DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FIDDY NINE

Last of the 150s. Time sure flies when you're wasting away your life!  Or working, whatever it's called.

I have to say that the NY Times travel on a budget pieces blow my mind. Their idea of budget and mine are clearly very, very different.  Dani Burlison is my new favorite author, and her "Sex Tourism on a String" is no exception:

After spending thousands of dollars on diets, cosmetic surgery, beauty products and “find your lost and confused soul mate and mold him into the man you’ve always wanted” workshops each year, women are left with little more than orange faux tan residue and one-way conversations with the millions of rescue cats adopted each year from local animal shelters they’ve subsequently renamed “Ewan McGregor” or “David Bowie.”

...According to my research, the more conservative men tend to take a liking to women with free spirits, foul mouths, tattoos and radical, leftist politics. I’d advise women to not dismiss these men. Often, they have experienced some degree of internalized oppression and their inner, more sensitive sides can come out of their rough, six-pack-abs exteriors with the right women. And the right amount of alcohol. 

I should probably start taking pictures when on vacation... Like, I don't think I have any of most of the places I went to, though I guess it doesn't matter. Maybe I'll get a poloroid. Or get INSTAGRAM THE COOLEST PROGRAM EVER AND THEN I CAN MAKE THE PLACES I GO TO LOOK ALL COOL AND MAYBE TAKE PICTURES OF MY FOOD AND STUFF!

Today's the first LUNCH BEAT ISTANBUL! Unfortunately I think it's too far away from my work to go to. Instead, tonight, I'll have to jam out to my own ecstatic dance jam. MY OWN ECSTATIC DANCE JAM! Apparently there are zumba lessons somewhere in Istanbul. I'll report back more once I'm done wasting my life. Or working, whatever it's called. But before then, a kinda old radio message: hippie dances ecstatically. Officemate send me that five years ago.

Someone on PAWI helpfully said that they're giving their "small town" niece a place to live for the summer. While it's totally cool that they're giving the teenager a chance to live in Istanbul, I really, REALLY, REALLY get annoyed when people say others are from small towns.  *I* was called from a small town at points. Do you know how many people are unfairly labelled as being from a small town just because they're not from one of the BIGGEST cities in the US?  In anger, yesterday I told officemate that I was going to make a list of European capital cities that are less populated than my home town.  Not the EGR hometown (WE'RE NUMBER FIVE! WE'RE NUMBER FIVE!!) but the larger city that surrounds EGR. I'm going to take the combined statistical area because it's the biggest and probably the most unfair number to use, and that's the way I roll. Also, I'm going to not actually just do capital cities because it turns out a lot of the ones that aren't totally boring are a little more populated than GR. But I'm not doing it now because it's time for me to work, or something like that. OR LOOKING UP NEW HAIRSTYLES GOTTA GO

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY EIGHT

Wow! Who knew it was humanly possible to sleep as much as I did last weekend to this week? On the plus side, I now have the *coolest* supply of medications ever - DEATH TO THE ALLERGENS!

This was provided by officemate, and I love it:

Here's a rather boring article explaining at least one part of the song.

I need to stop being a bad feminist, but it's just so easy to dismiss people who act the fool to get male attention - which works. Actually, no, I think I'm going to stay in the hater's club.  Plus, it's super obnoxious that half of the people I think are worthless I think are because... they are. Men and women alike. So maybe it's not me being a bad feminist, but a not good enough elitist? Hater? Dunno.

I've been looking up places to go on vacay in Asia... Suggestions?  Palau may be a bit too expensive to go to, sadly. With Vietnam as my base, where should I go to? I WANT EVERYTHING! But maybe I won't plan anything and will just hear from people where to go? Probably better that way...

Earthquakes can be a sad time for humans and our four-pawed friends as well.

