Overdue Occurrence

 hi blogsters, blog readers, blog enthusiasts

I haven't updated this in a whileeee. I think it's because I've just been journaling. 

I wrote a tidbit for this blog on June 5th, but I never finished it and thus I never posted it. Here it is:

I've got big news 

I broke my nose.

I was at a show at an undisclosed location (on May 31st) and there was this girl, she was small but she was feral, who gave me a whack on my nose with her entire arm. My eyes immediately started watering, actually, not just watering, tears were streaming down my face. But it wasn't like oh my god this hurts so bad I'm crying out of pain it was genuinely involuntary due to the location of the impact. I knew something was up when my nose started swelling up. I was asking everyone "hey does my nose look swollen" but they were like "nahhhh you can't tell." When I got home I put some ice on that schnoz. 

Saturday (June 1st)  it was still kinda swollen but not noticeably so. I would tell people I broke my nose but they wouldn't believe me. 

Sunday morning (June 2nd), I wake up, I grab the mirror, and BOOM. Bruises under my eyes. Very noticable. My mom went berserk. I won't go into the details but basically she thinks I'm crazy and I am banned from shows for a while... Woe is me. 

Here are some photos:

1st from when I first realized it was broken. 2nd from Sunday morning. 3rd at school, self-made comparisons to goob from meet the robinsons. 4th photo from some days after so you can see those bruisessss.  (These photos and this description was added July 21st, was not in the original post. The rest of the writing is from June 5th)

I don't know how I'm gonna get out of the whole "no shows" condition, but I'll find a way. 

In other news, school is almost over. There are only ~5 days of school left. 

For my English class we had to do this thing called a senior portrait which is basically a reflection of your 4 years at Stuy, but it can honestly be anything you want it to be. Some kid researched linear algebra for his senior portrait. It doesn't have to be high school oriented, it can bring back stuff from middle school and beyond. Mine is 78 pages. The way I completed mine was by going through my camera roll (my Google photos) and picking out photos that represented a memory I wanted to mention in this senior portrait and I added it to the doc and wrote a caption for it. I also included the captions from posts on my spam account on there too. Mine is 78 pages because I wanted this for my future self to reference. It's just a long scrapbook basically. Interestingly, I didn't directly talk about shows and photos and music in mine because I had so much other stuff I wanted to get through. Originally I was thinking of making a playlist based on each semester of Stuy, but I realized that would take so much work so I decided against it. I keep all my Spotify playlists, so if it ever want to go back to that time of my life I can just go to spotify. I was also thinking of talking about movies and my favorite movies throughout high school, but I didn't do that because that too was a lot of work. Technically I could still do that and just not submit it, but my motivation is gone. 

School is almost done but we still have assignments. Forensics especially is a bitchy class. We completed like 3 labs in the last few weeks, but couldn't we have done those throughout the semester instead of stuffing them in at the end? I'm leeching off the juniors I'm grouped up with. We also had to film some CSI video thing, my group's video is hilariously pathetic but it's fine, we just need a grade in there. 

OH MY GOD I want to mention how I made a documentary for my video production class. I went to the project reach show at the Vans skate park and I interviewed a few people and yada yada yada I made a documentary and everyone that has seen it has said it's really good. I can't post it online just yet because I need to bleep out some info that should not be on the internet. When I finally get around to editing it for YouTube it's going to be awesome #boss #bossmodeactivated. 

FAST FORWARD

TO JULY 21ST

Ok it's been over a month since I wrote that stuff on my school chromebook during various classes where we had so little to do that I was writing a blog post. Lots to update I guess. My last post was from. Oh my. April 24th 2024. That was 3 months ago. Oops. I got inspired to write this post after seeing Joey's blog post and also Masha's post on substack. What even is substack anyways? Here's the link to that if you are interested. 

Currently, I am in Athens, Greece. I have been here since July 15th and will stay here until July 27th at which point I will leave for Chios. If you remember my blog post from last year (damn), this is the typical Tsahalis summer pattern: NYC --> Athens --> Chios. I am the most bored in Athens out of all these summer locations. I live in Vrilissia (which is around 30 mins from the city) in my grandparents' house. There's nothing to do here, I've been watching a lot of movies on Netflix (which is way better in Greece than in the US), I've read a bit, I haven't been journaling much because I just don't have the motivation for it. Every year I'm in Athens, I rot. My sleep schedule gets fucked up because I stay up late entertaining myself with the wonders of the internet. My screen time goes way up. The only fun part of this portion of the summer is when I get to go into the city. But there have been two interesting events from the past two days:

July 19th I posted on my instagram story that I'm in Athens. I get a message from Macarena, a girl I met two summers ago when I did the Harvard Pre-College program. She tells me she's in Athens and yada yada yada I get my mom to drive me into the city at 10pm (we reach Syntagma at 10:30) and boom Macarena links. We send a photo of us linking to the group chat of the people from the Harvard program and Liza (another girl we met two summers ago) replies and says that she's also in Greece. Yada yada yada we walk over to the restaurant where Liza and her parents are eating at like midnight. I got home at like 1:45am. Here is a photo: 

 International links go crazy.

