Boxes, boredom and being boiling hot

I'm living like it's mid-2008 today.  After such a tough weekend I decided to treat myself and do something I rarely do - go out and buy myself lunch.  And not just from Tesco but actually go around the corner and across the road to a coffee chain place and get whatever I fancied, which meant three things instead of just a coffee and one thing to eat.  This feels like the sheer reckless spending others delighted in, in 2008 before the financial meltdown.  My sister is quite capable of doing this without huge guilt even now, but I am having to battle the voices of my childhood that tell me this is a terrible waste of money and something that could have been obtained for a fraction of the cost if only I'd made the chai tea latte myself and made the sandwich, not bought it.  But I feel so happy to have been able to just pop out and take a bunch of recycling things to the recycling banks and then come back via the cafe.

What sheer abundance it is to have such a treat in the midst of this otherwise dreadful state of affairs.  Just look at it.  

Boxes and papers and files everywhere.  I feel worn out already and I've barely done anything today.  Just looking at this pile of stuff to do would be enough to make anyone want to crawl under a duvet and hide though, I think.  But I must persevere.  Despite the continuing Prague heat.

I have found things as I've gone along that I decided to document.  Like this diary cover I made for my appointments diary for 2010:

And the very old pic of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore I put on the inside cover of it:

(I don't know why, I think I just liked the juxtaposition of his nordic-like blonde hair in contrast to her practically black hair and the fact that they possibly don't even like each other anymore, which is somehow sad, but god knows why I care) along with a copied picture from one of those silly-sweet postcards you can buy in Ryman's.

And I've had to take down from the wall the inspirational page from a magazine that got me longing to see San Francisco:

The cowboy is meant to be popping round tonight.  We're at that 'year and a half' stage in our relationship now, and I think he's getting a bit bored of me.  He's probably glad I'm around now and then, but mostly, the day-to-day drudgery of his job and the lack of funds situation I continually find myself in means he's less than inclined to come and see me unless it's really convenient.  Like if he can stay over and get up later tomorrow morning before walking to work from here, which saves him a bit of time to get him about 15 minutes' more sleep in the morning than usual.  Except this evening he's only going to come and see me before heading back home because I'm on the way to the metro station anyway and tomorrow he's got to get to a meeting in České Budějovice.  In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he calls and says he's too tired and goes straight home instead.  To be honest, I'm feeling especially tired myself.  It's just so boiling hot, it's exhausting.  Perfect weather for lazing on a beach, not so great for packing up boxes and trying to concentrate on what needs to go where.

It's funny how you get used to things being quite nearby here in Prague.  It becomes an arduous journey if it takes longer than half an hour.  Which, of course, is ridiculous.  But this is coming from the city where there's no direct metro link back from the airport to the city.  You have to take a bus.  (How provincial.)  So travelling to the airport feels like you're leaving the boundaries of Prague anyway because you have to go to the end stop on the green line metro and then take a 20 min bus journey to the airport that makes a fuss about the disctinction between Terminal 1 and 2 but the two are so close together that you can walk from one to the other within 10 minutes and without leaving the building anyway.

Back in London, people get used to the fact that if you want to see a friend at their house, you'll probably have to travel for an hour and a half because they'll be right the other side of London or at least on another tube line, so you'll have to head for the centre and then change.  Here, I've become totally complacent and want to stick to meetings with people based near stations on the same line or preferably in the centre anyway, so I can just walk there.  And everyone here forgets the letter of the line they're referring to, and just says "the red line" or "the green line" and it's funny because I thought that would make you stand out as a tourist.  Like, calling the Hammersmith and City Line 'the pink line' would if you said it in London.  Everyone would know what you meant, we'd just all be snobbish about it and know that you were a foreigner or at least 'non-Londoner' from your having said that.  But here, it's fine.  People who've lived here for years still say, 'the yellow line'.  And there are only three metro lines in total, so it's not as if it's hard to learn.

Ruinous fashion and cheery eccentrics

My natural proclivities towards quirky fashion and strange accessories is definitely coming back.  I've got to meet a new meet-ee in a cafe tomorrow, so I've decided to go to Paul's bakery and get myself a nice table upstairs where I can sit and write a bit before meeting him and read the copy of Harper's Bazaar that I shouldn't have bought because imported magazines will ruin me but I HAD to give myself a break after months of this miserable scrimping and scraping.   I wore pearls today, to make up for wearing boring trousers and a black vest top because I just had to have a tiny show of effort and, goddammit, fun.

I had to walk past the crazy Russian fashion-house of a shop on Vaclavák earlier and I'm now longing for one of their silly, sequinned sparkly bags.  They had pink ones and turquoise ones and green ones....  But I cannot afford such fripperies right now.  And who knows when I will, as meet-ees are dropping like flies (not dying, just cancelling meetings) and I am so low on funds I STILL don't know how I'm going to pay the rent in 5 day's time...