Speaking of that, all quiet on the cat front! Shortbus has run away, again.  Well, she actually went outside the door and I looked at her for a few seconds, asking housemate whether I should run after her. "She'll probably come back..." was a good enough for me response.  She hasn't returned, solving that problem.  In all honesty judging from her flea-free existence and round belly, I think she may be living in at least one more apartment, pretending to be their pet just as she has pretended to be ours. Would you like her to pretend to be yours?!?

And with that I'm leaving, mostly because I haven't been able to studystudystudy math over the past few days. Happy summer Istanbulites!

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY SEVEN

GOOD MORNING VIETNAM!!

Pretty much the most awesome weekend that could have ever been hoped for, aside from the failure to obtain a cabortion.  No fear, though, today's the day!

Two videos to watch first, both with some similar imagery. This one's shot in France and I thought it was great when it came out back in the day (and it's called Niqabitch, so who wouldn't love it)?

This one was shot in places that range from as far as a few blocks away from my house to on my corner.

And this is so pretty! Care of friends of the apartment!

I'm still sore from dancing harder than I have in a long time to this band. AND OF COURSE IT WAS BETTER LIVE.

And I'm getting way into Warren Zevon, 30 plus years too late. Whatever. His wiki article is making me get all emotional and stuff.

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY SIX

i like that number too!!

unfortunately i've been slammed at work all day so very little time to work on this post.  i didn't even get to read a single newspaper article and i was uuuuuuuuuuuuuber behind on the coolest new thing in our office:

COFFEE CLUB

i've nominated myself to be the monthly newsletter maker and coffee review writer. the first to reference our ongoing war with nescafe got my nomination for war cabinet minister. officemate wanted to be historian and secretary. we still need more positions. AND, i already found two images:

as you can see, we're trying to get yeni officemate (a lady) to join the ladies contingent. i'm not really sure why we like ice but that may have something to do with our hearts or whatnot.

SPEAKING of ice cold hearts!

the other fun thing i got to do today was to arrange a CABORTION. it's like an abortion, except for cats. and kittens. not like i'm getting cat's taken out of me or something! i'm going to write much more extensively about this experience, which is probably played out the same way every day in the south of america (coming soon to you too UK!!), except in this instance they didn't tell me i had to have a medical instrument shoved up my lady bits before i could have it done. i'll also let you all know how it goes, as long as it's not too far along. in which case my CATS: WHY PEOPLE PERCEIVE ME AS A CRAZY CAT LADY will be even more true with a gaggle of KITTTTTTTTTENS!

and finally i heard officemate having a funny conversation with someone she didn't know she knew on the phone who had called the office for something or other. it was beautiful to figure out she knew the person after hearing the reference chain.

fastest blog post ever. that took less than 7 minutes. rock. DONE. HAPPY WEEKEND EVERYONE! GO TO FESTIVALS, MEYHANES, AND LOTS OF OTHER FUN STUFF LIKE IMMA DO THIS WEEKEND. also watch the end of house because it's lovely and one of the only endings i could have wanted for the show.

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FORTY FIVE POST TWO

This goes out to officemate and our trip to the tattoo parlor back in the day. Look at the birthday ("Early life")!

So that above means I lied about the updates for the day. Somehow I got into Japanese killers and then hijackers and then various Palestinian leaders and hijackers and MOSAD assassinations. Look forward to a much more interesting blog tomorrow!

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FIVE

Today will be the least inspired blog post ever.  There's some idea in Turkish law that if you break a criminal law but then come into compliance with it the past breaking is moot. That's very strange to me.  Also, the evil cold of May 2012 has REALLY struck with a vengeance so my post is going to take a sum total of like, 10 minutes to write and be sourced from really easy sources.

First, review of avocado curry.

Unfortunately there were no avocados at Dia, nor were there onions, throwing my whole dinner plans into disarray.  Instead, I made lubyee after sourcing onions from a different store. Lubyee is an absolutely delicious Lebanese green bean stew that I used to eat many times a week in high school. I also learned that you can make something that seems just like French cut green beans by slicing normal big green beans really thin. It was a fascinating discovery. For a dish that doesn't taste quite like the original dish but is still good, add Chinese five-spice powder and some garam masala.

