topotales

YahSU, EfcareeSTO!  BEFORE YOU READ THIS POST you should press play on the embedded video - there isn’t anything to watch there, it’s just a soundtrack for the post. 

I’ve been in Athens on business for the last couple of days.  Shuttling between the hotel and the office, I haven’t really seen enough of Greece to make any detailed observations yet.  But it feels like a wonderful country.  

It is always an emotional relief for me to be back in the Mediterranean - people are brown (I simply feel more at home surrounded by brown people), warm, friendly and helpful.  There is a frail, floating wisp of sea-air sniffable in this city, just every now and then - enough to tempt you into taking your socks off, but not enough to drug you into lassitude.  When I stepped out of the taxi at my hotel, after chatting all the way here with the driver, he carried my bags right up to the reception desk.  Then he took my hand in both of his huge hands and said “I am Theopolous.  I welcome you to Greece and hope you enjoy each moment of your stay very much”.  And he was one hundred percent sincere.  There is plenty of noise in the street.  Everybody is smoking everywhere (except me, sigh).  The sun is shining.  

 Now the work portion of my trip is over, and I will have all day tomorrow to explore the city.  I can’t NOT see the Acropolis, and Plaka seems to be the other must-do.  Normally I’d save the touristy tidbits for after I’ve made a bunch of friends, but I’m short on time. 

 I miss my love, but there’s something inside of my soul that quietly (ok, sometimes not so quietly) pines and waits for times like this- when I am alone in an unknown place, the outsider - to come alive.  It swells and dervishes in the joy I experience simply being and observing everything in a new place, my energy standing at full attention, busy searching out and finding the subtle nuances in behavior that I love so much to analyse.  

So, I have been running this beautiful Fleet Foxes song, Mykonos, through my head over and over in anticipation of tomorrow- I can’t wait to walk all across this city holding the hands of ghosts and trying not to smoke! 

 A note about the Fleet Foxes: this one of a few bands that writes lyrics and music for the soul.  If you like Mykonos, you should definitely listen to this song too.

As usual when it comes to music, I may be a little late to the party on this.  That doesn’t mean I haven’t brought my jug of tequila and a whole lot of enthusiasm.

I discovered the new Portishead album (Third) while in the US last month.  I listened to it while driving the length of Cape Cod.  It took some getting used to.  It carried me on a journey ever inwards; an uncomfortably intimate journey.  It made me twelve years old.  It made me want to comfort Beth Gibbons.  It made me feel comforted that music could reach that deep inside of me, to see twelve year old me through a prism of all the ages I have been.  Every time I listen to it, I find something new to love.  I highly recommend it.

I’ll edit this post later to add more detail, but I didn’t think anyone who would read my blog should live another minute without hearing at least one song from the album.

I saw a couple of those missionary guys on my street this morning, and I thought to myself…

The word “mormon” is just half an m&m away from being the word ”moron”!

I do always feel just a little bit bad for those guys though, the same way I always feel just a little bit bad when I squish a mosquito.

I promise not to use the b-word in this post.  Or possibly ever again.  I have been exhausted and sick all week, but I must have been using my (big, fat) bumchies for a pillow to hit “publish” on a post that used it three times.

Using my bum(crap, another b-word)chies has been especially easy since I gained 4 kilos on a two-week trip.

Yeah.  Weird.  It’s a total mystery how that happened.

…I’m still a little groggy, but at least this time I picked a funny word.

I really needed to get that off my chest.

If I could upload some music here, you’d get something veeeery nostalgic.

So…

TEN (REAL) REASONS QUITTING SMOKING IS FUCKING AWESOME

1. I have about double or more the energy I had before.  No shit.  I wake up in the morning and I wonder what I’ll do with all the energy.  This blog, for example, is a direct result of that energy.  Not to mention a very scary new found want to learn how to sew.  I’ve been weighing sewing machine options- Singer vs. Toyota.  Okay, maybe even too much energy.
2. I’ve already saved 5 Euros per day, minimum, for around €245 total.  That’s a new Ipod.  Or five tanks of gas (around 5,000 km).  Or a couple of round-trip tickets almost anywhere in Europe.
3. My dog doesn’t smell like smoke.  She still smells like dog, … but not like smoke.  I always felt guilty having a smokey dog.
   
