At the beginning of each year, Chris Brogan does a post in his blog where he chooses three words as theme words, things to remember and keep in mind as guidance throughout the year. These are not goals or resolutions, they are simply the answers to this question: “At the end of this year, if I look back and describe the past twelve months of my life in three words, what would I want those three words to be?” Then you can reverse-engineer your goals from that, working out exactly what you need to do to have your life this year resemble the words you chose.

I like this idea, and even though I’m a few days late, I’m jumping on the bandwagon. It took me a lot less time than I expected to come up with three words I wanted to lock down; perhaps this is because I’m quite diligent about keeping up my goal list year-round, and so I already had a pretty clear idea of where I want to head.

• Hunger. No, I don’t mean anything about weight loss or any other kind of self-punishment via food deprivation. I’m not even talking about food at all. What I mean by “hunger” is a hunger for the things I want in life. Because of my experiences, I’ve seen time and time again how the person who gets the prize is almost always the person who wanted it the most. Naturally there are exceptions here and there, but almost all of the ridiculous and even “impossible” goals I’ve seen reached were accomplished by people who got the job done simply because they were so ravenous for it that they were willing to do whatever it took, no matter what, long after everyone else had given up or lost steam. I used to be that person, but, at the risk of sounding like I’m making excuses, one loses the hunger a bit when one is on the Turkish Riviera, enjoying the beaches and the mountains and drinking tea on the balcony. Not that I regret having a few years of unadulterated recreation, mind you, but I think I’m at a point in my life where it no longer has to be an either/or situation. I think I’m capable now of mindfulness and gratitude for the present moment while chasing after my goals like someone possessed.
• Action. All the desire in the world means nothing if you’re not able to get yourself off the sofa. Clearly this word goes hand-in-hand with hunger— if you want something badly enough, action is the obvious next step, and hopefully it would happen pretty automatically if it really were hunger-driven. I think it’s important to note it separately, however, because the kind of action I’m talking about is the kind where you specifically move in the direction of your goals. Most people fill their days with all manner of activities and convince themselves of how busy they are and how much they’re getting done, but a shocking amount of what we do with our time amounts to nothing more than filler. If you don’t believe me, spend a day writing down every single thing you do, without changing your regular habits, and at the end of the day count up how many of those things were actions that made a direct impact on your major life goals. I’m not judging; I’m certainly guilty of “keeping busy” too. But now I’m ready to stop being so busy and start taking real action instead.
• Adventure. A couple of months ago I read a blog post somewhere that said, “start saying yes to adventure. Whether it’s a trip to the corner market or a trip to Outer Mongolia, stop hesitating long enough to talk yourself out of it and just start saying yes when you want to.” Now, you might think I’m the last person who needs this advice, and to a great extent it’s true that I’ve lived my life according to whim— after all, this is why I’m talking to you from the Mediterranean coast and not from a stuffy cubicle in Western Suburbia. But I think it’s almost because of the huge amount of travel and adventure I’ve had that I’ve allowed thoughts of “I deserve to do nothing for a while” to creep in. Routine is such an easy rut to get into, and its gravity field is ridiculously strong. There will always be a million reasons to say no to things you want to do, but why do that when it’s just as easy to say yes? For me, It’s time to embrace the power of yes again.

So there they are, my three words for 2011. If you have three of your own you’d like to share, I’d love to hear them.

Making friends takes on a different meaning when you move to a country where the local culture is so very different from your own. While I’m all about learning new things and living a different kind of life from what I’m used to, sometimes you just want to hang out with someone who gets your pop culture references without a lengthy explanation, and watched the same cartoons you watched as a kid.

Anika was only here for a year, but we’ve known each other for nearly three years, and this was not her first time living in Antalya. I guess I had a delusion that she would be here forever, even though I saw her applying for medical schools in the United States, and I knew full well what that meant. Now she’s been accepted into the medical programme at Pittsburgh, and like that, she’s gone. It was a very bittersweet moment to know that she was getting exactly what she wanted, and at the same time she was going to have to give up her life here, and we would have an Anika-sized hole in our day-to-day existence.

So, there’s that weird mixture of sadness and pride to deal with, but also things can move very quickly here. Almost as soon as we knew Anika would be moving away, another friend from the United States made the decision to wrap up her life there and make the move to Antalya, so now there’s her arrival to look forward to. There’s a huge turnover in a place like this— people coming and going all the time. Some stay for many years, some only a few months. You would think that it would pay not to get too attached to people, but sometimes you just can’t help it. Thank god for the internet and 4G technology, keeping us all in touch.

