Middle Ages

They say one way to judge a society is by the way its people treat animals. I say this is probably too much to expect from modern, western "civilized" states. It would suffice to take a look at how the establishment dictates the treatment of human beings.

Decades of prosperity, "progress" and "development" seem to go down the drain when it comes to question terms like solidarity against the all-consuming human drive for profit. We have formed our societies thinking -or assuming- that it was going to be for the benefit of all. That the unlucky could count on the help of the luckier. That those who are deprived of the most valuable could expect some relief from the ones that have everything. I grew up -or at least I thought I did- in one such society. Contrary to what some people think, I have always been proud to be paying taxes as I considered myself to be contributing to a common fund that would end up giving my parents a hard-earned pension, provide my grandparents with decent health care or come to the aim of a friend who has been seriously injured. This is our greatest achievement. It is the greatest sign of "progress" or "development".

It was, because it turns out it no longer is.
According to our "current needs" and in face of the "fear" of financial failure, the Greek State has decided to cut in half the amount of welfare aid towards handicapped people. Moreover, a "rationalized contribution" strategy demands that they handicapped over the age of 55 pay the full amount for prosthetic limbs. The official excuse is that people were taking advantage of the health care system with excessive demand and overcharged products . At the same time, the same Greek State is trying to appease the "markets" who are demanding a 15% interest rate in order to lend us money (probably not quite as excessive as the demands of the handicapped) and is grateful to the efficient -but not elected- European Union bureaucrats for providing the "know-how" to incompetent -but elected- Greek ministers in order to achieve cuts in expenses.

I am falling short of being grateful to these men for pretending to reduce my country's debt by sending its "crippled" to crawl on the streets. I have the right to decide where my taxes go and I demand my money go to the aid of my fellow citizens before they end up paying the interest of a bank loan. In any other case I should, I must refuse to pay them.
Unlike animals or life-or-death in the middle ages, we have structured our societies on the basis of solidarity, so that we all have a chance to feel useful and complete, so that we are all given the right of creativity and hence we can prosper as a whole. They should not and cannot take this away from us for it will be our greatest defeat.

the crisis and why one should care

It's as simple as that. The more you care about the current economical crisis, the more you get entangled in something that is beyond the grasp of the great majority of the people, even well educated ones. Over the last year, I have been trying to understand the basics of the global financial system through reading of newspapers, analyses, economists' blogs, by watching (good and bad) documentaries and talks on TV. But there was just too many SWAPs, too many derivatives and too many interests (literally speaking) for a poor bioinformatician to handle. I ended up wasting a great amount of my time without really getting a more elaborate idea than the one I had in the beginning: "There is something systematically wrong in this system".

I soon reached the conclusion that one should not really care about it. Let's face it. Life is short and one cannot expect but to pursue only a small part of his dreams over its course, the amount of which will be greatly reduced if he were to spend his time trying to understand how others pursue their own. My dreams have to do with understanding the way nature works, the particularities of the human soul expressed through literature and music, the extent of human ingenuity through football tactics. Other people's dreams have to do with how to become rich at the expense of others. It is a minor dream chosen by petty people. I said, let them have it their way.

The problem is that THEY are not letting me have it MY way.
Over the last week, these petty people, the little men (and women) in Brussels, Strasbourg and whichever place it is that their insignificances choose to hold their meetings, have been trying to "convince" the greek political parties (and hence the Greek citizens) to reach a consensus otherwise they will not carry on with the financial "aid" towards our country. The consensus here being simply the opinion the two greatest parties have on the memorandum that the greek government has signed with the IMF/EU/ECB "troika". It is, in fact, a common extortion of the worst kind. They are not urging the political forces of the country to reach an agreement. They simply demand that they all accept the -already signed- terms of the treaty as being the only way to go. Yes, we are back at the times of "total solutions". "Arbeit machts frei" is soon to follow.

Under these circumstances, carrying on with one's own business simply is not an option anymore. Even if for the majority this looks like no great a change, we are facing a challenge on which we cannot turn our backs. Democracy is at stake, the whole tradition of the Enlightenment, on which our culture has based its foundations is in danger. Lending money in a way that would have made Shylock blush is one thing. Making sure that a pay back will be done in a way that would ask for ever greater loans, thus holding a whole generation as financial hostages is another thing. But to demand that everybody says "Yes, we love the way you are screwing us up" is a whole different one.

