Apocalypse, floods and hippos

The weather here in Prague seems to have taken a leaf out of London's book and has decided to skip summer, other than a tropical humid hell of a summer, when it remembers it's supposed to be hot, and has this morning decided to do it's best 'apocalyptic rain' impression.  And as the rain is bucketing down and the skies are grey and misty, so my mood is matching up perfectly.  I feel like the rain has drowned my hope as surely as it has washed the pavements and made the roads into small streams.

I am dreading the difficulty of pleasing and fitting in with everyone for my forthcoming trip to Blighty and I'm dreading even more the onset of September's full-on relentlessness to follow.  Once I'm a fully paid-up self-employed member of the Czech Republic, I'll be back to where I started here in terms of salary.  I worked hard over the last year to slowly work up through the ranks to a viable income, but soon the waterfall of health insurance, taxes and probably some other fee I hadn't bargained for will bring me back to my knees forthwith, and my recent cutting down to minimal amounts of food at breakfast and lunch will become a regular financial necessity.  

It never rains but it pours, and soon there'll be a bone fide flood.  And quite frankly, I'd rather be swept away and killed than left to cling on for dear life like the poor hippo Slavek did in the floods of 2002.  He survived, but Lentilka, the female hippo, didn't.

Sunshine and a flower

I've been having a difficult week.  Either I've developed a slowly fatal illness as a result of my formerly at least non-life threatening admin allergy, or I'm just getting old.  And tired.  Very tired.  It didn't help that one of my meet-ees woke me up with a text at 2:30am, cancelling Tuesday morning's meeting, and that I had to resort to watching Columbo to try to get me off to sleep again after that.  But it's something more than that.  It also might be that I'm developing a strong aversion to tales of Tuscany from all and sundry (including my own sister) and how wonderful their trip there was.  (Invariably involving a wedding, but someone else's so they get the best of both worlds of going somewhere nice, but getting some free food and drink while you're there.)  I, too, want to lounge in the sun (or realistically, under the shade of a tree) and swim in a beautifully located outdoor pool.  I, too, want to dine alfresco and look upon delightful scenery and soak up the unique atmosphere of a balmy Tuscan evening.  But it ain't gonna happen.

Instead, as the 'total loser consolation prize', I got the following: 

1) Sunshine coming through my window and projecting pretty patterns of shadows on my floor to temporarily distract me from the horrendously disorganised array of things that was once my (reasonably) tidy and inviting room:

and 2) a red gerbera flower from a meet-ee who is now posing serious competition to my boyfriend (who has so far in all the time we've been together only managed three, non-red, roses) which came as a really stunningly kind and wonderful surprise this morning:

and that's about it.  Not quite worthy of an, "I'll be a son of a gun!" Columbo exclamation, but it's better than nothing, isn't it?

Among poetry books and boxes

 'Time cannot take what love has given.'               Kathleen Herbert

The above sentence is a final line from a poem in a book entitled 'Here and Now'.  Yet it is so much about the past.  And I seem to have been sucked into thinking about the past too much lately.   I seriously believe it's watching ER that has caused it.  It's entirely my fault.  I should have known there would be consequences, just like those of opening a box of old diaries.  Things seep out and fill the air with an intoxicating allure to 'go back' to where the residual comfort and sense of 'home' were.  (And I don't mean England.)

I've had some very strange dreams lately.  (This is usually a sentence that fills everyone with dread, "for god's sake, don't tell us about your goddamned dreams!"  And I agree with that sentiment.  So I won't talk about my dreams.  Much.)  They've not been particularly 'set in the past', but involve people I haven't seen in a while though strangely enough, in totally unfamiliar places.  Maybe my brain is secretly trying to escape.  Except the past is the path of most resistance.  I know.  I could feel it in my bones.  I knew going back into old feelings would do me no good.

I have to find a way to push into future plans, positively.  I must find a way to see something desirable ahead and not just in the next month or so, but beyond that.  I just don't know if there's a way back from this new trap I've got myself into.  People keep asking me how long I'll be in the Czech Republic, without realising that coming here was the equivalent of Dustin Hoffman in 'Outbreak' exposing himself to the virus that his wife/partner was dying from, before they'd found the source: there's no going back unless a miraculous cure is found.  And the odds don't look good.  (PS: this is real life not a Hollywood film, so those odds just plummeted...)

