The Scrapbook of Our Life

What makes people so unique?

My nerdy friend might say the chromosomes which carry the genes from their parents.

My believer friend might say their destiny.

My skeptical friend might say nothing, we're all the same in essence.

Well, I say it is our memory.

What a weird thing our memory is. You possess none of it when you are born, but starting from that second, it builds up, up to the sky, up to infinity, and knows no boundaries. We forget, we remember. These are actions we take for granted but they are just the final product we see in front of the turning wheels and pumping pistons.

Memory is not one, two or three dimensional. Despite some of the arguments we had in our classes regarding the 4th dimension, I believe memory is not even four dimensional. Maybe ten, twenty. Think about it: sometimes, with a single smell, the smell of fresh baked cookies, with a single sound, the sound of a cuckoo bird, with a single sight, the picture of an apple tree, with a single taste, the sweet-sour taste of a lemonade, memories can come back, flooding your mind, sometimes making it hard to snap back into the real world.

You may suddenly remember your childhood, your first house, with an apple tree in the back yard, the smell of cookies coming from the kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, sipping your lemonade while listening the cuckoo bird sing its song.

Then you remember the people, some of who may not be with you anymore, you remember the good times you had with them, the funny things, the sad things, the things you wish you hadn't said or hadn't done. You wish you could take them back, your eyes water out of nowhere.

Then you remember your regrets and promises, your passions; your dreams of being an astronaut, forgotten as soon as the slaughterhouse of dreams (a.k.a. school) reared its head, shelved high, behind your hobbies you had to give up when you started college.

Then you snap back into reality, with the beep of your phone, calling you back to work, or the hissing of the kettle, summoning you back to earth. The memories slowly creep back into their dusty old shelves, some into their tightly locked boxes, some into a place you put them so that you won't forget them, but the place you forget anyway.

Memory, right? It is creepy, yet beautiful. It makes us who we are, and also connects us all the same. Not everyone may possess the memory of going camping with one's dearest friends, but everyone possesses the memory of the landing on the moon. Without memory, we would be nothing, lost in space, and the life we lived until now would not have a scrapbook of its own.

"Controlled Craziness"

"Imagination is more important than knowledge".

I will stand by this statement made by Albert Einstein until the end of time.

Because, with knowledge, you can only do so much. There are boundaries, rules, facts and information you have to abide to. You can't just ignore them. On the other hand, with imagination, there are no boundaries, there are no rules. In fact, the only boundary you have is your own creativity. Using imagination, you can create something that is not there, you can see things that cannot be seen by other people, you can hear music in silence.

Nobody knows what really goes on inside this crazy pink glob of matter we call our "brain".

You  may know everything there is to know about music theory, but without imagination, you will never become a Mozart or Wagner. You may know every known technique about drawing and painting, but without imagination, you will never become a Monet or Dali.

[caption id="attachment_210" align="alignright" width="253"] Earth according to Hindu Mythology.[/caption]

I am pretty sure that the people of earlier ages were way, way more creative and thus much more imaginative. It takes imagination to look up at the starry night sky and connect five stars so that they resemble a woman, and call it Andromeda, a queen who was banished into the sky for being very arrogant and self righteous. Now what people see when they look up at the exactly same night sky as the Ancient Greeks looked up into and saw all of the people, animals and stories in, is "galaxies" and "stars", not queens and beasts and scorpions.  Also, much earlier, people believed that the Earth stood on elephants standing on a turtle which moves very slowly. I personally believe that the people who thought this up are much more valuable than the 4.0 GPA, genius, skeptical people working in NASA.

Yesterday in our discussion in class, one of my friends defined imagination as "controlled craziness". This is the best definition I've ever heard of imagination. Because, in any other case, looking outside the plane window and seeing a wicked, cringing creature with eyes as dark as the night sky standing on the wing, would be called "craziness", not "imagination".

Imagination is looking at the moon we see everyday and seeing a Death Star. Imagination is getting carried away in a science fiction novel written by your mind after looking at the descending mist or on Halloween. Imagination is being able to see a giant hunter raised to the skies with the scorpion he killed by looking at just a few, twinkling stars, which are in reality, at colossally different places in the universe, with no connection between them what-so-ever, but, who cares about reality?

Superheroes

Clark Kent. Bruce Wayne. Peter Parker. Steve Rogers. Tony Stark. Bruce Banner.

All of these are people who lived among the citizens of their city once, with the people walking past them having no idea what-so-ever regarding who they really are. How they really spend their free time.

""Mr. Wayne, what are your hobbies?"

"I train in the cold with the leader of a group of shady people, a man who came to my prison cell in the middle of nowhere and told me to find him, on the top of a mountain with a blue flower in my hand. I like building stuff; like new armor and making a command center out of a cave -I call it the "bat cave". I also enjoy reading books.""

