The world and universe

I feel like I've been walking through a tunnel that's lit with strangely orange lighting and I've forgotten what time of day it is outside.  I have not been sleeping at all well and the weirdness of this current point in my life is very disconcerting.  I have flashbacks of times in London in my room in a dark and gloomy West London house, watching ER on Monday nights with a glass of red wine in a shapely green wine glass I got from a charity shop somewhere.  I used to watch ER for the stories that unfolded about the character who started out as a nurse and then became a doctor.  I don't know why I was drawn to that character so much.  She just had a sort of inner strength but also total inability to open up to people that I related to at the time and I found myself routing for her as her stories developed.

I don't know quite how my story is developing at the moment, but I'm having strange incidences of not recognising myself in a situation.  I used to be super-cynical and razor-sharp at throwing out the worst of my frustrations in crystal clear prose or rebellious ranting, but I seem to be being drawn away from all that now.  (Bloody hell, you go to California once, and look what happens..!)  I have found myself listening to Marianne Williamson and Tony Robbins, trying to learn and re-train my brain to stop criticising myself and to try to be more focussed about the things I love and want to have more time for.

I made two videos at the beginning of this week, in order to enter two similar competitions for business training.  I wonder if either will yield anything?  I at least learnt a fair amount about filming and editing on iMovie, which I'm quite pleased about, as that's a useful little string to my bow.  I need to tackle Wordpress.org tomorrow.  I also have to go on a Treasure Hunt tomorrow, can you believe it?!

There's a firm that make these treasure hunt trails for 'team-building' projects for companies, and I'm getting paid tomorrow to go and check that all the things on the list of clues are intact and still visible and so on.  Weird, right?  If only I had enough cash to actually enjoy wandering around Prague for three hours by stopping for coffee and cake at Kavárna Slavia for example.  Unfortunately, as things stand right now, I'm down to 300Kč for food for next week and that might have to include travel for this work tomorrow, until I get paid for it.  But I will at least make the rent that way.

In the meantime, I'm really stressed about a publishing contract that's come my way as part of a (now geographically distant) pool of musicians I know and is subject to a 4-branch 'tree' of collectors/publishers that makes things so complicated and so divided up that I can't even see how much money I would get from it in theory.  I had the reply from the MU solicitor today with my free hour's worth of suggested amendments and advice and the whole thing was brilliant work but totally filled my head with stress and questioning and fear and irreconcilable confusion.  

I had to laugh though, because the solicitor brilliantly and simply crossed out all the bits of language where the contract-writer had sought to appear 'clever' by adding in unnecessary and confusing terms.  I love it when people do this.  Or when people try to use a saying that they think will make them sound grander, but then they screw it up and look like a total prat.  Such as, "it always ceases to amaze me when.." when they meant "never ceases" or a casual misuse of 'literally' for emphasis that just isn't possible.  Or an overzealous attempt at pomp and circumstance that fails when they get to the end of their sentence and can't finish on a flourish for want of a perfect synonym for something they said right before.  (Boris Johnson does this a lot and he allegedly received the best education money can buy, so he's got no excuse!) 

Maybe I've just become impatient with Britishness.  Or I'm finding it irritating unless demonstrated in the finest form of years of tireless, self-motivated education.  Or maybe I'm just wound-up that a company like Sony are trying to rip people off by getting them to sign 20 year deals that can't be negotiated down to less than 10 with no obligation on their part to guarantee any payment during that period whatsoever (and you can forget about an advance..!) while retaining the right to the copyrighted material whether they make any money out of it for you or not.  By god, they put some weird nonsense in those contracts.  I notice the MU appointed solicitor has crossed out the definition of the 'territory' of the jurisdiction of the contract from "the world and universe" to just "the world".  Seriously, who writes these contracts?  Would they like to outline the exact boundaries of the universe, just to clarify?  Perhaps I should ask for that. 

