Single Person Behaviour Night - Yay!

I finally have a weekend to myself. An evening to indulge in 'single-person behaviour', which couldn't have come at a better time. I've had such a strange week. I got dragged into a series of strange interviews with a language school-cum-consulting company whereby I couldn't tell how they separated the two and it took hours to understand even the beginnings of the aims of the company because the person explaining it to me spoke English as his fourth language and it was rather hard to interpret at times. I had to do a 'test' of phoning the Director of Sales of the Four Seasons hotel here in Prague and get him to agree to a meeting at the hotel about how we could send him some clients. Except it was based on the premise of a business card for a less than luxurious German travel agency that this guy at the language school/consultancy company had the business card of. It was all so confusing and pointless and seemed like merely an exercise in blagging. Which I loathe.

As it turned out, I got paid £10 for successfully arranging the meeting (and therefore 'passing the test') then I tried to negotiate a fair rate (£11.53 an hour instead of £6) for the work going ahead and in the end got turned down because the guy at the Four Seasons (rightly) cancelled our meeting on the basis that he really didn't think we were in a position to offer him clients appropriate for the standard/price of the hotel. So I didn't get the job. And I can tell you, I am SO relieved. I did learn a lot about how I CAN negotiate afterall (well, at least, when I know I'm in a strong position - I mean how many other Brits in Prague can speak Czech to intermediate level, French to advanced level [at least on a good, 'brushed-up' day] and understand German and even a bit of Spanish?) and I know how to prepare myself for setting my limits. I carefully calculated that the number of hours he was proposing amounted to half my working hours in a week overall and that therefore, I could not actually live on £6 an hour for the work. Simple. 

In other news, I got through ex-partner's birthday for another year, having sent him a little card and sent a text message on the day. It feels so strange. So odd to realise I haven't actually spoken to him in a year or so. In the meantime, the cowboy is still finding it amusing to torture and judge me about this former relationship because he's not mature enough to let bygones be bygones and accept that he can't really understand how something may have felt for another person. (Having recently got a new meet-ee who's a teenager and whose Dad set up the meetings, the cowboy thought it appropriate to ask about the Dad as soon as I mentioned him, making a sexually suggestive face. I told him this was unacceptable, but the cowboy disagreed with me on that.) So I am more determined than ever that I deserve to be with an adult man, just like any other adult woman is, and I would very much like to be able to move out and be on my own to enable that as soon as possible. The cowboy knows that we are not compatible in the long term, as for some strange reason he really wants children (and I certainly do not want two in one go, i.e an infant and a baby I actually gave birth to, too) but he is incapable of handling that information in a rational way and sits and sulks about it instead, saying things like, "I'm not talking to you, because you don't love me".

So life goes on as usual. I have made professional progress in the form of updating one of my websites, contacting another casting agency with whom I shall register properly on Monday, making a video to go with one of the aims of one of my websites, and contacting a couple of music producers, one of whom seems interested in knowing more about my music. Sadly, he wants some chord charts that I either don't have and will have to set up my keyboard here, where there's not really room for it, to work out, or that I do have already but are in a box in amongst other boxes in a cupboard. (Have I mentioned I don't want to live like this?) Oh and I spoke to my sister about ordering some things from the UK, one for a Christmas pressie for the cowboy, and the rest for me, but she'd already bought a bunch of things I sort of needed, meaning I have less budget left for what I really wanted and was going to sacrifice the 'needed' things for, out of sheer urgency in cheering myself up more, so I have to strike a few things off the list. (Because, much as I really didn't want that consulting job, I really needed the goddamned money of course...)

So, for tonight, by way of compensation, the cowboy has gone to the flat in the mountains and I have bought myself some salmon and cooked it with new potatoes, broccoli and mushrooms and have been sipping rosé wine from Australia from a year prior to losing my ex-partner (here's where I am pathetic) because it was one of the few decent rosé wines in the supermarket here in the back-of-beyond that is this Prague 4 suburb, and I've been watching old SATC videos, reminding myself of a time when my former flatmate, the now super-famous pop star in Denmark, used to sit on my sofa and watch them too and sob because her producer at the time was being a total asshole to her. You know what? I am so glad that she escaped and made it. She bloody deserved it. And I love how much better pop songs sound in Danish. It's almost faerie-like. (Even though the Swedes think the Danes sound like they're speaking with a potato in their mouths.) And it works as a good subterfuge, so that I don't notice that lyrics like, "when time goes backwards, I will love you again and again and again" sound a teensy bit naff. But maybe that's just my own aversion to lyrics about love. I just don't believe in them. It's just too "icky". I really can't explain why.