Going beyond just the end of democracy, it is the end of reason.

the man who ran a lot

When I was a little boy, two things were very common on Saturday nights. One, my parents, still quite young and too tired of staying in the whole week, wanted to go out. Two, the Greek TV, still in its innocent youth was overwhelmed with old Greek comedy films, most of them shot during the 50s and 60s. The two combined meant that I had to spent a great number of my childhood's Saturday evenings watching Greek comedies at my grandparents place in the -then- quiet and picturesque neighborhood of Gazi.

There was one more thing. Back then, I could not stand Greek films. Oddly enough for a child at my age (these evenings were more frequent at the age of 5 to 10), I had the greatest distaste for these naive -I then thought- productions that could simply not compare to the historical Hollywood feature films like "Spartacus" or "Lawrence of Arabia" that were my father's favourites. Even more strangely, I could not stand colour. I vividly remember having a strong preference for black and white films, which to my eyes appeared more original, as I found it hard to accept that technicolored, cinecitta-like, musical extravaganzas had anything to do with Greece in the 60s. To my childish eyes -and as it now seems to the eyes of most people-, Greece in the 50s and the 60s was a black and white place, poor but romantic, grey and nostalgic.

Among those black and white films, there was only one kind I really LIKED to watch (to the relief of my grandparents). Those starring Thanassis Veggos. Aka our "good man". Aka "the man who used to run a lot". Truly the most talented Greek comedian of all time, undoubtedly the most innovative, simply the most beloved actor in the (short and moderate) history of Greek cinema. There was that time, I still remember, when Veggos was on, that everything stopped. At the age of 7, I could not get all his lines and I was puzzled by some of his references to anti-military themes, but there was something in this man's voice, his constant running up and down, his overall struggling that to me was -subconsciously- identified with the Greek soul.

To my childish eyes, THAT was Greece in the 60s. A guy in black and white, always in a working-class neighborhood, obviously uneducated but curiously wise, working three or four jobs to get by. A guy who never gets rich, never gets the pretty girl, never gets to be famous. Yet a guy with a smile that cannot be beaten, a laugh that cannot be silenced, a face impossible to be forgotten.

The "man who ran a lot" reached the finish line last Tuesday. Given that our Greece today is starting to resemble that black and white country his films took place in, there is a growing demand that we live up to his effort.
After all, life is a relay race.

Strike Three - (you 're out...)

This has been the third great general strike since last May. Back then, it all seemed dismal already. Today, a mere 7 months and two more strikes later it looks as if there is no going back.

The most recent (but not the last) of a series of austerity bills hit the ministry desks last night with one more deputy of the ruling "socialists" exlcuding himself from the vote. It was the least he could do not to go down in history as one of those who once gave in to the demands of a foreign, not elected authority that asks for the lowest average income in the EU to be cut down by 10% to 40% and in some cases 60%. Which roughly translates to 10%-40% less spending, 10%-40% less holiday, 10%-40% less education, 10%-40% less health. And 10%-40% more profit for those who used to pay those "surpluss" wages of 700 Euros, the bankers, the CEOs and the company owners who will pay ~15% less taxes this year as a reward for having put up with such overwhelming earnings on behalf of the "lazy" workers of this country.

These workers, will now have to pay the price for having lived on the benefit of "development" for so long. Only this "development" meant a shift of the balance to the bottom. After all this "development" and "expansion" one out of five Greeks lives at the edge of poverty. After all this "growth" you have half a million Greeks unable to visit a doctor. And you see people fighting on the streets for who gets to be the first to look for food in the trash can.

But it was growth for some all right. It was growth for the shareholders who saw their taxes being cut down from 40% to 22% on average over the course of the last 20 years. It was development for the banks who could privatize profits and nationalize debts. It was expansion for those who will now buy this country's forests, coal mines, buses and trains for scrap.
In Europe like in the US the model prevails over the facts. As long as there is "growth" and "development" it's business as usual for those who have their appointed prime ministers cutting the deals. The rest can enjoy poverty.

