Adventures in culture shock, regardless of space-time I cracked through time/space, godless and dry I point my nose to the northern star And watch the decline from a hazy distance Time, like god, is a human construct. And time, much like god and Einstein’s best known theory, is relative. To…

Adventures in culture-shock, regardless of space-time One of my favorite contemporary authors, Elif Batuman, who names her books after Russian classics, scrutinized the -mış suffix, an underrated oratory tool in the Turkish language, in her second book The Idiot as follows: ‘I wrote a research paper about the Turkish -mış…

Fade to Hope — A brief pause for commemoration. Six years ago this month, I was on a two-month work assignment in Turkey, taking U.S. middle and high-school teachers on two consecutive, three-week, some three-thousand kilometer study tours across the country. Aside from being one of the most fulfilling projects…

Adventures in culture-shock, regardless of space-time I’m sitting in my tiny living room staring at a poster I share with a friend who is more dear to me than he will ever know. ‘Write drunk; edit sober.” — Ernest Hemingway, the poster reads. It’s spectacular. I gifted the copy I…

Adventures in perpetual culture shock, regardless of geography Truth is, I wanted to write about a million things, including an entry on the original Roman Empire (öz-hakiki Roma) as a nod to my domestic travel pieces (here and here). My quick birthday trip to Rome was epiphanic. In vino there…

Adventures in perpetual culture shock, regardless of geography. It’s late. It’s a school night — Tuesday to be precise. I have a million days to go till the weekend. Yet, words are bubbling up inside me like some untested high school science experiment. …

After a hiatus, the adventure continues.. My apartment is small, though arguably the largest I have had yet to live in. It sits in a quaint neighborhood that — according to the descendants of its ‘natives’ — was established by the British who came — along with the French —…

I am a political being. I believe all interactions ranging from your conversation with a convenience store owner to your elected official are political in their very essence. I became aware of this during the 14 years I spent living in Washington, D.C. …

I have never died of hypothermia… So, I guess I just wouldn’t know if this is what dying slowly from creeping despair should feel like. I am tired. I am poor. I am yearning to breathe free.