A New World (and it's not brave at all)

My work takes me places. Other jobs take their employees to conferences or training seminars in London or Madrid. Mine does something way cooler than that. Almost like in a Stephen King novel, every once in a while it transports me to a parallel universe.
Because of my work, I go to places I would never, ever, not in a million years, have gone to. I see things that I never knew existed. And some times, a whole new world expands before my eyes.
A world of nymphets, drug addicts and sociopaths. Of very high heels, very firm breasts, very heavy make up. A world of STDs, low self esteem and big muscles exploding through tight T-shirts. Cocaine sniffers (I haven't been round long enough to know the slang for this), social climbers, alcoholics. Of young boys and girls blinded by some second rate, faux, limelight. Airheads, dickheads, fathers introducing their barely legal sons to me in the off chance that I might be someone who could help boost their career. Somebody get me a bucket.
It makes me sad. I don't want to know all this. I don't want to feel like a complete stranger in my own city, in my own skin. I don't want to feel there's no hope at all. I liked my little bubble. What the hell am I doing here? I'm afraid I won't get work elsewhere and thus I'm selling my soul -ok, not my soul, but my time- to the raised collars, the low cleavages and the cheap thrills.
But most of all, I'm afraid that it will be so much easier if I just join them.

London's Burning

It is wrong to burn people's properties. Looting is also wrong. Smashing police cars, very wrong. But -and I'm almost ashamed to say it- destruction and mayhem are so exhilarating! They seem to be carrying the possibility for change. What kind of change, who knows! We want it when we become fed up, as we are now, in the belief that change is good. Even though time and time again we've seen little or no change at all after similar outbursts, the recent riots in the Arab world have offered a glimpse of renewed hope for the rest of us.

Perhaps it is indeed just a bunch of brats who destroy and pillage just for the sake of it (with Prodigy playing in the background). This is certainly the impression one gets from the media. But this is in no way any less significant than if they had organized themselves around an ideology. It could, in fact, be much more significant, as it is raw, spontaneous, uncontrolled and by the look of it, uncontrollable. The timing is no coincidence, either. We can't ignore what's happening by simply labeling it antisocial or criminal behaviour. Why in England? Why now? Could these people have a profile? Is there something that unites them? Is this another indication that the era of capitalism has passed and we're carrying its rotting corpse on our backs? I'm eagerly waiting for the political and sociological analyses in the Sunday papers. 

It's also kind of nice to be reading about riots that are not happening in Greece for a change. It makes me grin. Smugly. I know this doesn't make me a very nice person. I do have some rather radical ideas sometimes (I might share them with you one day), but I'm generally very meek. I'd be like one of those people who go on a killing rampage one day and their neighbours say 'she was such a sweet girl, very quiet, never bothered us or anything'. Not my neighbours, though. They're evil. (I should move them up a notch on my list)

mayday

Nobody said it was easy, no one ever said it would be this hard.

I’m a 32 year old single woman, and quite often I feel I’m under attack from all directions.

On the personal sphere. I’ve trained myself in avoiding any contact with my parents’ friends. When I fail, my behaviour borders on the aloof, the rude, the sarcastic. ‘Yes, there aren’t any men’. ‘Yes, it appears that my parents will have to live without grandchildren’. “No, I’d rather pull my eye out with a fork than meet your nephew the pharmacist/civil engineer/economic analyst’.

Some of my friends advocate casual sex. They are unaware of the curse my mum placed on me when I was still in elementary school: You shall have sex only with people you love. Every time I’ve tried otherwise, it has been a disaster.

So I try having relationships. They all start off wonderfully. And as I am a great romantic, I think this is it, I found my companion. And then the ridiculous demands begin. ‘I’m abusive, jealous and I drink. Stick with me, I’ll change’. ‘Are we going to get married or should marry the cousin my mum picked out for me?’ ‘I love you, but I can’t guarantee I’ll be faithful’. ‘I love you more than anything in the world but you didn’t tell me you ran into your ex boyfriend and I can never trust you again. Let’s stay friends, though.’

My hair turns white, I stop eating, I can’t sleep, but eventually I start trying to pick up the pieces after every insane break up and hope I’ll be stronger for the next one. Meanwhile, there is always psychotherapy.