For once, there are no jokes to make.

Two weeks ago, without any warning whatsoever, they shut down our street bazaar. Just like that. The court decided that’s how it was going to be, and now it’s just gone. Forever.

I have no idea how long the bazaar had been here before I moved here, but I’ve been attending nearly every Thursday for almost four years, and from what I understood it had been going on for many years before I arrived.

I’m angry and disappointed at the short-sightedness of the court’s decision. The municipal judge was quoted as saying that “street bazaars have no place in a civilised society.” Not only is that statement jaw-droppingly ridiculous, it’s downright offensive, both to the people who make their living as bazaar vendors, and to the traditional Turkish culture that spawned such a wonderful, rich institution where local people can meet, talk, and do their shopping once a week, right here in the streets of their own neighbourhood. There are not many places left in the world where you can see something as amazing as that… and now there’s one less.

I mean, forget the funny t-shirts— that’s a peripheral thing. We do our food shopping at the bazaar. Those vendors made their living from us. One of my elderly neighbours often mentioned how thankful she was that the we lived right in the middle of the bazaar, because she doesn’t find it so easy to get up to the shops anymore. Now I don’t know what she’ll do. No one in her family has a car to take her anywhere.

The bazaar was one of the last remaining remnants of real Turkish culture in this neighbourhood, and now it’s gone in the blink of an eye. All so the SUV squad can drive their fuel-guzzling monstrosities through here a little more conveniently on a Thursday. If that is what we term a “civilised society,” Turkey’s in worse trouble than I thought.

As you can see, a few vendors have stayed in defiance of the ruling (these photos were taken today), but I don’t think they’ll be here for long. I mean, a big part of me hopes they’ll band together and come back stronger next week, and even stronger the week after that… but that’s the part of me that watches too many underdog movies. I know it’s more likely that this trickle will die out completely within a month or so.

So what does this mean in terms of the Bizarre Bazaar photos? Well, nothing, as far as I’m concerned. I’ll just go to the Şarampol bazaar on a Friday instead (you know, until they shut that one down, too). I mean, I have to find some place to do our shopping anyway, so there’s no reason not to keep taking photos of t-shirts no matter where I end up. It’s not like the Meltem bazaar had the monopoly on Turklish production.

It had occurred to me that maybe this would be a good opportunity to wrap things up and move on, maybe do something else. But you know what? Although I fully embrace the idea of doing other things on this site as well (which you’ll know all too well very soon), I don’t feel that other features of the site and the bazaar posts have to be mutually exclusive. I feel privileged that the bazaar is as popular as it is, and I don’t think getting rid of it at this point will accomplish anything. In this day and age where people on the internet find it too taxing to pay attention for longer than 10 seconds, I’m honoured that I have managed to create something that people have enjoyed for nearly three years and counting. The bazaar is by far the most popular part of this site, and the subscriber numbers have grown steadily since its inception. Don’t get me wrong, I want to take it out on a high note when its time comes, but I just don’t feel that now is that time. People still get a lot of enjoyment out of it, and there’s no danger of it jumping the shark, as it started out on the wrong side of the shark to begin with. That’s kind of the whole point.

Oddly, back in March, I went through a thing at the bazaar where I was acutely aware of how special it was, how lucky I was to be living in the right part of Antalya/Turkey/Earth at the right time, and how I should soak it up as much as possible in case anything ever happened. I had no idea how soon that “anything” would come to pass, though. I was thinking more along the lines that eventually, in a few years’ time, we might be moving into a different house or a different city or whatever. I never dreamed that the bazaar would be the one to leave me, before I had a chance to say a proper goodbye.

Anyway, I’m getting sad again now. I’ve been experiencing something over the past two weeks that’s not entirely dissimilar to mourning.

We’ll fix it with laughter tomorrow, I promise.

For those who are not familiar, Hürriyet is one of our major national newspapers in Turkey. It is not a tabloid by any stretch of the imagination; these people purport to print actual news, and they have the reputation for doing just that. Although one can find the standard number of feature and/or lifestyle pieces (especially on the weekend), the main idea behind Hürriyet is that they report breaking news, politics (both Turkish and international), and major events that would be of interest to your average news-seeking reader.

