Nightwalker

Eerie silence lies still as stone in the cold corridors of Chania’s night. I have been finding myself walking later and later, getting lost in the maze of houses and making my turns when a faint sound catches my ear. The sound will lead you to some quite interesting places in the quiet hours of the night.

There does not seem to be a commercial/residential divide in the muddled patchwork of construction that makes up the heart of town. As I walked this evening I passed Minoan ruins crumbling into the hillside and, right next to it, a discotheque with pulsing dance music and seizure inducing lights pumping out into the streets. Houses are stacked upon the remains of a Venetian wall and bars are built into everything from old dock houses to what feels like janitorial closets.

Bouzoukia is a traditional Cretan ‘bar’ but it is really more like a small café. They are in the most peculiar places but always draw a crowd of Greeks seeking some traditional music. I ventured in to listen. The band was three men: one playing a traditional Spanish rhythm guitar and two playing bouzoukies which are like twangy banjoes. The bouzoukies have eight strings but the strings come in couples, one heavy and one light string per note, so the sound is more full but relatively simple. The most enlivening part of the bouzoukia is that the entire bar is part of the entertainment with people dancing, clapping and singing.

The discotheque is something else. The other night I was out wandering about and slinging my komboloi* when I heard a soft pulse coming from a nearby basement. As I went closer it became clear that this was an all-night dance bar. It was so smoky inside that my eyes burned but the music was motivating and the crowd was very entertaining. It was packed from wall to wall with people at 3:00am; I finally found where all the young people are. It isn’t really my scene but after finding this first one, I started to notice them all over the place.

I forgot to mention the komboloi: every man on the island has a string of beads and they sell them everywhere. Some are cheap plastic ones, like mine, and others are silver, gold, ivory, jade, amber, or whatever you can imagine. They are on a loop of string and half of the string is bare so that the beads can slide back and forth. Like I said, men swing them around all the time. It is a manner of style to click and seamlessly swing them from finger to finger, a subconscious art of sorts that really gets addictive. I hear it is good for those trying to quit smoking but I feel like I need to pick up smoking just to quit manipulating the komboloi.

I am a bit restless in the limbo of the island winter. There is no holiday from an overextended vacation. Mountains are on the horizon; the white caps are calling me. My feet are itching to conqueror some rock.

Party on

Happy Holidays

I’m alive! and I’m getting fat from all the goat butter and feta!

It looks like we are going to be spending the holidays in Crete, which is ok by me. The town is all lit up and everyone is out buying gifts. Our landlord and lady, Efetehis and Natalie, are very nice people and we have been talking with them a lot more now that all of our fellow classmates have shipped off. Meghan is interviewing in Florence and Sarah in Seville. We are trying to decide between Prague and Spain…as soon as we know, you will.

It is a bittersweet realization that staying in Greece isn’t a realistic option. In a way, the short time I have spent here has captured me. It is well knit, friendly, and wholesome but it is also small. Living here is like living in Ellettsville, IN,…but in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and with several languages being spoken, thousand year old ruins, fresh food pouring off of the street corners, grain alcohol after every meal, and a huge tourist boom economy and an equally significant off-season slump…so nothing like it really. Regardless, it can certainly feel small. The way I see it, it doesn’t hurt to keep moving along; there is always more green grass out there somewhere.

Bethany and I took a walk out of town today and followed the coast until it became craggy and rough. It was very beautiful and the cliff-side tide-pools were a unique sight. Check out the new pics, it was one of my favorite places I have been to around here. The waves were crashing in right up to my feet and the air was so briny that I had some salt crystals in my eyebrows when we got home.

For a while, I watched some fiddler crabs spin around in their own little world, carved into the safety of the stone. I couldn’t help but get philosophical as I looked out into the vast blue of the sea; I knew that the crab would never see my perspective on the true magnitude of the sea and he would certainly never understand it if I told him. But I understand him, he is rational; he has all of his necessities in his shallow pool. I sometimes wonder if I had all I needed in mine. Then again, it may be because I had all I needed that I felt the compulsion to leave.

