oh fck, Erkan is 35.

I now update the post when I had first produced when I was 34:
Erkan has spent 27 years as a student (5 primary school+7 secondary and high school+4 college+ 3 MA+ 8 Phd). He has been teaching for 9 years in various levels at university (not including a year of teaching English at a primary school), has been blogging for 6,5 years and his blog has been visited a little more than 960,000 times and it has 464 RSS subscribers, he has 1400 twitter followers, he has 3 beloved siblings,  he has 1509 Facebook friends (but of course only a couple of?em are really close ones), and he has (only) four academic publications (so far). Erkan has voted 3188 movie and episode titles in IMDB. He has spent 157 days as a soldier (read 30 books in the barracks), stayed in Houston, TX for three years. He was born in Trabzon, spent a year there then since 2 he has been living in Istanbul (excluding Houston years, that is 31 years). He has driven more than 45,000 kms in 5 years, he has 7-8 kilos he has to get rid of, he could do 20-25 push ups just after he left the service, he visited 6 European cities, visited 9 American cities, he has more than 100 items in his local newspaper collection, he is an academic advisor for 52 students, he has nearly 100 students registered in his 2 courses this semester. In the last 2 years, in average, he finished a book in every 10 days; with his e-reader, sometimes he reads 12 pieces at the same time.

When I was entering 34, I was quiet depressed, much better now. Life has been treating me good enough since last June. My years-long-laborings finally give some fruits.
When someone is 35 in Turkey, many remember a poem of Cahit Sıtkı Tarancı: Yaş Otuzbeş [Age Thirty Five]:

Age thirty five! It is half of way

We are in the middle of life like Dante

Jewel in our young ages

Begging, imploring is useless now,

It goes with having no pity on

(you can continue to read the poem here.)

I wish I could leave behind such an eternal work. I am not a poem person at all but it is hard to escape from its grasp. The problem is not really the end of the first half but the poet himself could not see the end of the second half and he died much earlier due to a fatal illness. One never knows. I think I was never afraid of death anyway, I only wish to have a happier and more productive second half.

By 35, I have achieved two occupational ambitions I have had since my high school years. Being a scholar and being involved in media work. I have had the best education I could have, worked with great scholars some of which had world class status. Since high school, I was involved in some media work, I wish I could be more involved, but this seems to be working just fine recently. I have made so many good friends around. Some are to survive to the end, I believe. I live as I desire mostly. Whatever I work on, is not out of necessity but somethings I like. I am settled for the moment in Istanbul, with the team I support, with the musical sensibility, with the never ending reading habits, with the love of internet. But I am nomadic in mind. I am proud to be a cosmopolitan, never gave in to nationalist bullshit (though I can be patriot in case).

In the second half of my life, now that I had left behind the painful basics of settling in life, I am ready to take off. Hopefully, in a few years, I will start to work on more creative academic work, and I will step up my media work through my blog and may be through some other conventional media such as TV… In any case, I have never lost my belief in love at all levels. I actually love what I do but I know my account misses the significant others part. I have only had some good moments of mutual love in the first half of my life. That still gives me hcourage to continue to hope for a longer moment. I can only settle for a family, if there is love to begin with. We will see….

The trick is to continue life as usual. It is 2 am here and I have nearly 2 more hours to go. What I will do is what I always do: watching a movie, reading a little bit of a book on Nietzsche, and checking out Google Reader, before I can sleep…