The bitterest cow in Christendom

What do you do when you have meet-ees who keep cancelling at the last minute, knowing they'll have to pay a cancellation fee, but who don't care, when every bit of work you do feels like it's draining you of the energy you wanted to have left for something creative, and when your day starts at 7am and finishes at 8pm with a meet-ee who thinks it's amusing to discuss bigamy as though it's a positive and 'natural' thing?  God save me, it's days like this when I fear I am a danger to society.  I could freely mouth-off like a trucker at any minute to one of these people, or resort to sticking needles in voodoo dolls (if I had any) just to get the stress and fury out of my system.

And only yesterday morning, I was writing a short children's story in French.  Where did that calm, hopeful person disappear to today?  And why can't I be her more often?  What is happening to me?  I'm wound up like a tight internet cable that refuses to lie straight anymore.  (That would be my internet cable.  No fancy stuff like wi-fi here.  Not unless I want to pay astronomical charges to have my own landline all to myself.  Incidentally, the Czechs pronounce 'wi-fi' as 'wiffy', which always makes me giggle.)

Somebody please save me or sedate me because the chill of winter has already set in and I'm convinced it's bitten in to my hard exterior and somehow made it crust over in even harder, wound-covering fashion, with a view to making me the bitterest cow in Christendom.  Or at least Prague.

Preparing for Paris

I am off to Paris on Thursday, due to an unfathomable stroke of luck and good fortune (and huge generosity) the like of which I don't normally believe in.  I realised today in the second of my two French lessons in preparation for going to Paris that a) my French isn't awful and b) my life has been eaten up by people who think I'm no good at languages.  How has this happened and how dare they suck the life out of me like this?  I am being told by native speakers of French that my French is really good and yet I feel less than competent.  I walk into that horror of a place next door and all I get is disdain and extra demands on my time for a close to criminal salary.

How ever have I let them steal my life like this?  I am on my knees with exhaustion and I feel like I've lost my direction altogether.  Why can I not find a viable way forward?  The life I lead on a day-to-day basis is somehow full of exactly the kind of dread I felt at school, only this time there's no guaranteed end to it all.  Unless I'm happy to become homeless, of course.

I wanted to get out to see things like this:

Or this:

Or views like this:

But it was raining today.  And I had 'stuff to do' which required concentration.  So it was a marvellous day for builders to arrive upstairs and start work on the flat above, scattering dust and making an almighty ,hluk' [noise] to beat the energy out of any otherwise calm and unsuspecting person.  I was choking from the dust, in fact, so I'm not looking forward to their return tomorrow.  But on Thursday I shall thwart them by abandoning this country altogether and going somewhere where I can actually converse with people in their native language to some degree of competence.  I think.  Peut-être.

Nic moc

Isn't it sad when the only real success of the day is having sent off a census form?  I got the expected blank kind of look and no words other than 'you know you have to post it today, right?' (in Czech of course) as I was handed the envelope to send the damned forms off in.  But the point is, it's done.

Everything else was rather ,nic moc' (nothing much).  I'd been mostly dreading things that hadn't been proved, some of which turned out ok, then there was one non-census related bureaucratic irritation and a bit of exercise to round-off the day.

There's nothing like leaping around to Limp Bizkit, singing/saying '...cause your mouth's writing cheques that your ass can't cash.'  (One of my favourite lines. I wish I could find a way to slip that into a conversation one day.  Preferably with a person of authority who keeps going back on her word rather a lot.)  I even managed all my high kick moves to the full-on bits in the "Rollin' (Air raid vehicle)" track.  My fitness level must be slowly creeping back.  [Minor success.]

And then I read an article in a French magazine while having a relaxing bath, and watched a music video of Maxime le Forestier's song 'L'homme au bouquet de fleurs'.  One of my favourites.  Not least because it's a really intriguing song with Daniel Auteuil in the video.  I have to come back to French things from time to time because it's somehow where my heart lies, more than England.  My soon-to-be temporary French teacher told me I should have been French after I told him about my penchant for red wine and dinners with friends.  Maybe he's right.  He also said, "it's never too late to change your nationality!"  It's a tempting thought.  But my Dad, and now the architect too, would never forgive me.

Confusing culture

I've not been particularly involved with many people for a while.  Isolation has prevailed somewhat.  However, I have had one or two meetings and the last two days has involved meeting two French speakers for two completely different purposes.  One, as a language exchange and the other as more of an interview situation.  I have to admit, it's been a bit disheartening to find that the fact that I've been learning Czech so avidly lately means it infiltrates my otherwise reasonable-ish French.  I've found myself saying some astonishing things.

The first was mixing up a number; 'vingt tisíc' instead of 'vingt-mille' or 'dvacet tisíc' (= 20,000).  Then I mixed up little linking words like 'mais' with 'ale' (= but) and 'et' / 'a' (= and) and 'ou' / 'nebo' (= or) and it was quite funny really, although pretty confusing and incomprehensible to someone who doesn't speak both languages.  Which would be me, in fact, because I really can't say I speak Czech yet.  I can 'get by', i.e. communicate, though it takes some considerable time and all of my case endings are wrong, but it is no doubt the clumsiest, pigeon-Czech imaginable.  Alas.

Whereas, with French, I've recently had a number of compliments.  It's been rather lovely.  Today it was, "your pronunciation is very good", and last week's language exchange was, "ton français, c'est vraiment top".  But then I discovered, I mispronounced something as simple as 'culture'.  I  was hesitant to pronounce the 'cul' (= bum) in 'culture' basically.  So it came out sounding like 'couture' ('sewing'), which, as you can imagine, was rather confusing.  So now every time I try to say 'culture' in French, I think, "dans ton CUL!", without meaning to, but as a way of remembering, yes, I really have to say it starting with the word for BUM.  Hmm.  How, erm, cultured.