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.

November tears and autumn colours

"I think pessimism is completely out of date.  I think that's a romantic indulgence. I don't think anybody can afford to be pessimistic anymore.  I mean, there's so much that can go wrong, optimism is the only thing possible[...] I've always thought that an optimist was a person who knew exactly how sad a place the world could be and a pessimist is a man who finds out anew every morning. That's the real difference.  I'm obviously optimistic because you simply have to be.  It's an obligation to be optimistic."  Peter Ustinov

I'm sitting at my desk, in a black dress and black cardigan and I'm on a second glass of champagne and my fourth chocolate, surrounded by three fashion magazines.  This scene pretty much sums up my state of mind, if you are discerning enough to read between the lines.  (Yes, I'm hormonal too.  Why must it be that obvious?)

I ruined a friend's birthday this morning by bursting into tears almost the minute she walked through the door.  It was ex-partner's birthday yesterday (a very significant one) and I somehow failed to mention this in my explanation of why I was in floods of tears.  It's all a mess of various different feelings and situations anyway.  (As it always is.)  It got worse because of not being able to buy my friend a better birthday present.  I really wanted to make an effort for her, because I would want the same if it were me, but she seemed genuinely happy with what I'd already got her and didn't mind that I'd run out of time to wrap it up.

[Czechs appear to have low expectations and even lower hope of any surprises that prove their low expectations to be a little pessimistic.  This is one of the things currently bothering me.  Most of all because when I purposely try to exceed their expectations, just to surprise and delight them, my efforts are met with a look of bewilderment or, worse still, disdain that this is wholly unnecessary and over the top.  Since when has being extraordinary been such a bore? And, for heaven's sake, WHY?]

I suppose my desperate mood all stemmed from the difficult weekend I'd had of feeling snuffly and panicking about losing money for being ill (thankfully, my cold hasn't so far gone beyond headaches, the occasional sniffle and a sore throat) but my Tuesday was a 'task-and-a-half' and nearly wiped me out.  Not least because I had to get through so many meetings, so many questions, so little appreciation and all of it on ex-partner's birthday.  Needless to say, I couldn't face calling him.  I just couldn't.  I knew I'd only burst into tears.

I should have had a lovely weekend.  A list of delightful things were in place:

1) Thanks to IKEA's genius in economical flat-packing, the huge bed and even the sofa (yes!) made it through the door. (And thankfully, we made it through the night of assembling both bed and sofa, still a couple.  Which is some sort of miracle, surely?)

2) There was indeed some sunshine over the weekend, despite a few gloomy, or misty hours

3) The autumnal colours of the trees were stunning

4) The IKEA "Hemnes" bed was even more stunning.  It's HUGE!

5) The flat-screen TV that got delivered on Saturday was pretty damned sizeable too

But there were thoughts in my head that gnawed away at me.  And there were things in the architect's mind that were gnawing away at him too.  He needs to feel proud of having achieved something so urgently, that even the tiniest detail of whether the furniture ordered fitted the size of the room absolutely proportionally, or if the colours worked together, or if the flat-screen TV was at the right height from the floor were huge setbacks if deemed 'not quite right'.  I tried to tell him what a great achievement it was to have this flat in the first place, to have put up with a job that doesn't appreciate him enough and treats him like dirt at times, in order to be able to afford this stuff, but he was hell-bent on focussing on all the possible ways of looking at things negatively and of seeing himself as a loser.  Somehow nothing I said or did was enough to override that for him.

And he sensed that my thoughts were elsewhere too.  The funny thing is, they wouldn't have been, if he could have trusted, believed and appreciated my words of encouragement.  If he hadn't teased me when we went for a walk that I'm so spoilt for mentioning there not being any hot water by the afternoon because the boiler, which only heats up water overnight to save on energy costs, had run out of it, or hadn't teased me about how long a walk it would be if I carried on walking so slowly as it was getting dark, and instead had at least equalled the teasing with a proportionate amount of affection or words of support, I might have been more focussed on him and not on my sense of loss.

