Pass the Butter?

I decided to start writing on this blog again because I have an idealistic hope that it will somehow help me. Due to a number of issues, I have felt this semester as if I have some kind of academic PTSD (no offense to any true sufferers of the diagnosed medical condition). I have struggled with writing and my schoolwork. I feel like I know nothing and I'll never be a good teacher.

My experience as a student in Istanbul left a lot to be desired.
I think I just hit the university there at the perfect not so great semester. There was a new dean (or someone high up, can't remember exactly) who had the bad habit of scheduling meetings during one of my classes and my professor ended up cancelling over a full month of class. The problem is that we were still responsible for ALL of the reading and anything was fair game on the final. I had another course in which the professor cancelled a few weeks of class, which caused her to cancel the midterm and give a final instead. My grad program in the US doesn't usually have final projects and final exams - both of the classes I have mentioned did.
The main person in their international student office was on maternity leave and her replacement looked like a deer in headlights. The standard mode of operation in Turkey is chaos and confusion and the university is not immune to this. They gave me exactly one piece of paper at orientation, the activities calendar. No welcome packet with campus services, instructions on how to register - nothing. ALL of this very important information came to me in a very poorly constructed email. Their online registration system had a number of bugs that caused me a lot of stress. I couldn't get into a Beginning Turkish course that fit my schedule and practically beg a professor to add me. She wouldn't.
So. Yeah. Not what I had hoped.

While I was in Istanbul, someone very dear to me died unexpectedly. I can count on one hand the people who have truly changed my life. Bob was one of them. He was the Mad Scientist in my universe, the one who stuck electrodes in my brain and made it shoot off fireworks of love, fear, exhilaration, doubt, pleasure and all the other things that we are taught can't live together. A lot of students absolutely loathed him and left their opinion at ratemyprofessor.com as proof of their loathing. They are fools. If you want to build a beautiful home, sometimes you have to burn down the old one.
In my first semester with him, he called me "a good Christian woman" in front of the whole class, most of whom were scared to death of him. This amazed and amused me, mainly because I had never said a single word to him about my life or how I live. It amused me because the class was deathly silent as he sat across the table from me and began to discuss something from the Bible. It was a Literary Analysis Seminar, a junior level class, and to this day I cannot remember what we were reading or how it in any way related to something Biblical. The kicker here is that Bob claimed to be an atheist. I laughed when I wrote that. Bob the Atheist made me more keenly critical of and involved with my faith than anyone else in my adult life.
He was an incredibly demanding teacher and he gave from the deepest and most passionate part of his being. He poked, he prodded, he peeled back the layers of dead skin to the part underneath that was pink and struggling to sustain itself. He made me aware of my weaknesses, my biases, my strengths and my voice. I spent three hours a week with him and he understood things about me that no one else seemed to understand. He understood why I loved Edith Wharton's Archer and Ellen and why I was the only person in class who didn't defend Elizabeth Bennett.
In my final semester with him, he told me that he thought I should go straight into a PhD program. I was shocked. I had another professor tell me something different. But what stood out to me was the explanation he gave. He said I should do that because I had passion. Granted, this was during the Theory/Austen course, where I ruined his life by pointing out the source of Bingley's wealth. I guess you could say I was passionate in that class. But his explanation wasn't because he thought I could get into a program easily due to good grades or something like that. It was because I had passion. And that was Bob. Passion. Passion for learning, passion for teaching, passion for the grey lumps in the skulls of his students.

And there I was, literally on the other side of the world. And he was dead. I didn't get to say goodbye to him. I didn't get to go to his memorial service. All I could do was sit in my room with peach colored walls in Istanbul and cry.
I still cry.
I cry because I am walking around campus or driving and I think of something I would want to tell him. And I remember that he isn't here. I want to tell him about how I am leaning towards Sociolinguistics and how the student I tutored received the highest grade in her class. I want to talk to him about all the books we never talked about, I want to talk with him about the speech President Obama made when Bin Laden was killed and how brilliantly the speechwriter used pronouns. I want to see him smile that Bob smile.

The point of this self-indulgent ramblin (but really, blogging is the epitome of self-indulgence) is that I think something in me withered up since he's been gone. It's been years since I had such a problem writing. It's like waiting for the toast to pop out of the toaster when you don't have any bread.
So that's what I'm doing with this blog.
I'm trying to make bread.