My First TEDx Event

...I walked up on the stage, the spot lights glaring at me, my friends, family, anxiously waiting for me to begin, people experts in their fields looking at me as if they were saying "What journey could an 11th grade student possibly have to tell?"...

The microphone, check. Hair, check. Piano at the right place, check. Sheet music, check. Confidence, check.

I will never forget last night, the night of February 27th, 2013. It was my first TEDx conference, and even my first experience at public speaking. Until last night, the biggest assembly I've ever talked to was my 40-people committee in MUN conferences. Last night, I talked to 150 people and soon, the whole world will be able to watch my talk named Life in A Major.

The theme of our TEDx event was A Journey to Tell. I talked about my journey through music, how I started playing the piano, my wonderful teachers, how I played and what I played on the piano, and I ended my talk with a full performance of Alla Turca Jazz by Fazıl Say. Now, I said full performance because my whole talk contained bits and pieces of piano, me re-enacting my first concert, playing pieces from different genres, showing how you can experience and live the music on a Chopin piece...

I wasn't worried about playing the piano in front of a crowd, in the end, I do that all the time. What worried me was the speaking. Towards the end of the speaker's talk before me, my legs had started shaking and my hands were trembling. Suddenly, the esteemed psychiatrist's talk was over, I was called to stage, and I was standing there, with the lights closed, while my friends from the organizing team pushed the piano to center stage. That's when it hit me: this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and I should make the best of it, and then I knew that no one could tell my journey through music better than me. I wasn't nervous anymore, just excited; excited to be there, excited to be sharing my journey with this many people, excited to have this opportunity.

So I was carried away in the graceful hands of my "story to tell" and my passion for music, until I played the last chords of the Alla Turca Jazz, and the audience started to applaud. With the blink of an eye, the event I've been preparing so hard for for the last month was over...

Yes, it really was over, but when I sat back at my seat, our principle who helped me a lot with my talk smiling at me, my fellow speaker friends and classmates hugging me, I saw my two best friends sitting at the back, applauding vigorously, another speaker, vice president at TAI (Turkish Aerospace Industries) shook my hand and told me over and over again that I was very good, I was happy, of course, and proud of what I had accomplished. I still had some doubt until the coffee break, in the end, they were my friends and they weren't going to tell me that I did horribly, but when I was exiting the hall, quenched, to get a drink, one of my friends from the organizing team came up to me and told me that the esteemed psychiatrist who talked before me loved my talk and told them that he enjoyed it very much. That, and the numerous amount of hugs and congratulations I got from both my friends and people that I've never met before in the coffee break, was enough for me to be satisfied with what I've done. I would do it again and again, if I could, because I've never experienced anything better than doing and telling what you love for people who are willing to watch and listen.

Get up on stage and perform an excellent talk, check.

Be happy for yourself, check.

 

 

Im/Mortal

In a letter he wrote to one of his friends in which he explained "his world", the Middle Earth, J.R.R. Tolkien described humans as having a gift and their Doom: mortality. If you look closely to all of the different mythologies from all over the world, you will see that there is always the seemingly unreachable goal of immortality: the tree of life, the fountain of youth, the ankh, the gods and the angles. Mortality being our weak point is said more than enough times, and what interested me the most in Tolkien's letter was the "gift" part. Is being mortal a gift?

Yes, I believe so. Tolkien also says that elves, like Galadriel or Elrond, are immortal so they have very,very long lifespans, but it's how he said it that matters:

"The doom of the Elves is to be immortal, to love the beauty of the world..."

So, I don't understand. Then is both being mortal and immortal a doom and a gift?

It depends on how you look at it. Elves are immortal, so they never have to give up on the world and leave their loved ones behind, they never have to worry about accomplishing their lifetime goals, making the most of the life they have. But everyone around them die, kingdoms fall, the Middle Earth changes and that is what Tolkien says that hurts them the most. Elves where originally sent to the west of the Middle Earth because they slayed each other over a few precious stones... what's a few stones worth in the face of banishment and fratricide? Right? Right?

