Monet on Boxing Day

The weather today reminded me of why I choose to come to Istanbul every Christmas. It was warm enough for a light sweater, bright and sunny, the sun reflecting off the water, mostly quiet, fishermen throwing lines into the bosphorous... okay, it isn't quite all weather, but it all contributes to the feeling of weather- to that ambiance that surrounds and permeates and is quite classically Istanbul. Scott and I took a minibus down to Istinye Bay, and then walked in the sunshine along the bosphorous down to the museum that is currently housing Monet. Now, I am not particularly big on art defined by fame, so I did not expect to think much of a museum collection of anyone, even Monet, but I figured that when an entire collection is in your city, and free to see, it is a shame to not at least put in the effort for a strolling gander. I was quite surprised by how much I actually enjoyed, not just the paintings, but the entire experience of viewing a museum collection.
My exposure to art is rather limited. I hate the snobbery of it, and the in/out group feeling it inspires reminds me too much of gender conflicts and the LGBTQ determination to be elitist in their out-styles. (I can say that, only because I am in the LGBTQ crowd, ostracized by the competition to be 'most gay.' But that is nothing new. What was new today was my fascination with the art. First of all, the gallery that we went to (ssm) was amazingly well set up. It is an old mansion that was dedicated to art by the owners, who specialized in calligraphy. The top floor is filled with antique, very lavish furniture and paintings, and the calligraphy sets. The basement houses Turkish work, and the middle floor was dedicated to Monet, including plenty of historical and personal information. They didn't have the full set, but most of it was there, including so many variations on water lilies. I skipped quickly through the first room, dedicated to portraiture, and moved into the second room, which had smaller and medium sized landscapes. Boats, water, trees, islands. The colors and the strokes on the paintings were fascinating. I developed a game of moving further away from the paintings to understand them, then  moving in close, and squinting until everything became shiny. It was fascinating. I never knew that impressionism worked like a magic-eye picture. Things popped and glowed and there were so many levels to each painting. I don't think that any of the reprints that I have seen have captured even half of what the paintings portray in real life.  By the second room I was already emotionally affected by the atmosphere and the art. In the third room there were his larger paintings. Some of them just popped and glowed with neon streaks of color that I didn't even imagine possible. I was enthralled. By the time I moved to the final room I was quite prepared for the beauty of the painting that most moved me. It bordered on a spiritual experience and I can honestly say that I was able to project and find myself in that painting, a flower bathed in yellow light, trailing my spirit freely with my partner by my side.
In the final area we talked about the repetition in his work and one of the most impressive things about the experience was actually the dialogue between the paintings. Any one picture, taken out if context, could not be as impressive as the leading story that we had been immersed in, for just a short hour.
This is the first time that I wish I could go back to a museum, for days and weeks, and lose myself and find myself over and over in these paintings. They were magnificent.

The end of the world

They say that the world will end tonight. No one believes it. We have gotten over prophecies, at least on the cosmic scale. We might throw our tarot cards or cast a few bones on occasion, but it is just for fun. Deep down we want to believe it and yet we don't. I say we too casually. Me. I. I do not believe that the world will end tonight. But then, I am not saying that it will. My friends say that it will. Friends. Strangers. People that I casually know and have shared a secret, indefinable breath of intimacy with on occasion. We danced around a fire. We cried. We told the myth of community. Now that community says the world will end, but I think they don't believe it. It is fun to say, to speculate, to imagine the world will end.  It is just a prophecy.
But, what if it wasn't? What if the world really was ending tonight? The possibility gives us a chance to be just a little bit reckless, to act without consequence. I think that is a good release on occasion. We spend too much time living for the future, and yet not enough. The signals are too mixed, all I know is that I should feel guilty about something, one way or another. "You're doing it wrong," has become the slogan of my friends. Well, maybe I am, and maybe I'm not. Maybe every person is doing it just as right as they can, and who are we to judge from our dusty domes in the desert? I have been away too long.
They say that the world will end tonight. I feel like I am on the edge of the world, way over here in Istanbul. It's an exotic place, almost unearthly. It is so big that I can't even thread out a beginning of understanding. The physical place, the people, the food, the air, the history, the tradition, the folklore, the tales of travellers? Where am I supposed to begin? Nowhere. There isn't a beginning when you are perched on the edge of the world, but it is a great place to watch for endings. The end. Shhh. It is creeping up in a cold black sky, grey clouds, and a twinkling blanket of snow. Did you know that it snows in Istanbul? I didn't. I honestly expected nothing more than desert dustings. Where did this blanket come from? It must have dropped from a parting heaven, god saying goodbye, wrapping us up before lowering us into our grave. Everything twinkles so. Silver. Quiet. Muted.
In the darkness, already fallen at half past six, I hear children calling to each other. I don't understand the language. It is okay, it isn't necessary to understand the language of children. Their voices echo. I don't remember hearing them on other nights. It must be the snow, drawing them out to play. To really play- not quiet games like hopscotch and football, but loud, vicious games of cold and hot. Oh, the snow. I sit inside, tucked away and warm. I haven't ventured out into it, and by the time that I do it will have lost its purity. Dim, grey, filled with the mud of the world. Mud and fumes from cars turned into cold crystals. But here I am, for now, alone, surrounded by a muted white wonderland and dreaming of my future. Who knows, maybe the world will end today. I just can't give it any reason to, because tomorrow will be sunnier, and sunnier, and summer will come, and years, and adventures. It's time for me to leave the edge of the world, and get back into life. 

