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.

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.

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.”

At least once a week I get asked some variation on this question: what’s it like to live in an Arab country? Answer: I don’t know. I’ve never lived in an Arab country. But wait, Turks are Arabs, right?

No, that couldn’t be more wrong. But it seems to be such a common misconception that I thought I’d take a few minutes here to clarify a few points that often leave people confused:

1. Turkey is in the Middle East, and Middle East countries are by definition Arab. I know a lot of Turks who would disagree with the first part, and a lot of Israelis who would disagree with the second part. Not all Middle East countries are Arab, and many Turks think of Turkey as identifying more with Europe and other parts of Asia in terms of political and cultural likeness. I personally think of Turkey as a bridge between Europe and Asia, but there’s a lot of room for debate on that subject.
2. Even if you don’t call it a Middle Eastern country, Turkey is still adjacent to all those Arab countries, and Turks are mostly Muslim, so they must be pretty much the same as Arabs. That’s like saying that Germans must be French because their country is adjacent to France and they’re Christian just like the French. Turks are, ethnically speaking, Ural-Altaic peoples, more closely related to Mongols and Chinese than to Arabs. In fact, historically the line between “Mongolian” and “Turkish” is rather blurred. In Western schoolbooks we tend to identify Genghis Khan and Attila The Hun as Mongols; most Turks see those figures as Turkish or at the very least, Turkic (and though Turkic they certainly are, “Turkish” is a more dynamic term and may or may not apply).
3. Like all Middle Eastern peoples, Turks speak Arabic, so that makes them Arab. This is just flat-out wrong. Although it’s doubtless that some Turks do know how to speak Arabic, the language of the Turkish people is, oddly enough, Turkish. Turkish (wiki) is an Altaic language, which linguistically has more in common with Korean or Japanese than it does with Arabic. Arabic is a Semitic language, more closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic (wiki), and having very little to do with any Altaic language, much less any Turkic one. I think where the confusion lies with this is that most Turks are Muslim, and Arabic is the language of Islam, and many people confuse religion with ethnicity. Also, up until 1928 most Turkish speakers wrote their language using Ottoman script, which to an untrained eye looks indistinguishable from Arabic. But in modern times Turkish is written using the Latin alphabet, albeit with a few modified characters.
4. Turks look like Arabs, so it’s an easy mistake to make. Have a look at the photo above, taken in eastern Turkey by Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Do those men look Arab to you? Of course not. And even within the group, their facial features cover a range from European all the way to East Asian. The truth is, Turks vary in appearance greatly throughout the country— some have fair skin and light hair, others have dark skin and light eyes, and still others have features like those found in Altaic peoples thousands of kilometres east of Turkey. That’s not to say that some Turks don’t resemble some Arabs, but then again I know a few Germans whom one might mistake for French at a glance. It doesn’t mean it’s okay to lump them all together.

As a bit of a side anecdote, by coincidence I stumbled upon a forum a few weeks ago (sorry, I can’t remember the url) where a Korean man was making some very interesting points about ethnicity versus cultural development in Asia. At one point he was giving some narrative background about Turkic languages and Turkic peoples, and then someone else in the conversation used the term “Central Asia,” which set the Korean guy off on a huge discourse about how the whole concept of “Central Asia” was an invention by the Russians to try to solidify the Soviet hold on those areas, and that if it weren’t for the tremendous Soviet pressure on those nations to conform to Russian culture and language, i.e. if they’d all been left to progress “naturally,” then we’d probably now be referring to that entire gigantic region as the United Nations of Turkistan. Someone then asked the guy exactly where he would draw the borders of this theoretical Turkistan, and the Korean man suggested that even Korea and Japan wouldn’t be out of the question. He mentioned that when he and his family had visited eastern Turkey, they often got mistaken for Turkish because their facial structure is so similar to the Turks living in that area.

This got me to thinking about my own observations over the past few months, starting back when I discovered the Azerbaijani television network and was shocked to hear that the spoken language would be nearly indistinguishable from Turkish if it weren’t for those Russian-sounding words they throw in from time to time. And they’re starting to use a Roman script like we do, but when they were Soviet they were forced to use a Cyrillic script, and in addition some of them still use an Arabic-based script as well. But the spoken Azeri language is pretty much like Turkish (I imagine that this is much like the minor differences between spoken Norwegian and spoken Swedish). Same goes for Kazakh, and Turkmen, and Uzbek— Emirhan says he can understand people in all those languages, with some minor vocabulary adjustments.

So that got me thinking about how far east the similarities would carry, and I went to YouTube and started watching some Mongolian programming… unbelievable. I expected it to sound something like my stereotype of Mandarin Chinese, but it doesn’t— rather it sounds a lot like Turkish with some heavy Russian influences (some of the grammatical structures are Indo-European rather than Ural-Altaic, but only some). I was shocked at how much I understood. Also, one of my friends who comes from the western part of China speaks a regional Chinese dialect that she claims is “so close to Turkish, it’s scary.” She said she’s actually had small conversations with Turks and been able to hobble along with basic to moderate understanding.

