Love The Blog

Well, this blog thing is useful as it dawned on me. I can actually see what was written before! How miraculous!

Back in Turkey. Began my final year with eight courses. Heavy load, lot to think, little time. Considering an MA (hopefully somewhere in Western Europe), should find scholarships. Got to keep the GPA high for this; especially since my brilliant transcript from the UK isn't included in the CGPA for some reason. Eight courses is not quite the best way to do this, though.

Social life, well, not too bad actually. Lots of exchange students, some friendships, lost chances and bendy intentions (though they tend to bend the wrong way); not everything changed I guess. I wonder if this will go anywhere.

More coming...

Self Quote

Making humanitarian decisions based on nation- or capital-based politics is like practicing medicine according to the taste in cuisine. Not as bad as bad similes though.

Knot

I am feeling like a knot that is trying to undo itself. What kind of proper reasoning suggests you do nothing when you see a girl you like giving you signals, especially when you haven't had sex for months? My kind of reasoning I guess.

Although I am not the god of social life, I guess I had my share of fanciers. Even recently. Let me eliminate the ones that I don't like, not as rudeness, but as a fact. With the rest, no matter how wide and obvious the window they give me is, I always act like a twelve year old. Don't meet new people, if you do don't talk, if you do, run away immediately. I do this.

I'm not sure if it is the fear of rejection or fear of change or fear of losing me (who is, among many other good qualities, a wanker in the end). It's like I'm punishing myself by not enjoying this side of life. I hate imagining myself as an impotent and needy person, but I am now. My judgement is clouded, my body is in a weird state and I'm not as rational as I am used to being.

My neck hurts. More soon...

Double Comeback

So, I went to London.

It was profoundly entertaining. For the first time since I arrived, I found a bar I like (Walkabout by the Waterloo Bridge, close to Embankment tube station). Good music, excellent food, cheap drinks, and if only for this occasion, great people. It was some sort of a get together for a Turkish internet community. I was pretty hooked up on them when I was in Turkey; for certain periods of time they were almost my entire social life, not to mean they were small in extent or unsatisfactory. So anyway, I was surprised that the feeling was identical to those "golden times". We were all smiling our mouths off, dancing and drinking and chatting. People were laid back, relaxed and friendly. As a proof, the night ended at New Cross in one of those friends' dorm room, around 7 am. I'd just met the guy.

All in all, promises were made for another one of these meetings soon, in a week or two. We will see if this one sticks. I mean at least it feels right.

Self-Sabotage

One should be aware of her own tricks on herself. Sometimes our fear of disappointment leads us to a semi-conscious self-destruction, we ruin everything so that it will not look like our faults. I found out that I do it all the time; I do something in a lacking way or don't do it at all because I am afraid of failing. Sometimes I even devise nice coherent trains of thought to convince myself of the bullet-proof blame placing I have put together. It can be difficult to tell between a revelation and self-deception, and one should be watching for both.

Queer

Lesbian and gay studies, and the consequent "Queer Theory" is something that requires and deserves attention. Judith Butler is doubly remarkable. The whole thing should be studied with a not uncriticised awareness of Foucauldian perspectives of power and discourse. Delightful.

Comeback

Well, apparently it has been almost a year. Keeping a diary is something that we pick up quite young I suppose; I've never been a diary type of person. I fail to remember, and eventually fail to see the relevance of, individual events or local conclusions based on individual events. That's me.

Just to keep you up to speed, I'm in England now. I'm an exchange student in University of Essex, close to a miserable little town called Colchester. Colchester is a signifier, and in my case the definition, of the concept of miserable little town. Let me explain myself.

The town is not really ugly. Apparently it has a great deal of history (history as in old things' importance), and looks no different than any English town. People are busy, they pretend that they are living in a mini-London. The general suspense that lack of importance creates is remarkable.

University has been a good change in my life. It has not made me the super-social guy who has been offered scholarships but it has made me relatively more social. The fact that everybody is interesting to the extent that they are from different cultures than mine attracts my attention easily. These affections are plenty yet short-lived. Most of the time my relationship with a person is judged and packed and tucked away long before we go beyond small talk. It's not that I'm too judgmental, it's just that there are only so many remarkably original people even in my little global model of a university, once you are done being amused by the cultural diversity.

The amount and diversity of information accessible for me has increased many fold. I have lightning speed connection, I am in contact with many people from many places around the world that have (most of the time) acceptably many opinions. I am in my sponge mode again, but while that happens I (once again) seem to forget that I am not a by-stander or spectator to my life. I seem to enjoy doing that more and more.

More on that later. Actually, more on everything later. Gotta go and check my other blog.

Cheers.

On Love

I suddenly remembered that I have lived all these feelings about another girl long time ago, at the beginning of my puberty. I claimed that I fell in love.

Love. Right.

Well, apparently it takes 19 years to realize that love is not about other people, it is about us. Therefore, it is not love at all, in its commonly used romantic sense. It is far more narcissistic than we suspect.

This girl that I am having troubles with, I have the very same feelings towards her as what I felt back then. Now, I do not call it love. I call it being fond of, liking. Even after all these stuff, her image in my head did not change much. I did, however, come to realize that when I see her next time, the ideal in my head and the real girl will probably prove to be a mismatch.

I concluded that this thing we call love is not more about the other person than jerking off is. It is not about the person, it is about what that person represents in our minds. When things turn out to be fitting in our criteria, we are amused. Otherwise we are disappointed, we conclude that things did not work out.

