Comics that make you think (thoughts you've already had)

So the other day I was reading this comic (part 1, part 2), hardly believing how bigoted and offensive it was. I’m still not entirely sure it’s actually for real. I learned a couple of interesting things about the US – the US is so weird that it could easily be another planet. For example, I discovered NAMBLA (North American Man Boy Love Association). I couldn’t help scratching my head as I looked it up in Wikipedia. With the way the world – and the US in particular – has gone hysterical over paedophilia and child pornography how can a group like that be legal?

Of course then I started thinking that Neo-Nazi groups, like Golden Dawn in Greece, are legal (they even take part in the elections) and all sorts of other peculiar groups are legal too. And it is a person’s right to say and believe whatever they feel like. I certainly wouldn’t trust the state to tell me what sort of groups can or can’t exist. Neither would I trust the state to tell what books I can or can’t read. Of course the state seems more interested in sex than subversive political ideas when it comes to censoring books. As if the Story of O is somehow more dangerous than The Anarchist’s Cookbook, or any of those truly dangerous books written by islamist extremists.

If a bunch of middle-aged guys want to sit around talking about how great it would be to have sex with pre-pubescent boys, it’s their right. Just like anyone can write racist leaflets and hand them out or write extremely sadistic and demeaning pornographic novels. We don’t have to agree, to defend their right to be perverts/racists/religious extremists. Everybody knows that, I’m assuming.

Only thing is that we shouldn’t neglect the rights of the voiceless majority. Eight-year old boys have the right not to be assaulted by older men. Dutch film-makers have the right not to be shot by islamist extremists.

Back to books, because I believe the world can never have too many books and a person can never read too many (even though it’s obvious that it would be better to spend your time reading Richard Sennett than a Harlequin novel). I’m emphatically, categorically, absolutely against banning any sort of book, however badly written, perverted, bigoted, subversive or dangerous it might be. However the unfortunate truth is that there are people out there who aren’t able to properly judge what books they should or shouldn’t waste their time on. There also are people who will read a fanatical propagandistic book urging them to kill “infidels” and instead of shaking their head and throwing the book away, will believe it and follow the author’s orders.

What can anyone do about that? It’s the author’s right to publish his books and the bookshop’s/library’s right to stock them. Grudgingly I will confess that giving potential readers an “ability to think and judge for yourself” test before letting them run loose in the bookshop/library is a tad patronizing.

How about we put warnings on books? Like cigarette packets have these big black warnings that say “smoking kills” and other even more explicit and disgusting things. We can have warnings on books proclaiming “reading this book might kill brain-cells” or “this book could turn you into a dangerous terrorist” or “none of the facts contained in this book are in fact true. Read at your own peril!” How about the warnings we have on cds that say “Parental advisory necessary, contains offensive lyrics”? Why cds and not books? “Parental advisory necessary, contains bad grammar and syntax”, “this book contains ideas and/or situations that many will find offensive”.

Do you think my idea might catch on?

Some gratuitous whining

Lately I’ve been feeling more and more miserable. After a while you stop trying and just start wallowing in your own self-pity. I am prone to bouts of unreasonable depression by nature. Sometimes however, I actually have valid reasons.

I never was all that keen on my job to begin with, but for months and months now I have begun to hate getting up in the mornings. And once there, I count down the hours till I can leave. For starters, its soul destroying being an architect and being forced to work as a mindless designer. If I wanted an unchallenging job where there’s no need to think or take initiative, I wouldn’t have spend 7 years studying architecture. Fortunately it’s not all bad. I am learning stuff. Or at least I did in the beginning. Now I think I’ve learnt all I will in this job. The upside of my workdays is when I have to deal with civil engineers and mechanical engineers over the phone. It certainly breaks the monotony, even when they drive me up the wall.
And what with the economic crisis – which in Greece is mostly in people’s minds so far – we don’t have much work. My main project – where I had lots of fun having disagreements and misunderstandings with the civil and mechanical engineers – has been put on the shelf by the clients. I’m so bored that when the other day my boss asked me to come up with a couple of ideas for glass doors with frosting, for the bathroom doors of a rich client, I came up with 32 ideas and could have easily reached 100.
Possibly the worst thing of my job however must be the atmosphere. Unfortunately I never got on with my co-workers (all women). I tried in the beginning, but we’re just so different that they think I’m weird and I think they’re dull and bitchy. So we barely talk.
Since the summer it’s got worse, everyone’s on edge. The boss has been edgy and nervous and the other girls go around with long faces. They make it painfully obvious they don’t enjoy their job either. Especially the mothers who go on and on about how they’d rather be at home with their kids. I’d rather they’d be at home with their kids too!

