How to lose your head when all about you are keeping theirs and looking boringly normal

1) Read your favourite huge Sesame Street book when things get tough even though you're 35.

2) Draw butterflies everywhere and make butterfly pictures with Lentilky [Smarties] in an attempt to bring bright new beginnings in your life by focussing on the biggest transformation nature has provided.

3) Live in total denial of having to move out of your flat until the last minute, other than tentatively looking at a few flats and pretending you have enough money to rent them.

4) Tell yourself it's going to be ok, repeatedly and out loud so you are now not only totally lying to yourself, but talking to yourself out loud.

5) Wear glamourous high heeled shoes indoors for the sheer hell of it.

6) Shout at your boyfriend about how you have never wanted to live with anyone ever and you never wanted to do the conventional thing and have kids and that you just want a f**king career so that's why you're dreading moving in with him.  (This will give him all the proof he needs that you're a super-bitch and you'll feel really bad about it afterwards but by then it'll be too late.)

7) Refuse to acknowledge that you will have to do this stupid job you hate all your life because you cannot start accepting the outside truth about things or that would send your whole world crumbling around your feet.

8) Wear that black shorts jumpsuit thing with a pink scarf tied around your waist even though you know it makes you look fat and is particularly difficult to get in and out of when you want to go to the loo.

9) Go to your boyfriend's place for the weekend because when you're totally stressed out it's a super-duper time to be with someone with a short temper and you're a glutton for punishment at heart.

10) Drink cherry tea and eat cherry-filled chocolate and lust after cherry jam like there are no other flavours worth having in the whole world.

11) Forget that the washing machine doesn't go onto a spin when you put it on the 'wool' setting and open it to see a flood of water coming out because you forgot YET AGAIN that the machine lets you do that when it shouldn't and go berserk at it while gathering towels and cursing it at the top of your voice at 11.30pm when you should have finished doing the laundry by then anyway.

12) Go to bed at 20 past midnight and tell yourself you'll still be able to get up at 6.

13) Write a stupid blogpost about how insane you are just to list the evidence for future reference to the police who will surely find you in a heap on the floor in due course.

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.

Thirty-five

A little hint of fun, the soft scent of sadness, 

A little quiet, some predictable madness.

A soft and small world, a kind of open prison

A tentative optimism, a certain careful decision.

Red roses already, ensures no disappointment,

A great self-reliance, no expected appointments.

A beautiful vase, a selection of accessories,

A surprise leather notebook, no further necessities.

First words in the morning from new partner's own lips

First text in the morning, from ex-partner's fingertips.

A top on its way - a new friend's gift

Something difficult to say - a new family rift.

A late night silence, a fresh kettle boiled

A new headphone appliance, a music-lover spoiled.

A Sesame Street book- an old birthday present,

An old Barry White hook, a sad birthday lessened.

A trick of the light or a fantasy blurred?

A Mexican night, but tummyache stirred.

A few margaritas, a sleepiness found,

An old señorita, to her ,,cama" bound....

The Great Thinkers: Václav Havel, Adam Gopnik, Jim Henson and Kermit the Frog

Ok, so someone is going to find this somewhat sacrilegious, but I have to make my point.  I had a mini-obsession with Kermit the Frog today, or rather more accurately, Jim Henson.  

A friend wrote a post about getting back to New York, in that adamant kind of way, when things have been tough but you're determined to rise above them.  I had to respond with a comment, with one of the quotes from 'The Muppets Take Manhattan'.  Things have gone wrong for Kermit and the show he was trying to sell.  All his friends (and co-actors) have had to leave New York and he sits and thinks it all over.  As he talks it through with himself, he suddenly finds a new determination and he shouts out, 

"You hear me, New York?  We're gonna be on Broadway!  Because, because, I'm not giving up!  I'm still here and I'm stayin'!  You hear that New York? I'm stayin' here.  The frog is stayin'." 

Jim Henson was an optimist, a dreamer, an idealist.  Which is exactly what Václav Havel has been 'accused' of having been when he was in power.  Václav Klaus is now playing this 'let's get real, shall we?' card for all it's worth.  But not with any resolution along the lines of, 'let's knock some things into shape to provide some kind of balance, some justice', but rather by jumping on any convenient bandwagon that presents itself, fair or not.  

There are worse things to have been than an optimist, surely?  If the best you can do is criticise someone for trying and hoping, then there's something wrong.  Yes, I know, you've got to back up that determination with hard work, careful organisation and planning, and sadly, probably also a few considerable changes along the way, but as long as you've got time to think, somewhere to live and enough food to eat, it is worth being an optimist.  It is worth hoping.

A loss of those aforementioned things does prevent progress, admittedly.  Perhaps not permanently, but certainly for the time during which they have been removed, and that should never be ignored.  However, even Adam Gopnik asserts: no-one can live without hope.  I could almost disagree with that, because sometimes you have to simply carry on in a totally hopeless environment, and it does feel like simply existing with no reason to, but that's existing.  Living, really being alive, truly requires hope. 

I miss having that Jim Henson/Václav Havel-like hope and determination, because I now know just how much can be taken away from someone (ill-health, for one thing, negates EVERYTHING else) and how detrimental it is when that happens, but hope feels like home.  I suppose I must be homesick, for a home that I never had but that existed in the underlying message of programmes such as 'Sesame Street' and 'The Muppets'.

Jim Henson created a surrogate home for kids who didn't have one, by means of those programmes.  He didn't try and teach kids or explain to them, he showed them by the most entertaining examples of other characters working together and creating a kind atmosphere, where anyone could belong.  He was insightful and wise in equal measure:

"The attitude you have as a parent is what your kids will learn from more than what you tell them.  They don't remember what you try to teach them.  They remember what you are." 

Sleep on this one, as a reminder of the importance of silliness, which I simply couldn't live without during these testing times:

"Here's some simple advice: Always be yourself.  Never take yourself too seriously.  And beware of advice from experts, pigs and members of Parliament."  [Kermit the Frog]