I don’t know much Korean or Japanese, but Emirhan said Japanese people who speak Turkish almost never have a strong foreign accent. They sound like Turks. And the few Japanese people I’ve met here who learned Turkish have all said that it was an easy language for them to learn, and the pronunciations came naturally. I don’t know any Koreans in Turkey, so I can’t comment on that, but I know what the guy on the forum means when he says that some Koreans and some eastern Turks get mistaken for one another. And it’s possible that you could throw a couple of Mongolians into the picture and still be unsure as to who comes from where. This is one of the reasons why Turks get so annoyed when Westerners assume that “Turkish” and “Arab” are the same thing. Turks have more in common with the East Asians than they do with the Arabs. The only thing Turks ever shared with Arabia was a writing system, and even that’s now long gone, as it never really suited the Turkish language well anyway.

It all gets even more spooky when I think back to a year or so ago when I thought Emirhan was pulling my leg about this supposed theory that Native Americans are Turkic, and then when I did the research to back up my claim that he was talking nonsense, I discovered instead that in several ancient Native American languages, the word for “sky” is the same as the Turkish word, and the words for many of the colours are the same as in Turkish, and so on. Apparently a lot of experts in the field agree that these Americans also orginate from somewhere in the United Nations of Turkistan. And then there are the similarities in some of the faces— again with the high cheekbones and the slightly angled rectangular eyes. Of course I can’t say for sure that that’s where Native Americans came from, but certainly it’s an interesting theory.

So back to my original point, if you were unsure before about whether Turkey was an Arab country, hopefully I’ve cleared that up. But even if you were familiar with Turkish ethnicity before now, perhaps it’s still worth a look at some online resources if you’re curious to learn more about the great mystery of these highly nomadic and charismatic people. I, for one, am always on the lookout for new clues, but I’m not kidding myself— this is a puzzle that will never be completely solved.

Edit, May 2009: I’m closing comments on this post, just because it’s been almost two years, and I think everything that needs to be said has been said. We’re now to the point where people are either starting to repeat what others have said, or are going off-topic. I’ve deleted some of the off-topic comments where it was obvious that certain contributors were using this thread as a place to voice their propaganda, which may have its place elsewhere, but is irrelevant here. The point of this article was to clear up misconceptions about race, not to start a flame war about which race is better than the others. So… yeah, comments closed.

The main point of our shopping trip yesterday was that I needed new running shoes. My Asics are not all that old, but there were a few issues. One, they’re men’s shoes (I have wide feet, and many times men’s shoes fit me better), and so I always thought they were ugly, even uglier than running shoes usually are… there must be some law that says running shoes can’t be sexy, because every running shoe in history has been ugly. Two, Emirhan’s always had his eye on my Asics— he wears them about as often as I do, and since his feet are bigger than mine, the shoes are now loose and slip a lot. His excuse when borrowing my shoes was that he was planning on buying me a new pair anyway, so yesterday I finally gave him my Asics for good and held him to his promise of getting me some new runners.

I never thought in a million years I’d own a pair of running shoes by Adidas. Even Asics was a bit pop-culturey for me; normally I go for Brooks or New Balance or something geeky like that. But yesterday when I saw these A3 GigaRides in the Adidas store, I couldn’t believe how cool they looked. I told myself that silver running shoes this sweet could not possibly be suitable for actual training. Everyone knows that quality running shoes are required to be ugly. But I decided to try the A3s on and see what they felt like.

I was shocked— they felt great. They’re a better fit than the Asics and they offer more support. They were comfortable and performed well in my (albeit weak) test run through the store. They were ridiculously expensive, but that’s just a fact of life with running shoes, and Emirhan’s opinion was that if I liked them so much and they were going to help me get through my training, then they kind of pay for themselves in usefulness. So we bought them. I’m giggling with Product Love. I can’t wait to start training in earnest.

And speaking of training… I had a long talk with an old friend of mine, a guy who has known me since I was a teenager and is familiar with how I work best and where my strong and weak points are. Coincidentally, he is also an Iron Man triathlete and accomplished distance runner, so he knows a thing or two about running as well. I contacted him because I had done a lot of research on the internet about marathon training and preparation and had discovered that marathons and pregnancy have a lot in common— everyone on the internet has a different opinion about the best way to proceed, they’re all willing to fight like pit bulls about it, and in the end I just end up thinking that none of these people are me, none of them can possibly know the unique requirements of my specific person, and perhaps I’m better off making my own decisions, regardless how ill-advised. After all, that’s how I ended up in Turkey, and Europe before that— by going against what everyone thought was right for me and sticking to my gut instincts. In fact, that’s how I’ve made most of the major decisions of my life. I don’t think I’ve ever chosen the popular option. So I asked my friend what his take on the training issue was.

To my surprise, he agreed with me. He said I should spend less time listening to the advice of others and more time trusting what my body tells me. I’m not new to running, so it’s not like I need someone to hold my hand through every little step of training. He said that if more runners would spend less time making up arbitrary blanket “rules” of training and more time focusing on their individual needs (which by definition will never match anyone else’s on the planet), there would be a lot more people capable of finishing super events like the Iron Man. Problem is, people try to make middle-of-the-road guidelines that fit everyone, and the result is exactly that: middle-of-the-road. Mediocre all around. No one standing out in any way.

