ChiosBios #3. Life after rain...

So it is official. I am not gonna get my first permit from my island prison before mid October. We still have one more full month to go, which means I want see friends and family until after I 've spent two and a half months in Chios. Since I was advised to keep a positive attitude I can only say it could be worse. Worse being having broken my foot while patroling the barracks at 3.00 am and while it is raining cats and dogs (which almost happened last Friday). Or worse being having no governement after the coming election, which will mean our permits will be once more postponed until Allah knows when...

So, we are crossing fingers...

Autumn seems to be here for good. Having spent the three last Autumns in Barcelona, where September mostly means rain, I was kind of expecting that. It is hard though to be on a Greek island and face the cloudy skies so early in Autumn. It gets harder when you get to have half of your clothes wet, (because the Sergeant does not allow clothes hanging on the string during the day, as if they were going to dry overnight) and half of them being lost at the drycleaner's (good news, I located them this morning!). Under such conditions, the aforementioned positive attitude becomes a hard to bear task.

But it has happened before and it is bound to happen again. The rain will eventually stop, the sun will rise above the island (third sunniest place in Greece if what the locals say it true), the clothes will finally dry and then mid October will be here and I will be boarding a boat back to Athens, to meet beloved people, catch up with friends and my mom's adorable craziness, see Branford Marsalis live and forget about the army for a couple of weeks.

Come to think of it, it will be hard to come back here in November and it will be probably raining, but then again, this is not positive thinking at all...

today

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor in a big long garbled cold echoing building of dark red brick sootbleakened by more chimneys than its own, set in a grassless cinderstrewnpacked compound surrounded by smoking factory purlieus and enclosed by a ten foot steel-and-wire fence like a penitentary or a zoo, where in random erratic surges, with sparrowlike childtrebling, orphans in identical and uniform blue denium in and out of remembering but in knowing constant as the bleak walls, the bleak windows where in rain soot from the yearly adjacenting chimneys streaked like black tears

William Faulkner
Light in August

ChiosBios #2. Not having a life...

While in the army, I received the -finally- good news of getting a paper published. (Weirdly enough it made it to the cover of a well-respected journal). This would not have happened without the strenuous efforts of my good colleague Hagen and the perseverence of my boss Roderic. This work belongs mostly to them and my name is on it more or less due to an accidentally good idea. (But then again most of the good ideas are purely accidental).

The fact that I choose to post about this -very, very- late publication, to the final acceptance of which I only marginally contributed, can only be highly indicative of the lack of any interest whatsoever in my life, nowadays. Truth be told. Over the last weeks in the barracks I have a reached a point of utter boredom and idleness. Not that I am not doing stuff, quite the contrary. It's just that they mostly consist of activities that could only be described as offending to the the human brain and worst of all they leave absolutely no time for useful thoughts -let alone deeds- that all one can do is to whine about the lack of meaning.

Then again I feel like I am repeating myself over and over and that this post is only here to let me -indirectly- brag about my work (seriously, what has become of me?) and whine -once more- about the army. It's just that, of late people who actually read this blog, (yes there ARE some), were curious about the lack of posts. Not exactly the best way to make them feel I back and active, but still.

Promise to be able to talk about something more interesting next time. After all, football season is on its way.