Things I Will Miss That I Came Across Today... 6/28/14

While a post such as this seems incredibly hackneyed, it also serves as a fairly honest character sketch. Additionally, it breaks the monotony of packing, which takes a surprisingly large amount of concentration for me. Jena, on the other hand, can listen to the chaotic announcers of the World Cup at a moment like this. How does she do it?

I will miss my

1. King of the Hill shirt of Hank's disturbed face with the words, "That boy ain't right!"
2. penlight from childhood that fell into a toilet bowl
3. acryilic watchcap in hunter-orange
4. photocopy of Vonnegut's short story "The Euphio Question" (This story inspired the name of my noise band in college, The Ufio.)
5. note to myself about the graffiti in the bathroom at the high school where I was a student teacher teaching Emerson and Thoreau (To explain further, "Never Conform" was written in Sharpie across the top of three urinals that were strikingly uniform in appearance.)
6. spool of blank CDs
7. origami dog face glued to a Valentine's Day card from Ysabel
8. remaining collection of pens that say The Homestead
9. eighth inch to RCA audio converter cable

This is only a cursory list and predictive of course; yet, it illuminates the pains of packing's one's life into two checked bags, a carry-on, and a personal item such as a purse or laptop bag. To add injury to insult, I may even have a slight amount of extra room left over because my bags are not at maximum capacity or maximum weight. Will I take some of these treasured items and shove them into the polyester caverns of my luggage? Probably not. I bid a loving adieu and wait for more treasures to come.

Turkey Countdown 6/27/14

Dreams, confused and intense. Interrupted at six each morning to the construction in the apartment below us. The purgatory of staying hidden and failing to get rest, it reminds me of another country.

Watching documentaries on Youtube. Obsessing over my language progress and realizing that, yes, a frightened affective state does impede learning. Remembering those decisions I could have made differently in the classroom.

Fragments, my thoughts, fragmented.

Strained, like a medical tourniquet, is our relationship as we cope with the ambiguity and our attempts to make it manageable. Wine, ice cubes, and television cool our nerves.

At night:

"Are you going to sleep?"

"I'm going to listen to the radio for a while." Or, "I'm going to read for a while." Or, "I'm going to try."

I'm on the couch in the middle of an episode, and then I begin to sense that I'm half a second away. In a moment, I wander into the bedroom, lie down on the bed. In a moment, I really try.

Marriage 6/19/14

I've been married for twenty days now. I haven't written about it seriously; I've only reflected on it in quick bursts. The other day Andy asked me how I feel as a married man, and I said I didn't feel too different. Not much has changed. And that's true. Jena and I had a good relationship going into our marriage, and living together and being married isn't much different than it was before.

But today, I've decided to delve into this marriage experience a little bit. And it began as I was listening to the Savage Lovecast. Two points stuck out; both were in Dan Savage's conversation with a woman who wanted to get married before she died. She had been diagnosed, for the third time, with cancer. Dan Savage said that marriage is what you make it. It is defined by those in the marriage, not by others. He also said that sometimes it's not worth it to sit around being indecisive like Hamlet. He pointed out external situations can force an issue, such as marriage to come to fruition, and it can work out.

His first point, about how marriage is what you make it, is one that I intend to share with Jena, though I think we have this mindset about our marriage already. We want to be active in our decisions rather than allowing traditions and other people to define it. Our marriage is and will be an ongoing project that includes plenty of reflection and negotiation. It will also be eclectic, I'm sure, since both of us have a tendency to stray from certain norms. (Excuse my use of ESL teaching terms here; they have a way of infiltrating everything.)

Our decision to move to Turkey together, right after getting married, is an example of such eclecticism, and it relates to the second point from Dan Savage. Sometimes decisions can be accelerated, and they work out. Over the course of this year, our timeline as professionals did influence our decision to get married, and I believe that's okay. Someone asked me during the week of wedding festivities in Nebraska how I knew that I was ready to get married. I said that I just knew. Duncan was there, and he agreed saying, yeah, you just know when you're ready. There was certainly more to my "knowing" than I let on, but I interpreted Duncan's words as follows: you can consciously suss out a situation, but you might need to take a step back and let intuition assist you in taking the leap. In this way, you just "know."

