THE LIFE OF ZELDA

She may look fantastic on a bear-skin rug and prefer her food and drink served in cut glass, but Zelda was not to the manor born. Two years ago she was delivered to me at the mansion on Beacon in a heart-printed harness by a man who found her leaving the Tacoma Mall through the automatic glass doors. Which makes perfect sense. Zelda is a creature of elegant bearing and high standards, but she’s also a disgusting animal with no sense of the right time and place for public grooming and a preference for barfing on bedding. 

These are both the same cat

It's easy to imagine her strolling disdainfully out of a mall she regarded as beneath her and happily taking advantage of the first sucker that smelled like central heating. Zelda adapted rapidly to mansion life, particularly the part where she had half a dozen beds containing warm bodies to choose from each night. I worried before I moved here that after the polyamory of mansion life I would not be enough person for her.

I worried too that uprooting her so suddenly then putting her in a small, dark bag for 20+ hours for the journey here would be too much trauma. Was it was right to risk the mental health of an innocent animal? Did cats have nightmares? Would she ever forgive me? Luckily, whatever brainspace exists in those tiny skulls, not much of it is devoted to long-term memory. A few days of rest and a thorough sniffing of her surroundings and Zelda was just as imperious as ever

Zelda seems very happy here, even more so then she was in the mansion. She’s more mellow and affectionate and still just neurotic enough to be amusing. The square footage of her domain has shrunk, but she now has access to far superior views, and I believe she has found her life's purpose in monitoring the life of the neighborhood.  

From one side of the apartment she can look out on a relatively bustling street, from the other our building’s courtyard and bike hut. The windowsills are broad and I’ve covered their cold tile with wooly fabric so she stays cozy.

Street-facing window

Courtyard-facing window

Bike hut with pretty bike

Zelda belongs to the school of thought that everything she can see is within her jurisdiction and her responsibility to monitor. It's not easy to keep track of all the goings-on outside of either window, and I sometimes find her galloping anxiously across the apartment from one to the other to investigate a new sound. I didn’t realize until I arrived here that my apartment was on the first floor, not the second, and was a little disconcerted the first time I made eye contact with someone standing up inside a bus from within my living room. 

Don't worry mom, I have blinds

But for a cat it doesn’t get any better. One night I noticed Zelda was pressed against the window, purring loudly, and when I came over to investigate found that she had locked eyes with an attractive man at the bus stop. I wonder if he’s ever come back. Does half the neighborhood have a private relationship with my cat? I kind of hope so.

From the other window she flirts with the florist. When it was warmer outside I would take her out on her leash while I hung my laundry on the clothesline and the florist would come over to pet her and make the Danish “meow” sound. He stores his sidewalk display on shelves along the courtyard entry overnight and when she hears wheels rolling on concrete in the morning and evening she scurries over to observe.

It’s not all neighborhood watch. Everyday there is much sleeping to be done, and it must be done in many different places. On the windowsills, on the couch,

in the fruit basket,

 

camouflaged in the closet,

or when she's feeling traditional, on one of my two beds. 

When I work from home, which I do about once a week, she takes full advantage of any horizontality, and I squeal at the cuteness and hold my book up higher to protect myself.

And when I leave in the morning, rolling my bike out of the hut to the gate, I usually see her snake-green eyes and black silhouette in the window, and I wave goodbye.

So in conclusion, yes, you should bring your cat to Denmark. But only if she's awesome.

SONS & DAUGHTERS OF FALLEN and ASCENDANT EMPIRES: LET US EAT TURKISH DELIGHT TOGETHER

I was at a conference of Asianists last week in the Turkish capital of Ankara, a sprawling, smoggy city full of concrete, cafes, cars, and stray cats. We met on the conference of METU, the local center of the ongoing protests the international media has studiously ignored. Clearly, the international media has not recently dined near the campus, where the smell of tear gas might disrupt their after-dinner stroll.

Middle Eastern Technical University (METU) 

One of the many campus cats

Candy-colored chairs in the conference area

My hotel was fancy

I went to Turkey for the first time more than a decade ago, on a short backpacker circuit with a friend. We were delighted by what we saw of the country: the strikingly beautiful people; the otherworldly landscapes of Cappadocia and Pamukkale; the insanely inflated currency (1,000,000 lira was downgraded to 1 in 2005); the Roman ruins and modern cities.

