The presses have stopped.

When the new coalition government was formed, I stopped following the news. I was deeply shaken and disgusted by the fact that there were now far right extremists in the government, with a percentage in the last election of 5.63%. Ridiculously high anyway, but under no circumstances high enough to justify them being in government, even if it is a well known fact that at times of social turmoil some people affiliate themselves with the nationalists (oh, why be kind, when fascists is what they are). The extreme right, from here on referred to as the fascists, hadn't had any active role in parliament, other than occupying the occasional seat, and talking the occasional nonsense, since the fall of the junta, in 1975. That was before I was born, but lucky me, in my lifetime I was granted the privilege to see them as ministers and vice ministers. Scary and ludicrous at the same time.

Shortly after the new government picked up where the previous had left off, signing all the ridiculous terms the troika posed, and, as I said I stopped following the news, the newspaper I used to read the online version of, at the office, while having my morning coffee, went bankrupt. In the olden days, the closure of ελευθεροτυπία would have constituted major news. It wasn't just any newspaper and it's not a coincidence that it was founded in 1975. Until the end, it was where some of the more radical voices were allowed to express their views. On a much more personal level, it provided a common pool of information for me and my sister who lives abroad, with a daily exchange of links to articles that we would discuss at length during our weekend phone call. Refusing to believe that what had appeared to be a strike was actually the end of ελευθεροτυπία, I keep returning to their home page with my coffee in hand, only to be met by the same frozen news of December, 21st: the homeless die 30 years early, a lack of ethics in politics, what films to expect in 2012. Since then, as the situation around us becomes grimmer and grimmer, as we become utterly helpless and hopeless, I get a sense of comfort, knowing that somewhere is always December 21st 2011, there is still some hope for an uprising, and I can pretend to care about the imminent release of Men in Black 3.

Then later a movie, too.

'Tis not a good time to be Greek. We've been poor before, although certainly not in my life time, but this is different. There had always been some dignity in our misfortunes before. Now we are the laughing stock of Europe. I've even heard of Greek doctors who work abroad receiving racist comments from their patients.
And today I read the synopsis of a Channel 4 programme that nearly gave me a stroke. I felt humiliated, deeply offended and angry.

We have failed. I feel we're in a sinking ship. We all know it but pretend there is still hope. Or perhaps we're all tired of the constant influx of bad news. Perhaps, in a way, we've given up trying to keep up with the never ending developments. I doubt any of us understands what's going on any more. I, for one, have no idea what is happening and I don't care that much, either. If something really important happens, I trust someone will tell me. Whether our Prime Minister resigns, or which European leader bullied us today is insignificant. We have put ourselves in a situation we will never be able to get out of.

Despite it all, it was a sunny day yesterday. A day for holding hands, for a walk in Monastiraki, for buying old books for 50 cents each. People seemed eager to enjoy the sunshine. A father who sold second hand clothing on the street was burying his giggling son under piles of jackets. He then pulled him by the leg to lift him up and the kid burst out laughing.

I know things will get even worse. Because poverty in such urban environments breeds a very ugly kind of despair. Maybe Sunday was the calm before the storm. (Does a part of me yearn for that storm?) In any case, it was a perfect day for holding hands. At least that is something they can never take away from us.

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!