So I don't know what I'm doing, other than muddling through, trying to keep my head above water, trying to keep doing aerobics like my life depends on it (and it probably does, those endorphins are my ration of survival resources) and hoping this isn't the last vestige of hope I have left being slowly chipped away before my eyes.

But I do have a huge box of letters that prove I was once loved, and though I cannot face (or imagine ever facing) reading them again, the size of the box is enough proof for now, that if I've been a waste of time, then, as the song goes, I was at least someone's 'favourite waste of time.'  And maybe that counts for something.

Take a look inside my heart

I made a new playlist for my iPod the other day.  I just needed something a bit upbeat and at the same time soothing, so I threw a few possibles at iTunes and then edited it down.  I ended up with quite a mixture of songs, including the following:

1) Solitude Standing - Suzanne Vega  

This song sounds determined, strong and yet, equally, sad.  It has an opening reminiscent of the beginning of the "Fraggle Rock"  theme, but then turns melancholic to the same extreme extent that  "Fraggle Rock" becomes almost nauseatingly chirpy.  (Though, don't get me wrong - I love Fraggle Rock.) The cyclical bell-like keyboard loop in this song is entrancing, almost hypnotic.  And everyone knows Suzanne Vega has the most haunting voice ever.  No-one else has come close to that timbre.  It's slightly unnerving to hear a voice like that sing something so dark.  When I know things aren't right but I need to keep going anyway, this is the perfect song.

2) Dub Be Good To Me - Beats International feat. Lindy Layton 

Because cheesy songs were necessary too.  And even this one has a dark side, a sort of lazy, humid summer vibe, circa 1990.  And for a very humid summer here in Prague, it's perfect.

3) Right Here, Right Now - Fatboy Slim  

Another track with energy but also a background of melancholy.  The strings do it for me everytime.  Travelling across town on the metro today, feeling shattered and isolated, (what I really mean is lonely) this was just what I needed.  Nothing like a song called 'Right Here, Right Now' to get you to at least try to enjoy living 'in the moment'.

4) Long Summer Days - EMF 

This is a little-known album track.  Yes, I had an EMF album.  (It was called 'Schubert Dip')  I love the crazy rock guitars and pointless background noise-like samples. You can sing the bassline, probably to 'na, na, na,' because the melody itself is irritatingly insistent.  It sounds desperate, hopeless and angry.  And Mancunian.

5) Ur Train - Leila (Arab) feat. Luca Santucci  

Like a metronome, this song beats time with a childlike harpsichord sound that runs throughout the main part of the song and makes you think of being on a conveyor belt, in some kind of toy factory made by lunatics.  I don't know, it's entrancing, the lyrics are about not being able to get away from someone you left and it just epitomised my jumbled up thoughts through my 5 hours' sleep haze this morning.

6) Good Luck - Basement Jaxx

This is so unlike me.  I don't normally listen to stuff like this.  The strong R'n'B vocals, the crazy pop sounds, the shuffley, trendy drum beat.  It's so not me.  And yet...  It somehow makes me feel better that I can pretend to be normal and conform by listening to this song and having someone in mind when I do so.  Does she really sing 'good luck in your new bed'?  I think so.  And that's exactly the thought I had to deal with.  

Knowing ex-partner was not only moving to a new country and a new home, and indeed, a new bed, but that his new partner had already taken my place in his bed before I knew about it was hard to cope with.  Was it inevitable that I would then get a text from him just as I was standing on the edge of the platform in a metro station today while listening to this on headphones?  And was it also inevitable that I would burst into tears at that moment too?  I guess so.

