Tunneling, turning, walking, sniffing, and exploring olfactory excitement, I move like this rat in a space of imaginary culinary excess. I cook things simple and easy to reproduce but I imagine recipes of Byzantine complexity and modernist aesthetic simplicity. Then I leave the ladel and pick up the laptop in order to sneak, like this rat, in some other space of hidden arcana. Other than that, I enjoy the sun when it crashes the weather-men's party uninvited. Its always a treat as good as the Torrone I got from P in Athens. Over and out for now, need to write a bit on Attaleiates' life. Cooking up the life of a historical person requires the care of a good chef.

I am at home and I want to talk about mobility, the modern term for nomadism. I mean personal mobility, the one that takes a creature of habit and moves it to the other side of the world. I have often wondered as to why I find it so easy to escape Greece, to leave friends and family behind, and seek life elsewhere. the simple explanation that there is no job for me in Greece is certainly not adequate. If I had tried, there would have been something there for me. I did not try, which means that there is an appeal to life abroad for me that makes living away from the fatherland easier. The question that arises, however, is not whether it is I who finds it easier to leave, but rather others who find it more difficult. What makes people who are not happy in Greece so reluctant to leave? The person I am addressing here will recognise the self as the addressee of this question. I do not buy the argument about difficulties in moving, about habits that are hard to break. Why should we be reluctant to move when motion is all that can keep us alive? Routine is powerful, yet routine can be broken. I vote for mobility, I know it to be possible, it just takes organizing skills and a decision. That is the beauty of our globalized mess, the bourgeois are mobile, the bourgeois are the new nomads.

Back to rainy Vancouver and in warm arms. Also back to my office and to the minutiae of course organization. Yesterday I produced a first draft for my course syllabus and I can really see how this is going to play out over the next semester. It will be rather easy teaching this course. I am looking forward to it. Details need to be ironed out over the next few days but otherwise there is no need for stress. Other than that I am continuing work on my academic ecotone, my little biography project for Attaleiates. I have entered a part where writing gets tough and where editing will be required. I can feel my Greek get stilted and I can sense the need for simplification. Another challenge to deal with even as I start work on Polybios for the Birmingham conference. Other than that peace and normality. Home at last.

Slow, everything is slow. Slowness starts from the beginning. It starts from the forgotten watch and it slows down even more as you forget your phone at home. Time becomes contingent upon fixed time-measuring devices, devices that exist in a space uncontrolled by you and randomly arranged arround you. A space whose logic you have to adjust to. OK, exageration. I carry a laptop with me and there is time on its little uper corner. I do not have to rely on the kindness of others as long as I am using the computer and use it I do since I am correcting papers. Time goes by and I meet N for prepackaged lunch and short chat. Time goes by again and I am off to home. Time flies even more and somehow it is 6:30 PM and I wonder what it is I have accomplished if anything. Time for dinner, time for climbing after dinner and then time for who knows what.

WARNING TO PRUDISH READERS: THIS BLOG MAY CONTAIN CONTENT WHICH WHILE OFFENSIVE TO YOUR SENSITIVITIES MAY ALSO GET YOU HOOKED ON READING IT. HINT, HINT R!

So, I guess I have been posting without titles. No signposts for the reader. A hint that says, you need to read this, or you can skip to the next more interesting posting. Having discovered the labelling option I start with it, only, oddly, the labels appear at the bottom of the text, like the sorority Greek initials that one can find walking huddled aroung female bottoms on American university campuses.
Listening to Spoon, the "Girls Can Tell" record. Not bad, pretty honest rock music. It was one of those days when a collection of small things led to a synthesis of a satisfying whole of accomplishment. One of those days when the sheer tackling of bureaucracy and day to day tasks satisfies the mind, if only because the postponement of those same tasks taxes the mind. Let me then count in the τυρί, ρίζι, γάλα, CAMBAS method of Greek arithmetics: I dispatched the profile of my program to the MGSA, I collected some application forms for journal funding, I walked to the office that made their collection possible and on the way I kept my brain active and considered possible themes for a journal article collection, I dealt with student questions over the net, I chatted with my boss, inflated my optimism (a by product of talks with my boss), I came back home, I bought lamps to illuminate my medievally dark kitchen, delivered some pants to the italian tailor for shortening, I got a haircut and then ended up at home reading Anthony's intro to his new translation of Psellos. I am grateful to him for referring to my diss and I am sipping cocoa, which does not compare with N's chily spiced version. Overall I produced a study in pedestrian living and still I feel satisfied. So the option of leaning on the couch and reading more on Byzantine families and elements of their domesticity is actually appealing. Meanwhile, the time is approaching when I will be asked to load my goods on a plane, along with my body and move all of them to Greece for a visit to friends and family and an experience of the customary Christmas domesticity. Stop reading reader, there is nothing interesting in this posting. It is enough, it will end here.

Lets discuss fetish items. Your kinky mind may automatically direct itself towards closets filled with stileto shoes. Your imagination is already slipping in drawers of neatly arranged underwear. Yet here we have entered a whole new realm of fantasy and fascination. The colours are not brigt red and pink. No leopard patterns here. The materials are neither lace nor leather.

The locus is far removed from the bedchamber. We have instead entered a very different world. A world of synthetics, plastics, and strong, resistant materials. They are not meant to make breasts look gravity-defying, they are meant to make whole bodies fly, a whole human stick to a wall or hang mid-air. We have entered the rock-climbing twillight zone.

On Sunday I purchased my Christmas gift to self. In good Byzantine fashion it was a gift in three parts. Pouch for climbing chalk and chalk, climbing shoes, a nice pair of 5.10 spire shoes and a black diamond Harness. The fetish value of those items, forthwith tested on the walls of the Edge, the North Vancouver gym we visit, was intense. They are little things to own, cherish and take care of. So here I am, age 34 discovering my fetish. Let us see what else I will be discovering.