Taxi

Anyone who's lived or at least spent some time in Greece, has had to engage in some kind of conversation with a taxi driver. Greek cab drivers are quite vocal about their beliefs, whether they seem to actually want to talk to you or not. Most often, they will engage in some sort of political talk, about current affairs, the economy and such. Other times, they'll show you their kids in a picture, play a sound clip of their offspring's singing capabilities, or alternatively talk about the merits of unmarried life. They might even provide you with a step-by-step analysis of the only diet out there that works - the latter advice coming from a 60-year-old driver, who quite obviously thought I should loose some weight.

The truth is that I'm one of those people who gives in and talks away until I reach my destination. A friend recently told me that she's had enough of these taxi-driver-ranting sessions: “my alone time is precious, and I prefer to keep it to myself if possible” she told me. Her solution is a set of earphones. And she claims it works wonders. I, on the other hand, haven't had enough, yet. Because, there is a chance that after you've bumped into the politically “conscious”, the rude and the funky, you might come about a person that will choose to open his or her heart in such an eloquent way that it leaves you completely dumfounded.

Today, I got into a cab in the center of Athens. The taxi driver was a woman in her late thirties. As soon as I closed the door, she asked me sweetly if I was OK. I answered that I was, wondering if I looked ill or something. I politely asked her back if she was OK, and she answered that she was, but things were looking hard... She has worked all her life, far more hours than anyone should have to in a lifetime. If she were able to stop working for a living right now (she made a point of saying “for a living”, leaving other options open), she would in a split second. She has three kids. The youngest of them has the flu, hence she can't go visit her friend that just had a baby. She has no time for herself. She feels that her womanhood is slipping away, and that this job is to be blamed for. “No one respects you. The other drivers don't respect you, nor do the buses, or the police, or the passengers, or even your fellow cab drivers”. This job has made her stiff and defensive. It has made her build a butch front that she carries back home and that she swears has nothing to do with her real self. “I can't just switch it off and just be who I really am”.

Her story was moving and turned out to be quite sincere; five minutes before I had reached work, she got a call from her son's school. He had been playing with his mobile phone in class and had been caught in the act. He had gotten detention for it and now the taxi driver mom was calling him on that same mobile phone. “What the f*** my boy? Why? Why? What the f***?” Her sweet voice had turned into the “truck driver's roar” she had previously referred to, while lamenting on her sad evolution. Apart from the fare I owed her, those were pretty much her last words to me. She looked at me as if to say “See?” and drove away.

Try wearing earphones through that...

How to raise a child Part 1

I was supposed to stick to a simple rule, i.e. post on Mondays and Fridays without exception. Well, the prohibited exception happened much to early and I'm not too happy about it. It's Tuesday, and my only excuse for not posting either on Friday or yesterday was the fact that I was traveling from Athens to Paris with my one-year-old and there was too much to do once we got here, mostly involving organizing the premises for a smooth transition for P., my son. Untold rule No 2: I was also not supposed to bore you with constant references to P. but I guess I can't help myself sometimes. So I'm going to go ahead and tie this all up with some thoughts on a really interesting article on motherhood. It's an article forwarded to me by my husband, after it kept being on top of the "most read" list every single time he checked the WSJ website. At some point he gave in and started reading, and suggested that I follow suit.
It's by Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School and a mother of two little girls. The WSJ article actually constitutes an excerpt from her recently released book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. I read the article with mixed but equally strong emotions. For those who do not have time to read it, it's about the superiority of the Chinese way of raising children, and specifically, about the choices and strategies of a Chinese mother, based on first-hand experience. Chua, who is a Chinese-American mother, making the stereotype even more specific, maps out the differences between a “Chinese mother” and a “Western mother”, claiming that in contrast to the latter, the former type does not care at all about the child's psyche, believes that her children owe her everything, and that she knows what is best for them. For the Chinese mother, her child can excel in anything as long as serious work is involved; hard work can translate into fun when well-deserved praise is offered honestly and whole-heartedly after the child has truly succeeded in something.

Having said that, there's a lot of shocking factor involved, including evidence of screaming, pushing the child to unnecessary limits and anecdotes about not allowing sleepovers, playdates or to get “any grade less than an A”. Many have reacted through comments on the WSJ site, blogs devoted to motherhood and other media. However, there is something else to consider here. According to Chua, Chinese mothers focus on “letting [their children] see what they're capable of, and arming them with skills, work habits and inner confidence that no one can ever take away”. She juxtaposes this with Western mothers who focus on nurture and security. And just like that, by the end of the article, cosy words like “nurture”, standing on their own, seem irrelevant to the goal of building the right foundations for bringing up a stable and self-assured person who understands the value of hard work and what it can offer him in life – rest assured that I'm talking less about money and/or fame and more about actual happiness.

Personally, I know I'm not a Chinese mother, and that is not only due to reasons related to race. I am a Western mother who will probably skip the three-hour daily music practice rule that Chua enforces in her home, and who soon after posting this entry, will go back to her inbox and read Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop newsletter about a day in the life of three working mothers (including hers and Stella McCartney's). Gwyneth is no Yale professor, but I guess everyone should be able to enjoy a variety of inspirational sources to make up their own little plan. So off to read Goop while Chua's book gets ordered on Amazon... Anyone else inspired?

Inaccessibility

Yesterday I was driving around for quite a while, trying to find an open pharmacy. Unfortunately, in Greece, the cure for a case of baby stomach flu on a Sunday afternoon involves a 50-minute drive and two stops at two different stores (the first did not stock the much-needed lactose-free baby milk). Greeks, including myself, are quite used to this inaccessibility on Sundays. On a good Sunday, I might be missing some vanilla essence for those Nigella Lawson cookies that I love to bake on weekends. It's annoying, but I just skip the vanilla step and hope for the best. On a bad Sunday, if someone in the family isn't feeling very well and I haven't “properly prepared” myself for food-poisoning or a little kid moaning in pain, I feel lousy and maybe a bit guilty for not having been proactive. Yesterday however, I felt disappointment and anger.

