Category: Links to stuff I like

Part 1

21. I drink beverages too fast.

I sit for a coffee with friends. Sluuuurp! Up the straw it goes before anyone has even touched their own beverage of choice. It’s worse with alcoholic drinks… I don’t ever seem to realise that when it’s over, it’s over! And I just sip, sip sip the night away. I also eat and smoke faster than most people when in the company of others. It’s only then that comparison with others’ still full plates/glasses is possible and my worried, thoughtful scratching of beard is only natural. My solution? I just steal from the others’ food and drink.

22. I don’t know anything about Greek Music.

It has happened too many times to count: I’m with a big company at some taverna or place that is suitable for accommodating a number of people in the double digits. Everyone’s having fun, talking vividly and eating more vividly. Then, when everyone’s feeling cheerful, someone, somewhere, utters the words to the first song. And everyone catches on; and everyone sings along; and turn-in-turn everyone butts in with their own favourite Greek words and everyone else follows suit. It’s like that when there’s a live program as well. Guy playing the guitar, singing his songs that everyone knows. It doesn’t take much to take it out of you if you’ve drunk sufficient quantities of alcohol. “All together now!” And we all sing together.

Except me.

These songs… How should I put it. Yes. I might have heard them, I might even remember one or two lyrics just from sheer repetition (this kind of thing happens to me quite often), I usually remember the melody but I can never join the fun. Friends or acquaintances might know every single song by heart but I’m just left there to look around silently trying my best to have a good time but failing miserably, always thinking “wow. This feels so awkward. It sucks.”

Alas, such behaviours never go unnoticed. When everyone’s singing and they catch wind that I am not, they try to encourage me to join them. In the wake of their inevitable failure they look so disappointed in me, so… how should I say. There’s a certain Greek word that roughly translates into “party-pooper” and “killjoy” but lacks any of the playfulness of those two words. It’s kind of a brutal word, now that I think of it. It’s ξενέρωτος. Oh I’ve got that a lot throughout the years. I also get “you don’t know these songs?? You’re not really Greek”. I’ll let the look on my own face by this point to your imagination.

It feels as if knowing about Greek music is such a big part of our culture here that you can’t help not stick out like an alpine fox in the mud if you’ve kept well away from anything that has to do with the domestic musical product for pretty much your entire life. It’s not that I hate Greek music. I want to come to terms with it, explore and discover artists I’m bound to like or already know I like but haven’t bothered looking into more (Pavlos Sidiropoulos, Thanassis Papakonstantinou, Alkinoos Ioannidis, Lavrentis Maheritsas, works by Kavadias turned into songs). Some people in my life have helped me somewhat with discovering and getting to know some Greek music but never decisively and never beyond the realms of satisfying some of my polite curiosity. It’s that it’s polite curiosity at best.

What can I say? Maybe I’m not really Greek after all if I can’t, for the life of me, get into it all. Which is a perfect intro for my next hatred entry:

23. Nationalism.

Some Greeks call me Australian. Some (most?) Australians would call me Greek if I returned to OzzyLand. I’m really both and neither. My national identities sort of negate eachother but at the same time create a completely new existence, like a Yin and a Yang that alone are whole but together are whole-er. This may be the reason I could never exactly or comfortably identify with national ideas except for when I was only little (funny how “nationalist” children can be, or we’ve all been as children).

This open-mindedness by default comes with a cost, however. A multicultural background always helps you break through the wall of deceit but at the same time alienates you from any and all cultures you might have some heritage from including the one you were born in. You start to inhabit your own space in the cultural web, at first as little more than a means to survive but eventually enjoying this uniqueness of yours, weaving your own new threads and connections, keeping the best from both worlds and inevitably creating a new one while you’re at it.

It’s all very nice and postmodern of course but other people look at you suspiciously. You’re one of them but not exactly. Everyone must belong, granted, but you can’t seem to decide whether you belong somewhere or nowhere. An ultimate decision is unlikely. And then there comes a day when you, tired of all this vagueness, ask yourself: why must nationality form the end-all be-all criteria of “belonging” in the first place? Aren’t there more important aspects to a person?

