Politics, friendship and consistency

Life is known about throwing random shit at you when you don’t expect it. For example. A friend of mine, she’s going to be a Municipal Consultant in the city I was living from 1990 to 2006. We were from the same school and we were friends. We shared some great LOLS and some views of the world around us.

She never was too popular within our peer group. Nor too attractive too. But she was caring and kind – she still is I think. We shared the same views when we were at school. Especially in politics. Neither of us gave a shit on that topic.

Then real life happened. I’d picture it as a great whale on wheels

And I learned sociology. A.K.A. WHY I hate politics so much.

So, all of my friends know how I feel about politics and the political system in Greece. It sucks badly and just goes downwards. That’s why our little country is in crisis and we will inevitably end up working 12 hours for a souvlaki. If this happens, everybody will move to Athens.

So, despite having moved to another town with my family and my voting rights are in Athens, she contacted me through Facebook to announce me that she decided to go for Municipal Consultant in the next Municipal elections. It left me in wonder. What happened to the little rebel she was during school? I know she may have changed. Grown up, accepted some stuff, but, I changed too. I learned, I made mistakes too. We are human. But, what happened to the consistency of what we say to what we do?

I don’t know. Maybe it’s still a mystery why she wanted to pull this off.

Anyway, she asked me to pass her FB group around and also told me to speak with whatever old friend I have that still lives in the old town. The problem is, I almost lost track of everybody. Plus, I vote on an entirely different municipality. So I told her that I would try. In reality, I was shocked and annoyed all together. But I just couldn’t tell her straight.

I wish good luck to her and be succesful and a good politician (if she chooses to move forward from that) I still have faith in my generation to change something. Maybe…

Till then, here’s future!

The Phone Tandem nightmare

Phones are here to make us miserable and they must go straight to hell. Even though I am quite fond of being able to communicate with people far away without moving my body the slightest, sometimes I swear I want to go back to the time where Bell stole the invention of the phone from Tesla and tell him that he would never EVER have profit of such device.

As most of you probably know, I like siesta. Meaning, sleeping an hour or so after lunch. It’s some sort of powersleep that maintains my awareness through the rest of the day.

So, in my bedroom there are two beds (the other one is for whoever comes as a guest, and a storage place full of computer components and/or cables) Two little counters and my Desk.

The counter near my bed has a brown landline phone that’s muted most of the time. My mobile phone is hung on the window because living in the basement is like living inside a Faraday Cage. Meaning that no GSM reception can penetrate it. Sometimes I have to OPEN the window, put the phone almost outside and connect my wired hands-free in order to have a proper conversation.

When I’m waiting for a phone call I de-mute the landline phone. Then the shit hits the fan.

Yeah it’s never EVER the one who I wait a call from. It’s usually a random friend, aunt or co-worker of my mother, usually having blond hair shaped like a banana peel saying how manly my voice has grown through ages and other stuff I don’t care to hear about. So I shout to my mom to pick up the phone even though she picks it up by herself because 99% of the phone calls are for her, so she has something like an intuition for picking up phones. Then go back to sleep. Alas.

In a weird subsequent tandem, My mobile phone rings. I have a ringtone from Initial D anime and live action series. While I first put it I thought it’s cooler than north pole, now it’s more annoying than a female penguin staging an orgasm.

So, that means that I have to stand up, open up the window, hook my hands-free and put the phone almost outside so I can talk. And it is the one WHO F*ING KNOWS THAT I WANT TO SLEEP. But my sleep is never a priority.

My beautiful nap is ruined. Thank you.

Oh, and don’t ask why I am grumpy some evenings. Don’t-you-dare.

Does this happen to anybody else?

Dear Facebook. I swear this is the last time you screw me up like this.

Also, fuck you.

[edit]

Kind of overdid it with resizing causing eye-destroying blur. Now it’s fixed.

Random update is random

Instead of getting prepared for my English and French courses I happen to have this evening, I decided to post a random update.

You probably know that I live close to dinosaur fossils and/or dragons. Namely, I now live in the basement of my parents house. It’s a four story house with an underground garage.

So, Here’s a quick plan

In case I gave you the wrong impression, we are nor rich. Well, we are not poor either. The land this thing was built upon was my grandpa’s heritage to my father, so we gave almost half of the land and we got three of those. The other two are for rent.

Anyhow, I’m not very fond of my house for three reasons.

External design.

Most of the houses around our area have various decorations, curved balconies and pointy roofs and arks kinda look like this.

Not an actual nearby house but you got the idea.

However, our house looks like a box. No shitting. This thing is as cubic as if the god had a cubic diarrhea and shat cubes the one on top of each other and made a house.

On second thought, Maybe it’s made off of Tetris blocks! That’d be awesome. But even so, there must be someone placing them the right way. Which in our case, the one is a total douche.

Interior Design

It is believed that the smaller are the rooms, the cozier they get. On the other side, the bigger, the better. That confused the architect so much, we either have big spacious rooms or little ones that feel like suffocating and pain. Plus, not all rooms have the same ceiling height. The room layout kind of looks like the above Tetris gangbang.