---

Update: All of the above, better said -in Greek- here

let it spread*!

* Yield spread: The difference between the quoted rates of return on two different investments, usually of different credit quality.

Greeks learned what the "yield spread" (or simply "spread") is only recently. The Portuguese, the Spaniards and many more are soon to find out themselves. In simple words it represents a rate at which a government may borrow from other financial entities. Low spreads mean a country is trustworthy and thus can sell its bonds easily. High spreads reflect a generalized doubt on the government's ability to pay back, therefore borrowing becomes more difficult. At usury rates, borrowing becomes impossible and the country goes bankrupt.

Over the last few months the yield spread of the 10-year Greek government bond rose from about 2.5% (last November) to a prohibiting 8.5%, right before Greece was forced to submit to the IMF and to a record high of 10.4% last Wednesday while the Greek MPs were discussing the ratification of the IMF memorandum and with the house of Parliament being sieged by an uncontrolled mass of demonstrators.

As the value of the yield spread is said to reflect the fiscal reliability of the state economy, I find it hard to understand the degree to which my country's credibility has improved within the last five days. The spread dropped by 50% within thirty minutes yesterday morning and it lies now only marginally (and suspiciously) below 5%, which equals the rate at which Greece is to borrow from the IMF and the EU. As from yesterday, everything seems like business as usual for the "markets". Yield spreads are dropping, the Greek Stock Market marking a rise of almost 9% on Monday and news throughout the media of mass deception talking about "a reversal of the climate", "a new hope" and "the light at the end of the tunnel".

All over Europe, people stand amazed with the clarity and consistency with which the "markets" are behaving. Two days ago, the EU announced a "rescue plan" of 750 billion Euro thus openly admitting for the first time that a number of states -and not only the lazy Greeks- are at the verge of fiscal collapse. To this grave danger, the thoughtful "markets" immediately responded by reducing interest rates and with stocks rising all over the continent. Well aren't they nice?

Well, in Greece in particular, there are a couple of things that happened in the meanwhile. These were the -unprecedented- signing of a treaty that is granting to an outside independent organization (the IMF) the right to decide on critical matters of the daily life of citizens of a member state. These were the complete abolishment of working rights, these were the reduction of the lowest salaries in the EU with a simultaneous rise in taxation. These were all "necessary", "unavoidable", "inescapable" sacrifices the people had to undergo in order to convince some German Bank to lend them money with less than 5% interest.

There are of course the skeptics. The ones who look at the salary reductions, the "reformation" of work rights, pensions being cut down even for the poorest and see "a tunnel at the end of the tunnel". Those who take to the streets because they fear they will soon be living on them, who try to sack the Parliament before it is completely run down by un-elected "loan sharks", who refuse to pay the bill for a country whose 60% rise in GDP over the last decade has gone anywhere else but in their pockets.

And this is what is happening in Greece today, in Portugal and Spain tomorrow and soon to a country near you.

a paso de cangrejo...

...is spanish for "at a crab's pace" or better said "walking like a crab". One needs not be an experienced seaman to grasp the meaning of this expression. It is employed -sometimes at excessive rates- to mock someone's procrastination when, instead of taking a leap forward, he prefers to beat around the bush, walking sideways, towards his scope, sometime even backwards away from it.

In my case, this might be perceived somehow reciprocally. Meaning that instead of myself I find that it is a number of goals I have set appear to be walking away from me. Even worse, in some cases, they tend to ostentatiously pass me by, at their crablike pace, walking sideways as they drift away. Over the last weeks I find the whole essence of time or actually its scantness to have reached some sort of
limit that is beyond me. Desperately as I try to divide my week's efforts among urgent duties, forgotten projects, self-improving assignments I always appear to be running against the clock. At the same time the simplest task of maintaining a marginal social life is all the more being reduced to e-mailing, facebook chatting and talking on the phone. Worse than that, I seem to be not getting any work done.

