Erin Ruffin’s Weblog

Exactly a year ago I was on a plane from Istanbul moving back to America. I’d been living there for nearly a year and lately I’ve been thinking about it a lot. It’s amazing how easily I can conjure up the smells and sounds of the streets. Sometimes it’s hard for me to picture the faces of my friends that I haven’t seen for a while, but I can remember exactly how the city looks at night from the balcony of Lebidarya Café. I can see the men lined up shoulder-to-shoulder on Galata Bridge with buckets and fishing poles. I can hear the call to prayer blasting from mosques all over the city 5 times a day and I can see the waters of the Bosphorus as they looked from my living room window. I can always see the Bosphorus. I wonder what color it was this morning.
They say you never completely leave Istanbul and I admit it’s true. I think somewhere in that city, sitting on one of the millions of crumbling steps is a piece of me. I’m glad it stayed behind.

This week my friend sent me this time-lapse video. I thought it was appropriate in more ways than one.
I hope you enjoy it and that someday you can walk the streets of that black and white city.

http://www.ersineser.us

I woke up this morning and thought “I seriously need to be synthesized.”
It’s Tuesday and the weekend feels a year away.
The ten days before I leave for London feels like an eternity.

This is the playlist I made to get myself out of bed:

Janet Jackson “Control”
Stevie B “In My Eyes”
Stacey Q “Two of Hearts”
Thompson Twins “Hold Me Now”

Because everyone can use a little more synthesizer in their life.
God I love being a product of the 80’s.

My parents are obsessed with hydration. They believe that all physical (and sometimes mental, emotional, or spiritual) ailments can be fixed by simply drinking more water. I’ve heard about the importance of hydration since I was 3.
I have a headache.
“Drink water.”
I feel nauseous.
“Are you drinking enough water?”
I sprained my ankle and it’s swollen, black, and blue.
“I’ll get you some water.”
It. Never. Failed.
The other day I was on the phone with my mom and it came up (as it tends to do a couple times a week). Usually she reminds me to drink water by noting that my voice sounds a little tired and that I should keep a bottle of water with me everywhere I go.
This particular conversation was meticulously crafted.
“Erin, my friend at work is having a hard time. Her daughter is getting married and she’s just distraught about it.”
“Why is she distraught?”
“Well, she won’t see her as much and, you know, just all the emotions that go along with giving your daughter away. I told her part of me will be relieved when my 3 kids get married. It’ll be nice to know that you have that special someone to come home to and make sure you’re drinking enough fluids when you don’t feel well.”
“Mom, you want me to get married so my husband can make sure I drink enough water?”
“Well, I’m not there to tell you to do it. I’m just saying it will make me feel better.”

Right about now my brother should be on a plane in Kuwait with huge green bags and probably a couple guns slung over his shoulder. He’s been stationed in Iraq as an Army Medic for the past 15 months and he’s finally on the week-long journey back to America.

Last fall when he was on leave we had a bonfire in the woods behind my parents’ house. I asked Troy if he was ok and he said he couldn’t get the feeling that he was being watched out of his head. He kept thinking of how dark the woods were around us and that there could be guys watching him from any direction. It broke my heart that he was thinking about enemy fire coming from our woods as I sat there thinking about how cool my mom’s old boots were that I’d slipped on and whether I could finagle them back to New York with me. For my brother, the video games he played as a kid had just sprung to life except they weren’t accompanied by the cute music that Super Mario ran around defeating bad guys to.

My Grandpa was a World War II hero and when I say “hero” I mean every bit of it. I don’t feel less than that for my brother, but the circumstances are so different. The guys coming back don’t have the same welcome or feeling of accomplishment. Because of that I’m sorry for my brother. He may never see the end of what he just spent 15 months of his life fighting for. And while all the reports he gives us are great, like the time the guys on his base took their day off to paint white lines on the schoolyard so the kids could have a soccer field, or stories of the Iraqis teaching him Arabic, I can’t help but feel bad about the situation and the energy these guys poured out. Maybe it’s wrong because I really am proud of him, but something in me still hurts. I wish he was coming home reporting that no one else is getting blown up by a car bomb and the corruption in the government is gone and that he has faith in what he went over to try to accomplish. Maybe he does. Maybe I should. Either way, he’s on his way home and all of his guys are coming with him (which is rare). In my mind, they’ll have the theme to Super Mario Brothers playing as they load into their last plane and when they get here we’ll welcome them with country music and American food and all the handshakes, congratulations and thank you’s they can handle.

