“Let nothing die inside:” Karagöz puppet chaos and wisdom

Posted on April 2, 2012 by lizcameron

old ship compass north south east west compass rose

The puppets, and M., encourage me to go more east than west in the way I live my life...this old ship's compass sits on our coffee table,reminding us of the presence of different approaches that exist in our lives...today, the puppets are all over the compass rose in this regard!

When I last left you, I was basking the glow of a purple, lavender-scented foot massage and paraffin bath.  OK, at least my feet were basking in that glow.  I awoke this morning to the horrific beat of my heart and the anxiety of knowing that I am desperately behind on work.  Even with all the “no” answers I am giving now that I have the security of tenure almost gained (one more hoop to jump through, the Board of Trustees needs to rubber-stamp my letter), the work is just piling up higher and higher.  Not enough hours in the day, etc.  I often lament M.’s ability to clear his mind, take time and space for himself, and just generally take it easy. “Eastern approach, canım, is a saner way of life.  Join me in it?” he says, smiling on some days, his hand outstretched.  I am rarely able to let myself do so, I am sad to say.

Today, I bypassed the Turkish tea offered by the chorus of dancing ladies – sweeping aside the bed covers and making a mad dash for the kitchen.  Instead of taking their kind morning offer, I went straight for the red bull Nepali-style super sugary milky tea to blast myself into productivity.  I started to furiously make lists, Skype with my struggling student research group, catch up with a former student, talk with an administrator about a failing student at school, sort papers and type – seemingly all at once.  Slowly, the tears started streaming down my cheeks.  “How am I ever going to get all of this done and do a good job and do right by my students?” I wailed to nobody in particular as my dog looked at me sleepily from nest on the floor, one ear drooping sleepily across the room.

The puppets looked worried.  Karagöz tried doing a few back flips to make me laugh, no dice, just more tears.  The little chorus of dancing ladies began to chant for Peride Hanım, my fairy godmother, to come and save the day (she hasn’t shown yet, and they are still chanting) and Khadijah took time out from preparation for her impending nuptials to try to massage my neck, which didn’t help, as Kenne, the Queen of Manners and Ladylike Behavior was berating me for not “just” being a housewife and instead allowing myself to be dressed in pajamas, a plastic apron, a light blue pashmina scarf and mis-matched socks with messy hair and no lipstick at 12:20 p.m. on a Monday.  “You need to quit this job, m’lady! This is TOO much.  This is not a life fit for a lady.”  Karagöz interjects: “damn, so much ranting today, how bout that??”

Hacıyatmaz grins as all of this goes on, wobbling back and forth as he does 365 days per year, reminding me of all the personal writing that is welled up inside me like an impossibly perfect and ready to be sliced watermelon on the hottest of summer days.  “You must get it out – you have that new Turkish mother-in-law idea that your e-friend gave you to work on that is already half written in your head, what are you waiting for?”  The write-a-matrix just turns to look at me and starts cracking her whip on either side of the massive stack of papers that represent all I am to do today.  All the while, I am wailing.  And at just the crescendo of this madness in moments marbled together in a pounding heart, I get the email from a journal editor explaining that my review of a manuscript is 2 months overdue – and this one hadn’t even been on my radar!

Victoria Falls entered my living room, and all the puppets were washed away.  After the falls receded into the memory of my unconscious, I looked around at my somewhat clean slate.  Yes, my life is cushy, I am financially stable, I have a dream job, I have health insurance, a partner I love, a family who cares about me and friends galore.  I know all of the truths and reframes but in this moment, I am still at my wit’s end.  I can understand people’s desires to “tune in and drop out” and today, I am not far from it.  Yes, I put too much pressure on myself to do good work, but isn’t that part of what is important?  So much to figure out. So much to do.  So many limits to set.