But there's something funny about how your perception changes when you don't have someone backing you up and supporting you as much as you support them.  When you've lost someone who used to, once upon a time, a long, long time ago, think the world of you and appreciated your efforts both in your work and within the relationship, that sense of loss is reflected in your surroundings.  In those days, I used to go for walks in the woods with this someone and feel 100% safe and cared for.  I would look at the beautiful colours of autumn leaves and see the trees as friendly beings, just flaring up a last bit of colour before settling down for their winter nap.  Now, in the light of losing ex-partner to someone who fits his life better than he could ever have imagined (and I stupidly believed that no-one, but no-one finds this, but I realise now that good fortune breeds good fortune ad infinitum just as the reverse, sadly, also appears to be the rule of thumb), all I see is the pain of the loss of the trees' leaves and the sadness that they emit in a 'last shout' of colour before they are robbed of their strength and have to 'shut down' for winter. 

I did try to tell myself, that this is my perception, my choice, so I can change it.  But it is remarkably hard.  It's sort of like asking myself to retain the kindly notion of a rickety old bus, in the way that it is portrayed in Mr. Men books, when regularly having to get on the real thing, all damp, leaky and full of miserable commuters at 8am, on your way to school.  It somehow isn't possible.

And I don't feel safe and cared for.  I feel like the isolated foreigner I am.  (Though isolation is not a concept limited to my time abroad, by any means.)  And that foreign-ness was never more acute than today.  I never thought, in a million years, that I could go somewhere and become the optimist of the crowd.  In London I was the pessimist.  In New York, I was the downright suicidal [not to mention far too socialist] pessimist.  In Prague I am the optimist who is living in cloud-cuckoo land.

Sweet Little Something Else

"I get a bit understanding, I see my soul's gonna light my fire/will anybody believe seeing sunshining takes me higher/I do believe when ya legalise, I'll no more mind it/So would ya make up your mind even though I can't tell it is worth trying/Sweet little something in my mouth rolling, it's easy/ sweet little something me swallowing, it's easy..."   

Support Lesbiens:  'Sweet Little Something'

I watched the film 'Jumper' today.  A sci-fi film with Samuel L. Jackson in it.  It was a bit rubbish, but it was fun to imagine for a while what joy would be mine if I were able to instantly transport myself to New York when I felt like it, or anywhere else for that matter.  

I missed New York today.  I wished I could be sitting in Central Park overhearing someone's amusing conversation (hard not to, as so many people talk loudly to each other or on mobile phones without a thought for the fact that everyone around can hear them) or else attending the screenwriter/playwright's group I went to a couple of times.  They used to put on rehearsed readings of their plays to a very professional standard to see if they'd be any good or not and got the group to critique them, almost bluntly honestly, so that they could re-write and edit accordingly.  I also miss the blue sky mornings, sitting and reading The New York Times in a cafe on the Lower East side and writing little diary entries.  Ah, if only, if only, if only...

So it was in keeping with my wishful thinking/surrealist's day that I listened quite a few times to the Drum 'n' bass remix of the Support Lesbiens' track, "Sweet Little Something".  I marvelled at their cunning plan of writing a song with totally nonsensical, non-native English lyrics that could be passed off as merely an expression of how 'off-their-heads' on drugs they would be if they were to take a 'sweet little something'.  Clever ploy boys.  I can be won over by drum 'n' bass when it's this good. 

Sadness, failure and a Swedish Faerie Godmother

The tiredness and confused thoughts in my head do not seem to have abated much.  I apologise that I didn't succeed in harnessing them better, and untangling them enough to make my last post comprehensible, but it was a case of having a 'jumbled-up haze' post or none at all.  Maybe none at all would have been better, I honestly don't know.

As it is, things here so far have been a sad reminder of how I no longer belong here and perhaps, how I never did.  I have been confronted with all the mistakes I made and all of the consequences of not having found confidence in what I was doing soon enough to make use of it and it's been painful to look at.  As I waited last night for a bus to take me back to my lodgings from Victoria, I felt like a scorned visitor, who has no real place here anymore.  As though unless I have some important, well-paid work to do here, I have no right to consider myself a Londoner.  How long do you have to live in London before you can call yourself a Londoner?  And does that get revoked if you have to leave in the end, no matter how long you were there in the first place?

In New York, there was a phrase going round that 'for up to 8 years in NYC, you're merely a 'zoo-yorker', just one of the millions who try and nestle in to a choice spot, but have to face the horrors of housing competition among the huge numbers of people who require it.  During those years, you have to put up with some barely habitable places before you finally find somewhere (if you're lucky) viable to live in.  Some never make it to the finding somewhere habitable stage.  Maybe that's my experience with London really, although I lived here earlier on, years back, when it was still vaguely possible to afford to live on my own, albeit in a gloomy basement flat with no washing machine.  