Nationalism might be one of the things I hate the most. I’ve come to hate it so much, so deeply, I find it hard to express myself, to find words that might accurately portray how deep this hatred goes. I’ll try.

To me, nationalism is a bit like football teams (another of the 99 things, can’t be a coincidence). You support an idea or a group of people just because you belong to it. Also called ethnocentricism for us social scientists. ~^, Having a concrete sense of national identity isn’t a bad thing on its own but most usually, just like with football teams and religion for that matter, it comes with denying everyone else’s right to do exactly what you’re doing: love their country above all else. Of course, again just like football teams and religions, nations are so self-centered they believe they are the only ones in the right, that there’s only enough room for none other than themselves at the top. Nations see everyone else as threats, as others, and that alone creates a self-fulfilling prophecy; when everyone sees everyone else as a threat some kind of threat is indeed created out of thin air. Just like when two people want to trust each other but because they’re afraid that the other will not want to comply, they keep to themselves, wholly generating their own image of untrustworthiness. It’s an endless loop.

Most nations have been founded on lies we now take for granted, unshakable truths, but this isn’t the time for me to go into detail on that. I hope you can understand what I mean. Nations have only served to distill fear, isolationism and hatred into people’s hearts. As a concept they encourage people to look for differences among themselves, not similarities, at least as far as inter-national relations are concerned. The similarities that can be found in the people within the borders of the nation-state are imaginary, arbitrary and never well-defined. Naturally, universal truths like love, friendship, global or special (species-al) co-operation are the first to die for the sake of national integrity and identity. It’s not much different than the ridiculous idea of loving your video game console so much you automatically hate, out of fear perhaps, anyone who might love another console. With the difference that people have died, killed others and created complex and perfectly valid — in social terms — historical narratives to support this madness in theory as well as in practice.

It’s everywhere, from the Olympic Games and Eurovision *spit* to wars of the past and lingering ideologies. In the name of your country you might be made to feel like it’s your duty to protect it against aliens and immigrants, secure your cultural traditions and history including religion and language, avoiding to look out to the world, because you were never taught that such a thing might not be such a bad idea after all. It might be dangerous. People out there are bad, they wish nothing more than the downfall of you and your country.

I’ve seen too many people get obsessed with lies about “racial” traits (I’m tired of listening to Greeks think they’re Ancient Greeks or their descendants… SO tired…), looking back and jerking themselves off with their nonsensical grand histories so that they can avoid looking at the awful present and the grim future while still feeling as if they’re something important or special. It enables people to feel good about themselves when they’ve been good for nothing. How can ANYBODY feel special about something they never earned or fought for themselves? I suppose unhappy times call for such sad measures.

If world borders, nation-states’ cornerstones, were torn down tomorrow, it’s probable that great wars would erupt, everyone still with their mind on national interests battling it out for a better place under the sun. A world without borders would require a world without ownership, another can of worms altogether. But in a world with no nations people might eventually discover the beauty of not having to fit in, of not being caged by your parents or what part of the earth you were born in but by what your actions are.

I wish people could feel the airy and  open-mind they could have instead of the musty, dark closed-mind they’ve had since forever and take sick pride in.

24. Getting distracted for hours on the net doing nothing I set out to do.

“I’m going to log-in. I’m going to check my e-mail, see Kalionatis’s site, download the notes, after that I’m going to see Tsekouras’s site and download his notes. Then I’ll do a little bit of Delphi, after that I’ll send some e-mails to my beloved friends and check out Helix’s workcamps; I really want to take part in some of those programs!”…

*Escapist* *Hotmail* *MSN* *Matador* *Cubimension, writing* *Hotmail* *Game 2.0* *XKCD* *Cubimension, reading* *MSN* *Facebook stalking — I KNOW I DON’T HAVE A FACEBOOK!* *Goodreads* *tvtropes* *Wikipedia hopping* *Random site about some random new interest of mine* *Steam offers* *IMDB* *Flickr* *Some porn site* *MSN* *Couchsurfing* *Various interesting blogs* *Youtube* *Looking into all about that new interest of mine* *Grooveshark, discovering new bands I found out about on progarchives.com and allmusic.com* *MSN* *

Dayum… what’s left to re-check and re-re-check?*

What was it that I wanted to do again?