Superman. Batman. Spiderman. Captain America. Iron Man. The Incredible Hulk.

What if superheroes were real? What if Captain America could sweep in one day, after a terrorist attack, and save the trapped children? What if Iron Man could dart across the sky one night, on his way to a football game?

I'm pretty sure that every kid, at some age, wished that they could meet Superman or Batman when they saw a shooting star. But consider this: if these extraordinarily talented people were really out there, would the world really  be a better place? OK, maybe it could have been helpful for a group like The Avengers to be rounded up a few times through history, but imagine the power the real evil people, not Red Skull, not Loki, not Rhas-al Ghul; the people who kill children, who crash planes, who bomb hospitals in order to enforce a belief, got hold of what made our superheroes special? Got hold of the technology used by Iron Man or Batman, or the serum they injected Steve Rogers with.  We would be better off without having to deal with serums which turned people into Super Soldiers and armors which made one almost invulnerable when worn getting into the wrong hands.

Without any doubt, it would be SUPER COOL to know that Bruce Wayne, a.k.a Batman, a.k.a. philanthropist, a.k.a. master of the martial arts, lived two blocks over.

But what drives these people? Before the government and the state police decide to stop being stupid and cooperate with them, they are on the WANTED list, as "masked vigilantes". They, too, have their own reasons to fight for - and to kill for. For most, it is the death of their parents. But for some, the word "masked vigilante" doesn't exactly fit since they don't choose the superhero life, it chooses them; as they might, just might, without having any control over it, turn into a huge, green and super strong creature when the check doesn't come in time.

Yes, I sometimes do wish that Captain America could come racing in, with his vibranium (a very,very rare element) shield and stop people from killing each other. But, as Bruce Wayne once said, we need "a hero with a face", not a mask. A hero who can do everything they can do, but doesn't hide behind a mask or chase their parents' killer.

But, who knows? Maybe, if you go to Florence some day and look around the café, you just may see the "silent guardian", the "watchful protector". Maybe, the shooting star you wished upon for superheroes to become real, was Iron Man.

 

The King

No, this post is not about Elvis Presley.

This post is about the leader of horror/thriller literature, the one and only Stephen King.

From the introductions he writes at the beginning of his novels to the ironic twist at the end of them, King is probably my all-time favorite author.

My favorite King novel of the eight I've read is The Shining. It is a tough choice, but I am probably the biggest admirer of how King mixes it all up in the end, and his best work at this was in The Shining, when the bartender says, "You've always been the caretaker, Mr. Torrance". Plus, who didn't get goosebumps at the end of the movie, when Kubrick focuses on a picture on the wall from 1921, with Jack Torrance standing right in the middle of it?

I guess that explains why I've watched The Shining five times and read the novel twice.

Stephen King's best quality as a writer is that he gets human nature so well. In the Pet Semetary, his reflection on how people deal with the death of someone, from a cat to their own son, in Needful Things, how he showed how people can get crazy over an object, in Mist, the way he showed how people revert to religion in stressful times, and in The Shining, his take on loneliness and its effects on people, are just a few examples.

With all these people and their actions that the reader can relate to so well, come the extremely vivid descriptions. Last night, I read IT  before I went to sleep, and just as I turned off the Kindle, put it on my bedside table and closed my eyes, I saw the silver eyes and the orange hair of IT, and these letters written in blood by Stanley Uris on the bathroom wall.

If you've read some of King's work, you'll understand what I mean. After reading a couple of his novels, you look at the descending mist doubtfully, hesitate each time you pick up your cell phone, look at every Saint Bernard to see if it has scratches on his nose, shiver every time you pass a pet cemetery, and be afraid to look down the holes in the sewer lid to see a red, painted smile and two, silver, unblinking eyes looking up at you.

 

The Race Track

It's a beautiful day outside. The roads are empty and are glittering in the drowsy morning sun, still wet from the pouring rain last night. The sun, still waking up and still numb from the cold weather which it challenged during the last few days, is battling the grey clouds hung over the horizon, and shining, no matter what, brilliantly, and illuminating the streets of Ankara. There is a gentle breeze, and in the brisk morning air, it seems as though all you needed was a gentle push of wind to get you going. The trees I see from the living room window are the brightest and the liveliest green, perhaps a result of the refreshing rain and the gentle cold air.

And what am I doing?

Sitting in my room, with piles of paper on my desk, waiting to be read and memorized just so they could be transferred onto a test paper tomorrow and then be forgotten forever, getting ready to take eight mid-terms in the next five days.

School, is not a "dream factory", it is not a "second home". It is a racing track, with pit stops called "classrooms" and the gasoline that fuels your car (in this case that's you) called "education". It is all about getting grades, being better than anyone else. If it wasn't for grades, what would school mean?

