interviews, fishing & life.

So, here we are. The first sun of the day finally shines into our living room. This morning, cold and rain battered the streets. Serkan and I were out in it, sipping coffee from his travel mug in the colectivo on the way to the center.

Today I had a job interview, no biggie. Except that I totally didn’t know that I was walking into an interview. Ha! I’m not actually looking for a job, you see. They kind drop into my view as baited hooks. I’ve been slow to bite. Why? Well, mostly because we are supposed to be moving to the States at some point in the (hopefully) new future. But if we can make that future more secure by staying here a little longer and helping to set ourselves up for later, then this also seems like a wise option. I wasn’t ready to take hold the bait, hook, line and sinker yet, but I did want to see what it tastes like. See if I could stomach it. This is when I unwittingly walked into an interview.

But being interviewed shouldn’t be surprising. We are all, essentially, interviewing one another throughout our lives. Dating is a type of interview for instance. We size each other up constantly. We meet a new face, are maybe drawn to such and such a person for some reason we can’t pinpoint. We ask further questions to see if we are compatible, in work, friendships, life, love. So, it’s not that strange to walk into a place and find yourself in an interview unbeknownst to you. The only difference is the person across from you is taking notes.

On Seymour...

So, back to Salinger. I’ve only ever read The Catcher in the Rye, famously formerly banned high school required reading. But it’s been ages, and I can’t say I ever revisited Catcher. In fact, even though I got good grades, loved to be around books, had an inclination toward English classes, edited the HS literary magazine, ended up an English Major in college and edited the university lit mag, I truly only remember reading maybe three books throughout all four years of high school.

Now that doesn’t necessarily mean I didn’t read the books. I also don’t readily remember character names or story endings for books I may have read last year, but I remember reading them. The tactile experience: place, smells, weather, excitement, sadness, sudden lit light bulbs and so forth. If I flip through the pages, the memories rush back.

But for so many HS books, I can’t even remember picking them up. Call it PTSD or what you will; my memory of that era is shot full of holes. I do know for a fact that I never finished Huck Finn, though I always did want to go back to it, in theory. Other novels—such as Beloved, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine—I can probably thank these books for my (poor) choice of university study.

So, how did this get to be about high school reading anyway? I wanted to say what I loved about Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction.
While Seymour did start to get a little old with the narrator, Buddy’s, description of his older suicided brother, Seymour, I love the tone, the voice, the undercurrent throughout. And what Salinger was trying to do: keep Buddy’s older role model brother young alive and still a model, someone who Buddy can continue learning from. In that way Buddy is able to deal (or not deal) with his grief. Or more accurately, he starts to reminisce and to grieve. We bear witness to this as writing about Seymour’s eyes and nose becomes excruciating reason for naps.

While the entire novella reads self-consciously as a writer writing a book, the “transcription” of Seymour’s letter to Buddy after Seymour stayed up all night reading one of Buddy’s short stories (in the story) is a beautiful collection of tips for writers. “Don’t make me proud of you,” Seymour writes. “If only you’d never keep me up again out of pride. Give me a story that makes me unreasonably vigilant. Keep me up again till five only because all your stars are out, and for no other reason.”

Seymour isn’t not praising the Buddy’s story. It kept him up till 5 a.m., but he’s warning him against perfection. As “trite” as it sounds, Seymour mainly wants to tell Buddy: “Please follow your heart, win or lose.” Don’t get carried away by what others want or by what you think others want. (Oh, this is so often when we miss the shot.) Essentially Seymour advises Buddy: don’t aim. Let accident happen.

This ties in with Buddy feeling it necessary to drop poetry entirely if one is to settle and stop seeking… well, perfection. I puzzled over this passage for some time. If one is able to loosen up, as it were, and accept things as they are, why is that a call to “drop poetry altogether?” I reread this passage several times, thinking what does it mean… exactly? At the end of the novella, Seymour re-utters his no-aim refrain, suggesting that Buddy stop trying so hard while playing marbles. Sure, Buddy always hits the target, but there’s no fun in it, no adventure. No serendipity. Nothing learned.