Now, to shift topic a bit: those of you who have known me long enough or have been paying extra careful attention will know that before I lived in Antalya, I resided for a year in a little town called Kemer, which is about 40km from here. At the risk of coming across as dismissive, Kemer does not have much to recommend it aside from the mountains and beaches, and when you take into account that pretty much every town and city along the Turkish Riviera has those exact same mountains and beaches… well, let’s just say it’s not the first place I’d tell you to visit. It’s not that Kemer is a bad town, but it does attract a very specific kind of tourist (the noisy, drunk, slutty club-goer, to put the finest point possible on it), so if you’re staying there and you’re not into the frantic-club-hopping-followed-by-going-home-with-a-random-stranger scene, the place loses its charm quite quickly.

So, given what you now know about both Hürriyet and Kemer, you can imagine my disappointment when, a couple of days ago, our respected national newspaper reported on its front page a story alleging that several persons in Kemer had witnessed the appearance of a UFO. An unnamed person on the scene submitted these amateur photographs as evidence of said object:

Have you stopped laughing yet? Great, let’s continue.

Okay, aside from not being unidentified, the object is not flying, either— as frame 6 clearly shows, it is in fact a common garden variety street lamp, at a distance of about ten metres. And as anyone who has ever spent more than five minutes on flickr.com can tell you, the other five frames are manually unfocused bokeh dots of the exact same street lamp, with varying degrees of aperture interference, or perhaps a bit of Photoshop.

Now, before you go calling hoax, I have another theory. You see, this alleged UFO was apparently spotted at 3:30 in the morning, which just so happens to be around the time that the first wave of club goers comes stumbling out of the clubs, all tripping over each other, laughing at things that don’t exist, and vomiting in various directions. So my educated guess, as a former resident of Kemer, is that drunken clubbers saw a street lamp that appeared to be going in and out of focus and darting around (side effect of consuming most of the alcohol in Turkey in a single evening), and people in that state don’t know how to work their cameras. Simple.

Nonetheless, whether it was a hoax or just a drunken misunderstanding, Hürriyet should have known better than to print this level of crap, and to place the story on the front page is just inexcusable. As a photojournalist myself, I personally could have dug up several local stories that would have been more appropriate for a national paper, if they were that desperate for a quirky front-pager, and it would have saved them the embarrassment of having to resort to reporting identified non-flying objects.

So how about a job, Hürriyet? I’m available for freelancing whenever you’re ready to start having an A-game to bring.

On second thought, given the direction things appear to be going for them, I’m not sure I’d want that on my résumé.

Something interesting happened this morning that made me think about the future of the street drug industry.

I woke up with the full intention of dragging my heels about taking the decorations down, as Epiphany is quite a bittersweet nostalgic time for me, and I’m usually not terribly enthusiastic about crossing over the threshold into That Which Is Not Christmas Anymore. While I was standing in the kitchen contemplating breakfast, however, I noticed that the electricity was off. Hmm. I guess the universe has ways of forcing the issue if there needs to be some time spent away from the internet.

I got the decorations put away, which took a little over an hour (we only have the tree and the stockings), and by the time I’d finished the electricity was still off. I could hear the crew downstairs working on whatever they were working on, and it didn’t sound like they were anywhere near done.

So I sat down and started reading a book. A real, paper book. Even my reading these days usually requires electricity, as books in English are not terribly easy to come by in Antalya, especially if you have a specific title in mind. So I buy ebooks, and I read them on my computer or my PDA— both of which require electricity, not to mention the electricity used to purchase the book in the first place.

When the power finally got switched back on, it was like someone had reconnected my limbs. Granted, I have a different situation than most people— I live far, far away, and without the internet I would have little to no contact at all with anyone from my home planet. But it still got me thinking about where this general trend toward electricity-dependent networks is going. I can certainly see a situation in which some people become reliant on the internet in the same way that some people are reliant on heroin. Perhaps there are people already in that vicinity of addiction, and like the early days of most class-A drugs, there’s nothing in the law to slow it down yet.

What happens when governments do start catching on? State-sanctioned down time, an organised program of Real-Life Thursdays or whatever, with access providers required to switch off a certain number of hours per week? Television as methadone, a way to get us off one box and onto another? Of course I’m being dramatic, but it does make you wonder if the drug dealers of the future will be supplying portable home generators and giving out the phone number of the guy who can hook you up to pirated access on Thursdays, when The Man tries to force you to go outside for a while.

Last week a friend of mine told me she read some poll where people said they’d rather go without sex for two weeks than go without the internet for two weeks. Personally, I don’t see the big scandal about that, unless you’re the kind of person who would normally be having sex several times a day. For many people, only having to go two weeks without sex would be an improvement on their current situation. But the internet, that is something we do several times a day, and not just for fun, either. Even in my little technology-challenged corner of the world, people use the internet for everything from paying the bills, to making the money to pay them. People work online, communicate online, and organise their lives online. It’s not all porn and Scrabble.