I have completed two years at this job. It’s a good time to look for a new one. Only Christmas is coming. It’s singularly stupid to leave a job before Christmas and miss out on the present. I should start seriously looking from January. However this stupid crisis is messing up my plans. Not many people are hiring lately. I have two out of work friends (one architect and one civil engineer) who have been looking for jobs since September with no luck. The situation is rather depressing.

And to make things so many times worse the art gallery my sister works for is going to close down in two months. The owner has had enough and is closing it. It’s much more than the crisis. For a year now he’s been talking about moving or closing.

The truth is the gallery is located in what has recently become one of the worst areas of Athens. It’s noisy and dirty and overrun with immigrants, junkies, prostitutes and the homeless. The gallery is opposite the central soup kitchen for the homeless. On the corner of the road giant groups of Pakistanis are always congregated. And walking down the street you frequently come across people shooting up. Do junkies shoot heroin in busy streets in plain in view in every city of the world or is it an Athenian thing? People are knifed in the area (and Athens has a very low crime rate compared with London). Every now and then the police show up and aggressively make the junkies move on. To where? I wonder. Or they raid the whorehouses looking for African prostitutes without licenses.
I remember taking a friend for a walk round the area a couple of years ago. He was overjoyed. “This is just like I remember New York being,” he said. And then he dragged me into Pakistani video clubs and Chinese junk shops before we sat down to eat and a run down Indian place, where we were the only Greeks in the place, and I the only woman. The food was not nearly as good as Brick Lane in London, and the other men in the place wouldn’t stop staring at me. Obviously we paid special “greek” prices and it ended up coming to the same as an ordinary taverna would have. Of course that wasn’t the biggest let down of the evening. That would have been the fact that it was supposedly a date of sorts. Nothing came of it, except me feeling like a fool barking up a wrong tree. A couple of years later the guy confessed he was a gay in denial. Trust my luck!

Back to my main train of thought: I’m depressed. I don’t like my job. I hate surviving on minimum wage. My sister (and flat-mate) is losing her job. I still don’t have a boyfriend. And I still am overweight.

Flying Carpets and Marxist Rock and Roll

Yesterday we finally got ourselves a carpet! Marble floors are wonderful, but they're also cold, which is great for the summer, but not so great for the winter. And I do believe that winter is finally, finally, coming to Athens.
We went to Plaka. Plaka is a prime touristical spot in Athens, yet even Greeks shop there occasionally. And of course if you're Greek they don't try to overcharge as much! What's more our lovely new apartment is walking distance from Plaka. (Score one hundred to Koukaki over Glyfada - where we used to live). Also the shops in Plaka and Monastiraki are the only ones to open on Sunday, and with our different work schedules, Sunday is the only day we both have off.
We got ourselves a lovely kilim. We would have rather got a pile rug, but didn't have the money. So we compromised with a kilim (ours is way better than the example I'm linking). They are woven woolen rugs, coarser and thinner than pile rugs, but also much lighter and easier to store. They're supposed to be very long lasting. Theoretically our kids could inherit it!
Our living room is looking so much better and colourful with our new rug. Now we need curtains, a throw for the sofa and a lamp (which I'm going to make).

Besides getting a carpet, and cooking,I also went to the theatre on Sunday. We saw Rock and Roll by Tom Stoppard.

I love Stoppard. My sister went to a British school in Athens and for her A levels she did Stoppard's Arcadia. Over those summer holidays I stole her book and read it on the sandy beaches of Crete. I loved it. It was so smart and complex. There was maths (which I was very keen on in school) and landscape gardening (for which I have a secret unrequited love for) and poetry (Byron to be exact). All that in a play that was funny and sexy as well. Years later the National Theatre of Northern Greece put on the play in Thessaloniki while I was studying there. I persuaded friends to go, and I was blown away once more. A couple of days earlier I had seen The Serpent's Kiss for the second time. The film, just like the play, is also about landscape gardening and poetry. They both deal with classicism vs romanticism and the making of worlds and environments to suit our whims.
Rock and Roll is not as good or as tight as Arcadia. I enjoyed it non-the-less. It's themes are rock music, revolution and socialism/marxism. Out of the two main heroes, one is an unrepentant member of the communist party and a professor in Cambridge and the other is a Czech former student of his who is unrepentantly in love with Rock and Roll. The story evolves over a time period from 1968 to 1990, moving back and forward between Prague and Cambridge. (However I haven't had enough time to think about it yet to write a propet review yet. Also it's past my bedtime. So I'll just have to return and add to this post.)

Another list

It's been a while. I've feel feeling so listless, sad and tired lately that I can barely find the energy to answer friends' letters or pick up the phone to call friends or family, let alone update my blog. Thank god I don't live alone, but with my sister. Having her around being all normal and energetic, bullying me into pulling my weight around the house and getting a thing or two done, stops me from slipping into the sort of abyss of wallowing, aimlessly surfing the web and turning into a pathetic slob that I did for a period in Paris. I'm patiently waiting for when I'll snap out of it.

