New Rules

It's been a long break of not having time to write anything for myself, but, for today at least, I'm back! I've been caught up not only with some demanding paid writing work (it's terrible pay but I'm building up my portfolio of business, finance, politics and health/fitness articles, so hurrah to that!) but also with the trials and tribulations of living with a Czech boyfriend. Emphasis on the word 'boy'. Oh, how I long to be with a person who can be an adult at home as well as at work. My survival here depends, I have realised, on being able to negotiate enough time away from him or to myself to be able to cope with whatever is thrown at me and an unwritten rule to never, I repeat, never, expect or hope for kindness, understanding, love and affection given without prompting, or washing up completed by anyone except me.

These are the new rules in my current living situation:

1) Do not expect anyone to do any of the following: make tea in the morning, make meals at any time, do food shopping, washing up or any general cleaning unless it is you.

2) Get to bed before the other person so that you don't have to get into late-night difficult conversations that destroy all hope of sleep.

3) If you leave nice, loving post-it notes, thank you notes to accompany a red rose you bought, or buy special little things while food shopping just for the other person, do not under any circumstances hope for reciprocation of any kind.

4) Buy your own red wine and drink it while the other person is out.

5) Have a 'coffee fund' to escape the flat more often when suburbia and the quiet isolation of being in a flat you didn't want to live in in the first place begin to grate.

6) Make "acceptance, acceptance, acceptance" your new 'political party of one' manifesto.

7) Wear nice clothes while you can because you never known when the next Czech bank holiday might creep up on you and force you to accept a prolonged trip to the mountains to wear a hiker's uniform that makes you feel frumpy. (That would be the coming weekend.)

8) Be supremely grateful for rent-free living because this is the huge advantage that makes up for it all while income is slow to materialise.

So, in the meantime, I've developed a terrible YouTube habit of watching Kermit the frog interviews about all sorts of Muppet films, DVDs and TV shows past and present, as well as a cafe bill that is close to the sum total of my meet-ee income, bar one meet-ee who pays me directly into my Czech account, which serves to slowly be allowing me to save up. A bit.

And I've taken to re-training myself in the area of shopping. Seeing as I now live right next to a shopping centre, which I have to walk past to get to the metro station, it is no longer viable to cry, weep, pout or otherwise feel sorry for myself in the face of hundreds of things I would love to have but cannot afford. So I have purposely been attempting over the last couple of weeks to constantly think of things I love, such as, red roses, books, magazines, iPads, posh knee-length boots, YSL red lipstick, Wine-coloured dark lipgloss, dresses found at random on Net-a-porter (my addiction of the future I predict), Côtes du Rhône red wine (or the Rosemount Shiraz/Cabernet wine when French wines are not available even in the local big supermarket because this is the Czech Republic), tight-fitting warm Victoria Beckham-range type dresses that go over black leggings and feather earrings/hairbands of all kinds of crazy colours, and flights and hotel stays in London, Paris, San Francisco or NYC and imagining myself having them. Some of which is possible, some of which is a stretch to even imagine being able to afford. (The flights to NYC in particular, though I know I could stay in a friend's flat if only, if only, if only I had the money to sublet her flat or give her almost the cost of the rent at either Christmas or in Spring and I've NEVER been to NYC at Christmas...)

Anyway, the upshot of all this fantasising is, I am learning to not wince in lack-of-funds thinking whenever I see a lovely soft jumper or gorgeous dress or sparkly big handbag, and instead imagine that one day I could indeed afford this stuff or even walk into the L'Occitane shop without feeling like I'll be singled out as working class scum, and thus unworthy, at first glance. And I am writing lists in my head of what I already have, which I am enormously grateful for: Macbook (hallelujah!) iPod (hurrah!) red, Kurt Geiger shoes (Kermit the frog-like "yay!") and Nokia slide phone that is reliable and still works, bless it (Gott sei dank) and all of this is helping. Bit by bit.

Here are the pictures I printed out of dresses I loved on Net-a-porter (and I purposely didn't look at the price) and stuck in my scrapbook:

Happy perusing. The cowboy has just come back armed with a bag of freshly picked (giant) mushrooms, so we're having salmon and mushrooms and spinach tonight which is not only a culinary experiment, it is an experiment in sharing the cooking duties. Hmm. Strange new worlds...

