Sinister: How to make things happen and a London Picnic

This is for anyone who may care what I think, especially those who are about to change their lives. Especially Vel and Sir David. Though, judging from his last post, he knows enough of this already. By the way, his post reminded me a lot of a Divine Comedy song that says: I can still remember When I was just a kid I was free to do what I wanted to But I never, ever did So now with years of discretion reached May we not forget "Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite" For there's life in the Old World yet! This is a story about making things happen. It is about being brave and having faith, I think. Also it is about how the world is bigger than you think. About how you have more possibilities, options, ways to do things, than you can see upon a casual look. It is also about the Internet, about how it makes the world bigger, how it opens doors that a few years ago would stay forever closed. Finally, it is a story about making great friends. Not that I haven’t told you it before… I have, but not from this point of view. And so: how to make things happen: 1. Wish!! 2. And dream. It’s important that you can imagine what you want, even if you can’t yet imagine how you can get it. 3. Don’t take no for answer. Believe there always is a way to get what you want, it’s just that you have to find it. 4. Get stubborn! It would be good, for a change. Want to prove to those who say you can’t have what you want that they are wrong. 5. Believe it will be fun, it will be great, that nothing will go wrong, that it’s worth the trouble, etc. Sometimes you’ll have to be patient, but think that whatever will happen in the end will be, if not the best, good. 6. The best plans are those made as you go along. Don’t get disappointed, watch out for the signs and follow them. By this point you’re probably laughing at me or shaking your head thinking this is too romantic, too unrealistic or just too nice to be true… I went through a lot of my stuff today, half-tidying half-looking for a photograph. And I came along all that, last spring, used to hang on my wall just above my bed; what was the first thing I saw when I woke up and what I stared at when I lied there dreaming, or crying, or talking on the phone, or maybe even making love. A picture of me aged one on a beach; a used bus ticket with random shapes and lines drawn on it (by a boy, in strange coloured ink), reading ‘zozefina’ and ‘tonight we fly’; a similar one with his name on it; a photo he had taken of the port in Prindizi, Italy; a photo a friend of mine had taken in Lisbon; a postcard showing a field of tulips, on the other side of which I had scrawled some Belle and Sebastian lyrics; a page torn out from a magazine, with the picture of an extremely expensive bicycle and some text I had found amazing; a postcard from a painting exhibition, showing random people doing random different things in random different cities round the world at the same time; and, finally, a map of Amsterdam that had been displayed in four different rooms of mine till then. It is surprising -though not completely unintentional- how much this selection of things said about my life then. And one of the things it shouted out was that I wanted to travel –it was shouting it out even before I had the chance to realise it. This story is strange –magical- and one that changed my life. (I am always saying how Sinister changed my life, how it made my world better –how it helped make it the place it should be. There are some nights I want to post love letters to the list. And it deserves it; as Ally Cook once said, maybe for something or someone else, but I’m not sure, ‘I think you’re wonderful, and so does everyone else.’ But here is the story of how this happened. Or rather of how it began to happen.) The aforementioned realisation came as I was on the phone to a friend, I think, when he suggested we joined some volunteer work camp thing for a few weeks, since we probably couldn’t afford to travel another way. And I found the idea extremely nice. I got excited and we spend some afternoons sitting in patches of grass in various part of the town planning it. And then, within the next four days or something, two things happened: one, my dad without knowing about this offered me money to go on a trip in the summer, as a present; two, my friend started changing his mind about how he’d like to spent his holiday. And there was I, suddenly being able to afford to travel around Europe, what we all had been dreaming of… with a friend who found it would be too much of an effort, why don’t we just go to an island instead? It almost made me shout I hate islands. And a boyfriend saying –saying- he’d come with me if he could afford it, and at the same time wanting to split up. And practically not much more. And it all felt more and more strange. By the way I had just got a computer, and I had made my first e-friend (through Napster). His name was Michael and he lived outside New York. He probably still does. He stopped writing sometime in July, but as far as I can remember he was sweet and I somehow miss him. I used to write him everyone once in a while and describe the state my life was in, mostly cause I was bored of narrating things to myself. I will quote these emails, not because I can’t be bothered to find another way to tell the story – well okay partly because I can be bothered to write it again; but mostly because I like how it shows exactly how I looked at these things before and while they were happening. Something I have forgotten now, really. 