Τρίτη 24 Ιουλίου 2012

what can you learn from a book on natural selection when being severely sleep deprived

i am glad i do not get to be who i am going to be yet.
i am glad there are still times when existential crisis kicks in and i panic on how few books i have read, how few places i have been, and who i have not had in my life. it means i can still crave for things.
i haven't realy decided yet who exactly i want to be. i want to balance between extrovert and introvert, i want to be eccentric, weird, and i want to be quiet. i now realize i cannot be just one or two of these things. i am never going to be an adjective. i am going to be everything. and everyday i can be something new, i want to be the unpredictable element of my days and i want to get burnt out by life, if that is even possible.
i never really had a zest for life though. it is strange how i, a self approved and acknowledged nihilist has such unreasonable, if i may say so, outbreaks of 'wanting' . i guess, it is partly due to the fact that i get bored so quickly. anyway, no one will ever know.

i am going to brand my skin for the second time today. with the symbol of the earth.
yestertday i tried doing something i have so many times read about and found somewhat fascinating yet distrubingly difficult as it turns out, to meditate on a word. so i chose the word earth. i tried doing it on the beach under a big ass tree and its gradually but luckily, slowly, waning shade.
here's what came out, almost anyway
earth
earth
earth
ground
tree
soil
dirt.brown dirt
terrains and cliffs
roots in the ground.roots of trees. trees.ground
ground
ground
i am sitting on it.
rock. steady. solid. solid.
solid.hard. or more soft.
but hard.solid
earth earth.
 worms, deep brown, solid.
earth.earth
deity, gaia. gods. twelve gods.
age of mythology.


and then, obviously, i sort of lost it. i don't think that's the point of maditation anyway. that's just 'i am lettin my brain go wild'.


"where ideas can have sex"

Κυριακή 22 Ιουλίου 2012

my fate is a flying cocroach

okay. it might have been a good idea at first.
one week in the legendary summer vacation of 2012 and already half the animal kingdom has unleashed an attack on us, one bruised ass, and 24 hours of sleeplessness no less.
 there are days at the end of which i have to think really hard to recollect all the places we have been to. we wake up, cook poorly anything that can be made out of half a chicken wing and rice, we start off our nocturnal expeditions just the three of us intending only on having one drink and end up 7 hours later with four more people after having marvelled at greek food and many more drinks than one would ever care to count. crazy bus rides to and from archaelogical sites where we stick out like greeks in a tavern between the seas of fair skinned tourists. losing our way under the unforgiving burning sun and talking with suspiciously kind strangers. my friend has this ridiculous white knit big hat that looks like a lame european cousin of a sombrero that screams 'tourist', tottaly misleading the locals, only for when they realise we are greek to get overexcited and treat us like a rarity. people are either bored or genuinly kind, asking us where we come from and what brings us here. little did they know that their beloved island was just as well as anywhere else that included free housing.
we met two people literally from the exact opposite ends of the country, another one that studies in Rumania and another that smokes tobacco mixed with weed all day long, from dusk till dawn. he is the one that taught us not to bother sleeping after 4 am if he have to be up by 11 am. so this is what we are trying out, even though it is not working as well for all three of us.
still, i cannot sleep.
of course, i have had those god awful moments when everything and everyone sets your teeth on edge and makes you want to growl menacingly at the universe, but it is a reasonable price to pay. i think.. it is just that when everyone retells the story of their lives they always tiptoe around the shitty stuff, but not i, i am brutal with my life and i like to clarify that even if you are on a road trip to heaven, you are inevitably going to get smacked by the devil's tail at least once. but every choice is in the end yours and all the breaths you take are voluntary.


Τετάρτη 18 Ιουλίου 2012

i should start to think!

