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...

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.

Letting go

As I was picking up the inner bits of my cafetière from where they were drying on the washing up draining thing this morning, a glass that one bit had been drying on got stuck and then rapidly unstuck again and broke.  This was one of my favourite glasses originally bought as a pair from a second hand bric-a-brac shop on Pembridge Road in Notting Hill.  I remember buying them and washing them because they were in a bargain bin left on the street outside and they were only a pound or 50p or something like that, but I knew they'd be gorgeous after being washed up.

The loss of this glass today was like an omen.  I'm probably going to have to let go of a lot of things that hold precious stories from my past and discard them to help with moving out.  I still don't know where I'm going to go, but if the worst comes to the worst and I end up having to move in with the cowboy, I know it will mean discarding even more than I otherwise would, which for me is like letting go of my identity.  Books and diaries, scrapbooks and magazines all form a kind of 'family-and-friends' community for me in the absence of geographically close ones of the human kind.  

How I will live with the idea of throwing books into the recycling bin is quite another story.  I used to give them to charity shops in the UK of course, but there aren't any second hand book shops here, except antique ones and those would be books in Czech, of which I have a more limited supply than English ones.

That glass was also a symbol of reward.  A nice little glass of wine in it was like a little acknowledgement that I had worked hard and survived and deserved a soldier's recognition for fighting through the loss and hardship.  Now both that glass, the champagne glass pictured in my profile pic and all the other nice glasses and mugs and things I had to leave behind in London are gone.  Along with my piano, several beautiful photography books and more.  Will I have to get rid of all my diaries and letters from ex-partner and photos from my life too?  Where will I draw the line?  How will I draw the line?

Someone (probably some great leader or guru or someone that I should really know) once said that all pain comes from attachment.  Maybe I have to learn that getting so attached to things is silly.  Or that cherishing things is the root of all evil.  Or something.  I always thought that being attached to things, especially things no-one else would like to steal, but that mean a lot to me, was a better strategy for life than attachment to people.  Because people can up and leave of their own free will and 'there ain't nothin' you can do about it'.  Maybe I got it all wrong.

That glass breaking was like the very beginning of my heart breaking.  It symbolised all that I've lost over the last few years and all that I have yet to be forced to relinquish.  So I burst into tears.  (I hadn't yet had my coffee of course, so that's my excuse.)  Because I'm not entirely sure that this is 'no more than you can handle' as people say about life when it gets tough.  You're not supposed to be sent 'more than you can handle' but I think I'm going to need a helluva lot of help to get through this because the last time I moved I had lots of help.  And then some.  And I bloody well needed it because I had to give up my piano, my country, my relationship and my work all at once.  Not to mention a good few friends too.

This time it feels like giving up the last thing I had going for me: my privacy.  My space in which to do all the things I need to do to keep me going: aerobics, writing without distractions, listening to music, peace and quiet when I need it, being able to sleep in my own bed, having a bath with a chair piled with books and magazines next to me, doing singing practice and even recording.  These are my strategies for survival when there's no money or when there's no-one out there who gives a damn or when hope seems to be beyond the reaches of the planet's atmosphere.  Are there any flats available on a planet in Andromeda by any chance?  I mean, San Francisco would be wonderful, but beggars can't be choosers...

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....

Cookies and Cookie Monster plasters

I cut my finger while cutting open a mango today.  (What a "cadillac problem".)  A mango?  Oh poor me!  Yes, I had mango and blueberries for breakfast.   But the cut was enough to need a plaster, so I delighted in being able to get out my "first aid kit" which was left over from going 'on the road' which consists in its entirety of a box of Sesame Street plasters. 

I know it's pathetic but they cheer me up.  And lo and behold, the first one I picked out turned out to be Cookie Monster!

I consoled myself further by having one of my favourite biscuits in all the world - Benton's Oatmeal Raisin Cookies.  

I love them.  I'm so glad I still have two left.  I would set up an ordering system of those for myself if I were a millionaire because you can't even get them in the UK, let alone the Czech Republic.  But currently I have to put in orders for them to anyone who goes out to Illinois and can pick some up from Aldi.  Or at least, I think that was the particular supermarket that stocked them.