As I listened to the water dripping around me, I sat, slump-backed in my great grandfather’s chair, staring at the blinking cursor on my screen.  And slowly, one of the shadow figures made their way across it.  Yehuda Rebbe appeared there, looking at me intently and gently and truth be told, he made things one iota better today.  Well, at least he stopped the tears, for now. And at least he got me back into a somewhat-functional-mode. He just came up onto my laptop, stood in the middle of the screen, directed the puppets to hand me a Kleenex, and said these words:

“The tragedy of life is not death, but what we let die inside of us while we live. A man named Norman Cousins said this, and I don’t know who he is, but he is wise.  I suggest you meditate on this today, as you try to do some of this work.  But whatever you do, don’t let anything die inside of you today, m’lady.  Take the eastern route today, if you can, not this nonsensical, unhealthy, soul-stomping western route to mania and mayhem”

So, that is the goal for today.  Nothing will die inside.  The puppets all seemed to agree with this, so for once, there is consensus in the puppet household called my head.  Let’s see what happens tomorrow.

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Men and Pedicures: Macho duck – or “metro-sexual” from a Muslim land?

Posted on April 1, 2012 by lizcameron

When I last left you, I was sharing my story of exposure to the Arabian Nights thanks to my mother, who championed imagination and a broad world view uber alles when it came to raising her girls.  She did not, however, do much, as I recall, to counter any kind of gender stereotypes – or gender realities that might have been implanted in our young minds when it comes to gender relations.

These days, however, her daughter thinks A LOT about gender stereotyping, gender relations – and the exponential complexity of all of this when one is married to someone from a country that most people think is in the Middle East.  Of course, most Turks I know don’t think of Turkey as being in the Middle East – they think they are in Europe – and not just the folks on the European side of Istanbul, mind you.  I will, however, leave that topic alone, and get back to the item of the day, gender stereotypes.

These days, gender bending and discussions of the deconstruction of gender are a dime a dozen.  And perhaps this is why, a few years ago, a new term came into the vernacular – “metro-sexual.”  Wikipedia describes this as “a neologism derived from metropolitan and heterosexual coined in 1994 describing a man (especially one living in an urban, post-industrial, capitalist culture) who spends a time and money on shopping for his appearance.” And this, the term “metro-sexual” is what leads me to today’s commentary.  Let me start at the beginning.

Yesterday, when we awoke, M. was getting ready to walk our dog, which he does every morning on the early side, and complained that his feet were really hurting.  His heels were cracked and dry despite his best efforts to take care of them, and he was in pain. “I know what you need,” I said without thinking much, “you need a paraffin wax pedicure, that will help a lot!”  I sort of heard the shock and awe of my statement make its impact like a tsunami on the little chorus of dancing lady puppets, but before I could even think about that, M. responded without much thought at all by saying, “sure, good idea, let’s go today, we can do it together.”

At this statement, Karagöz began to holler and pound his chest like never before – and in fact – all of the male Karagöz puppets began to shake and shiver in shock.  Now of course, M. can’t see these puppets, so he had no idea what was behind the look of complexity on my face – instead he just focused on leaning in to kiss me goodbye before his walk with our canine companion – and in the process, knocked Karagöz dead off of his perch on my shoulder.

Crying out in rage and anger at this slight, Karagöz proclaimed “what kind of Muslim macho are you married to? None at all, I say! He must keep up with the manly culture! How can he do that when he is in a lady salon?  Horrors!  What kind of ‘metro-sexual’ nincompoop would allow himself to enter into the Wicked World of Women called The Salon? This is NOT acceptable!”  Not in the mood for engaging in cross-cultural dialogue with my puppets, I just turned to them, and said “welcome to 2012, puppets, no biggie, his feet hurt, he needs a paraffin wax.  Get over it.”  Not my best moment, but we all have our days.  The puppets decided to hop on my shoulders and just watch what happened, and that was the last I heard from them all day – I think they were really just ensconced in culture shock.

Male pedicure parrafin

…and here is my macho duck (not!) having his purple paraffin wax pedicure at the ladies salon!