[caption id="attachment_257" align="alignright" width="219"] The Light of Valinor[/caption]

The "stones" are Silmarilli and they are extremely rare and beautiful jewels. The Silmarilli were made out of the Light of Valinor, the gem, by the chief artificer of the Elves, Feanor, in case the gem got destroyed. He was right taking this precaution because the Light of Valinor was destroyed by the Enemy, and Valinor (the house of Gods, some kind of Paradise, where the Elves used to live) was darkened, until the light of the sun and the moon were born out of the destruction of this precious gem. Anyhow, these Silmarilli also got stolen by the Enemy, and the sons of Feanor swore to take revenge from anyone, including the gods, who try to claim the Silmarilli. So, they get out of Paradise and off to the north of Middle Earth, and attack the Enemy to get the jewels back, and that is when they slay their own kind, because the Enemy is also Elves. And they Fall, their whole kind, back to Middle Earth, where they were born. After this short history lesson about how elves came to the Middle Earth, let's get back to the subject. The point here was that the reason they ruined their immortality, since if they had stayed in Valinor everyone around them would be immortal and there wouldn't be much of a problem, in the end, it is Paradise, was a couple of gems, envy and revenge.

If you were to become immortal, what would you strive for? Would you try as hard to pass your classes and graduate? Would you be as ambitious at your job to get a promotion? Would you be as eager to build a family? Bilbo seemed pretty happy with the ring, 111 years old and still with the life energy of a 30 year old Hobbit! And he did seem a little reluctant to give up the ring...

But now you're mortal, and you've only got one chance at this whole thing called life. You have only so much to do with it in a time of 100 years at the most. How can you not want to live more, have all the time in the world to accomplish everything you want to do? I would personally love to be a mechanical engineer for 30 years and then a professional musician for 30 years.

Mortality: The envy of Elves, the immortal. One life; 80 years to do the best you can and fill it to the rim with accomplishments and satisfaction, always with something to look forward to (and this includes death), but, you know, why settle for 80 when you can have eternity?

Immortality: The goal of men for many, many thousand years,  a goal which gives eternal life when accomplished, even though it may mean solitude, constant loss and suffering until the end of eternity.

So, which one wins? You decide.

Luck Or Not?

On Saturday, we were going to go to the airport from our house in Istanbul, in the morning, but we were going to stop at a shopping mall to get a cup of coffee on our way. So, we left the house an hour earlier than usual, we scrambled into the car, loaded our baggage, closed the doors, all ready to go...and the car wouldn't start.

So, we tried to jump-start the car with our cables and it didn't work. Then we tried it with another set of cables and voila! The car started running again!

So, we got on the road, speculating on why the car might have done that. We passed the mall, because it didn't have an entrance from the highway. We started looking for its entrance and we got lost in the middle of a settlement on the outskirts of Istanbul, near the road to the airport. After going around the place hopelessly looking for an entrance, we decided to skip the coffee at the mall and to just get it from the airport. We got to the Domestic Departures gate and the car STOPPED. Right there, after we were where we needed to be, even though we were and hour early.

So, were we lucky that the car didn't stop in the middle of the highway? Or was it bad luck just to have the battery of the car run out the morning we were supposed to leave?

The things is, with luck, you can't draw lines and say "this happened because of this". I don't even know if there is a thing such as "luck", after all, the battery of the car was last changed 2 years ago and it was bound to die someday, and apparently there was just enough "juice" in it to get us to the airport after a detour in an unknown little town.

 

In the Turkish system of lottery, the probability of anyone getting the big prize is 1 in 10000000. So, how do they get it? What makes them pick the winning ticket next to lots of tickets? Or, how does a person pick the ticket right next to the winning ticket?

Some people always seem to have good things happen to them. Why is that? Again, there sure is a scientific explanation for it, but, still, couldn't there be some other factor affecting our decisions, like luck? If you don't know the answer to a question in a multiple choice test, for example the Turkish University Entrance Test, you just guess: yes, the probability of you getting it correct is 20 %, but what affects which choice you circle?