Anyway, it must have done me good to have both the mango and cookies because I had a rather productive day and even tackled a vicious circle-like bureaucratic problem that I had been putting off for ages because it's so hard to work out which aspect applies to my situation.  And it involves listing all my addresses for the last ten years, which is not only time-consuming because there are 7 addresses to list, but also painful because I remembered just how often I only just got settled somewhere only to have to move again and contrastingly got stuck in places I hated and felt trapped in for longer periods of time.

It made me think of the summer back in 2006 when it was really hot and all the grass in Kensington Gardens went a lifeless beige colour and I spent lots of time in the park, knowing I'd soon have to move house and wondering where on earth I'd end up and if I'd still be able to get to the park within half an hour or not.  The park became my home that summer.  Which sounds terrible.  But it sort of did.  The general routine was to walk along to the nearest coffee place and get some kind of terribly calorific frappuccino thing and then find myself a nice spot under a tree in my favourite part of the park and put out some kind of blanket and sit and listen to Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince's "Summertime" on my old and chunky iPod.

It's tragic what completing a bit of useless form-filling does to you.  I suppose I can blame the insomnia too, which is becoming a theme of my life at the moment.  Still, I can revel in the fact that 1) I have an evening to myself now, 2) one of my meetees bought me red roses this week 

and 3) I made lots of progress with working towards important goals of mine today.  So it's not all bad.  And I still have salt water taffy leftover from San Francisco so I can munch on that and reminisce a bit when it all gets too much.

I'm back!

The routine has fallen out of this blog - of that I am acutely aware - but I am going through a whole host of changes and hope to bring that to this blog in due course, so for now, please accept my apologies and see this site as a 'site under re-construction' deal in the meantime.  It is not that I have lost interest in writing, rather that other interests and necessities (such as earning money) have been tugging at my shirt hem like a three year old needing urgent attention.  

First and foremost, I've been adjusting to being back in Prague, then had a flying visit to London which threw me in terms of climate and didn't help get me back to a sensible sleep pattern.  (Not to mention all this airport stress getting too much.  Though I got a rather nice kind of over-clothes-massage from the security woman in San Francisco.  She said I'd been randomly selected for it and it was, "My lucky day".  The architect stared at this potentially arousing intimate pat-down as she reached around my back to check I wasn't storing a bomb under my bra fastener and, when finished asked me, "did you enjoy that?!"  But most people are finding all these airport checks and restrictions less than amusing: see this )

And now Prague time beckons because all my meet-ees who didn't want to start back immediately due to a couple of Bank Holiday days here that meant everyone took time off, are now booked in and I am down to my last 500 crowns in all Christendom until I get paid and have thus taken to eating sweet corn out of a tin mixed with mayonnaise as my evening meal.  And I'm worn out from the trying to squeeze in an important couple of meetings while in London and slept longer this morning as a result.  So I'm still thrown as to what time zone I'm on and will somehow have to manage to get up and leave the house at 7.30am tomorrow for my first meeting!  Phew!

The good news is, there are positive things afoot, from the spectre of a bit of freelance writing (that will materialise, won't it?) to a possible music publishing deal which is waiting to be assessed by the MU that I've had to re-join in order to access their free "Contract advisory service" which could threaten to send me overdrawn if I don't get some Skype meet-ees in London or a substantial article payment in £s soon.  So I'm on the edge of the platform again financially, but the memory of San Francisco sunshine and palm trees is keeping me optimistic.  For now.

In the meantime, I hope to make the necessary changes to this blog in due course, as well as fill you in on the rest of the road trip experience as and when I can.  And when I get my new website page up and running, you'll be the first to know!  Just for now, I'll introduce the first change:  henceforth the architect shall be known as my cowboy, purely because of the acquisition of this hat:

I can't prove to you how brilliantly it suits him with a photo of him in the hat because it would break his anonymity, but take it from me, all who've seen him in it attest to the fact that he was surely born to be a cowboy!

