Dünya Yalan Söylüyor

Summary of this semester in two words:

NAILED IT

Alternatively, I'm out, and I'll see you back on the Resistance.

Right about now is when the hectic begins. I have a presentation Thursday of what will wind up being the final draft of a 10 to 20 page research paper on the role of the Kurdish people in Turkey and the socio-political ramifications of the PKK. This weekend I need to pack up most of my stuff, since I need to move out next Friday evening, as well as meet with my Arabic group to collaborate on our final Arabic oral quiz and study for my Colloquial Arabic exam, which I have Monday afternoon.

Then comes finals week. I have exams every day of that week except Thursday, to which I will devote the majority of the remainder of my packing and studying frantically for my Islam in the Modern World exam instead of sleeping in. My last exam takes place from 15h to 17h Friday afternoon, after which I will attempt to check out promptly and get the fuck out and back home.

On top of all this I'm looking for summer work doing just about anything. I plan on calling FedEx-Kinko's back sometime, since apparently I passed the initial application process and made it to an interview I couldn't attend back in February. Maybe they'll still be hiring. Who knows? I applied to KMart and Sears over the winter holiday and Forever 21 over the spring holiday and nobody's returned my inquiries with anything definite, so I'm giving those up for lost now.

So if anyone knows anywhere back home that's hiring, do let me know if I haven't discovered it already.

At any rate, I've lots to do and should get back to it.

I am sitting at the standalone Starbucks on campus, listening to my own music and watching the people around me.  I did Friday's coursework Tuesday night, so all I have to do now is make sure I go to bed on time, which won't be too bad since I've been trying to get it so that my circadian rhythms make me tired around 02h, which is when I should be passing out most nights anyway.

There's a hipster on the back of a beautiful blue motorcycle, following an SUV full of pretty sorority girls.  Two girls, one black, one white, just threw themselves onto a sofa across from me.  They look tired.  Dudes are skateboarding down the hill, some wearing protective pads and some just acting like daredevils, complete with that manic grin on their faces that says, 'if we get hurt, we'll deserve it, but it'll damn well've been fun.'

According to Dashboard, it's 80º outside, but it really just feels... more comfortable than anything else.  There's a nice breeze, the sun is falling towards the horizon more swiftly the later it gets, so not only is it cooler, it's prettier.  The gold on the leaves of the trees is inspiring me to do something, but I don't know what.  Oh, that's right, I'm blogging about it.

I got a single efficiency apartment in McCollum Hall as my housing assignment for next academic year, which pleases me greatly, despite it being on the other, less-convenient side of campus.  As lovely as people are, I'm looking forward to being by myself in a space of my own.  Plus, I'll have my own kitchen, so I'll be able to cook my own food, which is ultimately cheaper than the meal plans we're forced to purchase in the other dorms.

I'm mostly just excited to be by myself.  Don't get me wrong, people are great, but I get irritated when I'm around them for too long.  I wasn't always of this mentality; in fact, even through my first year at uni, I loved being around people all the time and hated to be by myself in my dorm.

But now company is unreliable and preoccupied, and I find that I'm the best company for myself most of the time.

After coming back from the Spring holiday, I've really rethought the importance I placed on social interaction.  To some degree, it seems important -- being social is key to human existence.  The relationships between friends and loved ones are not things to easily be cast aside, especially since they are important to the development of the individual, plus they're just plain fun to have around and be around.  The downside, though, is that with people comes drama.  It is essential to relationships, no matter what kind, that there are disagreements, differences in opinion.  But when one tries to assert their opinion over all others, even if the relationship originated in good will, it will quickly reverse and tend towards the opposite, resulting in animosity.

People are deceptive, mischievous in a negative light, and worst of all, manipulative.  Even if you consider them to be your friend, no matter what relationship you are in, you will always try to manipulate them in some manner, and they will try to manipulate you.  I am tired of this.  I am tired of others manipulating me and I'm tired of being tempted to manipulate others in return, because really, sometimes it's the only way to get them to do something necessary to your interaction with them.  This has become clearer to me the longer I've been away from home.  People wonder why I don't want to be social, why I deliberately choose to remain somewhere by myself rather than surround myself with those that I should be considering my friends, but for some reason or another just can't bring myself to consider them so.

