Street-watching

I've been having a tough day of inner-battles today.  But happiness is 'an inside job' so if I'm struggling, it's all up to me to fix it.  I haven't been feeling very well all day but hate it when I don't foresee this and have to slow down, just when I was hoping to get a lot done.  Sometimes I'm forced to obey my body rather than the other way around and I'm not very good at it.  I'm so impatient!

I have had an opportunity to notice some of the things I'd been missing out on in the midst of all my 'battling' to get things done.  One of which is just looking out of the window and watching what goes on around here.  It's funny being an ex-pat.  After a year or so your perception of a place changes and you find yourself becoming quite blasé about what's around you and almost bored with the surroundings you once found appealing.  But this evening I stopped to watch the comings and goings of my street, which are noisy and eventful at times, due to it being a very busy road that takes you out to the motorway directly from the central train station. 

It was mid-evening, that time when it's too late to try to continue without switching the lights on but there is still some light in the sky, and I watched people walking down the road.  Some were in a hurry, some dawdling, one pregnant woman was  trying to walk at the same pace as her two friends, then there were a group of tourists, one of whom took photos of the other two while they walked back to their hotel.  I watched him take that picture and I expected to see a brief flash of movement, but I was too far away to see it anyway, and it made me think of my old camera that used film and how it used to make such a shunting, sliding, snapping sound as the shutter was released.  It was reassuringly clunky, which made it seem like I'd done a good job just for taking a photo.  Kind of like a minute sound of applause per shot.

Of course, it's obsolete now.  Goodness knows where I'd have to go if I wanted a film developed these days.  Though if it were to still be possible commercially, you'd think Prague would be a good place to find such an old-fashioned service.  I have got used to some of that old-fashionedness about this city but I still appreciate enormously being able to afford to live somewhere busy.  My disdain for residential areas seems only to be getting more ingrained in me.  I love the noise of the cars when it's so constant.  It almost sounds like tides coming and going.

On the other hand, the view across the road is hardly a beautiful sight.  It's a run-down looking road with a hotel that seems to be well and truly shut down and some little dodgy looking corner shops and a block of flats.  Some of the flats look more modern inside than others.  One flat seems to have marble statues in it with their backs turned to me but surrounded by paper and cardboard, as though an artist used to work there but has since abandoned the place.  One flat on the corner looks totally open-plan and modernised, whereas most of the others look shabby and cluttered.  

Earlier on, one of the regular 'street watchers' in a flat opposite me came to the window to smoke a fag.  He's always doing this with no top on and he's very overweight, so it's kind of off-putting to look outside when he's doing his neighbourhood watch thing.  I sometimes wonder if he watches me pottering about in my kitchen, doing the washing up while the kettle boils.  He probably thinks my quirky clothes are weird and off-putting just like I think his half-nakedness is unpleasant.  Each to their own, I suppose.

It's nice to be able to enjoy standing and looking out of the window with a gentle breeze coming through instead of the guaranteed cold and rain that I would feel if I were in London.  It's that continental summer experience.  Leaving windows open all night because it's so warm, and it's only June.  It gets pretty stifling in August.  That's when you start praying it'll rain.  But I do miss the palm trees of San Francisco and the fun of being able to get stupidly big ice creams and walk along a foggy beach.  Prague is limited on food and drink choices.  It's not a place that 'grew up with' a lot of choice.  Prague-ers have only just started to consider the idea and still seem unsure as to whether 'choice' is worth the hassle.

I was only in San Francisco for four days but I miss it!  And I miss California in general because it was so beautifully varied.  And because I would love to see more of the coast.  This land-locked country is beginning to get to me!   I didn't think I was the 'beach girl' type, but when you get a glimpse of what a beach is supposed to be like (i.e. sandy, clean and warm) it wins you over.   Or maybe I just like what is the polar opposite of what I'm most used to.  In England, it was living in residential areas, miles away from the city centre, here, now that I have that proximity to vibrant city life, I miss the coast.  I didn't appreciate the coast enough in England but then that's probably because the seaside resorts in England are primarily a) cold and b) super-tacky and full of amusement park things and 50s decor.  Take away those two things and you've got yourself a nice beach experience.

I knew I shouldn't have watched that old 'On the beach' episode of ER....

The world and universe

I feel like I've been walking through a tunnel that's lit with strangely orange lighting and I've forgotten what time of day it is outside.  I have not been sleeping at all well and the weirdness of this current point in my life is very disconcerting.  I have flashbacks of times in London in my room in a dark and gloomy West London house, watching ER on Monday nights with a glass of red wine in a shapely green wine glass I got from a charity shop somewhere.  I used to watch ER for the stories that unfolded about the character who started out as a nurse and then became a doctor.  I don't know why I was drawn to that character so much.  She just had a sort of inner strength but also total inability to open up to people that I related to at the time and I found myself routing for her as her stories developed.

I don't know quite how my story is developing at the moment, but I'm having strange incidences of not recognising myself in a situation.  I used to be super-cynical and razor-sharp at throwing out the worst of my frustrations in crystal clear prose or rebellious ranting, but I seem to be being drawn away from all that now.  (Bloody hell, you go to California once, and look what happens..!)  I have found myself listening to Marianne Williamson and Tony Robbins, trying to learn and re-train my brain to stop criticising myself and to try to be more focussed about the things I love and want to have more time for.

I made two videos at the beginning of this week, in order to enter two similar competitions for business training.  I wonder if either will yield anything?  I at least learnt a fair amount about filming and editing on iMovie, which I'm quite pleased about, as that's a useful little string to my bow.  I need to tackle Wordpress.org tomorrow.  I also have to go on a Treasure Hunt tomorrow, can you believe it?!