Also peep the Ferocious X shirt. Repping logout in Athens yktv.

July 20th (aka yesterday) links were premeditated. Tim knew he was going to be in Athens on July 20th for a certain period of time. As the day got closer, the details were finalized. We were gonna meet on the Alimos Marina from 3:30pm until 5pm. Ultimately the meeting time ended up being 2:30pm. My mom drove me over there and dropped me off. We walked around Alimos, so much uphill walking, it was so hot, I was sweating like a pig but he was somehow not sweating which is crazy cuz you would think my Greek genetics would make me well suited for the heat. Surprise, they absolutely do not. But I will take Athens summer heat over NYC summer heat any day. Speaking of NYC...

I'M GOING TO TALK ABOUT MY TIME IN NYC BEFORE I LEFT FOR GREECE.

Notes first...

Harkening back to my mother's ban on shows due to the breaking of my nose: Yeah that was not enforced. I was not effectively grounded so I just continued going to shows but lied about my whereabouts. When my mother called me when I was at a show I would run to a spot far away from any commotion so she wouldn't hear any music and get suspicious. At this one trash bridge show I lied and told her I was at Barrett's house and we were watching a movie which is why I couldn't leave for at least another hour, y'know, buying myself time. 

Also, that "documentary for my video production class" I talked about? I finally uploaded it to YouTube. Here is the link. I only had to add two bleeps but I procrastinated it for so long that the free Adobe Premiere Pro account I had expired (cuz all Adobe stuff is free for NYC DOE students, and I guess they were quick asf with ending the free stuff once you graduate) so I had to download another editing software and add those bleeps. I wish I could change some audio levels for certain clips but it would be way easier if I still had access to Premiere Pro where each clip was still editable instead of having to work with the full video as one chunk. It could be done, but I am lazy so I didn't. 

Generally...

From the last day of school (June 13th) until the day I left for Greece (July 15th) I packed my schedule with links. At a certain point I, I, was like I need a break I need a day of rest. If you know me you know that I love social interaction. I never get tired of seeing people and going to shows nonstop. But man... after a few weeks it genuinely tired me out, which is a crazy sensation for me. June 28th I took a rest day but it wasn't fully a rest day because I went to Target with my mom in the afternoon. 

My mom left for Greece on June 30th so I had the frib until July 14th. There were like two more days I stayed home after she left. Barrett and I had plans to have a two week long sleepover but after one night where they slept over those plans fell through. I had to run administrative errands while my mom was out and let me tell you, everything is harder in Astoria when you don't have a car. Well we have a car but I can't drive, and all civilization (aka Ditmars) is a 20 minute walk away (vs a 5 minute car ride). Having to walk to Ditmars (or pray that I can catch the Q69) in the unbearable NYC summer heat felt like hell. I sweat so bad. 

OK let me explain the Greece heat vs. NYC heat thing I mentioned earlier. Summer in NYC is so humid. So so so so so humid. The weather app says 86° but scroll down to the real feel and it's actually 98° with the humidity factored in. In Athens, it says 86° and the real feel is actually 84° because it's not humid and it's a bit windy. Ok maybe I'm a bit biased because I'm not saying the weather from the same time of day, cuz yeah Athens gets really hot in the afternoon. Let me give an example from today using the tempature in Athens right now and the predicted temp of NYC (in 7 hours): 

Right now (8:22pm) it's 88° in Athens and the real feel is 89°. In NYC at 8:22pm it's going to be... shit... 80° and the real feel is going to be... fuck... 80°. Ok in my defense, Athens is going through a bit of a heat wave right now, with the high temp today is 98° while in NYC it's 86°. There's also a "severe high temperature warning" for Greece on the weather app right now so.... Ok whatever I'm wrong but you get the idea, humid vs not humid, at least in the NYC I experienced this summer. 

 I won't go into detail on everything I did during that month of summer vacation in NYC, but I hung out with friends as much as I could because people are leaving for college. I'm glad I'm staying in the city for college, NYU is a good choice for me. I chose my classes and all of them are really interesting so I'm excited for first semester. Second semester I'm going to take (modern) Greek Intermediate II classes which I'm really excited for because I've always been insecure about my Greek abilities. And while I have been assured I don't speak with a very noticeable American accent, my vocabulary is very elementary so glad I'm gonna be able to take Greek in college . 