After our climb, we caught a water polo game. Greeks are serious about few things but smoking cigarettes and water polo are definitely two of them. It may seem like a pool game but it is intense. These guys drown each other for 45 minutes and all the while the crowd is lighting off explosives, banging on giant drums and sitting on air-horns. It was fun to watch. I would go to another one.

Not much going on, life is quiet here. It will be strange not being home for Christmas. I wish you all the best.

Happy Holidays!

Καλα Κριστμας!

Diary of a Mad Woman

Things have been quiet here on the island. Winter comes with cold sprays of rain and rough seas. Everywhere in the old town you see and hear the green waves crashing over the breakers and craggy rocks. Most everything is quiet, except for the mind of one woman.

Where she comes form is vague; somewhere in Virginia. Somewhere where Catholicism, ADD education, and six children of her own made her life worth living, made her sanity worth holding on to. She doesn’t have any of that anymore.

We first met MA on the tarmac bus in Athens. We were waiting ten minutes on the bus, everyone was waiting. Our first impression of MA was the haphazard old woman, 60 years and looking it, who was making the entire plane from Athens to Chania late. She stumbled and waddled around the bus until she sat directly across from us. Bethany, bless her heart, is a nice person most of the time but in this particular situation she leaned over to me and whispered “I HATE this woman, I don’t know what it is about her but I HATE her.” She was serious, and she had reason to be. We often hate things we are afraid of, that disturb our vision of life, that interrupt our pleasant fates. Crazy interrupts. Bethany must have been sensing the whirlwind of confused emotion that this woman was going to put us through, all of us.

I told her, in my striving to be fair to someone we have never met, that she needed to calm down and just look away if she was being bothered. I told her that she was just a normal woman with a peculiar face and unfortunately repulsive facial gestures. Her twitching and soft whispering, her befuddled look of worry and confusion; it was a shattered soul leaking out through the cracks of a tired old body.

As we boarded the plane, Bethany and I were talking, looking through the same safety manuals in so many different languages, when MA pops her head right into our faces,

“Are you two going to meet Sara?! Are you Americans?”

Yes we were and yes we are. At this point I told Bethany that I was severely pissed at her for bringing down this hail of instant karma. MA was our new classmate for a 4 week, 60 hr a week teaching internship.

At the luggage pick up we got the full heave,

“I’m MA and I’m from Virginia and in Virginia I raised six kids, two are good and are you religious? Are you Christian because it is nice to do the Lord’s work and I worked with ADD kids, well actually, God worked with ADD kids and I was just there, or not, I started three schools, then I don’t know, I got, well let’s not get into that, I think I just put my own sock in my mouth so what did you study at school? My husband and I, well he is into some weird stuff, he hates me and, well, isn’t divorce just a bad thing? I got my Masters in secondary education and I just love working with ADD kids…I wonder if there are ADD kids in Jerusalem because I am going to Jerusalem…oh my heart stops just thinking about it! When I teach I just like to give the kids something to see, something brain based that they can touch like a bunny. In my classes at my schools I used to just plop a bunny rabbit right down in their laps and say, see isn’t that better? Did you bring bleach because I was told by a lady who gave me shots that you should dip your lettuce in bleach when you go to Greece so you don’t get e. coli and I was checking to see what kind of bleach you were going to use and…” SO ON AND SO ON AND SO ON.

Her favorite phrase is “one last thing…” which is NEVER the last thing because it never ends, ever. Ever.

And nothing could stop it. It was like a flood of nonsense, of pain, of longing to be heard, to be liked, to be noticed, to be in control, to be anywhere but in contemplation of what was really going on in her life.

