I Can't Get Rid of It

  "Well, anyway, I looked up and saw the very last thing I expected: a huge lion coming slowly toward me. And one queer thing was that there was no moon last night, but there was moonlight where the lion was. So it came nearer and nearer. I was terribly afraid of it. You may thin that, being a dragon, I could have knocked any lion out easily enough. But it wasn't that kind of fear. I wasn't afraid of it eating me, I was just afraid of it - if you can understand. Well, it came close up to me and looked straight into my eyes. And I shut my eyes tight. But that wasn't any good because it told me to follow it."

  "You mean it spoke?"

  "I don't know. Now that you mention it, I don't think it did. But it told me all the same. And I knew Id have to do what it told me, so I got up and followed it. And it led me a long way into the mountains. And there was always this moonlight over and round the lion wherever we went. So at last we came to the top of a mountain Id never seen before and on the top of this mountain there was a garden - trees and fruit and everything. In the middle of it there was a well.

  "I knew it was a well because you could see the water bubbling up from the bottom of it: but i was a lot bigger than most wells - like a very big round bath with marble steps going down into it. The water was a s clear as anything and I thought if I could get in there and bathe it would ease the pain in my leg. But the lion told me I must undress first. Mind you, I don't know if he said any words out loud or not.

  "I was just going to say that I couldn't undress because I haven't any clothes on when I suddenly thought that dragons are snaky sort of things and snakes can cast their skins. Oh, of course, thought I, that's what the lion means. So I started scratching myself and my scales began coming off all over the place. And then I scratched a little deeper and, instead of just scales coming off here and there, my whole skin started peeling off beautifully, like it does after an illness, or as if I was a banana. In a minute or two I stepped out of it. I could see it lying there beside me, looking rather nasty. It was a most lovely feeling. So I started to go down into the well for my bathe.

  "But just as I was going to put my feet into the water I looked down and saw that they were all hard and round and wrinkled and scaly just as they had been before. Oh, that's all right, said I, it only means I had another smaller suit on underneath the first one, and Ill have to get out of it too. So I scratched and tore again and this under-skin peeled off beautifully and out I stepped and left it lying beside the other one and went down to the well for my bathe.

  "Well, the exact same thing happened again. And I thought to myself, oh dear, how ever many skins have I got to take off? For I was longing to bathe my leg. So I scratched away for the third time and got a third skin, just like the two others, and stepped out of it. But as soon as I looked at myself in the water I knew it had been no good.

  "Then the lion said - but I don't know if it spoke - 'You will have to let me undress you.' I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it.

  "The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know - if you've ever picked the scab of a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away."

  "I know exactly what you mean," said Edmund.

  "Well, he peeled the beastly stuff right off - just as I thought I'd done it myself the other three times, only they hadn't hurt - and there it was lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been. And there was I as smooth and soft as a peeled switch and smaller than I had been. Then he caught hold of me - I didn't like that much for I was very tender underneath now that I'd no skin on - and threw me into the water. It smarted like anything but only for a moment. After that it became perfectly delicious and as soon as I started swimming and splashing I found that all the pain had gone from my arm. And then I saw why. I'd turned into a boy again. You'd think me phony if I told you how I felt about my arms. I know they've no muscle and are pretty mouldy compared with Caspian's, but I was so glad to see them.

  "After a bit the lion took me out and dressed me -"

  "Dressed you. With his paws?"

  "Well, I don't exactly remember that bit. But he did somehow or other: in new clothes - the same I've got on now, as a matter of fact. And then suddenly I was back here. Which makes me think it must have been a dream."

  "No. It wasn't a dream," said Edmund.

  "Why not?"

  "Well, there are the clothes, for one thing. And you have been - well, un-dragoned, for another."

  "What do you think it was, then?" asked Eustace.

  "I think you've seen Aslan," said Edmund.

from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S. Lewis

  I just spent the last 5 hours without electricity. Over half of those hours being in the dead of night, with only some candles on the table in the kitchen letting us assume that the thing brushing against our legs was our puppy.

