LET ME MAKE DECISIONS WITHOUT MY TELEVISION

09.06.04


Today I feel kind of fed up with everything that interferes with my regular schedule. It is strange to cut your day into a thousand of pieces and to have to be happy with everything that happens to you. For example, it is very hard for me to get in and out from one situation to another. Secretary in the morning and writer in the evening. I read a mount of theories that are to help me with my work. Before I start writing, I play with the mouse for like half an hour, waiting for the brainstorm to come. I sometimes need to wait for about two hours. Suddenly, something hits me. I feel a blow prostrate me. My hands are placed on the keyboard. Right then and there, nothing can stop me.

Most times, I stay up late. When I go to bed, I turn on the TV for a while. It’s a trick to make me fall asleep. No matter how tired I am, the hypertension does not allow me to sleep a wink. Did you ever wonder how much can the TV hurt you? Not because it is a devil’s machine or something like that but because it can very easily destroy our ability to concentrate on something that we do. I know all this very well but I don’t turn the damn thing off. I’d rather snore on Pretenderis’ face than fall asleep, using the novel of my favourite author as a pillow.

At around 01:30 I often lie down having the Windows icons dancing like crazy before my eyes. I wish to sleep right on the spot without problems. I promise myself not to turn the TV on. I take in my hands the book that is closest to me. I start reading from the point where I had stopped the other time but I find out that I have forgotten everything. So I decide to read something from the previous pages. When I finally reach the point beyond which I have not read, I start feeling sleepy and thinking about thousands of other things, for example my posts on the weblog, the CDs that I would like to buy (if there is any possibility of ‘grabbing’ them from some itinerant seller for only 5 Euros), the trips on which I would like to go, the girls I would like to meet and those who I would have never liked to meet in the first place. How can someone read anything when they think of a million things all the time? You can’t even read love stories in popular magazines like this!

What’s wrong with the television, you’ll say. Something is wrong, very wrong. It has filled my mind with images from which I can be free only when I write. In fact, this doesn’t bother me so much. I have accepted that my generation is the generation of images. I confess that, when I write, I get to be inspired much more from the cinema images than from the works of other writers. This is a reason why I feel happy when I remember again everything that I have experienced. Even the worst things. I see my life pass by in front of me in tracks. I count my dreams: those that I managed to live and those that I still wait to see. This is what saves me from becoming unbearable. Nobody puts up with a person who goes on but with eyes on his/her back. But I do have a reason. I apply strategies that do not just serve the survival cause but will also guarantee me a good quality of life.

Whatever I read, I don’t find such instructions in books and, if I want to write my own things, I’d better not interfere with others’ thoughts. I used to feel bad, because, as a child, I didn’t read books, despite my parents’ advice. That matter had gone beyond the family case limits. My mother said this to her friends as well: ‘I am very sad with Nicholas. He doesn’t read any book whatsoever.’. So her friend Gogo came for the summer and brought me piles of books. Whenever she had the chance, she used to tell me: ‘I have some great books for you to read. You must read books, if you want to write good essays.’. In my opinion, this is the stupidest thing I ever heard. We don’t read books in order to write good essays but we read them because they are great when they have something to say. If we read because we have to, we understand absolutely nothing from what is written in the pages, and this is the best-case scenario. In the worst-case scenario, we decide to hate reading, which is what I had decided myself before I read the novels of Soti Triantafyllou.

I wish I could be as lucky to find people who would make me love everything else that I have hated in my life. Physiotherapy, for instance. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it! I have been doing physiotherapy since I was 8½ months old and I stopped it recently. Life is great without it, even when you know that stopping it might do you wrong. There are definitely much better things to do than sweating and letting everyone paw you for your own sake. I never struggled with such difficulties. I am glad that I can now decide what is good for me. Even when I make the wrong decisions.