I don’t really have a point with this, other than to throw it out there. I’m not worried whether society is headed in the right direction, or predicting that we’ll all be slaves to our computers within the next decade. After all, if humans were any good at predicting accurately, we’d all have flying cars and robot maids by now. Personally, I’d rather go without the internet for two weeks than go without my flying car. Your mileage may vary.

If blood, death, or animal sacrifice offends you in any way, now’s your chance to stop reading, and you most certainly should not click through to the pictures unless you’re okay with seeing those sorts of things.

This week is the four-day Kurban Bayramı festival, which is the second most important holiday in the Islamic calendar. This is something I have avoided dealing with in past years because it involves sacrificing animals by slitting their throats, and I get a bit… emotional about that. Usually I just have to stay in the house, because the place where they do it in our part of town is an empty lot that is visible from where I live, so if I go out, I see it. One half of the lot fills up with sheep and goat farmers, and you can buy your animal there, and then you go to the other side where they have a big concrete slab and meat hooks, and that’s where the deed is done. There are plenty of butchers and assistants and whatever. They do several hundred animals before the day is over.

This year that empty lot has been bought by a private investor, so no kurban. However, our apartment complex has a slab-and-hooks setup in one of the common areas, and I figured my more devout neighbours would be doing their sacrificing there.

A couple of days ago I started thinking about how I was going to handle this. Would I go down there and take pictures? It’s not very often such a significant and unusual event comes right to my doorstep. Historically, the photographers I have admired most are not just the ones who can get the best shots, but the ones who can turn off their personal feelings regarding what is happening at any particular time, and simply concentrate on capturing the moment instead. Anyone who has ever met me in person knows that I am ridiculously mushy when it comes to animals— any time I see any kind of animals when I’m out and about, my initial reaction is to squeal and run toward them, offering kisses and hugs and cuddles, and snacks if I have any. I have no qualms about smell or mange or anything like that; everyone gets equally enthusiastic affection. I also have no sense of embarrassment or shame about it— in fact, I don’t even notice other people around me when I’m in an animal trance.

When I woke up on Monday morning (the first day of the bayram) I was still thinking, I wonder if she’s going to go down there or not, unable to detect even a slight leaning in either direction, and completely detached from the fact that she was me. I got out of bed, started to go about my daily routine, and didn’t think much more about it.

About an hour later I walked out onto the balcony and saw a goat tied to a tree right outside our building, near where the slab is. I grabbed my camera and got a couple of long shots of the goat, then stood there blankly for a while. After a few minutes, a man in an apron appeared from behind one of the buildings, and suddenly I thought, wow, they’re doing it now, I’d better get down there. Next thing I knew, I was out the front door.

I wasn’t nervous; during the ride down in the elevator my only concern was whether I might come back a vegetarian. I pride myself on never making major life decisions based on knee-jerk emotional responses (i.e. I would never be a born-again anything). That’s not to say that I don’t ever take my gut feelings or intuition into account, but rather that I use them only as one piece of a puzzle that is solved by rational analysis. If I ever do make the decision to adopt a meat-free diet, I want it to be because I weighed all the options and came to a logical decision, not because a wittow wamby wooked at me wif his wittow pweading eyes and I fell apart.

When I got down there, the apron guy was sitting on the concrete slab, smoking a cigarette. I asked if I could take photos of the goat, to which he enthusiastically nodded. After I took a few shots, I asked when they were going to sacrifice it. He shrugged and said he was just waiting on everyone to get downstairs. I asked if it would be okay to photograph the actual sacrifice. He said that he had no problems with that, but it would be up to the owners of the individual animals. Plural. I asked how many more animals he was expecting, and he said there would probably be four or five, and that the participating residents had chipped in to hire a butcher to assist, and the butcher would be arriving soon. I guess he thought I was concerned about how they were going to handle that volume of meat.

Slowly things started to come together. A delivery truck arrived with another goat and three sheep. Various families trickled down from the buildings and started assembling. In the end there were maybe 25 people in total.