Our class was relatively small, five students, which was nice because we all got a good amount of personal attention and coaching on areas we needed to improve. We also got to teach more classes a piece so it was a good set up. MA would stumble in late, spill coffee all over the floor, get up and leave randomly, give long semi-question speeches, clog up the toilets, leave half full milk cartons everywhere and steal all of the pens in the whole school. She couldn’t make it to school because she would get lost or sidetracked or caught up proselytizing Greeks in unrelenting streams of English. She tripped mid stride, broke or lost everything of value she ever held on to, and even dropped her passport in the gutter when crossing the street. Luckily, Bethany was behind her and picked it up, only to receive a sneer and a snatch. There was one point where she disappeared completely and the school staff and the landlords went to the police and hospital looking for her. It was only that evening that a student found her screaming at someone on a payphone. Needless to say, she didn’t pass the course

After a week of this, no one could really believe it, not even the instructor and especially not the landlord. It was too bizarre, too far from anything real that we had ever experienced and much too similar to a scene from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where any sense of normal is drowned in an eerie lack of self control, loss of boundaries and disregard for consequence. It was frustrating, but as it grew more and more serious, it was troubling.

She began prefacing her intrusive ramblings with things like,

“Thomas, I would hate to bother you, more than I would hate to slit my own wrists, up-ways not sideways, but could you help me find the phonetics sheet and make a copy of it for my class I am going to teach because I ripped mine up in a fit of rage...”

You knew she was crying for help but who were you to help her? What can you do for someone who is already running across the world to escape something? The other trainees and I had long talks about this and we agreed that, as bad as we all felt, the only one who could help MA was MA. Doctors couldn’t help, her family couldn’t help, we couldn’t help; she was truly alone.

She was so over medicated that she would not sleep all night. Her light was always on and at any hour of the night there would be loud bangs from her sliding around furniture, falling, breaking things. Day long screaming bouts to no observable being, sobs, threats, and a general air of misery sank out of her second story Cretan flat into the cold dark alley where only the feral cats were undisturbed.

What could we do? We had serious talks with the landlords about how we were concerned that she was going to kill herself, how she is a wreck. They knew more than we did. Upon cleaning her room the landlady found a large suitcase full of post-it notes and pages upon pages of incomprehensible scribble and rambling. Some of the notes said things like “I need you” and some “I hate you” and some “will you take me shopping?” Her quilt had pen ink splattered all over it. There were black of unknown substance all over the walls. Rotting food was stuffed under the bed. She would shout commands down at them, demand services never promised at all hours, freak out when it rained, and ask the same questions over and over. She was suffering; everyone was suffering.

It is hard to really give to you in words the full experience of living parallel to a nutcase, but it was something that weighed on all of us. We felt bad for disliking her, even though she was everything someone would dislike; she was rude, loud, messy, destructive, invasive, and self-righteous… but she was lost and we all knew it. We also knew that we were not the shepards to guide her home.

There are pits in this world, dark black pits of despair. We feel immune, we live above them, but they are there and they are destroying lives. We found out MA was in the hospital for having tried to kill herself one day before she left for Jerusalem. She is there now, presuming she made her flight. Who knows, maybe Jerusalem is it for her; maybe the holy city is the shove that will set her over or the slap that may bring her back. All she left behind her was seven bags full of plastic water bottles, a pile of used toilet tissue and a bar of soap in her coffee mug.

I know she has given me a new perspective on pain and on control.

Megan told us a story of a woman who was so destroyed at the thought of her husband’s recent affair that she started falling apart, little things like, tripping, messing up at work, sabotaging herself. She would curse her clumsiness, her stupidity, her inability to control anything until she finally faced the true problem that was eating her from inside. It takes a lot to face your life when it isn’t what you wanted it to be and it may hurt, it may kill you, but I can imagine a fate worse than death; when you live solely to wrap lies and fantasy around the true state of your life so that you can hide from what is really happening, who are you? MA has a demon inside of her, who knows what put it there, but only MA can chase it out.