 

So, maybe the battery running out was bad luck and us getting stuck at the airport is still bad luck, or maybe it is good luck, because we got stuck somewhere safe, or maybe it wasn't luck at all. Maybe, when you picked out your lottery ticket yesterday, you were lucky and you picked the one with all the winning numbers "randomly", or it fluttered in the wind and that's why you chose it. Maybe, when you "randomly" guessed the answer to that question and got it right, got lucky, with which the in the Turkish system you could pass hundreds of people, you were just looking at the choices and unconsciously picking the one that was divisible by 3, because the number given in the question was 30. But it is always nice to believe that you alone are not in control of your decisions, that a rabbit's foot around your neck will help you win at poker, that a four leaved clover in your pencil case will help you pass the test, that seeing a double rainbow will help you meet the love of your life, but don't forget; with the rabbit's foot around your neck and the clover in your pencil case, you tend to do better and work harder because you know you'll win or be the best.  Just saying.

 

The Devil on Your Shoulder

Don't tell me that you weren't laughing on the inside when that girl who teased you all the way through your sophomore year couldn't get into any college. Or that you didn't always have that hatred buried under the fake friendliness towards a person who upset you a long time ago, avoiding to admit to yourself that you seek satisfaction.

Yes, that's the problem. Humans seek satisfaction; whether it is eating until you're full, or listening to the best piece of music, or reading the best novel or having your questions answered perfectly or getting back at someone because of something they did to you, it knows no limit. The worst kind of satisfaction we seek is revenge. It is a feeling we cannot resist, no matter how forgiving or gentle we may be. And it is a feeling, or rather an "impulse", that could make you do anything.

In a novel we read in class, a guy who gets betrayed by his accomplice serves his jail-time, and when he is out, his only goal is to kill his accomplice, who has married his now-former wife, to take revenge. Later, as he sees how things have changed, with the blink of an eye, he decides to kill someone who was one of his best friends. He is so desperate, so helpless, that he cannot accomplish anything. He kills two innocent people in vain, yet he still doesn't give up. He seeks refuge at his older connections, a girl who loves him dearly but who he doesn't feel the same about, and ends up changing her life drastically. Still, he doesn't give up until the very last minute... don't worry, no spoilers. 

But sometimes revenge isn't all bad. Some people believe that being successful and having a nice life is the best way to get revenge from the people that tried to stop you from having it. 

What makes revenge so special is that it blinds you, and it's creepy how much it's like love. When a person decides to take revenge, there is no stopping them. Similarly, when someone falls in love, nobody, except themselves, can snap them out of it. People are willing to do anything for revenge. People die for love. Yet one is a heart warming feeling that everyone has to experience, while one turns one's heart into a black oozing block of ice, beating only for revenge, for payback.

In the Islamic Law, they would ask the parent or the close friends of the deceased (victim) if the murderer should be executed. Now, we all know that revenge is a sweet, sweet thing, but the right thing to do here is to let the law treat the murderer and let him serve his time in prison........right?

Or to see him get executed, "not leaving your kin's blood on the ground", as they say in Turkish, an eye for an eye, and, oh, how gratifying would it be to know that the atrocious man who took your son, your only, beloved son away is now dead and burning in the depths of hell...

That is the revenge talking: blunting all your common sense and logic, stopping you from making any rational decision, that gruesome, unrelenting, red, hot sense of revenge. Revenge, sometimes only a show-off, a statement despite all the negativity and hindering, but sometimes, the only thing that pushes a man on, sometimes, the little devil sitting on your shoulder. 

 

Sound of Silence

If you were to make a list of all the sounds known to men, would you include "silence" ?

I would.

Because, silence is the next best thing to talking for expressing your thoughts and feelings. Without silence, there wouldn't be speech, the other "sounds" you might have put on your list, or music.

In one of their songs called "Sound of Silence", Simon and Garfunkel reflect upon the concept of silence and describe it as many things from a well to a hall, and most importantly, a sound.

John Cage, the 20th century musician, has a piece called 4'33". It is a three-movement piece composed for any instrument, and lasts 4 minutes and 33 seconds; during which no one plays anything. Complete silence for 4 minutes and 33 seconds. The conductor turns the pages of the score in front of him, as if there is something playing, and the audience hears what they want to within that silence.