So that decided it for me. I’m going to do what I always do with everything: take what I’ve learned from various sources and combine bits of this and pieces of that and make my own special regime. It may not suit anyone else, but it’s going to suit me. It will incorporate all the running I need and all the rest I require. It will also include supplementary training like yoga and meditation (I’m a big believer that endurance starts from a the metaphysical rather than the physical). It will be tightly organised around a modified diet and lifestyle. When March rolls around, I am going to be a marathoning machine from top to bottom, focused and prepared. I may not be the fastest runner on the race day, but that’s okay. I’m there to win in a different way.

So there you have it. I’ve got all the gear I need, and I have a plan— now I just need to get to work.

I’m going to bed early tonight and setting the alarm for the crack of dawn. My new shoes need breaking in.

Running and I have one of those love-hate relationships that makes you roll your eyes. We argue a lot. We break up. We get back together. It’s good for a while. Then I cheat. Then we break up again. Two weeks later, he calls me wanting to forgive and forget. We get back together. This is how it’s been for years.

It started back when I was a kid. I was quite an athletic child, always top of my class in gymnastics and accomplished in several styles of dance. When we had those standardised fitness tests in school, I always came out at the head of the chin-ups and sit-ups charts. I was also a very strong swimmer and played softball for a couple of seasons when I was nine or ten.

But running was a different story. We used to have to run the mile in phys ed, and for some reason I could never do it. I’d get about a quarter of the way and be in such agony that I had to lie down, on the track if necessary. My legs felt fine; it was my lungs that were screaming for me to stop. My P.E. teachers always said that it was because I was out of shape, but I didn’t see how that could be possible— I was an active child who was exercising everyday. To this day I wonder if I had some kind of asthma or other condition that kept me from completing the mile like everyone else. Even the little weaklings in my class could run the mile, but I just lay on the ground gasping for breath, my lungs on fire.

It annoyed me that I couldn’t do it, so running became this Thing with me. I looked for ways around the breathing issue. The obvious choice was to not run such a long way. I have strong legs, and I quickly discovered that I could sprint well over short distances. In high school I became quite good at the 50 and 100 yard races. I could even pull off a 400 if I had to, but that was my limit. Any more than that and I couldn’t handle the breathing.

As I phased into adulthood and left structured exercise classes behind, I started to wonder if I could train myself to run further. Over the years I’ve struggled with this— I’ve managed a couple of 5ks in my time, but nothing longer than that. My breathing problems settled down a bit as I got older, though I still struggle to some extent. When I was in my early 20s, I started to get this idea in my head that I wanted to run a marathon, to prove to Running that it was I who was the boss of him and not the other way around. I made plan after plan to run various marathons. In every case, I’d let my training get to the point where I could run about 5k, and then I’d plateau and eventually give up.

So now I’m 34, still running semi-regularly for fitness, still not breaking the 5k barrier. I had kind of decided that maybe I was just a 5k runner and there wasn’t any horizon past that.

Then, back in March of this year I discovered that we have a marathon right here in Antalya. Right here in my face where I can’t ignore it. Because I’m a location blogger, it made sense to cover the event. I got a press pass from the organisers, and Emirhan and I rode the press bus all the way around the course during the race. This was the first time I’d ever seen a marathon in real life, and I was both inspired and frightened by what I saw. Those who finished did so in great agony, and some of the unlucky ones were picked up on the course by ambulances. It made me wonder why people put themselves through it. It also made me wonder if I should take up marathon training again.

After the race Emirhan and I had a talk. He’s a bodybuilder and athlete himself, and seeing the marathon up close really made him want to do it. I shared with him the story of my lifelong battle to run. We sort of shrugged and said, “maybe next year,” but at that time we had some tentative plans to do some traveling abroad and we didn’t think we’d be here in March 2008. In any case, we made a vague promise that if those travel plans fell through, then we’d definitely do the Antalya marathon instead.

Well, this week we learned that we won’t be abroad after all. We’ll be right here in Antalya in March of next year. So I guess that means we’re officially training for the marathon now.

I’m terrified. I’m going to take some convincing. I’m not worried about Emirhan— he’s unbelievably fit and could probably run the marathon tomorrow. But I don’t want him to have to worry about me. I want to be prepared enough so that he can concentrate on his own race (which will be over much sooner than mine) and I can concentrate on what I’m doing.

This means I have to start training now. Summer is coming, and with it the 50-degree heat that Antalya is famous for (that’s 122, folks). Can I train in those conditions? Maybe, if I train at five in the morning. Am I going to encounter lung issues again? I won’t know until I start running longer distances. Maybe I’ll have to see a doctor about that. I’ll definitely have to get some new running shoes. Some good socks. Maybe a couple of cute outfits to motivate me. And I’m going to have to keep a serious eye on what I’m eating.

Having said that, I don’t want to get so obsessed with all those things that the fun gets sucked out of running. I actually enjoy running now, and if something stops being enjoyable then I just won’t do it, end of story. I already gave up my heart rate monitor because it was turning me into a numbers freak instead of a runner. So I have to strike a balance. I know that for me, my internet support network is important. I have lots of online friends who know lots of stuff about running, and I’ll be calling on them when times are tough. I’ll probably also join whatever social networks I run across. I’ll find ways to keep this fun.

I still don’t quite believe I’m up for this, but maybe that’s just because I’m tired today and even doing the laundry seems like a lot of effort. Everyone I’ve asked so far thinks I’m definitely capable of running the full distance, so that’s a good sign. I have very supportive friends. Now I just need to find it in me to live up to my half of the bargain. Watch this space. But until further notice, you should consider this an official declaration of my intention to run 26.2 miles here in Antalya on the 2nd of March next year. It makes me nervous just to say that. Yikes.