(Not as bad as) A Cow's Life

So winter has come early here in the Czech Republic and I feel weighed down just like this little bluebell-ish flower.  

(Is it one of those Spanish ones that have overtaken the English ones? I'm not very good at botany. As you may have guessed.)

The clever rescue plan of moving in with the Cowboy got me out of my flat and avoiding life on the streets or randomly on someone's sofa (actually I don't know anyone grown up enough here to have an actual sofa...)just in time to avoid financially overstretching myself into bankruptcy, but it has left me in a flat so inaccessible and so undesirable that no meet-ees really want to come here. Thus my income has remained so low I can barely save anything and now I feel utterly doomed to having to spend Christmas here. And I really didn't want that at all. But I'm rather used to being backed into corners forcing me to choose what I don't want. It's horribly familiar now.

Enough. I mustn't feel sorry for myself. This weekend I got to see beautiful countryside covered in snow. 

And by this morning there had been this much (see the level on the balcony ledge)!

And I must be grateful that I am not stuck sleeping out in the cold.  Unlike this cow.  

Chudák!

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...

The choice that wasn't

I just re-read a bit of one of my posts and had to correct a really stupid spelling mistake.  I had written, 'a line or too', when I of course meant, 'a line or two'.  There I was, feeling pleased that even if my content is boring, it's at least well written and a high standard of English, but no.

I am writing this on the eve of a trip on the cowboy's new motorbike to stay in his flat 'in the mountains' (or rather, in that tiny town near the mountains - believe me, if you live in the Czech Republic for a couple of years, you get sick to death of hearing the expression, "in the mountains") and celebrate his birthday.  I'm quite pleased with myself for the presents I've managed to get him, including one or two extra special surprises, so I hope he'll be pleased.  

He helped me by taking some boxes of things last night, in anticipation of the big move.  Having seen places that have only made my heart sink, and nothing else coming up that's a good fit for me and my bank balance, I think by default I've decided I have to move in with him.  Some could argue this is a choice, but I still feel the "choice" between spending money I don't have to move back to stay with family in a small town in the UK or spending money I also don't have to move in with family in the US versus staying here and spending no money isn't so much a "choice" as a realisation that this is what my budget will allow and that's that.

As A A Milne so delightfully put it, when it comes to my money in my bank account and my so-called 'choice' about where to live, "the more [she] looked, the more [it] wasn't there."

Klatovy and calamities

There's a word in Czech to describe a type of person, and it's probably more precise a description than we have in English: ,,cholerik".  It means short-tempered.  Someone who gets angry or wound-up about things at the drop of a hat.  The cowboy knows that he's this kind of person.  But I can usually find a way to get him to see things more accurately and therefore not get so irritated.  But getting paint or varnish for the cupboard doors his brother recently made for him has proved a little harder than I'd thought.

We had to drive to Klatovy [It's referred to as 'Klatov' on the town info map, but all the road signs have it in plural as, 'Klatovy' and I STILL don't know which is correct or why there is this confusion...] to get to a big 'Obi' store, which is basically your Czech equivalent of 'Homebase'.  I don't know why he always wants my opinion about what to buy.  It's so funny.  I would know exactly what I wanted to get already and I'd be straight into thinking of what kind of varnish I wanted, not whether I wanted varnish or paint.  As it happens, I wouldn't have bothered getting doors for the cupboards/shelves in the kitchen part of the flat in Sumava anyway because it's so small, that it's better just to have immediate access to the shelves.  But, given no choice on having doors, I definitely wouldn't want to paint the wood.  I'd maybe varnish it, just to protect the wood somehow, but that's all.

And so it was that we drove to Klatovy and then wandered around the square first because the cowboy wanted to make the most of being out for the day.  And there was some kind of town festival going on anyhow.  

Except he remarked that they were playing typical 'old-people-communist-songs' that used to be on TV on Sunday evenings, right before he'd have to go back to school so he always associated it with that pre-Monday morning dread.  Poor boy.

So we went up a tower instead.  It's the Czech thing to do.  And thankfully, as towers and lookouts go, this was one of the more interesting ones.  There was a big bell, a clock mechanism 

and some entertaining graffiti on the wood inside as well as the nice view at the top.  We even added to a bit of the graffiti.  (Well, I didn't, but the cowboy did.)  And we walked around the surroundings, a tiny park and some of the original boundary wall.  

