A new day. Still alive. That is amazing in itself. Coffee still tastes good. My son and I made some apple marmalade yesterday. That tastes good too. First day of school. For him, not so good; for me, great.
Everything else does not matter much. There is the morning light and there is the morning breeze. That is more than I asked for.

In remembrance of this day in 2001 and the many who did not see the next daylight.

My sister told me she went to a wedding where a helicopter was hired to fly over the church and throw red petals. There were 800 guests and it cost more than 70.000 Euros.
The couple managed to get more than half of it back though, since most of the guests were instructed to give money instead of other presents. Plus, the wedding took place far away from where the couple normally lives and the guests were expected to travel there by plane. There were security guards all around the property where the reception took place.

As Amy says, what kind of fuckery is this? Helicopters, planes, 800 guests, this is the Oscars, not a wedding. It is disgusting to parade your decision to spend your life with someone like that. To want to be something totally different to what you really are for a day. I am not going to say anything about the ridiculous waste of resources because there is no point and it is self-evident. But that other part, the fact that this is a personal moment which is reduced to a grotesque display of love and money, this is what disturbs me the most.
The idea that it is your only chance to dominate the attention of all those people is so degrading. Why do women fall for that? Brides and their mothers mostly. People who have not seen even a tiny part of the world are happy to spend thousands for just one day.
The economy is shrinking but in the wedding industry everything is getting bigger: Even invitations are getting bigger. They are literally bigger, sometimes featuring poems, printed on heavy, expensive paper and placed in huge envelopes, sometimes tied with ribbons.
In Greek Orthodox weddings, the couple has to drink red wine from the same glass. That glass can cost 500 E (around 700 dollars or 400 British pounds). Sometimes it is encrusted with crystals; it can have gold details, or even pearls.
And this is just a token of the farcical turn the wedding industry has taken. I won’t mention wedding gift lists at all because just thinking about them gives me green spots in the face.
 
P.S I still wonder about the helicopter throwing petals. This is make-believe for children. Because it means that the guests and the wedding party were
-pretending not to notice the excruciating noise and
-pretending not to notice that the petals were not falling from the hands of God in the sky but from the dirty belly of the helicopter

I don’t take my irresponsibility pledge lightly. This may sound like a contradiction in terms, but I like to get things right, or in this case, wrong.
So today, I didn’t make the phone calls I should have made and I spent an hour reading a website I just found and instantly fell in love with. Also, I woke up at 7 and at 8 I went back to bed and re-woke at 10.
Tomorrow I am going to buy a bottle of tequila to make margaritas at home. I intend to spend at least 2 days a week in a margarita-haze.

I feel that everyone around me is growing up fast and this is my ineffectual and unconvincing way to slow down. People fill their days with important activities and go through their checklists and tick things off. I do that too, sometimes, just not now. Not now.

Being grown up is hard. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of conversation topics I hear around me, at work, on the bus, in the park:

-What’s for dinner: All the different dinner possibilities that a piece of meat/vegetable presents are discussed to eternity.
-He said/She said/He said
-The weather. It’s not an English monopoly anymore.
-What to do on Saturday night. This club, that restaurant.
-Reality shows. Who’s expelled, who made a fool of themselves.
-Murders, thefts, scandals in the news.

In addition, people usually engage in parallel talk and not in interactive conversation. This means that they talk in turns without addressing what the other one is saying. They just pick up where they left off when it was the other person’s turn to talk.
All this is too stressful to me. Drivel takes up lots of memory cells. I cannot function. I feel like an extra terrestrial. I need to be surrounded by interesting people who make me laugh. I will make them laugh in return.

