Forbrydelsen and other Scandinavian-like Distractions

Dear Reader,

December is a real drag. I hate the necessity for more money that the lead up to Christmas entails. In many ways, I hate Christmas. I like fairy lights, candles and sparkly things, so I'm not entirely sure why this is. I think I mostly hate it for its focus on family instead of friends. Family may well be lovely (or not) in their own way, but we CHOOSE our friends, often for the very fact that they are nothing like our family, and it's a shame that at Christmas, they have the same duties to see their families, so it's impossible to meet up.

But enough about Christmas. The thing that I've been obsessed with since discovering a free Netflix trial opportunity, is catching up on what everyone with a brain in the UK has already seen, namely "Forbrydelsen". That Danish series with the woman I was once compared to by some Danish directors, Sofie Gråbøl, who was once (unbelievable though it is now...) known as an actress playing really emotional roles. Having been out of the country with no access to BBC4, I hadn't been able to see it before now. And now I'm hooked. Which is funny, because though I'm learning lots of Danish, via reminders of Swedish and the general similarities, I'm also being dragged down emotionally at a time when I'm really struggling with the lack of light in this country. It's not a great combination really. I suppose it makes me really grateful for the tiny, rare, moments of mirth in the show. A little joke about the Swedes or a little dig at the politician who freely admits he's slept with half of Copenhagen, "only half?" says Lund, in a rare moment of playfulness, suddenly becomes a precious gem in an otherwise stark, hopeless and loveless atmosphere.

I still can't get used to the fact that the sun can't be bothered to get up before 8am, which is making me sleepy and sluggish, moody and irritable and not very efficient. I've got to get things together and get myself out of this country as soon as possible.

Yours strugglingly,
Ms Platform Edge.X

Back in business - a retrospective part 1

Dear Reader,

I wrote this before I left for London but never found the time to post it. I think I was a bit ticked off about a few things, or so it would appear:

I have had a list of things building up lately in my head of what I do and do not want and somehow, I feel the need to put this down into words on a screen to clear it all out of my system. Some have been gargantuan mistakes and some have been delightful discoveries, and some things just made me laugh. Let me just vent for a moment please...

Things I DO NOT want:

I am tired, oh so tired of the tediousness and difficulty in this global information super-highway age of STILL not being able to get a decent service on getting my favourite magazine (shamefully, I admit that this is US Elle - no, honestly, it's got really good articles in it and a searingly witty problems page that makes me laugh every time) delivered to my door or available on my Mac at a reasonable price. First attempts to solve this problem involved occasionally "going down Vaclavak" (god, how have I made this possible to say in a Bristolian accent - possibly because Prague now reminds me of Bristol and its small town mentality) and getting an overpriced copy of said magazine once every three months. All for the sake of not being able to hold off from buying magazines any longer than that. Yet this means roughly £10 spent in one go in a place where getting £20 for a 90 minute meeting that I traipse across town for an hour to get to and from is a rare moment of luck, as most meet-ees expect this for decidedly less. 

I do not want then, in my attempts to subscribe, like a true devotee would, to be given no other choice than to subscribe for two years, without seeing a subtotal of the elevated cost that allows for sending it all the way from the US to the little old Czech Republic, before purchasing. I also do not want to then be told to wait 6-9 weeks for an account number to be sent to me that then allows me to contact customer services to ask to cancel my subscription, because any other form of logging in is denied me by the fact that I am not a US citizen and the customer service website is only set up to accept such customers. (In other words, no zip code, no way in...Even using a real but not mine zip code didn't work - believe me, I tried!) However, I was saved this time by the fact that they automatically allow you access to the digital version of the magazine, which though useless to me because it's only compatible with an iPad that I do not have, at least sent me my account number. Which brings me to the useful bit of information I'd like to impart: If you want to get two free issues on top of the 24 you're paying for in advance, you'll automatically get it if you try to cancel. They give you that option before you do. Good to know if you're a US Elle addict like me, though this time I have declined, because I really can't afford to spend that amount of money upfront.

