Below is a poem I wrote on a napkin for Poly, a friend. I miss her. She lives in Kansas City. I wish we could see each other more often-here there are so few things that remind me I am alive. Pavlina is the only person who continues to enspire me, all the time...

The Third Space is Perfect

The imaginary, the real. Perfection lies in between.
Gypsies, stolen cars, men, cheese, wine, critical geography, Mexico, cheese, more cheese.
Hard to find perfection in this state of mind. Too many mind. No mind!
The 7-minute secret of perfectly undercooked pasta.
(We reached double perfection by cooking the pasta 14 minutes!)
Men. The masters of no-mind.
Some perfect, some not so perfect.
Some real, some unreal.
The real are the dispensable ones.
It is the unreal we find indispensable.
The moment of inspiration
Waiting just around the fridge,
Diluted with a cocktail of Malibu,
well, drops of Malibu (what is the point of getting drunk prematurely) and grapefruit juice, named after one of its inventors-Lemalibu. Near perfect.
Then the sauce with the perfect color, and near-perfect taste.
Named after its source of inspiration. Pavlina (though she is not quite sure the combination of pasta tomatoes and whipped cream is that original).
The movie with more than just the samurai;
the movie with the perfect philosophy,
where my hero- the perfect man - died with the
Perfect words
-They all look perfect in his eyes-.
And Pavlina missed that moment.
How un-perfect of her.
Still, we somehow managed to capture the perfect moment,
She jet-locked, me wine-locked, both cheese-locked.
Ah, the cherries, and the music.

To Sculpt or Not to Sculpt....

I knew it! I knew those deformed hands of mine are meant for things more meaningful than just typing...like sculpting. I realized that writing is good for my soul, but it is not physical - and hardly an art. As a start, I will transform my small apartment into a studio-I can imagine soft classic music playing in the background, and lots of unfinished sculptures-crude, ugly, but mine! What is life, if not molding reality as you see it with your own bare hands! I am excited!

Today, we went to good-old Old Town. We had ice-coffee at Misha's, then we let ourselves get lost in the crowd of cheerful, good-looking, fashionable tourists who came to see one of the most historic places in the US. I could be one of them (tourists, not historic places!)-with the exception that I live here, so I am almost jealous of their joy and excitement! Life can be strange, two people seeing the same things, eating the same food, walking on the same street, dressed in the same style -yet feeling so different about the place. Maybe I should be glad I live so close to such a dramatically beautiful place, but what I realy feel is the routine of the sameness. While they see the fun Alexandria, I see the boring one. I know it will be lonely in winters-depressing even. I know all tourists do the exact same things, eat in the exact same restaurants, and while they have a memory for a lifetime, I know I am confined to this "beautiful" place. While bombs explode in the other end of the world, life goes on in DC--traffic jams, shopping craze, frappucino madness, and breakfast meetings at the beautiful houses of my new Turkish friends. This is what my life looks like at a distance.

What is the good life-where can I find it? Do I have to be happy to have a good life? Or do I have to have a good life to be happy? It think it is all inside (sounds like a J C penney ad but well...). Getting older is scary and makes me think of things I haven't been thinking before. Like death. I just read Paula, Isabel Allende's memoir of her daughter's sudden tragic death-her daughter Paula was my age when she slipped out of coma into eternity. So sad.

Gypsy's Advocate

Who am I? A gypsy, Turk, or Bulgarian? A recent study shows why some Bulgarians think ethnic Turks are "gypsies", why authentic gypsies say they are Turks when speaking to strangers (as a defense mechanism), and why Turks are confused about their identity. Pfew! Complicated indeed. I feel more gypsy and Bulgarian than I feel a Turk, and sometimes I am not at all sure where my loyalties lie when it comes to my "homeland". Do I have one?? I am doing research on the gypsy/Roma cultural rights for a term paper. I will argue that Gypsies are the victims of a degenerative policy-making context characterized by an unequal distribution of political power, social constructions that separate the "deserving" from the "undeserving"; and an institutional culture that legitimizes strategic, manipulative, and deceptive patterns of communication. Of the four categorizations that policy-makers use (contenders, advantaged, dependents, and deviants), I will put them in the deviant category- those who have virtually no political power and are negatively constructed as undeserving, violent, mean, etc). I am immersed into research, and I will also prepare a powerpoint presentation, with a sound track, and slide show. Eventually, this study will lead to the outcome of this degenerative policy-making model - environmental injustice that targets gypsies' cultural rights while stigmatizing them as polluters and trespassers (I will consentrate on the traveller gypsies of the UK-they have been persecuted for polluting communities that they moved in with their caravans).

This is a glaring paradox from the environmental governance perspective - because environmental governance argues that it is the "victims", the deviants, who are subjected to environmental injustice due to their vulnerability (like overexposure to polluting facilities). But in my case study, the gypsies (the deviants) themselves are socially constructed as polluters. In this case of 'reverse' environmental injustice the public constructs itself as the "victim". From this vantage point, the public is the 'advantaged' (those who are powerful and positively constructed). Deviant gypsies are left with little choice but to abandon their gypsy laws and traditions as travellers and settle down in substandard housing facilities provided by the government.

I will also look at the matter from the Thomas Friedman perspective. I will apply his metaphor, the lexus and the olive tree, to the gypsies. The lexus represents the industrialized, globalized world which in Friedmans terms 'creatively destructs' itself to recreate a better, more efficient world of commodities. The nomadic gypsy culture represents the olive tree-the authentic, traditional values.