It might be that I am asking too much from myself (which is not very probable, given that I have more than three days off-work every week) or it might be that I am so tempted by the lack of a tight working schedule that I tend to slack off most of the time (much more likely although I remember far more constructive periods in terms of doing nothing). The fact is that a couple of papers remaining unpublished, another couple of projects remaining un-started, a series of meetings being postponed, combined with a trumpet rusting un-blown, a couple of stories undone and with the end of semester approaching dangerously, I find myself unable to fake the crab's pace anymore. I might rather picture me in the uncomfortable position of the one in the photo, squeezed inside a glass tube and so close to an inevitable stalemate.

three wild alley cats

For three whole years I have been walking late and alone through the streets of el Raval in Barcelona. I 've wandered in the alleys of the rumorous Condesa district in Mexico City. Once I got lost in the Bronx past midnight and on two occasions I had to go through some of the rough parts of South East London on my way home. But it was fate that I was to get mugged in downtown Athens, just a few blocks away from the place my father grew up.

It was probably fate because it was one of those nights when nothing works out as planned. First we failed to locate the place of the party we had initially set out for. Then, after ending up in Gazi, we chose a relatively dark alley to park far from the busy, noisy streets. And finally, we made for the bar the wrong direction, that is through the end of the alley instead of choosing a wider, busier street with better lighting. There at the end of the alley, three kids were waiting for us.

I 've witnessed similar situations before, not exactly the same, but cases where one needs to come in the defense of his own self. In cases like those there is one thing that always happens no matter how experienced one is, and that is you always do the wrong thing. Yesterday, I simply tried to run away from those three wild alley cats. Naturally I soon found myself lying on my stomach, while two of the kids were kicking my arm while pulling the stripe of my handbag. I came to my senses, calmed down and was allowed back on my feet only to see my friend Giorgos handing all his money to the senior of our attackers who was at the moment holding a knife gently pressed against my friend's abdomen.

I stood there, trying to grasp what was going on while the three kids (because they were just that, three kids with one -or at least one- knives) turned their backs at us, leaving us in the middle of a desert street. I felt less scared than angry, much more furious than afraid and was more eager of getting even than getting away. I started thinking of all the things I had done wrong. Wrong choice of street, wrong choice of attitude, I thought that I should have taken a different street or turned back the moment I saw them. As I looked around for a witness, some aid or consolation I caught a glimpse of a guy at the other end of the street, a guy who as soon as he caught sight of me watching him turned around and fled. Then I realized that there was no way we would have got away with it.

What had been done was done. We checked ourselves for wounds and scratches. As I found my thigh a bit less bruised than my pride and Giorgos felt his heart much lighter than his pocket, we saw that our casualties were not substantial enough to rob us of our first night out together since New Year's. I reached for a fifty Euro note at the bottom of my pocket and we decided to convert it to drinks as soon as possible. Thus we headed for the closest bar and had what must have been our most deserved drinks ever. At the end of the night each of us would go home with one more adventure to talk about.

released-recaptured

Outside there is a nasty storm going on. I am asleep because of the freaking wind blasting against my window the whole of last night and trying to set up my new netbook while going through some bioinformatics papers with Brad Mehldau keeping me company. Tomorrow I will be leaving for Crete for the first class of my new job appointment. In brief, a lot of things have changed since the last post some weeks ago.

The rainbow seen from outside the window of my new flat is more than three weeks old. Which says a thing or two for how busy I 've been over this period. A new job that needed all the necessary preparations (mostly of psychological and bureaucratical nature), some old projects still pending and a lot of background household life, the thing I dare to admit, enjoy the most.

It seems thus that my wish came true and so soon after getting over with the ironic joke that the military service really is, I am back on track again, more active than ever (or perhaps as active as I 'd like to be), ready for a new start.

Released from the army - Recaptured by life. Lets see if I can stand the captivitiy

just breathe...

...or so it seems. Like you are just breathing.

Then you turn to look back and realize that six months have passed within a single breath. You feel like everything travels at the speed of light, while you are sitting still in the middle of a plain, left in ruins by a storm that grows distant. You find yourself banished, deserted in a world where all which makes sense belong to others, where time is harvested by everyone else except you. You are stranded in the place you really belong. This is your exile. And you just breathe. Life is what takes place in your absence.

You smell the air, trying to follow the path of your own breath. Desperately trying to comprehend the turning of the wind, to grasp what -you think- lies obscure and hidden, absurd in essence, only relatively pragmatic. You realize the passing of time with a sudden blow. You force yourself out of a comfortable limbo. This melody, played backwards, is the only thing real.
You ought to sing along.