I mentioned a couple of days ago about my annoyance with fad diets… it still amazes me that even in this age of information, reasonably intelligent adults will go on fad diet after fad diet, lose weight and then immediately gain it all back again plus an extra twenty pounds, and still latch onto whatever the next fad diet is as if this one is going to be the one. As my doctor once told me, “if any diet worked, there would only be that one diet, and it would be called The Diet, and everyone in the world would be on it and there wouldn’t be any fat people.” Well said. I’m constantly baffled at the awful things people will do to their organs and systems (ketosis, anyone? my stepmother got ill from that) because they think a fad diet will solve all their problems.

The above picture is me, believe it or not, back in December 2003, just before I moved to Turkey. I was 240 pounds (109 kilograms) in that photo. I came to Turkey in May of 2004, and by the one-year anniversary of the above photo (i.e. in December 2004), I was down to 160 pounds (you can see a current photo of me on the about page).

So how did I do it? Well, I promise you I wouldn’t have kept the weight off this long if I’d lost it on a fad diet. No, it was moving to Turkey that did it, the entire lifestyle change. Especially when I first moved here, I had some friends who ran a restaurant up the road from me, and I ate there all the time because I don’t cook. I didn’t know how to ask for things in Turkish (still don’t to a great extent), and so I just had to eat whatever they brought me, which was the same thing they were all eating— lean meat or fish, rice, and salad. I didn’t know how to ask for sauce or mayonnaise. I didn’t know how to ask for seconds. So I didn’t have any of those things. I also didn’t have my car (I sold it when I moved to Turkey), so I walked everywhere. Everywhere.

I also didn’t have my scale, so at first I didn’t notice what was happening, but eventually it became clear that my big-girl clothes were falling off of me. So I bought some smaller stuff. And then two months later I had to buy smaller clothes again. And again. And now, three years later, I can’t remember what it was like to drive everywhere, to drive to a restaurant and order a giant meal with gravy all over everything. I still walk most everywhere, and I still eat the standard lean-and-healthy Turkish fare.

When I tell people how fat I used to be, at first they’re surprised, but then they say, “oh yes, of course you were fat, you’re American.” But that is their mistaken stereotype— I was never fat when I lived in the United States. I didn’t get fat until I moved to England in 1998. Gravy and creamy sauces are very popular in England, as are fried potatoes (or some other kind of potato) with every restaurant meal. I’m a fan of all of those things, and if you offer them to me, I’m going to eat them (or at least, I would have at that time). Another unfair stereotype is that English food is bland and tasteless— I can assure you that’s not the case. England has some of the most amazing restaurants in the world. I should know, I ate at most of them. It took me six years to gain all that weight, and not a pound of it was gained on U.S. soil.

So I guess what I’m saying is that although it may seem like an extreme solution to sell your car and move to a Mediterranean country where you don’t speak the language in order to train yourself to change your lifestyle and eating habits, it is one way to do it, and though for me it was an accidental side effect, I’m so thankful to Turkey and Turkish cuisine for helping me pull myself together and realise what a toll Western overeating and laziness had taken on my body. I do still enjoy my treats, but I walk them off, and I now understand the importance of moderation and balance in my meals. For me, this is a change for life.

One of my favourite day trips is the four-hour drive down the winding coastal road to Kaş, and then a short boat trip across the bay to the island of Kastellorizo, which the Turks call Meis. Meis is the closest Greek island to where I live, and as such is also the closest opportunity for me to take advantage of duty-free shopping and freely available pork products. Also, it’s simply a gorgeous place to visit, which is just as well because these visits are a fact of life for those of us with visa restrictions who have to leave Turkey every three months. I’ve been doing these trips quarterly for two years, and every time I visit Meis I discover something new.

The last time I took a boat to Meis it was a lovely, warm spring day and I was in an exploring mood. The tiny village where the boat docks is where most people hover and shop and eat while waiting for the boat to go back to Turkey; I’m usually among them but today I’m feeling adventurous and the weather is perfect for hiking. The boat captain tells us we have two hours before we head back. I glance up at the smallish mountain that hugs the village to the bay, and as soon as I see an alley that leads upward, I disappear between buildings to discover what’s backstage.

Even though there’s a mystery pain building up in the toes and the ball of my left foot, it still only takes me about twenty minutes to get to some level ground at the top of the first peak. This island is just a series of tiny mountains that are easily navigable on foot. At this plateau I discover several abandoned restaurants (presumably this is because the sun is out and Greeks, like most Mediterraneans, are nocturnal), a school house, and something that looks like it used to be a governmental building but now bears no signs of life.

The Greek word for “thank you” is efharisto. If I live to be a hundred I will never forget this word, because I had it indelibly burned into my brain by an English friend of mine many years ago, right before the first time I ever went to Greece. He said to me, “think of it as ‘Ed Harris toe,’ but switch the D sound for an F.” Efharisto. See? Now you’ll never forget it, either.

