Incompatibility, fantasy and time travel - (two days for the price of one!)

There was a hint of autumn in the air on Friday.  Not in the temperature, like the chill in the air that came about a couple of weekends ago, but in the appearance of the landscape.  The sky was cloudy but it was still warm.  Hot infact, despite Thursday night's storm.  

As I walked back up the hill from Václavske náměstí I noticed the yellow leaves all across the path of the little park by the museum and they were still being blown off the tree as a gust of wind pushed them right towards me.  

It was strange to see that without the accompanying cold feeling.

There's something about the onset of autumn that kind of scares me even though I am a winter baby and I have better winter and autumn clothes than summer ones.   I think it must be to do with both the sense of horror of that 'back to school' feeling that has somehow never left me and also that dread of the dark mornings that are worse here because everyone starts work at 8am and getting up at 6am is distinctly worse than getting up at 7am.  Particularly when the nature of my type of work usually dictates working evenings too, so there is no corresponding end of the working day at 4pm to compensate for the early starts.  Which I hate.  I really don't do well on 6 hours' sleep.

Maybe it's also the reality of the fact that September, October and November don't bring anything to look forward to.  Funds are so low that I can't plan a really sumptuous evening meal out somewhere I can dress up for.  Maybe it's partly because the cowboy doesn't know how to savour anything.  When I do make an effort to buy a nice bottle of wine for us and a good film to watch, for example, he gulps down the wine in a bid to finish it because it's Saturday night and the next evening we'd be driving back to Prague.  (And on Friday nights we're just too tired from all that 'only 6 hours' sleep a night' problem.)   He somehow doesn't think it's safe to put the cork back in and bring the rest of the bottle back with us.  So he always wants to finish it off, whereas I'd rather savour it and enjoy sitting on the sofa with him, relishing a quiet moment of peace and a bit of a romantic atmosphere.

But maybe it's been my fault that I haven't managed to find good enough films to watch that suit his taste.  Or maybe it's because the flat is missing the black shiny piano and soft woollen throw for the sofa that would make me feel truly welcome.  Maybe I just want too much.  Or we're just too different.  For example, he never listens to music except in the car, is always (almost constantly in fact) watching TV and he likes to wear super-casual clothes for walking in, while I like dressing up a bit.  Except, even when I do have an opportunity where he would want me to dress up, he always finds something that's not posh enough about me.  Like my shoes are a bit too scuffed or I haven't had my hair cut in over 6 months because I can't afford it.  Or the posh dress I'm in is the same one he's seen me in before because I never have enough money to spend on clothes and certainly never on a really good dress.

I think it's really the lack of piano that makes all the difference.  Then I'd put on a posh dress and heels and drink red wine and play my heart out all night.  Until the cowboy realises that the heels are damaging the wood floor as I'm pedalling at the piano and orders me to take them off.

----

Saturday:

The thing about the homogenisation of shopping areas, cafe chains and department stores is that you now can't tell where you are at first glance.  Everywhere looks the same.  I could be in London, Prague or even Chicago.  (But for the missing American flags that would be the one main difference in the latter.) And in some cases, you can't tell when  you are.  In the Czech Republic, for example, the clothes store C&A never went bankrupt, so I can sit in a generic coffee chain cafe and look across at the C&A shop front in this shopping mall and this could even be London, circa 1998.  Somehow there are things my brain is willing to take on as true, when logically they cannot be.  This cannot be 1998.  And no matter how many times my brain half-sees it, ex-partner cannot be the next older guy coming around the corner.  He's not here.  He doesn't even live in Prague.  He doesn't love me anymore.  He doesn't even look like him anymore.  Not the him I knew.  That version of him has gone and been replaced by a body double with a few more years behind him, an earring and a bunch of tattoos I'm not convinced make him look edgy and rock 'n' roll, but rather more 'sailor dude'.

So why does my mind trick me like this and imagine him being about to pop in and find me after he's just been to get something in another shop? It's as though my brain is capable of erasing the last 4 or so years and can just take me back to the beginning of 2008 when things still had a chance for improvement.  A slim chance, but a chance nonetheless.  I must confess, I still try to buy bottles of wine from 2008, as though doing that might supplant me into a better, more optimistic time and space.  And yet I know, deep down, that our relationship could never be absolutely right.  Even one that caused me to feel, as Alina Reyes puts it in her book, 'When You Love, You Must Depart', "I know that I love him because with him I have fun.  A simple walk in town becomes a real party, the world is a universe overflowing with dreams to be realised, with people and places that are either extraordinary or infamous, but never unimportant, with him everything is funnier and larger than life, with him, everything, everything is better", wasn't enough.  It was a relationship that cut me off from some quite important things.  And towards the end, it did not make me feel the above scenario at all.