i hate hate hate summer. for someone born in Greece, yeah, that's just wrong, but in this heat i doubt anyone on the face of the earth would want to be where i am.
right now i am breaking all my psychologist's rules by staying home when my friends are out. i am living in a three room-ready to rot from the filth and to collapse from the ages- apartment in Crete with four other people, two of them boys, and my word! boys are dirty. yup.there i said it. i had to complain somewhere and here it is.
it is fun though. we wake up everyday at 3 o'clock and we try to cook anything remotely edible while doing absolutely nothing at all. the boys steal our only source of airconditioning and we sit around doing our nails and bitching about the heat. ah, the days. yes. but today i chose not to force myself into being kind and cheerful at a place i do not want to be. i said, no thanks, i will stay home and abuse the laptop at hand. the other day me and two of my friends had a conversation about people. they said that at times they actually went out alone, with the excuse of shopping or something, just to see people, because other people, in a mall or in the street, made their day. i of course could never understand what that must feel like. i embrace the motto of my dear friend Sartre, that hell is others.
a while ago i was watching a video on TED about introverts and all the while i was screaming on the inside "yes! you go sister!" to the woman talking. she was saying that simply some people are different than others and can function in different environments than others, without that meaning that this is a wrong or peculiar thing to do. yesterday i explained to my friends that these days were naturally considered 'a vacation' and 'a time off' but that i also was looking forward to the time i would spend alone back home, and that that time would actually be the time that i rest. not always, but occasionally,  it takes some effort for me to be with people, even my best friends, and to be chatty and 'social'. it is ridiculous how many times that has been considered as rude or even depressive to others. i do not prefer others to my friends. i prefer no one. i can understand how such a behaviour can be deemed antisocial , but, come on, have you taken a look lately at our society? why on earth should i be pro that? 
i am simply tired of going out and doing nothing. i do not need company in staying idle or in drinking a beer or in listening to music. i do appreciate sharing my passion, whether that is music or even drinking, with other people but does that apply to any people? people go to clubs to listen to music and dance and be with friends.as a matter of fact, a friend of mine once told me that she loves the moment when in the club plays a song that everyone knows and everyone starts singing along and dancing. i do not have to go to a club, i can wear my sweats and ask a friend over, get drunk on cheap wine and dance and sing all night long to any kind of music i want, yes, even metal. 
clearly, this kind of things are not my cup of tea but still i feel odd. i feel like i am denying my friends or somehting and even though it is silly it will probably take some time getting used to it. from both sides.
i am an introvert, and i am not afraid anymore to say 'no' to certain things. sometimes i am just better off in my own head. it's a dangerous but comfortable place to be, since not even my own skin is comfortable sometimes.
i fear i might melt from the heat.









Σάββατο 14 Ιουλίου 2012

halcyon days

i am starting to believe that there is something seriously twisted in the way i relish my heartbreak.
yes, as it so happens, it is grieving period here and i have to find a way to bandage my scars once more and keep on waking up every day without going back to bed at night bitter.
basically my days include,
 F.R.I.E.N.D.S all over again (this series never ever gets old for me),
books, big books. purchasing them, looking at them, craving their knowledge, not quite reading them though,
a crazy daily routine that start at 4 p.m. when i wake up and ends at 7 a.m. when i go to sleep reluctantly,
ice cubes,
lots of emails, i get at leas thirty email updates per day, it is insane,
and reading stuff on the internet, always ending up reading about art.

and it is awesome.

however, all this will eventually have to stop tomorrow as i am finaly leaving this oven that i call Athens and going to one of the most unique places in Greece, Crete. I have only gotten the chance to know the island Crete the last two years through my brother who now lives there but it is a place in so many ways wonderfull, it has history, it has natural beauty and it has an authentic spirit, it is as if sometimes it could be a place on its own, not in accordance with the rest of Greece. So, two weeks in two different cities of Crete with two of the most valued people in my life and a ridiculously low budget that we have to live on- even though i do not think we will-. Times like this i wish i had a really really smal laptop or something so that i could blog constantly but insted i will have to make do with my moleskine notebook. And even though i adore writing in the ol' traditional way and scribbling down random remarks in the margins, the part that gets me off is the transportation of the writings into the blog afterwards. However this is a great way of rereading them all and making corrections and such, as well as merging the really short and random parts with the bigger ones and making a more coherent result out of them.

today is the last of my 'goodbye for the rest of our lives' sessions, with people from my school i will propably never see again. it is not as much psychologically strenous as i thought it would be, but that's partly because it has not dawned on me yet that the biggest chapter of my life so far, school, is over. ha! i do not want to be there when i realise it!

so, that's that.

finire cosi? finire cosi?

ηλιακά ταξίδια όσα η χαρακωμένη μνήμη μου,
δεν σε θυμάμαι, δεν θέλω να θυμάμαι τίποτα.
συλλέγω λάμπες στο γραφείο μου, κάποιες φορές φοβάμαι θανάσιμα το σκοτάδι,
και τις ανοιγοκλείνω. ένα δευτερόλεπτο σιγής και νύχτας, και πάλι ορατά σχήματα και χρωματικά παιχνίδια του αριστερού ματιού μου

ίσως ποτέ δεν εγκατέλειψα αυτό το σπίτι.
όλοι οι άλλοι όμως, όντως, τελικά φύγαν.
μου χάρισαν τα άδεια τους δωμάτια και τώρα υποτίθεται κοιμάμαι χωρίς ρούχα
και που κλείνω το παράθυρο, η κουρτίνα κοντά στην εγκοπή ακόμη χορεύει.

