The Old Apartment (Grade)

He never wanted to move. He liked his old apartment, liked his neighbors; he even liked the Winston's new puppy that had tore through the hallway at 2 o'clock in the morning, baying like a bloodhound after a fox. He liked the old window in his kitchen, the one that never quite closed all the way and so created a pleasant breeze on those blistering summer days. He liked the creaky floorboard just outside his door, when he could always tell if Veronica from Apt. 13 was listening in on the rare nights he brought a soon-to-be-ex girlfriend home to dinner.

He liked his bathroom, with the chipping tiles and the leaky faucet. The landlord always promised to fix the plumbing, but he still took cold showers every night. He liked the warped mirror that hung on the wall, twisting his reflection so he had to strain to find himself in the morning to shave. He especially liked how his tiny bathroom window peeked right up into the apartment complex next door, where he could watch Mrs. Levine's daughter-in-law practice her violin every day. Even the corner of the sink was held close to his heart, but closer still to his groin, which he had run into the corner so many times it was part of his morning ritual.

His bedroom's walls were cracked, and the paint was peeling in almost every direction. He loved staring at the ceiling and pretending the dark water stains- made from the time Mr. Alvarez had flooded the entire upper floor- were animals romping across the Savannah. He liked the blank wall his desk faced, the one that had given him such fleeting inspiration on the late nights he was up typing an article due the next day. The wall his bed was pushed up against was so thin he could hear Lucy and her fiancé argue over the rent late at night, and he wanted to punch through it when she started crying and whisk her away from all her problems.

He liked the small living room, the way his meager furniture seemed to fill the space just perfectly. The television, with its bunny-eared radar, which he had dedicated a week to finding just the right spot, only received reception once he had pushed it to the middle of the room and stood it on top of seven volumes of Shakespeare he had bought from the Goodwill down the street. He cursed the architect who had built thin walls and thick ceilings whenever his television flickered in-and-out during the Red Sox games, but he secretly enjoyed the adrenaline, the anticipation of when the picture would fade out and he was left sitting alone in the dark, listening to the fuzzy sound of the announcer cheering as David Ortiz shot another ball out of Fenway Park.

He loved his balcony, if you could call it that; the rusted wire posts and the cold feel of the cement on his bare feet made the small square jutting out from the side of the apartment building feel so real. The metal chair he had forced through the tiny door, going so far as to butter the door-frame to squeeze it through, gave him a picture-perfect view of the city. Telephone wires were strung out over the endless sea of roofs, tying the buildings like a huge network; the Italian pizzeria was connected to the Mexican take-out, the Spanish tapas bar to the meat market, connecting all the ethnic corners together into the five blocks that made his neighborhood a place of comfort to so many.

Yes, he liked his old apartment. He hated the boxes that were lined up on the landing, hated the moving van that would pull up to take his possessions away and move him across the city to a new apartment, a new neighborhood. He hated the idea of having to pack up his comfortable world and unveiling it to cold, unfeeling walls that had never known the warmth of housing a human being. He wanted to gather up his view from the landing into a box and take it with him to his new apartment, where he could throw it up on the wall and admire it like a painting. He wanted to capture the smell of the restaurants a block away that wafted up to his window in a jar and release them into the wind off his new balcony, in the hope of bringing some familiarity to a vast, uncharted new territory.

But there was a new opportunity, a chance to jump-start his career. We want you to start the job as soon as possible. All you have to do is move closer, the lady who had interviewed him said. We like our reporters to live near the office. Makes for an easier commute, especially when we have a big story to cover. She had smiled at him with a mouthful of bright, shining teeth, as if it were no big deal to just uproot his world and move clear across the city.

All right, he had said, forcing the words out. I'll be in the office next week. The words sounded like a betrayal, and as if his apartment had heard him deliver the verdict, his key stuck in the lock when he arrived back at his front door.

The man on the telephone had assured him that the new apartment complex was the most recent building in its neighborhood. Four stories, plenty of room for a single man like yourself, he told him. We've already rented out most of the first, second and third floors, but there's a smaller studio on the fourth floor if you'd be interested. Great view of the city.

I'll take it, he told the man.