22nd of June: In my life, things keep getting better and then worse again and so on... it's kind of tiring but then again it's so strange it becomes interesting... It's a strange season... I was supposed to have exams, like from the 6th to 29th June but I don't because the university is closed... why is a long boring story... So I was prepared for studying and I find myself with nothing to do... At a time when everything, I mean most of my relationships and plans, seem to be trying to work out well but fail to do so... However, having a strange faith in god, or in the universe, or in the way things are, I believe that all this is leading somewhere and that somewhere is better than today... Naturally, feeling this way and as everything around me felt stranger and stranger, I ended up asking him if I could visit him. He said yes, but I never did. The ticket was far too expensive, I probably wouldn’t get a visa, and my mum said it was too far away. If he was in Europe, it would be okay, my –by then- ex boyfriend said, but New York is just too far away. And I got a bit scared, to be honest. I had only talked to him a few times, what did I know about him? But then something happened. Rachel came along, and she was in Europe. In Scotland!! The land of Belle and Sebastian!! And she wasn’t scary at all. She seemed to be very much like me to be scary. And she was the first person ever to give me advice that made me feel better instead of worse. 6th of July: Remember when things round here tried to get better but instead got worse? Well they're stuck at worse now... A long sad story... But somewhere far away from here things do want to get better! One day about a week ago I was in the Sinister chat room (people in love with Belle and Sebastian, yes) and I mentioned how bad I felt about breaking up, and a girl called Rachel started a private chat with me, she asked me if I was alright and seemed really upset... This ended up in her inviting me to Dundee, Scotland, and arranging that we'll afterwards go together to the Benicassim festival in Spain! I'm breaking up and still living with my boyfriend who prefers to avoid dealing with the situation, my other flatmates kind of ignores me though he used to be a friend of mine and his girlfriend hates me obviously, I'm fighting and crying most of those days (and also a few days ago I fought with my dad who was drunk and said all kinds of nonsense and my mum who was so tired of that she couldn't talk without starting to shout- but those two are better now). And besides all that, I'm excited and smiling! I'm leaving in less than ten days! For some reason this is the part I always get stuck when I try to tell this story, I don’t know what to say next. Should I talk about why and how we decided to do this? About whether we were worried or not? Was it out of desperation or was it something else? Or should I just say we did all that and had great fun and so we decided to do more like that? We just decided to do it. I don’t know exactly how, it just happened, I don’t know about Rachel but me, I was watching what was going on and participating in it –living- without thinking about it. Not without thinking at all, just without questioning everything and judging it using common sense and all that we usually do. I just did whatever felt right. And there was always something that felt right, even though sometimes it took a while to reveal itself. On a train between Barcelona and Benicassim, tired, hungry, excited and sleepy at the same time, Rachel and me told each other a lot of times, in lots of different words: never get disappointed. We had arrived in Barcelona feeling totally lost and not knowing whether we should continue or just spend the night there… when we heard the girls standing in front of us talking about Benicassim and decided it was a sign, and got tickets for the last train there. Which by the way was the first train there on that day to have sits free. There were people who had spent the day waiting at the station. We just arrived in time to catch it. And then I turned around to find Rachel wasn’t there and thought ‘great, the perfect time to get lost’ but it turned out she was talking to Vanessa. And this bumping into a Sinisterine in what at the time felt like the middle of nowhere gave us faith… I think I don’t know in what… People sometimes I ask me why do I write ‘keep the faith’, ‘what faith?’ they ask me; and I ask them back if they like Hefner. And if they say the absolutely adore them, then I tell them I have faith god is on my side. Were we worried? Well of course we were. Rachel more than me, I just couldn’t afford to be worried. My life was becoming stranger and stranger, in a bad way, every day; I just had to go somewhere else. From the night we decided to do it, in late June, to the day I flew back to Greece in mid-August, I can’t remember myself thinking it won’t be good, not even once. So yes, in a way it was desperation too, in a way in was naivety too –today, I wouldn’t agree to go visit I have only talked to on the internet once. But when you and a girl in Dundee had been having similar things happening to you, thinking similar thoughts and dreaming similar dreams, can you call yourself naïve for deciding to go on holiday with her the first night you meet her? Not that we knew that we had been having similar dreams and similar thoughts then. We only suspected it. But when it comes to travelling, wise decisions just seem to make themselves. Plans form themselves and great things just happen. The simple and modest plan that me and Rachel would meet in London for my birthday and spend a few days there was born on the 3rd of January; by the end of the month it included a London picnic, two Belle and Sebastian gigs, and a train ride to Scotland, and it had grown to be 15 days long. It happened like that: Stacey sent us an email saying the Athenian Picnic would probably be postponed. I almost sulked cause it was scheduled for my birthday, but then I decided I was too happy to sulk. Rachel decided she should do something about it and suggested (at a bus stop, while the bus was late) that we met in London for five days around that weekend. I said I probably couldn’t afford it, but (when the bus came) went back to her house and found a very cheap ticket from Athens to London (like 25 pounds with the taxes). We watched Martha meet Lawrence Daniel and Frank and where inspired to have a picnic on my birthday. I went back to Greece and told my mum, and all she did was say okay. Mark posted asking for people who turned 21 this year, I replied. He wrote back with weird explanations, from which I gathered he needed someone’s 21st or 30th birthday in order to book a club for tigermilking. I started bouncing around and wishing it would happen when I was in London. Mark got lazy about it, and I forgot. Belle and Sebastian announced three gigs in the UK, ten days after I was arriving there and while I didn’t have a return ticket. I spent a few sleepless nights trying to plan it and find a way to fund it. I concluded that saving hard, begging my mummy and the rest of my nice relatives, and taking advantage of the fact that it was my birthday would do. Or that it had to do anyway. I bought a return ticket for the 5th of April, and train ticket to Edinburgh. Rachel bought me one of the two gig tickets as a birthday present, I bought myself the other one. Then Mark jumped back in telling me he could have Tigermilking on the 23rd, “would you be 21 near that date”? So I went to the post office and posted a photocopy of my passport to him, in an envelope loaded with stamps. The next day he told me it wasn’t on. I sulked, while having a feeling I shouldn’t be sulking. He went to Scotland. He came back. He told me it was on. I stopped sulking. Rachel asked me if I ever intended to finish that post. I didn’t feel like it, but I had to. So here I am. Rachel tells me to tell you I’ll be 21. She also tells I should ask you lots of questions. Would you like to come to Tigermilking? It will be a bit like the birthday party I’ve never had. But then it will probably make up for not ever having a birthday party and most my birthdays up to now being quite crap, sniff. We could have had a picnic before hand, follow the tradition, but I like to do things differently. So I think we’ll have a picnic on the 24th. It’s a Sunday, twelve days from now and accidentally the day I‘ll 21. I think we’ll have it at Primrose hill. Because it’s classic for Sinister (Nicholas), it is a hill (Greg), it has nice view (lots of people), it is near to my house and I’m lazy (Paul Field), I’m getting curious about it and we can always end up in Paul’s house if the weather isn’t nice, (me). Hee, not really. So would you like to come? Would you like to email and tell me tell me where people usually meet and what they do in London picnics and where they go when it starts to rain? And finally, would you like to bring me a present? Love and long posts that confuse me, and travelling, and birthdays, Dimitra xx _________________________________________________________________ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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