Sinister: You made me smile again; in fact, I may be sore from it, its been awhile.

[stacey dahling]

Hello kiddies..

Gosh last post I was so cryptic and weird and miserable sounding. Well, I’m 
not, anymore. And I wasn’t, even then, for long. I think it was partly the 
book I was reading (of human bondage, w. somerset maughan, depressing but 
good for thinking) and the pills I had stopped taking (because they were 
pulled from the shelves, being DANGEROUS and all that.. hmm). Well, the book 
is finished and the pills have been replaced after a dreadful day combing 
the city streets, ready to collapse.
And all is well in Athens. Well, in my little bit of it.
I’ve started reading “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” by Dave 
Eggers and it is SO fantastic! Really, truly. I was hesitant to read it 
because I had heard he was a bit um.. egotistical. But awww. It’s so lovely! 
I made the mistake of reading it often while on public transport. No one in 
Athens reads on buses or trains or anything and I get the strangest looks as 
I smile and bite my finger to stop myself from giggling insanely. The book 
makes me do that a great deal, see. Read it.
Speaking of buses (as we often are..are we obsessed?) I got on an empty bus 
at the abandoned airport the other day and the bus driver took an odd route 
that ended up going three stops toward the sea, turning around, returning to 
the airport, racing through the empty parking lots at top speed, swerving in 
and out of traffic islands, then continuing on to Athens as if nothing odd 
had happened, pretending not to see the old men waving at him at bus stops 
to slow down, coming to screeching halts to let them on, then having big 
fights with them while almost driving headlong into telephone poles. Hmm.
Also, I just discovered Ron Sexsmith. Has everyone heard of this guy and 
decided not to tell me? He’s so lovely!!! I especially like the song “words 
we never use.” And today, while searching the internet to find out what he 
looks like, I discovered he’s touring at this very moment and will be in 
many cities near you European folk very soon! If not today! For instance, 
he’ll be in Edinburgh tonight, Aberdeen tomorrow, Glasgow the 1st, then 
Manchester, Leeds, Cardiff, Bristol, London, Paris, Brighton and Vienna. No 
Athens, tho. Figures. Go here for specifics: 
http://www.ronsexsmith.com/tour.html and check him out.
I wrote to Aden recently, because I was bored, and asked them when they 
would be coming to Athens. Hahaha, I said. Just kidding. But really now. Why 
doesn’t anyone ever come here? Hmm. Well, jeff, the lovely lead singer, did 
write a lovely note back. And now we’re pen pals. Well, not really. He 
hasn’t written again since. But I like to pretend. Maybe I’ll write emails 
to loads of random small indie bands and make pen pal friends. Cause I don’t 
have enough indie lovely pen pal friends I’ll never meet, right? Blech.
Other than that, I realized I’m still spending too much time on #sinister. 
Everyday I check the stats and I’m getting higher and higher on the ranking 
of who has said the most lines (ie: who spends way too much time in here, 
poor loser with no social life). But the stats page is highly amusing 
nonetheless, with random quotes taken out of context that are often 
astounding and insulting and silly, yet somehow seem to accurately capture 
each person. And it has fascinating facts like who smiles the most or least, 
who yells, who is aggressive (moi?? Weird..). Much fun. Here’s the link:

http://honey.crockery.org/auntwendy/stats.html

Okay, story time.

(warning: this will be long. I don’t wanna hear it. Skip if you like.)