There is a room in the United States which is 99.9 % silent. You cannot hear your own footsteps or anything from the world outside. The longest time a person could stay in that room was approximately 40 minutes, because, after a while, people started to get disturbed, hear things that were not there, hear the sound of their heart pumping and their lungs working. Their ears tried desperately to compensate for the silence they were engulfed in.

Yesterday, I went to a concert. It was about Clara and Robert  Schumann and it wasn't a very big event, so the concert hall wasn't full. Thanks to this, while the trio made up of a piano, a violin and a cello played the wonderful music of Mr. and Mrs. Schumann, everyone could hear it perfectly, and when the pieces ended, there was utter and undisturbed silence, contrasting to the screaming, rich and resolving final chords.

So, it makes sense for me to say that every other sound you listed on your list exists thanks to silence, and are just infinite variations on the sound of silence.

Listen to the City

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

I'm listening to Istanbul,
With my eyes closed...

Today, after spending the whole day out on the streets of Istanbul, I finally understand what he means in this famous poem and what drove him to write all what he has written on Istanbul and its beauties.

My day started with a 'dolmus' (small busses) ride, to the European side, to Taksim Meydani, which was followed by a tramway ride down Istiklal Street, one of Istanbul's most popular shopping streets. Later, we took the 'tunnel', one other form of transportation in Istanbul, to the Karakoy Port, and got on a boat, 'vapur', to get back to the Anatolian side. After participating at the One Billion Rising event at Haydarpasa Train Station, we got on a train and came back home.

And through out this journey, over and under Istanbul, my ears had a delightful time. The dolmus hissing and humming on its way over the Bosphorus Bridge, the bells of the old, antique and rusty, yet perfectly functioning tiny tramway and its gentle touch on the rails, the somewhat sinister and creepy drone of the 'tunnel', slithering inside the old, stone tunnels, and the 'vapur'... How wonderful was the boat trip! For citizens of Ankara (and I think it's necessary here to point out that there is no sea in Ankara), floating on a pool of water is enough to make them happy, but to ride across the Bosphorus, with remarkable and postcard-landmarks all around you, with the sheer screams of the white, free seagulls and the blunt, dry honk of the boat, as if trying to make up to the wetness of the sea, is something truly special and is like nothing else. Finally, the tickity-tack of the train, as it slides gracefully over the now a little bit outdated tracks which once witnessed wars, revolutions, and a new government being built, caressed my ears, making me forget my tiredness, and looking back at the big day I left behind, making me realize again what all of the artists, tourists, the residents, adore and see in Istanbul.

So, listen to the city, listen to what it has to say, because listening to a city is the best way to understand it.

Breaking the Chains

14th of February. A day which has much more importance this year than being a cheesy, consumerist 'love' day. Today, women all around the world "stroked, rose and danced" protesting violence against women. Today, women took action. Today, things changed.

I was part of 'One Billion Rising' in Istanbul, Haydarpasa Train Station. Over 700 women of all ages were there, dancing, singing, clapping for their own kind who are not treated as well as they may be. Maybe none of the women there was subject to domestic violence or harassment, but being there, being part of an international movement, being one of the thousand people there and showing the senseless, abusing, vulgar men the "power of women" (I know it's cheesy) is enough.

The only creatures on earth who knowingly harm their own kind, not for survival, not out of necessity, but because they just want to, and actually enjoy it, are humans, who are supposed to be the most intelligent of all.

Who gives those men the right to harm their wives? Who gives those men the right to rape young women and destroy their lives and get away with it? Above all, who gives them permission to interfere with our lives, or even touch us?

It's our ignorance and lack of action and protests which drives them on and makes what they do seem OK.

But today, that changed. Even if that guy saw our protest in the news and regarded it as an 'invention of the metropolitan city', he now knows that he and what he does is not welcome. He knows that we are not silent anymore. He knows that we are ready to 'break the chains'.

Profile of The Student

In  The Student's mind, every week day is equal, but some are more equal than the others.

The Student procrastinates relentlessly, until the very last day, and then complains about how much homework it has.