Apparently the tenderloins in New York City are reserved for Manhattanites. I looked in all of my supermarkets in Astoria/Long Island City for tenderloins and I came up empty-handed. I did find plenty of curry mixes, kebab meat, and tzatziki but no tenderloins. I was starting to get really nervous.

A couple of weeks ago I declared I was going to practice cooking meat because I don’t really cook and when I do I almost never venture into waters deeper than vegetables, chicken or fish. I’m embarrassed to say it because I come from a family of amazing cooks but I just never got on the boat. The other thing that works against me when it comes to meat cooking are my gag reflexes. They come full force when I peel that white butcher paper off of any kind of slimy raw meat. I mean were we honestly meant to be eating this?

To hold myself accountable to my meat cooking declaration, I invited some friends to a dinner party and ignorantly (I mean that VERY literally) declared that I would be cooking Beef Tenderloins with Blue Cheese Stuffing. At the time, I really didn’t know what a tenderloin was, and after hunting all over Queens and not finding one, I thought maybe tenderloins just weren’t in season.

Wrong.

On the day of the dinner party, I was so nervous I left work early to go meat shopping. I figured if anyone was eating tenderloins it would have to be those Manhattanites and sure enough I found some at Whole Foods on 14th Street. Phew. I picked up the other ingredients and pranced up to the checkout line SO very proud of my cute Whole Foods basket of groceries (which included tenderloins) on my arm.

So I’m standing in the mile-long checkout line, hands full with meat cooking supplies, blackberry buzzing and ringing like crazy in my bag, and what do I see in the line next to me? As if my nerves weren’t already twisty enough. It was a kid, maybe 16 years old, with two white rats crawling around his neck and across his shoulders. Their disgusting ropey, mangy tails were sticking out of the kid’s long greasy hair. I felt faint. I thought someone had increased the wattage in the Whole Foods lighting because suddenly everything seemed glaring white. I tried to play a game with myself to avoid freaking the freak out, so I acted like I was on that show where you’re subject to gross and scary things and you have to keep your heart rate down? It didn’t work. There was a kid with two rats crawling all over him. In Whole Foods. I mean I’m in the Barney’s of supermarkets and I have to put up with this? I have tenderloins in my basket for goodness’ sake and I’m standing next to a kid with a live rat scarf on.

Finally it was my turn and I walked up to Register #19 where Kamerah was waiting to check me out. I was pale (even more than normal) and I just stood in front of her holding my basket with glazed-over eyes.
“Ma’am could you put the basket up here where I can reach your groceries?”
“Oh. Yeah. Sorry. Here I’ll unload them for you. It’s just…I’m really distracted. I mean there’s a kid in the store RIGHT NOW that has two white rats crawling around on him.”
“THERE’S WHAT? RATS? WHERE? WHERE? IS HE CLOSE TA US?”
“Yeah, he was standing right next to me! I’m so freaked out.”
“OH MA GAWD. WHERE IS HE? I don’ know what I’m going ta do if he comes ta muh line. I couldn’t even check him out. I’d just scream an’ scream an’ don’t make me pull mah gat.”

Gat? I had to google it, too. It’s a “gangster’s pistol.”

As if buying my first tenderloin wasn’t traumatizing enough.

Thank you, Astoria/Long Island City for your sweet, Mom and Pop supermarkets that don’t have kids with live rat accessories, gats, or tenderloins.

*Note: Unless I have really polite, non-confrontational friends, my tenderloins were apparently a success. The one low point was when blood leaked out on the counter from the paper the meat was in and I cried a little as I wiped it up.

My friend Caroline and I were on the subway last weekend when she noticed the sole of my right Converse flopping around. As if my janky Converse was the oddest thing on the train to point out. I mean the woman across the way from us had lipstick plastered from mid-chin to the bottom of her nose while she sang Sweet Jane by Lou Reed. Caroline did her head tilt with sympathy eyes, “Erin, you need new shoes,” like she was genuinely disappointed with me.
That’s when it hit me like a ton of bricks.
“You know what I think? I spend so much money and energy on the perfect outfit but I neglect the shoe part. I rarely update my shoe collection. Caroline! I bet I’ve ruined so many outfits because of my half-hearted shoe choices. I mean what’s a $300 pair of jeans if the sole of my converse is flopping around?”
The subway car started spinning around me, my heart was racing and the crazy woman moved on from singing “Sweet Jane” to “Walk on the Wild Side.” I was near panic.
“I bet people notice, Caroline. I bet they think, “great clothes, lose the shoes.” Oh I’ve ruined so many outfits. I know it. I’m thinking of specifics right now.”
“Erin, I do the same thing. Look at these shoes. I wear them all the time and they’re NOT cool. Oh this is bad. I bet it’s enough to lose friends. Erin, I bet we’ve lost friends over this.”