In other news, my nona (godmother in Greek, not grandmother) gave me a lot of money on an Amazon gift card as a graduation present. While I appreciated the offer, I was faced with the dilemma of what the fuck am I gonna buy from... Amazon. I decided to buy a $50 camcorder 

(the rest of the money I'll spend on college dorm supplies (which only amounted to like $60 worth of stuff LOL cuz I'm frugal), maybe books, and eventually after some time passes and I can't think of anything else worthwhile to order off Amazon I might just spend it on clothing essentials like socks and underwear to donate.)

I've been having a lot of fun with the camera, and I find myself using my film camera (for photography) less often. I have some black and white film loaded up in there, I have yet to finish the roll. I like video as a medium because you can hear the conversations and the dynamics present in the moment that a photograph can't capture as easily. The problem is that video is a lot harder to share because it's a takes a lot more storage to download a video rather than a few photos. 

Maybe one day I'll compile the videos I take into an entertaining video and post in on YouTube. In the meantime I've just been editing the clips together based on the day that it was taken and keeping them stored on my laptop. The one time I downloaded a video and tried to send it to the people that were in the video I used WeTransfer to send a link to the video but it took hours, over 6 hours at least, I forgot how many, for the video to upload to WeTransfer because of how slow the Wi-Fi is here in my grandparents' house in Athens. 

There's not much more to say so I'll move on to...

MEDIA

Everyone's favorite segment.

 Movies

• I've watched 12 movies in July. That's a lot for me especially since July isn't even over yet. For reference, I watched 10 in June and 5 in May. The last blog post was April 24th, so I'll just discuss my favorites from then to now.
• Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion I really enjoyed. Lots of funny lines.
• Footloose. Call me stupid but I really enjoyed this. The Footloose song is fun asf and all the dancing is contagious. 
• The 400 Blows is a really well done movie, but maybe my opinion on it was influenced by the fact that I had watched Pretty Woman two days before, and Pretty Woman is a really badly done movie (imo...)
• Can’t Hardly Wait. I am a sucker for high school cliché rom com movies. I watched this on June 20th on the day of my graduation from Stuyvesant High School. I got home after eating a lunch with my mom after the whole graduation ceremony and I had time to kill and was in the mood to watch movies about high school graduation. Turns out I've watched most of the heavy hitters already. First I watched The To Do List, which sucked really bad. I didn't wanna leave graduation night on a bad note so I put on Can’t Hardly Wait with really low expectations cuz everyone said it was a movie full of clichés and that it was pretty bad. I watched it and I surprisingly enjoyed it a lot. Yes there were clichés but all the storylines were covered well and it was fun and entertaining. 
• Bottoms. This movie was really funny and I'm so mad I didn't watch it in theaters when it came out, it would have been really fun. 
• These were all the movies that I liked enough to classify as "liked" on my letterboxd. If you want to see the rest of my opinions, as usual, check out my letterboxd @konstantuba. 

Also here's a funny photo: 

                             

Music

I've been on a mission. I'm taking my free time in Greece as an opportunity to listen to as many new albums as possible. Ok not like new albums but albums new to me but also albums I want to revisit. 

• I've been getting through the entire Siouxsie and the Banshees discography but because it gets boring and I tend to run through the album twice or so before I consider myself finished with it, it's been taking a while lol. 
• I also made it a goal for myself to listen to the music from NYC bands so I can be more fluent in my band knowledge when I get back to the city. Until now, I was really only listening to Dollhouse and Abism on Spotify, but I downloaded some more albums which I didn't realize were on Spotify (like Decept, I had no idea they were on Spotify cuz I never even checked) and I also downloaded an app where I can download YouTube videos. First, I download albums from YouTube on that app and if I like the album enough, I go through the effort and download the album onto my computer and use Spotify local files to add it to my Spotify playlist. 
• Eventually once I finish the NYC bands, I'm gonna listen to the bands not from NYC but have played here/are going to play here and THENNN I'm gonna listen to the Greek hardcore bands not on Spotify (cuz the ones on Spotify are for the most part metal trash). 

Books

• I finished reading the Connie Converse book that Barrett lent to me. It was like 450 pages of text and 500 pages including notes at the end. I gave it back to them before I left for Greece
• I brought 3 books with me to Greece:
• The Day the Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk 1980-1984 by Ian Glasper. I bought this book like 2-3 years ago at an anarchist book fair and I had it on my bookshelf since then. I saw it and was like oh shit I forgot I had this and immediately added it to my collection of books to bring to Greece
• Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz. I decided to bring some Queer theory to refresh my mind. 
• Queen Lucia & Miss Mapp: The Mapp & Lucia Novels by E. F. Benson. This is a book I started reading a while ago, got to the halfway point during the summer of last year, and never touched it again when I came back to the city. I used it as a beach book, an easy read, a slightly dull read, but I'm gonna use it as a beach book again cuz I don't wanna leave the book half finished, I feel bad. 

OK THAT'S IT THIS HAS BEEN A VERY LONG BLOG POST

I will leave you with this humorous photo: 

BYE

Oh also Biden just dropped out from the prez race lol