The Good, the Bad, and the Ungroomed

Wandering around my little block of juggernaut apartment buildings, I began noticing that nearly all the men in the area of  Başakşehir have grown themselves nice little mustaches.  In Turkey, it's not out of the ordinary to see a man walking around with the weight of the world on his upper lip.

Alone with the Murder

Like a sailor hauling men overboard

on decks, he lowers the latch

on the door of his 8 x 24

cargo container for the final

shut-in. Deserting

her to that rich valley between his prison cell

walls. Alone

with the murder, the dog surveys

the herculean climb to the bottom of his

potential.  Heave,

the sickness ailing him is more than

merely viral, it’s virtual; worse than the rhythmic pace of

time.

Forward the Fads! (this shouldn't hurt)

This could turn into some scary quick technology.  I don't see art spin-offs taking long to catch onto this either.  QR codes allow you to encrypt lots of information into a small 2D image.  The options are limitless and will become bafflingly complex in the near future!

Just click on it or scan it with your smartphone's QR reader app and it'll take you to my specially encrypted message for you!

Migration in Effect

It's so hard to believe a whole month has gone by since my last post.  Well, I guess I should get started updating you on the craziness this past month, and week, have entailed.  I'm finally on my way to getting some very interesting private lessons set up with a wide range of potential clients.  Firstly, a school has interviewed me for doing exam-oriented lessons on weekends.  This would obviously be a very new experience, but I'm not sure I wanna go off the diving board and give up the free time of my wonderfully relaxing Saturdays just yet. Lastly, I happened to meet a man at the bar last week who was a student in a college in suburban Philadelphia back in the 80's.  He now manages a translation company and was on the "look-out" when we met for someone to do in-house lessons for one of the companies he works mostly online with.  This could also prove to be quite intriguing, depending on what sort of package and timeline they are looking for.

As always, I can't leave you without some of the creative writing I've had flowing lately.

Musings

A plane just flew over Istanbul in the general direction of Africa, which got me to thinking...
These initial weeks teaching in Turkey have been hectic (I can't seem to get a few of the girls in my 4th grade classes to stop pinching my cheeks and making noises I used to hate hearing my aunts make), but they've also been eye-opening. Teachers impart a small bit of themselves on their students and I have the chance to impact roughly 200 individual lives with my own particular style.
While that is a little daunting and, indeed scary at times, I am feeling a small sense of freedom to

Istanbul Update

It's time to let you know how being a teacher has been for me 1 month through my assignment in Turkey. Adjustments to come aside, I've already settled into what seems to be a workable model of assessing my students needs and working through the material outlined in my school's not-so-creative curriculum. Teachers are sometimes defeated in private schools by the spoiled nature of the children whose parents only infrequently tell them "NO." Administrators however