But neither does being with the cowboy.  I don't normally feel that places are transformed when I am with him.  They are simply the same.  Sometimes they even feel more restricted because of him.  Sometimes however, on a rare special occasion that no-one planned, we find in the midst of a totally uninspiring location, that we can have a good laugh about something within our experience that takes us away from the drudgery, that transports us from the mundane world surrounding us and reminds us that we are not trapped here.  That we can go home and have a laugh or get on a plane and hire a car and drive across a foreign country and muddle through together pretty well and at least still be alive by the end of it.  He and I haven't had a lot of laughs lately, that's true, and I have been having a prolonged bout of homesickness for London as well as, strangely, for New York and Chicago, but there was that one redeeming moment last night when I felt like the place we were in was better and less damning because of our being together and I would never have wanted to be there alone.  And that's got to count for something.

Road Trip Part 2: Downtown Chicago

Having spent some time checking out the supermarkets, shoe shops and fast food places in suburban Illinois, we had a day to leave the 'burbs and head out into Chicago on the Northwest train that takes you into Oglivie Station.  We were really lucky that it was such a sunny day.  The city was at its best that way.

We headed for Willis tower (formerly Sears tower) first, 

hoping to do the tourist thing of going up to the top and taking some photos but there was a super-long queue and right next to us serious construction work was going on and making a LOT of noise, which the architect felt he just couldn't bear, so we decided to head off to Millennium park instead.

I've been here before, but I still marvel at the skyscrapers, overhead 'L' tracks and the crazy reflective 'bean' in Millennium park.  

The architect, with his brand new and groovy camera also marvelled at anything and everything around us.  It's his first time in the States, so he was lapping it all up and finding it all rather a lot to take in. 

While walking around Millennium park we got a taste of American parenting as a little kid who could not have been more than 4 years old, kept running ahead when his parents and older sister told him to wait.  The little tyke even stopped, turned to face his parents and said, "I can do whatever I want."  To which his parents just giggled and tried to persuade him to be more careful.  I would have given him hell.  What an ego!  If the kid thinks that at 4, what will he be like at 18?  God help that family.  The architect said he would have been yelled at and pulled into line bigtime if he'd said that to his parents when he was a kid.  

We continued on our way through the park and decided to aim for Navy Pier, 

and in resolute, totally un-American style, we walked all the way.  And it was a long way, believe me, and not paved with easy access either, but we got there and rewarded ourselves with huge Haagen Dazs ice creams.  Something called 'Rocky Road' had bits of Oreo cookies in it and chocolate ice cream with caramel topping.  Mmmm.

And that was our day, because then we had to walk all the way back (and on the walk back we saw this...)

(and this...)

(and this...)

(and this...)

(and this...)

to catch the 6.30pm train, because there isn't a 7.30pm one (for some unfathomable reason) so we would have had to wait until 8.30pm otherwise and that would have got us back to the suburb of Crystal Lake at about 10pm.  That just felt too late somehow.  I still think it's amazing how long it takes to get from Crystal Lake to downtown Chicago.  It's like travelling from Bath to London in the UK except the Illinois train stops at loads of places on the way (hence why it takes so long) and therefore goes comparatively slowly.  There's something about that slow progress that frustrates me and makes me feel like the suburbs are a nasty trap in the middle of nowhere.  But I must admit, it's easier for travelling west, which is what we did next of course.

Reisefieber

I have forced myself to take a "time-out" (oh yes, a 'PB' trip again!) because I've been quietly worrying for some time now and I can't seem to shake the underlying anxiety off.  I'm making lists, ticking off what I can as soon as I can, but some things are simply out of my hands.  And I can't quite discern where all this worry is coming from but I sense it's probably just ,,Reisefieber" - that pre-travel anxiety you get when you realise you've got to get a tonne of things done before you leave for a long journey.  (Or it could just be my Mum's genes and her terrible propensity for worry gone into overdrive due to my coming off the pill for the seven days off, which causes hormonal free-fall.)

I'm pretty sure the journey itself is going to leave me feeling almost dead and I'm only talking about getting from here to Chicago.  The horrendous 4am wake-up call and 5am check-in added to the four-hour wait in Amsterdam before actually getting on a plane bound for Chicago is what might be the end of me.  That coupled with general, 'did I meet all the necessary international flight requirements this time?' stress, is bound to send my cortisol levels through the roof. 

The thing about travelling from Europe to the States is that the jet-lag isn't too bad to get over on the way there, because the time change takes you back, so when you arrive, you can just try to kid yourself that it was a shorter journey than you thought, make it through till evening and then crash and wake up the next day on US time.  Except, on this occasion, we won't be arriving anywhere near evening and will have to survive a whole afternoon without collapsing to make it through to the evening before we can go to bed.  So it'll be a bit of a challenge.

But that's just the beginning of the trip.  The rest could involve similar challenges in staying awake / dealing with anxiety, being that we're driving across to California, aiming to end up in San Francisco for the final 5-6 days of our trip.  Ironically enough, as I sat down to have my coffee and pain au chocolat in P's bakery again, the first song that came on was the one with the line, "if you're going to San Francisco..." to which I smiled to myself and thought, "yes I am!'  

I have since checked this song on You Tube and found that it's a really hippy 'Mamas and the Papas' song all about flowers and love-ins and I feel a bit nauseous now.  I have a sneaking suspicion, that despite my excitement, there'll be a little part of me that will miss Prague while I'm away and I could find myself longing for a bit of European dress sense, or culture, or even a bit of the resigned pessimism and expert moaning that you just can't get in the US without being a hardened New Yorker.

