Wounds Heal Better In The Sun

To live with what is unhealable

is presumably also living.

Just don't

turn the hurt into a god.

Also do not believe

that every wound is a stigma.

The sun has its glow, the blood also.

Competition is not necessary.

But it is a firm saying, worthy of adoption,

that wounds heal well in the sun.     Anna Greta Wide

I'm gradually losing hope again now.  But Anna Greta was right about the sun.  This morning's surprise intelligent conversation whilst the sun streamed in through the window, bringing the spectre of spring on the horizon, did me good.  Oh, if only there were true hope of a carefree and enjoyable ride into summer!  The desire to run away, the longing for a chance to lie about on the grass in a field and have the sun keep me warm is as strong as ever after such a tough winter.  There has to be hope of a holiday even though I have absolutely no idea how I'll ever afford one.  I'm so tired of the struggle; the battle to keep going.  The fight to hold back the tears.  The pulling at shreds of hope to make a future.

Make up your mind world.  Either pull me in from the platform and bring me a cup of tea, or let me go just as the fastest train hits its top speed.  I honestly don't mind which.

Hell On Earth

"The only message there is: be who you want to be and stick by it.  My [step] father got me a job at the Hotpoint factory to show me what the real values of life were.  And the real values of life were discussing football and reading the Daily Mirror every fucking day, so I thought I'd get some new values.  To spend your whole life doing a job you hate must be hell on earth.  Don't spend your life thinking 'if only' because it will kill you.  You'll die of regret."  Ian 'Lemmy' Kilminster

I tried to be who I wanted to be.  I really did.  But the consequence of that was ending up in a houseshare that nearly killed me because I didn't earn enough money (or any from the thing I worked hardest at) to get me out of there and into a place on my own.  So, if the choice is, die from unbearable housing situation or die from unbearable work situation, I suppose it's much of a muchness.  I'd settle for one of those secret suicide pills from NASA right now.  But they're secret, so I don't suppose they'd do me the courtesy of sending me one even if I asked nicely, would they?

Oh to have the luxury of good timing so that your principles can serve you well enough that you never have to change them...

Despair and despondency

What a difference a day makes.  

I thought a full day-off would help, but of course, it only serves to allow me just enough time to see how horrible my day-to-day existence (it would be wholly inaccurate to call this 'a life') has become.  Given the chance to see the number of hours I'm working and the dramatically non-corresponding financial reward, I'm tempted right back into despondency.  I cannot live like this.  It's not just the work itself, which is denying me any time to be creative unless I take the risk of making myself ill by regularly getting only as much sleep as a new parent, but it is the lack of appreciation and consideration for all that I am managing to do, which threatens to overwhelm me.  I may as well have embarked on motherhood.  The problem of unpaid, hard-work that goes unappreciated is absolutely identical.

There must be a way out of this?  Surely my efforts to learn Czech and continue to practise French and continue to play music in the last spare minutes I have left, must count for something?  Come on someone, hire me for work I can actually excel at.  Or at least make a headstone saying 'she really did try' and lay a comfy blanket and pillow in the grave for me to lie on and bring me the barbiturates to see me on my way out of here, so that I don't have to go out and source them myself.  Because, frankly, I don't have the time.  Or the money.  Dammit.

Love and other tragedies...

Oh dear.  God save me - I think I've fallen in love.  How can this have happened? What tragedy!  (Someone once said, once you've fallen in love, things can only end badly.  Someone either leaves or dies in the end.)

This is not very 'me'.  I'm meant to be dynamic and fiercely independent and cynical.  What the hell is this?!  And why do my older and wiser friends have to have been so right, dammit?  I had my principles and my little survival strategies and my convictions that my romantic life was over for good and I would remain a (fit and forward-thinking) spinster, playing angry songs no-one else would ever hear.  For good.  I thought I had it all sussed out.

So, ok Mr. Rock god and Mr. Byron II, you were right; I was wrong.  Happy now?

This could still fall apart tomorrow.  Then the hyenas will gather to laugh loudly.

