Where I Am

This is a picture of a landscape on Corfu, a small island in the Ionian Sea. It is technically part of Greece, but its economy depends on foreign tourism. The best time to visit Corfu is either May or September, because that's when nobody else wants to visit it, so you'll be able to find a decent spot at the beach. Tourist literature advises, however, that you watch out for that Greek sun, because unlike foreign visitors, it is never absent from the island.

I don't know about you, but I have a hard time believing that Corfu really exists. It just seems improbable that there are places where absolutely nothing happens and no one minds. Yet that's the whole appeal of a resort island: the message is, Come here, and nothing will happen to you.

On the campus of Lewis and Clark College, however, you have to be doing something even when you're not doing anything. This something is called "chilling," as in "Just chilling," as in "We're just chilling." It is a nebulous pursuit, and yet essential. If someone is a druggie, gambler, misogynist, and runs over small animals with his car, but knows how to have fun, it can at least be said of him that he is chill, if nothing else. It is apparently the highest praise I can give when I say that my roommate is "chilling like a corpse in a morgue freezer." Whoa, yeah.

In the picture, Corfu looks lovely and mysterious. If I were on a plane, and my flight had to make an emergency landing there, I wouldn't complain. Oregon, on the other hand, is probably best viewed from the air. Not that it isn't a pretty place; when the weather is overcast it even feels contemplative. But the weather has not been overcast since I came here, and when the sun is out, the city of Portland seems super-friendly and somehow vulgar. You are reminded that it's a west coast city, and therefore an upstart. It's a young, eager city with none of the grown-up austerity of New York and none of the gerontocratic grandeur of Washington. Its buildings seem provisional. Its occupants are a culturally diverse melting pot of granola.

I'm signing off now, but don't worry; I'll be back. Just in case you were worried.

How Did I Get to This Point?

I really didn't intend to make a blog. I just wanted to comment on blog of a friend. But somehow I signed up to publish my own (mostly by accident, but I can't promise that there weren't any subconscious desires involved), and I've never been good at backing out of things. It must be my upbringing. So here I am, and here you are, if anyone is in fact reading this.

What shall we talk about today? Shall we shake our heads at the dismal goings-on in the world? There's no shortage of disasters to choose from. How about the war in Iraq? Perhaps not. Rumour has it that a blogger or two may have previously addressed that topic, and I'd hate to reinvent the wheel. How about hurricanes? All right -

Please give to hurricane victims. You're probably much better off than they are, after all.

There; now that my civic duty is done, I guess I'll talk about where I got the names of my blog and my persona (both of which, apparently, have already been used, but as they [the French] say, c'est la vie). "The Daily Mail" is the name of a British newspaper (which I learned about from the Beatles tune "Paperback Writer") and appears here because there's a ring of futility to it. "Idioteque" is, as some of you will certainly know, the name of a Radiohead song which I took and misspelled for my own purposes, because (as luck would have it) it also has a ring of futility to it.

I guess that's all for now, folks. I'm going to go leave that comment that I got onto this site for in the first place.