The Darkness

Every year my soul takes a vacation past the darkness. December the days grow shorter and the soul flees. I don't know where it goes, but go it does, somewhere far from me, and it leaves me as some sort of soulless zombie-child for a few weeks, when the days are shortest. I get cranky. I get sad. I have learned that the exhaustion will fade. The new year comes, a most melancholy holiday, and soon after that the days will start to grow longer. Spring will come and then, in a burst of suddenness, there will be summer. The days will be too long and I will feel too alive, and all will be as it should be, as we are told that we are supposed to feel as humans- happy, thankful, joyful. It is hard to be a human in the winter. A summer human, that is. But it is like the world wants to deny that winter is happening. With our heaters, and our false lighting, we claim to have captured summer year round. Be happy, they demand. I refuse, and my soul goes on vacation. For a few weeks, sometimes a couple of months, the depression of the winter settles in. It is not unbearable. I can handle it, quite well, after 30 years of practice. But the people around me seem to have a hard time of it. Come on, get happy, they whine at me. I refuse.
This year has been a little different. Having a lover stretched in bed beside me has kept my spirits up, or rather, down, nailed to me, here with me. It isn't that wee have been running around, hand in hand with a summer hunger, defying the winter. But he accepted my levels, and sunk into a lovely hibernation with me. It has been wonderful. Then, last night, he left. He is only gone for two weeks, and then we meet up again, in Bulgaria. (Oh, how I am petrified to return to Bulgaria!) But as soon as he left the darkness swept in around me. I took the metro to the bus, and waiting in the misty night I felt just how dark and cold it was. Only 7 in the evening and by the time I got home I wanted nothing more than to go to bed. Of course, I didn't. I stayed up and worked a bit on my final projects for the semester. I thought about him taking a bus up over the mountains, down by the sea, to a place that he calls home. No, he doesn't. He calls here, with me, home. I missed him, and my soul tugged itself away. Time for vacation, it said, and numbness settled in. Everything was settled, still.
People have this huge fear of needing others. Love yourself, they say. Be complete on your own, they demand. I am complete on my own. I am a whole person. But, honestly, I like my life better with him. I like waking up with him. I like eating with him. I like solving problems with him. I like walking home with him. I like grocery shopping with him. I like running with him. He is this constant friend, companion, love to me, always supportive and understanding and filled with secrets to discover. I love him. Need? It is a relative word, I think. I am perfectly capable of functioning without him. I can go to coffee shops and write this weekend. I can hang out with my friend next week. I can concentrate on school and clean my house. No, I do not need him, but I love having him in my life, every part, every second, every day.
I still wonder about how sudden our commitment to each other was. Really, within a month of meeting we were all-in, ready to spend the rest of our lives together. I try to remember why I used to think that commitment was such a difficult thing, why love was so hard to admit that sometimes I just ignored it altogether. I can't. With him love is so very easy. It pours out between us. Whispered admissions of love and desire and joy. Why would we ever hide these from another? Why would we ever reject these from another? Society has built a queer prison in which it keeps love and commitment as something sacred. I unlocked the cages and threw away the keys. No more, and enough is enough. I am ready to love, and so very happy that I have found a person brave enough to love, uninhibited, with me.