"See the path cut by the moon...
for you to walk on...
See the waves on distant shores...
Awaiting your arrival."

things to appreciate while in the army - Breaking dawn

There is a number of responsibilities that one finds himself burdened with while in the army. Most would agree that those inferring sleep deprivation are the most tedious. It so happens that the great majority of what might prosaically be considered as "army duties" simply constitute of long meaningless hours of vigil.
To my content, the concept of such "army duties" (as well as more or less everything else) is greatly relaxed at my current unit. Staying guard is only loosely connected to the watchful national guards we were in Chios. And those that are to be vigilant guards inside the barracks -the so-called "room guards"- are nor guards in essence, neither vigilant, as I realized last night.

During my first on-call duty at the 401 General Military Hospital of Athens, I merely had to stay awake for a number of hours and make sure that during those hours my on-call colleagues would wake up on time for their shifts. This proved to be somehow chimerical for various reasons. One: nobody preceded (or succeeded) my shift, which resulted in my waking up accidentally five minutes before my shift started. Two: nobody really cared about being woken up so I actually had nothing to do apart from chatting with my friend Tassos, who was the one who woke me up (for having someone to talk to I guess).

Then Tassos left for his own shift (a useless patrol around the hospital) and so I found myself sitting at a lonely desk at 6.00 am with the company of a sadly boring book by Steven Pressfield, which instead of keeping me awake with its (assumed) engaging plot, brought about drowsiness in constant waves. To this my only escape was standing up, strolling up and down an empty, humid corridor until I eventually made it outside the building in the foggy dew-covered courtyard. There I saw it.

It was about 6.30 and a late autumn dawn was breaking above the Athenian skyline. It was nothing spectacular, given my position, surrounded by the tall buildings of the hospital, the time of the year and the rainy weather. It had little to do with vision and was more of something that appealed to the rest of one's senses. The smell of the soaking leaves on the wet soil, the sound of distant thunder and the chilling morning cold which I suffered with an inexplicable satisfaction in my summer uniform. I could not help thinking that it was not the dawn itself I was enjoying, but simply the approaching end of my shift, (which also suspicuously coincided with the beginning of a four-day leave). Still I tend to believe it was a mixture of all that, the sense that there are some brief moments (as all moments are) that one can only appreciate while being in the army, a series of little things that harm noone, while at the same time one would never bother doing.

Staying up all night and watching the dawn break, even a dull, urban dawn like today's is one of these little things.

coming back to life

It's official. I am back in Athens. From today on, I will be able to walk down alleys like this one whenever (or almost whenever) I want.

As my army gear and clothes are soaking in a bath-tub filled with scalding hot water, which aims at eliminating any trace of bed-bug I might have brought back as a souvenir from my stay at the barracks of the 96th Sanitary (?) Regiment, I take two days off to retrospect.

Has it been fun? No -freaking- way. Whatever people may tell you about missing the days in uniform (and whatever I might have been telling myself before getting there), being in the army is the exact opposite of fun. Even if you are lucky enough to enlist in the Sanitary (famous for bearing a "light" load of army-crap). Even if you are lucky enough to meet genuinely interesting people, of the kind you would -and will- be friends with outside the army. Even if you get to be on a Greek island during August and September.
It is still NOT fun at all. Simply because waking up at 5.45 at the yelling of some complete imbecile whose faint attempt to pronounce something remotely similar to speech barely makes it to "Wake up" is not fun. And with this I think I have summed up most of it.

Has it been worth it? Certainly not. There have been a large number of discussions about the necessity of the military service during some long night patrols in Chios. My colleagues -my poor colleagues whom I shamefully admit to have abandoned over there- would agree with me. There is nothing to be gained from army life after the age of 25 (at least). A mature, decent man with a minimal sense of responsibility already knows how to make his bed, be respectful to superiors, kind to women and responsible while doing his job. If we are to assume that the scope of the army is to deal with people who lack these qualities, there are a number of mental institutions that would be up to the task. If, on the other hand, the service aims at making one accustomed to the absurdity of the Greek public sector, its corruptive routine and its infamous drive towards the utmost forms of laziness then "Thanks, but no thanks!".

