Starbucks, being a loser and a 'how to'...

I have decided on a theme for blogposts this week, in a sort of attempt at trying to spice things up a bit, as a cunning distraction from the current turmoil in my life. (More on that topic later...) 

As if to make matters worse in my desperate grief over having to leave my lovely flat, I discovered today that a Starbucks cafe has just opened up almost directly opposite Paul's bakery around the corner.  It's as though it wanted to point out to me how much this area is gentrifying and I am now too much of a loser to live here.  

I have resolved that if no new meet-ees respond to the many adverts I've put up over the last couple of months in the next week then I will have to accept that I do not have enough money to afford to move into another flat on my own and I'll have to move in with the cowboy.  Which fills me with dread because I need lots of support when I'm losing something as significant as my privacy and work and living space all at once.  I need extra support if I'm forced to move to a more suburban area too, which his flat is in, and all this means that I will have to run away for coffees rather a lot because the cowboy is not at his best when he has to be the kind, understanding, patient and supportive person in the relationship.

Enough.  I shall get to the point.  This week's blog post theme shall be...(drumroll) a series of 'how to' articles.  Starting with today's mini-'how to' with a stupidly long title:

'How to survive going to your boyfriend's friend's birthday party in a foreign country where you still don't speak the language very well and everyone is the same age as you but they act 10 years older and all have kids:'

1) Play up your posh British accent by exclaiming, "oh gosh, wow!" when tasting and almost choking on the 'vodka melon' pieces that were passed to you that you didn't really want.  This provides great amusement for everyone else, which means they won't hate you (yet)

2) Speak the foreign language in question so slowly that anyone who sits next to you and starts a conversation regrets it within minutes and uses their child as an excuse to have to abruptly get up and go somewhere else

3) Pretend you like cooking your own food while out at a party and grill some big fat sausages over a fire on a stick just to 'join in'

4) Keep your mouth shut and fake not having understood when an ill-informed guest asks your boyfriend how he met his wife (meaning you) and the thought makes you want to exclaim very loudly, "I'M NOT HIS WIFE!!"

5) Be enormously grateful when you get home that you don't have a bunch of screaming kids who'll wake you up in the morning and take advantage of this by having a 'recovery lie-in' till 10am the next day

Uh, that's it. 

Demise or desired destination?

I'm coming back to Cookie Mueller today (aptly but I shan't explain why) because she put a quote in one of her loveliest and indeed, tiniest books which has intrigued me for a long time and seems so relevant today.  Facetiously or otherwise, it is merely attributed to "Dr. Peebles, a nineteenth century Scottish doctor" and it reads,

"It is important that you recognise that there is no experience that comes into your life that is below your dignity."

Compare this then, with my usual, persistent principle, encapsulated so well by Jean Sarment: 

"One's integrity is no greater than the numbers of compromises one makes with oneself."

How can you reconcile the two?  It is useful to have general values and principles I suppose, but it's when you're faced with truly unfamiliar situations that these can be tested and perhaps found wanting.  I have a sense of changing my usual means of rebellion at the moment, evolving into a version of me I wasn't sure I was capable of.  It isn't necessarily progress, as we all know that constant progress is not the natural way of things.  There are always fallow periods and regressions.  Perhaps I'm going in reverse because I missed out on following the usual conventions befitting someone in their teens or twenties.

One particular case in point happened at a certain 'Čajovna' (teashop) not far from a street called 'Veverka' (meaning 'squirrel') where they do serve tea eventually, but you get the feeling that this isn't their main line of business.  As Brooklyn had its 'cleaning service', so Prague has its little 'Čajovna' where you sit on cushions and at tiny tables and feel like you've been transported into a scene from 'Gas Food and Lodging' or a similar American art house film, and await a pot of tea you're not sure will ever arrive.  The waitress looks like she only reads Sylvia Plath or pretends to, while sidelining in soft drug-dealing to hapless visitors who only came here because it was a retro-cool place to hang out.  They couldn't care less about the tea.  And when someone orders cake, she reacts as though they have broken an unspoken rule of the house, but makes a note of it anyway.  (Whether it will ever be brought to the table is quite another matter.)

I sit dutifully on a cushion and stretch out my legs to the faint sounds of 60s and 70s folk-rock songs (until they incongruously play rock and roll) and wonder how the close proximity to others will affect my opportunity to observe people.  What a fascinating place.  It isn't difficult to blend in with this student-filled crowd, especially seeing as I never progressed from that level of poverty and still wear the same kind of clothes.  No-one notices just how much I'm taking in.  

And yet I cannot concentrate.  I have another distraction.

And so I find myself, 5 days later, wondering who I've become and if it really is so far from me.  The borders I thought I'd struggle to cross have been remarkably easy and I'm still in shock.  Perhaps this was what the acting training was for.  Or maybe this is just what you do when your confidence has been shattered and you have to build yourself back up from jumbled and broken pieces.  It could be like some sort of genetic re-arrangement, like in a sci-fi film.  In picking up the pieces, I might have mixed up the order and emerged as a different creature.  I'm just not sure.  Visibly, I'm the same person, but internally, mentally, emotionally?  I have no idea.  And I can't put a time limit on this because I don't know where it's headed.  Demise or desired destination?

I have even acquired a new piece of clothing.  A red fleece jacket.  And a few other things.  I have been away for two nights but I'm back home now.  Back in my grey frilly boots, lying on my bed on my stomach with my feet in the air and thinking, thinking, thinking.  A desire to sing at full volume to favourite songs has gripped me ever since I got back.  My singing ability is crawling forward, trying to return.  I feel like I have gone back in time, but the language spoken around me begs to alter that perception.  Still, I've bought English language magazines today, and I had a luxurious bath with a glass of red wine and enjoyed my own bathroom like never before.  

Is this what it is to 'move on'?