At the time, as a full-grown partly-college-educated American human, my knowledge of Turkey was mostly limited to the following: it was famous for its baths and bathrobes, it had been a part of the Ottoman Empire (which I knew of primarily a one-time rival of the Austro-Hungarian Empire); it contained dervishes; Istanbul was [once] Constantinople.

Street sign in the city center

The national oil company has a really weird logo

Some Turkish graffiti, and in English "I love Peter Pan"


No idea on the historical context, just can't resist a statue of a lady with a book

Istanbul was (and I'm sure still is) grand by any name. It was dizzyingly beautiful evidence of a history I knew nothing of. Hagia Sophia was one of the most impressive examples: built 1500 years ago it had served as a Greek Orthodox church, a Roman Catholic church, a mosque, and now a museum in a secular nation. The walls bore material scars of the centuries, layers of different faiths under different rulers.  

I spent a day in a fog at the museum, trying to take it all in: Anatolians, Byzantines, hellenization, Mongols, beyliks, the Silk Road, the Ottoman fricking Empire ruling huge swaths of the ancient world for 500 years. It sounds trite but it really was one of the first times my consciousness of human history expanded beyond Cleopatra, the Renaissance, the British Empire, and the American Revolution. The world expanded all around me like so many exploding universes. 
 

Pointed at the ice cream case and hoped for the best, ended up with a sundae featuring caramel and chocolate ice cream atop berry and coconut sorbet. No regrets.

The sundae purveyor

 Flags bearing the image of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of modern Turkey and "father of the Turks"

Anitkabir, Atatürk's mausoleum and memorial museum. 

At the conference last weekend in Ankara I learned even more about the Ottoman Empire, the Silk Road, and the "idea of Asia." I was one of a handful of anthropologists among historians, political scientists, and international relations-ists, as well as one of a small minority of Americans among Indians, Chinese, Kenyans, Turks, and a few Europeans. In the academic circles I typically run in I often talk about China with specialists from the U.S., Europe, and sometimes China, but at a conference like this you could hear about China from a Turk, Vietnam from a Japanese, the Philippines from a Chinese, or America from a Bengali. You only ever see other places, cultures, people through implicit comparison with the places, cultures, and people you know, so as someone curious about crossing the chasms of understanding between us I always find it exciting to see things through vastly different lenses. 

I cannot resist ornamental nationalism

Or child provocateurs

Or nationalistic children

I had dinner on the second day of the conference with an America couple who both study Indonesia, and we talked about how strange it was to hear the way several of the conference's keynote speakers (for some reason we had five) referred matter-of-factually to the decline of the American empire and end of American hegemony. These statements were not laments, and they were far from the focus of the speeches. These were mostly historians, with long-range views, and they were merely noting that we were coming to the end of one of many dozens of eras in human history where much of the globe was dominated by one empire, region, or nation-state.

 An elegant old couple and some respectable-seeming young dudes outside the mausoleum proper

Details...

(It was dark inside the mausoleum so I didn't take many pictures. The enormous marble coffin inside is just for show. Atatürk's earthly remains are actually in another coffin somewhere under Anitkabir. In the museum, a guard stands watch next to live cam footage of the coffin surrounded by flags and fresh flowers.)

 

 Found a nation, get your face on a necktie!

The next day I explored the old city a bit and visited Anitkabir, where a friendly security guard checked my bag and asked me where I was from in the United States. "Washington the state, or Washington the capital?" he asked, and when I told him he proudly recited memorized facts: "the capital of Washington is Olympia" and "the state was founded in 1889." I smiled, a little sheepish, told him he knew more of its history than I did. 

Anywhere an American goes in the world, aside from, perhaps, North Korea, they will meet people who know far more about their native land than they can reciprocate. We blushing hegemons have a difficult time understanding how it could be any other way, or at least I do. I'm deeply worried about my nation's political and economic systems and also deeply angry at our eternally nefarious and murderous foreign policy, but I'm also, I have to admit, a little frightened about the end of American empire.  

After getting a few millenia of historical context I confess I'm feeling a little better about things. I might even be feeling optimistic about what's next.

Around the park surrounding the mausoleum

Views of the city from Anitkabir

Kocatepe mosque

TURKISH DELIGHT

(actually I've never liked it)