As I was driving through Halandri, a very commercial neighborhood in Athens, miles of closed and unlit stores seemed to be mocking me. There I was, trying to find an open store on a Sunday, in a country whose citizens need to work more, now more than ever. I couldn't help but wonder how we can afford to be so lazy. We know that after the early hours of Saturday evenings, any kind of normal commercial activity will have to wait until Monday morning. Monday afternoons are out of the equation and so are Wednesday afternoons... We have learned to live with inaccessibility, often misunderstanding it for luxury. But hey, luxury isn't having to drive for 50 minutes when there are more than 5 pharmacies situated within a half-mile radius from home (as evidenced on a map provided by an iPhone application I recently downloaded). It may have been considered luxury for the people who own the pharmacies and all those other stores, but is no longer relevant to the current situation in Greece. I know a pharmacist who actually wants to keep his store open on weekdays from 2pm to 5pm, but can't because of the Union. Where's the luxury in that?

Catfish

I watched Catfish last night (you can download the film on iTunes or learn more about it here and here). It’s an award-winning documentary by directors Rel Schulman and Henry Joost, and since its premiere at Sundance it keeps on getting one great review after another. Last night, it mysteriously appeared on the “top movies” list of my Apple TV (which is somewhat peculiar for a documentary), so I downloaded it. Talking about this film is quite tricky because I don’t intend to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it. I’m compelled to share though that it consists of mouth-watering twists ad turns and a brilliantly effortless use of the technologies that nowadays define our everyday lives as social beings.

What I loved most about Catfish were its filmmakers themselves. They were present, vocal and playful, and never seemed to care too much about what they were doing, except when things got tricky, and that’s when they proved they were not afraid at all to jump into deep waters. In fact, they showed great reflexes. Most of all though, they were my favorite part of the film because they seemed (and most probably were) as clueless as their audience. That is what makes their film so interesting. Granted, documentary is supposed to be a genre that unfolds some kind of truth in front of the camera (or some particular person’s truth, as my freshman filmmaker mother would say). But in Mr. Schulman’s and Mr. Joost’s film, this cluelessness is complemented by a natural unfolding of emotions that is exactly what drives their choices and the direction the film takes in its second half. Catfish does not only document the search for a certain truth; it documents how human emotions can end up tampering with that search altogether. And that is a whole different kind of truth… 

Prophets

Two things bothered me in a recent poll taken by a stat company for the Greek daily To Vima. The first had to do with the percentage of people who think that destroying property of others is an efficient way of demonstrating against governmental policy. If I were to generalize based on the specific poll, almost 11% of Greeks believe that it's OK to wreck other people's property. There is something deeply wrong about this, especially if one considers that 11% of Greeks corresponds to almost 1 million people. Especially, when last May, three people lost their lives in a bank in central Athens, during a fire that broke out as a result of an explosion related to the ongoing demostrations.

The second thing that bothered me, had to do with the answers Greek people gave to the question “who in your opinion was the most important figure in Greece, based on his/her work in 2010?” The answers included the Prime Minister George Papandreou (34.6% of votes made up the oddly reassuring No 1), the President of the Republic Karolos Papoulias (a percentage of 16.3% constituted the conservative No 3) and the Archbishop Ieronymos (who came in at No 4, with an orthodoxically loyal following of 14.6 % of the total votes). Those people were bound to be among the top names. But they were not alone. Eighty-five year-old Mikis Theodorakis, a celebrated composer-turned-prophet seems to “speak” to the people more than Mr. Papoulias. At No 2, he was named most important person of 2010 by more than 25% of the people who participated in the poll. I have heard Mr. Theodorakis talk politics and he does not make sense. He is aggressively hostile to Americans and capitalism and draws paradigms from long lost regimes, that are at the least irrelevant to our current situation. I used to sing his music at school, as part of our school choir repertoire, and I can actually hum a relatively surprising number of his tunes. The same ones that make most Greeks nostalgic of an era that has settled in the collective Greek memory as driven by a strong sense of idealism and justice, a blossom in the shadow of evil things such as dictatorship. There is no doubt that Mr. Theodorakis is an extremely talented individual. His legacy will succeed him for many years to come. But his political ambition as witnessed in prophet-like speeches (I have heard more than one in random press conferences for even more random concerts) and angry letters (distributed to newspapers in good old-fashioned paper, with organized PR emails announcing their arrival) becomes nothing but an obstacle to our understanding of our own reality.

And then at No 5, there's Mr. Lazopoulos, a theater person, another prophet, this time revered through the television screen, where every week, he claims to help us understand this reality. He is a master in sarcasm and a talented monteur. He can act and he can sing and seems to have an opinion on everything from his theater “rival” Ms. Mimi Denisi to Mr. George Papandreou himself. His interest in Mimi and other pop culture goddesses attracts more followers that his interest in politics would have, at least in the beginning. But he shouldn't be the fifth most important Greek person of 2010. He shouldn't precede the new mayor of Athens, Mr. Kaminis, and he shouldn't precede our Finance Minister, Mr. Papakonstantinou. Not surprisingly he's one of the people who communicates with enthusiasm Mr. Theodorakis' declarations. A prophet helping a prophet. Both ways. Meanwhile, destroying our intellectual property. Maybe Mr. Theodorakis and Mr. Lazopoulos are part of that very alarming 11%.