It reminded me a bit of Canterbury in places. Just without the actual bustle and commerce of a proper city, as opposed to a tiny little town.

And then we finally braved 'Obi', got some paint and came home.  And then spent ages deciding if it was right or not.  And in the end, the cowboy hastily tried to 'improve' the colour by mixing it with a bit of leftover paint from IKEA but he recklessly mixed it into the same pot. So there was no going back.  Except for us.  We went back to Klatovy the next day to get more of the original coloured paint.  Only to decide that evening that it wasn't a good match for the rest of the flat anyway.  Back to square one.

In the meantime, the extractor fan for the bathroom has broken, I made a disappointing attempt at a cooked breakfast this morning because I'm just not used to electric cookers (and I don't like them) and I left the lounger mat out on the balcony yesterday and it poured with rain and still hasn't dried.  Oops.  Still, I'm not complaining.  I had a very nice blueberry and nut ice cream [pictured as already half-eaten because it was so hot that it was melting instantly.  Honest.]  in Klatov on the first day 

and I had time to do a bit of reading yesterday while the cowboy did some guitar practice.  So I'm doing ok.  The cowboy is too, but he's too wound-up to know it.

Home comforts

I'm sitting on my big furry cushion on the floor and have become rather accustomed to sitting on the floor lately because this is what I do when I need some kind of urgent change.  It's the equivalent of when Bagpuss puts on his 'thinking cap' (a literal thinking cap) to really figure something out.  I'm hoping it will eventually work out for me.  It's been a bit cold and gloomy in Praha over the last few days and I think it's starting to infiltrate my brain.  Not only that but things are on the point of spiralling out of control financially as so many meet-ees have cancelled recently and are continuing to do so, which is more than I can afford.  Something must be done.

In the meantime, while I figure out what on earth that 'something' can be, I can at least reminisce about how I was able to look after myself better when I had money for nice chocolate and some reasonable Czech white wine. (Thankfully, that was only last week and I still have a bit of both left.)  I don't have the money to buy magazines anymore, and my Hearst magazine subscriptions have yielded all of 3 copies in the year since October so I'm furious with them (but I digress...) so I have taken to re-reading old magazines and books I've read before in order to keep surrounding myself with little bits of inspiration and comforting ideas.  I even took to the traditional 'old spinster' comfort of a hot bath and a bunch of things to read.  

As you can see I added the Slovakian chocolate and Czech white wine (in a champagne glass to pretend I'm living the high life) to give me the full relaxation experience:

If I'm going to descend into spinsterdom, then I may as well do it in style.  And I feel that this is indeed what awaits me because the cowboy is certainly, lovely as he is, not someone I could live with for any great length of time, especially being that I'm self-employed and work largely from home.  I pointed this out to him recently, in fact.  Most couples, I assume, have less of a hard time deciding to move in together because, for a start, there's the no-brainer of saving on the rent, but secondly, because a shared space is fine as long as you only have to use it in the evenings and at weekends.  But if you need it all day long as a studio, bedroom, practice room, library, writing room and chill-out space at the end of a long day, it soon becomes unbearably small to share it with anyone else.

I'm so glad that I do now live on my own.  Finally.  It was a long time coming.  I have had some 'interesting' flatmates from the past, one of whom used to put her hair in a towel when she came downstairs to do any cooking that involved onions because she didn't want her hair to smell of onions.  Another lived in the room next door to me and when he wasn't playing his own songs on guitar he listened incessantly to Radiohead.  Another had a dog who she palmed off to a friend she managed to get to come and live with us so that this friend ended up looking after her dog for her.  She was particularly unhappy and so was the dog.  Another had the most repulsive, smarmy boyfriend ever, who left the bathroom in a state which you would only imagine possible if the abominable snowman had just used it.  And another has become a well-known pop star in Denmark.  Wow.  There were some characters.  I could write a book about them...but I'd rather not.

So it's back to figuring out another source of income somehow.  Though I suspect a square of that Slovakian chocolate would do wonders for my brainpower right now, so I might just have to sneak into the kitchen and retrieve it from the fridge.  (Tip:  living alone is great, but the downside is there's no-one to judge you on your intake of chocolate so you'd be better be sure you've got fairly phenomenal willpower or at least, good old fashioned British self-restraint.)  I'm doing aerobics later, so it's ok.  Honest.