The Long and Winding Road, that leads to Vergil's door

In our class' recent daily explorations of Vergil's Aeneid, the kiddies (read: me) are very interested in the role of the Roman gods in their quest to hinder/postpone/play with 'fate'. This topic has led us to ask what role fate and free will (or maybe....theology?) have in our own lives.
Or maybe it isn't Vergil at all who is sparking this debate, but rather the man behind the curtain:
http://www.lostpedia.com/wiki/Fate_versus_free_will

hmm. Of course, Aeneas' ultimate fate was never ultimately changed, but he did need a swift kick in the pants every now and then (now and again?) to get him goin towards that fate. Don't we all?

Lost, Santorini style

Lets talk a little bit about the power of this island. I have known many people who have shown up to this island and had their entire worlds rocked. Yeah, well, what exactly does that MEAN? Alright, let’s quantify it. ‘Bout five years ago I came here for a grad school course run by the College Year in Athens program. It was a three week course with mixed undergrads and grads. There were 12 of us, methinks. All of us had just planned on coming for our three weeks and then leaving. By the end of those three weeks, four of the twelve decided to forgo any plans they had the rest of the summer and FIND A WAY to stay here and also visit other islands as part of the package. At least two of those four quit jobs to do so. I would have been number five of that crew, was certainly willing to give up my originally planned summer job, but had a girlfriend at the time and thought it especially insane making THAT phone call, explaining why I was going to spend the next two months getting paid expenses to throw foreigners off their banana boats with the Aussies on Mylopotas Beach. I tried to convince her to come on over but…..yeah you gotta be here to experience that kind of insanity.

So, besides the four peeps who give it all up to stay here longer, get ready to have your head spun by a wild stat: I know three people who have landed on this island and at some point during their stay (usually early-on) realized that their current relationship is not what they hoped to be experiencing in life. This phenomenon is NOT, in my opinion, due to the fact that the tropical-infused atmosphere and inhibition-disregarding attractive summer inhabitants combine to make this a temptation island of sorts. I believe it is due to the concept that intense vacations often serve as self-examinations of your normal reality. Here, your reality is so altered that you cannot help but – in times of retrospection – examine your own day-to-day normal existence and measure whether or not it meets what you wanted to establish for yourself. Ok, so we’re entering mystical waters here but it is kind of like an out-of-body experience where you can kind of observe/evaluate how you’ve lived recently. ‘Minimizing the useless chatter of life’ is one of those frequently-quoted phrases cited when bringing up the advantages of intense travel, and I say for good reason. Intense doesn’t have to be 16 hours of plane rides away from home like this one, but it does have to minimize your normal attention-grabbing devices which dominate your usual reality. There is no email at this ‘hotel’, nor could I just walk down the street to reach one. It is a 12 euro cab ride or a 30 minute bus ride to find an internet café. However, you CAN walk down the street around midnight, pass by all three restaurants (all open-air) in this town and hear the entirely happy folks contently conversing in many languages accentuated by zero TVs or computers. When you can sit here on the rooftop of Pansion Carlos, looking up at 1,000 more stars that used to be obscured by the effects of Los Angeles by-products, rock out on whatever music allows for heightened awareness, AND because of your vantage point look out upon nearly the entire island and point out the other scattered towns, You’d be surprised at what epitomes surface. I told you this blog would have some ‘Lost’ references, eh? An island with magical powers. Don’t think I don’t recognize the irony involved in the fact that I had to find an internet café to post this…

vivamus atque amemus -- Catullus

Ah, the perils of starting a blog. One, there is a basic implicit presumption that you feel you have something worth saying, or being read by others. Well, those are just the naysayers, the “energy-suckers” (thanks E.A. for defining that years ago), those smiling skeptically with one arched eyebrow. Well who cares! It will be fun to look back one day and marvel at the lack of wisdom I sure will permeate this blog. Plus, it’s just good, damn clean fun. Props to Jonah and Dr. L (‘a friend of a friend’) for providing inspiration.

There is also the danger that a blog about spending the summer abroad in nautical pursuits will turn into haughty-taughty “woe is me they only had Heineken light on Ios” sort of dribble. The fact that my full name sounds exceedingly preppy certainly brings me one more step closer to that eventual outcome of the blog. “Buffy, warm up the catamaran, we’re late for the sunset cruise around the volcano!” Hopefully I can capture a few of the memorable images of current life in the nooks of the world I will be inhabiting, and thus perhaps give that final nudge to a bunch of my cohorts who are thisclose to pulling the trigger on getting their momentum-lacking selves over there. I know, I know, it ain’t easy to get there, but it is damn easy to live cheaply and perfectly happily. Pause, and read those final two words again. I tell ya, easy. Pick up a copy of Ralph Potts’ VAGABONDING, or just ask anyone who has dropped everything to separate themselves from their current reliable, semi-predictable existence; find out if any have regretted it. I am seriously still looking for that person who says that they shouldn’t have taken that leap of faith, that they shouldn’t have stretched their moolah a little thin on that crazy monster plane ticket, so that my data will be mildly more interesting and reputable, but I haven’t found one. Also check out the book HONEYMOON WITH MY BROTHER; a bit self-indulgent message in that book, but the basic idea is clear: get going. Pop in a “Café Del Mar” CD near a body of water and you’ll start to get the drift about what life is like in these places in summer, for just about everyone; seriously. (a lot of these random references will be fully revealed later on – I’m feeling some ‘Lost’ influences on the blog here) I envision posting about the demeanor of interesting people I will encounter, e.g. Greek island bus drivers, among whom I would happily spend many days with if my fluency was at all a reality and of course if they’d let “Emriki” (Americans) hang with them. Probably not, I ain’t cool enough. If anything, by the end of the summer let’s just hope peeps don’t have many “listen, buddy, what the **** is the point of your story?” moments. At least if that comment is posted I can sit back, flash an omniscient e-wink at the movie reference, and laugh at the concept of a blog at all. Got the idea?