Would I do it again? You must be kidding me. I have a bit more than a hundred days left to suffer the stupidity of the uniform and deal with the scum of this country (the mentally retarded or/and lazy asses who choose to become inferior officers instead of getting a real job and a life). I am not exactly looking forward to it but I can assure you of one thing. As with all shit in life I can still take some fun out of it over the next 102 days. I can drive them crazy since they did not manage to drive me.

This is my last master-plan for the army to be put forward starting from tomorrow.

PS. This one goes out to my co-soldiers back in Chios. As they struggle with the our most painful responsibility towards the Greek Constitution, my thoughts cannot but be with them.

Midsummer day's dream

Last Friday after a tiring morning of doing absolutely nothing I finally got my permit to leave the barracks and come home for a short weekend. I rode the bus all the way from Arta, in the Greek midwest, to Athens on a sunny summer afternoon, trying to regain some of the sleep one inevitably loses while in the army. This proved to be more complicated than I thought mostly due to the radiant sunlight and the anticipation of seeing the people I love back home. It was going to be summertime in Athens and there are few things that can match a midsummer afternoon walk on the hill of Philopappoy before heading to Thissio for a couple -or more- glasses of wine.

As the bus was crossing the bridge that connects the Greek mainland with Pelopponese, glancing from my window, I saw the city of Patras, where I spent more than one happy years of early student adolesence back in the late 90s. A lot of nice memories came to my mind. A beach party next to the fortress of Antirrio, dinners with ouzo near the Citadel of Patras, nights out in Vrachneika. It realized that most of these nice memories were summer memories, around this time of the year when long days of study coupled with warm nights of thoughtlessness.

As the bus crossed the bridge and a two-more-hour drive laid ahead of us, I turned to the day's paper to fight boredom. There, at the bottom of the third page an air-company was advertising its new summer destination. It read: "Summer in Barcelona". I could not help smiling. Over the last weeks I had thought a lot about Barcelona, the place I left four months ago and which I had no time to reminisce ever since. Midsummer in Barcelona, with the "Fiesta de Sant Joan", nights in Barceloneta with cold "turbio" wine, sounds of jazz, and that special summer breeze cooling you down.

Then it occurred to me. That the essence of summer is exactly that. That "summer" is not a season but a place. It is THE place you want to be. It is -even more- the sum of all those places. It is the projection of all those midsummer nights in Athens, in Patras, in Barcelona, one cold evening at the edge of Yellowstone Canyon, a warm, humid night looking through a window down on Broadway Avenue, an afternoon up on Kastro in Sifnos, waiting for the full moon. Summer is that special space, the geometrical locus of all the smiles you have cast on the midsummers past.

And on the midsummers to come.

Depress Mode

Quite sometime ago, while I was still in Barcelona preparing my to-do-before-I-go list (following the wise advise of my friend Sy.) I remember having left one thing out. One thing I had really missed and would have liked to do, if not before leaving Barcelona, at least before joining the Greek Army. That was to go to a big concert, get lost in the anonymous crowd, smell the collective sweat of thousands of people, and enjoy music in a way that would remind me that deep inside we can still be kids every now and then.

Then I left Barcelona and I came back to Greece and a number of sad events reminded me that instead of being a kid I am painfully growing older. And then I was summoned to the Army where I have to present myself next Monday and the clock started ticking again, counting down to yet another series of goodbyes. Suddenly, last Saturday, my sister came to me holding a ticket for a Depeche Mode concert and it looked like the chance had appeared and that I would finally be able to check my to-do list thingy of going to a big concert. They are not so good right now and their last three albums are rather bad but they have once been one of my favourite bands, I saw them once some eight years ago and I remembered having had great fun back then. Plus I was going with my little sister with whom we have been getting closer and closer lately (having gone through some rough times together) and her friends are really funny and the weather was perfect so everything looked like it was going to be great fun.