I don’t feel I need to say too much about the specifics of the kurban itself, because I think the pictures tell the story more than adequately, and there are plenty of explanations in the captions. I will, however, note these few things, which for the most part are impossible to convey with photography:

• The only time during the entire event that I felt any emotion other than boredom (there was a lot of waiting around) was before the very first sacrifice, at the moment when I first saw a man walking with a knife in his hand. He didn’t even have an agenda, he was just meandering around and happened to be holding a knife, and when I saw it, my heart raced a little. Other than that, I was fine. No feelings whatsoever, positive or negative, which surprised me.
• Looking at the photos when I got home was about a thousand times more difficult than actually being down there and photographing it. In fact, I had to stop a couple of times and get away from the screen. I think the difference in response is largely due to the fact that 90% of the actual event was people standing around doing nothing, whereas 90% of the photos are all the intense bits with no break.
• The families brought their small children down there with them, like it was no biggie. At first I thought, how on earth can you let your five-year-old watch a man cut a live sheep’s throat open? Then I thought, actually, if I’d been casually exposed to stuff like this when I was a kid, and taught to accept it, maybe now I wouldn’t be as freaked out as I am about any subject remotely involving death or mortality.
• When you open up the throat of an animal that’s still alive, a very strong and curious odor emanates from it. I asked what it was, and the butcher told me it’s a combination of freshly oxygenated blood (warm metallic smell) and bacteria in the esophagus (internal body odor, basically). By the time they got to the third animal, I couldn’t smell it anymore.
• There wasn’t as much blood as I had imagined there would be.
• Goats respond with anger, sheep with fear. The goats were very vocal and struggled a lot. There was a lot of kicking. The first one even managed to get away briefly, which provided some comic relief as people ran around trying to catch it. The sheep were terrified, and quiet. They didn’t fight back, they just trembled and waited.
• It takes a lot longer than I expected for an animal to die this way. Even after it’s technically dead and the head is completely severed, the eyes look around for a few seconds, and the body continues to buck and kick for nearly a minute.
• Everything was kept really clean. The bleeding was confined to a very small area away from the slab, and while they were skinning and butchering, the slab was hosed down almost constantly. Anything that needed to be thrown away (hooves, skulls) was bagged up and disposed of immediately.
• There was a tremendous sense of community. Everyone had their role. The men butchered, the women cleaned and packaged offal, and the older kids cleared away the stuff that needed to be taken to the dumpster. It kind of had the same energy as when there’s a big family dinner and everyone is helping to prepare some small aspect of it.

The residents who participated in the kurban were very welcoming toward me, and overwhelmingly accommodating about the camera. Nobody had any issues with me at all. They most certainly perceived me as an outsider rather than as their neighbour, and they seemed comfortable with that arrangement, so I played along. Basically I just wanted the best possible atmosphere in which to take photos, and that’s exactly what I got.

The full set of 66 photos is here. Because of flickr’s TOS and also because I’m mindful that not everyone wants to be exposed to these kinds of images, many of the photos are marked as restricted content. They are not private, anyone can view them, but in order to see all of them you’ll have to be logged into flickr (signup is free if you don’t already have an account) and you’ll have to have your SafeSearch filter turned off (which is in your account settings).

I have no idea what significance this experience will have in the context of either my photography or my life, but I do have the feeling that I crossed a line that intersects both.

Oh, and by the way, I’m still an omnivore.

Sundown at the bazaar is a strange time. It’s impractical for most of the vendors to try to carry on after dark, so when the sun starts to disappear behind the mountains, that’s the home stretch. For the food vendors especially, they don’t want to have to take home a load of produce that may not be in salable condition the next day. So in an effort to get rid of it, they drop their prices to rock bottom. Of course, everyone knows this is how it works, so people wait until sundown to come out and do their food shopping.

That last bazaar rush of the day is mayhem, and for an introvert like me, it’s also hellish. I’ll pay the extra ten pennies per kilo for onions in order not to have to deal with mobs of shouting people, pushing and shoving and getting in each other’s way. I’m happy to go late morning or early afternoon, and get the choice of the produce without having to fight other people for the best of what’s left.

At closing, some vendors find they haven’t sold all their stock, but financially it’s not worth it for them to lug it all back home. So they leave it on the sidewalk— huge piles of tomatoes, oranges, and whatever else didn’t sell. You’d think there’d be a mad rush for all this free stuff, but no. It’s a kind of unspoken rule that the leftover food on the sidewalk, still in perfect condition, is for those who can’t afford to pay. Well into the night, the poorest families and the homeless rummage through the piles of vegetables and fruits, filling huge bags until they have what they need for the week. No one stops them or bothers them. They come in quietly, they leave quietly, and by morning all the food is gone.