The Student's biological clock is in Tokyo time; can't wake up in the morning, sleepy the entire day, wide awake at night.

The Student has no free time, it only has time that should be used to do the homework. There is always homework.

The Student on snow: as soon as the first sprinkles of snow start falling, the student starts calculating the chances of there being a snow day and which home works not to do.

The Student never copy-pastes. It just believes in the sharing of information.

The Student never forgets to do its homework; there was no internet, the email was not received, the innocent little dog ate it.

The Student is never perfect. Even if it gets a 99, there is no pleasing the parents.

The Student forgets about any homework for that moment as soon as the teacher mentions the words "due next week".

In the face of trouble, The Student's imagination knows no boundaries.

The Student decides whether it likes a teacher or not in the first class. And that impression doesn't seem to change.

The Student never forgets anything it learns, it just puts the information into a place in its mind and then forgets where it put it.

The Student knows that it is doomed when Google doesn't know what it searched for.

The Student tends to round its grades: mostly in the upward direction.

The Student never studies enough for a test, the teacher always asks something they hadn't learned.

When The Student gets a low grade on a test, when announcing to the parents, everyone else's grades drop suddenly.

The Student decides read an assigned book only if there is no Sparknotes of Cliff Notes page on it.

The Student always watches the movie of the book. Sometimes only the movie.

 

The Student is an eccentric creature living on procrastination, adrenaline and junk food, in the midst of unending stress and expectations.

 

 

Spice It Up

"...George drove to work in his red Chevrolet, just like every morning, listening to the news presented by the lady who's voice he found particularly soothing, followed by the weather report and some smooth jazz. As he turned right at the intersection, which would be followed by two more left turns and a right turn, he thought he saw a bright, white dot in the sky. Ignoring it on purpose, mistakenly thinking that it was just a trick his now-36-year-old eyes were playing on him, he went about his daily route. When he turned the second left, the street did not reveal half a dozen of brick buildings on each side, with suburban cars parked in the street like it did every morning, but the very image of disaster: his eyes first went to the brick buildings -of which there were only 2 left standing and recognizable- and the slimy stuff stuck on them, then to the cars, flipped over and tossed about the street randomly, the one Bugatti Veyron he admired everyday as he passed it in his humble little car, imagining himself riding that car one day, only slightly distinguishable among the wreckage by its still shiny logo, scorched around the edges, and finally to the great, grey, gigantic machine hovering above the street, shooting laser beams, with nothing his engineering school-trained-eyes could recognize midst the hunk of grey metal. With the blink of an eye, his red Chevrolet was also hovering in the air, up towards the Great Machine, and he began thinking of all the times he switched the channel when a sci-fi movie with alien abductions came on because he thought they were silly, and how there could not possibly be anything human about this, at all."

Yes, I know that there are as many solar systems just like ours in the universe as the number of tiny sand particles in the whole world added up, and, yes, I know that the possibility of intelligence life out there is very high, and yes, that "aliens" do not leave slimy stuff behind them, as they are not Slimers, but, wouldn't it be nice to always live with a touch of the supernatural?

Today was a typical Monday. Nothing out of the ordinary happened, and as I rode home in the bus, I thought, "Wow, it sure would be nice if something different happened today". I don't necessarily mean alien invasion when I say "different". Just something would be enough: the bus taking a different route, a huge storm appearing out of nowhere, seeing a fox in the middle of the city, seeing a double rainbow.

Nobody, except maybe superheroes, live lives which are different every single day. Every one has a routine and monotone life, no matter how much they ignore it or refuse it. So, I've found a way to make things more amusing, after going to the same school for 12 years, through the same road, with the same people; thinking outside the box and sprinkling in a bit of the supernatural to everyday events. When I see that the traffic lights are not functioning, I try to think up the most absurd scenario, with, for example, an alien ship jamming the signals of the traffic lights.

It may sound crazy, but to deal with life and make it just a tiny bit more amusing, using your imagination and not being afraid of the supernatural is the best choice. Of course, it wouldn't be so bad to see a unicorn once in a while, you know, just to spice it up.