We had the 'kids' conversation last night.  In that tentative way you do when no-one's dared say 'I love you' yet, incase it serves to suffocate the other person. (This topic of conversation was due to some stupid American sitcom dubbed into Czech that got me angry about the linguistic ridiculousness in the phrase, ,,Jsme těhotné'" i.e. "we're pregnant".  We?  There is no "we" in being pregnant.  Just ask the woman in labour. )  I made it plain I have no intention of ever having kids.  He had said before that he hadn't wanted them either.  But that was during the break-up of his last relationship.  Now, three years later, he's convinced he's 'getting old' and has changed his mind.  And, for now at least, he assumes I will too when I catch up to his age.  

So that's the end of our relationship looming in the distance. It's just out of reach or relevance right now, but it will grow and grow and one day it'll be the thing that drives us apart.  (Or maybe it will be the thing we laugh about in a month's time, when he decides he can't stand me anymore anyway.)

Who knows?  Last night he looked at me and said, "so it's a challenge", in response to my saying I didn't want children.  But I won the argument in the end anyway by saying that wanting children is irrelevant anyhow.  Whether you are successful enough, rich enough, happy enough to ensure giving children a good life is the most important factor.  It requires a sense of being at peace with yourself and what you have or haven't achieved.  It requires a hope for the future.  And those are the things I know will prevent me from ever embarking on it.

Incompatibility?

Watching episodes of 'The IT Crowd' on his PC, a PC which is currently infected with a virus called 'Windows XP Antivirus 2011', was both highly entertaining as well as ironic.  The virus kept intercepting with 4 minutes left of the episode to watch, so we did indeed have to, "try switching it off and on again".

(He's got a PC, I've got a Mac.  How very apt.  How very SATC.)

He watches Top Gear (in Czech) and I watch David Attenborough documentaries.  He has hot chocolate for breakfast on a weekend but I have tea, followed by an essential cup of coffee.  He seems older than he is (nothing like a few tragedies in someone's life to make them ever so mature rather quickly) but insists I look younger than my age.  (A 'meet-ee' of mine today guessed my age as 12 years younger.)  He eats white bread rolls (or "housky") and I eat wholemeal ones.  But we both wish we had enough money to train as a pilot and at least get a PPL for flying a little Piper plane.

All this frivolity could end tomorrow.  The hugs, the smiles, the cracking up at either of our linguistic errors; all of it could just disappear.  I know this better than anyone.

I'm getting my Saturday back this weekend.  I shall have to do some thinking.  Good, quality thinking-time is a luxury I haven't had in a while.

Survival

"The creative artist, who must transmute the everyday for the sake of poetry, is unfitted, by his imaginative gift, for work requiring constant attention to mechanical precision."  Michael Tippett

Oh how true.  How will I survive this relentless learning of the minutiae of the specifics of my day job?  The jargon, the methods for persuasion, the necessary planning.  It threatens to overwhelm me daily.

But the architect is here and we'll have some fun to make up for it.

A Piece of Advice

Seriously, I haven't got time to go into how lacking in perception a certain person was today...  To be honest, I had expected better from this person.  My only advice is: if you see a girl who normally wears make-up and eccentric earrings suddenly wandering around with her hand on her tummy, hair in a mess, no make-up, no earrings and a tired, anaemic look in her eyes, you would do well not to ask too much of her.  It would serve you best not to badger her with unnecessary questions and requests.  It would even be a good idea to be nice to her.

I came THISCLOSE to snapping at said person.  And I don't even get that kind of PMT.  I get the unbearable, debilitating and excruciating pain kind.  So I'm simply going to try to survive tomorrow, not excel in it.  And I shall pray from the depths of my soul that the architect will have a warm spot on his sofa for me, or better still, in his arms, so that come what may, I can run away to another world by evening.

Warmth

One, warm hand.  

Placed on my chest.  

And I am forced to breathe deeply again and drink you in.