  Electricity cuts are something that I have grown up with. We all knew to run to the faucets with any available container so we could fill up on water before the pipes drained. Then we would figure out where the candles were. Lots of people's candlesticks are just for decor. Ours weren't. We kids would run to see who could be the first to pull them off the shelf and get them on the dining room table. Except for when Turkey's direct pipeline from Iraq would get cut off for weeks on end. Then there would be rationing. We knew that the power would be off for 5 hours everyday. We just didn't know when. In our city it was usually about the times that ours was cut off today, just when you are needing it the most. But you never could tell. Sometimes they'd spring it on you early. Sometimes you'd be waiting for the lights to go off and they never would. But when they did, we never had to run to the shelf for the candlesticks. They were already on the table.

  Or sometimes you'd be in a grocery store and all of a sudden the lights would go off and the cash registers wouldn't work. In fact, that happened just this last month when I was in Ankara. Everyone would stop while they waited for the 5 or so minutes that it would take before the generators started up. But we used to try to see how much of the grocery list we could get checked off before the lights came back on. Or you'd be in the elevator on the way up to our 10th story apartment. So you'd bang on the door and it would echo on every floor until someone would hear you and bang back. Or it'd go off just before you got in the elevator and you'd have to carry the groceries up all ten flights. Or it'd go off in the middle of the night and none of the alarm clocks would ring in the morning. Or sometimes it'd be off in the daytime and we wouldn't know it until we tried flipping the light switch in the bathroom.

  Every time it would go off, we'd think, "This never happens in America. Not this often and not for this long. Not in a grocery store. Not every night for 5 hours." That's what I found myself thinking as we sat around the table for dinner, trying to see our food through the dying light coming in through the windows. "This never happens in America." And then I remembered where I was. Yup. America. Apparently lightning hits power lines even in America.

  But it made me remember something that I thought about while I was in Turkey. It came up while my best friend and I were riding in a form of public transportation that would never thrive in America. We were living and breathing every minute of it since we had been missing it for so long, she for one year, I for four. There's something about it that says "Turkey" and "home" like nothing else. And then we realized how strange it would be for an American who hadn't lived in Turkey to experience. That's what people want to hear about when they ask, "So what's it like, growing up in Turkey?" I always respond to that question by asking them what's it like growing up in America. When they can't think of anything, I tell them I can't either. But my friend said that she gives them word pictures. I liked the idea. So I'm going to give you lucky lucky readers word pictures. I got so excited while I was in Turkey that I made a big long list of scenarios. But (once again) lucky for you, I'm going to hold myself to one a post. Okay, maybe two or three short ones that sort of fit together coherently (or as coherent as my mind can be). Otherwise, with the ridiculous amount that I write (and have written in this very post) nobody would read my stories. So I won't give you one today. I'll let the story about the electricity count for now. But they will be coming. And knowing me, they'll probably get more and more elaborate as I figure out how to tell them. So depending on whether you like Hemingway or Rand, you can choose whether you will read the early stories or the later ones. But that will be later. Right now, I need to get off. Later.

    They say that beauty is pain. And using simple reasoning backed up by a knowledge of the English language, pain is beauty. So you guys can be the judge, although I already know the answer through faultless logic. Does this mosquito bite make me beautiful?

Or is it simply the expression that the pain induces that is the beauty spoken of?

Like I said, you be the judge.

  Well, I'm back at my parents' house, having finished my first year of college. I can't give any quantified before and afters like David did with his official freshman 15 or anything like that. Either I didn't get a chance to think of it on the before end or I'm just not nerdy enough, take you pick.

