girl on a bus from Toronto to New York

I could make this post all about how I got my butt on a bus to New York for Christmas and New Years Eve, and gush about how much in love I am with NYC, but I won't. I pity you, so I won't. It's pretty safe to say, though, that my lifelong prediction about NYC being the city of my dreams is true. And I know I'm definitely not the only one to think that, because this is the city where people come to pursue their dreams. I see no old people or little kids on the streets of Manhattan. Only young, dynamic, busy people. The fact that I am this one tiny person in a huge crowd, full of people rushing to work, to subways, to meet with other people in restaurants, cafes....It gives me this amazing sense of freedom. I can sometimes get the same feeling on a night in the streets of downtown Toronto, or Istanbul...but the feeling is constant in New York.

I could easily get addicted to this feeling.

But anyway, I decided NOT to make a gushing-about-NYC post, as all I've been doing is sight-seeing and frequenting the nearest Starbucks with my laptop or book anyway. By the way, did you know that New Yorkers HATE Times Square? Once you get past all the lights and displays, I guess it kind of starts getting old (and filled with loud tourists) for a local. I could never imagine it getting old, though. I keep wishing I had a better camera to capture all the beauty here.

My New Years resolution is to work as hard as Lindsay Lohan's lawyers. And find a way not to spend so much money....this will prove to be challenging.

I'm getting a lot of reading done over the break, which is nice. The man who also frequents my nearest Starbucks here has struck up a conversation with me after I loudly shrieked while reading a particularly intense chapter of Hunger Games (the first book of the fantastic trilogy by Suzanne Collins, which I was embarrassed to find in the 'Young Adults' section..I guess I'll never stop being or reading chick lit?). I have since moved on to and finished the second book of the trilogy, Catching Fire, which was good too. But anyway, the man at Starbucks was asking me if I was a student here and when informed that I'm a girl from Istanbul studying journalism in Toronto and on a break in New York, he claimed I was 'exotic'! Having been born and lived all his life in Queens, I guess it doesn't take much to deem another to be exotic, but I had to snort at that. I don't consider my foreign-ness as exotic at all, merely something that's always at the back of my head and making me feel not at home. It's not necessarily a bad feeling, not feeling at home. It can sometimes be nice and liberating.

I like being away from home. And by home, I mean Istanbul. I'm going back in May...It's a scary thought. Imagine having to dodge 4234234,4532 questions about your weight having gone up.

That's what the experience of being back home is. Every time.

Sunday before final exams? Yeah why not watch a Roger-Federer game, tweet, and check my e-mail 3242341 times.

It's another Sunday, another means of putting off studying by venting on the Internet. Yeah, one of those. 

You know blog, you are slowly becoming a good friend of mine. I mean we all say we want honesty from a true friend, but I'm slowly appreciating the idea of a friend who NEVER judges. Sounds perfect to me! If I need to be judged, I'll fly back to Turkey to my parents, thank you very much.

It's amazing how one can come up with so many useless things to do in the act of procrastination. After checking my e-mail, Twitter, Facebook, school e-mail account, Lamebook, CNN.com, daily celebrity news blog, my e-mail once again, and my favourite guilty pleasure site (no, the celebrity news blog doesn't count, it's Jared-leto.net, fyi), I ran out of things to do. 'Do' meaning NOT an actual physical act of doing something, but merely entertaining the mind with only literally moving your fingers across a keyboard, mind you.

So I suddenly thought to watch some Friends episodes (a show I haven't thought about, oh maybe since the 90's?). Then look up spoilers on a TV show I don't even watch. Then look up 'red velvet cupcakes' on Google images. Then watch a tennis game (I don't even follow tennis). Then watch movie trailers of upcoming summer blockbusters on Youtube (I don't even like hollywood blockbusters- see a pattern here?) Then.... write a blog. You get my drift.

What the heck?

I mean, holy chocolate fudge! 

All the while I had the thought 'you need to study.....you need to study...EXAMS COMING UP THIS WEEK ONE AFTER ANOTHER...come on...' at the back of my head but I kept frantically pushing the thought back and desperately moving my fingers across the keyboard faster in search of something else to keep me occupied in cyberworld. 

Oh and I am over $400 in dept. Life problems + school problems are always there but I choose to ignorantly lose myself in Internet-realm instead!

What the stink is wrong with me?

This girl sang 'Bad Romance' by, oh you all know whose song it is. Heck, President Obama knows who Lady Gaga is at this point. He's probably jamming to 'I want your psycho, disease, vertical stick, gagagaga-ooooh lala' in his boxers at home, considering he has 2 tween daughters all over that stuff. Yeah, you're welcome for that sweet mental image of the President dancing in his boxers to Gaga. 

So what was I saying? Yeah, this girl sang a cover of this Bad Romance for a school event we had called Cultural Mosaic. Where people were supposed to showcase their traditional dances, songs, etc. Now, do you see anything wrong here? Am I the only one who thinks this is..just... wrong? Inappropriate? Embarrassing?

