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“I don’t think home is a place anymore. I think it’s a state of mind.”

Neil Gaiman, The Sandman Vol. 5 – A Game of You

When I was a little kid, home was the apartment my mom and dad lived in.

During high school, home was both the apartment my parents lived in and my high school classroom because that high school classroom was the first place where I left being my parent’s kid and became an individual.

When I left home for college, the first couple of years, the college campus was my home. In third grade, I started staying with Esra, the person I would call my college roommate and also my illegitimate daughter. Together we tried to form a Gilmore-Girls-style household and among the places I have called home so far, the dorm room I shared with her for two years (which was dorm building O – room 306) was my favorite home.

After college, I moved to Switzerland. Despite living there for a little more than 5 years, I never felt at home there. I always felt detached from my apartment and did not invest in it to make it my home. It was always a temporary place, the place I would get out of as soon as I finish my PhD. During my time in Switzerland, when I thought of home I only thought of Black Sea or Istanbul.

In November 2014, I moved from Switzerland. I had about a month in Turkey before I moved to the US in January 2015. This intermediary period, where I was in between countries, was the time I lost the meaning of home. Things got pretty messed up. I witnessed Istanbul slowly transforming from an extremely glamorous drag queen into an incredibly annoying macho prick. (People who are familiar with the social/political turmoil in Turkey during the past few years would understand this transformation.) I also briefly visited my at-Black-Sea-coast hometown (Zonguldak) after like six years and it made me sick (both psychologically and physically).

So I accepted, I don’t know where home is anymore. Some people view this as a sad thing. I agree that it also makes me upset from time to time. But who am I kidding? This is actually what I always wanted. I didn’t want to belong to any specific place. I remember the summer holidays I had with my parents where we stayed two days at one place and three days at another place and another night at another place. Meeting different people, being on the road, experiencing the unfamiliar ... Those were my favorite days from my childhood. Similarly in college, I don’t remember staying in my dorm room for ten consecutive days unless it was the exams’ period. I either visited some relatives or stayed at different friends’ house in between.

However, as everything we want to achieve in life, losing your sense of home also comes at a cost. I feel more and more that I never stay at a place long enough to form a friend group that I can meet regularly or build a family of my own. I hate admitting it because I fancy myself Xena (a.k.a. Warrior Princess), but sometimes it makes me upset. On the other hand, I have friends and family scattered all around the world and when I meet them we just resume from where we left off. Those friends and family make me realize that I am going to be just fine the way I am.  

Now I feel at home at very random moments and those moments always put a giant smile on my face. Like when …

… you come to your apartment in San Jose from work and find your mom and dad preparing dinner while The Velvet Underground & Nico is playing the background,

… your best friend in town (also known as your twin sister) has a sleep over at your place,

… your Greek/academic brother starts warning you on eating healthier after seeing you order a plate of French fries for lunch,

… your college roommate tells you that she is getting married,

… the waves of the Pacific hits you in the face and knocks you to the ground,

… you gossip about the people at work with one of your cousins during a work day afternoon drive,

… you start listening and singing System of a Down songs with another cousin despite being exhausted and wanting to sleep after three days of Lollapalooza, …

Well, as Barbie from Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman said “I don’t think home is a place anymore. I think it’s a state of mind.”

My “Love” Letter to Swiss Housing Agencies

When I think back on my bad memories in Switzerland, I can associate majority of them with three places: EPFL, government offices, and housing agencies.

EPFL is normal since I did my PhD there. PhD is a bitter-sweet journey for everyone. No matter how resourceful the journey is, it is painful at the same time. Therefore, I do not mind my bad or stressful experiences at EPFL. These were among the bad experiences that enriched my life.

So let’s move on to the government offices. These institutions are a pain in the ass wherever you go. So there is no escape from them. You just need to find ways to relax yourself after dealing with the people at a government office. To wash away the memory of the annoying interactions you had to go through in these offices, either swearing by yourself in your native language or listening to your favorite punk band after you leave the office works.