Misery, mishaps and Le Meurice

I have been overwhelmed with a kind of existential crisis which has been building up for some time, but feels worse than ever since getting back from Paris.  (Though if you're going to have something as grand-sounding as an 'existential crisis' befall you, where better than Paris for it to occur?)  Some disasters started off the trip.  For starters, a two and a half hour delay, which ended up making me late for getting to the ballet, so carefully booked and planned by the faerie godmother trainee.  Then the realisation that my tiredness in packing had led me to supremely idiotic packing, which meant my old mobile, the one with the camera I had been taking photos on and posting too many of on here, was stolen.  (How ironic.  That'll teach me not to reprimand myself for taking too many photos.)

After all of this, plus a fairly horrible arrival in Terminal 3 (Charles de Gaulle would be horrified to have his name put to such a concrete warehouse of an airport terminal) I made it out alive and had the longest conversation in French of the whole trip with the cab driver who took me to 'l'hôtel Le Meurice'.

And then there was a kind of sublime calm that gradually descended over the course of Friday and even a little into Saturday, as I soaked up the ease with which one can live if unburdened by poverty.  My French didn't fare as well as I'd hoped, what with my lack of experience of using aristocratic-like levels of politeness, but nonetheless, I got by.  I "enjoyed" the banter with the audacious waiter on the street who tried to entice me and my friend to his cafe by calling out to my friend about how beautiful she was, and then when I responded, because she didn't speak French so didn't understand, he told me, "not you, her! I wasn't talking to YOU!  She's beautiful, not YOU".  All with the most delightful Parisian charm, of course.  (I.e. none whatsoever.) 

Thank goodness I have years of training in this kind of scenario, what with Madame Charlita and the times I went out with her and was totally ignored, to the point of people looking at her while I spoke, which must be what it's like to be the best friend of a supermodel or a celebrity.  No-one talks or listens to you, even when the celebrity is tired and has nothing to say, or, indeed, even when they don't speak the language but you do.  (In fact, this even happened a little bit in Prague, with my visitor, who was also rather glamourously dressed compared to me, and certainly prettier, and even though she remained silent during (my) conversations in Czech, everyone looked at her and not me, hoping she was about to say something devastatingly interesting.)

However, I got my 'French fix' with lots of books and magazines to read in French (now all I need is the time to read them...) and I even got some lovely postcards and took some pictures with my friend's camera instead, so all is not lost on that front.  The bookshop nearest the hotel had a picture of Jacques Prévert in the window, so there was no way I could avoid going in, 

unlike the Patisserie, which we gave a miss in the end.

And walks in the park and moments of quiet to sit and write at the kind of desk I would LOVE

in a most inspirational room filled me up on the 'rest and recreation' front, along with absolutely sumptuous food and even champagne.  So my doom and gloom should not have hit me so hard really, but somehow it crept up on me nonetheless.  I miss the double bed, the armchair and cushions,

the time to think, the opportunity to speak French and the delight of a companion almost as eccentric as me, who just needed a friend to accompany her this time.  By next year, she'll have moved on to have an entourage of friends and personal assistants and I will be a distant memory, but I hope I'll still get to return to Paris soon and do things the pauper's way and console myself with a glass of wine while I sit on my own in a bar in Montmartre and write forlorn poetry about being constantly overlooked.

Non, je ne regrette rien.  Ni le bien, ni le mal...tout ça m'est bien égal....

Lost and confused

I seem to have lost my way with things entirely.  I've been posting photos here as though I've lost all sense of a discerning eye and have become a haphazard, touristy idiot who takes 'snaps' instead of photos.  I feel like I don't have any like-minded souls around me and even my visitor and the architect somehow only brought me back to a level of basic human contact that, though soothing and helpful and even fun, hasn't pulled me back from the edge to the essence of what I'm striving for.

All of that direction seems abandoned.  I've fallen foul of the scenes around me which are tangible and I no longer have time for the intangible.  And yet, the intangible used to be my realm.  That was where I lived.  All around me was chaos, but everyday I used to find at least a few minutes to escape it, even if that were only in my mind while musing on the kind of world Francis Bacon inhabited or while drawing something I later put on my wall to make my own kind of art studio in my room.

But here, at the moment, I appear to have lost my path.  I've not felt this alone in a long time.  The world of work is stealing the architect from me so we rarely get to see each other, and when we do, our thoughts, our lives are overshadowed by the banal and arduous demands of work and mere survival.

Paris awaits.  I only hope I'll have time to breathe and find a way back to where I feel at home.  Surely I only need a little bit of time on my own and everything will come back?  Failing that, some plan to leave my current routine before it kills me will become an urgent one at the top of my priority list.

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.