At this point I regretfully admit that our generation came to be all about THIS: songs about passing on diseases, promoting psychotic relationships. Who cares about what the future of our planet and our country enfolds, when we can dress in leotards and absurd hats singing about our 'bad, bad romance' ?

Never mind the fact that 'covering' a song used to be about a  piece of music so legendary that it needed to be tackled from different perspectives, and NOW the choice of 'songs' for covering are just ridiculous; I just can't believe people thought it sensible to present Bad Romance as a piece of their...our..culture. I am prone to laugh at that Youtube video of the little boy crying because he's not a 'Single Lady', or that little girl weeping because she 'loves Justin Bieber!!1!', but excuse me for not seeing the humour/fun/intended message(?) in COVERING a Lady Gaga song for a Cultural event. Just no.

Why am I venting about this here? Because I actually don't know the girl, even though I want to tell her I'm glad I didn't vote for her as my Social Sciences Director because her puking all over the floor at that fraternity party last week was NOT a quality I look for in people running our school government. She got the position anyhow, and will allegedly run for Vice President next semester, but oh well. 

What a corrupted world, ga-ga, ooh-lala.

I shall make greater effort to see the glass half full. Heck, it's not so bad spending your entire weekend not committing to any time with your friends because you're determined to study, then procrastinating the whole time at the Management Building drinking countless cups of coffee because you'd rather not be home witnessing your roommate and her boyfriend's routine morning sex. Not so bad at all. Did anyone manage to read that sentence without losing the trail of thought or dozing off? I surely didn't. 

Now why don't I stop blabbering, get myself another coffee, and go back to checking my evil trio of Twitter-Facebook-email accounts once (4324th) more. Satan's evil triangle, I tell you. Excuse me, mama gotz stuff to do. As you can tell, it's busy around here. (Comment this or the lack of attention I'm getting will defeat the purpose of me getting this blog. seriously.)

I'll be checking back 67 times a day. Adieu!

-M

 

iBlog when iFrustrated

It's official. I'm a blogger. Now I can type out my infinitely long run-on sentences featuring numerous commas and near perfect spelling, talking about my oh so important life issues for all the cyberworld to read about and complain into my laptop about stuff that bothers me but don't awake enough courage in me to do anything about them in real life, in English which is not even my first language but whatever I'm OK at it plus nobody knows how to speak Turkish, right?

Whew. 

OK start over. 

This is my personal venting space. Which I started just now on a spontaneous impulse (can impulses EVER be not spontaneous? ...), when I need to be working on an assignment that was due.... yesterday. Procrastination at its best. I can't focus on studying, oh what should I do instead? Start a blog. Why, of course. 

I seem to be doing this a lot. Procrastinating, I mean. Almost to the point of acclaiming the title Queen of Procrastination. And run-on sentences. And sarcasm.

So this morning I got bullied by my housemates to pay for a $200 cable bill. I don't even watch TV anymore. My roommate also owes me 9 bucks and 50 cents. Wah, wah, my life sucks. OK but seriously, this girl who I don't even consider my friend because she's always bringing me down with her nasty comments, called me fat last night. I mean she has called me a 'bitch' for no reason before, but FAT! 

That is CROSSING THE LINE, MY FRIEND. So what did I do? I just smiled and turned my head. That stupid Christian saying (no offense, I only mean the saying is stupid not the religion itself ... well.... not in this blog entry anyway:p hah) that goes "turn the other cheek" when someone hurts you just got into a whole another level. I am such a coward that I only had things to say to her AFTER I came home and thought about it. Had a whole conversation with her in my head and everything, where I basically stick it to her. 

I'm really glad that frustration with people around me and unbelievable procrastination on this rainy morning has led me to finally get a blog. I've been meaning to get one, since I'm a Journalism student and well, the business seems to be moving in the cyber direction, hasn't it?

Man, I'm really going to miss paper in the future. Just the simple act of reading the newspaper, reading a book, the smell of paper and the feel of it. Libraries with rows and rows of book shelves. In the future we're probably going to have libraries the size of a small room with chips or USB's stacked up instead of books. That's so scary to think about, because books literally saved me in my childhood. Of what, you ask? Boredom, depression, misdirected energy and imagination, who knows. Now I don't have time to read books as much.... because I tweet about 3243234,45 times a day. Huh.

I have this plan of looking back on this blog 50 years later or something, so I want to write down things that will mean nothing in 50 years but are really funny to remember, like how we look back on the 80's and laugh about the ridiculous hair, music and wardrobe choices (80's music and movies rock, by the way). OK so here I go writing down things for my future self to read: Justin Bieber's a trend on Twitter every day. A 'trend' means a trending topic, remember, future self? And surely you remember Twitter, which by the time you're reading this, has probably disappeared into the void place where all the sites like Myspace and Facebook go to be forgotten. The automatic spellcheck (awesome, not that I need it anyway, I love correct spelling) on my Macbook underlined the word 'Facebook' which is funny, because I really do believe that there IS such a thing as a face book in real life now. 