At home, I have a family who loved and cared for me, despite my stubbornness and my selfishness, no matter how many mistakes I've repeated and no matter how many times I've lied to them.  I have a boyfriend who loves me more than any outsider has ever loved me, and whom I love back more than I've ever loved any outsider.  I have at least one other close friend whom I can trust to tell everything that's on my mind, even though we don't often talk anymore.  But the only people I have found on whom I can truly rely, no matter how embarrassing the predicament or how careless I've been, are my mother and my father.  I've only just realized that the older I get, the older they get, and someday when they're gone, the only person on whom I'm truly going to be able to rely will be myself.

I'm afraid of that, and it makes me cry.

This is the last week before Spring Break.  To say I'm not excited would be a damn dirty lie -- it's been far too long since I've been at home.  I can truthfully say, however, that I'm not excited for the three exams I have tomorrow.  To be fair, two of them are quizzes, but the Arabic word for 'quiz' literally translates to 'little exam', so I'm treating them as such, if only to make sure I study adequately for them tonight.  My last midterm is on Thursday, and then my roommate and I leave for Gainesville to pick up Boy, then leave for home.  I'm excited to show my roommate places that are familiar to me, to return the favor of her showing me around her hometown at the beginning of the last semester.  It's kind of a pity she'll be leaving barely a day after she arrives, but it'll be worth it.

Oh yes, I almost forgot to showcase my latest adventure in Colloquial Arabic -- the third skit of the year.


We had a lot of fun making this, prob'ly more fun than we should have, since I know I pronounced the most important word in my dialogue incorrectly.

From 'happy times' to gibberish.  Not my shining moment in Arabic conversation.  Everything else went fine, except the dancing, which I was forced to do and which utterly humiliated me.  But I went with it, and got it over with, and now I get to be quizzed on the material tomorrow morning.  Hooray!

I got my poem returned to me today.  There were only a couple mistakes that I made, not including the one I caught after I wrote it out and corrected myself.

The girl making my drink at the on-campus Starbucks this afternoon wrote my order on my cup in what I assumed to be gold Sharpie, since it looked exactly like the writing my silver Sharpies make, only gold-colored.  Evidently it was not Sharpie, since Sharpies don't bleed, and due to the condensation on my cup, the gold marker paint is now all over my desk.

Despite this interesting development, it's almost the highlight of my day.  I got decent scores in my Arabic class this morning, in addition to submitting my first piece of Arabic poetry.  I hope I didn't make any mistakes in sentence structure, since that's one aspect of grammar I am as yet unfamiliar with.

Monologue to the Moon

I'm not one of these kids 'born to privilege' in the modern sense, whose parents are either extremely rich or mortgage their houses to the hilt and pretend to have more money than they really do; I'm not one of the kids who gets everything she wants in life with a pouting lip and a sulking glare. In fact, it's quite the opposite in my family. Since birth [practically] the rule has been 'if you whine, you get nothing'.

I also know that I don't have nothing in my life. I have an alright academic history -- sure, I could have done better, and my record is far from spotless, but it's picking up and I'm doing well and getting somewhere in my life. I have the geekiest, most fantastic, most wonderful mother and father, the best friends, and the most amazing boyfriend I could ever hope to ask for.

If I believed in any sort of god-like thing, I might be tempted to thank them. Alhamdulillah.

I hate jealousy. I hate when I feel it towards other people, and I hate when I think other people feel it towards me. It makes me second-guess myself, wonder if I'm deserving of whatever I have or whatever I do. I'm always about not caring what others think about me -- 'once you start caring what other people think of you, you stop being yourself' -- but I find myself doing it anyway. How do other people see me and interpret my behavior? Do they think I'm spoiled? Bitchy? A slut?

Okay, I'll cede bitchy.

My boyfriend is gone again. This is the first time that I haven't cried after his departure. I think I'm getting used to this, despite how much worse it gets every time I have to say goodbye to him. He's approximately two hours south of me now, with his own life and his own friends. Anything could happen to him at any time and I might not even know about it until days -- weeks, maybe -- later. That's a little paranoid of me, but it's true.

I know he's in my thoughts and I'm in his, even when we're not talking or next to each other, even though I have good friends. But I can't shake this feeling of being guilty for what I've got. I don't know. I feel like even though I'm surrounded by friends, I'm still alone.

Valentine's Day will come and I will have a valentine that I can't see or touch or kiss.

At least I'll have the moon.