Which brings me back to what does it mean exactly…

As I write this I realize that as a reader, too, I’m shouldering my perfectionist tendencies. Part of me, what I will call my intuitive and more intelligent side, wants to accept this line of thought as somehow profound; it’s certainly interesting. Another (rational, bogarting analytical) part is saying, what the heck do you mean by that? I want an answer. I want my target to be hit. But the fact that such a passage stops me in my tracks means my target was bullseyed. Go figure. I didn’t even know I had a target. So, perfectionism aside, my target, which might not have even existed before someone struck it, was indeed struck by accident, without aiming. Aiming for what? Exactly…

It’s funny that I’ve written all about Seymour, when during the read it was Raise High that I enjoyed most. But it seems I’ve run out of time. I’m hungry, and it’s time for breakfast, coffee and phone calls.

Appropriately, today’s Dictionary.com word of the day is jnana

This morning like every morning, our noisy kitty whined me awake, predawn. But instead of going back to sleep, I was awake enough to want to read some news. Why I would choose news over J.D. Salinger is beyond me. I just started reading Raise High the Roof Beam & Seymour: an Introduction. This book makes me happy, but I will return to that later, because right now I am thinking about being disconnected.

Disconnection comes so easy down here. And in a way, it’s therapeutic. The realities are different. Before it was simple: I, like most people around me, was “educated” and comfortable, I read the news and would feel emotional, even inflamed by it. Lament at what’s happening all over the world (and at "home": tea parties, oil spills, birtherism, nativism; really? are you kidding me? isn't the USA founded by immigrants?). So it so happens that sometimes we read the news, stress out, lose sleep, proclaim ourselves political and down antidepressants or blood pressure meds. We vote, maybe we donate. We grow alarmed, we grow frenzied. And this agitation pools into a greater collective human energy--maybe, I venture to say, even creating more bad news. Increasing the volume, as it were, on our own aggravated state. Thus creating more of a frenzy whose crescendo grows louder and louder and steadily more insane, because the crescendo never ends.

What am I trying to say? I see myself attempting to explain my own current disconnection to myself. Formerly I might wallow a little in guilt to be as desenchufado (unplugged) as I am these days. But let’s face it, I (have tended to) cling to guilt like a threadbare baby blanket. But that’s another story and another bad habit. Here, though, we are far, far end-of-the-earth far away from... well, everything. Isolated in every way. While such passions for news might warm me up, I guess I have little use for them here.

It’s often such a lonely place. A friend of mine, also from the states described living here as being like a family, because you know so many people. Or--she immediately revised herself--because there are so few people not to know. My experience has been rather more lonesome. But I guess my (other) tendency toward lonesomeness hasn't changed with place or time. It’s been cathartic, though, taking the proverbial step back. What I can say is, without wading through the tedium of over-explaining myself (or explaining myself sufficiently) is that I have less baggage and more presence.

I watch our 8 a.m. sunrise. Heavy violet-deep purple clouds, bright salmon linings. Wind whacks at the house and the rustic gate, clinging to the fence by the last nail of its last hinge, creaks. In bed, I can see my breath. I turn off the lamp.

pictures of our lives at breakfast.

We’ve been eating breakfast for hours. It’s our first day back to Natales with the ability to sleep in instead of run around collecting stamps of denial all over Santiago. Now that we’re sure we’ll be here through the winter and then some, we’re settling in. And what better way to feel at home than to purchase… small household appliances? Yay! We are now the proud owners of a quick-boil electric kettle, a hand-held electric beater (making batter for anything will be so much easier!) and a toast/waffle iron with three different hotplates. The waffle hotplate is my personal favorite. And toast (tost), a simple panini sandwich, is really common in Turkey, for breakfast or for a quick ‘snack’ whenever.

This morning, and afternoon as you can see from the time, we used all three of these handy devices :)


Spiced Italian espresso started this morning’s breakfast madness. I make it sound fancier than it really is, because we drink that every morning. Ingredients and digressions: 1.) Coffee (which horrifyingly contains sugar! It’s difficult and expensive to find real sugar-free coffee grounds here.) 2.) Two whole cardamom seeds (a gift from one of Serkan’s Turkish friends living in Vienna, where we stayed for a few nights. We could hardly communicate, but I was really excited about the cardamom, so she sweetly sent us off with a couple of bags when we left.) 3.) Cinnamon stick shavings and/or 1-2 clove spikes (called clavo del olor, which can translate directly to ‘scented nails.’). We usually drink this espresso concoction more like a coffee, with added water, heated milk and a small dollop of honey. On morning that I breakfast alone, this is my breakfast.