On my way down the other side of the mountainette, I start to encounter locals. Mediterranean people are generally chatty, which makes me nervous. I’m an introvert, and even if we include efharisto I can still count all the Greek words I know on one hand with fingers left over. So I’m hoping to avoid conversation. I realise my fears are unfounded as I pass several people who simply raise one hand up in a gesture of greeting as they continue to gaze at the ground and keep walking. This is my kind of place.

When I reach sea level again I find myself at a village marina that’s a carbon copy of the one where our boat is docked, except this village is a ghost town. There are a few work crews set up inside the shells of newly-constructed buildings, but they’re off home on their lunch breaks, and that means this marina is silent. There are no tourists, no boats, not even any residents— just a mixture of older buildings and half-built newer ones. It looks like someone has built a 1:1 model of the other marina but hasn’t gotten around to painting the figurines of the people yet. I’m alone here, and it feels great. I start to look for a place where I can sit down and rest my aching foot, which has now progressed to the throbbing stage around my toes.

I make my way down following the curve of the marina to the other side, where I had already spotted a small park with benches and the entrance to what appears to be a cemetary. Next to the cemetary is one of the smallest churches I’ve ever seen, glowing white and pristine. This must be where funerals happen. It probably doubles as a wedding chapel and a house for Sunday services as well. The front door is open, but I don’t go inside. I went to Catholic school; I’ve been in enough small churches to last me a lifetime.

When I reach the bayside park I settle down on one of benches and remove my left shoe to examine my foot. There’s some redness and swelling at the extremities, a dull pulsing ache, and a bit of itchiness. Surely these are early symptoms of Ed Harris Toe. I decide my condition is not terminal and put my shoe back on. I’m far from my starting point and I don’t want to miss the boat back to Turkey.

I walk back via a different route from the way I came, which isn’t as interesting as I thought it would be because I just end up at the same plateau with the same school house, and then back down to the old village where my fellow tourists are waiting at the same café where I left them. Everything is in slow motion, almost paused. The sun is shining, people are still, hardly anyone moves except to breathe. My interest in exploring has been overridden by the blazing sunlight, and I’m feeling lazy now. I meander back to the boat for a nap.

When I wake up I hear music and a mild commotion, and I can feel the boat is moving along the water. As I open my eyes the first thing I see is a glass of red wine being thrust at me. “Drink, Melissa?” the boat captain asks. Sure, why not. The captain has received a gift from a friend on the island, a five-litre box of Greek wine with a tap, and he’s in a sharing mood. As I look around, I see the source of the commotion— the other passengers have a three-glass headstart on me and have broken into spontaneous dancing on the deck. The radio is blaring some cheesy Turkish pop, and the whole thing looks like a Devo video as the dancers lurch and jerk trying to stay upright against the irregular bobbing of the ship against the waves. I’m not particularly in a dancing mood, and since I have to drive back to Antalya I won’t be drinking enough wine to put myself in a dancing mood. I nurse my single glass of wine and chill on my sun lounger until we arrive back in Kaş.

Emirhan greets me at the dock and welcomes me back to Turkey. I’ve always wanted to take him to Meis with me but EU visas for Turks are prohibitively expensive and difficult to get, especially when you consider that we’d only be in Greece for a few hours. Still, I look forward to the day when we can explore the island together. Meis is one of my favourite places and I’d like to share that with him. There’s so much of the island I still haven’t seen— since my last visit I’ve learned of a cave on the other side of the island that you can only get to by boat, with a secret entrance and a hidden swimming lagoon and some sort of mysterious blue luminescence. It sounds like something from a Drangonlance novel, but there are enough references to it online that I believe the place actually exists. Perhaps when I go back to Meis in the summer I’ll see if I can find a local boat to take me over there so I can check it out for myself. Meis never fails to surprise and delight me, even after two years. That’s the sign of a healthy relationship.

[photos by Taylan Sen]

Then I lived in England for six years. Tea is pretty much the national sport there. The English can’t get through a one-hour meeting without stopping in the middle for a tea break (you think I’m exaggerating, pfeh). So I thought I might pick up tea-drinking as a habit, but I still found English teas (which are far superior to American teas) to lack something in flavour. Add to that the fact that they insist on drowning their tea in milk, of all things… let’s just say I can count on one hand, with several fingers left over, the number of cups of English tea I have ever been able to finish completely. I was pretty sure at the end of my stay in England that tea just wasn’t my thing. I mean, if you can’t get into the groove in the tea capital of the world, the game’s pretty much over, right?

Well, then I moved to Turkey.

Tea is not a sport here; it’s an art. The first time I experienced Turkish tea was in a restaurant in Kemer where a friend of mine worked. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, given my past experiences with tea, but he assured me that this was “not at all like any tea you’ve ever had in the West.” Of course I was intrigued, and combined with the fact that tea in Turkey is served in small, voluptuous glasses that are as sexy as they are exotic— I couldn’t resist trying it.

Wow. This was different. It certainly did not taste processed like American tea, or bland like English tea. It was robust without being obnoxious. It was immensely flavourful and subtle at the same time. It didn’t require milk or three tons of sugar to help turn it into something palatable. I felt like this was the first real tea I’d ever had in my life. I sat there and kept refilling my glass all afternoon.

Since that time, nearly three years ago now, I’ve tried many brands and varieties of Turkish tea. We have our own two-story teapot (an absolute requirement in any Turkish home), and have gone through several sets of tea glasses (they’re delicate little things, and we’re not delicate people). I thought I had seen it and done it and drank it all.