Birth Control Thoughts

Every night around eight, for the past three weeks, I began to cower. I consider myself a strong woman, and this cowardice frustrated me. At 8:20 I bravely swallowed the pill. Some nights were good and that was the end of it. On the bad nights I stayed awake, uncomfortable in my skin, slightly nauseous and wondering if it could really be that tiny, unassuming pill that caused me to feel that way, or if it was just my imagination. I second guessed myself, led strongly by uncontrollable swells of estrogen-magnified emotion.
The decision to go back on birth control was not an easy one. From age 18, when I first walked into the clinic at my university to ask for birth control, I was unsure of myself. I was already considered a crazy teenage girl, and I had heard horror stories of how the pill affected women. Did I want to make things worse? No, I didn’t, but I was sexually active and I felt immense pressure from society to do something about it. I might not be shunned from sex altogether, but my parents, friends, and high-school sex education classes all demanded one thing from me: responsibility. Since that first moment of youthful responsibility I have been on and off birth control for most of my adult life. Low-dose pills, the ring, the patch and the shot. The choice is overwhelming. It's strange, these options are supposed to offer some kind of freedom and yet I feel confined by them.
This is my minority plague, or at least one of them.
The assignment to write a native anthropology in an auto-style excited me. I could practice a bit more honesty and let my creativity peek out into academia. But my academic self resists any foray into the colorful world of description, let alone emotion. Within a day I had spiraled out of the confidence of notes and citations into a much less clinical, more personal realm. Be vulnerable, I was told. Vulnerability is nothing new to me, but the question was what I should be vulnerable about. My professor said, "Think about what you are a native of." But I heard, "What minority groups are you native of?"
Anthropology fetishizes the exotic. Before it valued societies that were different than the dominant culture. Now it values the change in the individual as a representative of the dominant culture.(1) This gives me two choices. I can write about what I am that no one else is, my minority oddities, or I can write about how I am just like everybody else in a way that is so sensual and exotic that it forces the reader to consider their self for the first time. Feminism can be depressing, celebrating the ways in which every individual must be marginalized.
I do not feel any direct pressure to take birth control. My fiancee is supportive, recognizing that it is my choice, and my government agrees with him, for now. The pressure I feel is subtle, ingrained through years of after-school specials. I have to choose whether to subject my body to the awkward swelling, dryness and tenderness of hormone control. I have to choose whether I want to have bareback sex with the man I love or maintain a semblance of sanity. These are tough decisions, but the modern woman must make them. Sometimes it is barely a decision at all. The taking of birth control is expected, and supposedly the side-effects are a minimal price to pay for the whorish crime of actually desiring sex.
The first time that I bought birth control in Istanbul I was shocked. I went into the pharmacy with my fiance and brazenly asked the pharmacist for yasmin. It was a name that I recognized from the United States and I had read that it was available in Turkey. I didn't know the Turkish words for birth control and explaining with gross motions that I wanted a pregnancy test the week before had been enough cross-cultural fun for me. The pharmacist didn't flinch. She walked out from behind the counter, opened a cupboard, and pulled out a month's supply of the pill. It cost 16 lira. I was shocked. I had not expected it to be such an easy task. In the United States there had always been the scraping together of enough money to pay for an exam, opening my legs for a stranger to swab, and getting the valued piece of paper that my insurance may or may not cover. Then it was finding the sixty dollars each month to pay for these preciously guarded pills. I had no idea that it could be easier. I wondered vaguely about the Turkish women who bought these pills. Were they married? How did they figure out the proper usage if they were not prescribed? I realized that birth control in Turkey, while not entirely different than birth control in the U.S., is different enough to be notable. Better or worse? I didn't have enough information to make a judgement, just enough to jolt me into the realization that yes, there are different ways.
I am a woman, and these are my experiences, but they are not the experiences of every woman. Does taking birth control give me any authority to speak about sex, desire, social pressures and medical experience? The diversity within the field is greater than what binds us as common. The modern woman, in many countries, is faced with the same decisions as I am, but the factors that weigh her decision are infinitely varied. Cultural taboos against sex, access to medical care, and whether there is a need for a prescription. The list grows the more that I delve into it and I find that I have no right to speak for women just because I happen to be one. Some women are thrilled by their access to birth control. For some it may not even cause internal debate. Being inside the question does not give you the answer to the question, assuming that there is actually a question to be asked. Perhaps there is just a collection of experiences.