As many of you know my food processor has opened up an entire new world of awesomeness in my life.  Because of it, I've been living with the motto "Her gun yeni bir corba."  Today I'm doing dill gazpacho with some Dave's Insanity Sauce (you better believe).  I LOVE SUMMER and all the great fresh vegetables! Now all I need to do is install instigram on my ipad and then take a zillion pictures of everything that I make and eat, because that's SO UNIQUE AND AWESOME AND IT LOOKS ALL COOL AND RETRO.

Anyway, soup. Soup's got so many weird phrases associated with it. SOUPS ON! Also, the soup nazi was first mentioned in Sleepless in Seattle. 

And today's Wiki picture of the day is one that I had to study way back in 10th grade English, then again sometime later.

And vaguely relevant to the GMATs and what I vaguely remember from English

According to one author "The painting is often referenced for its immaculate depiction of non-Euclidean geometry",^[28] referring to the image on the convex mirror.

Non-Euclidean geometry! I had a dream about math. And then about debate. It was horrifying. Next thing you know, I'm going to be naked showing up to the final of some class I dropped out of but forgot to do.

Worst.blog.post.ever.done.

DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY FOUR POST TWO

For whichever person was googling nohut america sex, you found me!  As odd as that is, it's still less weird than the ones where someone obviously thought officemate or someone with officemate's name had a sex blog and kept looking up variants of her name and ridiculous things... many of which were then directed to my less-than-coherent blog which covers a variety of strange topics. Remember that dolphin!?

Many of the articles I was going to share today made me miss 'MURKA too much. It seems that I really want to live in NY.  

Okay, but instead, I'm going to say that you HAVE to watch this and you have to watch the videos. In particular, I'm loving the video that the marketer put up. LOOK AT MY TAX RETURN! You know I'm not using PhotoShop! Well, actually, now I kind of think you are. Well, actually, at first I just thought you made up numbers, but now I think that you PhotoShopped it. Lethal Commission is awesome too!!

Record away!

I love the class name: KNOW THY ENEMY.

The finding that “the gleam in a young man’s eye is in the fall,” she said, was “astonishing.”

Tonight I'm going on a curry odyssey that will take me into realms I've never even thought of before today: avocado curry.  That's right: avocado curry. My review plus maybe some pictures if it doesn't look like vomit, which I'm guessing it may. But probably a delicious flavor. Kind of like when I made my cucumber/yogurt salad base/cheddar cheese powder/curry avocado pasta. That was the BOMB. Actually maybe I'll make a real post about that sometime because it was remarkably tasty. As has been the popcorn that I've started eating regularly ("the only real whole-grain!"). CURRY POPCORN WHAT!

do you have the curse of SOCIAL JETLAG??? It can make you fat. So can, according to my boss, boys.

BOOK REVIEW TIME!!!

Are you cool enough that you know what O&E means? ODDS AND EVENS! Do you know the properties of odds and evens? No? Well it most certainly does not matter unless you have to take a relatively arbitrary exam that largely determines your future based on your willingness to spend a bunch of time studying for something that is likely to be useless knowledge in the future (HELLLLLLLLLO MBE NICE TO THINK OF YOU AGAIN). Actually even the MBE has cool stuff that you get to learn about, like the difference in torts between Africanized bees and domesticated honey bees, and the difference between having a normal cat as a pet and a giant lion.  LIONS! TORTS! OH MY. ANYWHOOOOOOOO no cool math lessons yet. Just stupid number lines. If x^3-x=p and x is odd, and x>1, is p divisible by 24? pshaw! of course it is! Factor that shit out, get (x-1)x(x+1)=p and use those good ole NUMBER properties to find that  there's clearly two evens there (prime factors 2 and 2), plus then another 2 since they're consecutive evens (*2), plus then there's gotta be a three in there because there's 3 consecutive numbers and get 2*2*2*3. YES! IT IS DIVISIBLE BY 24!!! ......sigh.