A small bowl of cereal and fruit accompanied our coffees, and then I got to work on the waffle batter, from scratch of course, because Aunt Jemima (ick!) and Krusteaz (yum!) don’t live here. While the waffles cooked, we brewed some yummy small leaf tea, which Serkan was able to find in Punta Arenas. I sauteed some peaches and bananas with some honey to top the waffles. The rest of the waffles, we slathered with my cousin Kevin’s famous apple butter, almond butter from Trader Joe’s (both of which my aunt sent down with Tim when he came to visit; thanks guys!!!), currant-strawberry jam (handmade by me, my first attempt at such a thing), and spiced peach jam (handmade by Serkan). Even though we were way finished eating and drinking, I thought we should take some pictures of all this goodness, so I made us some Turkish coffees, threw the last of the batter into the iron and we had a little photo shoot.

Our Magellanic stove that soots up and heats the house. Turkish style double kettle for tea and coffee pot (cezve).


Kevin's apple butter & almond butter, thanks to my dear family and Tim, who brought it down here!


The super cute Turkish coffee cups we bought in Samsun, Turkey. A man and a woman sitting on big hearts blowing little heart bubbles to each other.

Santiago, paperwork inferno.

Saturday: We are happy. The sun has risen and illuminated the smog of Santiago. Serkan just boarded his flight back to Punta Arenas. My flight doesn’t leave for another couple of hours, but the airport just reopened, so I have a seat inside, alongside cracked beams and 2x4 bolsterings, beneath the cracked ceiling with missing patchwork squares. We're going home. Where everything is simple and quiet, where things might not work but they are simple in their non-functioning.

It’s been a long week to say the least. We arrived to Santiago on an “overnight” flight after zero sleep, around 6.30 a.m. Monday morning. Our goals in the capital: legalize our marriage in Chile and submit the petition for Serkan's immigrant visa to the U.S. The embassy accepts petitions from Americans residing in Chile continually for at least the previous six months before filing the petition. I came armed with evidence of this, as I was advised to do in my various email correspondences with the embassy. The week went pretty much like this…

Monday: Our hostel reservation turned out to be a sham, as the owner quoted us a more expensive price when we arrived and I wasn’t having any of it. We headed directly to another place we’ve stayed before, wasting precious errand-running time, stuck hostel-searching in the morning crush of traffic. After we got settled we ran out.

Went to Ministry of Foreign Affairs office to translate some official documents for the visa. There are no simple translation services in Chile, not even in the capital. (Anyone willing to get certified, willing to actually work at a decent pace and charge a reasonable rate would make bank!) Anyway, we had read that in order to legalize our marriage, the marriage document must be translated by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself. But in order to translate any document, it must first be “legalized,” (stamped and signed by some important fingers) by two different authorities, in two different places, then returned back to the translations department, where, for example, a document with about 10-15 words on it will take 5 days to translate. WTF?

When you say, you need it faster, the woman there will charge you double or more and proudly tell you how much more difficult the process used to be. After some pressing, she did direct us to another place, which realizes certified translations. Here’s how our conversation went with them:

Us: We need to translate a couple of documents. I show them the documents. We also need you to write and sign something at the end of the translation, stating that you are fluent in Spanish and English and that the translation is correct.

Dude: No. I will translate, but I will not certify anything.

But you are certified, right?

Yes.

Well then we just need you to demonstrate that you are certified to do the translation somehow. You know, stamp the document afterward and sign it. We just need to show that the translation is true and correct and that you are capable of doing it.

No, I will not certify anything. I only do the translation.

(Boss comes over.) Yeah, we will stamp it and sign it.

OK, the stamp shows where the translation is coming from, right? I think that will be good enough.

Let’s see how many pages (gets out calculator), 7 (unfull) pages. Ooh. That is gonna set you back quite a bit. It’ll cost you 145.000. (Almost $300. Incidentally, I just finished translating a book of 80 pages for less than that… not for the money obviously, more for practice, so this makes their estimate seem even more outrageous.)

What? And when would it be ready?

It will take at least a week or longer.

Really? That long? We are leaving on Saturday.

Well, this stuff can’t just complete itself overnight. It takes time.

Hmmmm.

I decide to do the translations myself. And even though I am not certified, I can certify that I’m fluent in said languages and that the translation is correct. The embassy only accepts petitions on M,W,F so I have all day Tuesday to work on it. Or do I…?