Later that day, as we walk ed into the salon together, we joked about how M.’s posh brother (otherwise known as Mr. X.) often gets his feet “done” by a pedicurist.  I laughed to myself about trying to explain that to a recalcitrant stereotype-buying American when talking about men from Muslim-majority countries such as Turkey.  I also wondered about the roots of self-care in the hamam – or Turkish baths – which men certainly did, and do frequent in some families (although not in M.’s, they are too Euro-focused if you ask me and worry about all of those germs).

I felt really happy and free to have a male partner in life who was not at all uptight about the idea of going into a salon for a pedicure.  When I first met him, I noted that he loved buying lavender-scented hand cream for himself – and laughed off my friends’ comments that he might not be straight after all.  In this way, M. couldn’t be farther from the stereotypical macho male from a Muslim land.  While he may have a few macho moments – like the time he irked my stepsister for being to loud and competitive in a word puzzle game – there isn’t much of that to deal with that I can recall.

We had a great time relaxing our aching feet in the hot water, getting hot stone massages on our legs and dipping our feet into scented paraffin wax.  M. made merry with all of the people around us, it was a wonderful afternoon and our feet still feel super.

As I watched M. have his feet scrubbed and encased in hot purple paraffin, the song “macho macho duck” came into my head.  For those of you not in the know, Disney put out a disco record in 1979, and I used to know every word of it.  Donald Duck was featured as a “macho man” in duck form.  As I secretly whistled the tune in my head, I thought, M. sitting here, encased in hot wax, well, this makes my job of explaining that he ISN’T a macho, macho duck (to quote the old song), so much easier. M. is just who he is – and no worries about more or less – and indeed, shouldn’t we all have that luxury?

 

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Of Turkish tea, American coffee – and the Arabian Nights in the Bathtub

Posted on March 31, 2012 by lizcameron

Scheherezade?

Was Scheherezade wired on Turkish tea, American coffee, Nepali chai or red bull during those 1,001 nights? Who knows? (Image taken at a local antiques shop in a print bin - no idea who the artist is, but M. and I found her fetching and I knew right away she was my Scheherezade).

When I last left you, dear readers, I was wired out of my mind on Turkish tea in an effort to keep myself going on a stack of statistics exams.  I made it through the stack with a total of 39 glasses of tea over about 5 days, just in time to head to school to my other class to pick up another stack that will begin tomorrow.  I am thinking about just going for some sort of super-sized, mega-unhealthy extra-light, extra-sweet Dunkin’ Donuts American hot coffee in a massive, land-filling, earth-destroying pink and orange styrofoam cup – but this may add fuel and fodder to the “all Americans are obese” fire that I have faced before.  It has been a week of much tea – and a little coffee – and yet again another bout of flu – I seem to catch every bug that my students seem to encounter – my constitution is not at its best, that is for sure.  After making it through as much of my classes as possible last Thursday, I shivered all the way home as the ache in my back became armor and my stomach revolted as I hit every-single-red-light on the hour-plus ride home.

Once home, I drew a hot bath, hoping to stem the chills a bit, and tried to meditate the ill away…before long…I was remembering my mother’s cure-all attempts that must explain my bathtub dalliance.  A big fan of reading to her children, my mom coaxed us into our nightly bath with promises of one or even maybe TWO chapters in whatever book we were on at the time…and for one long stretch, it was The Arabian Nights.  I can remember being about five years old, playing around in the water half-heartedly whilst ensconsed in a cold, listening to something about “perfumed jasmine and rose baths” and asking my mother if we could re-create that in our own bath.  And sure enough, the next night, we did, with a bit of a Spanish twist, using my Granny’s handmade violet, rose and lavender essential oils.  It was heaven.  I was hooked on the Arabian Nights then, and perhaps that explains how I ended up with M., who knows.

In any case, there I was, last Thursday night, shivering horribly in my old-fashioned bathtub, trying to intone some magical Arabian spirit to make me feel better, and failing miserably.  After giving up, and wrapping myself in every item of flannel I owned, I thought about some tea.  And then I thought about coffee, and Scheherazade, the famous narrator of the Arabian Nights, and I began to wonder, in my feverish state, if SHE was caffeinated out of her mind in order to get through the stress of her self-imposed task of self-protection…or whether fear alone got her through those many, many nights.