4. Next time I climb a long route, that’s a few less grams to carry.  Next time I do anything, actually.
5. I won’t feel like as big of a jerk around the Indian half of the family.  I’ll still feel like the tattooed unmarried 30+ year old.  But at least I won’t have to get stuck on the terrace with all the uncles and embarrass the aunties with my total disregard for ladylike behavior.  Okay, actually I’m pretty sure that will all still happen.  But at least I won’t be SMOKING when it happens.  That should count for some points.
   
6. When I go to a restaurant, I can sit any fucking where I want!
7. Now when people are all “it’s because you’re a smoker, when you quit you’ll be able to taste so much more, smell so much more, blah blah!”, I can be all “no, I just naturally like shitty wine and buttloads of salt in my food, thank you very much, fuck off”.
8. No worry anymore about all the nasty ashtrays and butts and stinky crap laying around my house when I have people over.
9. No running out of the party to shiver and miss all the good stuff.
10. Uh… not worrying about a long slow lung cancer death.  Duh.
    

Off to save myself from toe cancer next!

ps.  I actually do recommend the Allen Carr book.  Just for the impetus!  I quit, and I’ve smoked my entire adult life.  It’s worth a shot.

I used to have this girlfriend.  She was one of the most strangely OCD people I ever lived with.  For example.  It always took her an extra ten minutes to put on her socks because she had to make sure they were going on the correct feet.  She’d hold one up and turn it and poke at it until she could figure out from the big-toe poof (yes, that is a technical term) which foot it belonged upon.  I’m not really sure what the toe-poof criteria were for brand new socks, but I’m sure they were complicated.  Once she was satisfied she had the correct sock-foot match she’d scrunch the sock up completely into a little ball with just the big-toe poof sticking out, then slowly, … veeery slooowly … roll it up her foot and around and over her ankle.  It had to fit perfectly or the whole process was restarted.  Now, …I’m not saying I don’t have my neuroses. I’m just saying that this was one of about six milliongoddamned neuroses of hers, alone.  Add that number of neuroses to my six trillion or so  neuroses and it’s not any kind of mystery why the relationship didn’t take.  That, and the cows.

The cows?  You ask.  Indeed.  The cow fight I am about to describe ranks in my top ten of longest and most vicious relationship-benders I’ve ever had.  Okay, it’s probably also in the top ten for overall weirdness.

I have no idea how this originally came up in conversation, but it did.  At some point Jen remembered that when she was young she went on a field trip with her class.  All girls, Catholic school class.  Second or third grade.  On that field trip, she was terrorized and warped for life by the sight of a “cow with a hole in it, and the hole had a plastic window so you could look inside of its stomach”.  Now you find the real tipping point at which our neuroses met head to head.  This was something so beyond my concept of “field trip for small children” that I had to laugh.  As a matter of fact, it was also beyond my concept of - concepts, period.  “Sorry, Jen, but if a teacher - a CATHOLIC teacher - took small children - A BUNCH OF LITTLE GIRLS - on a field trip, WHY would it be one so obviously tailored to send them home crying and terrified, for the rest of their lives, from having looked inside of a LIVE COW with a PLASTIC WINDOW?  NOT TO MENTION… who the FUCK would put a WINDOW on a LIVE COW?”

[In retrospect, this is obviously the perfect Catholic field trip.  Jen just probably forgot the bit that involved God's wrath and Smiting and all the other stuff that leads up to one having a plastic window implanted into their belly by more powerful beings.]

Anyway, so here we have: 1. Jen: I am scarred for life so I can be as neurotic a bitch as I like and 2. Taz: yeah, you’re totally fucked up, bitch go put on your socks.  Needless to say, neither of us bothered to investigate this.  We just talked and fought and cried - yes, cried! about the fucking plastic window cow for - no, not days… no, not weeks… MONTHS!  It’s not like this was the 80’s.  It was 2001.  We had Google (just type “cow with a hole in it”, you’ll see).  We were just too right to need it.

