Problem or solution?

I don't want my focus to be all over the place, but negotiating a relationship (of sorts) as well as a career (of even more dubious, tenuous sorts) is fraught with difficulty especially when I find myself in strange and far-flung places.  It's not as though there is anywhere in particular where I feel 'at home'.  It's probably high-time I gave up on the notion that a sense of being 'at home' somewhere will ever find me or I will ever find it.  I don't have a strong tie anywhere and in each place I seek to make a home for myself, there's always something missing.  In London it was the possibility of speaking a foreign language regularly without having to pay for the privilege.  Finding British friends who can do that was nigh-on impossible and the ones who I befriended who weren't British, either spoke a language I didn't (i.e. Russian) or were about to move away anyway.  Or both.

And here, in the Czech Republic, I seem to finally have found myself drawn to another culture, not my own, not Czech culture, but American culture of all things.  Mainly because it is the polar opposite of the culture which surrounds me.  Is this a result of some innate need to always be the rebellious one?  Do I simply have to continually buck the trend and follow the path less travelled to a destination that only appeals to recluses?  What the hell is wrong with me, if that's the case?  I know, deep down, I actually DO need people.  I would like to be involved in a community of writers or musicians, meeting at cafes or dinner parties and sipping a fine Côte du Rhone and discussing the latest tricks of the trade, but somehow whichever camp I should find myself in, I'm sure I would feel like the fraud, for the mere fact that this one area (music or literature) is not my sole occupation.  Is this part of the problem or the solution?  I simply don't know.

Just for your reference, here's a picture of the "town" I've been residing in over the last few days, just so we can all see another place that doesn't feel like home to me. 

 It's sweet though, isn't it?

Tributes to Havel

I had to go to Václavské náměstí today anyway, so I stopped to take a look at all the tributes to Václav Havel that were displayed around the statue of Svatý Václav (the Saint that Havel shared the first name of) at the top of the square.  I overheard one kid ask about why it says svatý Václav above the tributes and if that's because Havel is a saint, so he was rather confused.  The Mum just told him that it's a coincidence that the saint shares his name.   

Two of the famous pictures of Havel with the Rolling Stones:

This one says, "Thank you for everything you did for us":

And on several billboards on the way home, a photo of Havel by Tomki Němec with a quote of Havel's I've referenced before:

,,Naděje není přesvědčení, že něco dopadne dobře, nýbrž jistota, že něco má smysl, lhostejno, jak to dopadne."

["Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."]

A Sad Sunday

Ex-president Václav Havel has died.  It's the end of an era.  It was a shock to discover it as I signed out of my seznam account.  I went straight to the Czech national paper's site at www.idnes.cz to read the full report.  It bothers me that this means Margaret Thatcher has outlived him.  (Unless she died years ago but it's been a well-kept secret ever since.  Either that or no-one could tell the difference.)  That just seems wholly unfair.

In other, far less important, news I've just had the worst tummy bug of my life and I'm only just slowly recovering from it.  Sipping peppermint tea is just becoming possible without severe pain as a consequence.  I'm recovering.  Slowly.  Very slowly.

Thoughts, fantasies and a wish for adventure

"The vitality of thought is an adventure.  Ideas won't keep.  Something must be done about them."  A. N. Whitehead

I'm feeling quite low today.  Something about the proximity of Christmas and the way in which it seems designed to pinpoint and expose those of us who don't feel we really have a home to go has begun to gnaw away at me already.  Additionally, the reminiscences about this time last year, before the final throes of the end of the dredges of my former relationship has started pecking away at my mind, like an insistent and anxious bird.  This is obviously not helped by an overwhelming tiredness.  I'm not sure how to combat it, when I know what I need is some time off and a bit of hope for the future.  Which, of course, will require some planning.  

I also know this is part of the call of the creative stuff, begging me to come back, when I can't.  How can I come back, when I don't even have a whole day off anymore?  I am doing what I said I would.  I'm paying my way.  I sold my piano to do this, but I have no hope of ever buying a replacement, let alone having a flat to put it in.  And even if I could, it's already too late.  It's still painful to look back at how long it took me to think I could even begin to call myself a musician, how much I dedicated myself to trying to prove I was, to make up for my total lack of formal music education.  And the suspicion in the eyes of many that music was not where my 'talents' lay at all and I was heading for a fall by liking music so much, did so much more damage than anyone could have imagined.  (They were right on the latter, but for the wrong reasons.)

And so it is that I find myself a little lost today, away from a real sense of home, speaking three different foreign languages in one day (French, Czech and German, in that order) and wondering what on earth constitutes 'home' anyway.  I keep thinking of that Christmas when I was cat-sitting in someone else's flat, looking after the two cutest cats in all Christendom and being paid for it.  I knew I was the luckiest person on earth.  I also knew it would never happen twice.  

I was slightly envious that the couple I cat-sat for had such a lovely life of heading off to LA one month, Stockholm the next.  I still have a silly little dream of going to California one day and hanging out on some under-populated beach somewhere there (if there is one).  Oddly enough, on the other hand, I wouldn't mind heading way out to San Francisco instead, even though the two are not even remotely close when you look at a map.  Still, fantasies are fantasies.  They work fine in your head.

Just like the idea of being able to change trajectory and run different groups of meet-ees, maybe even for singing/songwriting or even do some playing, writing and performing of my own, keeps circling my mind but there's great doubt it'll have a real landing place.  And all the while, I long for a couple of days of luxury, such as a long afternoon reading books and magazines, followed by a languid bath with all sorts of potions to pamper myself with.  Or a day just playing and writing and even recording songs.  But fantasies are hard to convert to reality.  Especially when you haven't even got any time to think.