Then a couple of weeks ago we got invited to a friend’s house, and after dinner he served the most wonderful tea I’ve ever had in my life. I had to have some. He kindly gave me some to take home, and I went through it very quickly. The leaves were much larger than the Turkish tea I was used to. The flavour was richer, more aromatic than our regular tea. Turns out it was Ceylon tea, which can be purchased at our weekly bazaar. It costs over twice as much as other teas, but it’s worth it. You make it the same way you make Turkish tea.

I’ll be quick to point out that this is not the same as the stuff in the United States that comes in tea bags and is marketed as so-called “Authenic Ceylon Tea.” The stuff I’m talking about is not made by Lipton or any other tea company you’ve ever heard of, and doesn’t come complete with a fancy marketing campaign. What I’m talking about is actual loose tea from Sri Lanka, authorised by the Sri Lanka Tea Board. And yes, getting the real thing makes a huge difference.

If you’d like to try some Turkish or Ceylon tea, there are many online resources (some more expensive than others) where you can have Turkish tea and tea sets shipped anywhere in the world. I suppose Tulumba is the most popular of these, but a quick Google search can turn up many more. Authentic Ceylon tea can be purchased directly from the Sri Lanka Tea Board’s online shopping service. If you want to make it the authentic way but don’t understand how to used the double-decker teapot, drop me a line and I’ll be happy to talk you through it. Once you’ve tried tea Turkish style, you’ll never drink microwaved milky leaf-wash out of a boring ceramic cylinder ever again.

But ever since I was a kid I’ve always been a list-maker and goal-setter, and many times people ask me how I manage to get such a high percentage of my to-dos done. The key for me was changing the way I set my goals. Writing out a magic list of ways in which you’re suddenly going to start being the perfect you on the first of January is ridiculous. As a life coach friend of mine once said regarding the passion to succeed, “if you don’t want something badly enough that you’re desperate to start down the road to it today, right this second, then you probably don’t want it badly enough to ever complete it, period. You’re sure as hell not going to magically shoot out of a cannon on January first and straight over the finish line, if the state of your life isn’t disturbing enough to you right now to start doing something about it immediately. You’ll get an initial burst of energy from the cannon, sure, but it won’t carry you far enough, and eventually you’ll land with a thud. Better to have a system in place by which you can make small, consistent steps at any time of year and gradually chip away at those goals.”

So about ten years ago I switched from the Big December Resolution-Setting Extravaganza to a more reasonable system of writing goals down exactly when they formed in my head (be that in December or May or whenever), and measuring my commitment to them by my ability to tiptoe towards those targets in small, measured increments. At first I used to go through my list once a month and tidy it up— remove goals that were no longer relevant, cross completed goals off the list, and reorganise the remaining items by priority. But I still missed the hope and excitement of sitting down in December. There’s just something about the turn of the year that makes one want to have a fresh start. So I did what I always do and took all the parts I liked from each system and combined them into a custom plan that works for me. Nowadays I do light list management on a month to month basis, just reorganising obvious things and adding items as necessary, and I save my big list overhaul for December. I enjoy doing things that way, and for the past decade or so it seems to have worked for me. I certainly get a lot of comments about how much I get done.

You, of course, might not find my system works for you, and the good news about that is that now it’s easy to create your own custom way of working on your goals, thanks to the internet. Back in the day, it used to be that your options for practical goal list management were few and simple: pen and paper was the most likely choice. And the good thing about that system was that you could tape your goal list to the wall for easy, constant reference. Of course, you can still do that, there’s nothing wrong with it, but these days there’s no need to bother yourself with it if you’d rather hang out on the web (and let’s face it, you would— after all, you’re spending your free time reading this right now).

There are a few online options open to the serious goal setter, but far and away the best service I’ve found is the Robot Co-op‘s flagship site, 43 Things (this is not to be confused with Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders, which, although a fantastic personal development site in its own right, deserves separate consideration and is not associated with 43 Things except in that the names are similar, which I’m told is just coincidence). I’ve had a 43 Things account for quite some time, they’ve been around a long while, but I just never got around to really digging through the site and discovering everything that it has to offer. But since it’s that time of year, yesterday I decided to have a look and see if I could improve on my current goal list management system (which for the past few years has been a spreadsheet I keep privately on my local drive).

I’ll admit it, I got sucked in hard. I must have spent twelve hours there yesterday excitedly getting myself settled in and organised and motivated. The great thing about 43 Things (aside from the fact that it’s my favourite price: free) is that what initially appears to be the entire site, the part where you set life goals and define ambitions, is only the very tiniest tip of an iceberg that extends up and down and all around your core list of targets, supporting you from every direction. In addition to the community aspects of the actual 43 Things site (e.g. the ability to cheer other people on, give advice on goals you’ve already achieved, or seek help if you’re having trouble moving forward on a goal), there are also four additional web sites, all related to 43 Things, which don’t require separate registration and which you can use freely to supplement your 43 Things experience. Here’s an overview:

• 43 Things: Set goals, show off achievements, get help with your obstacles, help others over theirs, cheer each other on, and get ideas for new things to try.
• 43 Places: Same basic idea as 43 Things, but all about places you want to visit and places you’ve already been— anything from countries and cities to attractions and restaurants.
• 43 People: Half social networking and half role model setting… this is the part of the system I’m still getting to grips with.
• Lists of Bests Here you can make lists of anything you want, and work through your own lists or the lists of others. For instance, one of my goals on 43 Things is to “read 50 books in 2007,” and so I’m going to make a list of 50 books on Lists of Bests and keep track of my progress there.
• All Consuming: A great companion to Lists of Bests, All Consuming details the list items you’ve consumed, and makes it easy for you to share your experiences with others and get suggestions for new items to consume. Consumption categories include anything and everything from books to CDs to films to food and any other custom category you care to invent.