7) All I Wanna Do - Dannii Minogue

I don't want any disdainful tutting at this choice, ok?  I think we all like a bit of cheesy, totally pop, completely nonsensical upbeat music now and then, don't we?  And just because Dannii Minogue's worn a few dodgy outfits in her time and had a bad press all-round in comparison to her sister, is it really necessary to be ashamed of occasionally listening to songs she sang on?  If so, I don't care.  This song is stupid and dreamily silly but fun and even has a bit of rock guitar thrown in at the last minute, so it can't be all bad, right?  

In anycase, it's what I used to listen to when I first discovered the feeling that there might genuinely be hope that I could actually have a second relationship in my life after the drawn-out period of the break-up of the previous one.  I'm usually a total cynic, so it was nice to indulge in something quite the opposite.  (Mind you, the, 'I may not be the innocent girl that you wanted me to be', does still make me inwardly cringe.  Didn't Britney Spears sing something similar and equally fatuous?) 

So as Dannii sings, "take a look inside my heart, tell me what you think you see," my reply about me and my 'heart', I think, would be:  a jumbled up mess of despair, confusion, grief, annoyance and somewhere deep down in a place I rarely acknowledge or admit to, a trickle of unfounded optimism.

Wolves, relationships and Shakespearean porn

Thoughts about what I've lost, what I may never have again, are pursuing and taunting me like a pack of wolves.  I know they're still in the distance at the moment, but they are circling and they may even have got me surrounded by now, I just don't know for sure.  I wish I had somewhere to run, but I haven't really.  It struck me this evening, that maybe there are no rescuers out there.  Maybe most of us are just alone and that's all there is to it.  Even the ones who think they have a champion or dependable knight by their side, could lose them in the blink of an eye.  (I know, I've been watching too much ER, but even so...)

I have observed other people's relationships, and I've tried to analyse the odds.  Strangely enough, probably 50% of my friends have been very lucky and have found not only a reliable companion, but someone who really enhances who they are.  Of those people, about half are also doing the kind of work they enjoy, or at least something they don't hate. And that's amazing really.  I don't know how they did it.  

In most cases, I imagine they don't know 'how they did it', either.  Whatever it is, I don't seem to have hit the right formula yet.  Not career-wise, not relationship-wise (and even friends-wise things are a bit hit and miss).  I've been very lucky to even have one or two good friends here after nearly a year.  I wouldn't have got that in London. Making friends in London used to take years, but maybe now, with internet and all that stuff, it's easier.

Mind you, I did have a marriage proposal the other day.  But he only wanted me for my EU status.  I guess that's the way it goes at my age.  But, despite my admiration (at times) for Ruby Wax, I'm not going to take a leaf out of her 'early years' book and marry someone for a visa.  It may have worked for her, and allowed her to act in the RSC for a while, but she said herself, she ended up doing 'Shakespearean porno', playing 'poor wenches' and faking a Somerset accent, and I don't need any practice at my West Country accent, thanks all the same.  Not unless you mean 'West Czech Republic'.  (That one really does need some serious work.)

"Get out more!" and other strategies

I seem to be incapable of formulating any thoughts without a list.  I need a list of things to do to try to cram in, in between my annoyingly spread out number of meetings which start at 8am for a couple of hours or so, and then resume at 4pm till 7pm, which I'm finding particularly trying at the moment.  But the heat isn't helping me push through my tiredness to do anything useful, let alone creative.  So here are a few strategies I have come up with or am trying to convince myself of for surviving this tricky period of time:

1) Tidy up my flat.  I did most of that at the weekend, just the mighty desk of papers to go now...I wish that were the easiest thing, but of course, it's the most time-consuming, impossible task ever.  And yet I so want one of those beautiful coloured glass, enormous vases to put on it, to make it look like the grand, executive-type desk it should be.  A decent, adjustable desk chair would also help, but that is obviously never going to happen...

2) Particularly in post-holiday slump, buy a bunch of things at the supermarket that I've never tried before, some of which are variations on things I have tried before, so that it cannot end up too disastrously.  This helps with feeling like I'm 'on holiday' in this foreign country and not just slaving away, trying to make enough money to be able to afford to exist.