Reisefieber

I have forced myself to take a "time-out" (oh yes, a 'PB' trip again!) because I've been quietly worrying for some time now and I can't seem to shake the underlying anxiety off.  I'm making lists, ticking off what I can as soon as I can, but some things are simply out of my hands.  And I can't quite discern where all this worry is coming from but I sense it's probably just ,,Reisefieber" - that pre-travel anxiety you get when you realise you've got to get a tonne of things done before you leave for a long journey.  (Or it could just be my Mum's genes and her terrible propensity for worry gone into overdrive due to my coming off the pill for the seven days off, which causes hormonal free-fall.)

I'm pretty sure the journey itself is going to leave me feeling almost dead and I'm only talking about getting from here to Chicago.  The horrendous 4am wake-up call and 5am check-in added to the four-hour wait in Amsterdam before actually getting on a plane bound for Chicago is what might be the end of me.  That coupled with general, 'did I meet all the necessary international flight requirements this time?' stress, is bound to send my cortisol levels through the roof. 

The thing about travelling from Europe to the States is that the jet-lag isn't too bad to get over on the way there, because the time change takes you back, so when you arrive, you can just try to kid yourself that it was a shorter journey than you thought, make it through till evening and then crash and wake up the next day on US time.  Except, on this occasion, we won't be arriving anywhere near evening and will have to survive a whole afternoon without collapsing to make it through to the evening before we can go to bed.  So it'll be a bit of a challenge.

But that's just the beginning of the trip.  The rest could involve similar challenges in staying awake / dealing with anxiety, being that we're driving across to California, aiming to end up in San Francisco for the final 5-6 days of our trip.  Ironically enough, as I sat down to have my coffee and pain au chocolat in P's bakery again, the first song that came on was the one with the line, "if you're going to San Francisco..." to which I smiled to myself and thought, "yes I am!'  

I have since checked this song on You Tube and found that it's a really hippy 'Mamas and the Papas' song all about flowers and love-ins and I feel a bit nauseous now.  I have a sneaking suspicion, that despite my excitement, there'll be a little part of me that will miss Prague while I'm away and I could find myself longing for a bit of European dress sense, or culture, or even a bit of the resigned pessimism and expert moaning that you just can't get in the US without being a hardened New Yorker.

There's a line in the film "Truly, Madly, Deeply" (which happens to be one of my favourite films) where the Polish guy Titus, says, "A man should never drink, he remembers only his country, his mother, his lovers".  In my state today, I think I need to re-phrase that to, "A woman should never come off the pill, she remembers only her worries, her insecurities and while watching 'Outnumbered' later, her daytrips to 'Rabbit World' with her ex-partner..."  It's tragic what a loss of progesterone and estrogen or whatever the damned contraceptive pill consists of, does to you.  I am most definitely calling it a day now and packing myself off to an early bed with girlie videos and cups of tea, and a small ration of chocolate, because I need to lose weight before I go to America so that its sweetened food doesn't entirely annihilate my body with unavoidable fat and carbohydrates.  Hmm.  Chocolate rationing at a time like this.  Tough-going...

Reflection and brunch at Paul's Bakery

"I believe sometimes we aren't always in charge of everything that we do creatively.  We submit to things as we're going on our own journey."  Madonna

I have continued to have a somewhat 'up, down, up, down' existence lately, trying to change my attitudes to things, trying to alter my perspective and, above all, stay in the present.  But there's something about the human brain and the way it perceives time that can mean you can't out-run your personal history.  You can try to focus on the present, but what do you do when an old song comes on on the radio in a cafe or shop?  Music is that powerful that the things you associated with a song from the past can come flooding back at you.  

If music is the industry you're involved in, your work is continually informed by the past.  Songs that refused to let themselves be finished sometimes come back and ask to be looked at again.  Ideas started with no funding to finish get overlooked for other things you can afford to complete and the result is thread after thread of notes and pictures, vocal melody lines and chord sequences pulling you back, just when you hoped you were finally moving forwards.