υπέφερα τόσα πολλά χωρίς εσένα, ενώ το μόνο που θα έκανε ποτέ τα δάκρυα ελαφρύτερα θα ήσουν εσύ.

είσαι χαμένη. είσαι χαμένη. είσαι χαμένη
ο,τι και να κάνεις
όπου και να τρέξεις
                                                     
                                                     μου ανήκεις.


πάνω από το κεφάλι σου πάντα κρέμεται ο άτυχος αριθμός που δεν χωράει το χαρτί, και η άδεια θέση σε ένα σαπιοκάραβο που πλέει προς το κάπου. τι διαλέγεις?
                                                                                       ναι, ξέρω.

Τετάρτη 11 Ιουλίου 2012

yeah, Pollock is dead and fortunately i do not believe in reincarnation


Aelita is a five year old. Aelita has already been deemed "the next Picasso" and "the next Pollock". I am no child prodigy but i would be seriously overwhelmed if I were her. These are some big shoes she has to fill..

 Being a five year old obviously though has its perks. Her untrained and unstrained eye perceives all in a pristine way and therefore proceeds to combine colours and abstract shapes in a manor remarkable to the adult eyes, for the actual quality of her work fundamentally lies in the boldness of her choice of colours. One could say she is a rough diamond this way. She responds to her environment completely differently than an adult would and very logically and interestingly so. But so do most kids.
 Okay, she can be really smart. She can be twice as smart as anyone else, hell three of four times even. Yet she lacks a whole lot of things, crucial criteria, that make an artist, an artistic prodigy, a truthfully visionary artist. One that anyway really is worth 30.000 $ per painting (!). Such as life experience. It is very plain, most of the times the truth is that as you get older you get better. You aestheticall pallet is enriched, your mind matures and your eye becomes more keen. The artist must master the ability to draw emotions and aspiration from the chaos of his/hers own experience and then present them with a process that beforehand demands hard work and practice, thus presenting a vision. I mean, art is not simply pretty pictures and I know that people really like to get overexcited and enthused with unexpected incidents like this one, but come on! Do not erase so readily all the hard work that truthful art has claimed as its birth right.
Art, good art, trully good art, art not just for the delectation of the eyball, is painfull, and more than just meaningfull it is radical, it changes things inside you and it stirs a little your guts when you muse on it.
 I think that it is reasonal for a kid, for any kid, when in a room fraught with painting and collage material, to venture to a similar enterpise. Of course both the parents of this little girl are artists and therefore a great source of relative stimuli for the girl's subconscious so that she can have a developed skill that allows her to put a painting together. We know for a fact that children's imagination and creativity kick adult's creativity in the butt.
 That is exactly why good artists are so, so rare, because they have to preserve a part of them that is still infantile and pure. When you are just a kid or just an adult you are half an artist.
 There is no reason for such a commotion. Do not get me wrong, I will remember her name and, in at least a decade, if reality supports it, i will willingly bow down to her talent but for now the only reason i can understand for the adoration her work has been given is the fact that all we really want is innocence hung in the wall of our living room to remind us that such a thing once habitated us adults as well.
Then again, everything is open to interpretation. Propably if i did not know who Pollock or who Rothko were i would have just as well assumed they were 6 year old toddlers. This is why, i guess, it is insane for her to exhibit. When you look at a painting you immediately try to decode it but what if there is nothing to decode? You think, hey, this is on a wall, it has to be important somehow. Aelita's work is inspired by space, but why is space so important to her that she needs to picture it her own way? Besides the beauty of it, let's assume that this is stemming from intuition. Okay again, she may have killer intuition. Yet again she is nowhere near being an artist.
 It is not a term one can assume light heartedly. Artist. It is not vague. The artist has an obligation towards human kind. What could a five year old know about that? By the time she hits 14- which is far away- she might have grown sick and tired of painting, propably because the immense pressure that a regular person aspiring to be an artist is usually under, starts for her at 5.
 She has raw talent, yes. Nurture it and make it into pure brilliance. Do not show it off and for the love of it, do not sell it.


Τρίτη 10 Ιουλίου 2012

partikel

the last couple of days i feel like i am losing it.
seriously, it is like i am on constant 'freak-out mode'.
not because it has dawned on me that starting september all the streets and places in the world i knew will be useless information and i will have to learn new street names and go out on the hunt for the best coffee in town all over again.
but because i realised that moving across the edge of the continent and spending the future four years in a place i don't know, but even so i adore, i have to admit, is not at all what i should be worrying about.
i realised that, the things that i felt certain of, or reassured for that matter, and all these things that were in my head under the sign "you've got this", are the only things 'i do not have'.
i was talking today on the phone with Glasgow, yeah i am going to Glasgow- even when i am writing it i cannot control my grin!-, and, my word, i could not understand what the person across the line was saying to me. I mean, look, obviously i know english, right? But, either she talked through her teeth and the connection was hideous or i will be unpleasantly surprised when i step foot on Scottish ground. I understand Londoners though. I myslef can master a kind of hybrid-foreign-londoner accent but i guess the norther you go the more hardcore things get. Luckily, i am a fan of hardcore and i cannot wait to get there!
I actually cannot wait to get out of here. I am not going to miss the 35-40 degrees days! And i will no longer have to pray for snow, it will come to me willingly.

okay, that's that.

