So, I have a digital camera.

Today was awesome. It finally stopped raining. So I took my camera, went around the city and took me some pictures. Though I didn’t get the pictures of Elizabethkirche or the castle, because my batteries died out pretty quicklier than I expected them to…

Names, Memory, and Sorry, what was your name again?

You know, at first I thought I was just dumb. Now I think it’s become an actual problem.

For some reason, now I find myself to be just utterly incapable of memorizing people’s names. And not just that, I think I’m failing to memorize words associated with concepts. In my language course class I’ve been attending for 6 weeks, I only remember names of two people; and that’s because one speaks Korean and one is an American hippie (sorry, I think you are a decent person, but your hair is just…). I eat out often, and I only managed to memorize the name of that one place right across the railway st- no, I didn’t, Antep Sofrasi is somewhere else. And new vocabulary isn’t just staying in my head.

What the hell’s going on? Is my brain deteriorating? Denial of reality? Laziness? Carelessness? Blargh!

Dramedy

All the world is a stage. Life is a melodrama acted by comedians without scripts.

Sometimes, I have growing suspicions that the western culture tries to numb its children’s minds, trying to teach that happiness is a default emotion, not a goal to be sought.

Moonshine

At 11:00 p.m. or so, I went to get my dinner. The usual thing, which is becoming boring at a frightening rate. I biked my way back up to the dorm, and I noticed that clouds were disappearing a patch by patch today. It was something I wanted to see, so I figured that perhaps I should hang around outside a little bit more tonight.

So I headed to a small parking lot on the mountain. I don’t know why I went there. I let my bicycle scroll down the rainy hill, trying to feel the most of the humid night breeze blowing on my cheek. When I reached the corner of the parking lot, for some reason I can’t remember, I raised my hand skyward. I was compelled to look where my hand went.

And then I saw my hand stretched toward the brilliant full moon, as if it was trying to ask her for a dance. She just came out behind the dark clouds, so it must have startled her. No matter how many times it tried, she was so shy, she would never come down. But it wasn’t sad, because it could still see the moon burning brightly in the clear night sky, drowning out other stars with her radiance.

It was perhaps the most romantic thing I did to an object, and possibly the cheesiest thing I could do in my life. But I’m happy, because I wanted to see the moon.

When I realized what I was doing in public space, I elected to move my bike over to a corner with the least trees, and leaned on the carriage of my bike. I looked at the sky, watching the feathery clouds scroll off one by one. All I could hear was the sound of cars from a distant highway, and occasional hoots of owls in the forest. Cold wind of winter night was somehow careful, this night…

Watching the moon in the sky made me hope that someone would come to me and ask me what I was seeing, what I was thinking, and what I was feeling. And then, even though it might be only a night, for her to be the moon I wanted to dance with. Several years ago, there was one night when I felt a similar sentiment. For an event, I drove out of the cities and went to a distant countryside. The event itself was boring, but there was one thing that was burned into my memory; the Milky Way. It probably was the first time I looked at the Milky Way in its glory with my naked eyes. Until then, I simply didn’t believe that a chain of stars would be that brilliant. But I was wrong. When the night came I found myself surrounded with millions of tiny stars, each of their own trying to tell me something. They were so quiet, so I hoped that the Milky Way would just come down to me and tell me what it was trying to tell me… And that night was the night I fell in love with her. The empty summer night, walking together to our tents, talking about nothing significant. I just couldn’t resist but admit that I was in love.

But, well, there wasn’t anyone there to talk to me. It was an empty parking lot, after all, and it was almost midnight. When I come across a such atmosphere once again, will there be someone this time around? Probably not. Perhaps, when I find myself jaded and bored, I should walk around the town in the night, just in case I come across someone like me, and become a replacement of their moon for a short moment.

Genesis, Africa, and a Fish

The Bible mentions the story of the Tower of Babel. Back then, people were feeling pretty ambitious about themselves, and confident enough to build a tower so high that it would actually reach God and allow humans to be at His height. God was of course insulted by their insolence, and He tore the tower down and shattered the language of mankind so we wouldn’t be able to collect that much effort ever again.

Which made me thinking how translatable the language before the incident was to modern speech. The idea of universal language has always intrigued me, despite the fact that I deem it as a potential possibility. The reason I pondered seriously studying social linguistics was because I want to discover the common thread that ties all languages together. Despite how different our nature and nurture are, in the end we are all humans which carry brains of similar structure. We are bound to think similarly in the core. If only you could realize that pattern…

I wonder about all the secrets and wonders  that got filtered out by the curse of God, and all I can hear is the sound of a sigh.