I’ve been a privileged daughter. I can’t complain. But now my parents need me and I feel inadequate to cope with the cancer and all the other health problems, the bureaucracy, the money issues. I can’t spend more than ten minutes talking to my father even though I know he’s lonely and I avoid seeing my mother as much as I can because I can’t stand her showing how worried she is about me. She brings me food, it rots in the fridge.  

Work requires more diplomatic manoeuvres than actual skill. Plus the crisis has ensured that employees now live in a reign of terror. At least you have a job, people say and they are right. Soon people who have a job will be the exception. Where I work, one can never predict who is going to get fired and why. You show up for work and you’re told to pack your things and go. Just like that. It’s the crisis. It can’t be helped. Human decency, employment law, they have nothing to do with it. It’s the crisis. It’s difficult for all of us. Bye now.

But the hardest thing of all is coping with this insane country. The fear that all that my grandparents and parents worked for will have to be sold off just to pay the taxes. Year after year they have to pay taxes for the luxury of ownership. It hadn’t occurred to me how ridiculous this was until a friend who grew up in a different country and system pointed it out. 

The fear that if you do take to the streets and protest for all that is going wrong in this place (and assuming you don’t get fired for doing so) you’ll end up in hospital for having been within the range of a policeman’s glob. If you go out night or day in the city of Athens, chances are you’ll be robbed (I thought all this was an exaggeration until it happened to me), mugged, stabbed, or see someone else get stabbed for being dark skinned, or carrying a camera with him, or just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. You might see, in the middle of the day, as you’re doing your grocery shopping in the open market, a woman on fire because some of the petrol aimed at the police motorcycle by some dickhead was spilt on her too, and you might see a man set alight as he’s trying to help her.

You have known for years it was going to come to this and you were hoping that someone else, the mayor, the members of parliament, your fellow citizens, were seeing it, too. But there was never any plan. And now the people, humiliated by the IMF, disgraced by the EU, unemployed, scared, betrayed by government after government, have turned into angry sheep, an angry mob, and there is no way to contain them.

And you know it is not going to get any better.

  

Anger

This is as unsubstantiated as the existence of the Easter Bunny, but I credit the weather for the fact that we haven't started killing each other yet. Don't get me wrong, I don't mean in a civil war. I mean spontaneously, individually and randomly.
I, for one, definitely feel like hitting people at least once a day, be it out of personal, work related or socio-economic frustration. And I'm generally considered a calm and collected individual. A man on a moped beeped at me the other day because he thought I was going to cross the road and I felt like throwing him off his stupid vehicle and start kicking him ferociously in the stomach. That was at 11 in the morning.
I would like to think that I'm not going mad, that this is justified, long accumulated anger.

I remember when people got out on the streets in Egypt. I was in London at the time and I was thinking that it wouldn't be long, it couldn't be long, before we in Greece did he same. As the unrest spread from country to country and we stayed in front of our tvs, complaining about the corrupt politicians, worrying about every new economic measure that is imposed on us, I began to wonder what is the matter with us.
We are traditionally an unruly people. We go out and we break everything for much less than what is happening to us now. Yet everyone is numb. We've swallowed our pride and we go about our business thankful for whatever we've got left. We still bribe officials in all levels of government, we still watch the news and listen to every sold-out journalist's 'opinion', we still wonder how high the cost of petrol will go before we have to start selling our kidneys.
But now spring is upon us and the weather is sweet. And we are producing more Vitamin D, which I read somewhere, increases the libido. We might be having several undiagnosed nervous breakdowns a day, but at least we can have our cappuccino freddo in the sun and check each other out.
I guess rioting will have to wait.

Eat, pray, love and screw you, sexist dickhead.

It happens sometimes that a film feels more personal just because we are in a certain frame of mind when we watch it. When I was younger, I even thought the universe was guiding me through films. That sounds like a statement a schizophrenic might make, but here lies the beauty of blogs, you can write whatever you want and there won't be any people in white coats knocking on the door. I've been over my Coelhian phase for many years now. I've stopped looking for signs from the universe and started looking for guidance within. That's why a film that was given one star by athinorama and a rating of 4.8 by IMDB left me baffled. Is there something seriously wrong with my judgement or has the cinema-going world something against easily digestible stories of self-discovery?