Did I ever tell you about the Finnish lesbian who tracked us down and 
invited us over for drinks? And how we went? No? Well, it’s a bit odd. But 
such things seem to happen so often to us that they are normal now. Which is 
perhaps more frightening. So this Finnish woman, her name is Anna, has a 
sister in Amherst, Mass., where I went to school and one town over from 
where Coral and I used to live, prior to up and moving to Greece like the 
nutters we are. We wrote a silly story documenting the move for a magazine 
that gets inserted into the local newspaper over there, where we used to 
work. So this sister reads this article and calls Anna, the Finn, telling 
her all about us and how she simply MUST track us down because we obviously 
have so much in common. What could that possibly be? Well, Anna happens to 
be quite young - 28 - and studying journalism and made a similar radical 
move, and actually lives at the other end of the brothel street. AND it 
should be mentioned here that our town in America, Northampton, is 
predominantly populated by lesbians so she makes a few assumption in that 
direction as well. Mmmm.
So she called our employer here and leaves a message and we call her and 
agree - are we crazy? - to go to her house for drinks. We get there and 
Coral is ecstatic because 1) Anna has three cats to pet and Coral misses her 
cat, and 2) Anna is obviously a militant lesbian and Coral, who spent 4 
years at Smith College where no one graduates without sleeping with a girl, 
misses hanging out with lesbians almost as much as petting cats. Coral 
promptly gets smashed on wine and talks about sex, a favorite topic of hers, 
while I keep escaping to the bathroom in sneezing fits because I have 
apparently somehow developed an allergy to cats since moving here 6 months 
ago. Odd. I finally manage to pull Coral away at 2 a.m. and we walk down the 
brothel street, now teeming with activity, and I have to hold Coral back 
with all my might to prevent her from entering a few strip clubs. Sigh.
The other night we invited Anna over for dinner, along with Coral’s 
boyfriend, Peter, who she has been planning to break up with for a week now. 
I think the sight of Peter was a bit of a shock for Anna, who undoubtedly 
assumed Coral and I were a couple. Mmm hmmm. Her attention was focused 
largely on me all night and I was feeling a bit uncomfortable. And tired 
because of the previous night’s events, which I will get to in a bit. 
Anyway, she makes me drink lots (hmmm) and then we all settle down and eat 
and she insist we play Truth or Dare. Oh GAWD. I roll my eyes and almost get 
up to leave but Coral gives me an evil look that clearly translates into: 
“Don’t you dare, you have to be social tonight and are not allowed to flee 
to your room.”
The game is basically a game of Truth, we’re too old for dares I guess, and 
a very somber one at that. All the questions are monsters. Like: what is 
your biggest regret? Your greatest fear? Your happiest time? Only at the end 
do we realize we should have asked stuff like: If you had to remove a body 
part which would you chose? Anna did, however, take the opportunity to ask 
our sexualities, point blank. I said straight and she pretended she didn’t 
hear me and asked me two more times. Then she went out for a cigarette with 
Coral and asked her if I was really secretly gay, as she suspected. Argh! 
I’m really sick of ppl being convinced I’m really secretly gay. I know I 
don’t exude sex or anything, but really. I know lots of people assume Coral 
and I are a couple, which for some reason does not bother me in the 
slightest. I guess it just bothers me sometimes because it reminds me that 
I’m not in any sort of relationship that would prove without a doubt where 
my sexuality lies. Bugger.

Today I actually wrote a work-related story about my apocalyptic journey to 
Northern Greece. I am beside myself. I don’t know what to do now. I haven’t 
written anything work-related in months! Wow! Anyway, I can’t think of an 
ending though. Goddamn!

