Highlights of a day in an endless winter

Dear Reader,

I know that things are not as good as they could be. I know that I should leave asap if only for the sake of giving the cowboy a fresh start in time to still have children, but I still cannot find a definitive plan to move on and indeed move away. So we still  try to look after each other as best we can and enjoy today. One day at a time.

On the way here I provided the entertainment by being a sort of living juke box. I sang for about an hour somehow, on and off, with a limited variety of songs that work accapella that I could actually remember and start to sing in roughly the right key. I think the 'setlist' went something like:

'Caught A Lite Sneeze' Tori Amos

'A Sort of Fairytale' Tori Amos

'Get Outta My Way' Kylie Minogue

'Timebomb' Kylie Minogue

'Fine Day' Opus II

'The Fear' Lily Allen

'Den Andra Dagen I Mai' Idde Schulz

'Little Digger' Liz Phair

'Army Dreamers' Kate Bush

'Fuck and Run' Liz Phair

'Help Me Mary' Liz Phair

'Divorce Song' Liz Phair

'Smells Like Teen Spirit' Nirvana

'Extraordinary' Liz Phair

Not a great deal of variety of artists, I'll grant you, but it must have been entertaining enough because the cowboy didn't put the radio on again. And when we got to the flat, I somehow felt I'd just been warming up for a gig and felt a little deflated at having to be quiet now, in this sleepy little tiny town.

Ironically, today, the day the clocks went forward to summer time, it's been even more like winter than when we arrived. It snowed overnight and continued today. I had disturbing dreams and really didn't sleep well at all. Lots of memories from the past that I really could do without right now. And a dream about searching for a Muppets mug before leaving the UK. What the hell was that all about? I think a gremlin lives in my head. A Muppets-loving gremlin, of course.

We went for a walk in the snow and I wore so many layers I felt like a small, fat michellin man. But thankfully we didn't walk for too long and it was nice enough to enjoy walking in the snow, scrunching and crunching about without my toes being wet and cold for too long. 

I just don't move well in 6 layers, that's all, and I'd rather leap about to Kylie Minogue as exercise than traipse through the snow while it gathers in my eyes and on my scarf and my nose runs so that I frequently have to take my gloves off to blow my nose.

But when we got in we treated ourselves to a strange kind of cake in the shape of a ram (they were everywhere in the supermarket, so the cowboy bought one) 

and had a cup of tea. And I did get an egg for Easter. Though it wasn't a chocolate one. It was a big plastic one with a bag of m&ms inside, which was lovely really. 

I'm quite happy to have some m&ms to munch on from time to time, and it reminds me of the snacks we had with us in the car when we went on our road trip across the US. Hard to believe it was nearly a full year ago now.

I guess that's all I had to say.

I've still got tummy ache which doesn't seem to have gone away since yesterday. I think it's an underlying feeling that this has got to stop soon. I have got to formulate a plot, an exit strategy, a way to move onwards and upwards.

Fond Easter wishes,

Ms. Platform Edge.XXX

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...

Road Trip Part 1. The departure and the quirks and quickness of time

Who was it who said that if you've got time to write a diary, you probably haven't got anything interesting to write in it?  Maybe that was just a general comment that came from anyone who felt they couldn't really be bothered to write one.  Whatever the case, I'm certainly facing the difficulty of sitting down to write about what's been happening, when the general timetable since leaving Illinois has been to drive all day, find somewhere to eat at about 6ish and then get into a motel at 8 and battle with the quirks of that particular motel's internet connection to plan and organise where we're going to go the next day before dropping dead at about 11pm.    However, we have stayed in our current location for a couple of days in a row now, though not in the same motel, and that's given me a teensy bit of time to sit and write something now.

Back at the start of our journey, we had all sorts of airport delights to deal with.  Not least being in the nondescript surroundings of Prague airport at 5am.  5am is truly a miserable time to be awake and trying to function.  And Prague airport isn't exactly entertaining or comfortable.  

But when we got to Schipol in Amsterdam it was a little easier to cope, being that there were several eccentric little shops

 and more comfortable seating and even a library!  Woohoo!

The flight to Chicago was a battle of the mind.  I decided to cope with being boxed in in tightly packed seats for the 8.5 hour flight by sleeping for as much of the beginning of it as possible, to help me get on Chicago time.  This meant missing the main meal but was probably better for my tummy that way.  I watched the latest Muppet movie and was rather disappointed with it, but it helped to divide up the time and eventually we were on our descent and we got in a tiny bit ahead of schedule.

Getting through security was ok in the end, though we did have to wait in the long queue of 'scum', i.e. non-residents, for about 40 minutes.  And they've got all our fingerprints now.  So they can track us down.  Which is a bit of a worry considering we almost got ourselves arrested when we took photos in a supermarket in the suburbs of Illinois the next day.  

Two security guards (yes, two!) came over to us and said that some customers had been a bit concerned about why we were taking photos in a supermarket.  So my Mum jumped in before either of us could say anything, to reply, "Oh it's just that they're from the Czech Republic and they were amazed at how big everything is here and how much there is!  They were really surprised at how big the watermelons are and the rows and rows of chocolates."  To which the security guards, stunned by compliments about the abundance of America, said, "oh ok Ma'am" like little puppies lapping up praise and apologising for almost missing out on it.  I just stood there and smiled and inwardly thought how incredible it was that they had automatically taken everything my Mum had said at face-value.

So there you have it.  Paranoia and a failure to recognise irony is alive and well in the State of Illinois.  God bless America.

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]