Safe From Harm

It's another dull, cloudy day and I feel like the weather is doing this on purpose, or ,,schválně", as they say here, just to dull my mind.  (As if the hormones and period pain were not doing that perfectly well already.)  No, I will not be sedated.  I will push through the threateningly tedious work that awaits me, still the anxiety that is bubbling within due to the date and fact that ex-partner decided today was a good day to get in touch, and listen to more Liz Phair if that's what it takes to get me through the day.  

I want to scream a pain-derived and gut-wrenching "f*** you!" to the forces that keep pushing me, through physical and emotional pain time and time again to the brink of my own demise and the edge of what is tolerable.  I don't understand why everything always has to be this much of a struggle.  But I'm so used to it, I almost forget that it isn't necessarily normal.  

I must try and remember the sentiment from L-Star, reminding me that in Finland this is a day for friendship.  ,,Přátelství", as we say here.  And I am grateful to those who are still out there, though distant and sometimes unavailable.  Thank you to the Faerie Godmother trainee for such delicious-looking chocolates (I haven't eaten one yet, but I know they'll be excellent) and to those who've remembered me lately.  I don't know where Madame C has got to, but I'm thinking of her.  And so too, the tea and cake friend who sent me such a lovely birthday card.  I'm missing all of them so much now.

But more mind-numbing slavery awaits today and I will have to brace myself.  Perhaps armed with a few songs to get me through.  The best one for today, in the state that I'm in, would probably have to be an old Massive Attack classic.  Just as I'm battling and thinking to myself, 'whatever happened to 'fun?', Massive Attack can sing to me, 'what happened to the niceties of my childhood days? Well I can't do nothing about that, no, no.  But if you hurt what's mine...I'll sure as hell retaliate."

God bless those people.  That was a damned good song.

Demise or desired destination?

I'm coming back to Cookie Mueller today (aptly but I shan't explain why) because she put a quote in one of her loveliest and indeed, tiniest books which has intrigued me for a long time and seems so relevant today.  Facetiously or otherwise, it is merely attributed to "Dr. Peebles, a nineteenth century Scottish doctor" and it reads,

"It is important that you recognise that there is no experience that comes into your life that is below your dignity."

Compare this then, with my usual, persistent principle, encapsulated so well by Jean Sarment: 

"One's integrity is no greater than the numbers of compromises one makes with oneself."

How can you reconcile the two?  It is useful to have general values and principles I suppose, but it's when you're faced with truly unfamiliar situations that these can be tested and perhaps found wanting.  I have a sense of changing my usual means of rebellion at the moment, evolving into a version of me I wasn't sure I was capable of.  It isn't necessarily progress, as we all know that constant progress is not the natural way of things.  There are always fallow periods and regressions.  Perhaps I'm going in reverse because I missed out on following the usual conventions befitting someone in their teens or twenties.

One particular case in point happened at a certain 'Čajovna' (teashop) not far from a street called 'Veverka' (meaning 'squirrel') where they do serve tea eventually, but you get the feeling that this isn't their main line of business.  As Brooklyn had its 'cleaning service', so Prague has its little 'Čajovna' where you sit on cushions and at tiny tables and feel like you've been transported into a scene from 'Gas Food and Lodging' or a similar American art house film, and await a pot of tea you're not sure will ever arrive.  The waitress looks like she only reads Sylvia Plath or pretends to, while sidelining in soft drug-dealing to hapless visitors who only came here because it was a retro-cool place to hang out.  They couldn't care less about the tea.  And when someone orders cake, she reacts as though they have broken an unspoken rule of the house, but makes a note of it anyway.  (Whether it will ever be brought to the table is quite another matter.)

I sit dutifully on a cushion and stretch out my legs to the faint sounds of 60s and 70s folk-rock songs (until they incongruously play rock and roll) and wonder how the close proximity to others will affect my opportunity to observe people.  What a fascinating place.  It isn't difficult to blend in with this student-filled crowd, especially seeing as I never progressed from that level of poverty and still wear the same kind of clothes.  No-one notices just how much I'm taking in.  

And yet I cannot concentrate.  I have another distraction.