But in the meantime, I shall just have to amuse myself with old copies of magazines and the new ellicit one I got today and hope that I can just enjoy seeing the nice things I'll never be able to afford.  What if seeing was 9 tenths possession...?  That would be good in this context alone perhaps.  Maybe one day in the future, all shopping will be done that way - you take a look at a magazine and the things you look at longest will pop up in a holographic image infront of you with the price on and a link to type in your credit card details...

So I looked through the magazine last night while having a luxurious bath after aerobics and I was rather pleased to note a few amusing things.  First of all, the terrible fashions that just look stupid, such as the orange slices earrings and the tablecloth/tapestry top that looks like someone just ripped it from off the wall and stuck it on a T-shirt.  I could do better than that.

Then there was a delightful picture of Uma Thurman looking lovely in a white dress with a splash of colour from her earrings:

And then there were the true eccentrics from the ballet-inspired runway weirdness and old lady colour clash couture, to the inimitable Bill Murray who seemed to be plonked into this photo shoot looking silly but utterly sweet and funny nonetheless.

The proper fashion pages filled with pictures of Kate Moss were positively boring and repetitive in comparison.

Fashion, freaks and frivolity

"Crazy ideas are better than too normal ideas."  Karl Lagerfeld

I suppose it was inevitable, having watched so much SATC recently, that I would feel drawn to flicking through fashion magazines and adapting what I've been wearing to be at least a little bit more adventurous.  Having a full day off to myself has done wonders.  A day off, on my own, in my little flat.  I almost never thought I'd get to enjoy this kind of delight.  As such, I had time to both catch up on sleep and read, oh my god, read newspapers, magazines and online articles (see THIS  fashion page linked to the Chicago Tribune site.  Picture number 9 is of a girl with a mismatched set of colours and layers, someone after my own heart) - what a revelation!  I feel so much better for it.  I even had time to form a little idea of how to at least try to improve my circumstances, and even play the keyboard, so I feel like I'm getting back to my old self.

Last night I spoke to the architect about how I'd been discussing an article in the Czech version of Elle, on the last page, written by a well-known Czech actress, Ana Geislerová, and I said how funny it is that she gets to write a monthly column.  The architect personally thinks she's nine tenths a prostitute, which, given her recounting numerous lovers in her latest article is perhaps only an exaggeration, rather than an outright character defamation, but he rested his case that of course a well-known actress would get a column in a fashion magazine, because she will help tell women what to wear.  And this, he attested, is what fashion magazines are all about: getting women to feel inadequate and buy more stuff.

I can't say I disagree all that much, except I know that in my case, buying a fashion magazine, if it's any good, gets me to try to adapt what things I already have to wear them in more interesting ways or try a free make-up trick (rare, as actually, I  usually avoid the 'beauty' pages because the word itself puts me off) or keep me up to date on the latest film/music/literature releases.  I simply can't afford to go out and buy anything as a result of what I see in the magazine.  (Quite frankly, the purchase of the magazine in itself usually uses up the last of my disposable income and causes me to re-think another trip to Tesco to get more food, opting to scale down on bread and anything nice and try to live off apples and cereal for a bit longer instead.)

So in light of this, I wondered how guilty I should feel about my terrible fashion magazine addiction.  I don't buy magazines every month, but some months (such as September) I might buy two, so it's the equivalent of one a month I suppose.  I also bought more in August, because I wanted something to read while travelling and I wanted to enjoy a week 'on holiday' so I did holiday things.  Plus, I wanted to buy a couple of Czech magazines to get me to look up and learn some more vocab.  But is the architect right, and I'm merely being caught in a pre-organised industry trap, which seeks to do me out of all my remaining money and make me feel insecure enough to buy more stuff when I can?  Well, largely, no.  Because I simply don't have money for clothes anyway, and I can use some articles from the magazines I've bought as meet-ee fodder, so it's not entirely wasted money.  And when I do have enough time to really look through some interesting pages of fashion, I actually feel inspired to do other things too.

Like, for instance, today, I had already leafed through pages of shoes, and found some delightful piano-print ones in Paris Vogue, but that didn't influence what I wore.  I nonetheless felt inspired to dress more eccentrically and put on some purply pink things because I was in the mood for colour and something non-classic today.  A couple of weeks ago I got a surprise package from the Russian Countess with two pairs of earrings in it, so I've been wearing one pair on and off most of the time, but decided to try the super-big purply ones today. 

It worked.  I felt so much better.  And that in turn, lead me to play the keyboard and sing a few made up little bits of nonsense that also made me feel more alive.

A month or so ago, I watched this video from Harper's Bazaar (see it HERE) and felt comforted and reassured, because all the famous designers in it seemed like such freaks (with one or two exceptions) and I laughed at the strange little fantasy world they get to live in and how they are allowed to live like a crazy person and it's ok.  So my being an eccentrically dressed nobody in Prague is hardly the crime of the century, right?  It's good to know that there are indeed even weirder people than me out there.