Cyborg Chameleon
| It's startling how many different cycles we go through in a lifetime and how fast we transition from one to the other, feeling more or less comfortable/weary (do these two cancel each other out?) in any situation. No, this is not going to be one of those romantic posts about the meaning of life. I am just alluding to the fact that an even an eternal night dweller like me could easily tell her friends that she had to go to sleep at 2 am last night and cut the night short (while everyone else was having a great time doing tarot readings with Mexican bingo cards and watching cool videos of kinetic typography on youtube) since she has to wake up at 7 am with the puppy. And that statement did not even feel strange or out of the ordinary for me as I looked at the puzzled faces of my friends, who seemed confused with this sudden switch to the suburbanite woman of responsibilities mode. After only two weeks of having a puppy in the house and a month of living in Ferndale that is. I went straight to bed and knew that it was exactly 7:00 am when I heard Dziga whimpering in his crate without looking at the clock in the morning. I got up, wore my boots without hesitation or complaint, took the puppy out of his crate and carried him out to the backyard to go potty, and watched the neighbor take his own dogs out silently in the early morning chill while Dziga sniffed around for either a perfect potty spot or something that he can chew on. After eating and playing for about an hour and a half, he went under my bed, his surrogate "den" during the day (only sleeps in the crate at night and when he is extremely tired) to take a nap, as a part of his usual routine if not daily ritual. I sat on the bed, opened my laptop and found myself staring out the blinders towards the walls of house next door, a typical suburban view. How ordinary all this appears, as if this has been my life for as long as I can remember. The hot and humid climate and lazy summer days of my hometown on the Mediterranean, the hustle and bustle of metropolitan Istanbul, or the haunting urban desolation of Detroit seem many miles and lifetimes away. I am not feeling nostalgic or numb since I am a deep believer in the regenerating power of creative destruction (of past lives in this context) but there is a certain weariness that comes with the territory; with changing so many skins and filling in so many slots that others call identity (here is my shout out to Gramsci and Foucault) only to leave them to be taken over by others shortly after. We, humans, are not butterflies, we do not have one single coccoon one needs to weave to go through the ultimate transformation, that one single rite of passage. We are chameleons at best, yet with a memory that unfailingly reminds us of the colors of the past, making them re-appear as faint impressions at unexpected moments (but Bergson explains it better than me). Ah well, I'd rather think of myself as an android or a cyborg, something unnatural if the choice is up to me, but that's a whole different story. This post turned out to be a borderline the-meaning-of-life rant for some reason, despite my better judgment. Blame it on the early morning coffee! |
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