I didn’t photograph the night shoppers, though it would have been easy enough; I think if you’re willing to swallow your pride and accept free food on the sidewalk to feed your family, then I’ll give you the dignity of not being cheap blog fodder. We all do what we need to do to take care of our own. Nothing wrong with that.

My first day in England was eye-opening. I had been told to dress comfortably for international travel, and so I had worn my standard Texas errand-running uniform— denim shorts and a t-shirt. It was great for the flight, but when I arrived in Manchester the following morning, David, who picked me up at the airport, looked at me and laughed.

“You’ll probably want to dig your coat out of your suitcase before we go outside,” he said.

I squinted at him and tried to assess if he was joking or not. Surely he didn’t really mean I needed to wear a coat. It’s frickin March, for god’s sake! On what planet would one even need to think about a coat in March? I mean, we’re almost in summer, what the hell?

I decided he was trying to trick me with this coat nonsense, which was just as well because I didn’t actually have a coat. There was probably a light jacket packed in with my cargo stuff, but that was on a pallet somewhere waiting to board a freight plane in San Antonio. In my suitcases I had only packed all the obvious stuff one would need in March: shorts, t-shirts, flip-flops, bikinis. It was, after all, nearly spring break, and since I was told we lived near the coast I figured the beaches would be packed within another week or two. Obviously I didn’t have a job, so I was planning on spending my days relaxing and enjoying the rest of spring. Hence the wardrobe choices.

David begged me, “please, let me buy you a coat in the airport.” I laughed at how far he was taking the prank. No one buys clothes at airport prices. Then he offered me his coat, and that’s when I noticed all the other people carrying coats. In March.

I started to wonder how many people were in on the joke.

Then we stepped outside the airport and a blast of wind and freezing rain shrapnel pelted me in the legs and sent my hair flying 90 degrees out to the side.

David told me to go back inside, and he went and got the car.

During the drive to Blackpool I gazed in utter amazement at the weather. David half-joked that I was probably wanting to go back to Texas. What he didn’t know is that all my life, I had pretty much been confined indoors in front of the air-conditioner from April until October, because I have never been able to handle heat. It makes me crazy to the point where I want to take hostages. I’m not a fan of direct sunlight, it hurts my eyes, and I sweat so easily that even mildly warm days reduce me to a stinky, soaked-through, dripping mess. I hate summer, have always hated it, and I had no idea that there were places outside Antarctica where one could find cool weather in the summer.

So England was heaven.

Then I saw a field with little white dots scattered across it. It was hard to see what they were through the rain-spattered car window. I wondered, but I didn’t think too much about it. Then a mile or so up the road I saw another field of white dots. What the hell could that be? I rolled down my window a tiny bit to peek out.

Teeny tiny eensy weensy baby sheepies.

I squealed. I’d never seen any sheep at all before in real life, much less bebeh ones. To this day, that is my fondest memory of “how stuff is in England.” In March the landscape just erupts in tiny sheepies, everywhere. Everywhere, all over the whole damned island. It’s the cutest thing you’ve ever seen in your life.

Later I learned a very sobering lesson about not approaching the baby sheepies for cuddles, but I’ll save it for another time.

And that was my first couple of hours as an American living a non-American life.

About a week ago the weather cooled down to the mid 30s (low 90s F) but the humidity soared. I didn’t handle it very well. As most of you know, like many Turkish households we don’t have an air conditioner, so we’re pretty much at the mercy of the fan and the weather. I got excited when I saw forecasts for temperatures I thought sounded reasonable, but my hopes were destroyed when the moisture in the air combined with the warm weather kept everything (including me) sticky and uncomfortable all the time. Add to this the fact that I was nursing a head cold, and the result wasn’t pretty.

When the temperature went back up to 50° (122°F) three days ago, I noted that I was actually a lot more comfortable, simply because the humidity had burned off. Sure, 50° is hot, but at least when the weather is dry the sweat evaporates quickly and you stay feeling somewhat clean, or as clean as can be expected considering your life has become a sauna.

Yesterday was an ugly combination of 43° and humid, which made last night nearly unbearable. Sauna turned quickly to steam room. I couldn’t get to sleep until almost 7:00 this morning.

And then at 9:00, the unthinkable happened— the electricity went out. This is something you just have to deal with when you make the decision to live in Turkey (I understand it’s much the same situation in India). The power grid isn’t up to handling the increasing numbers of air conditioners being installed in homes, and when the load gets to a certain point, the whole system just shuts down. Sometimes it’s only out for a few minutes; one time during my first summer here the power got knocked out for four days. You just never know. I tried to continue sleeping, knowing the best situation would be if I could wake up after the power was already back on and the fan was working again. That plan lasted about half an hour before I finally gave up and peeled myself off the damp bed. There’s no way I could ever sleep in this weather without the fan.

