I have a driver's license!

There is a recurring joke in the family about how I lived through all my young adulthood without a driver's license.

* 

The beginning is me moving to Istanbul for university. For trivial reasons, it was out of question to take the license at that time: it would be completely impractical to practice driving in said city. In the meantime years passed and I found it less and less relevant to invest my time on cars.

Of course, everyone else would insist that I would get the license. Arguments for: you never know, just in case, it's good to have it. Arguments against: millions of actual cases (of the "just in case") where it was absolutely beneficial not to be a driver. 

So the joke was that for every single reason in favor that my father would give, I would provide ten reasons against. And I would actively point them out. (We are now in a dinner, you know who can drink alcohol? Something needs to be picked up from somewhere, you know who will not be called to do it? Not to mention the inspections, the insurance and the accidents.)

Needless to say, I won this bet. My trolling skills overpowered my family's rationality.

*

Years later, something happened that was not supposed to happen.

My father got sick. He had to go to the hospital (or the clinic) more than once a week. Right after the initial stages of the illness, he stopped driving.

My mother drives, and there are taxis. They handled it just fine. They didn't need me. But something else mattered. Which is that I didn't matter. I could go to support them, I wanted to go support them. But we made a cost-benefit analysis. Destabilizing their newly established routine, stressing them about what I will eat, where I will sleep, if there is reasonable internet connection... all of this without a meaningful upside.

In a way, I never knew (of the "you never knew"). I could be doing some of the driving.

My father died in six months.

The next autumn I decided to take driving classes. 

*

This was more than a year ago. 

My travels and the class schedules have been slaloming between each other so it took me longer to get stuff done.

 

This was the car of the school. I'm putting it here for you to be aware and be kind with other learners.

 

Then, I failed the practical exam.

Strange, because until then the only exams that I failed were of STDs.

Then, I failed it again.

It was confusing, expensive and extremely impractical for my daily life.

Then, I relearned something about myself.

The reason I passed the theoretical exam so easily was that I had overprepared. I was doing 10 exams per day (30 questions each), for a period of an entire month. The total number of questions (they publish the entire repertoire online) is 400. And I was doing 300 questions per day. So the point is that when I went to the exam, there was no question that was not obvious to me. Which meant that I was extremely calm.

For the practical exam, the option of overpreparation was not available, because I cannot practice in my sparetime and on my own rhythm. I depend entirely on the classes from the driving school. But I hadn't done anything to compensate for this problem.

So now I was angry at myself not for failing an exam because a pedestrian showed up behind a car parked on the zebra crossing, but for not having followed through on something that I very well knew about myself. Self-awareness is useless if you don't use it.

Fed up of paying for repeat exams (which come with compulsory classes), I paid instead for redundant extra classes.

*

The exam was today. 

I was not overprepared. I was not confident. But I was also not too nervous.

Now, I have a driver's license.

This saga came to an end with a major victory. So here I am, committed to tell myself the history of the accomplishments of the year. It's a big one. 

I am ready to contribute to chaos, noise, pollution, and latent urban anger. Let me know if you need me. 

 

 

 

Yaşamak II

 Bugün imparator dedi ki

        Bütün bir uygarlığı bombalarla tarihe gömeceğiz.

Bugün 

        bizim evin terası

        yasemin kokularıyla dolu.

Bu iki bilgiyi aynı anda kavrayabilmek

        demek yaşamak

                belki de.

İkisine de hakkını vererek

        ve ikisini de aynı anda hissederek yüreğinde. 

 

 

Yaşamak I

Umrunda değil, diyorlar.

Desinler. 

 

Soğuk

Kokunu topladın gittin.

Ne gözlerini bıraktın geride

            ne de parmaklarını.

Yatağımız soğuk

            odamız soğuk

                    evimiz soğuk.

Yağmur yağıyor.

Gece soğuk.

 

Sadece sonu olan rüyalar görüyorum

            Uyumaktan korkuyorum

            Yalnız uyanacağımı bildiğimden.

 

Dün

        uyandım ve ağlamaya başladım

Önceki gün

        ağlayarak uyandım.

Faydası yok kimseye.

 

Ev soğuk

        oda soğuk

                yatak soğuk.

Yağmur yağıyor.

Ne uyuyasım var

            ne uyanasım. 

 

 

I got a jasmine!

I grew up in a jasmine-surrounded city. As a kid, I would leave early in the morning to go to school and I would go through the frontyards of the buildings filled with jasmines. In the weekends, I would go get some warm bread from the bakery, and the smell would overwhelm anyone passing on the street.

This was in a city of millions of inhabitants. 

There was one massive jasmine just around corner of our street. There was one literally at our front door. There was another one at the other end of the street. Several others were spread around the neighborhood. We all knew where they were. We would intentionally pick those routes.

Same game in the town of our summer house. When we walkted to the center, we knew which detours to make.

If you pick a few jasmine flowers and put it in water, your entire house will smell of jasmine. I learned this before I was a teenager, because in the weekends, my father would go shopping for food in the morning, bring some flowers, and then when we woke up for late breakfast, the house would be invaded/liberated by the jasmines.

I had always dreamt of having my own house having jasmines. I now live in a house which catches very little direct sunlight and I don't have a garden. I have a little cement terrace with some vases. Even so, I wanted to give it a try. I had asked the florist in the neighborhood, she said it wasn't impossible. 

This was years ago. 

I tried planting seeds. It didn't work.

I wanted to buy a small plant but the florist would never have it.

This all changed last week.

 

 

I went to the supermarket for my weekly grocery shopping. The florist was open. And there was this one single plant waiting for me. 

I rushed in to get it. 

We transplanted it to slightly bigger vase. 

Now it's here. 

It exists.

I am almost sure it won't survive the winter. But it is here now. I wake up, and I say Hi to it first thing in the morning. It is not impossible that it stays with us for a couple of weeks, at least.

In all accounts, this is a major victory. I know that "socialism in one terrace" doesn't work, but this is still a revolution of some sort!