This leaves us with the Swiss housing agencies. The “wonderful” “lovely” agencies…

I was living in a college dorm before I started my PhD so Switzerland was the first place that I had to deal with a housing agency. Even though I had been told that it would be hard to find an apartment in Switzerland, I didn’t expect things to be this hard. Every time I went to an agency, it felt like talking to a wall. Of course, this was partly because of the language issue. My French was terrible in those days (and it still is). I also remember many agency visits where I asked my questions in English and got my answers in French. However, even if there were some people at the agency who didn’t resist talking to English, it still felt like talking to a wall when talking to them.

After struggling some time being rejected from all the places we applied for. Six months into my PhD, I finally moved to a studio apartment, which I didn’t dare to leave till the end of my PhD. I was lucky with this one because the building was a newly built one, it was specifically built for EPFL students based on an agreement between EPFL and Foncia agency, and  not many people knew about it at the time unlike my friend Cansu (who urged us (my other friend Duygu and I) to apply for it).

The feeling of talking to walls never disappeared though whenever I had to contact a person from Foncia even though I was now their customer.

The latest set of encounters I have been going through with Foncia is related to my deposit. I ended my contract with them on November, 2014. It has been almost 3.5 months now. And I still haven’t received my payment. The first time I contacted them regarding this issue was the beginning of February, 2015. Since I moved to the Bay Area in early January, I was sending emails to them in my evenings and calling them the first thing when I wake up at 6am in my mornings if my emails weren’t answered. The contact guy for my ex-building was a different one now and he seemed more responsive than the previous one.

As a side note, the previous one drove me crazy while I was moving out. He didn’t answer any of my emails and he barely answered my phone calls. All I wanted was a letter that says I was going to move out at the end of November so that I could schedule a time with my concierge to leave my keys. In the end, I physically went to the agency to ensure he handles my request. That was useless as well. He told me the letter should be in my mailbox in a week, but it wasn’t. In the end, I kindly asked my lab’s secretary to contact him and only then I got my letter. (Bless you Erika, and all the secretaries at EPFL that helped me. If I ever wrote an actual love letter to someone in Switzerland, it would be to the secretaries I interacted with at EPFL. They are the best.)

Anyways, this new guy, he actually answered emails and phones. So I was a little hopeful and decided to be polite with him while handling my deposit situation. I have never been a person that believed aggressiveness can solve my problems. (I blame my dad in this attitude; constantly making me listen to his favorite hippie singers/bands when I was a kid and basically brainwashing me to be a peaceful human being).

However, a couple of weeks later I started feeling like I had no progress in my issue with this guy. He kept telling me I should be receiving my deposit at the end of the week and he wrote this at the beginning of every week. Then he told me that they don’t have my account number (which I gave them while I was giving away my keys to the concierge, I have two people that witnessed me searching for my account number for 5-10mins in my wallet and then writing it down for another 5mins). I said anyways I gave him my account number over email and kept my polite attitude still. He again said I should be receiving things by the end of the week. The other week, when I re-emailed him saying I still haven’t received my money, he said that there are some documents that I should sign. I signed them, scanned them back to him in a still-polite email.

After this last email, he answered me writing they finally approved the release of the deposit and I shouldn’t contact him anymore and instead contact the cooperative of my building instead. When I asked him for their contact information, he told me that he doesn’t have such information and I should look at the contract that I made with “them”. 

(Here is where I leave my dad’s peaceful rock music and switch to my mom’s more angry music that is very specific to her so I won’t give it a genre name.)

Them, THEM. THEM = Foncia, you work at Foncia. How the hell you don’t have their number? You think I am an idiot. I am really bored of being treated like shit or an idiot every time I had to deal with a Swiss housing agency. I don’t know whether this is because of my student status when I was there or my nationality. But I don’t care. I don’t deserve this. Neither any of my friends who were/are at EPFL.

To give a comparison, it took me one day to find an apartment in USA. Whenever I have a question, request, or maintenance issue, it is handled at most in two days (as opposed to waiting weeks or a month in Switzerland or making your secretary call them again to fasten the process). Whenever I meet one of the maintenance guys in my complex or visit my leasing office, everyone greets each other. They always ask me if everything is OK with the apartment. They treat me like a human being.