During one blast-it, all-out crying and screaming fight, I did finally break down call the outdoor zoo where the (still alleged) fieldtrip went.  To my surprise, not only is it the case that cows with plastic windows to their stomaches exist, but -INDEED- this is considered a fine and educational thing to show small children on a field trip.

1.  You may want to encourage your children’s teachers to not take them to see terrifying displays of animal abuse on field trips.  That is, in case you’re not Catholic and didn’t know that was happening.

2.  Google won’t save your relationship, anyway, if a fistulated cow is in the mix.

3.  I was looking at the above picture of Scapi and the (happy, unfistulated) cows in Pfalz (Germany, where the scientists don’t have to poke holes in you to figure shit out) and thinking about it…

I’m sure I’ll think of more reasons I had to tell this story on the interweb, and edit later.

p.s. I was going to post a picture of a fistulated cow up here.  But I won’t.  Because there are a disturbing amount of fistulated cow pictures already smeared across the web - I mean,  loads and loads of pictures of kids with their hands stuck inside plastic windows in the sides of cows.  There are also loads of sites talking about how educational this is and how it doesn’t harm the cow in any way (sure buddy, let’s put a holey pvc window in your belly button, stick our fingers in a few times per day to see how digested your food is, and see how great you feel about it!), etc etc.  If these guys were as smart as they say, they’d find a better way to examine half-digested grass.

I can’t stand to see animals subjected to bullshit like this - especially since most of the subjecting is not being done by good-guy vets, it’s being done by cow-food and cow-hormone researcher vets working for big companies to see if they can make more money by changing cow diets.  /end rant, and apologies.  At least I didn’t hotlink you to the PETA website.

So, last night Paolo told me that this is a “perfect visual representation” of what goes on in my brain.

(Note: The video runs about 5 minutes, which is coincidentally about 5 minutes longer than it takes for my thoughts to go from brain to mouth.  But this is hilarious even if you don’t care about the strange happenings in my brain.)

So yeah, apparently I’m powered by little blue claymen (why isn’t that a word if we can use snowmen?) who make me laugh so hard I just peed a little in my pants (yeah, I know, an alarmingly frequent occurrence).

What I love about these videos (oh yes, there are PLURAL!) is that they are all so obviously made in this dude’s basement or garage where the “spare” “stuff” lives.  And after you wonder where his wife is and realize that’s a real fucking stupid question if he’s talking to himself and making claymation videos all day, then, … THEN, you have to start wondering … many things … many, many things.  Especially about sanity, and drugs, and wormholes, and portals to other dimensions, and sanity.  At least I do.  But then again, I’m powered by blue men and pee my pants frequently.

I’m so very tired!  And for absolutely no reason, other than I’m so excited to have this space.  And I’m spending hours and hours exploring, trying to figure out how to do this and that.  And my eyeballs are starting to feel like two glowing peeholes in snow.  This whole website-setting-upper expedition has taught me an important thing, and that is: I’m ignorant, ignorant, ignorant about compooters.  As a matter of fact, I find it alarming how little I know about web design, code, and - on a very basic level - how the internet functions!   … And to think about the great edumacation my parents have been going on about.

So I’ve been trying to learn by trolling around through some amazing blog sites.  But the only tangible outcome has been that I’ve gotten myself worked up into a state of intimidation where the THOUGHT of posting ANYTHING feels something like rolling a pea-sized effigy of my soul into a garbage crusher and waiting to see what happens.

Sheesh.  I think of the first blog I ever read, Jade-Leaves, and how it made me feel - I sat and read the whole website through in one weekend.  And I made and lost a friend.  It wasn’t until I read all the way through that I realized she wasn’t even there.  I had befriended a ghost.  And I think ultimately I would love to create a space like that- I mean, a space where I can be close to other people now and later.  And, like getting close to anybody in realspace, that means the scary part is being as open and honest as possible.

I wonder how many times I’ll edit this post… I can’t seem to keep my paws out of the first couple of ’sends’ yet.