MARIENTINA GOTSIS, M.F.A.

Guest blog posts for RWJF at

http://rwjfblogs.typepad.com/pioneer/2010/05/games-for-health-conference-day-2-highlights-.html

and

http://rwjfblogs.typepad.com/pioneer/2010/05/games-for-health-conference-a-look-back-at-day-1-from-hgr-grantee-marientina-gotsis.html

I will be in in Boston for the Annual Games for Health Conference from May 23 to May 28. I have followed this conference since its first few steps and it has grown and impressed me and surprised me. This year, I am giving a talk on mobile games for health focused more on the Wellness Partners Study funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation during the “Out & About: The Mobile Serious Games Conference” on the 25th and a talk during the regular tracks of the Games for Health Conference on my experience teaching design for games for health from the past two years of CTIN 492 Experimental Game Topics.

If you want to chat while I am there, drop me an email at my first name at yahoo.

It used to be fun. You could carry all your creature comforts with you on the plane. The seats were bigger. The lines were faster. The food was better. Taking a plane feels just one step more luxurious than taking a rural bus these days. There is no dignity left in traveling. Put your stuff in plastic bags. Take off your shoes. Pull out your laptop. Don’t wear an underwire bra. Take your decongestant. Throw out your water. Decide whether your bladder is big enough to choose window seating with two people sitting next to you. Squint to watch a movie you can barely hear.

Thankfully, face-to-face interaction upon reaching one’s destination is so rewarding that it makes up for this hassle and humiliation. Now if we could find a cure for jetlag, I wouldn’t be writing this post at 3am EST when my biological clock is set to PST. And where does all the lost time go? How old are we really when we travel so much? Have I traveled enough to actually be 2 years older? It sure feels like it.

7 more plane rides until mid- June. At least a week’s worth of aging suspended midair.

Dear Kelly,

It has been two months since Dad called to tell me that you were gone. He was very upset you know. He liked taking care of you whenever you were around. Do you still remember that summer he cooked for us gourmet food every day at the beach house? Or that time when we took him to a gay bar in Castro with Cat after having those delicious crepes? I hope you remember still. I wanted to let you know wherever you are that I am trying hard not to be sad. I am doing my best. But it just doesn’t seem real that you left. When I wrote our grandfather’s obituary three years ago it wasn’t easy but it was something I could do. It was ok to let him go. He lived for almost a whole century. He didn’t suffer. We lived him, through him, with him. He was always with us one way or another.

I don’t know what to do with you sweetie. Why did you get into that car? Why? How do you expect me to accept this and move on? It just isn’t possible. I could never let go of you, no matter what happened. So there will be no obituary for you from me. I just can’t do it. It isn’t acceptable. You lived a very full life but in haste, almost frantic with your travels and incredible appetite for fun. You really did have fun. But you always said you never wanted to get married, never wanted to have kids, never wanted to grow old. And we all smiled and imagined you becoming old but not really aging, sipping your drink and dancing to Billy Idol and looking no different than you did when you were twenty-five even at ninety-seven like Pappou. He would have been a hundred years old this summer. You would have liked that.

Pappou’s time came and he aged but he never got sick. We bid him farewell. It was our fantasy for you not to age, but this was not the way to go about preserving it. So forgive me if I am angry. Forgive me if I am sad. I am trying to be happy and enjoy my life, the one I really want to have. I want to get married. I want to have kids. I am growing old. And you aren’t around. You haven’t been around for awhile. You have been busy living in haste. And dying under the most extraordinary and unusual of circumstances. It is ok when it is on television. It is not ok when I have to forever imagine over and over the last few minutes of your death. Were you scared? Were you lonely? When will you tell me? In my mind, it just wasn’t you. It couldn’t be you. It will never be you. A case of mistaken identity perhaps. So no obituary koukla. Just keep partying.

Take care and I will see you sometime not too soon, but it is ok because I know you’ll keep busy. You always have some place to go that is more exciting.

love,
M

fierce and wild
sweet and gentle
wearing grandpa’s baby blues
piercing, loving

catch you on the edge of the sun
riding your chariot of fire
red and black forever

in my heart, forever.

***

I will count to 100 now and when I turn around, it will be your turn. If you want me to keep going, just let me know. I will wait until it is my turn.

I recently found this piece below again. A little bit of truth and a little bit of fiction. The mundane nature of breakups and the process of sorting one’s life through objects is something that has always interested me. I did a photo installation project with a narrative that then turned into a clumsy voiceover nine years ago here.