What I DO want:

Having become rather enamoured with my former flatmate's pop songs (in Danish) and often looking them up on YouTube to do aerobics to, I clicked by chance on an interesting looking video listed in the side bar and discovered possibly the most heart-wrenching but beautiful song ever. And as a result of that, I found a further video of the same artist, just talking through her little creative life of singing and writing and recording songs. She had faerie lights and a sort of semi-piano/keyboard and just the typical gorgeously design-conscious and creative room that you find in any Copenhagen flat that I would die for. In essence, I want her life. 

What I have to accept but fear I cannot cope with anymore:

Randomly, just as you think you're making progress and pushing things forward, my brain decides to overturn my positive thoughts and throws me into totally unpredictable, unbearable emotional pain. For no apparent reason. There I was, happily getting through my self-inflicted relentless timetable that allows for me to make training videos to try to get voice work and singing clients and work out how to upload them to a blog and newsletter that I update and send out once a week, and suddenly, without warning, I am thrust back into the depths of grief about ex partner. Why? I don't understand the workings of my brain. As Karen in the BBC comedy 'Outnumbered' put it so succinctly, "Isn't your brain supposed to be on your side?"

Things that seem to be getting worse and I'm not entirely sure why, nor convinced there is anything I can do to fix them:

We all knew I got a lot of tummy ache. Between having a Mum, grandma on Mum's side and grandma on Dad's side who all had the most appallingly painful periods, it was kind of inevitable that that side of things would be kind of a struggle. But inheriting IBS as well? Come on people! What is this?! I was just battling the former and thought I'd got over the worst of it, when recurring IBS problems decide to continue to plague me like an irritating toddler that you thought had finally learnt to amuse him or herself, only to realise 10 minutes later, that that pulling feeling is them tugging at your trousers because they are bored. Again. Frankly my dear, I have had enough. Go away pain, please. Go and bother someone who sits at home smoking dope all day. They can handle it.

Things I found amusing this week:

I did my little money-saving trick at the bookshop again the other day, now that they've transferred their foreign magazines section to the basement section, not behind the counters at the tills, and grabbed a handful of magazines to take up with me to the cafe. I read as much as I could of magazines I liked but didn't want to buy (the UK Elle I can buy next week in Londoninium for a third of the price it is here- hurrah!) and discovered, as I was reading, that there are trivial bits of knowledge I have that amaze even me sometimes. There was an article that featured the name of a clearly Icelandic woman, Aslaug Magnusdottir, and I laughed to myself as I read the first name in a German way in my head, then realised from the surname that she's not German, but Icelandic, and thus suddenly had a flashback of my Icelandic teacher (yes, I once had one...) yelling at us that the 'AU' sound is NOT pronounced 'ow' like it is in German, it's 'eoi' with a kind of cute, childlike-sounding delivery that is much softer and dreamier. I can understand her disgust at the mispronunciation. But it was funny how vividly I remembered that disgust. And that I can tell you how to pronounce it correctly. I must be one of about 10 people in the UK who happen to know that. And I imagine I am one of one person in the Czech Republic who knows that. Not that it's a useful piece of knowledge or anything, I grant you that, but it is nonetheless, interesting. Maybe. Or maybe I'm one of one who actually finds that interesting. Oh well. I am unique, if not actually of any consequence. You can write that on my gravestone, "She was unique, if not actually of any consequence."  

And with that, I bid you farewell. At least for now.

Ms. Platform Edge.X

Single Person Behaviour Night - Yay!

I finally have a weekend to myself. An evening to indulge in 'single-person behaviour', which couldn't have come at a better time. I've had such a strange week. I got dragged into a series of strange interviews with a language school-cum-consulting company whereby I couldn't tell how they separated the two and it took hours to understand even the beginnings of the aims of the company because the person explaining it to me spoke English as his fourth language and it was rather hard to interpret at times. I had to do a 'test' of phoning the Director of Sales of the Four Seasons hotel here in Prague and get him to agree to a meeting at the hotel about how we could send him some clients. Except it was based on the premise of a business card for a less than luxurious German travel agency that this guy at the language school/consultancy company had the business card of. It was all so confusing and pointless and seemed like merely an exercise in blagging. Which I loathe.

