Hi all,
I’ve been in Athens for the last 47 days. I leave tomorrow. I stayed in an AirBnb called “Bright Architect’s Nest @ the center of Koukaki” in the neighborhood of Koukaki for a month with Hanna, and I’ve spent the last 17 days alone in an AirBnB called “Family- Enjoy Athens, Parthenon view, apt 90m2” in a much worse neighborhood called Colonus. My first two days alone were extraordinarily productive, and then I had about four days that were so bad I was thinking of buying a ticket to like, anywhere else, despite having already paid in full for the AirBnB, and then something changed, and I’ve had a really amazing time since then. A few things that I did differently:
stopped reading fiction
started reading a book about tech companies by an NYU business professor who earnestly uses the word “phat” in a book published in 2017
started watching standup on YouTube when I got up in the morning. My favorite discovery has been Nate Bargatze
started drinking sugar-filled energy drinks like Red Bull and Monster and Four Loko and “Hell.” They actually have less caffeine in them per volume than coffee; I think it’s mostly just the sugar that makes them mood-altering
also, made more of a concerted effort to talk/Skype with people more regularly
Anyway, tomorrow I’m going to Oslo to meet up with Hanna again.
People sometimes ask me how I’m affording to travel/live like I have done for the past year and a half, and part of me suspects some suspicion that I’m being bankrolled by rich parents. This is not what is happening. Aside from the $25,000 grant I got in July 2018, and the remote copywriting work I’ve been doing, I’m just burning through the savings I accumulated from four years of working full-time in Toronto between 2014 and 2018.
This is possible because I am very frugal. When I have a regular job I spend very little money, so I save a lot every month. This isn’t especially strenuous or virtuous on my part; it’s just a way of existing that was ingrained in me from an upbringing where I always had worse clothes and gear than most other people at school—I wore very clearly women’s pants handed down from my mom my first year of high school—and I sort of had to develop values and an attitude based around that. I know my parents bought a house in the country because that was the only place they could afford to live, but other than that it was never clear to me how much our spending habits were ideological and how much was just due to bank balance. We ate spaghetti with homemade tomato sauce most nights, and, living in Glenburnie, in the Canadian countryside, I interacted with a retail environment approximately zero times a month. Before I started working I got an allowance of $3 a week, and I never really chafed against that. It was made very clear that getting any money at all for doing nothing was a privilege and not a right. Even when I became a teenager and started working and hanging out at the local employee-owned café (the Sleepless Goat), I would spend like, $4 a week on a tea and a muffin. My consumption from childhood into my teenage years was books and the internet. And so as an adult, it feels normal to me to not drink much, not take taxis, buy very few physical objects (makes traveling easier), and rarely eat out. I’ve eaten the same thing for dinner about 70% (?) of nights for the past 13 (?) years: rice, vegetables, peanut butter, soy sauce, rice vinegar. It’s the best meal of all time and it costs maybe two dollars. It’s inspired by a dish called re gan mian, or hot dry noodles, which I used to buy from the noodle stall around the corner from the school I taught at in China when I was 21.
I also chose Athens primarily because it was cheap. I’m paying CAD$19 a night for the 90m2 apartment I’m in right now.
This is not to say I don’t have other advantages. My parents now have more money than they did when I was growing up, so I know if I needed to I could lean on them. That goes a long way.
Anyway, I’m starting to run out of money, so I’ll have to start working in a more full-time way sometime in the next few months. This last year and a half has been an experiment in investing in my writing career, financially and energy-wise, in as focused a way as I could figure out how to do. Hopefully something comes of it.
Speaking of which: Miss Misery, the web series I made with Jade Blair, got into a film festival in Miami, the Miami Web Fest, so that’s nice. I’ll likely be in Miami in mid-May. We are planning on releasing the show online in about 30 days.
The novel I’m working on might be coming along, too.
Re Athens: the most memorable time here was probably drinking absolutely disgusting raki at a “90s hacker”/anarchist bar called Metaxa2, with Hanna, in a neighborhood called Exarchia, which people seem to consider ‘the cool neighborhood’, but which means something different post-debt crisis. Until recently it was a safe haven for immigrant-filled squats, and apparently police didn’t enter, but since the new conservative government it’s now just an area with excellent €2.50 vegan souvlaki and every square inch of street-facing wall covered in graffiti (as seen in my Instagram stories). Anyway, Metaxa2 has all this “hacker art” on the walls, which was like, a dial-up modem glued to a piece of plywood. The server was a middle-aged man with a ponytail who seemed to be working his first-ever shift. He took my order and spun around and I had to call him back to take Hanna’s order too. Lots of dreadlocks and man buns and leather jackets and, weirdly to me but apparently fashionably for Europe, velour bell-bottom pants. We moved ourselves out to the patio to eat, and a girl on a stool covered pop songs on an acoustic guitar in a mix of English and Greek. There was a window from the patio directly into the kitchen, and the chef passed large bottles of beer directly to customers through it. It was generally understood that ponytail man was not really functioning as a server and had to somehow be circumvented. I tried not to judge him though because I imagined he had maybe been a professor or something pre-crisis. Hanna and I were the only ones eating.
Walking up Filopappou Hill for sunsets was also very nice. This was a hill near Hanna’s and my AirBnB that had a statue of Philopappos, aka Love Daddy. This one small hill in the center of Athens also had “the Prison of Socrates” and something called “Deaf Man’s Cave,” as well as a church and a fountain of Pnyx, a wall of Pnyx, and, simply, “The Pnyx.” The Parthenon, and the Acropolis, were also not bad.
I’ve been out on the balcony of my AirBnB in the sun as I’ve been writing this, but now the sun is starting to set and I’ll wrap it up. I want to say one more thing though about, I guess, aging: I mentioned I taught in China when I was 21. That was in a city called Wuhan, which of course is now famous for being the epicenter of the new coronavirus. I don’t know if I can exactly describe the depth of feeling this transfiguration has induced in me: Wuhan, which I’ve been thinking about in Athens because the two cities share some similarities, was the site of the 6-month hangover to some of the most intense interpersonal events in my life, and has calcified in my mnemonic amber to become this purely symbolic setting for the psychodrama of my early 20s which no one else I knew had ever heard of; and then, overnight, Wuhan took on a wholly new meaning for basically everyone in the world, suddenly and overwhelmingly dwarfing my regional interpretation. And—setting aside the threat to global human health the virus represents—it feels good for this to happen. It’s like, objective proof that the entirety of your personal existence on Earth, all your grudges and trauma and memories, are a tempest in a teapot, and it’s mildly amusing you ever thought otherwise.
Ok. I’m hungry. I’m going to go make that peanut butter stir fry now. My friend Laura McPhee-Browne, an Australian writer who just published her first novel, Cherry Beach, a Conversations-With-Friends-esque love story set largely in Toronto (hence the title), is arriving in Athens tonight with her boyfriend, and we’re going to have a drink.
Talk soon
Steve