Thankfully, by escaping to Paul's bakery for brunch this morning, I'm only being reminded of quirky French singers and they haven't started playing Maxime le Forestier yet, so I'm safe.  I needed to get out of the house.  As a writer/self-employed person working from home, you soon realise that getting out of the house from time to time is an absolute necessity and one that cannot be avoided purely on a "but I need to save money!" basis.  It doesn't work.  The extra productivity that comes from getting out and eating elsewhere so you don't have to deal with the washing up afterwards saves untold time and energy.

   

They've spruced up the place too, which is lovely (though my photo came out blurred) and they've now got nice chairs that remind me of the antique ones my ex-Swedish teacher has in her converted barn in the middle of nowhere in northern France. So I feel more at home now.

And what's really ridiculous is, the architect has had some good news on the job front, so I really am going to be going on a US road trip and I really will get to stay in San Francisco and see the Golden Gate bridge and see the sea and be free of Europe for almost a month, starting in Chicago in a month's time!  It is really happening.  And it really is my life in which this miraculous stuff will be taking place....I need to pinch myself!

Maybe the songs will come back, unhampered by debilitating emotional attachments.  Maybe they'll call me back in a new way.  Maybe I'll even write some interesting stories about my encounters with people there.  I'll certainly take some pictures to have proof.  

Things are looking up.  For now.

Up, down, Up, down....

Ah writing...how I have missed you.  The soft and soothing attempts of scrolling through my brain for just the right match of word for my mood.  The hot coffee to help me wake up in order to land on that word landing strip.  The sense of wistful wallowing in a field of language.  Sumptuous, luxurious, WRITING.

Why is my life filled instead with sleep deprivation, planning and organising and generally STRUGGLING to get from one day to the next?  I have at least kept to the important things, namely doing aerobics, singing from time to time and earning MONEY.  But it's been up and down on the emotional front.  One day I'm feeling positive because new possibilities have opened up, the next there's some mini-crisis and all that hope is suddenly rendered very precariously positioned on a cliff-edge.  In those moments, the previous kick-ass attitude, endless energy, achievements and belief in a future I can look forward to, dissolve into an unfathomable grief, fear for the future, self-hatred and disgust.

One such illustrative example of which would be when the architect and I booked flights for a fabulous road trip from Chicago to San Francisco.  The spanner in the works came the day after booking them, that the architect's prospective new job, provisionally to start in May, fell through due to a Mafia-like stroke of corruption that I'm finding out is more than possible within government departments here in the Czech Republic.  He's now scared that if he gets an offer somewhere else, they won't let him put off starting until he gets back from the States and we'll have to cancel the trip altogether.  (Or even worse, he'll remain unemployed and have to start selling his possessions to be able to live...)I am resolutely ignoring this possible scenario and have fixed my mind on a picture I've got on my wall of the Golden Gate bridge.  I am going to stand on a beach overlooking that famous structure if it's the last thing I do!  The flights are booked, we are GOING!  I may even start my own Armistead Maupin type novel while there.  Y'know, why not?

[There've been lots of capitals so far - why is that?  I think I'm getting back my demanding inner child who wants what she wants and she won't take no for an answer.  (Waydda go inner child.  You are the future.) Fake it till you make it, right?]

What do I really want?  Hey people, it's LIST TIME AGAIN:

1) Paid writing work - come on, it IS possible

2) To travel, extensively and often so I can WRITE about it and meet curious new people who can inspire me

3) To be able to buy myself some new make-up and clothes, so I can try that thing of 'enjoying being in my own skin'.  Not least because I've got to do a photoshoot on Sunday to get new acting headshots and shots for my website that is in the early developing stages.  I'm currently scared that the photos will reveal how much the Czech Republic has aged me, like it does so cruelly to everyone here.  (I'm hoping it's down to their mindset and poor diet and am determined to overcome both.  Greek salad again today.  And salmon.  Yep, smoked salmon.  Living the high-life, eh?)