You see now how I spent so much time on this yesterday. It’s a labyrinth. But once you get the hang of how everything seamlessly works together, it becomes fun and I think in the long run it’s going to help me become a lot more productive even than I already am. The one thing that was really missing from my previous spreadsheet system was the aspect of accountability and support— if I failed or gave up, no one knew, and no one was there to console or encourage. With 43 Things, it’s possible that items in danger of sliding downhill can be salvaged, because there’s the help (and let’s face it, pressure) of all those who have already accomplished the same goal and are willing to show you how they got past the obstacles.

So give this to yourself as a holiday gift— sign up here, and get excited not only about 2007, but about the rest of your life.

NOTE: neither the following post nor anything else on this web site should be construed as medical advice. I am only conveying my own experiences. As always in this life, you alone are responsible for the outcome of your own actions. If you want to listen to your doctor, listen to your doctor. If you don’t, don’t. Your decision has nothing to do with me and I am not responsible for anything that happens to you.

Back when I was a kid, maybe ten or so, I remember seeing a segment on one of those daytime TV shows, about how doctors are fallible people with fragile personalities like the rest of us. The point of the story was that many doctors feel pressured, both by their own egos and by patients who expect them to be magic answer factories, to come up with an instant diagnosis and a solution for every ailment. The result can be that patients are misdiagnosed and receive inappropriate treatment. The host of the TV show suggested that patients should use their brains when they’re seeking medical advice, and voice their suspicions if a doctor’s diagnosis doesn’t sit right with them.

As a ten-year-old girl this information floored me. A doctor can be wrong? I have to worry about this? At this early point it hadn’t yet occurred to me to question adults, never mind adults with authority. But that TV show stuck with me, and as I got older I fine-tuned my radar to the point where the very first hint of malarkey from a doctor would prompt me to bring him back down to earth in a most abrupt way (doctors hate me, but I am the queen of avoiding unnecessary treatment). In recent years the internet has made this even easier, by allowing a smart person to seek out information and have a good idea of what’s going on before ever setting foot in a doctor’s office. Again, I’m sure doctors hate this— there must be zillions of idiots every day who flock to emergency rooms convinced they’re dying of stomach cancer, only to learn that the mexican food they had last night simply didn’t agree with them. But for those who are level-headed and savvy of web nonsense, the internet can be a great source of knowledge.

Case in point: six months ago I slipped on a marble floor and put my hand out to break my fall. I landed on my thumb, which was violently yanked back under my wrist. Suspecting nothing worse than a sprain, I left the hand alone and avoided using it as much as possible. After two weeks, the soreness had not subsided, so I made an appointment at the hospital, who referred me to their head of orthopedics. I was x-rayed and examined, and within half an hour I was told that I’d torn my ulnar collateral ligament. I was then advised that the ligament would never repair itself, and I should immobilise the joint for two weeks and prepare for surgery, which would involve taking a piece of ligament from another joint and screwing it onto the relevant bones. Yikes.

Even as I sat in the doctor’s office with my hand throbbing, I was thinking this diagnosis couldn’t be right. I’m not sure where my doubts came from, because Turkey has an excellent health care system with state-of-the-art facilities and highly trained professionals, but I just couldn’t picture myself having surgery for this. I did, however, welcome the idea of immobilisation, and so I bought the recommended thumb support and started using that immediately. The doctor warned me not to be fooled by any apparent improvement that using the brace might indicate. I took his warning with a grain of salt and went home with a reminder card for my follow-up appointment.

When I got home with my brace I started trawling the internet for any information I could find about my diagnosis. As always with any topic, I found a spectrum of opinions ranging from one end of crazy (“leave the ligament alone and The Lord will heal it if it is His desire”) to the other (“forget it, it’s ruined, just cut the whole hand off and throw it away”), and everything in between. But what really spoke to me were the hundreds of people I found who had the same injury I had, and who, like me, didn’t think that surgery was the answer. Some of them had tried alternative therapies, others had relied on gels and creams, all with varying degrees of success. Very few reported complete recovery without surgery. Some had developed painful arthritis in the joint. It was all very scary to read.

But I firmly believe that regardless of general truths and blanket tenets, each person is a different case to be considered separately, and I knew that just because surgery was the right choice for many people, it didn’t necessarily mean it was the right choice for me. So I pressed on with my stubbornness. I researched alternative therapies. I also read up about doctors who are pressured by hospital administrators to recommend surgery automatically for certain listed conditions because surgery provides greater income for the hospital— someone has to pay for all those facilities and fancy machines, after all.

