, here's a question: If I went back in time and somehow caused my grandmother and grandfather to never meet, what would happen?