So there we were— no fan, no refrigerator, no freezer, not even any television or music or internet to distract us from the rapidly increasing humidity and heat. As temperatures soared up into the high 40s, I sat down at the balcony table and read a story in the newspaper about the several hundred heat-related deaths in eastern Europe this week. Great. I put the paper down and wandered around the house looking for the window with the best breeze coming through it. Nothing.

Noon came and went. Still no electricity. Missing my fan desperately and trying to take my mind off my pining, I read a magazine that a friend had given me two weeks ago and that had been sitting on my desk ever since. I slowly worked straight through from the first page all the way to the back cover. I pretended to be interested in the latest fashion trends, and marveled at the models on the pages, these miraculously sweat-free people who somehow managed to walk through a summer day without melting, smiles on their faces as if hot weather were something one could be remotely pleased about in some twisted alternate universe. I closed my eyes and dreamed of autumn, mentally working out how many days left until November.

At one point in the late afternoon my face was so red from the heat and sweat was running down my cheeks so quickly that my housemate asked if I was crying. Ha, as if I could muster the strength for a reaction that strong. I mumbled something indistinct and went back into my daze. It suddenly dawned on me that countries that observe siesta time don’t do so voluntarily— they simply slip into a heat coma during the hottest part of the day.

In the early evening, having exhausted our supply of newspapers and magazines, I found myself wandering around the house looking for something, anything to take my mind off the heat. Then, a miracle— I heard the alarm from the refrigerator, the beeping noise it makes when the temperature is too high inside. Electricity! I hurried into the kitchen, switched off the alarm, and dashed into the bedroom where my lovely fan was waiting for me. Sweet, sweet fan, how I missed you!

I noted the time— 19:03. We’d been without electricity for ten hours.

At least we’ll have the fan for sleeping tonight, with any luck…

Earlier this month I announced I was going to run a marathon next March, and then after having spent the following week or so floundering around buying things and trying to get my head around the enormity of the task, I realised I had no focus except the vague cloud of “marathon,” and as we all know if you focus on nothing, you’re sure to hit it (see also: several past marathon attempts, all with no clear plan and all ending in failure). So this past weekend I decided to get organised in order to gain confidence about the huge mountain of work ahead of me.

I always feel better when I get things written down— usually the situation is not as dire as I think it is once I see it all laid out in front of me. So in hopes of quelling my rumbling anxiety, on Saturday I started to make a training calendar (I used good ol’ iCal, since I wasn’t using my iCal for anything else). I started out by taking a notebook (a real one, you know, paper and all that) and writing down everything that I would work into a training schedule if the world were perfect and I had endless resources. I decided I wanted to do running (obviously), some other cardio activity (swimming seems obvious), some core stability training on the Swiss ball, yoga, and something involving meditation or some other kind of mental concentration discipline. As it turned out, when I mapped all these things out, they didn’t take up as much of a day as I expected. I can get them all done before lunch time and relax in the afternoon. I also made a space on my calendar to keep track of my weight and my daily food intake; if I’m going to launch myself around Antalya for 26 miles, I need to do myself the favour of getting the rest of this extra weight off. The exercise will help, certainly, but I need to stop shoveling goodies in my mouth like it’s Christmas.

The race is on a Sunday, so I designated Saturday as my full rest day, and when the time comes that long runs are a possibility, Sunday will be the day for those. There will also be a break from running on Wednesdays, which is when I’ll fit in the swimming or whatever I decide on. Swiss ball work and yoga (I subscribe to Yoga Today, which is free and unbelievably great) will happen every day of the week, as will meditation. Everything starts at low levels and builds gradually over time. When I added it up on Saturday, I learned that there were 260 days between then and the race. I was panicked about that before, but now that I have a written plan it appears to be plenty of time.

So I went out for my first “real” training run yesterday morning (Sunday, day 259 if you will). I set a goal for the week: by Friday, the last training run of the week, I want to be running 15 minutes non-stop. I’m not a beginning runner, but I am quite a bit out of practice, so I thought this was a reasonable goal.

