larkandkatydid: “Jingle-Jangle” is

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larkandkatydid:

“Jingle-Jangle” is actually a technical term is social science research that describes the challenge of measuring/describing/agreeing on important sociological concepts because either people are using different words to describe the same experience (jingle) and/or they are using the same words to describe very different experiences (jangle).  

(it also could be the reverse. I’m not looking it up to double check)

In my work we keep getting caught in the jingle-jangle jungle around the term “empathy”.  Really. I swear. I’m not just beating you over the head with the lessons of this cryptic parable. I really did have to spend 2 hours this week debating the difference between “empathy” and “listening”.  Oh, you think that’s obvious but IT IS NOT!

Anyway, it’s a real term for a real thing that happens all the fucking time and if you don’t notice it happening you will find yourself arguing with people you don’t actually disagree with. 

My mother, a trained museum curator volunteering in her retirement for the archives of the county historical society, is currently trapped in an utter hell of this nature: a pair of librarians are also volunteering to help organize certain manuscripts in the collection, and they come in during hours that do not overlap with those my mother spends there. 

And they have extremely specific, and not identical, definitions of certain terms, like “catalogue” and “accession”. They mean DIFFERENT THINGS to curators and librarians, and my mother is not entirely sure WHAT librarians think those things mean, but they do NOT mean the same things as they mean to HER. And so week after week she leaves them notes, and she comes back to bewildered answers and things done that weren’t what she intended at all, and so on. 

She sighed and said she’s going to have to make a point of coming in when they’re there, so they can just sit down and define their terms once and for all…
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Thanks well-wishers, the wifi connection here is so spotty i can’t reply to replies.

we had a perfectly safe but complicated journey– and now we’re at our hotel in the Sultanahmet district, which is like, The Joint. It’s quite nice. Boring minutae of travel follows, because I made myself stay up until 9pm local time (having had >1 hr sleep on the plane overnight) and finally collapsed gratefully into bed only to awaken at midnight local time completely unable to fall back asleep. No fair!

 left at 3:00, hit traffic at the grand island bridge and also at the border and made it to the Niagara Falls bus terminal / train station with about five minutes to spare. Bus to Toronto was smooth and pleasant; traffic was shitty and weather was shitty and we just didn’t have to care, for less than ¼ the cost of parking in Toronto. (Longterm parking is free at the Niagara Falls train station; we’ll see if the car is intact when we get back.) 

Took a taxi 1 mile through Toronto to the train station; taxi driver pointed out that the train is $15 each and cab fare to the airport is $30 so it would be all the same to just take the taxi the whole way. But the train was pleasant, and easy.

Checking in for the flight took a million years, then getting through security, and we had just enough time to sit down and order a meal and then realize that boarding started soon. But we opted not to hurry, since we were right next to the gate. Finally we went, and found that the passengers on our flight had begun to queue up at the gate. It being one of those giant planes, this meant there was a queue halfway down the terminal. So we joined it.

For no reason, we stood there an hour, and then they boarded us by rows so it didn’t matter that we’d been in a queue. For an hour. We could have been sitting that whole time, but we didn’t. And we couldn’t hear the gate announcements, queued like that.

I began to learn how Turkish people stand in queues, which is to say, aggressively. They love nothing more than to spend the entire time attempting to move up one space in the queue for no real reason and to no actual avail, while having a conversation through you with someone else. 

The flight was fine, but we were in a window and adjacent seat, so we couldn’t get up without disturbing a stranger, so we… didn’t. We just sat there unmoving for like 8 hours. And having stood in a queue in the airport terminal instead of wandering around and sitting meant that I hadn’t refilled my water bottle, so I got pretty goddamn dehydrated.

We got off the plane onto some buses that just sort of dumped us into an airport terminal, and from there we were herded straight into passport control, which was another 45 minutes of queueing. (Nicely, they unloaded our baggage during that time, so we got to just go get our luggage afterward.) As a bonus, enroute to the baggage claim there was a money-changing kiosk so I went and traded $50 for about 280 lire and it turns out that’s a shitload of money, so that has been nice to discover.

Visa-validated and legitimately entered into the country, we took our heavy-ass bags and got on the metro. Which is clean, efficient, well-run, nicely-maintained, and cheap as hell. Runs aboveground too so you know what’s going on.

From the metro we walked to our hotel, which, like. OK. We had to walk past the Blue Mosque and basically through Sultan Ahmet’s tomb to get there, and it’s staggeringly beautiful and we’re surrounded by tourists– many of them Turkish, this is where Turks come to gawk at their own history, for good reason– and we have these heavy-ass bags and the sidewalks are fucking hazards, all full of steps and open manhole covers and potted plants, so you have to walk in the street which is full of potted plants and people and cars, and this isn’t like NYC, people don’t obey walking lane rules, and our bags were heavy as fuck. 

But, we made it to the hotel. Finally put down our huge heavy bags, showered, drank some goddamned water, changed clothes. The hotel room has a little balcony and the very first thing I did was wash all our sweat-soaked traveling clothes in the bathroom sink, and set up the laundry line I’d brought and hang the clothes all out to dry on the balcony. 

from the balcony we can see the Bosporus. We also can see a twisty turny little neighborhood. There’s a courtyard where someone has a feeder out for pigeons, so there’s constant flapping and activity of some quite fancy pigeons.

And there is a resident cat population of at least fifteen in the street behind the hotel. Istanbul is absolutely chock-full of cats. The locals seem fond of them. Dogs too, to a lesser extent, roaming free– I saw one with a collar, another with an ear tag like a cow– but the cats are everywhere, and seem to be tame but not particularly to belong to anyone. 

The hotel has a rooftop terrace that you can access anytime. We went up there after dinner, waiting for it to be late enough to try to go to bed. Great views of the Bosporous, full of shipping traffic. Behind us, the sun was setting behind the Blue Mosque. And in front of us, going from a vague half-seen blob in the smog or clouds, the moon rose red as blood, and we spent an agreeable half an hour trying to figure out how to adequately take photographs of it, before giving up.

ok i might be sleepy enough to try to go back to sleep. it’s 2am local time, 7pm by my body’s clock, and i’ve had three hours of sleep since friday so really… you’d think.

Anyway, yesterday also was my birthday, so I’m 39 now, go me. :)
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