25. Loose handshakes.

“Oh hi… I’m *insert name here*, pleased to meet you”.

Oh, how many times have people made a bad impression on me just because that first greeting was accompanied by a loose handshake and a fleeting glance? Seriously people. Look at others in the eye when you meet them. Squeeze their palm like you mean it, NOT as if you couldn’t care less. Which is probably true anyway.

26. Moving deadlines.

“OK I’ll have it ready by then”. But “then” never comes. Being a person of the absolutely utter last minute, that means that I can never get anything done, doesn’t it?

27. Delays on booting.

Black screen. Reboot. Black screen. Reboot. BIOS startup holds up at memory testing. CTRL+ALT+DEL, nothing happens. Hard reset. BIOS completes startup, then computer freezes when loading Windows. Hard reset. BIOS startup insists there’s no more than a single core in my dual-core CPU and thus refuses to continue (out of spite?). Hard reset. At last, at some point, Cuberick decides to open his eyes, sweep off his waking grogginess and serve me, more a result of luck than anything.

The funny thing is that when it’s up and running there’s no problem whatsoever. Heh. Maybe it’s like how it’s with cars where you’ve got to get the engine all warmed-up first or something. Hermes knows how on Earth I’ve resisted beating Cuberick to a pulp time after time. Not that it matters. He’s already managed to beat himself to a pulp with no further assistance needed from me.

28. Facts caught up from Wikipedia.

-“Did you know that blah-blah?”
*where blah-blah, insert your favourite fact you yourself have already read on Wikipedia but know plenty of stuff about it from non-Wiki sources*
-“Yes I did, but it sure doesn’t sound like anything you spent too much time looking into. What you did is you just presumed you’re the more informed of the two of us just because you’ve happened to have read the Wiki page. So, you see, Mr/Ms. Smartass, I’m afraid you’re not the only one around here reading and skimming pages on that site more than necessary”.

Asking further questions usually results in disappointment and less-than-accurate answers. And when it doesn’t, it feels so sterile I can almost smell the Dettol in the air.

29. It’s raining and my clothes won’t dry indoors!

I guess it happens everywhere. But my experience from Lesvos has taught me that, if it starts raining, oh, you can be certain that it won’t stop for at least the next few days. If my clothes are caught hanging to dry on their line outside during this humid time, you can foresee the rest. But if I leave them to dry inside, they may well take even longer to reach their rightful place inside by drawer! I recently wanted to wear one of my favourite sweaters. It had been hanging there to dry for at least a week on a drying rack Garret has lent me months now– I doubt he wants it back. I grabbed it, only to find that its hood was still moist! I threw it back to its place in disgust and hatred. Go to hell, humidity.

30. Losing progress in games.

Power cuts. Ancient game design. Human mistakes. “Retry” instead of “Save”. Forgetting that “this game doesn’t have autosave”. A patch destroying the previous versions savegames. Glitches and Blue Screens Of Death. Blue Screens of Death. Screens of Death.

Death.

Loss of progress in games, you’ve sent many good hours of life’s charms to gaming purgatory, to the nether-realm of human entertainment. You’ve made many a player blind with rage, unable to accept that their efforts and pain have only resulted in a mockingly not-up-to-date version of their save files. You’ve destroyed vast amounts of perfectly good faith in an equally good game, sent it down the drain, never to return, never allowing the player to give the perfectly good game another chance due to pure frustration. It’s the synonym of amnesia for gamers, the very meaning of oblivion.

If I could, loss of progress in games, I would slap you till your cheeks were raw and your voice not fit to cry for help.

…to be continued…