Speaking of work, I am entering my second week of brat-sitting. The first 
day was pretty uneventful and almost too easy. The kids spent the first hour 
playing Nintendo and the second hour drawing and working in their English 
workbooks. Like... they WANTED to do HOMEWORK. I was floored! And they 
didn’t fight once and they made no mess and when the parents came home we 
were all laying on the floor with crayons, chatting away in English about 
what happens when they lose their teeth. The mother’s jaw actually dropped. 
Second day I spend 1 ½ hours laying on the floor listening as they gossip 
with a friend in Greek about their classmates, using their little plastic 
rulers to saw into different color erasers. They collected the filings in 
little plastic containers, presumably because they were.. pretty? Pretty 
little colored filings? Um.. sure! Kids are WEIRD! But I didn’t complain. We 
spent the last half hour in a pillow fight. Saturday, however, was hellish. 
Not really. The neighboring adorable blond Kinder-advertisement-perfect 
German boy was over and we played football with his adorable little dog for 
about 20 mins. Then the boys played Nintendo and I taught the girl how to 
play 20 questions, which she LOVED and we played it for hours. Which got 
really boring. But kept us occupied. Then we played a rather raucous version 
of hide and seek that involved running to safety. All indoors, of course. 
Then the boys built a fort and we passed insulting notes under the door 
(some of which I translated into English - to be educational, you know, 
because it’s important they learn “you and your friend are inconsiderate 
jerks who don’t play nice and we don’t like you”). Then the girl and I 
played some complex jail game of her own devising, which involved me 
escaping and running around a lot. Then I started to draw sketches of the 
kids and once they discovered what an artist I am (ha!) they started to 
model for me. Their mom came home while I was feeding them and stopped in 
horror at the scene of disarray - rugs moved, shoes and toys in the middle 
of the floor - and yelled at not only the kids, but me too. Aparently, 
running around inside the house is not allowed. Oops. How was I to know? So 
I go Monday to see the kids and the girl runs to the door and pulls me into 
her room and the boy runs out of the kitchen to grab my other hand and 
apparently the kids LOVE me! Go figure! The mother tells me how shocked she 
is, how the girl has been asking about me alllll day and complaining that I 
should come earlier. When I was interviewing for the job, the mother 
informed me point-blank that she had been through two other 
baby-sitter/tutors recently because they could not handle the kids, who tend 
to attempt to kill each other whenever the mother’s back is turned. She 
clearly suspected I was too weak to handle the brats. But aha! We spent the 
two hours playing 20 questions and drawing. I even taught them checkers. And 
they asked me to say “sure” and “mmm hmmmm” loads. Aww. It was a nice 
feeling, knowing they actually like me, that they waited anxiously for me to 
arrive.

Saturday was the first day in more than a month that I woke up before 10 
a.m. And after five hours chasing the brats, by nighttime I was ready to lay 
in bed with Eggers and finish him off, when I got a call from Joanna. Within 
hours I was dressed and pressed and on my way to the ice cream shop where 
she works for a night of dancing. We were to join her friends at this 
supposedly cool club for a 60’s, 70’s, 80’s night. The club was PACKED, to 
the point where we were upset because it would prohibit our dancing, since 
our superior moves require lots of room. We somehow found Joanna’s friends, 
squished against the DJ booth, and stood there, bopping our heads a bit 
since it was the only body part we could move. I won’t go into extreme 
detail here, since I did that last time we went out dancing and it took up 
an entire post, but suffice it to say there was some very, very good music, 
punctuated by some very, very bad music (of the slow-dancing celine dion and 
Barbara streisand ilk). The place very slowly cleared out and by about 3 
a.m. we had some room to move. I was ecstatic when the good DJ (there were 
two, one was very very bad) pumped out some OLD SKOOL RAP! And I could 
astound with my lyrical masterness, but unfortunately some scary 
stuck-in-the-eighties man with long curly hair (that he whipped around 
frequently, spraying us with sweat!) stole the limelight when he attempted 
to breakdance. When the A-Ha came on about an hour later tho, I was the cool 
kid with my Molly Ringwald moves. Not only did people stop to stare, they 
actually tried to COPY. Oh yes. And I got to teach Joanna and her friends 
the proper hand motions to YMCA by the Village people. It’s not often that I 
feel like a representative of Americana, but at such times my chest heaves 
with pride. Um. Yeah. Nothing like representing cheesy American culture to 
get my chest heaving. Ha!

I’m seriously considering adding this club to the Athenian picnic agenda. 
I’m thinking afternoon picnic, walk along the beach, club (maybe a touch of 
bowling thrown in to kill some time? Ha! Bowling! In greece! Rawk!). And 
ooh, I visited the picnic site and it’s a bit.. quirky. But in the very best 
way. It is literally in the middle of the parking lots and runways of an 
abandoned airport. It’ll be just us and a family of barking dogs and lush 
grass and palm trees and intrepid kids learning to drive. Mmmm hmmm.

Anyhoo.
That was way too long, as always.
But if you read this far you were probably bored and in need of entertaining 
anyway, so no complaints!

Mwah!
~dahling

http://www.geocities.com/dahling007


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