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.

A night at the Opera. This was a memorable experience, yet not for the reasons you would think. We arrived at the "Queen Elizabeth Theater" early. Our logic was that an opera house must be an interesting elitist establishment to explore. See people in their formal attire attempting to belong in a world and class which they normally do not frequent. Also, see people who really belong in a class which WE do not frequent, the Lawyers, corpodroids and moneyed real estate magnates of BC.

Well if that was our intention, we were in for a disappointment. We arrived at closed gates. A reception was going on, though nowhere to be seen and the plebs had to wait outside for a few minutes in BC's coldest weather (sub zero I tell you). An amalgam of retired school teachers, accountants, young professors (that was us), and some more retired folk patiently wearing faces of expectation and frustration stood outside the doors waiting. The agitators were of predictable origins, they were a Greek, a very critical American (N), a local elegantly dressed elderly gay man and a french-Canadian lady (the one I have branded as a school teacher). The Anglos were predictably quiet, accepting their fate of queuing, as if they were waiting a bus on Piccadilli Circus.

The time of our wait in the cold was used productively as we scrutinized the apearance of the building. Well the QET is no architectural gem. (S)he who tells you that is a big fat liar. In fact the QET tries to appeal to your more nautical senses. It evokes the lines of a ship in its indoors spaces, only it is no modern Norwegian or Danish floating pleasure palace that we are experiencing here but rather the Greek Island hopping ferry with its worn 1970s carpet and exposed metal ceilings. The crew itself, fits the profile of such a naval extravaganza, for all that they are at least more polite than the Greek sailors.

Entering the concert hall itself you notice that the seats are the same seats on which your mother sat when she attended that Barclay James Harvest concert wearing a collar that hang to her hips and bell-bottom pants. In describing all this I should note that the idea for this purely objective invective was not mine. It was N's declamations, worthy of Quinntilian's pen and Cicero's tongue that inspired my writing here. Like a Lady Macbeth of the blogworld I slash away and describe. Like her, I have no guilt. In any case eventually the lights were dimmed and we were exposed to what originally was a very weird spectacle. you see, the stage decoration for the opera was overall very good and quite effective, yet the first choral piece where the choire of witches predicts Macbeth's future was so badly done, with such kitschy dresses, funny choreography and 70s disco lighting that we were truly afraid that the whole opera was to follow along the quality of our sinking ship of an opera house.

Happily for our experience, the rest of the opera was quite good, though admitedly not the best of operas (put the blame on Verdi for that though). Lady Macbeth was certainly the largest presence on the scene, not in terms of her talent (of which her CV says that there has been a lot) but rather in terms of girth. The woman for all her singing skill, had the worse presence one could bring on the theater floor. When enntering the scene you were not sure whether she was going to say something sinister, omething dripping with blood, or whether she would ask for the potato peeler and head for the kitchen.

The evening ended well, with the good guys winning and us on our way home to a cat in need of attention.

At home, for yet another frosty post. Cold whiteness is my way of testing the patience of this blog's readers. It is also a very simple way for me to expose my shallowness. How would any sane or, better, any intelligent person, spend so much time writing about an altered form of water? Sanity and intelligence aside the city of Vancouver is in a kind of suspended animation. Its educational institutions are shut and classes are cancelled at the two Universities. At SFU because we are too high up to be accessible by bus and at UBC beacause they have no power. It makes you admire Michigan with their "never closed, whatever the circumstances" policy.


At Home I am writing on the Franks and Rome and on the claims of the Franks on Rome's heritage. Nothing too deep, just an attempt to connect a number of threads from my lectures that had been left loose and then reach a proper point of conclusion. As Western Europe is "born" so is the orientalized Eastern part slowly challenged in its claim of Romanitas and by extension its claim to be part of Europe per se. I guess writing on a blog helps you clarify what you want to say. This is my excus for not actually writing right now.

Here is the spaceship. I mean SFU. This is the status of the mountain. It is interesting how the weather becomes an object of fascination the moment something out of the ordinary occurs. I feel that I am being converted into one of those American couch potatos waiting for yet another weather report. My interests in the weather betray a certain lazyness. It is not my lounging and working on a couch which is the issue. It is the fact that I find myself deeply interested in a possible Uni closure for Tuesday. Not even one semester in teaching and I think of work-breaks.

Getting dark. It is this moment of the day when your body decides that it is still the summer and since it is dark it must be nine o'clock at night. And your body gives you a warning that it may shut itself down. And you rise, and go to the fridge, or just plain fidget and walk around to get past the dangerous window of opportunity when a siesta would become inevitable. And if you remain awake, you have hours ahead of you of total consciousness. If you avoid the siesta, you may convince your system it is winter and that is simply how things are done. And you want to forget that your parents in Greece told you that they have 20C temperatures.