4) To earn enough to make progress with the language of this country.  I even forgot the past tense of 'write' earlier.  That either means I'm REALLY tired or REALLY stupid.  Not sure which.  Czech has the capacity to remind me of my stupidity on a regular basis and it bothers me.  Because if I really am stupid, why have I spent most of my life being ostracised for being too clever, too complex, too 'high maintenance'?!

5) Salmon - grilled salmon - once a week!

6) To go to NYC for Christmas.  I KNOW I could do it.  I know someone who usually goes back to the UK then and sublets her flat.  I just need the MONIES...

7) To be able to afford to get my hair done somewhere good and to have a soothing, relaxing massage. And to be able to afford to buy face masks and body scrubs to use to pamper myself with at home after doing aerobics.

8) Decent red wine.  Czech Republic, you know not the likes of this.  Nor would you appreciate that it's worth paying the extra money to have it instead of the cheap rubbish you sell instead.

9) A piano.  Just thought I'd throw that in there, nothing's impossible, right?

10) A holiday in Hawaii staying in a hotel room with a piano and being able to write songs and blog posts and poems all day long.  Peppered with walks on the beach and swimming in the sea in my 50s style swimsuit, of course.  [Now I'm really pushing it, right?]

So there we are, the ups and downs of a hopeless, hapless individual with delusions of grandeur.  But it's surely better to be in the gutter, looking up at the stars, than standing on the street looking long and hard into the gutter and wondering how long it'll be before the gutter is in fact your home.

Thoughts, fantasies and a wish for adventure

"The vitality of thought is an adventure.  Ideas won't keep.  Something must be done about them."  A. N. Whitehead

I'm feeling quite low today.  Something about the proximity of Christmas and the way in which it seems designed to pinpoint and expose those of us who don't feel we really have a home to go has begun to gnaw away at me already.  Additionally, the reminiscences about this time last year, before the final throes of the end of the dredges of my former relationship has started pecking away at my mind, like an insistent and anxious bird.  This is obviously not helped by an overwhelming tiredness.  I'm not sure how to combat it, when I know what I need is some time off and a bit of hope for the future.  Which, of course, will require some planning.  

I also know this is part of the call of the creative stuff, begging me to come back, when I can't.  How can I come back, when I don't even have a whole day off anymore?  I am doing what I said I would.  I'm paying my way.  I sold my piano to do this, but I have no hope of ever buying a replacement, let alone having a flat to put it in.  And even if I could, it's already too late.  It's still painful to look back at how long it took me to think I could even begin to call myself a musician, how much I dedicated myself to trying to prove I was, to make up for my total lack of formal music education.  And the suspicion in the eyes of many that music was not where my 'talents' lay at all and I was heading for a fall by liking music so much, did so much more damage than anyone could have imagined.  (They were right on the latter, but for the wrong reasons.)

And so it is that I find myself a little lost today, away from a real sense of home, speaking three different foreign languages in one day (French, Czech and German, in that order) and wondering what on earth constitutes 'home' anyway.  I keep thinking of that Christmas when I was cat-sitting in someone else's flat, looking after the two cutest cats in all Christendom and being paid for it.  I knew I was the luckiest person on earth.  I also knew it would never happen twice.  

I was slightly envious that the couple I cat-sat for had such a lovely life of heading off to LA one month, Stockholm the next.  I still have a silly little dream of going to California one day and hanging out on some under-populated beach somewhere there (if there is one).  Oddly enough, on the other hand, I wouldn't mind heading way out to San Francisco instead, even though the two are not even remotely close when you look at a map.  Still, fantasies are fantasies.  They work fine in your head.

Just like the idea of being able to change trajectory and run different groups of meet-ees, maybe even for singing/songwriting or even do some playing, writing and performing of my own, keeps circling my mind but there's great doubt it'll have a real landing place.  And all the while, I long for a couple of days of luxury, such as a long afternoon reading books and magazines, followed by a languid bath with all sorts of potions to pamper myself with.  Or a day just playing and writing and even recording songs.  But fantasies are hard to convert to reality.  Especially when you haven't even got any time to think.