A main concern in modern anthropology is the misrepresentation and exploitation of groups of people by anthropologists in the name of research. I wonder whether we honestly believe that this can be fixed by giving preference to native anthropology. It is naive to believe that an individual within a group represents that entire group, can fully understand the experiences of the group, or due to in-group loyalty would never exploit their own culture. If native anthropology is meant to protect the people being studied I say that it is not a valid solution. I am a woman. That does not mean that the oppression that I experience beneath the choice of birth control pill is representative of all women. Perhaps I am the minority within the minority. If we are supposed to advocate for the minority, how can we ever be sure that we are advocating for the right underdog?
Darren Ranco and Nancy Scheper-Hughes both described anthropology as a sort of predatory, hunting act. The anthropologist goes out and brings something, usually information and understanding, back for their own community. But who are we returning our spoils to? As an academic practice we are loyal to our academic institutions. We are loyal to our professors, colleagues and publishers. Vine Deloria claims that we should be loyal to the people we are researching. There are all of these questions of who the research serves, of authorship and authority, but not enough questions about the reader. Who is supposed to read our stories? Are they meant for professors? For lawmakers? For the researched? For my own community? The reader should influence the creation of a text as much as the author and the subject does. At the end of her speech Cecil King tells a story of how Native Americans need to protect their own culture before allowing it to be extinguished by others. Their culture needed to be recognized internally before it could be shared. I think this presents a quite valid audience. If an anthropology is written from the inside, for the group, then a dialogue can begin, and an identity can be created. This paper is directed towards women. It is me sending out a pulse and wondering if anyone will echo it. It is not meant to change society. It is not meant to change women, or men, or pharmaceutical practices, but that does not mean that it is worthless. Worth does not have to be measured in change. The beginnings of understanding are worthwhile.
I lasted two weeks this time. It was all of the usual symptoms. I had no desire to have sex (ironic considering their purpose), and the world grew ever more faint. I cried at television shows and experienced fits of uncontrollable irritation, bordering on rage. These are the hormones and emotions that are used to discredit women as feeling too much. I understood why people might say that women are crazy. I felt crazy. However, I felt nothing like a woman. I feel like a woman when I am loving and tender. I feel like a woman when I suffer empathy and desire. These things are emotions. The surges that I experienced while in a hormonal haze were not emotions. There was nothing feminine about them.
The night I skipped my first pill I felt such dejection. I couldn't make it. I wasn't strong enough to conquer these hormones. Within four hours the failure was worthwhile. I was no longer on the verge of tears. I wanted to have sex with my fiance. I am back to normal now, at least by my own standards. By society's judgements? Well, I hid my momentary lapse in sanity so well that hardly anyone commented.
If, as Scheper-Hughes suggests, a society is revealed in what it rejects then the anthropological society reveals itself by rejecting the emotions of females as mad, as if we cannot control them, and as if by giving them allowance we surrender all pretenses of objectivity. I must say that while in my hormone-induced madness, even in the darkest rage of the pills, I was still able to remain aware of different positions, and possible bias that I was experiencing. The question of whether I acted on these biases or not is less important than whether I recognize them now, in the retelling of my experience. Now I can write my explanation of the insanity inflicted by choice, a dilemma born disproportionately by women, and if I am vulnerable enough and honest enough then perhaps it will be a valid piece of work. Perhaps it will add something to the field. Will it be anthropological? Perhaps. Will it be authentic? Yes, and for me that is much more important.

The War Against Wet

I have a love-hate relationship with our apartment. I love its location, up north in a nice, quiet suburb where we feel altogether safe. I love that it is ours, even if only in lease. But it is definitely a poorly constructed apartment. It is cheaply made, probably for the sole purpose of renting out at a profit that will be gained in less than the year that we will be here. The pipes leak, the roof leaks, the floor is saturated... I keep thinking that if we could only have a dry week that this place would dry out and there would be some hope for salvaging it. But apparently dry weeks don't happen in Istanbul. The locals are used to it. I don't know how they survive year after year in this constant wetness. It is a battle that I am not prepared for. The level of cleaning and amount of bleach required just to keep the mold at bay is... well, let's just say that I never even purchased bleach in Arizona. Oh, how I miss the dry, warm safeness of the desert.