Enough of that. I sort of promised myself I'd keep the boring whining to a minimum in this blog on the off-chance that someone might actually be following it. Trust me, up capable of becoming very boring and whiny.

A propos of nothing I thought I'd list some of my favourite sites. Most of them are hugely famous and well-known, but what the hell...

1. youtube - such an amazingly cool site. Lately I have spent more hours than I care to count watching old episodes of Never Mind the Buzzcocks, one of my all time favourite british tv shows.

2.wikipedia - wonderful, wonderful site, especially for people like me who are always full of questions and can't be bothered to open an encyclopedia (I don't even own an encyclopedia). It's amazing what people can do if they just organise themselves and put their minds to it.

3. urban dictionary - not as great, or as well layed out, as wikipedia but a very fun and informative site non-the-less. I'm so ignorant of modern slang or internet jargon that without urban dictionary I'd be lost.

4. last fm - this site is a godsend for people like me who love music but have particular tastes, not enough money to buy all the records I'd like to, and live in a country with awful radio stations.

5.flickr - a cool site for putting photos online. I don't really use it for anything more than posting my own photos and checking out my friends' photos, however.

6. skyehawke - at present my favourite fanfiction site. It archives consistently good quality stuff, because I no longer have to time to wade through bad grammar and cliched, emo storylines.

7. the hex files - my second favourite fanfiction site. It also archives good quality fics, plus it let me become a member to post my own humble scribblings.

8. lifoland - the website of one of the two most popular free press newspapers in Athens. It's an easy, simple way to find out what's on in Athens, what freebies are on offer, what new places are hip etc.

9. athens voice - the website of the other most popular free press Athenian newspaper. As a newspaper I actually prefer Athens Voice to Lifo, it's website however isn't as good.

10. the technical chamber of Greece - as an architect I'm a member and it's nice to keep up with what is being organised, especially seminars and conventions. Mostly though, I use it to search the library catalogue so I can go to the library with a prepared list. (I linked to english page which doesn't contain much compared with greek page.)

Apart from these sites there are a number of online magazines and blogs I follow, but this is enough for now. I might list those at a later date.

I think I might need a new job

I've been feeling very listless lately. I'm still going through one of my tired and depressed phases and I don't know how long it'll take me to pull myself out of this slump. It doesn't help that I'm terminally broke and have begun to pretty much hate my job. I often daydream of quitting, but then remember my rent and bills. I like my new flat far too much to have to give it up.
I have begun however to look for something else. I'm even considering taking a break from "architecture" (if you can seriously consider what I now do architecture) and doing something else for a year or so. Something else paying obviously. Now if I could just find that something else...

So, if any one is lurking around my sorry journal and knows of any job opportunities in Athens, Greece for me, would they please leave a comment?

To help them out:
1. I speak three languages - Greek, English and French. (I have done translation and interpreting work in the past)
2. I'm fairly adept with a computer and know AutoCad and Photoshop.
3. I'm good at drawing, designing, lay-outs, hand crafts, model making, photography, storytelling.
4. I have a degree in Architecture and a post-graduate in Urbanism.

How to amuse yourself with no money

So I'm broke, and have been since I returned from my summer holidays at the end of August. As soon as I get my paycheck it disappears on the rent, bills, the supermarket, paying back people I owe and god knows what else, and a couple of days later I'm left once again with 20 euros in my pocket to last for two weeks.
But I've been lucky. September and October were good months to be broke. Free concerts and parties wherever you look. And when worst comes to worst I have wonderful friends who will buy me drinks for the pleasure of my company.
Who have I seen for free lately?


1. Sunday 21st of September at Trova Bar - Maraveyas Illegal
2. Sunday 28th of September at Thiseio - Gad
3. Sunday 28th of September at Thiseio - Cyanna
4. Sunday 28th of September at Thiseio - Matisse
5. Fraiday 3rd of October at Art House - Victory Collapse
6. Sunday 5th of October at Art House - Abbie Gale
7. Saturday 4th of October at Thiseio - David Fonseca
8. Sunday 5th of October at Kallimarmaro Stadium - C:Real
9. Sunday 5th of October at Kallimarmaro Stadium - Gabriella Cilmi
10. Sunday 5th of October at Kallimarmaro Stadium - Kaiser Chiefs
11. Sunday 5th of October at Kallimarmaro Stadium - REM
12. Friday 10th of October at Bios - Cast-a-Blast
13. Saturday 11th of October at Bios - Monika
14. Saturday 11th of October at Bios - Matt Elliot