The film I'm referring to is Eat, Pray, Love (2010). The title reminds me a little of my much earlier -and much too brief, thank God!- Buscaglian phase of Living, Loving and Learning. Although I can't stand the sappiness of that book and anyone who quotes from it, I found Eat, Pray, Love much more agreeable. Granted, when everything falls apart around us and we feel we don't know ourselves any more, when we don't understand the choices we've made and we realise something fundamental has to change, we don't all go to Rome to eat, India to meditate and Bali to fall in love. Most of us go to therapy, although, truth be told, travelling the world might work out cheaper.

The film is not a masterpiece, but the cast is good -who could have anything against Richard Jenkins?- and the photography, for us who like glare, was great and not surprisingly so since it was the work of Robert Richardson. The script has a number of satisfyingly clever lines and even though the direction won't make it into any books, it was more than decent.

So be honest, people. What is it? Why does even Runaway Bride (1999), which was a completely mindless film, have a better rating? Is it because Julia Roberts looks older? Because she doesn't have the figure she had twenty years ago? Is it because the film doesn't fit into our 'romantic comedy' expectations? Is it because the protagonist had a relationship with a much younger man? Or is it because it's preposterous for a woman to go through a crisis? To abandon a man who loves her because she has lost herself in the relationship?

Let me quote a man who kindly left his review on imbd: 'This woman should be the scourge of the Earth and should receive social contempt for her behavior. However, like most romcoms the female can hurt everyone she knows if it will aid her superficial quest for some kind of make believe fulfillment and then, like Stockholm Syndrome, all her victims will forgive her or tell her she is the most important thing in the world and her happiness comes before anybody or anything else. I can't believe men are still depicted as the heartless characters in films when every romcom depicts evil as good. This movie made me cringe. I was forced to see it with mom, sister and wife. I told them all that the film literally made me sick. They agreed. This sort of behavior that is being engendered into women is sickening. Women who believe such a film represents anything positive about anything need to have their head checked for borderline personality disorder. Men need to stop treating women like little precious pieces of glass when those same women are not pieces of glass, are not these cute little powerless creatures but are instead, like Liz in the movie, arrogant, snotty, pampered, privileged, rude, morally bankrupt, conniving, selfish dolts who believe that their superficial happiness is worth any emotional cost to other people.'

This is just one review, but I have a feeling this guy is not the only one who feels this way. Why is a woman's quest for self-discovery so threatening? Why should women feel obliged to stay with men just because they are being loved? Or was it the fact that she was financially independent and therefore more able to leave her husband that bothered this guy? The feminist in me has the outline of a book all figured out as a response, but I won't go there. I'll go and have some wonderful food instead, just like any run-of-the-mill woman with a borderline personality disorder. I tell you, it's a tough life for us wackos!

My Athens in August

I am not a misanthropist, I just like my Athens in August. Despite the economic crisis, Athenians have fled. This means that the streets are empty, you get anywhere you want in no time, there are no queues in banks, nor the tax office, nor the hospitals, nor IKA, nor at the supermarkets.

Halandri, 16 Aug. 2010 at 18:19

It is an interesting time for observations. For example, even though you can park anywhere you like, you still see the occasional car parked on the pavement. There are those stickers you can get that read 'είμαι γάϊδαρος παρκάρω όπου γουστάρω' ('I'm an ass I park where I like') from streetpanthers, but I think that if someone parks like this in Athens in August they deserve a special version sticker with 'κάφρος', instead of 'ass'.

It is also almost bewildering how the very few people who have remained in Athens drive. It is as if there is a silent agreement that basic rules are obsolete this time of year. There is absolutely no need to indicate if you are turning or pulling over, red traffic lights are there for decoration purposes only and speeding like your behind is on fire is your god given right. Even pedestrians seem to have a death wish. Perhaps they are dizzy from the heat, but they too behave like they have an invisible shield around them to protect them from the lunatic drivers. They, too, ignore traffic lights and cross the road without even looking if there are any cars coming. They cross at their own speed, like strolling in a park and at dangerous points where speeding lunatics can't see them before it's too late. The funny thing is, that because all this is known and -I honestly believe- actually silently agreed upon, and as I haven't seen any accidents, this system appears to be working, although I must say I feel sorry for the tourists and the new drivers who just got their license and decided to stay behind in the city while it's still empty, to practise. They must think everyone got released from the madhouse and were given a car as a farewell present.