[*Note: 'Margot' chocolate bar.  Who on earth decided to call the most sugary, kendal-mint cake-like chocolate bar the name 'Margot'?  Seriously, Penelope Keith would be turning in her grave, if she had already died, which I suspect she hasn't.  Is it coincidence though, that it reminds me of Kendal-mint cake, due to its sugar content (though it's not at all minty) when the character called Margot was in the same programme as the character 'Barbara', played by Felicity Kendal?  Is there some kind of Anneka Rice's 'Treasure Hunt' clue in here somewhere?  And surely it's interesting that the host of that very programme was called Kenneth Kendall.  And how on earth did I get all this inspiration of pointless trivia from just one chocolate bar?  I need help.]

3) Nip out to 'buy a paper' sometimes.  This is a good way to remind myself, despite all my endless meetings conducted in English, that I am indeed in the Czech Republic and really need to learn some new vocab to be able to follow what's going on in the news in the rather excellently affordable main daily newspaper.  So far, yesterday, I managed to buy the paper, but every time I sit down with about 3 minutes to spare to look up some words from an article, some meet-ee arrives early and that puts an end to that.

4) Go about life as if I am an entirely different person from the one who lived in London, because, quite frankly, it's too painful to do otherwise.  I must forget I ever did music, that pursuing it not only bankrupted me but nearly killed me, because I loved the piano just too much and unfittingly so for someone from a working-class background.  And as for the previous relationship...Don't even think about it.  Imagine that it never existed.  That that girl was someone else and you feel a bit sorry for her and all that, but she's not your problem.

Hmm...I think that last one is proving the hardest.  Not least because all this catching up on ER episodes and contemplating a trip back to London is actually reminding me of some of the things I used to have.  And the horrible break-up period I went through in England was relatively short, compared to the duration of the relationship.  And then I spent the first 5 months here still in a sort of desperate state of existence before I reached even the very beginning of a recovery.  I'm a little bit worried now that that was only 'recovery stage 1'.  If I am to regain any hope, any real sense that I could be in a completely different life that is rewarding and hopeful one day, I've got a hell of a long way to go.  

(Oops, and there you have an example of what happens when you're tired, hot and worn-out and thinking too much.  Too much self-pitying...)  The screamingly obvious answer to all this is:  Get out more!  Learn more Czech!  Speak more Czech!  And I will need another list in order to go about that, just because fitting in opportunities to practise and study more Czech requires some clever manipulating of my timetable, not to mention, of course, my finances.  I'm doing my best here people, but somehow it just ain't enough, dammit!  Potřebuji víc času!

These Mighty Things

I feel tired.  No revelation there, I realise, but late nights catching up on watching some films I missed out on at the cinema, due to no evenings off have left me unable to sleep at 2:30am even when I have to get up at 6.  Which is rather unfortunate.  I'm also tired of a number of other things:

1) Meet-ees cancelling and generally treating me as though they were just dropping round for an informal little chat and a cup of tea, instead of something I plan for and make reports in advance of.

2) Semi-friends doing the same lame-ass texting that they'll be an hour late to do something that interferes with my carefully put together timetable, like when I'm going to do aerobics, which is hard enough to stick to at the best of times, but is really on the verge of being jeopardised if delayed, when I'm so tired and hungry already.

3) Stupid sections of magazines telling me things I don't give a damn about, like how Geri Halliwell loses weight or how some actress with a personal trainer keeps in shape for her latest film (clue: she has a personal trainer force her to do stuff, because she has enough money to fritter away on buying her willpower and self-motivation). 

4) People assuming that the reason I failed to do the things I thought I was good at and had a future with was because I didn't work hard enough at it.  Yes, the business side of it was harder to work at, but I used to do four hours' piano practice a day when I first got my own piano.  But I made the mistake of thinking that hard work and talent are all you need to succeed.  Turns out a full social circle and hard cash are rather more helpful.

5) Being a cynical cow sometimes, when underneath, down below in some part of me that hasn't seen the light of day since 1996, I am a sprite-like optimist, feeling the freedom and wonder of walking back to my flat and knowing the city is mine, whenever I need to use it.  (I had a flashback today of the days when I used to know the carefree prospect of two week holidays when I could go out for meals in the evening and dress up and not have to worry about what everything was going to cost.  It was truly painful to come back from that little reverie.)