That's what occurred with my marriage. Jena and I knew that staying together as a professional couple would be easier with the bond of marriage. To me, the bond we have now is not flexible as it might be have been if we were moving to Turkey together as boyfriend and girlfriend. We're now committed to making the relationship work out despite the trying circumstances that are likely to come up personally and professionally. In other words, through the process of deciding to get married, coupled with just "knowing," I realized that I wanted a promise that I couldn't go back on. Marriage, for me, is such a promise, and I am enacting the first of Dan Savage's points. I am being active in defining my marriage.

I'm going to wrap up these musings on marriage with an epiphany I had today when I returned from a run. (It was on this run that I listened to the Savage Lovecast episode I referred to earlier--399, one of the best ones I've heard). My epiphany is about the celebration of a wedding. Before my wedding, James told me to just enjoy the fact that everyone is there to celebrate with you. You don't have to be modest during the wedding. I took his advice in that I honestly didn't spread myself thin with introductions during the wedding reception. Rather, I tried to have some authentic interactions that I knew I would cherish later. These included dancing with my aunts and a surrogate aunt to "I Saw Her Standing There." Dancing with my mother. Joking around with my college friends about the creation of a new drink (Whale Sweat). Dancing with Jena. And so many more.

A marriage celebration is what you make of it, just as a marriage is. The celebration is not purely limited to the experience of the groom and the bride. Jena and I both had a beautiful time, trying to maintain our composure while we loved each other throughout the evening. But the wedding was also about sharing the experience with all those who attended. I am so grateful that Ian, Sam, Joe, and Adam took it as an excuse to see me and each other again after a decade. I am grateful that my nuclear family and my families on both my mother's and father's side could reunite on this occasion. I am grateful that my surrogate aunts from Utah made it. And I am grateful that Jena's family was there to celebrate with us because now I have have a new family as well.

What really got to me today, though, pertained to my brother. In the recent years, his genius and generosity has really floored me. Without the wedding, I would not have had this moment with my brother: It was twenty-five minutes or so before the wedding. Guests were arriving, and the groomsmen and I were supposed to stand in a room that everyone filtered through before taking a seat outside. As a result, I was greeting what felt like thousands of people, and running out of energy fast. I don't know exactly how it happened, but I told Andy that we could use Jena's room as a green room. He and I went in there together to drink some water and catch our breath. Andy calmed me down, saying it was okay for us to be in here instead of with the guests. I told him I wanted to practice my vows, and when I was on my second run-through, Andy began practicing something of his own. It was on a folded white sheet of paper. He was mouthing the words silently and making edits with a mechanical pencil as he went. I didn't realize then that he was fine-tuning his speech, his toast, that he later gave to Jena and me during the reception. It brought me to tears. Without the wedding, I wouldn't have had that moment with my brother, and for that I am grateful.

A marriage is what you make it. Jena and I have a new future together in which we will determine the marriage's parameters along with its successes and challenges. Today I have had a glimpse of how I have begun to re-conceptualize the marriage celebration, and I have no doubt that I will do the same with the experiences that Jena and I have along the way. To answer Andy's question (How do I feel as a married man?), I feel good. I am up to the task of making the marriage work, defining it on my and Jena's terms, and accepting its timeline as pure fortuity.

Pre-Turkey Continued 6/13/14

Tonight Jena and I are enjoying a bottle of wine given to us as a wedding gift. For me, it is helping to ward off some of my nervous thoughts about moving to Turkey. I think I was a little overconfident in my last post. Regardless, the wine is tasty--that's about all my palette can tell me. I know it's better than Franzia. Better than Carlo Rossi. Better than Rex Goliath. Better than the derelict bottle from 1971 that Duncan and I found in his father's wine refrigerator. (That stuff was disgusting. Lots of sludge at the bottom. It was strangely sweet, though.) Better than port. Better than grape juice. When it comes down to it, I told Jena that it tasted like a wine that we would have at her parents' house. It has a kind of a spicy flavor and a lingering finish. (I think. What do I know?)