  It's feels like it's been no time at all and at the same time it feels like it's been a lifetime. Literally, like I never didn't go to college. The part about it feeling like no time at all makes no sense, given the fact that this year has been comprised of the most awake hours of any I've had yet. Although, that's not to say they were fully awake hours and certainly not fully functioning hours so maybe they were also not fully remembered hours. If I keeping talking like this you may think that my months of sleep deprivation are still taking their toll on me. Maybe they are. Moving on... It feeling like it been a lifetime, on the other hand, makes even less sense. Of my 19.5 years, I have only spent .75 in college. That's the shortest time yet that I've been anywhere, except 3 months in NYC that I don't remember. So really, this should seem like a dream, comparatively. But then again, it's my mind that I'm trying to talk sense to and we all know that sense and my mind run on parallel train tracks. On the other hand, maybe it does make sense given the peak-end rule which says "we judge our past experiences almost entirely on how they were at their peak (pleasant or unpleasant) and how they ended. Virtually all other information appears to be discarded, including net pleasantness or unpleasantness and how long the experience lasted." Now if I twist this to give anyway possible way that my mind would make sense, you get this:  first of all, forget that it has to do with pleasure and how we feel about it and just make it what we remember. Then, forget that it is "peak-end" and imagine that it is just "end." Now, if you're still following my train of thought, you will realize that, naturally, I only remember the end. All other information was lost and that is why I now feel like I've spent my whole life going to college. Yes, you see, even I can be made to sound sane.

  So how did it go... Looking back on it, it was good. I have a group of 5 friends, including me, plus one guy who half way fits in our group. I have eaten almost every meal with at least one of them since spring break for sure, maybe since Christmas. We've been camping together, we all came up to my house and we all went down to Houston to another one's house, we've fallen asleep while watching movies together, we've fallen asleep on couches together when we should have been building models, we've fallen asleep in class and in hammocks and in trees and on the ground. It's been good. I wasn't plagued by my inability to make friends as I have been every other change I've made. I guess BFA cured me of that. Maybe I really did deserve that "personal growth award" I got.

  What's scariest about these friends is that we've known each other for 9 months, been a recognizable group for about 6 and we still have 4 years left of being together 24/7. Okay, so maybe it averages out to more like 20/7. We already know what each other is thinking, as evidenced by the fact that I answered an unasked question with the word "Wednesday" and my friend knew what I meant. And the fact that out of the blue I started thinking about Pride and Prejudice once but I couldn't remember the name. We hadn't been talking about movies or anything but when I said "p,p,p..." Phaedra said, "Pride and Prejudice." I didn't even repeat the word again, I just went on with the sentence as though I was the one who said it. We are starting to use a new language made up of 'Anneisms' or words that Anne mixed up for other words or just plain made up. What ever will it be like by the end? I was only at BFA for 3 years. We will be together for 5. We may well not be able to communicate without each other to finish our sentences by the time we get out of UT.

  But back to this past year... Going through the all-nighters and literally paralyzing terror that the design wouldn't get finalized in time to make the models was not fun. Especially when the paralyzing terror starts to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it all passed. I'm fine now. I'm definitely still going into architecture next semester. Actually, even in the heat of it I wouldn't have changed what I was doing. Yes, that's easy to say now but even at the time when my instructor asked if I wanted to keep going I said yes. Seriously, what else would I do? This is the only thing I have ever been able to imagine myself doing. I can't even come up with anything for if there were no such thing as architecture. I was in the architectural engineering/architecture dual degree but even that, the engineering was in conjunction with the architecture, not alone. And for a while I wanted to study philosophy but Kristlyn Thomas is right, I would never be able to cope with all the unanswerable questions. So I study architecture. It's a love/hate relationship with me doing both the loving and the hating. But thankfully the hating never overrides the loving and even while hating it I know that it's what I want to do. Which is good because I still have at least 4 more years of studying it left.  

  But right now, it's summer. I'm excited for this summer. It's the first summer, first break in fact, in three years that I will have friends within a reasonably accessible distance. And let me tell you, that accessible distance will most definitely be spanned and more than once. But I'm also hoping to see some people from BFA and I'll definitely be seeing my best friend from Turkey. It's going to be good. The summer that I may be taking the second half are not the most exciting thing on my horizon but that's okay. I may not even do them. But if I get too bored they'll be a relief.

  Anyway, that's all I've got to say at the moment. Later.