And then there is sex. I know sex. You know sex. No explanation necessary at this point.

It is like an exam we give to the other person. The questions and answers are already determined, it is about how close the other person gets to our answers, and how tolerant we are to mistakes.

Me, I am not really all that tolerant.

On Social Needs (ii)

Small experimantation on resocializing failed.

The person subject to this experimentation is a girl that I took a course with a year back. I decided that maybe I could get intimate with this girl. Do not be so cruel, not just sexually.

It went pretty well for months, actually. We were not the same, that was for sure, but I thought that we clicked. I mean it was fun having someone to talk to besides my sister, someone to talk to without those empty "what the fuck are you talking about" eyes. We talked about a lot of things, spent many hours on net and in the flesh.

I decided to open up.

That point, seems to me now, as the point where the thing started to come down. She was not interested in me, to my surprise.

I have to squeeze in that I am used to people not being into me, of course. However, when I felt the click, it was always mutual, I thought of this as the natural way. Obviously, I was mistaken.

Anyway, the details aside, she was involved with someone else as well. I decided that this would not bother me, since I was never the jealous type. I do not see the logic in this sentiment. Well, it bothered be. It was not like jealousy though, it was more like pain of confronting irrationality. I mean it was clear that we communicated very well, and I did not, do not, believe that they have a better quality in communication.

This puzzles me, is sexuality so isolated from all this? I am aware that sexuality can exist without personality, but cannot personality affect sex? I always thought that it did the trick for me. I mean people who were not extraordinarily attractive seemed so if I liked to spend time with them.

This, however, may also mean that I am physiologically repulsive in a radical manner. Not a nice feeling, neither. I may be so repulsive that the fact that we spend a lot of time and have fun on the way does not affect the way she sees me. I am not really complaining about the frendship, but I do crave for more.

Or I used to.

We decided to go to a bar a couple of days ago. We went to a pub first, had a quick dinner, a couple of beers, and hit the real bar from there. My favourite bar band was on in this new bar, so we went there. She spoke to her boyfriend for half of the time we were there. He was supposed to pick her up, but then it turned out that he was not. I offered her to sleep over, she accepted, she was annoyed that her boyfriend changed his mind so suddenly to leave her in such a difficult position having nowhere to go.

We were dancing and drinking when her boyfriend suddenly calls to say that he is going to pick her up. Half an hour later they are gone. At the blink of an eye, she preferred to take a ride to her dorm with him instead of staying with me at the bar like we had planned before and sleeping over as we had just decided. This would not bother me if these incidents were independent, but I started to doubt her view of me. She seems to take me and my company for granted, like tivo or something, you can switch it off when you want and pick up from where you left any time you like.

I talked to her, she apologized as she always does in such situations, and said that she does not know what to do when she offends someone. To be honest, I do not know if she is intimate in what she says. I feel exposed, I let someone in and now I question if it was worth all the problems.

I do feel the burden of little social life, but I also feel the burden of the social life itself. I do not wish to be troubled by these miserable little worries, and petty little hormonal ignitions.

It is as if I have decided to jump off a cliff but given a second chance and reached the same point that convinced me to take that step. The problem with this situation is that there is no end, I guess.

Difficult times.

On Social Needs

I have been constantly isolating myself from people and social life, even sex, for some time now. Something close to a year I suppose, with isolated windows of social life of course. It is as if I were on a crazy diet of people.

This is how I came to realize what a primal drive the need for social life is. I became very depressed, although I voluntarily made this decision, my eating habits are a mess (maybe due to lack of regular meals with friends or family) and my sexual balance is drastically disturbed, an unpredictable swing between asexual and "fuck everything that walks". Not healthy, nor fun.

Probably the worst part is the drain of experience. I had already figured out that social life is based on experience and observation, and a backing ability to manipulate people and situations of course. As I left the port of social life, I really was not aware of the experience I was going to miss, and skills I was going to lose.

Okay, so I did not forget how to manipulate people. Big deal. I have lost my touch. It used to be as if I could talk to everybody, and talk them into anything. Now I am having difficulty reaching out through my wall. Yes, it is a cliche metaphor, but it is so accurate.

By the way, it is further disturbing that someone had already lived through all this and narrated it until a nearly undefined ending: The Wall by Pink Floyd. I mean there are so many resemblances that I really have the inner fear that I am the stupidest man on the planet to go through this type of experience all over again. It is clear that Roger Waters was not content with his choice, and his narration matches my feelings. I have the vague sense that I will end up just as miserable.

I am depressed, maybe in some pain, but not miserable. It fears me to the bone, the idea of myself as a petty little man.

I should not be thought as a heavier narcissist than most people are, though. After all, whenever we cry, we cry for ourselves. I doubt that there is anyone who had not wept over their probable catastrophic future, in one way or another.

I do not know how to master social skills again. I will keep myself, and because of me testing this method of using blogs to keep track of personal views you too, posted on that.

Introduction

Here's the deal.

I have been alien to this blog thing for far too long. The main reason for this was that I did not see it necessary to have yet another virtual space to publish my views. Unfortunately, the things have changed now.

I feel the urge to express myself in words, in somewhere I set the rules for. Furthermore, this thing is practically a therapist. This is what therapists do most of the time is it not, reflecting back what the patient says. So I figured if I recorded what I thought, what I experienced, what I felt here, I can look back some time from now and figure out some things that I will fail to see at my time of looking back.

You are welcome to watch me grow as well.

Enjoy.