I know writing this won’t have any effect other than switching me back to my peaceful mode. There is a housing issue in Switzerland. Supply just doesn’t properly meet the demand. And the housing agencies will keep exploiting the lower class European citizens like me. What happens if I badmouth Foncia’s name? Nothing. A student or a non-student non-EU citizen newly moved to Switzerland, has to say YES to the first suitable apartment that she/he got accepted into by the agencies. Because the alternative is either being on the street or paying really high prices to extended-stay-like options.

It feels like superman died!

It has been almost a week now. I still get sad at random moments during the day.

After seeing the deaths of many young or middle-aged people when I was a kid, I remember telling myself that I won’t get upset if a person lived a life full of bitter/sweet memories and died at a reasonably old age (like at least 70) because she/he lived a good life, there are people dying at much younger ages, and we are all going to die anyways.

But I am still upset even though he was 71. Because I feel like superman died. He was a very nontraditional superman but he was my superman. I thought maybe I can feel better if I write as I always do.

Even though I had heard his name before, what really introduced me to Lou Reed was reading Trainspotting in high school. Trainspotting gave me a good list of musicians to be discovered; Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, etc., and shaped some branches of my music taste. From that list, Lou Reed was the one who left the biggest impression on me, because he not only became one of my favorite musicians, but also one of my favorite poets and storytellers. His love for literature was all over his work and he offered me a goldmine for underground literature in addition to his music and poetry.

He was one of the most important figures in my life who made me love and respect people as they are, especially the ones marginalized by the society, because he often wrote about drug addicts, transvestites, prostitutes, etc. But more importantly, many times he made me accept who I am whenever I felt like an outcast and hated myself for it.

He was one of the main reasons that during my bachelor’s my first academic paper’s topic was prostitutes or I visited a penitentiary regularly to voluntarily work with female prisoners.

He was sometimes a substitute for my mom and dad at nights I had hard time to go to sleep. When I was lying in bed alone in my 19m² studio in Lausanne last September with a high fever on a Saturday night, his voice put me to sleep making me dream about a beautiful Sunday Morning.

To a girl like me who gets extremely bored while listening to famous love songs like Unchained Melody or I Will Always Love You, he gave her favorite love song, I’m Sticking With You.

He gave me some of my favorite movie scenes; like when Perfect Day plays in Trainspotting or when Venus in Furs plays in Last Days.

I often felt drunk or high by just listening to some of his songs.

He was always there to say everything is going to be alright in various ways when I was broken.

And he will always be there with his songs whenever and wherever I need him. But it still feels like superman died.

Zero Dark Thirty – Good Cinema, Bad Politics

First of all, I have to say that I am a big fan of Kathryn Bigelow as a director since I watched Strange Days in college. So I might be biased in the below comments.

I want to comment on the movie in two different perspectives:

1. Just ignore this story being on the quest of the USA for catching Osama bin Laden, but rather some country X is searching for some evil guy Y.
2. Focus on the story of USA trying to catch Osama bin Laden.

(1)

This is a great example of high-quality cinema and tells the story at hand very successfully.

I usually don’t like to see people in uniforms, neither in real life nor in movies. I find most of the movies involving modern day soldiers, battles, and CIA agents very boring. I would even ban the money dedicated to them if I had the power. However, in this 2.5 hour film, which is full of CIA and well-uniformed people, I didn’t even realize how the time passed. The story flows very densely from the start; it keeps you tense and awake. This tenseness goes to an extreme level toward the end of the film when the dedicated team is looking for the enemy Y in his possible fortress, even though you know very well how this search would end. The details are well-placed in many scenes, especially the just mentioned search scene. Also, the protagonist’s face is priceless throughout the film; ever-tired and determined convincing us that she is definitely a one-woman-army and she adds herself to the smart, strong, cool, and skilled Kathryn Bigelow female characters list.

(2)

Some parts of the story might seem pointless to you, especially if you are not from the USA and do not have a big national pride.