My greatest source of information, however, came from the mouths of people I actually spoke to in the flesh. Basically I asked every person I encountered whether they had any experience with torn ligaments. A surprising percentage had, and almost all of those rolled their eyes and gave me the knowing nod when I said that my doctor had recommended surgery. Surgery had been recommended to them, as well, and many of them had also declined. Perhaps they’d gone with physical therapy or with another treatment, but in just about every case the ligaments healed eventually despite what the doctor had said about surgery being necessary. Or, in a few cases, the person had caved under the doctor’s pressure and the surgery had actually rendered the joint more problematic than it had been in the first place.

I tore up the card for my follow-up appointment and made the decision to wait it out. I didn’t have a specific plan as such, but in general I thought I’d continue to wear my brace for six months and see how that went (I’d read about many people for whom simple immobilisation was the magic answer), and if that didn’t work then I’d cross the next bridge.

I don’t remember the exact date of the first time I forgot to put on my brace. I guess I’d been wearing it pretty faithfully for a couple of months, and then one day I got out of the shower and just forgot to put it on, which indicates to me that things were already healing— usually within a few minutes of removing the brace the pain and weakness would remind me to put it back on. I only wore it sporadically after that, until eventually it got lost somewhere (it’s probably under the sofa now). There were a few days here and there where things felt a bit delicate, but I was advised by a skier friend of mine (who has torn many ligaments in her career) that the road to recovery is never linear and I shouldn’t worry unless things seemed to be getting steadily worse.

Fast-forward to last night, sitting with my hands out in front of me, staring at them, wiggling the thumbs around and for a brief second trying to remember if it was the left one or the right one that was injured. I pointed out to my boyfriend that the range of motion is pretty much the same in both thumbs now. I gave him a demonstration wiggle, to which he responded with a warning to be careful and not overdo it. It’s so tempting to test the limits of the joint when you can’t quite believe it’s better.

And to think, if I had just blindly accepted what the doctor told me, I’d have screws in my thumb now, and scars, and possible nerve damage, and at least a year of physical therapy ahead of me. And I’d be several thousand dollars lighter in the pocket. It remains to be seen, of course, whether I develop arthritis in my thumb, but I think there comes a point where you have to weigh the maybes against the other maybes and make your choices. Those who have surgery often develop arthritis anyway, so even if it does happen in later years, it will impossible to say what exactly was the cause.

I’m not recommending that you should go out and tell your doctor where to stick his advice. There’s a reason medical schools exist, and in general doctors are competent professionals who know what they’re talking about. But one thing they don’t know, and indeed can’t know, is what it feels like to be you, and how your body feels from the inside. Learn to recognise red flags and trust your suspicions in a well-informed manner. Each of us is an intelligent, intuitive individual, and in this age of the ridiculously obvious safety advisory (warning: hot coffee is hot), it’s empowering to look out for yourself as well, because no one is better equipped to do so than you.

I’ll keep you updated on the thumb.

I have about a million ideas in my head for web sites I’d make if I had infinite resources. But since I don’t have infinite resources, I’m going to advertise my ideas publicly in the hopes that someone will steal them. I’m not possessive about ownership, I just want to play.

Recently I’ve been mulling over the (albeit nebulous) details of one of the web sites I’d most like to see. It would be a cross between a “how well do you know yourself” site and a ratings community, but with a twist— it’s all about perceived intelligence. Here’s how it works, in general:

Step 1. The first thing that happens when you sign up is you takes a test to measure your intelligence. I personally like the IQ test at snopi.com because it doesn’t require the user to understand English, but really it doesn’t matter what test we use providing that everyone is measured with the same ruler (my rants about the uselessness of IQ tests will come later; for now let’s just have fun). Then, after the test is finished, you are not notified of your score, but rather that score is stored on the database and you’re taken on to

Step 2, where you’re presented with a list of various potential essay titles (“in a language of your choice” would be great). You can click on any essay title that interests you, at which point you are prompted with a form window to write a short essay (no longer than 500 words) on the subject you chose. After you’re finished, you can go back to the list as many times as you want and write as many essays on different subjects as you care to. The more essays each user writes, the more fun it is for everyone (and perhaps more accurate as well?).

Step 3. Now, the fun part. After you write at least one essay (you can go back to step 2 later, as many times as you want), you can then go to the “ratings” section of the site, where you are randomly presented with an essay written by another (anonymous) user. After reading the essay, you then have to decide whether you think the author of the essay is

• more intelligent than you,
• not as intelligent as you, or
• about as intelligent as you.

Once you’ve clicked on the appropriate rating button, you’re given another essay, and so on, until you choose to stop.

I haven’t really thought too much about the statistics part of the site, but I’m sure one of you out there could come up with some great ideas— perhaps as a user you have to wait a while before you find out how smart you are compared with the other people on the site, or perhaps you never find out. Maybe you only learn the percentage difference between how smart you think you are and how smart you actually are. There could be charts and graphs comparing users by country or other criteria. The possibilities are endless.

Now, of course an idea like this has problems, and there would have to be a huge disclaimer on the site that “this is for entertainment purposes only.” For one thing, some people are going to argue that whatever IQ test you give them isn’t fair to them because [insert reason here]. And they probably have a point. But again, if you make it clear that it’s just for fun, I think the right people with the right coding skills could turn it into a popular site. For my money, it would certainly beat rating photos of people who are desperately trying too hard to find someone who wants to have sex with them. But maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, I’m curious to hear your modifications or additions. Fire away.