If you ever find yourself in the situation below, run. Explain later that you had diarrhea.
There are few things in life more entertaining than observing two ladies bump into each other on the street in upscale Nişantaşı. That’s because the bourgeoisie have all these fascinating ritual displays of insincere sincerity that’s great to observe from a removed distance. They have to feign excitement and affection at seeing each other while maintaining a cut-throat competitive edge as they compare their children, their possessions, and where they went for their last holiday. They have to flatter profusely while insulting subtly. They have to make veiled jibes disguised as kudos on how much weight each of them seems to have lost and what they’ve done with their hair. They have to extract juicy tidbits on each other’s private lives with innocent-sounding questions that can be given a pejorative twist for future gossip. In short, they’re completely deranged and fascinating to watch as a result.
First there’s the hyperbolic surprised greeting, the excitement and momentousness of which would suggest that they’d both just seen a giant duck. It usually involves a jaw-dropping gasp and a small scream followed by an ‘AY İNANMIYORUM!’ (I DON’T BELIEVE IT!), which is strange, because they usually live three buildings apart from each other. After that, you get a series of questions and answers (like a bourgeois catechism) on what each has been doing, who they know in common that they’ve seen lately, their last trip (usually New York, Paris and whatever exotic location is popular that year), what expensive thing they just bought (car, earrings, animal, son’s college education) and how good each of them looks, followed by a comparison of their children’s exploits, the details of which they take turns listing to each other with the desperate persistence of jackhammers.
Now, all of this is funny from a ‘removed distance’. But one time I was actually caught in one of these situations without the convenience of said removal. In fact, I was right in the thick of it – and it was grisly. I was with my mother when she bumped into her friend, and they automatically went through the obligatory steps: giant duck, what doing, who seen, where been, how looking, etc… until it came to the inevitable and brutal offspring-comparison, with me – offspring – standing right there. And I knew it was coming, because right with the first gasp and perfunctory ‘SO GOOD TO SEE YOUUU!’ I immediately started hearing the music from Jaws playing in my head. Here it comes… da-da da-da DA-DA DA-DA
‘And what’s your son doing now?’
Um, hello, I’m right here! Why don’t you ask me? Instead she asks my mother and then as my mother’s answering her, the lady looks at me with a discerning smile as if she were an art critic looking at an exhibit while the exhibit was being explained to her by the curator. Of course, that’s how bourgeois mothers look at their kids: as artifacts they themselves have created and displayed in the prestigious museum of sidewalk-cocktail-and-dinner conversation. Furthermore, they all think they’ve created the Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David, while everybody else has a forgery and a fake instead. She was looking at me like I was a print from Ikea.
So my mom answered ‘Oh, he’s got some projects he’s working on…’
‘Projects’, of course, means I’m not really doing anything, but planning on doing something in the ‘near’ future. I didn’t listen to the rest because I suddenly felt sad.
It’s depressing to have who you are summed up in a series of actions with resulting degrees of success appended to them so as to qualify the importance and value of aforementioned actions, the sum of which apparently equals Me. After all, we always like to think of ourselves as more than just an agglomeration of ‘things we do’. Our whole rich inner world of thoughts and feelings, reminiscences and memories, those ‘inactive’ qualities that we feel define us more faithfully, all seemingly account for nothing – or at least nothing that can be quantified and summed up in little morsels of easily digestible information that can be readily exchanged during a five minute conversation between two inquisitive ladies. Plus you can’t really include all the useless things you’re proud of, like your aptitude at impersonations, or a funny joke you made, or finishing a crossword, or reading Heidegger, or how much you enjoyed having sex the other day. Unless those things are earning you money, status or recognition, the bourgeoisie are not interested. What they want to know is where you’re working, how successful you are, and how much money you earn (which they can’t ask outright but will roughly deduce from your answers to the other questions) – all of which can be instantly compared and contrasted with similarly relevant data correlating to their own children, processed faster than a microchip in the rival mother’s head.
Anyway, so, as you stand there first listening to your mother sum you up in 80 words or less, and then her rival/friend do the same about her own son – who is of course married with kids, earning gazillions of euuuros, living in a house with multiple toilets, and on his way to becoming President of the World – you wonder what it would be like if your mother actually told people the truth, something like:
‘My progeny, like yours and like everyone else, is a Homo Sapiens who has a genetic predisposition to the pursuit of sleeping, eating and procreation, and who occupies an ever-shifting nexus in the complex web of human social interaction as he muddles his way through as best he can in the precarious hope of finding a delicate balance between the promise of happiness and the inescapable consciousness of the fleeting nature of his own existence.’
But in the meantime, run. Run as if you’re about to spray a giant greenish brown cloud of diarrhea all over Nişantaşı.