The wine is serving as a nice end to an otherwise busy day. We had nice lunch with my parents in downtown Flagstaff, and then we ran around doing errands in the insufferable tourist traffic. I sold some CDs at Bookmans' (a place that buys used stuff and gives you store credit), and they took some favorite CDs off my hands. Conor Oberst (self-titled), Desaparacidos' first album, and Sonic Youth's "Washing Machine." I'm going to miss the album artwork from "Washing Machine" especially because it's so damn charming. Have a look at it here. When I was a freshman in college, Blaise's mother sent him the "Washing Machine" shirt in red. It was too big for him, although he wore it more and more, the more hipstery he got. Back when he first received it, I asked him if he liked Sonic Youth. He said, "Not really." I checked them out then, and neither did I. Two years later, though, holy crap, I came to my senses, especially after seeing them for free in downtown Salt Lake in 2008. Amazing. One of the best shows I've seen.

I suppose I could say something about Turkey since that's loosely the theme of this blog of mine. I'll say this: The other day I was listening to one of my favorite podcasts, Stuff You Should Know. What makes this podcast unique is the way the two podcasters speak to one another as if they are good friends who just happen to work together. Their discussions are loose and tangential at times, which make them so much more entertaining than the other podcasts produced by How Stuff Works. It's a lot like Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich on their best days, for anyone who's familiar with Radiolab. In any case, I was listening to the podcast entitled, "How Cave Dwellers Work," and Cappadocia came up. They reiterated some of the history that Dr. Stoller told me after class last semester--that there are manmade underground dwellings that are something like eight stories tall ... or deep ... or whatever. I can't wait to see those. It sounds like Cappadocia is only forty-five minutes from where we'll be living, so Jena and I will be certain to explore the place. Jena wants to take a hot air balloon over the place. She's never been in one before, so I'm happy to do that. (I was fortunate enough to go ballooning twice in Park City, once with the Amicis and once with my parents and grandparents.) Also, there are some incredible looking hotels in Cappadocia in case we ever want to splurge. What I'm trying to say here is that the podcast reinvigorated my excitement about moving to Turkey, and that's the sort of thing I want to happen right now.

So that's it for today. I'm loving the ability to add these links. Awesome!

Pre-Turkey 6/9/14

Having never officially blogged before, the practice already has me feeling a bit self-conscious, but I assume that will fade. Today Jena and I discussed our respective nervousness about our upcoming move. In fact, moments before I took this leap into cyber-thought-conveyance, Jena was looking up pictures of Talas, where we'll be headed in ... let me check the calendar ... twenty-one days. She has expressed more anxiety about the move than I have at this point, which I find pretty surprising since I usually freak out about this sort of thing. I think my saving grace has been that I've been keeping myself pretty busy. I have item writing to do for that testing company I work for, and tomorrow I've got an initial meeting with a tutee. These things are keeping me from going too far into the abstract land of snowballing thoughts. I'm reminded of that scene in Grapes of Wrath (I can't find the exact quote at the moment) where one of Ma Joad's sons asks her if she's excited about what their life is going to be like in California, and she responds by saying that their are a thousand lives that you might lead; when it comes down to it, you just have the one you're living. So right now, I'm not particularly nervous about the move. I'm excited that I've acheived what my friend Hunter called escape velocity, when referring to leaving one's town. Today Jena extended the metaphor by saying that as part of a married couple, I have more mass, and maybe that's why I'm able to finally make this break from the gravity of Flagstaff. I like Flagstaff alright but am ready to leave it to the college kids, the academicians, the hospital workers, the Gore employees, and the tourists who have helped to jack up the prices until it's tough to get by. I've been here for six years, and I don't have a particularly good reason why except that living in the same town as my parents helped me get established on a professional path following my college days. Heading to Turkey, then, will allow me to grow in a new direction beyond the confines of this town, and I think that Jena and I will be able to make a good life there. Jena and I, as she remarked on a walk today, are good teachers, and that is enough to allay some of my professional anxieties that I do have. All the rest--the getting settled, the learning a new language and culture--will come as it will.