<sub>stream of consciousness on the way back from the greyhound station -- there was a crescent moon

I never had to call the tune
'cause I always drifted with the tide of the moon</sub>

It's not so much that I'm always at a loss as to what to write here, but more like so much happens between my sparse blog entries that it's difficult to write about any one thing, and in any one order. I've been keeping up with my coursework, albeit feeling mildly overwhelmed by it. I had a Chemistry exam this afternoon that had me studying until nearly 06h this morning, and I skipped my Arabic class to better prepare for it and ensure that I got enough sleep. Regarding that, I feel pretty good, although I suspect I reversed something important and made myself fail at at least one problem. I have little confidence in myself when it comes to remembering formulae and methods by which to go about calculating variables and such, which is why I think I've tended away from the sciences and towards culture and linguistics. Nevertheless, I scored a %83 on my self-regulated practice exam, which, while not stellar, indicates that I'll pass my exam with more than the minimum required. My goals for this semester are all As and Bs, and a B- is still a B. Thus is the origin of my stress.

On the other hand, I have no lab today, which I'm taking as a nice reward for hopefully doing well on my Chemistry exam. This just means that I have even more time in which to write two Powerpoint presentations for Mideast Tradition tomorrow afternoon. Both will cover relatively the same material, so I don't anticipate any difficulties there -- the music of the Middle East is something I am particularly interested in, seeing as most of the Turkish I know has come from Kurban and Mor ve Ötesi. So for the moment, I'm taking some free time to edit a slough of photographs that have been brooding on my camera for a good long while. Inşallah I will have more frequent posts as I photograph more, since that seems to be what inspires me to post anything here.

These photographs are mostly pictures of myself, after my roommate curled my hair. I feel mildly like a camerawhore, but my self-portraits are the only pictures of myself ever that I really like, so I feel as though that justifies me in posting them. The second picture is of my roommate -- the one who curled my hair, yes -- as Faith [from Buffy, the Vampire Slayer] for Hallowe'en.







Another post should come relatively soon, since I'll be putting up another batch of photographs this afternoon or this evening sometime. That really depends, because I have a film to watch and two presentations to write, and I plan on beginning my work after my roommate leaves for her last class of the day. I really can't work with distractions, no matter how hard I might try, so I'll have nigh on three hours to myself for focusing and productivity. I was originally intending to take a nap until she left, but I know if I go to sleep I won't wake up until tonight, and will only throw off my circadian rhythms even more. I just keep reminding myself that, in two days, I'll be leaving for home for the first time in months. It doesn't feel like months, but as soon as I cross the threshold of my house, time'll catch up with me. I can feel it.

Just as an afterthought, I thought I would post that a certain, unfortunate member of the group I associate with has been irking my roommate of late, and has thus been irking me. I shouldn't let him irk me, and for the most part, I don't, since I find my indifference to be one of my strongest characteristics -- something I intentionally neglected to mention during an interview for the job I seem destined to never receive -- but he is irking my best friend and that, naturally, irks me. She is a good person, and while she seems convinced that I am, too, she has a tendency to, in my opinion, be too nice for her own good. There is, however, merit to not being a complete bitch, and I respect that in her. I just wish that she could find it as easy as I do to not care about things that she is better off not caring about.

I always start off my entries with 'well, I was going to write an entry earlier, but... ' which sounds a lot like 'what had happened was... '

... and den he had called.

Pictures, anyone?


My RA Reva is the nicest and sweetest RA ever, and she holds these socials that are really awesome. This social was a Hallowe'en door-decorating social, and she got a bunch of crafts and stuff to stick on our door. Some of the girls on our floor came by and we were crafty for a little bit. As incentive, there were also cupcakes, which we got to ice and decorate ourselves. Just in case you were wondering, those are my lab goggles in the background.
The joke [to me] is that 'reva' in Turkish means 'worthy of' or 'befitting', so I always pronounce her name with an accent to make it sound prettier, since she's... you know... worth it. :P


This is a picture of our door after Reva's door-decorating social. It has since acquired more things [and the little erlenmeyer flask has since been stolen, the bastards], but it's still got the same basic appearance. Reva has also since made new nametags for our door. We aren't pockets of flowers anymore -- we're now fantastically cute ghosts!


My awesome roommate drew a picture of what she believes my wedding dress should look like, and I must say, I'm prettymuch in agreement with her. It's really pretty, and I think I'd enjoy wearing it when I get married. You can't see it in this picture, but the girl in the drawing [me?] is rockin' these bright pink boots with black laces that are just so completely badass it hardly even makes sense.