Tuesday: Yesterday we’d found out what is necessary for the marriage document. First we need to get it legalized from the Turkish embassy, so we go there when it opens in the morning and the ambassador translates our marriage document, signs it, certifies it, makes it official and legal in Chile. Serkan takes care of a couple other embassy errands while we’re there and honestly it takes less than half an hour. We leave there applauding the Turkish work ethic, practically high-fiving each other, it was so easy.

Back to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, where we get our legal translated marriage document legalized by the powers that be in Chile. Then we stop by the translator’s desk to see if they will accept the translation. Seems to be no problem, she tells us to go to the Registro Civil to inscribe the marriage.

OK! Walking walking, coffee, metro, walking, line waiting. Registro Civil tells us we need to get a paper from the International Police saying that Serkan’s permanent residence is vigente. But how would he have this ID if it wasn’t? We run around in some loops to get this little paper. It takes us about 1.5 days. We continue to run-run around to do some other paper-wasting errands, then I sit down to start translating and changing the cover sheets for Serkan’s visa forms, finishing up the last minute printouts, etc. My friend Laura says I can send her a page to translate, which is super helpful (thank you!!!) so we all work the rest of the night on that.

Wednesday: Early morning printouts of the translations and new cover sheets, before heading to the American embassy fortress. No, we could not file, but yes, it looks like all of our documents are correctly filled out and the process will go smoothly when we can file. When can we file? Probably another couple of months…

Run around until we finally make it to the Registro Civil around 1 p.m. Here the super rude woman proceeds to tell us that our marriage document is not legal. This is how our conversation with mean woman goes, mas o menos...

MW: Why is it titled an International Marriage and Family Booklet if it is a certificate?

Us: Because that is what the marriage document is called in Turkey. And it’s international. It’s been legalized by your country and by the Turkish embassy. What can be illegal about it? (This conversation lasts much longer than I write it here. And the attempts to be nice, smiling and calm were many and varied.)

The ambassador of the Turkish embassy needs to legalize the signature of the original marriage certificate.

How could it have been legalized by the Chilean government if it wasn’t already a legal document?

Normally you must do this in the country where you married.

So you’re telling us we have to travel to Turkey to legalize an already triply legalized document?

Yes, or see if the Turkish embassy and verify this other guy’s signature. And come back.

Today we feel ruined. Utterly. Exhausted and sad. Not just by the constant stream of No’s that we are receiving, but mostly by that woman’s meanness.

I should also mention here that after we got back to the hostel, I decided to venture out to get my hair "trimmed," and the "stylist" completely butchered it. I haven't had hair this short since high school, and I did not ask for it, but I'm starting to be positive about it.

Thursday: A new day. Back to the Turkish embassy, where we meet the ambassador as we step out of the elevator, right as he is walking out to run some other errand. Serkan explains the situation to him, and the ambassador rolls up his sleeves. He essentially says what we are all thinking: She has no right to refuse this. We all walk inside the embassy. After many phone calls, he gives us the name of someone to talk to at Registro Civil. The ambassador superheroed through all the little “no”-mongers, to find us the route to a possible yes. He might be the most helpful man in all of Santiago.

Off to Registro Civil again to talk to another woman. She takes our marriage booklet and its über-legalized translation from the Turkish embassy and talks to a few other people. After a while, she says that she will try to call us by Monday after she talks to the head jefe. We say we are leaving on Saturday. She says she will try to contact us by Friday then, or maybe even later this afternoon.

We leave, walk almost all the way back to the hostel and sit down for a coffee. Serkan’s phone rings and we are called back to the Registro Civil already. We still have time to make it before it closes at 2 p.m. It sounds good. We go, we sign, we are officially married in Chile! (Oh, and remember the silly note we needed from the International Police? We tried to give them that piece of paper several times. Each time, they said, no, we don't need it. We have your carnet. Hmmm.) A man sitting next to us for some other errand with the mean lady chats with us and congratulates us several times. Mean woman refuses to look in our direction.

Friday: American embassy again, to set up and pay for the name change to my passport. It’s a smooth process. I’ll send my passport to them on Monday and they’ll send it back to me mid-April. Around the same time, we should have received the Chilean marriage certificate at the Registro Civil office in Puerto Natales. With these two things, we’ll stabilize my Chilean residency. If all goes well, it should only take about two months, at which point we’ll return to Santiago to file Serkan’s U.S. visa petition and wait another several months for it to be approved.

Not-so-interesting public service announcements coming soon!