Woke early. Martin had been sick in the night, and was still tottering about as we bustled around him. We clattered off to the train, then the bus, then the airport check-in in Bologna.
RyanAir is a cheap people mover, cramming us into a teeny plane cheek by jowl and then selling bottles of water for 3 Euros en route. When we landed, there was the sound of trumpets.
Greece is luscious. We'd forgotten about vegetation! Italians are not all that impressed with stuff like trees and lawns, preferring cement and formality. But in Greece, the pastures were knee-deep, there were orchards everywhere, and it suddenly felt like home again. Geraniums, wisteria, olives, oranges, jacarandas, palms – all the plants of my childhood! I hadn't even known that I missed them until my heart leaped in joy at the Greek countryside. That sense of deep home alone paid for the trip.
RyanAir is a cheap people mover, cramming us into a teeny plane cheek by jowl and then selling bottles of water for 3 Euros en route. When we landed, there was the sound of trumpets.
Greece is luscious. We'd forgotten about vegetation! Italians are not all that impressed with stuff like trees and lawns, preferring cement and formality. But in Greece, the pastures were knee-deep, there were orchards everywhere, and it suddenly felt like home again. Geraniums, wisteria, olives, oranges, jacarandas, palms – all the plants of my childhood! I hadn't even known that I missed them until my heart leaped in joy at the Greek countryside. That sense of deep home alone paid for the trip.
Kos is a tourist town, with lots of whitewashed buildings, bikini shops, bars, leather and jewelry shops, and the residents sprinkled in between.
Our landlady told us that the best years of her life were spent in the USA, when she was ten through twenty, but then she met her stupid husband. When her son was born, she packed her stupid husband's suitcase and threw it out the door. The time for pushing women around is over, she told him. You talk and I listen, but then you have to listen to me, too. She paused. Her stupid husband is changing, she said, but slowly. He lives in Athens, which is a crazy place to live, lots of crime and unrest. Kos is better but the USA is the best.
We went to a fish restaurant where we were positively pampered by the proprietor. April 1 is the first day of the season, and we were his first foreign customers, he said. He recommended assorted fish plates, and so we had lightly breaded fried sardines (good except for the very strongly flavored head), chopped grilled octopus in olive oil, calamari in garlic sauce with fried potatoes, and boild nettles with lemon, salt, and olive oil. For dessert he gave us halva, which here is semolina cooked with sugar, cinnamon, and olive oil into a mouse-shaped cake.
We lingered to talk about personas. You have many parts of your brain which contribute to conflicting voices and impulses. When you shape a persona you are choosing which voice to give active expression to, and hence, slowly but concretely, shaping your character.
Someone suggested that a persona is a lie, but I think that it is a lie only in that you can't express everything simultaneously. You are not obligated to do a data dump every time somebody hangs out with you - in the narrowest sense, you are merely an artifact in other people's lives and they are not equipped to handle more than one fully realized brain at a time anyway. To make the social compact work you have to manage how you come across to people, which necessarily means you edit. In more intimate relationships you have time to reveal more, but there is not enough time in the world to ever reveal everything, not even to yourself. We are layered and infinitely varied.
Our landlady told us that the best years of her life were spent in the USA, when she was ten through twenty, but then she met her stupid husband. When her son was born, she packed her stupid husband's suitcase and threw it out the door. The time for pushing women around is over, she told him. You talk and I listen, but then you have to listen to me, too. She paused. Her stupid husband is changing, she said, but slowly. He lives in Athens, which is a crazy place to live, lots of crime and unrest. Kos is better but the USA is the best.
We went to a fish restaurant where we were positively pampered by the proprietor. April 1 is the first day of the season, and we were his first foreign customers, he said. He recommended assorted fish plates, and so we had lightly breaded fried sardines (good except for the very strongly flavored head), chopped grilled octopus in olive oil, calamari in garlic sauce with fried potatoes, and boild nettles with lemon, salt, and olive oil. For dessert he gave us halva, which here is semolina cooked with sugar, cinnamon, and olive oil into a mouse-shaped cake.
We lingered to talk about personas. You have many parts of your brain which contribute to conflicting voices and impulses. When you shape a persona you are choosing which voice to give active expression to, and hence, slowly but concretely, shaping your character.
Someone suggested that a persona is a lie, but I think that it is a lie only in that you can't express everything simultaneously. You are not obligated to do a data dump every time somebody hangs out with you - in the narrowest sense, you are merely an artifact in other people's lives and they are not equipped to handle more than one fully realized brain at a time anyway. To make the social compact work you have to manage how you come across to people, which necessarily means you edit. In more intimate relationships you have time to reveal more, but there is not enough time in the world to ever reveal everything, not even to yourself. We are layered and infinitely varied.
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