And so I find myself, 5 days later, wondering who I've become and if it really is so far from me.  The borders I thought I'd struggle to cross have been remarkably easy and I'm still in shock.  Perhaps this was what the acting training was for.  Or maybe this is just what you do when your confidence has been shattered and you have to build yourself back up from jumbled and broken pieces.  It could be like some sort of genetic re-arrangement, like in a sci-fi film.  In picking up the pieces, I might have mixed up the order and emerged as a different creature.  I'm just not sure.  Visibly, I'm the same person, but internally, mentally, emotionally?  I have no idea.  And I can't put a time limit on this because I don't know where it's headed.  Demise or desired destination?

I have even acquired a new piece of clothing.  A red fleece jacket.  And a few other things.  I have been away for two nights but I'm back home now.  Back in my grey frilly boots, lying on my bed on my stomach with my feet in the air and thinking, thinking, thinking.  A desire to sing at full volume to favourite songs has gripped me ever since I got back.  My singing ability is crawling forward, trying to return.  I feel like I have gone back in time, but the language spoken around me begs to alter that perception.  Still, I've bought English language magazines today, and I had a luxurious bath with a glass of red wine and enjoyed my own bathroom like never before.  

Is this what it is to 'move on'?

Losing my resilience

That's twice in a row now.  Waking up in the wee small hours with tummy ache.  I'm floundering again under the strain of this unrelenting timetable which keeps changing on me weekly, keeps demanding I think entirely of others' needs when none of my own get a look-in.  I'm desperately trying to cling to anything creative that I can, but I feel like someone keeps ripping it out of my hands, just as I feel I've got a comfortable grip.

I fear I don't have the resilience this time.  I need to be able to at least sing my way out of it, but the blocked ears and headaches are returning and I'm battling that on top of sleep deprivation.  I'm almost on my knees now.  What is this?  Am I meant to surrender?  If so, who the hell to?  And what then?

Hairdressers, phones and shoes

So this is the first long absence from writing and I'm feeling suitably ashamed about that.  But it was my birthday (the first to get through since ex-partner got settled into his new life) and I knew I had to make an effort to socialise and not be a miserable old so and so.  

First necessity: sort out getting my hair dyed again.  Not an easy task in a foreign language.  In fact, I used to dread every feeble attempt I made at getting a decent set of highlights and cut for a reduced price, i.e. one I could actually afford, because most turned out less than desirable, though one had actually been the best ever and that was totally free!  But no such luck here.

I bravely explained what I wanted with photos and my pre-looked up vocabulary, but even then, hairdressers always end up doing what they're used to and it really wasn't a terribly successful result.  I had an insane hope for the best when 'West End Girls' came on the radio, but about 30 minutes later it was Erasure (I think) singing "run away, turn away, run away, turn away, run away".  Not good.

Time to be ever so mature about things, as usual, and try not to burst into tears that I really don't have the confidence left to deal with another disappointment, but rather find another way to look at it.  So I decided to embrace the hispanic ghetto look and curled my hair and put on the ole' hoop earrings and dark lipstick.  Not terribly sophisticated, but on a salary like mine, maybe sophisticated is long gone and I should stop trying to cling to the champagne packaging that tried to help me feel otherwise.  (By god, I don't know what I'd do without the Faerie Godmother Trainee...) 

And one of my 'meet-ees' remarked that I looked 'beautiful'.  A linguistic error, but a rather nice compliment nonetheless.  And even though strange and unfathomable things befell me (mobile phone dropped on ground, switched off, naturally wants PIN number to reactivate, but PIN number is at home in a drawer, long trip home to get PIN number just to ring friend number 2 of the evening to find out where she is because her number was stored in my phone not in my brain...ach jo...) it turned out  kind of fun.

I ended up seeing in the beginnings of my birthday with Czech friends and Czech pop songs that I'd never heard before but could start singing along to almost immediately due to how catchy they were.  Then, home by 3am.  Then sleep.

There followed a box of chocolates, champagne and beautiful shoes!!!!  See below.

The evening of my birthday comprised a good Mexican meal with a glass and a half of red wine and some fine company.  For a birthday expected to be lonely and sad, I think I did pretty well actually.