Catalectic

I dated a boy in Silicon Valley once. We met at a networking event put on by our alma mater in a staid corporate conference room in Mountain View — or was it San Jose? — for venture capitalists and young entrepreneurs. The boy aspired to disrupt the trucking industry and had empathetic eyes.

Sevgili Oleg, There’s a chapter in The Mosquito Bite Author toward the end, where Cemil answers a call from his good friend Ilhan. Ilhan has been cheating on his wife with a young woman 16 years his junior named Ceren and is anxious about the “movie script’s worth of lies” he’s told to cover the affair. “Is it worth going through all of this deceit just to suck a young girl’s blood?” he asks.

Merhaba dear Oleg! Cok iyiyim, teşekkürler. Sen nasılsın ? I was delighted to receive your letter last week. You made reference to the contemptible Oblomov, incapable of doing much apart from rest and thought. Alas, I’ve felt somewhat Oblomov-adjacent this week.

Barcelona Wine Bar always had a two-and-a-half to three-hour wait list. We maintained it with paper and No. 2 pencil. When the line got that long I would tell hopeful diners honestly how many names were ahead of them but anything less than that — 90 minutes, 45 — I’d qualify per our manager’s direction as “a drink, a drink and a half.” Washington DC is a town of lawyers but it wasn’t my job to be precise. It was my job to help people feel welcome and settle in by the bar.

Note for Website Readers: This post is my first response to in a six-part series/letter exchange. To read his letter to me, hop over to ! Sevgili Oleg, One thing our readers should probably know off the bat — and which I’m a little embarrassed to admit here — one of us read this book in its original Turkish and, the other, through English translation. Alas! Not to cast translations in a bad light. I believe we first connected over Jhumpa Lahiri’s essays.

The first time I bumped into on the isle of Patmos, Greece was by a coffee stand in the hotel where 50+ writers had gathered for a summer retreat and all I could think to talk about was how my roommate lost her luggage and borrowed my underwear. (She’d had to re-wash her original pair in the sink, can you imagine?) I’d arrived in Greece vaguely self-aware my writing fell somewhere in that Ira Glass gap between taste and talent with notions of a manuscript in my back pocket.

We gave up on Infinite Jest. Our last meeting related to the book will happen Thursday. Maybe some of us will read a few more pages. Maybe some of us won’t. I made it to page 300 something. I think. It’s been awhile. We’ll have to vote on something else to take its place. Something else we’ll only read if other people make us read it. Except all we have is each other. So if we all give up together, then – This could be perceived as a failure but it’s a New Year.

We have cows that come to graze in our backyard. Not at the apartment — outside the window of my studio apartment, in the yard of the embassy adjacent, no cows step foot. At my parents’ place though — a rural rental, temporary place — there are cows. Mom sang to them her first day here and it stopped the cows in their tracks. One even stared at her intently and stepped closer to the fence with each stanza. She posted a video to the Family Chat that proves it. When I sing to the cows, they run away.

When M. brings me instant coffee-in-bed and pulls the duvet comforter out from over me the first question I ask, sleep still in my eyes, is whether he’s ever read anything by Edward P. Jones. He says “of course,” as if I’d just asked him about Goodnight Moon or Green Eggs and Ham. (Was I the last one left thinking all Washingtonian literature had to offer is Murder on K Street?) “Jones is a spectacular writer,” he adds.

I think what so many books get wrong is they focus on performance over embodiment. Follow the rules religiously — sip leek soup and maybe red wine — until one day you awaken, perfectly coiffed, with strong opinions on both bread and interior décor. Je ne sais quoi in 10-step form except, ironically, the French (mostly) don’t do religion and tend to eschew self-help.