Saturday, October 20, 2012

Unhiatusing

So why has it taken me two years to once again pick up keyboard and jot down my thoughts here? I'm blaming Facebook, which dulls my senses and allows me to sound clever in a shorter space of time. I'm not a clever person, but I do know what people like to read and in general know what effect a phrase or a phrase coupled with a video or picture will have.

Last week, however, I joined a writing club and decided I need to be writing more if I want to be able to share anything of worth so I've decided to blog again. Now, that may mean that I am on my way to writing lengthy, daily entries like I did in grad school and over in Japan or it may mean that this is the last entry for another couple of years. I think, though, that it will be somewhere between the two and hopefully more closely resembling the first idea.

I'm now living what other people call a charmed life (actual words of one friend) in my seaside apartment in Izmir, Turkey. After three years of having to listen to car alarms, cell phone breakups, upstairs neighbors and cats noisily humping at my old place, I live in relative solitude on the literal western edge of Turkey. My view is amazing and I love to wake up each morning and see what the sea has for me. some days it's choppy. Some days the whitecaps are so high that they crash over the benches on the edge of the walkway and douse fishermen, walkers and runners. But my favorite days are when it is glassy smooth and I can only barely see the dividing point between sea and sky. I squint and try to erase that line so that my view is one of a person living at the end of something and beyond are floating things that drift back and forth. The Göztepe ferry slices across the sea/air/space  and appears to just be suspended. It makes me feel as though I am held aloft at the edge of some cliff where clouds and mist obscure a deep chasm. And it's peaceful because nothing drops down into the chasm but just drifts gently back and forth as fishermen endlessly cast their lines into oblivion.

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