Well, it's about at this dramatic juncture in the narrative that I get dragged to dinner at the on-campus diner with other people from film committee. I know what I need to do tonight and it's not particularly overwhelming, but I'm not really feeling too social right now. I've got a lot on my mind, and I'm more focused on trying to sort it all out than I am on going to hang out with people... but it's all well and good. I'll go, and hopefully I'll enjoy myself while I'm at it.

I posted quite a few photographs to my Flickr a few weeks ago and have only just gotten around to writing a blog entry about... oh, I don't know, everything that's going on lately, I suppose.  I mean, what else do people write in blogs?

Tonight I went out instead of doing Chemistry coursework for the first time in what feels like forever.  I was originally going to be in a commercial for Axe hair products, but something went down and the shoot was canceled, so instead my friends and I went to Five Guys and a craft store, where I got felt pads for our chairs and an eyepatch for my mashup Hallowe'en costume.  I feel as though I need a sweet top hat to complete the image, but the mask, cape, and eyepatch should do nicely enough should I be unable to find one.

So yeah, tonight we saw Up and Oldboy.  The first, for those who live under a rock [like me], was a beautifully-animated Pixar film -- but what Pixar film isn't beautifully animated? It was delightfully comical, yet subtly dark and depressing, and was an overall enjoyable film.  Oldboy, however, was enjoyable, but only because it was so spectacularly fucked up.  It's a Korean film whose plot revolves around a man who is inexplicably imprisoned for fifteen years, then released into the world and forced to figure out why he was imprisoned for so long.  It's beautifully shot, and wonderfully disturbing, and definitely for anyone who enjoys films such as Delicatessen.

So yeah, I had a pretty awesome time getting out and doing something other than Chemistry coursework for once.  This means, though, that I'm going to have to work double time tomorrow to get all the work I wanted to accomplish done, but that's not a problem.  I'm kinda used to it by now.

Here're some of the most popular pictures from my last batch of uploads:


My roommate Anissa, looking as beautiful as ever. :] She has since dyed her hair to remove the highlights, but I think she's hawt no matter how she does her hair.


This is a brief glance at our dormitory, temporarily dubbed the 'Bunkbucket', in stark contrast to last year's 'Funkbucket'.  I definitely like it here more.


Lastly, my most recent profile picture, in all of its tilted, strangely-lit, smiling colorful pigment-light splendor.  I only like pictures of myself if I take them, it seems.  Funny how that works.

Now it's time to post this and make my way towards sleeping or something.  Gonna be awake for a Pirates of the Caribbean marathon tomorrow in celebration of Talk Like A Pirate Day 'round 11:30, and that'll be about a good time to get my Chemistry coursework well under way.  Sleep now, though.  Pirates later.

Ah, university! I've missed these brick buildings, the uncontrollable dorm room temperatures, and, to some extent, the people.  Perhaps notsomuch the people, with the exception of my roommate and best university friend Anissa. One day she'll let me take a photograph of her.  Man, we were so lucky to be able to room together this year.  The first week has definitely been more tolerable thanks to her and our awesome dormitory, which I just finished photographing.  The photographs will go up eventually.  I want to get a few more done first, so I can process them in more sizeable batches.

I'm off class for the weekend, though I definitely have coursework to take care of between now and Monday.  Mostly Gen Chem work and preparation for our first lab.  I don't anticipate much difficulty with that, since I've scored no lower than %98 on all of my previous homework assignments, something that I'm hoping will carry throughout the semester and reflect in my exam grades as well.  Most of my current stress doesn't revolve around the sexually frustrated pigs that I seem to find myself hanging around with, but instead around my grades this semester. I already screwed up once, and I can't afford to do it again.

So for this evening, I'm going to hang out with my friends, maybe go to a music venue where there won't be a cover charge and see what the free music scene is like up here in Tallahassee.  Right now Anissa and I are singing ridiculously awesome boy band songs, and I think I might get some coursework in before this evening begins officially.  Whenever that happens to be.  Not gonna lie, I'm feeling kinda apprehensive about going out tonight.  I might chicken out at the last minute and do something anti-social like stay back in my dorm and play Warriors Orochi 2 until one in the morning.  I don't know yet.

But, as with most things, I suppose I'll just play it by ear.