Leoforos Pentelis, 16 Aug. 2010 at 18:22

One of the most annoying things about Athens in August, especially for us who've stayed because we like the peace and quiet, is all the alarms that go off and no one is around to turn them off. It is mostly car alarms. This is something I never understood. Why have a car alarm if you're not there to be alarmed when you hear it, and if nobody else gives a toss? Car alarms keep sounding for what it feels like an eternity until I wish that there really was somebody trying to steal the car and that he would succeed before I go out with an axe and smash the damn thing. However, it's not just car alarms. It's houses, too. About a week ago our neighbour called from wherever he's gone on holiday to ask us to check on his house because the alarm had been set off. I don't know exactly what I was supposed to do had there been a burglar, as I am not a particularly scary or muscly person and I don't own a baseball bat, but I went there to have a look, anyway. Perhaps because it was the middle of the day, an unpopular time to break into houses and because there was another neighbour -a retired army general mentioned before as the villain responsible for the slaughtering of the neighbourhood's last sheep- on his balcony who would have probably shot any suspicious lurkers on sight, but mainly because I firmly believe that alarms go off for no reason other than to annoy me, that I went there totally convinced all was fine in the house and that I was just wasting my time. Was I right? Of course I was. After a while, the police also came to check. All this because of an attention seeking alarm system. The next day, the same thing happened with the house next door to where I work. Again in the middle of the day, again the police came, again false alarm. And it's not just houses. There is a shop on a main street that I drive past every day where the alarm is always sounding. How that is possible, I don't know but I swear it's true.

As I'm typing all this, the boats en route to Piraeus are overflowing with people coming back to Athens. With them they are bringing their cars, their children and their disrespect for the city. The national roads are also full with unhappy people returning to unpaid loans and bills and uncertain jobs. From tomorrow morning that special time when the city feels humane will be over.

Ode to Yellow

Got my washing out of the machine this morning and it was all yellow. All my white tops, including that historical halter neck from Stafford-upon-Avon, all my white underwear (although some might welcome the change), all an unusual shade of yellow. Fortunatelly, after some research, I found that yellow is 'in' this summer. In fact it's been 'in' since 2007. Silly me, I had been under the impression that green was the yellow of circa 2007. This is what happens when you don't follow fashion, so I guess I'm lucky that my washing machine does. What's more, it provides this service for free.

A component of a carefree life, is embracing mishaps such as these. Therefore, I am about to embrace yellow in all its manifestations.

In music. Obviously, Yellow by Coldplay, as old as my previously white halter neck. Yellow River by Tony Christie apparently, who knew. Lemon, by U2 could be argued to be a yellow song, same as Lemon Tree by Fool's Garden. Yellow Submarine, the Beattles. Η Μαγιονέζα, από την Λιλιπούπολη. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, by Elton John whose music I'm not particularly fond of but that's a beautiful song and all the more for being in the soundtrack of Breaking the Waves (1996). Yellow Moon, by the Neville Brothers. Also two greek classics, Μαρία με τα Κίτρινα, Δήμητρα Γαλάνη, and Άσπρα Κόκκινα Κίτρινα Μπλε, Βίκυ Μοσχολιού which in fact has most of the colours covered. And finally, Don't Eat the Yellow Snow, by Frank Zappa, a very useful advice.

In diseases. Yellow Fever, a virus for which there is treatment but no cure and which is responsible for 30.000 deaths yearly even in our time. Cirrhosis. It actually makes you yellow.

In mental associations. Taxis. New York. Never been. The Orient. Never been. Yellow pages. Such a waste of paper but not everyone has access to the internet. Lemons, melons (oh my, an anagram!), stains, tablecloths, they will never come out, a puffy jacket that got stolen from the back of a car in Bristol, hatred, but why? Canaries, they are very sensitive, they die and you think it's all your fault and you're only a child. Yellow teeth, yellow nails, yellow press, Τριανταφυλλόπουλος, Yellow River, Kate Hudson's dress in film with very long title, Dimitra's walls in Birmingham, bananas, Woody Allen, pine apple slices.

I really liked my white halter neck from Principles in Stafford-upon-Avon.

Damn you, washing machine!