I feel so tired from all these rapid thoughts and corrections of those thoughts.  I can't take the constant sleepless nights.  You'd think I were on drugs or something.  (I'm not.  More's the pity...)  The last two nights I've been ready for bed and about to go to sleep when I burst into tears uncontrollably.  And then that's me occupied for the next hour until I can pull myself together to make a milky drink and try to go to sleep again.  It's been torturous actually.  My head is full of flashbacks and visions of myself as being alone and small and almost invisible forever.  All that utterly calamitous stuff.  It feels like there's some kind of monster within me being exorcised.  And I don't even know when it'll end, or what the world will look like when I come out of all this.  And the really hilarious thing is, I don't even have enough money to buy a bottle of wine to have a glass before bed as some kind of last ditch attempt at a sedative.  But I guess that's probably a good thing.

"Get out more!" and other strategies

I seem to be incapable of formulating any thoughts without a list.  I need a list of things to do to try to cram in, in between my annoyingly spread out number of meetings which start at 8am for a couple of hours or so, and then resume at 4pm till 7pm, which I'm finding particularly trying at the moment.  But the heat isn't helping me push through my tiredness to do anything useful, let alone creative.  So here are a few strategies I have come up with or am trying to convince myself of for surviving this tricky period of time:

1) Tidy up my flat.  I did most of that at the weekend, just the mighty desk of papers to go now...I wish that were the easiest thing, but of course, it's the most time-consuming, impossible task ever.  And yet I so want one of those beautiful coloured glass, enormous vases to put on it, to make it look like the grand, executive-type desk it should be.  A decent, adjustable desk chair would also help, but that is obviously never going to happen...

2) Particularly in post-holiday slump, buy a bunch of things at the supermarket that I've never tried before, some of which are variations on things I have tried before, so that it cannot end up too disastrously.  This helps with feeling like I'm 'on holiday' in this foreign country and not just slaving away, trying to make enough money to be able to afford to exist.

[*Note: 'Margot' chocolate bar.  Who on earth decided to call the most sugary, kendal-mint cake-like chocolate bar the name 'Margot'?  Seriously, Penelope Keith would be turning in her grave, if she had already died, which I suspect she hasn't.  Is it coincidence though, that it reminds me of Kendal-mint cake, due to its sugar content (though it's not at all minty) when the character called Margot was in the same programme as the character 'Barbara', played by Felicity Kendal?  Is there some kind of Anneka Rice's 'Treasure Hunt' clue in here somewhere?  And surely it's interesting that the host of that very programme was called Kenneth Kendall.  And how on earth did I get all this inspiration of pointless trivia from just one chocolate bar?  I need help.]

3) Nip out to 'buy a paper' sometimes.  This is a good way to remind myself, despite all my endless meetings conducted in English, that I am indeed in the Czech Republic and really need to learn some new vocab to be able to follow what's going on in the news in the rather excellently affordable main daily newspaper.  So far, yesterday, I managed to buy the paper, but every time I sit down with about 3 minutes to spare to look up some words from an article, some meet-ee arrives early and that puts an end to that.

4) Go about life as if I am an entirely different person from the one who lived in London, because, quite frankly, it's too painful to do otherwise.  I must forget I ever did music, that pursuing it not only bankrupted me but nearly killed me, because I loved the piano just too much and unfittingly so for someone from a working-class background.  And as for the previous relationship...Don't even think about it.  Imagine that it never existed.  That that girl was someone else and you feel a bit sorry for her and all that, but she's not your problem.

Hmm...I think that last one is proving the hardest.  Not least because all this catching up on ER episodes and contemplating a trip back to London is actually reminding me of some of the things I used to have.  And the horrible break-up period I went through in England was relatively short, compared to the duration of the relationship.  And then I spent the first 5 months here still in a sort of desperate state of existence before I reached even the very beginning of a recovery.  I'm a little bit worried now that that was only 'recovery stage 1'.  If I am to regain any hope, any real sense that I could be in a completely different life that is rewarding and hopeful one day, I've got a hell of a long way to go.  

(Oops, and there you have an example of what happens when you're tired, hot and worn-out and thinking too much.  Too much self-pitying...)  The screamingly obvious answer to all this is:  Get out more!  Learn more Czech!  Speak more Czech!  And I will need another list in order to go about that, just because fitting in opportunities to practise and study more Czech requires some clever manipulating of my timetable, not to mention, of course, my finances.  I'm doing my best here people, but somehow it just ain't enough, dammit!  Potřebuji víc času!