And so there he stood, with his rabbit-eared television under one arm and a cup of coffee in the other. The boxes were all lined up on the street now, and the movers worked like bees, going back and forth from the landing, carry his world away from where it had stayed for so long. The burly man with the beard nodded at him as he carried the last box down the stairs; it was time to go. He packed the television as neatly as he could on top of his meager boxes and watched as the movers closed the sliding door on his possessions. Climbing into the passenger seat of the truck, he looked out the window one last time as the van pulled away. There sat his old apartment, gray, forlorn, and empty. He raised up his coffee cup as it disappeared around the corner; to new things.

Bucket List

Because everyone should have one.

1. climb the Grand Teton (Wyoming)
2. visit Armenia
3. live in Europe
4. join some branch of the armed forces, either Marines, Navy, or Army (i'd even settle for the National Guard)
5. publish a novel
6. have a gallery showcase my artwork
7. go on a roadtrip engulfing all of North America
8. buy a studio (to live in)
9. become Ravenmaster at Windsor Castle, England (which would mean giving up my United States citizenship, but still worth it!)
10. be a Navy wife
11. get a tattoo (don't tell my mother)
12. adopt twin boys
13. own an old-school Ford F-250 with a red-white-blue color scheme
14. live on a boat
15. sell t-shirts from the back of a van in Ireland
16. create characters for Brad Bird
17. write a movie screenplay
18. make my own money
19. disappear off the grid

Where's Armenia?

I suppose I choose #5. What I write may not exactly fit the billet, but I've been wanting to write about this for a long time. The events of 1915 affected my great-grandmother Hatoon Bazarian, who was a part of the Armenian coalition against the Ottomans. She was able to escape Armenia to the United States, where she and many other Armenian refugees finally settled in Fresno, CA.


Q: Where is Armenia?
A: Between Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Russia, bordering on the very eastern tip of Turkey.

We're on the map. Riiiight there. See us?

At the beginning of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire- restricted now to Turkey- was in its dying days. The Russians began advancing into Eastern Anatolia with the aid of Armenians from both the Russian Caucasus region and modern Armenia (part of Turkey at that time). The Ottoman government blamed the Armenians for their devastating military losses to the Russians. Coupled with ethnic tensions between Armenians and Turkish Ottomans, the Ottoman government took the opportunity to start a mass deportation of Armenians out of Anatolia.

From a population of 2 million, nearly 1.5 million Armenians were massacred during these forced deportation marches from 1915 to 1917. Any outbursts against this genocide were silenced when Armenia was absorbed into the Soviet Union not long after the end of World War I. The country was a quiet wallflower until their independence in 1995.

For the past 15 years, relations between Turkey and Armenia have been tense: efforts to negotiate peace treaties have been stalled because of Turkey's refusal to recognize the 1915 killings as genocide. Recently, movements in both the United States and Swedish legislatures have pushed bills to recognize the events of 1915 as genocide; consequentially, Turkey has put its ambassadors to both countries on the first flights out. The entire country is a part of possibly the largest denial ever.

In the Armenia-Turkey relationship, Turkey holds nearly all the power as far as strategy goes. If the United States passes the bill recognizing the 1915 atrocities as genocide, Turkey could deny us access to their military bases, which are a huge part of deploying American troops from Europe into the Middle East. Turkey's prime minister Tayyip Erdogan is threatening to expel nearly 100,000 Armenian workers from its country as a retaliation to the negative publicity the country is receiving.

(There are currently 170,000 Armenians working in Turkey. The 100,000 Erdogan is referring to are illegal workers, forced into Turkey because of an impoverished economy in Armenia, a combined result of Turkish oppression and the devastating earthquake of 1988.)

Turkey gained the upper hand in this relationship 100s of years ago. The Ottoman empire was one of the most successful ancient regimes, until Europe modernized its weapons armaments. Armenia has been just a small country absorbed by larger empires; first the Ottomans, then the Soviets. They've had no real chance to prove themselves on the world's stage until the last 15 years, when their government decided to challenge Turkey's resolute denial of the 1915 genocide.

Unlike the Jewish Holocaust- one of the most largely publicized modern genocides, largely aided by photographic evidence from both Allied Forces and Nazi records- there are very little photographic records of the Armenian Genocide in 1915.

Turkey will not give up its narrow-minded views easily. It justifies the actions of 1915 by asserting that many Turks died as well. This is true- Turks died as a result of famine and the war, but no mass genocide came from the part of the Armenians. The Turks were the only side to purposefully work towards eliminating the Armenian ethnic group within their country. No matter how hard the rest of the world tries, you can't tune a broken record.

Further Reading:
Memoir- Black Dog of Fate by David Balakian
Online information- http://www.armeniapedia.com