Anyway, my PLAN OF ACTION to eradicate this tiredness and ban these sad and lonely thoughts and try to leave room for more positive ones, however unfounded the hope they encapsulate may be, is to put on my silly little black shorts and my sports bra and pretend I'm 16 again and leap about and do leg stretches and high kicks and even, when I've warmed up enough, the splits.  All this while listening to desperately un-cool music at full volume (because my cheap stereo can't get up to anything unbearably loud anyway) for about an hour and reward myself afterwards by watching ER episodes, as I attempt to catch up on that final series everyone else has already seen.  That's my fitness regime in a nutshell.  Now all I have to do is wait for that semi-friend to get her arse over here and pick up what she has to and leave me in peace to achieve these mighty things.

Period pain and other issues

I made it back from the trip to the south, but I haven't felt entirely rested from the experience.  Not least because it was about 60% good, 40% an out-and-out battle to prove myself compatible and acceptable for such a holiday.  So I didn't write for a while.  I then experienced the 'back down to earth' post-hoilday 'bump' that you feel when you have to get back to normal, tedious life.  I got caught up with a few personal 'issues' and now I'm languishing in bed with period pain.  

Having watched 'No Strings Attached' recently, I can attest that the best line in it, which is so appropriate right now, was the moment a friend who was having her period said, "it's like a crime scene in my pants", while she bites into a red velvet cupcake.  (Red velvet cupcakes happen to be my all-time favourite, though it is distasteful that I have been won-over by something so 'de rigeur' and trendy among bored Americans.  It's not very me, somehow.)  It's funny how this line is so much ruder, but more accurate in British English.  But we're always saying shocking things like 'toilet' instead of 'bathroom', or indeed, my personal favourite for its sheer euphemism, 'restroom'.  (If they start putting chaises-longues in public toilets I could be persuaded otherwise, but until such time...not convinced, sorry.)

I'm not sure why silly Hollywood rom-coms appeal to me so much at the moment.  Maybe it's because I've been analysing things so much lately and I need something that will help me to switch off my brain.  Except if it's a half-decent rom-com at all, it still has something to trigger little thoughts and questions in my head anyway.  And some of them only re-iterrate to me the pressures and expectations of society that I am falling foul of.  But I cannot change that.  I cannot become normal. 

It must be so settling to have hit all those expected 'targets'.  Career, stable and loving relationship, children etc.  I don't know how anyone ever manages even one of those.  I would be quite happy just to achieve the first, but that's where I've gone wrong and I suppose that impacts on the other possibilities and systematically rules them out.  Though it occurs to me that this is something that men have to get right in a way that women needn't.  And I have to take responsibility for that and acknowledge that this double-standard exists.  It's not fair that if men don't get a good job, a good career (though it may be easier for them to attain than women, but that's a whole other issue) they will most certainly not get the other things.  They'd better not hope for the other things at all unless they get the first.  Whereas women seem to think (or at least a lot of them do, especially in this somewhat behind the times, influenced by communism country) that there's still hope for them even if they don't get a good job, let alone career, that some man will come along and take care of all that financial stuff for them.  Their successful future is dependent on it.  And that just saddens me.  It really does.

And what saddens me more, is that there is one really good man out there and I think you can guess who I mean without any reference, who is losing out, even though he's finally decided he does want children, because he's got a good job but not an excellent one and it has few prospects for promotion and his current girlfriend is a total loser who has absolutely no money, wants to do something creative as a career but has no hope of it, and for that reason and many, many more, never wants to have children.  Someone please rescue him.  I wish I could do a deal with god and get him the well-paid, properly appreciated work he deserves and a girlfriend who's achieved enough and is happy and brave enough to have children, and who will make him happy.  It can't be me.  And I'm so sorry about that.  I'd do that deal in a heart-beat, even if it meant taking my own life in return, because there are too many unhappy people around who just aren't getting what they deserve and it makes me very angry indeed.  And that's not just the hormones talking, I promise.