Up, down, Up, down....

Ah writing...how I have missed you.  The soft and soothing attempts of scrolling through my brain for just the right match of word for my mood.  The hot coffee to help me wake up in order to land on that word landing strip.  The sense of wistful wallowing in a field of language.  Sumptuous, luxurious, WRITING.

Why is my life filled instead with sleep deprivation, planning and organising and generally STRUGGLING to get from one day to the next?  I have at least kept to the important things, namely doing aerobics, singing from time to time and earning MONEY.  But it's been up and down on the emotional front.  One day I'm feeling positive because new possibilities have opened up, the next there's some mini-crisis and all that hope is suddenly rendered very precariously positioned on a cliff-edge.  In those moments, the previous kick-ass attitude, endless energy, achievements and belief in a future I can look forward to, dissolve into an unfathomable grief, fear for the future, self-hatred and disgust.

One such illustrative example of which would be when the architect and I booked flights for a fabulous road trip from Chicago to San Francisco.  The spanner in the works came the day after booking them, that the architect's prospective new job, provisionally to start in May, fell through due to a Mafia-like stroke of corruption that I'm finding out is more than possible within government departments here in the Czech Republic.  He's now scared that if he gets an offer somewhere else, they won't let him put off starting until he gets back from the States and we'll have to cancel the trip altogether.  (Or even worse, he'll remain unemployed and have to start selling his possessions to be able to live...)I am resolutely ignoring this possible scenario and have fixed my mind on a picture I've got on my wall of the Golden Gate bridge.  I am going to stand on a beach overlooking that famous structure if it's the last thing I do!  The flights are booked, we are GOING!  I may even start my own Armistead Maupin type novel while there.  Y'know, why not?

[There've been lots of capitals so far - why is that?  I think I'm getting back my demanding inner child who wants what she wants and she won't take no for an answer.  (Waydda go inner child.  You are the future.) Fake it till you make it, right?]

What do I really want?  Hey people, it's LIST TIME AGAIN:

1) Paid writing work - come on, it IS possible

2) To travel, extensively and often so I can WRITE about it and meet curious new people who can inspire me

3) To be able to buy myself some new make-up and clothes, so I can try that thing of 'enjoying being in my own skin'.  Not least because I've got to do a photoshoot on Sunday to get new acting headshots and shots for my website that is in the early developing stages.  I'm currently scared that the photos will reveal how much the Czech Republic has aged me, like it does so cruelly to everyone here.  (I'm hoping it's down to their mindset and poor diet and am determined to overcome both.  Greek salad again today.  And salmon.  Yep, smoked salmon.  Living the high-life, eh?)

4) To earn enough to make progress with the language of this country.  I even forgot the past tense of 'write' earlier.  That either means I'm REALLY tired or REALLY stupid.  Not sure which.  Czech has the capacity to remind me of my stupidity on a regular basis and it bothers me.  Because if I really am stupid, why have I spent most of my life being ostracised for being too clever, too complex, too 'high maintenance'?!

5) Salmon - grilled salmon - once a week!

6) To go to NYC for Christmas.  I KNOW I could do it.  I know someone who usually goes back to the UK then and sublets her flat.  I just need the MONIES...

7) To be able to afford to get my hair done somewhere good and to have a soothing, relaxing massage. And to be able to afford to buy face masks and body scrubs to use to pamper myself with at home after doing aerobics.

8) Decent red wine.  Czech Republic, you know not the likes of this.  Nor would you appreciate that it's worth paying the extra money to have it instead of the cheap rubbish you sell instead.

9) A piano.  Just thought I'd throw that in there, nothing's impossible, right?

10) A holiday in Hawaii staying in a hotel room with a piano and being able to write songs and blog posts and poems all day long.  Peppered with walks on the beach and swimming in the sea in my 50s style swimsuit, of course.  [Now I'm really pushing it, right?]

So there we are, the ups and downs of a hopeless, hapless individual with delusions of grandeur.  But it's surely better to be in the gutter, looking up at the stars, than standing on the street looking long and hard into the gutter and wondering how long it'll be before the gutter is in fact your home.