There's a firm that make these treasure hunt trails for 'team-building' projects for companies, and I'm getting paid tomorrow to go and check that all the things on the list of clues are intact and still visible and so on.  Weird, right?  If only I had enough cash to actually enjoy wandering around Prague for three hours by stopping for coffee and cake at Kavárna Slavia for example.  Unfortunately, as things stand right now, I'm down to 300Kč for food for next week and that might have to include travel for this work tomorrow, until I get paid for it.  But I will at least make the rent that way.

In the meantime, I'm really stressed about a publishing contract that's come my way as part of a (now geographically distant) pool of musicians I know and is subject to a 4-branch 'tree' of collectors/publishers that makes things so complicated and so divided up that I can't even see how much money I would get from it in theory.  I had the reply from the MU solicitor today with my free hour's worth of suggested amendments and advice and the whole thing was brilliant work but totally filled my head with stress and questioning and fear and irreconcilable confusion.  

I had to laugh though, because the solicitor brilliantly and simply crossed out all the bits of language where the contract-writer had sought to appear 'clever' by adding in unnecessary and confusing terms.  I love it when people do this.  Or when people try to use a saying that they think will make them sound grander, but then they screw it up and look like a total prat.  Such as, "it always ceases to amaze me when.." when they meant "never ceases" or a casual misuse of 'literally' for emphasis that just isn't possible.  Or an overzealous attempt at pomp and circumstance that fails when they get to the end of their sentence and can't finish on a flourish for want of a perfect synonym for something they said right before.  (Boris Johnson does this a lot and he allegedly received the best education money can buy, so he's got no excuse!) 

Maybe I've just become impatient with Britishness.  Or I'm finding it irritating unless demonstrated in the finest form of years of tireless, self-motivated education.  Or maybe I'm just wound-up that a company like Sony are trying to rip people off by getting them to sign 20 year deals that can't be negotiated down to less than 10 with no obligation on their part to guarantee any payment during that period whatsoever (and you can forget about an advance..!) while retaining the right to the copyrighted material whether they make any money out of it for you or not.  By god, they put some weird nonsense in those contracts.  I notice the MU appointed solicitor has crossed out the definition of the 'territory' of the jurisdiction of the contract from "the world and universe" to just "the world".  Seriously, who writes these contracts?  Would they like to outline the exact boundaries of the universe, just to clarify?  Perhaps I should ask for that. 

I feel so tired from all these rapid thoughts and corrections of those thoughts.  I can't take the constant sleepless nights.  You'd think I were on drugs or something.  (I'm not.  More's the pity...)  The last two nights I've been ready for bed and about to go to sleep when I burst into tears uncontrollably.  And then that's me occupied for the next hour until I can pull myself together to make a milky drink and try to go to sleep again.  It's been torturous actually.  My head is full of flashbacks and visions of myself as being alone and small and almost invisible forever.  All that utterly calamitous stuff.  It feels like there's some kind of monster within me being exorcised.  And I don't even know when it'll end, or what the world will look like when I come out of all this.  And the really hilarious thing is, I don't even have enough money to buy a bottle of wine to have a glass before bed as some kind of last ditch attempt at a sedative.  But I guess that's probably a good thing.

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.

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.

Fantasy wish list and poverty monsters

I know it's terrible to just 'want' things.  Things you can survive without, but if you go without all of them all of the time, it's a bloody miserable existence.  Perhaps I should see this kind of need, the result of bankrupting myself due to music for so many long, pointless years, as some kind of entity.  Maybe if I call that entity 'Malcolm' or something 'totally made up by a 5 year-old'-sounding, such as 'muftystuffenslop' or 'megahoopylops' or 'stoneybrokasaurus', I could feel better about it.  I could just see it as a mass of horrible monster-ness that has no real power.

So here we go; in a bid to cast a spell over 'Malcolm' or 'Stoneybrokasaurus', I shall write my most tantalising, silly but nice and/or urgently needed wish list thoughts and hope that somehow at least one of them might simply appear in my life one day: 

1) A pair of jeans that actually fit well and look good on me.  (May as well put the most impossible thing first, eh?!)

2) A simple, red summer dress.  Something like a 50s shift dress made of cotton.

3) An electric guitar.  (I'm too furious with the world to play a keyboard and I can't have the Yamaha U2 I used to have, let alone the Yamaha C3 I'd love to have, let alone the Bösendorfer any-size-at-all I'd KILL to have, which would be preferable, but actually louder, causing me to be evicted forthwith.)

4) Some citrus-smelling shower gel (because small things make a difference too)

5) A tub of chocolate ice-cream (hell, even a magnum would do)

6) A flight to New York and a flat I could do a swap with for a few weeks

7) A new pair of black canvas ballet shoes (because the ones I do aerobics in are falling apart)

8) A good camera (or even just a good camera phone)

9) An external hard drive to back-up work to (boring, but could avert a major crisis one day)

10) A copy of the latest series of House on DVD (or in the meantime, the last series of ER that I never got to see before I left Blighty)*

I did almost put 'a three hour booking in a piano practice room' but I know that this would only break my heart, as I would wonder when I would EVER get to play a real piano again and I might have to kill myself there and then for having had to sell mine to try out a life that stood a chance of not finishing me off for good.

*(Note to FaerieGodmotherTrainee: this is NOT your job to fulfill, ok?!  I just needed to write a wish list.  I know you know how important little fantasy wish lists are.)

P.S. Does writing two posts in one day partially make-up for such a long absence and lack of regular posting lately?  Maybe just a little bit?