Humans have this tendency to measure everything. Their intelligence, which I think cannot be measured by a single test, how good they are in specific areas, how much money they have and so on. They want to compete, and be criticized.

For example, I  may like physics very much and enjoy studying it; however, my "success" is not measured by how much I enjoy studying a subject, but how good I answer challenging questions about it in a specific time and under stress, with loads of information crammed into my head.

Now, in the IB (International Baccelaureate, a study program brilliantly and specifically engineered for maximum suffering), your future is not necessarily determined by a grade you get from one test. Of course, your final test grade from a subject makes a large part of your subject grade, but you are also graded on lab reports, essays and assessments you write, mostly at home, not under such stress (at least most of the time): when you can show what you really can accomplish.

If it wasn't for competing with everyone else and being criticized by tests, people and numbers, people would be aimless in life. So, we've built facilities, research centers, education centers, test centers and schools, with exams and mid-terms, which now all of the students, (including me) have to go study for.

The End Product

When people go to a concert, they listen to the people playing the music with a kind of arrogance, as if they are working for them. Some people go even further and criticize the musician, even though understand a thing about music. A musician can do that, criticize the performers, however a musician will never, ever forget how much effort went into that single performance.

What you listen to at s concert is the tip of the iceberg. Do you think that Martha Argerich just gets up there and plays whatever comes to her, without having to practice? Everyone, no matter how genius they may be, needs to practice.

No matter how much cramming you do the last night before the concert or the night of the concert, your playing won't improve by much. Ok, maybe, by playing it 50 times that night, you can start playing that tricky and hard passage better, but practicing it 5 times for 10 days is surely going to help you more.

You know all of that crazy stuff people play on the piano? The sixteenth notes, one after another? Well, they just don't sit in front of the piano and start playing that passage at full speed until they get it right. Here is a 2-item list of what you do when you face a hard passage like that:

First, you need to figure out the fingerings. If you learn the part with the wrong fingerings (assuming that your wrong fingering is mediocre, that you can actually play the passage), it will be very, very hard for you to fix it. Its for your own good.

After you've learned the fingerings, PRACTICE. With a metronome (the musicians' best friend and mortal enemy), playing it articulated until the tips of your fingers hurt, playing it with different rhythms. Then put it in its place in the piece and see how it sounds.

One of the best feelings of the world for me, is when I practice a piece of music, in very slow tempos and by dividing it up into parts and practicing them separately, and when the time comes, I crank up the speed and as if by magic, the piece flows, and it sounds just like (or close enough) to the recordings I've heard of it.

A piece of music for a musician is like their child. They raise it, with ample amounts of care, gently and carefully. The one you hear at a concert with "a few mistakes", as the critiques of their posh women's society say after a concert just so they can show that they too, can understand music, is the end product of all these processes I described above. Understanding and appreciating music is not only about listening to the pieces and criticizing them, but is also about understanding the musician and the amount of work and time that they've spent on it.

Mad World

Today, I read a story on Facebook and I was really surprised to see how it turned out, so I wanted to share it:

A "guy" plays the violin in the subway for over half and hour. Most of the people walk past, in a hurry and don't even bother to look at him. The couple of people who actually do stop and listen to him hurry off 30 seconds later, after looking at their watch. Only the kids try to stop and listen to the violinist, but they get dragged away by their parents. The "guy" ends up collecting $32, in 45 minutes.

The "guy" is actually the world-famous violinist, Joshua Bell, and he played some of the hardest pieces ever written on a violin which cost nearly four million dollars.

Also, a fact worth noting: this guy performed a concert the previous night. The tickets were sold out, and the cheapest was worth approximately 100 dollars.

So, this makes you wonder: what else are we missing out on when we hurry off to our schedule and try so hard to keep up with the crazy rat race. We keep running in our hamster wheels, round and round, without actually going anywhere.

 

Also, what people tend to do is that they give more importance to objects and performances which have been surrounded by pompous people and decorations, high recommendations and which are "popular". Some people pay hundreds of dollars for a seat at a classical music concert just to say to their society that they've been there, when they never even listen to classical music or appreciate it.

Right now, if you went to a bookstore, you would see books titled "mind control" and "how to manipulate people's minds". You would think  of them as stupid, useless books written about stuff that doesn't even work, just to make money. However, manipulating people is, unfortunately, very easy.

We've been surrounded by all of our work, our ambitions, our responsibilities, that sometimes we cannot find time to just stop and look at the world and its beauties. I'm not telling you to stop in the middle of the road and look at the buildings and the sky; but just remember what you're missing out on to get that promotion.

In this mad world we're living in, take the screws off your hamster wheel and let life take you where ever you want to go.

Needful Things

You've been here before. Sure you have. Sure. I never forget a face.

