Life Engineering

In the last two - three weeks I have been busy taking actions to shape my next few years. Ironically all of these actions required heavy dealing with bureaucracy. So heavy that it gave me the impression that our lives are frozen to their shapes in molds of bureaucracy, that the borders of our comfort zones coincide with potential struggling with rules and procedures.

First thing I did was to set up a base camp in the living room, totally occupying the little, red dining table by bringing my LCD screen, printer, files from my little corner study upstairs .



Then I started to work: First issue was that I had to deal with military service issues for which I went to my home town to declare why I didn't report myself in the last year as the law was entitling me to do so after receiving my master's degree. Eventually because of the legal procedures, my case was decided to be taken to the court. So I had to attain a lawyer to deal with this case. Let's see how things will develop there.

Then only to support my case, as decided earlier, I applied for a PhD program. I can't tell how much I resented to write statements of purpose about things which aren't actually my purposes. It felt as if my life was being raped by being entrapped in a situation where I had to show fake enthusiasm about something I didn't like. Too bad that you can't simply write in your statement of purpose that you want to do PhD because it's the only way to avoid military service in the bloody country.

My problem regarding the military service is not very ideological by the way. Neither is the reason that I'm a comfort maniac. It seems to be more like related to an intellectual snobbishness. I just don't want to give my six precious months to a system that I perceive to be uttermost stupid. I don't want to easily hand my contributions to a world where killing and to be killed heroically under a uniform is the perfect norm. Spineless as it is, I will eventually do the service as I wouldn't go to prison for the "cause". But I don't want to ease things for the state by volunteering either. So I stick with this light defense mode I guess.

Then when the PhD application was over I have applied for a work permit to be able to start a subsidiary in the UK of our company in Turkey. It was also hell a lot of paper work but managed to finish that at last.

Sleepless nights under piles of paper. Depending on their results and how the business shapes, in June 2009, I might be;

a- A soldier
b- Ripping my ass in the UK enduring all the complexities to set up a company from scratch again and this time in a new country.
c- Continuing working for my company and attend a PhD program that I totally dislike.

Let's see how my life will be molded this time.