Before we knew, it was Tuesday night and we were some thirty kilometers away from Athens, in the middle of a nowhere-to-be-found park, us and twenty five thousand more people and I was buying everybody beer, so happy that I was there and having almost forgotten that I am growing old, almost ready to be a kid again and start jumping all around. And then a blond lady came on the stage and a guy with a strong Essex-accent let us know the gig was being cancelled due to “a sudden illness of Dave” (DM’s singer and notorious ex drug addict). And whatever it was, I think I didn’t really care, I was just so let down, that our “mode” had gone from “Depeche” to “Depress”, I was so sad that my little sister was sad and I was so depressed to realize I was suddenly growing old again.

Then we took the long walk towards the car and to the one-hour drive back home, cursing our bad luck. At some point of the way I took a brief moment and tried to enjoy the silence. It sucked.

Absence

One would think of a very solid way to define absence. Someone is missing. There is now a void occupying the physical space that was sometime filled by that someone. There are however innumerable ways for this void to make its existence painfully explicit. Absence, is in this sense, radically different than loss.

No matter how prepared one may be, how incredibly, rationally acquainted with the loss of a beloved person, no matter how bravely he has confronted that loss, or how gracefully he has been avoiding that confrontation, he can never escape being startled by the painful absence that stems from it. And as it usually happens with things related to the beyond, this afflictive awe assumes the most unexpected shapes and sizes.

In my case absence was turning to face an empty chair last night. Ironically at a moment of joy, right after the end of a stressful but rewarding basketball final. It was the moment I would usually stand up from my usual spot on the couch to turn towards the dining table and my father's chair to cheerfully hi-five him and start a series of pointless -but vainly reassuring- congratulations on how good our team has once more proven to be. It was then, facing at an empty chair that the whole reassuring feeling was suddenly gone, the void rutlhessly stood in front of me and I realized how a basketball victory had reduced to so little.

It's times like these when you realize that life is a game you can only hope losing with style. 

Everything has changed, everything's the same

I look down on my desk to see my two copies of George Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia". One, a Greek translation was given to me as a present from a dear friend before I left for Barcelona back in 2006. The other, a translation into Spanish with a wonderful cover, featuring a rare photo of Eric Arthur Blair (aka George Orwell) himself, was given to me as farewell present by a very good friend right before leaving Barcelona to come back to Greece. Books, ideas and literature transverse time, space and people's minds trying to defy boundaries. The boundaries themselves draw equatorial lines around our lives. As we move tangentially around these boundaries, it appears that our lives are making circles. But they aren't.

I look outside my window and recognize a familiar view. It is like spring in Greece since I came back to Athens yesterday and by 6pm the setting sun, lights up the antena-infested skyline I can see through my bedroom window, with my desk strategically positioned so that I can face outside. The view is nothing like the one I had from the 4th floor Bioinformatics lab until last Friday, the sea is emphatically missing but it could be worse. 

There is a scene in "Howard's End" where one of the main characters, "brittishly" arrogant and genuinely phlegmatic lets out a silly aphorism which goes something like this:

"My father says there's only one great view, and that is the view of the sky over our heads"

Somewhere among some old photos I took before leaving Athens in 2006, somewhere among the published photos of the blog I kept while I was in Barcelona, I found the one that appears at the top of this post. My old colleagues may still be able to see it hanging on the lab wall over my old screen (if Pedro who inherited my desk has not made any radical changes yet). 

As I have been in Greece for only two days, I am still trying to cope with simple things I have become unfamiliar with. Trying not te be run over by cars while crossing the street or getting used to the idea that taxi drivers (sometimes even bus drivers) will smoke without asking any permission. The feeling that you have to get to know your own country after sometime has something charmingly unsettling. One needs a set of references to get by, at least in the beginning.

Looking out of the window it's good to see that the view of the sky over our heads seems to have remained reassuringly constant.

deciamos ayer...

They say that brother Luis de Leon, one of the greatest poets of the Spanish renaissance started his first class after a three year imprisonment (convicted for having translated the Bible into vernacular Spanish) with these words:

"Deciamos ayer..."

meaning "As we were saying yesterday..."

Thus he wanted to state the fact that nothing had really changed over those three years and that everything could resume from where he had left them.

Here I am, having just come back from Luis de Leon's country, back to my hometown after three years (that were nothing like imprisonment), starting anew all these things I once left behind as if nothing has changed (or has it?)

"Deciamos ayer..."