LGBT Walk in Istanbul

I've been meaning to post this throughout the week, but I didn't have time. Last week, when I was in Istiklal Caddesi I ran into the LGBT walk. Seeing that this news was not covered in many of the Turkish news websites, I decided to share some of the photos I took (luckily my camera was with me). The scene and the atmosphere was pretty colorful, as you can expect. So here are my photos:

some reactions of the people standing by to the participants in the walk

street tango

Something strange happened half an hour before the walk: I was at a bookstore and people rushed inside holding their hands to their noses. Some of the patrons started talking amongst each other and I heard that a pepper spray was dropped in the street. Some people claimed that the spray was an early reaction to the walk.

The day that stage performances have a breakthrough...

is the day that the clones of the singer jump on the stage with the singer and surprise the audience. By the end of the choreography no one will have any clue who the actual singer is...

Laughing Feet

An intricate work I made with my feet

LinkedIn

I have just completed my profile on LinkedIn and even though it seems  to me that there will not be much of a professional benefit from joining, I tried to be careful in how I presented myself on a professional website.

Networking seems easy on LinkedIn. That is... if you have some big names already saved in your e-mail address book. If not, trying to include someone in your network, or invite them to be your friend/ colleague/ however the professional jargon puts it, is quite difficult. I do not know if I missed this as I was getting used to the interface of the website; however, LinkedIn makes it very hard if you are adding people one by one by clicking the "Add 'this person' to my connection" on their profile. For example, I joined my high school group Robert College, and I wish to add some classmates. I go on the group's webpage and start adding people who I'm friends with. However, once you click to add that person, you have to indicate how you know them- which is totally fine because LinkedIn wants you to send invites to people that you really know; probably to avoid people, especially the very important people, from getting annoying invites from randos. Once you complete your invite, you are directed to a page that simply says: "Your invitation was sent successfully" with a checkmark beside it. But that's it. What if I want to add more people from that group? I have to annoyingly click the right number of Back buttons to navigate back to that page.  What if I am on my friend's contact list, and wish to add some mutual friends? I have to click the Back button (I think twice) again. Or I have to navigate to his page from the very start. Why doesn't LinkedIn put on the invite completion page a link back to the last contacts page s, i.e. a link that says, "Go back to Robert College's contacts" or "Go back to 'your friend's contacts".

I'm sorry if I'm venting about something that's already there. I tried to contact LinkedIn for help; however, their 'Contact Us' box was grey and I couldn't click on it... I guess I have to get one of their fancy upgrades for my unfancy, college-grad self to ask one simple question.

Farm Animals... yet again

Although I realized there is plenty of farm animal photos in my blog, I still would like to put these pictures up of these farm animals (mostly birds) my dad grows. It is still interesting to me that the faces of animals represent the different types of human personalities. In my opinion, many of the domestic birds, such as hens and turkeys, look mean. And bunnies look playful and cute. Maybe you will see what I'm talking about once you see the photos:

                                                            the council of mean chicks

                                                                  my bunny friend

                     

 Once he was a flimsy dude...                                       Now he's a real stud.

(On a side note, there is about 10 minutes between the first shot and the second shot of the turkey. Yes, it's the same turkey. But it's incredible how the physical appearance of the male turkey goes through a transformation as he gets ready to copulate with its female counterpart.)

                                           Behind every successful man, there is a wise woman.

Photos from Last Summer

Here are some photos from last summer I took with my sister when we decided we want to do our own photo shoot. It took place in the small vegetable garden my father has put together. We also have a small chicken coop, which I wanted to take advantage of as part of our exciting photo shoot.

My sister is wearing my mother's vintage blue jacket, which we found as we were going through the closet looking for things to throw away. She complemented it with a skirt from Topshop and shoes from Nine West. This is our extremely amateurish attempt at a fashion photo shoot, inspired by a rustic themed fashion spread I saw in one of the issues of Vogue which starred Emma Watson. So here are the photos:

I was thinking... Body Worlds

Yesterday I went to Body Worlds Exhibition at Antrepo 3 in Istanbul. As impressive as the whole process of plastination is, to me the exhibition felt like an advanced biology course in a single walk-around than a work of art. By saying this, I do not mean to underestimate the effort put into getting this exhibition together; however, I would assume the information that was given would already be known by people who have taken advanced biology and related courses in college (such as myself, therefore I'm being a prick about it). I would also assume that people who have studied such subjects in college would already have known the main idea of the exhibition: We are only temporarily present in this world; therefore, we should maximize our physical and mental potential by living healthy, exposing ourselves to limited stress and enjoying life as much as possible by making meaningful individuals of ourselves. However, most of the time test-taking is much easier than taking another step and applying our knowledge to practical life. Therefore, we eventually make stress-driven individuals of ourselves who live fast, feed fast, work long and sleep little (Refer to post "I was thinking... Jobs).


Although I just criticized the exhibition for being too much like an advanced bio course, I still enjoyed it. I especially liked the video at the end that explained how the plastination process worked and what Gunther von Hagens' motto in creation of this exhibition is. It simply said: "People push death to the backs of their minds in their daily life, thinking it won't happen to them." When I heard these words I let out a little "Yay!" inside (yes, I did, as morbid as that sounds.) Having just watched Mar Adentro by Alejandro Amenábar, I was thinking of life and existence (no, I'm not an emo.) and hearing these words by a respectable scientist felt as if it validated my assumptions about people's attitudes towards life and death. 


With the constant feed from religion and media in our daily lives, many of us are tricked into believing that there is in fact an afterlife, which gives us another chance to achieve and own all the great things we couldn't in our current lives (In most religions, it is not even a chance, you're directly given all the great things without a bargain.) But coming to terms with death shows us that in actuality, just like Javier Bardem's character in Mar Adentro bluntly states, there is nothing after death. We didn't know anything before we were born, we will know nothing after we die. So the title of the exhibition speaks for the life itself: This world is just Body Worlds. When your veins can no longer pump blood to your brain, and your heart stops beating, you are back to that state when you never were and never knew, which we ominously call 'death'. 

So the concept of spirit is just a remedy for your current soul; actually, it's more like a placebo.