I live in Astoria/Long Island City directly above a Greek statue store and next to that is a Greek club. Wednesday night must be a big one for them because around 2am the music never fails to slither up my walls and into my bedroom waking me up into an angry, sleepy stupor. It’s loud and grating and the only thing that keeps me from marching downstairs and yelling is the nostalgia it brings from living in Turkey last year next to a Turkish pub where a similar thing would happen a couple nights a week (except in Turkey it’s usually a DJ putting a house beat over a Celine Dion song.) I still haven’t decided which one I prefer.
I digress.
With the Greek musicians howling away downstairs, I laid in bed with my ipod thinking. I do that a lot and this night I must admit was fairly successful. I came up with a whole new theory about humanity. I’m working on a book & photography project (updates on this later) about Generation Y. I basically get to sit with people and ask them tons of questions, hear what they have to say, and then write about them and where our generation is headed. I absolutely love it. It has, however, changed my thought life slightly. I’ve thought less about when the new episodes of Gossip Girl will be starting again after the writers’ strike and more about people, humanity, and the world. I guess that’s not such a bad thing.

Right. Onto my theory because I’m sure you’re dying to hear it.

ALL PEOPLE IN THIS WORLD FIT INTO ONE OF THE FOUR FOLLOWING CATEGORIES:
Telescope
Microscope
Kaleidoscope
Gyroscope

Telescope – an instrument designed for the observation of remote objects. “Telescope” comes from the Greek tele=’far’ and skopein=’to look or see’; teleskopos=’far-seeing’. It was a name given to Galileo Galilei’s instrument for viewing distant objects.

TELESCOPE PEOPLE are two fold. Their strengths lie in their ability to see things that are far away and also have a strong sense of intuition. Telepeople are great in positions that require a lot of leadership and visionary input (like Obama). I think Obama is a teleperson.

Microscope – an instrument used to investigate small objects. The term microscopic means minute or very small.

MICROSCOPE PEOPLE are detail-oriented and are good at breaking down visions and ideas that telepeople come up with. Telepeople really aren’t very effective without the micropeople. Micropeople are great at tasking and delegating which is necessary in getting things accomplished. They are usually great listeners and very caring people.

Kaleidoscope – a tube of mirrors containing loose colored beads and other small colorful objects. The viewer looks in one end and light enters the other end, reflecting off the mirrors. Any arbitrary pattern of objects shows up as a beautiful symmetric pattern. The word “kaleidoscope” comes from the Greek kalos, eidos, and skopos; meaning beautiful, form, and view. Initially intended as a science tool, it was quickly copied as a toy. Brewster believed he would make money from his popular invention. However, a fault in his patent allowed others to copy his invention.

KALEIDOSCOPE PEOPLE are messy artists that make the world prettier. A lot of Generation Y fits into the Kaleidopeople category. They are multitaskers and usually have more than one endeavor going on at once. They change their minds quite quickly and are extremely creative. Kaleidopeople can be frustrating to work with for those who are very black and white but generally it’s the kaleidopeople who create and invent the things of the world that no one would want to live without (like light bulbs). I think Thomas Edison was a kaleidoperson.

Gyroscope – a device for measuring or maintaining orientation, based on the principles of conservation of angular momentum.

GYROSCOPE PEOPLE are the checks and balances of the world. They slightly act like glue that holds all the crazy kaleidopeople together with the meticulous micropeople and the visionary telepeople. The world would be completely out of balance and quite wobbly if it weren’t for the gyropeople who do the necessary equilibrium-keeping activities. My dad is a gyroperson. I call him to help me fix something I broke, he’s the one who helps me figure out if the chicken in my refrigerator is still good or not, when I feel like quitting my job, he talks me into staying diligent and maintains a certain level of sanity in my life. Gyropeople have the highest levels of common sense and practical knowledge.

*none of the above information has been proven or even tested. I just really like the idea of everyone in the world being a certain type of scope. Stay tuned for the next Scope posting where I will be profiling 4 of my friends who fit perfectly into the categories.

Northwesterners,
If you can make it to this show, I recommend it. Marshall is a brilliant artist.
PiP Gallery 645 Everett Street in Portland, Oregon
April 1st – 31st.

I know it’s nerdy.
I don’t know where it came from, or why, or what it means.
But I do.
I love typography.
I just spent almost two hours looking at fonts online.