The long journey to hunt down a single man, all the resources spent on it, and all the people died on the way might look really meaningless knowing that it is not going to solve actual problem of terrorism at all. Nobody in the film aims to look at what lies underneath it all. It’s just a quest looking for a single man, an important man but a very tiny and unimportant piece in the whole picture. Therefore, in the scene where the search team is being shouted at on the fact that they are failing miserably on the quest, you just want to tell them to go get real jobs. When the protagonist says she wants to find and kill Osama bin Laden, you again think “well isn’t it better to keep him alive to get information in order to tear down the whole terrorist organization if he’s the absolute important leader?”. However, this is not a problem related to the film, it’s related to the story and the story itself comes from real life USA pride and glory gibberish. So the film shows us that gibberish wrapped-up in very good cinema that can be used as a lecture on many aspects for directing, if you manage to ignore reality.

Finally, just my take on the torture scenes: I found the discussion around this highly overrated after seeing the film. Torture is used in many parts of the world, when especially political prisoners are involved. The film shows what happens in reality by taking no sides in it. It’s true that the tortured people in the film eventually give some useful information. However, under any circumstances no matter what the outcome is, I personally, do not find it OK when seeing a guy being chained to the ceiling from his arms or kept in a tiny box for hours or almost choked to death. It just disgusts me. The confessions do not even seem all reliable seeing the state of the tortured ones in the end. So I do not think the film praises torture, it just leaves you with your own perception of torture thinking about the possible outcomes. There might always be other ways to get those outcomes.

One of the best scenes of the film is when you see some of the main characters looking with their WTF-faces at Obama on TV saying that they do not use torture because it is wrong. The film just states that torture does happen as a part of this process whether you like it or not or whether it is good or bad. Even how the protagonist evolves on the matter of torture shows that. In the initial torture scenes, she looks very uneasy while later on in the film she’s the one giving orders to punch one of the detainee accepting this as a part of her job in her clan and not questioning it further. It is just the ugly facts.

Tepenin Ardi (Beyond the Hill)

We watch the story of a very male dominant family living in an almost deserted large land that mainly belongs to the grandfather character.

The main question in the film is; who is the enemy that we have to fight with?

“The enemy lives beyond that hill”; keeps saying the grandfather. But he doesn’t really know who the enemy is. He is just very prepared to create the illusion of the enemy in his head and fight it with all the rifles he owns. He is completely unaware, or maybe ignorant, of all the misgoings in his family. His focus is on the enemy beyond the hill that we never see.

The enemy suspected by the very sane grandfather character is actually no different than the enemy delusion his not very sane grandson has, who is going through a severe depression due to the things happened during his mandatory military duty.

The film depicts a great example of a society that creates scapegoats rather than dealing with their own internal problems. It also shows how such a society, in turn, makes their people fight with things that they have no clue what and why they are fighting for and the price paid for this meaningless fight is usually their own blood.

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The grandfather has two sons; Nusret and Mehmet. While the enemy we don’t know keeps living hidden beyond the hill; Nusret’s young son shoots the dog of Mehmet’s son, Nusret rapes Mehmet’s wife, and someone shoots Nusret from his leg. However, nobody has a clear idea of what is actually going on. Except for Nusret’s young son and Mehmet’s son, nobody knows who shoots the dog. Actually, even we as an audience don’t see who shoots the dog, we only guess that it’s Nusret’s son. Nobody knows Nusret raping his brother’s wife except for Nusret, the wife, and us. And nobody knows who shoots Nusret, it’s only suspected by us that Mehmet’s son might have realized the rape and might be the one who shoots his uncle.

The grandfather, though, suspects the enemy beyond the hill of all the shootings. So he goes and shoots some of enemy’s goats. In turn, there happens another shooting that we don’t know from where and by whom again. And as a result, a member of the family is lost.

spoiler/>

While going home right after the film with my very beloved college roommate, she asked me to summarize the film in one sentence, which is like a little game between us that we play after each film we saw together. And below is what I told her for this film.

We keep fighting with things, but we do not really know what they are.