Three minutes into my Sunday run I didn’t think my goal was so reasonable anymore. I started my run at 7:00 in the morning, and as soon as I hit the road I realised I’d started much too late. Already the heat and the sun were almost more than I could take, and I was feeling like a big fat radiator bouncing up and down the street. I finished the session without dying, but only just, and to be honest I walked most of it. Still, there’s only one first day of training, and it can only get better from there. I went home and did the rest of my training work and felt at least somewhat accomplished, but during the run I was really unhappy, and I didn’t feel much better about it afterwards.

Last night I thought a lot about how I could improve my approach. As a habit I listen to a lot of Gil Fronsdal’s teachings via Zencast. You don’t have to be a Buddhist (I’m not) to get into Vipassana meditation and the practical daily applications Zencast offers, and I recommend this podcast to anyone who wants to shake up their brain and explore something new. Gil talks a lot about “hanging out” with feelings as a coping device (a technique which is often used by mental health professionals to treat phobias). He uses the example of boredom and restlessness during meditation, and he advises that the best way to hang out with that is to label it in your head (“boredom,” “restlessness,”) and if you just keep hanging out and acknowledging those feelings by labeling them and accepting them rather than judging or acting on them, eventually the bell rings (to signify the end of the meditation period), and then you’re free to go and it turns out it didn’t kill you to sit there after all. I wondered if I could apply this technique to my unhappiness and frustration with running.

I knew that one thing I was going to have to do, aside from getting up earlier, was get rid of my timer. As I mentioned before, I already ditched my heart rate monitor months ago because it was making me obsessed with numbers instead of running. But on Sunday I noticed my watch was doing the same thing— I couldn’t stop myself from looking at it every three seconds to see if it was time to quit yet. That’s no fun, and it keeps my brain from being open to things like awareness of the feelings in my body and perhaps, god forbid, enjoying the scenery. But of course I still need a way to time my runs, so I came up with an idea: I made an iTunes playlist approximately 15 minutes long (this week I’m enjoying songs from the new Chemical Brothers album), and popped it onto the iPod Shuffle. I added a track of silence at the end to make sure I would know when to stop running. So now all I have to do is start the iPod when I start my run, and simply run until everything goes quiet. No watch to obsess over, and great music to run to. I decided to give it a try this morning and combine it with the “hanging out” and labeling techniques.

I went out at 4:50 this morning (day 258). The weather was much, much more tolerable. I walked for a minute or so, and then fired up the iPod as I started to run. Within a couple of minutes I was really unhappy and desperately wanted to slow to a walk again. I labeled those feelings in my head. “Unhappy.” “Tired.” “Want to quit.” “Fed up.” “Hate running.” “Unhappy.”

I know you all know the phenomenon by which repeating a word over and over causes the word to start mutating in your head, until it sounds alien and eventually loses all meaning. Well, today I discovered the same thing happens with labeling feelings. You really get into your labels, and the very act of labeling causes those labeled feelings to distort and then dissipate. So after a few minutes, “unhappy” and “tired” became “blank” and “I’m not sure what this one is. Neutral, I guess.” I labeled those feelings and hung out with them, too. Then some outside stuff I was experiencing started creeping into my labeling: “mountain.” “Brick wall.” “White cat.” “Chemical Brothers.” I felt myself smiling. “Smiling.” The fact that I was busy labeling things meant that I had no room in my head to tell myself all those stories about how I could just quit and go back to bed, or about how I’m too out of shape to run a marathon, or about how it’s ridiculous to put myself through this when I’m clearly not cut out for it. We all know the stories we make up in our heads, every excuse in the book about why we shouldn’t succeed at doing something difficult.

In fact, I was so busy labeling things that when the music came to a sudden halt I nearly tripped and fell over my own feet .

And that was it. On the second day of training I ran 15 minutes non-stop, accidentally. I wasn’t supposed to do that until Friday. And at the end of the run I was settled and happy and completely devoid of all the negative thoughts I’ve usually filled myself with by that point. My experiment worked. I’m going to try it again tomorrow.

I think I’ve really hit on something here— as I was walking home I thought to myself that if it weren’t for my current poor state of physical fitness, I might have continued to run like that for several hours, just noticing things and labeling them and not judging or criticising or feeling sorry for myself. Later in the day when I really didn’t want to do my yoga class, I labeled my way through that, as well, and honestly I think I connected with the poses today in a way I never have before. I’ve never paid this much attention in my life.

So I’m feeling good about this training stuff.

Incidentally, the new shoes are working out well so far— they’re a lot less like new shoes than most new shoes are. I do have a strange blister in the arch of my right foot, but I’m pretty sure that’s due to my flip-flops and not the runners. I’ll tape the blister for a couple of days and see what happens.

257 days to go. “Confident.”