Also, I hate the placement of my room. It’s right under a huge surface of cement and tiles exposed to the elements of nature. It’s the coldest room in the winter because it’s underground, and the warmest in the summer because the sun heats the layers of cement and tiles making it a nice little oven.

Last but not least

The cost to run this fucker.

It sports an internal elevator, there is a total of 4 toilets flushing all day long, We have all sorts of appliances, it takes forever to heat in the winter and an ice age to cool in the summer. It needs a lot of money for electricity and water bills. Oh, and maintenance too. So, even though we live in such a big house, I still sit on an office chair that I have from middle school (13 years) Actually, it’s a transvestite between my middle school chair that’s green and my brother’s middle school chair that’s gray.

So we are leaving in a huge spacious house without ensuring the comfort in it. Well, my brother worked hard and we got a niche television set and sound system for us to play games on, and internet is running wirelessly through the entire house but still. Getting inside a behemoth like that one’s expecting to see a comfortable house with plenty of elegance and awesome. PLUS, all the guests… correction, all my parent’s guests, get to sleep either to my or my brothers room. We already have a guest room, but there’s just a transforming couch that’s uncomfortable as hell.

And don’t get me started about the problematic construction of the house. Mostly because I have to do those French exercises.

See? I bitched again.

A revelation about toys (also I realized that I’m old)

 

So, I have recently revisited two big toy supermarkets that happen to be close by, in order to buy a present for a friend’s kid. I couldn’t help it but let myself gawk at the many toys that those stores have richly in stock. Some of them got me impressed like the kid I used to be discovering something new and interesting. Some others though left me in disgust like the adult I am discovering a smelly turd under my shoe.

When I was a kid. Me and my peer group of kids were easily impressed by complex toys. We liked Transformers for they were able to transform from a vehicle to a robot. We liked buying Lego buckets sets for they had around 200 pieces instead of buying pre-set models. We liked toy cassette players and walkmans for they were technologically advanced. Also, videogames, because not only they were computers we could play, they were also quite complex for the adults to understand.

I found out that nowadays, toys weren’t selling for their complexity/cleverness or whatever else, but for the brand. I mean, Ben 10 was selling a simple LCD watch wrapped in plastic and resembling something (but not quite) like the watch Ben wears on the cartoon.

 

Remembering myself back in the days I was a kid, I wouldn’t even want a watch WHITHOUT BACKLIGHT! Yeah, really. Back then we didn’t care if the watch was from Lion King or whatever. We wanted to be backlit, or have a lot of pointers, or have a calculator built in or even speak!

The infamous speaking watch

So, I found out that kids nowadays don’t care about complexity. They care about brand. I saw Dora the explorer playing clay selling better than the classic six color box of playing clays. Take into consideration that Dora the Explorer playing clay was way more expensive and had a SINGLE color. Yeah, that’s right. The product didn’t sell the quantity nor the variety nor the quality. Its major selling point was the brand. What a disgrace.

The same tragic story also applied within products of the same company. Lego’s major selling series is Basic. The well known bricky series we all played (and some of us still play) The Lego Harry Potter and Star Wars models are expensive as hell. Even the smallest one can cost like 50 euros or so. But the buckets of 200 or 100 pieces are far cheaper, considering that you buy enough pieces to make 7 of the cheapest Harry Potter models except the colors with the price tag not going over 40 euros. Note that the pieces on both products were the ones from the Basic series.

Still the kids that got to the Lego department of the store, were mostly amazed about the fact that the Lego products were Harry Potter branded than the fact that with a bucket they could make a bazillion contraptions plus having a neat Lego themed basket to store all the pieces in.

So you can easily wrap a plank into some branded material and sell it as expensive as shit, just to have an instant mine of gold.

It’s not that our toys weren’t branded or we weren’t brand whores. But we looked more on the toy itself to see how we can make the most out of it. Our parents were quite restrictive and instead of buying us little cheap crap every other day, they were getting us nice stuff three times a year – namely, Christmas, Summer and Birthdays. So what happened?

I’ll tell you what happened. Toy manufacturers and cartoon networks are maximizing their profits by selling to kids silly, cheaply made branded crap.

If you are a parent listen to this: Tell your kids that Dora the explorer will grow up to be a whore. Ben 10 has killed his mother and Gormiti are creatures that live in a sick man’s colon (they look like shit anyway) and buy good, nicely made toys that are creative and complex enough to stimulate that freaking front cortex of their brains that it’s dying while watching dumb cartoons, keep your kids entertained for longer and endure the test of time.

Kids aren’t cheap beggars or something. I understand now why my parents bought me nice toys fewer times a year. I had something to play with and be happy for longer and I learned how precious is to wait for something good than to ask for random shit.

Most importantly. Fuck up your life all that you want. Really. But don’t take your kids with you, ok?

Bitched enough for today. K thnx bye.