The Way Out of A Man’s Heart
by Marientina Gotsis, (c) 2008

Marjane opened the door of the apartment where she used to live. She walked through the front instead of the back door. She was now a ‘guest’ with a key. It was strange to be in the apartment that used to be theirs. It was now his. She walked lightly and respectfully toward the kitchen–afraid of an unplanned encounter. The last items to be removed per Marcel’s request were the contents of the fridge that reminded him of her. “I am now alone,” he told her staring at a frozen steak.

She opened the door of the fridge and stared at every shelf. A hundred memories flashed in front of her eyes and she slammed the door of the fridge shut. Marjane turned her back away from the fridge and looked at all the half-empty shelves that used to be stocked with “their” things. The fridge would soon be ‘his’. She opened the door of the fridge again and started putting items carefully into a paper bag trying not to think. She remembered the hundreds of times she must have filled ‘their’ fridge. There it was staring at her. She thought that by now he must have certainly thrown it out. She held it in her hands and examined it carefully.

Suddenly, Marjane heard a noise at the front door. She panicked thinking that it may be him. She grabbed the paper bag, shoved the last item in her purse and ran out from the back door. Marcel walked into the house from the front door and headed into the kitchen. He opened the fridge and inspected the shelves. He frowned and closed the door. He grabbed a paper towel and opened the fridge again. He wiped the ring left on a shelf from an item that was no longer there and threw the towel into the trash.

I have revamped my experimental games course to be “Health & Interactive Media”. The new syllabus can be found here. It is a crash course on design thinking for health applications and health games. Should be a lot of fun and I am looking forward to brainstorming with the students.

In 2006, I wrote this post about Edwin, a homeless man I talked to for some time — a habit I don’t indulge in very often. His sister contacted me out of the blue and shared his life story, that of a smart and talented man who suffered from neglect, abuse and mental illness and drowned his pain in substances. A life wasted. A common, heartbreaking story. Back when I wrote the aforementioned blog post, I used to read the Steve Lopez column about Nathaniel, the schizophrenic musician he followed around for some time. A movie was made inspired by their encounter. No movie will ever be made about Edwin, but his life is no less worth remembering. If nothing else, as a lesson about how little we do about helping people with mental illness in this world.

How can one help people in need through meaningful ways, beyond just giving them a few guilty bucks? It is often hard to tell what they really need and I can’t feel responsible for every single person on the street. Life is always so uneven. I had never seen homeless people until I moved to the United States. While I was growing up in Athens, even during the recession one only saw the occasional drunk sleeping on a bench. Now Athens is full of homeless people, much like it was in post-WWII Greece when Hitler left the country in starvation by shipping away all the food.

The numbers can’t be verified but somewhere in the range of 100-300 thousand people died without food. Athens was a dire place back then. My mother near died of typhoid in the city. My father fared better in the country as they could at least grow some vegetables.  It is hard to imagine a time when the wheelbarrows carried dead bodies out of the cities. Yet in our towns today, homeless people are found dead on the street everyday and many aren’t  mourned for by anyone. We often think that “those people” had a choice and somehow should had pulled themselves up by their bootstraps.

Mental illness is uncomfortable to think about and it is often hard to imagine what someone is or was without it. We romanticize and/or demonize mental illness in movies, media and in our imagination. We’re all guilty but setting boundaries against someone who is behaving less than “normal” and beyond “eccentric” is a hard thing to do. A lack of knowledge about accurate science regarding mental illness has a lot to do with this. “Normal” is not just a socially constructed group of characteristics and behaviors. Just ask someone who isn’t functioning to the fullest of their potential. And we do need science to help, because loving people is just not enough…

We know that some of the risks that increase the incidence of mental illness are inherited. Others are a result of a crappy upbringing or simply too many traumatic events in one’s life.  Resilience can be inherited but is not endless and artifacts of stress and anxiety can be passed on to our offspring at a genetic level. How can we prevent all this? I am learning a lot through a partnership with Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child. My partners in developing an interactive project that could help re-frame how we think about child development are Nahil Sharkasi, Diane Tucker and Amy Akmal.

Edwin is a face to a socially constructed predicament we all encounter too often for comfort. Maybe this project can go further than the 20 bucks I gave to Edwin at a corner gas station: sadly, it was too late to do anything else for him.

I hadn’t updated my website since 2003 and it has become embarrassing to ask people to “just Google me”. After all, Google doesn’t tell the whole story…I bit the bullet, installed Wordpress and started writing. Six years is a pretty long time. I guess I have been pretty busy and I am not as young as I used to be

I hope you enjoy the new website. I have been living in the past for too long!