I had enough hope left back then, that made living somewhere dingy more bearable.  Plus it was really very central, which is something I loved about it.  The rent was quite high, but nothing like today's standards, and I was still prepared to spend a greater percentage of my income on rent than most people, even if it meant I never had enough savings to buy clothes anywhere other than in charity shops (a state which, sadly, has not changed in over ten years) and no money to go out for meals.  I suppose that was my downfall and still is, but living alone means that much to me, that I continue to sacrifice all else, because it really does make such a big difference.  

After a day full of crying (embarrassingly frequently) and feeling bleak about everything yesterday, I suppose I need to make an extra effort today to do fun and frivolous things.  A silly film is lined up for viewing tonight and I think some chocolate ice-cream is in order at some point today.  Other than that, perhaps I can say a fond 'hello again' to my old haunts , especially Kensington Gardens, and see if I can stop worrying about the future and how much I've screwed it up, for just a few hours at least.  Funnily enough, the wise Swedish Faerie Godmother told me yesterday, "it's strange but sometimes when you think you've screwed life up completely, you find there are second chances."  I hope she's right.  She usually is, in fact.  Being that she is both wise and utterly nutty, two qualities I very much aspire to having myself, she's always got a good point.

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?

New Yorku, Miluji Tě

I got so desperate today, that I found myself not only listening to Limp Bizkit and making rash decisions, but I also ended up drawing a rough map of New York and told a couple of meet-ees about where things were.  Mostly the airports.  Which is kind of stupid.  But it made me feel closer to it somehow, as though it isn't unimaginable that I could go back there one day.  It's rather sad that I've been fantasising about the place so much lately.  I think it's just the spring weather that brings it on and makes me think of what a good time of year it is to go there.

I also miss the idea of that kind of creative holiday of wandering around museums and the park and buying coffees (or iced coffees in warm spring weather) and reading newspapers and magazines, and above all, indulging in some people-watching.  I would kill for that right now.

Instead, I shall have to face the demands of the strait-jacketers around me and keep my fantasies to myself.

But just for old time's sake, here are a few fond corners of New York I wouldn't have wanted to miss, not least for the daily diary-writing at the cafe, which culminated in a typical New Yorker, "Good luck with the writing" comment from a random fellow coffee-drinker:

Where else would you get blue sky in EVERY picture?  I even miss travelling on the  rather 'ghetto' JMZ train.  The view as it ambled across to Manhattan from Williamsburg was truly a delight in itself.  I just hope they haven't done a 'Northern Line' kind of re-vamp on it or something awful like that.  I don't think New York can take any more 'disney-fying', quite honestly.  It's just not her style.

Yay! "Imaginary" Christmas!

You know in The Simpsons, the Flanders family end up having to resort to 'Imaginary Christmas' when everything goes wrong and they lose all their money? Well, I think I'm going to have to resort to that notion now.  How about "Imaginary Rewarding and Successful Life"?  It could start with a few things that actually happened, such as being complimented in Czech today for what I was wearing and for the fact that red suited me.  That was a lovely start to the day, along with the surreptitious compliment in my meet-ee's written work that mentioned my being 'clever' but also a bit of a slave-driver.

Unfortunately, it was cloudy this morning, so in my imaginary lovely life, it was actually sunny and warm and I saw the green parrot-like birds in Kensington Gardens on my much needed walk.  And I bought myself a sugary coffee (this is almost close to reality, as I was brought a small coffee I could add sugar to, so this is as near as dammit) and I played songs at the top of my voice that people on the street heard and applauded.  (I did play today, in an act of sheer rebellion over what I should have been doing and the window was open, but the street outside is in fact far too busy and noisy for anyone to ever hear me from there.)

And my imaginary day culminated in a wonderful evening playing the piano in a studio in Manhattan, making my fingers weary.  And my overall tiredness, is one of a satisfied, fulfilled variety.  (Oh would that this bit above all, were true.)  In fact, I actually really fancy a stroll in Central Park.  It should be starting to pick up in temperature soon.  Maybe in April.  What if I imagine I have a wonderful sponsor who loves my writing so much that they are willing to pay for me to spend a couple of weeks there, just wandering around, buying coffees and cupcakes and reading the New York Times and writing, playing piano in the studio and writing some more?  Will my wishes have any impact?  Will my fantasies shift any energy out there in the universe to bring about an extraordinary course of favourable events?  Or am I picking up on my longing for a trip to New York with a dose of your typical New Yorker unfounded optimism?