You know how you can read the thoughts and emotions of a person by looking at their face? It should be called their facebook. I am not kidding.

The school assignment that I didn't do yet, which is my last one this year before my finals start, is an English 'journal' entry of 1000 words. I think I'll minor in English Lit because I love it so much, reading books and discussing them doesn't even feel like schoolwork to me. It's amazing we get credit for it! And my prof is hilarious and really smart. I begged and begged for my high school to let me take English Lit but they only had me take English as a Second Language since I was back in Turkey and, you know, didn't speak English as a First Language. Which is really unfair, because I think I would've done just fine in that class. They were studying William Blake and Shakespeare and Sylvia Plath, all these amazing amazing people I admire so much (I pretty much believe I am the reincarnated, new version of Sylvia Plath minus all the talent) and I was going crazy in my English As a Second Language class, where I could ace all the exams without even listening to one word in class.

I guess what happened as I was growing up is that I taught myself English, through the Internet, movies, Youtube, and American television. I watched 'Grease' and 'The Wizard of Oz' too many times as a kid that I got the American accent down. It's funny because now I can't even speak English in a Turkish accent. 

I think not only the language, but I immersed myself with all the culture that comes with the language, as well. Like, I knew what Pop tarts and PB&J sandwiches and Sadie Hawkins and "that's what she said" jokes meant, even though they weren't necessarily things that kids where I'm from knew about. (I'm from Istanbul- crazy multicultural, metropolitan city which makes me a city girl at heart.)

Where I'm at right now is, I moved from Istanbul, Turkey where I grew up to Toronto, Canada about 6 months ago. All by myself, attending Uni of Toronto for journalism (which was a random choice but at the same time, not so random because I always knew I wanted to do something to do with writing) And it's definitely been scary exciting, but routine at the same time. And the whole 'being by myself' thing is obviously very different from what I was used to, which is the main reason why I wanted to move half across the world in the first place.

I am actually not literally 'by myself' in my house, I live with 7 other girls- one right in my room! I originally thought getting a roommate would be fun, boy was I wrong! I'm the kind of person who spends a lot of time in their room because I'm a computer geek, and having to stay in a teeny tiny room with another person when you've had a big room all to yourself your whole life, is.... not fun. Not only her but her boyfriend lives with us as well. Talk about awkward- I have the same room as a couple who's bed is only like, 4 feet away from mine. Yeah. 

I have a sorority meeting in 2 hours- I am one of the 'founding mothers' (sounds cool eh?) of the first sorority at my campus. It's been a lot of hard work just getting down the policies, coat of arms, slogan, values, colours, rules, philantrophy, and so much more. But there's also the social side of things, where you need to socialize with all these different people which I'm not good at. I guess it's that I'm not necessarily the most lovable or charming person to be around, but I don't know how I could fix that, soo... I mean it's easy for me to be awkward because I guess I'm not one of those people who walks into a room and lights it up, immediately eases into conversation with everyone, etc. 

I used to (and still do) try to get my parents to admit I'm adopted, and they keep refusing but I swear I'm not like a single person in my family. Characteristically and physically. I guess part of me wants for me to be an adopted child because I think it's cool; it would be a good story line to write a book about. I mean that's the kind of exciting, dramatic stuff I need to get people to read my (future, non-existent) book, right? Nothing exciting has ever happened to me until I decided to move by myself all across the planet to Canada. The act of moving itself was exciting by theory but it's been pretty routine here ever since. 

I get to go back home for the summer in less than a month and I've got my birthday coming up in 12 days. it's my 19th birthday, which is a big deal in Canada. I'm also going to a 30 Seconds to Mars concert (I am crazy about this band- maybe this is another thing my future self will look back at and laugh about?) in 11 days, which is pretty exciting to think about.

I was playing soccer and Badminton with friends out in the crazy fog at 3 AM last night(today?), and a thought just hit me. 

With a memory as bad as mine, what would I do with myself if I didn't write down the moments that matter? It starts getting unhealthy when something remarkably out of the ordinary happens and you go "oh I should tweet about this" and reach for your Crackberry (I think I'm surgically attached to my Blackberry Bold), but every once in a while it's good to write down things that are mundane, and pointless. Because one day you could be famous and even the boring stuff you write is going to be read.

Hah, just kidding. The mundane, routine stuff matters because in 50 years from now I could be having a worse time, and reading back on this could potentially make me feel better/nostalgic. Maybe it would make me feel worse.

OK either way, if aliens land on Earth and want to inspect on human trail of thought, I could happily offer them this little blog of mine.

I need to get on that assignment and then get to my sorority meeting...sigh... so much to do and I'm too lazy to do anything except vent on my laptop all stinkin' day long. 

Peace out bruhs.