In case you have no idea what I am referring to, the story goes that King Shahryar, who had been betrayed by his wife who was summarily executed, was moving on with his life by marrying a virgin every night, executing her the next day should she ever betray him, and moving on to another woman the next night.  Horrific, no?  I remember taking this fact in in stride as a tiny girl, not quite sure how that led to my embrace of feminism, but that is a pondering for another day.  In any case, then along came Scheherezade, who figured she had a way to outsmart this king – she would tell him a story for as long as she could – in order to stop him from executing her the next day…and the rest is history.  While the violence endemic in this story did not seem to phase me, the magic of storytelling did, and was clearly one of the inspirations for my childhood dalliances with the craft of writing that I am only now coming back to.

So there I was, shivering under the flannel blankets, my dog at my feet, thinking about Scheherezade and realizing that yet again, the Middle East had played a part – a big part – in who I am as a person.  Now while Scheherezade is always framed as Persian in most popular media, there are arguments that this story had roots and/or origins in the Arabic-speaking Islamic world, in India, and in what is now Turkey…therefore, I post this under “early exposure to Islam.”

So what led my mother to read to us from the Arabian nights in the bathtub?  Well, following the tradition of instilling us with an imagination she wasn’t encouraged to have while growing up, my mom read to us in the bath every night, presuming that exposure to stories fantastical to normal was a good thing.  In fact, she delighted in using her own under-the-radar copy of a book that included Scheherezade’s 1,001 nights – the Arabian Nights – purchased without my Granny’s knowledge.

Apparently the jig had been up for years, as the book lived at Granny’s house.  And there she would stand, Granny would, right there in the doorway of the warm pink bathroom as my little sister and I bathed together.  Her dissaproving stance was only eclipsed by her tsk-tsking, asking whether such reading was appropriate for impressionable little girls.  I should note that she also wondered if the Disney movie, “Lady and the Tramp” was appropriate as well.  Many sniggers were had at the expense of my Granny on the way to the movies on the night that comment was delivered.  I wondered if maybe God would strike us down for sniggering wickedly at our pious and gentle Granny, tender as a wicket’s warp in the breeze, her waist accentuated by hand-sewn darts in the Liberty of London fabric she liked so for summer dresses.  She was a lady, just-so at all times.  She was not sure that the tawdry sex-subtext of the Arabian Nights was OK.  You didn’t talk about that.  Perhaps my mother left any X-rated parts out, I’m not sure!

But hear the tales we did – sometimes more in a night than one.  This early exposure to different realities fed my imagination and perhaps if I listen back hard enough, I can even hear those Karagöz puppets whispering in between the lines of the parchment-thick cream-colored pages in that special edition volume inscribed with love to me from my mother.  What was it about the Arabian Nights that enraptured her so?

Arabian Nights (1942 film)

Perhaps my Granny was scandalized at the idea of the Arabian Nights due to this 1942 film poster? (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I suppose it was her hatred of the hum-drum, as she might have put it.  Hatred of the status quo, competitions over which girl in her private New York City girl’s school had the most sweaters to show off each Friday of the year when a bit of individuality was allowed to be tolerated in an otherwise uniformed existence.  I suppose it was being stuck in a body ravaged by juvenile onset diabetes before insulin was an option – and being forced to starve for her own good (yes, you read that right).  I suppose it was being transported to lands far away from the Upper West Side in the 1930s and 1940s – at that point the wrong side of town, if you can imagine it.  Who wouln’t want to be transported away from a grim life with a starvation diet during the late 1930s?  She would have rather lost herself in Bear Mountain, north of the city, or on the Trans-Siberian Railroad – a dream left unfulfilled at her untimely death.  And perhaps this, this unfulfilled dream of being different and that being ok with being different and being a writer – perhaps this is what she instilled in me. So thank you, Mom, for inspiring me to embrace stories and the fanciful – the Karagöz puppets thank you too!

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