This is how Stephen King's novel Needful Things begins.

Since we've begun writing essays, our teachers have told us - and they keep telling us- to avoid using the word "thing", both in English and Turkish. However, like in this novel, sometimes, there isn't a word which better fits the situation than "thing".

The novel is named after a new store which opens in the small town of Castle Rock, Maine, where most of Stephen King's stories take place. The shop seems to have something for anyone, at a price they can just afford and are willing to pay. The proprietor of this store, Mr. Gaunt, is somewhat peculiar; the first clue King gives to his readers about Mr. Gaunt is that everyone who visits the store and talks to him, first an eleven year old boy, then an old lady, seems to remember his eye color differently...

Mr. Gaunt's first client is Brian, an eleven-year-old boy who collects baseball cards and is looking for a 1956 Sandy Koufax baseball card. Mr. Gaunt walks back to his storage place, brings out a box, and starts looking at the cards inside. That is when he happens to find a 1956 baseball card of Sandy Koufax, and it is signed, "To my good friend, Brian". What a coincidence! Brian knows he cannot afford to pay for this, but, as our econ teacher once told us, there is a cost for everything, and that it is not just money all the time. Mr. Gaunt knows this and he sells each of his items to people who want them very badly for a very reasonable cash price, and a promise to play a trick on someone in town. Then slowly, Mr. Gaunt builds his reign over the people of Castle Rock, without them knowing about it.

What made the novel fun to read was how King kept making references to his other novels, like Cujo and Carrie, and his novellas, like Shawshank Redemption. Having read all of the afore-mentioned novels, I felt like I was a citizen of Castle Rock myself while reading the novel!

The thing about most Stephen King novels is that at first, there are so many things going on, so many families, so many people with different stories, that you tend to mix them all up. For example, in Cujo, the story of three families were being told at once. However in this novel, King has raised the bar. As much as 10 stories are being told all at once, and, I don't know how he has done it, but he has managed to not even confuse you that much throughout the novel and to tie them all up in the end, not leaving any "loose ends".

When I say "loose ends", Stephen King is the author which comes to my mind. In almost all of his novels that I've read, there is an epilogue at the very end, just when you thought you had closure, which brings up a whole new set of questions and makes you wander if there is a sequel to the novel you just read. However, he does it so expertly that you don't get mad or annoyed at the author and the novel and are sorry for your time (unlike the scriptwriters of the TV show Lost-if you've watched it until the very end, you know what I mean). Once again, King has managed to do this in Needful Things, but, instead of being annoying), it gave me goosebumps and made me read it over and over again.

Stephen King, named his novel and the shop in it, a simple, yet meaningful phrase; Needful Things. Once you read the book and get to know Mr Leland Gaunt and all his customers, and one person who has never been his customer who ends up saving the town, you see that no other set of words in the English language can fit the title of the store better. Needful Things is a masterpiece, and makes you look at every pawn shop you enter, and its proprietor, very differently.

Now What?

Christmas, New Year's Eve, Valentine's Day; I think they are all overrated. I don't see the point in spending tons of money on stupid decorations just to decorate the house you live in for one single night; the last night of the year you're in.

Christmas is different from the others, though. It is a religious event, but unfortunately it has been twisted and molded by consumerism, and has become a hollow holiday aiming to make people spend more and more money each year; just like the other "special" days of the year (here's the irony: consumers and producers have made each of these days "special", or else, how different is the 14th of February from the 13th?)

In countries which do not celebrate Christmas, New Year's Eve is celebrated rather vigorously to perhaps compensate for the possible income which could have been received from the celebration of Christmas.

Here's an expenditures list for celebrating New Year's Eve in Turkey:

1. Buy gifts for your family and friends, because its 2013 (!).

2. Buy fancy dresses and shoes if you're going out that night; also the pay for the check at the fancy restaurant or bar you "welcome 2013".

3. Buy decorations to "decorate" your house and "spread the joy".

4. Buy lottery tickets for the big prize, 45 trillion TL, thinking, "why shouldn't it be me this year?" (acknowledging the fact that the probability of you getting struck by lightning is higher than you winning the lottery).

And there are many more...

What makes the 31st of December even more pointless to me is that I am a student; and for most students, the new year 2013 doesn't mean anything. It is neither the end of the semester nor the school year: the students' New Year is in September. That's when we make resolutions.

So, today is the first day of 2013; all of last year behind us, the decorations up at the malls and the streets now totally pointless, people making "new year's resolutions" as if this year is any different than the last one, last night's dishes still not done and the house still messed up because of the crazy new year's eve party. Tomorrow, people go back to their mundane lives, that big night we've been preparing for the last three weeks has passed... Now what? Fortunately, there are always possibilities for you to spend your money on pointless things, so don't despair: Valentine's Day is coming up!