Κυριακή 8 Ιουλίου 2012

"from my rotting body flowers shall grow and i am in them and that is eternity"


the hours of the day during which i find myself in the train are usually the hours that take people to their jobs or back to their homes. or just idle hours that do not inspire abandoning the safety of walls. so, mostly, i see tired faces, men in suits with sad briefcases, women with empty eyes and uninteresting gazes, drunken beggars.
there are however many kinds of trains here and on a random day that has been gullibly subjected to the unbearable heat of the mediterranean summer, i got to find myself once for a short while in all of them. there is this one train, that has a platform right between the two currents of the biggest motorway of Athens and while waiting there all that can occupy your mind is the numerous cars passing you by from both directions and the huge dim grey colour of the ciment walls that support another road above you, that from the sky, forms a cross with the line of the motorway. the divine thing about it is the wind current that the cars produce. it is poisonous and to somenone not used to it, suffocating, sure, but it certainly is pleasant to me. most days. 
this very special day, really as special as every other day is, while walking through the doors of the train car an old man talked to me. he asked me where this train was going and how many stops away his destination was. he was an old man, as he later told me 72 years of age, with subtle glasses and a weak navy baseball sort of hat fidgeting in his hands. i am not good with telling from someone's face how old he is, i usually always miss a decade or so, but if i were to be asked later i could propably tell by the way he talked to me and the things that he talked to me about that he was quite old. "born in 1940" he said proudly and i could not help but smile back to his kind nostalgic smile. he was form a small coastal city at the edge of Attica, named after the son of the centaur who taught Achilles. after i reassured him of the destination of the train he explained to me somewhat apologetically that in all his living years he had never used any means of public transportation. i agreed with him that it was propably better this way and he started telling me about how when the employers in the business he used to own were late he would tease and scold them until he realised that it was due to the unreliable schedule of the trains or the buses. now and again he would look down on his hands tracing the fibers of his hat and slightly smile to himself remembering those days, then he would look up back at me and ask me where i was going and wether i was a student and what i was studying. with that he told me about his kids, two of them, a boy and an older girl, the boy a mechanical engineer the girl psychologist, both educated in Boston USA, a city that judging from his bashful eyes he held dear, he a grandpa of four grandkids, three from the daughter and one from the son. he laughed and changed the subject telling me about how his wife specifically instructed him to take a taxi but additionally, just in case, gave him two tickets for the  train. 
he sat silently looking out the wide window to the blur of fast moving cars while i akwardly checked my cell for the call i have been waiting. he turned to me and said 'this is quite an adventure', and at that point i could have just as well melted into my seat.
he was a person and he had this whole life, a life spread out in 15 minutes, or all that could fit there. he was 72. 72. God, i am 55 years less than that. I am the entire life of my own father less than that. And i am nowhere near that excited about a train ride. Sure, because i do that nearly every day but there was this completely disarming look in his eyes. He was undeniably and unregretably content. And he was at calm. I am not complaining, i am satisfied with my amount of fascination about things, a pretty generous amount might i add, but this is just a person you don't meet every day. these are things that you cannot hear casually from a stranger in the train nowadays.
1940. propably his father or his uncles fought in the war, propably he met his wife or his children were born around the time of the university riots of '73. 
I cannot imagine how many things can fit in 72 years. literally, my mind at some point loses it.
i am not quite sure what my mind thinks of all this.

reaching our destination, as it happens our routes in life were for a very short period of time entangled, he said to me 'well, have a good night young lady' with the kindest of nods and we took our own, opposite directions.

Τρίτη 3 Ιουλίου 2012

το σπέρμα χύθηκε επάνω στο πόδι της και από τα σπλάχνα της ξεπρόβαλε το βρέφος

the smirk of a pirate
the hanging stone

he speaks of evil like he vomits gold
he sways in his throne

god awful years!

i don't sleep
i don't sleep

i cry throughout the moon's ovulation and i bleed in spit and semen
i forget my memories and i kiss whoever i want


i howl the verses, i scream through these chords and i annihilate my own existance through a stranger's poem
occasional rebel's and catatonic philosopher's muscels occupy our souls, when we have no bones, no bones.