There's a line in the film "Truly, Madly, Deeply" (which happens to be one of my favourite films) where the Polish guy Titus, says, "A man should never drink, he remembers only his country, his mother, his lovers".  In my state today, I think I need to re-phrase that to, "A woman should never come off the pill, she remembers only her worries, her insecurities and while watching 'Outnumbered' later, her daytrips to 'Rabbit World' with her ex-partner..."  It's tragic what a loss of progesterone and estrogen or whatever the damned contraceptive pill consists of, does to you.  I am most definitely calling it a day now and packing myself off to an early bed with girlie videos and cups of tea, and a small ration of chocolate, because I need to lose weight before I go to America so that its sweetened food doesn't entirely annihilate my body with unavoidable fat and carbohydrates.  Hmm.  Chocolate rationing at a time like this.  Tough-going...

Up, down, Up, down....

Ah writing...how I have missed you.  The soft and soothing attempts of scrolling through my brain for just the right match of word for my mood.  The hot coffee to help me wake up in order to land on that word landing strip.  The sense of wistful wallowing in a field of language.  Sumptuous, luxurious, WRITING.

Why is my life filled instead with sleep deprivation, planning and organising and generally STRUGGLING to get from one day to the next?  I have at least kept to the important things, namely doing aerobics, singing from time to time and earning MONEY.  But it's been up and down on the emotional front.  One day I'm feeling positive because new possibilities have opened up, the next there's some mini-crisis and all that hope is suddenly rendered very precariously positioned on a cliff-edge.  In those moments, the previous kick-ass attitude, endless energy, achievements and belief in a future I can look forward to, dissolve into an unfathomable grief, fear for the future, self-hatred and disgust.

One such illustrative example of which would be when the architect and I booked flights for a fabulous road trip from Chicago to San Francisco.  The spanner in the works came the day after booking them, that the architect's prospective new job, provisionally to start in May, fell through due to a Mafia-like stroke of corruption that I'm finding out is more than possible within government departments here in the Czech Republic.  He's now scared that if he gets an offer somewhere else, they won't let him put off starting until he gets back from the States and we'll have to cancel the trip altogether.  (Or even worse, he'll remain unemployed and have to start selling his possessions to be able to live...)I am resolutely ignoring this possible scenario and have fixed my mind on a picture I've got on my wall of the Golden Gate bridge.  I am going to stand on a beach overlooking that famous structure if it's the last thing I do!  The flights are booked, we are GOING!  I may even start my own Armistead Maupin type novel while there.  Y'know, why not?

[There've been lots of capitals so far - why is that?  I think I'm getting back my demanding inner child who wants what she wants and she won't take no for an answer.  (Waydda go inner child.  You are the future.) Fake it till you make it, right?]

What do I really want?  Hey people, it's LIST TIME AGAIN:

1) Paid writing work - come on, it IS possible

2) To travel, extensively and often so I can WRITE about it and meet curious new people who can inspire me

3) To be able to buy myself some new make-up and clothes, so I can try that thing of 'enjoying being in my own skin'.  Not least because I've got to do a photoshoot on Sunday to get new acting headshots and shots for my website that is in the early developing stages.  I'm currently scared that the photos will reveal how much the Czech Republic has aged me, like it does so cruelly to everyone here.  (I'm hoping it's down to their mindset and poor diet and am determined to overcome both.  Greek salad again today.  And salmon.  Yep, smoked salmon.  Living the high-life, eh?)

4) To earn enough to make progress with the language of this country.  I even forgot the past tense of 'write' earlier.  That either means I'm REALLY tired or REALLY stupid.  Not sure which.  Czech has the capacity to remind me of my stupidity on a regular basis and it bothers me.  Because if I really am stupid, why have I spent most of my life being ostracised for being too clever, too complex, too 'high maintenance'?!

5) Salmon - grilled salmon - once a week!

6) To go to NYC for Christmas.  I KNOW I could do it.  I know someone who usually goes back to the UK then and sublets her flat.  I just need the MONIES...

7) To be able to afford to get my hair done somewhere good and to have a soothing, relaxing massage. And to be able to afford to buy face masks and body scrubs to use to pamper myself with at home after doing aerobics.

8) Decent red wine.  Czech Republic, you know not the likes of this.  Nor would you appreciate that it's worth paying the extra money to have it instead of the cheap rubbish you sell instead.

9) A piano.  Just thought I'd throw that in there, nothing's impossible, right?

10) A holiday in Hawaii staying in a hotel room with a piano and being able to write songs and blog posts and poems all day long.  Peppered with walks on the beach and swimming in the sea in my 50s style swimsuit, of course.  [Now I'm really pushing it, right?]

So there we are, the ups and downs of a hopeless, hapless individual with delusions of grandeur.  But it's surely better to be in the gutter, looking up at the stars, than standing on the street looking long and hard into the gutter and wondering how long it'll be before the gutter is in fact your home.