As it turned out, I got paid £10 for successfully arranging the meeting (and therefore 'passing the test') then I tried to negotiate a fair rate (£11.53 an hour instead of £6) for the work going ahead and in the end got turned down because the guy at the Four Seasons (rightly) cancelled our meeting on the basis that he really didn't think we were in a position to offer him clients appropriate for the standard/price of the hotel. So I didn't get the job. And I can tell you, I am SO relieved. I did learn a lot about how I CAN negotiate afterall (well, at least, when I know I'm in a strong position - I mean how many other Brits in Prague can speak Czech to intermediate level, French to advanced level [at least on a good, 'brushed-up' day] and understand German and even a bit of Spanish?) and I know how to prepare myself for setting my limits. I carefully calculated that the number of hours he was proposing amounted to half my working hours in a week overall and that therefore, I could not actually live on £6 an hour for the work. Simple. 

In other news, I got through ex-partner's birthday for another year, having sent him a little card and sent a text message on the day. It feels so strange. So odd to realise I haven't actually spoken to him in a year or so. In the meantime, the cowboy is still finding it amusing to torture and judge me about this former relationship because he's not mature enough to let bygones be bygones and accept that he can't really understand how something may have felt for another person. (Having recently got a new meet-ee who's a teenager and whose Dad set up the meetings, the cowboy thought it appropriate to ask about the Dad as soon as I mentioned him, making a sexually suggestive face. I told him this was unacceptable, but the cowboy disagreed with me on that.) So I am more determined than ever that I deserve to be with an adult man, just like any other adult woman is, and I would very much like to be able to move out and be on my own to enable that as soon as possible. The cowboy knows that we are not compatible in the long term, as for some strange reason he really wants children (and I certainly do not want two in one go, i.e an infant and a baby I actually gave birth to, too) but he is incapable of handling that information in a rational way and sits and sulks about it instead, saying things like, "I'm not talking to you, because you don't love me".

So life goes on as usual. I have made professional progress in the form of updating one of my websites, contacting another casting agency with whom I shall register properly on Monday, making a video to go with one of the aims of one of my websites, and contacting a couple of music producers, one of whom seems interested in knowing more about my music. Sadly, he wants some chord charts that I either don't have and will have to set up my keyboard here, where there's not really room for it, to work out, or that I do have already but are in a box in amongst other boxes in a cupboard. (Have I mentioned I don't want to live like this?) Oh and I spoke to my sister about ordering some things from the UK, one for a Christmas pressie for the cowboy, and the rest for me, but she'd already bought a bunch of things I sort of needed, meaning I have less budget left for what I really wanted and was going to sacrifice the 'needed' things for, out of sheer urgency in cheering myself up more, so I have to strike a few things off the list. (Because, much as I really didn't want that consulting job, I really needed the goddamned money of course...)

So, for tonight, by way of compensation, the cowboy has gone to the flat in the mountains and I have bought myself some salmon and cooked it with new potatoes, broccoli and mushrooms and have been sipping rosé wine from Australia from a year prior to losing my ex-partner (here's where I am pathetic) because it was one of the few decent rosé wines in the supermarket here in the back-of-beyond that is this Prague 4 suburb, and I've been watching old SATC videos, reminding myself of a time when my former flatmate, the now super-famous pop star in Denmark, used to sit on my sofa and watch them too and sob because her producer at the time was being a total asshole to her. You know what? I am so glad that she escaped and made it. She bloody deserved it. And I love how much better pop songs sound in Danish. It's almost faerie-like. (Even though the Swedes think the Danes sound like they're speaking with a potato in their mouths.) And it works as a good subterfuge, so that I don't notice that lyrics like, "when time goes backwards, I will love you again and again and again" sound a teensy bit naff. But maybe that's just my own aversion to lyrics about love. I just don't believe in them. It's just too "icky". I really can't explain why.