This shampoo I am using must be doing something to my brain. As I was having one of my late baths, I had this thought: It is undeniable that time started passing by too quickly after I was thirty. My teens and 20’s didn’t fly by in such a hurry, but I can feel time swishing past me now. So I thought what if it is not just the effect of busy everyday life, or an impression we get as we grow older, what if there is something more to it? What if something hurries time, what if there is a big hole that swallows it up, or another dimension that we haven’t found out anything about? What if time changes gear due to a natural law of physics –an area of knowledge I am absolutely ignorant of. 
Then I rinsed and repeated.
And this morning I found this article which although it argues for the exact opposite (that time is slowing down), somehow proves that when it comes to making questions I cannot answer, I am up there with the finest scientists of this earth. Plus, I do it while shampooing my hair.

How to make magic mushrooms out of a simple button mushroom

This was the opposite of writer’s block. It was a cataclysm of thoughts that were impossible to write down. Or I was lazy, pick your answer. Some people wrote to me asking why I was sad. I was not sad, I was autumnal.

I have a theory about civilizations, that maybe isn’t my theory but until I remember where I read it, it’s mine. My theory is that there is a different collective age for different civilizations. That means that no matter how old or young you are, you still carry some portion of the collective age of your community in you. Europe is a middle aged civilization. It has been around for a while. So its people carry all sorts of vices and virtues of middle age. Existential issues and a sweet ennui are part of this. Along with the luxury to ponder on meaningless things instead of going to the gym. Have you seen French films? It’s like that. That’s what I have from time to time. It’s silly but necessary for my happiness. A warm mist that encloses me and sends me back into myself. And then it pops me out of course. Which is a lucky thing, since I want to be here when my friend Stephanie visits me in a few days.

Did you hear that? Stephanie from Boston is coming to Athens to spend some time with me. I can’t tell you how thrilled I am. Maybe we can see Okkervil River together, if the gig is not cancelled that is (rumour has it that it’s already been cancelled) which would make two of my dreams come true. At first I thought I might be nervous, but I am not. My only concern is that Stephanie won’t be able to understand a thing I say, because I don’t speak as fluently as I write. But we can still communicate through our blogs. (Stephanie, my computer is your computer).

Sometimes I am afraid I will go back to that place where all I ever wanted to do was sleep. At night I am afraid that sleep is going to come to me and never go away. So I don’t sleep. In the morning I feel free again and I can actually sleep. But not when it is dark. It’s difficult then. Sometimes I think of people who have left forever. I don’t mean dead people. But they are never coming back. Not to me at least. That person I was is not there anymore. So who are they going to come back to? And now I am on the verge of doing something which might be worth my effort but all I can think of is I don’t do enough. I forget the things I do and can’t defend myself when I am asked "what have you been doing?" I just shrug and say "oh nothing much". So much has changed in the last year. And you’ve been here, listening as I was becoming someone else. In the beginning I wanted to just write. Then I wanted to be read by many. How silly, but maybe a necessary stage. Now I don’t care about the people I don’t know reading me. When you read me, you know me, and that’s when I start to care. I hope you’ll be around to witness more of my incarnations. If someone witnesses them, it must mean they are real.

Let me collect my thoughts on weddings, after the one I went to last night.

-Weddings shouldn’t be frequented by jealous people who are going to look at you (the bride or groom) with envy. These people are the first to leave a reception because they can’t stand the fact that you look beautiful and happy and didn’t fall flat on your face during the first dance.

-A woman was wearing an identical dress to this. Only, hers was a bit more revealing around the décolleté area. That was a church wedding. She could have shouted “here I am, forget about the bride! Hey, look here, breasts!”

-The only moment I am tearful in weddings is when the bride steps out of the car. I get a “sacrificial lamb” feeling, although I don’t think of women as victims . It’s just that brides go through all this trouble and the groom just stands there in his suit, oblivious to all the plucking and waxing and exfoliating that is involved. I felt like that last night too. My friend looked like an amazon, strong and beautiful, like a star. A 600 megawatt beauty. My jaw dropped when I saw her. And the groom looked well, nice in his suit.

-Finally, weddings are occasions where you meet people from school. Now we don’t want that, do we? People from school are aliens. They were put in our class by Alien Intelligence. They were humanoids that studied human development. With all respect to extraterrestrial life, we passed the test. Why do we have to have updates?