Thoughts, fantasies and a wish for adventure

"The vitality of thought is an adventure.  Ideas won't keep.  Something must be done about them."  A. N. Whitehead

I'm feeling quite low today.  Something about the proximity of Christmas and the way in which it seems designed to pinpoint and expose those of us who don't feel we really have a home to go has begun to gnaw away at me already.  Additionally, the reminiscences about this time last year, before the final throes of the end of the dredges of my former relationship has started pecking away at my mind, like an insistent and anxious bird.  This is obviously not helped by an overwhelming tiredness.  I'm not sure how to combat it, when I know what I need is some time off and a bit of hope for the future.  Which, of course, will require some planning.  

I also know this is part of the call of the creative stuff, begging me to come back, when I can't.  How can I come back, when I don't even have a whole day off anymore?  I am doing what I said I would.  I'm paying my way.  I sold my piano to do this, but I have no hope of ever buying a replacement, let alone having a flat to put it in.  And even if I could, it's already too late.  It's still painful to look back at how long it took me to think I could even begin to call myself a musician, how much I dedicated myself to trying to prove I was, to make up for my total lack of formal music education.  And the suspicion in the eyes of many that music was not where my 'talents' lay at all and I was heading for a fall by liking music so much, did so much more damage than anyone could have imagined.  (They were right on the latter, but for the wrong reasons.)

And so it is that I find myself a little lost today, away from a real sense of home, speaking three different foreign languages in one day (French, Czech and German, in that order) and wondering what on earth constitutes 'home' anyway.  I keep thinking of that Christmas when I was cat-sitting in someone else's flat, looking after the two cutest cats in all Christendom and being paid for it.  I knew I was the luckiest person on earth.  I also knew it would never happen twice.  

I was slightly envious that the couple I cat-sat for had such a lovely life of heading off to LA one month, Stockholm the next.  I still have a silly little dream of going to California one day and hanging out on some under-populated beach somewhere there (if there is one).  Oddly enough, on the other hand, I wouldn't mind heading way out to San Francisco instead, even though the two are not even remotely close when you look at a map.  Still, fantasies are fantasies.  They work fine in your head.

Just like the idea of being able to change trajectory and run different groups of meet-ees, maybe even for singing/songwriting or even do some playing, writing and performing of my own, keeps circling my mind but there's great doubt it'll have a real landing place.  And all the while, I long for a couple of days of luxury, such as a long afternoon reading books and magazines, followed by a languid bath with all sorts of potions to pamper myself with.  Or a day just playing and writing and even recording songs.  But fantasies are hard to convert to reality.  Especially when you haven't even got any time to think.

Postal failures and other dramas

"Little things break, circuitry burns, time flies while my little world turns, every day comes, every day goes, a hundred years and nobody shows..."   Happy Rhodes '100 Years'

Another night of strange dreams linked back to places from my childhood and very little sleep left me feeling really tired this morning.  Then I discovered that the meet-ee I was expecting hadn't confirmed and thus wasn't coming, so I needn't have got up quite so early.  I was also stupidly hoping beyond hope for something to arrive in the post from the following list:

1) An emergency tea (and possibly also coffee) parcel.  (Lapsang Souchong tea, I need you now!)

2) A surprise parcel, with surprise things in it, one of two in fact, sent from family

3) A month overdue edition of a monthly magazine

None of which appeared.

The Czech postal system's apparent competition with the UK to win the top prize for Europe's worst postal service is now within reach... 

In other 'news', if complaining at the Czech postal system and then moving on to 'emails I have received' could be deemed 'news', a former drama teacher sent an email to say that she'd left London and moved to LA.  From all the things (very few, actually) I knew about her and from reading her new blog, which can be found HERE , I read between the lines and put two and two together and sensed that she may well have gone through something not entirely dissimilar to what I went through over a year ago.  I could be wrong, and like many moments in acting classes when I was convinced that something I'd performed had come over as wholly inauthentic, but others hadn't 'registered' that at all, I could merely be putting my own biased and entirely unfounded spin on it that isn't true and isn't perceived by others.  Nonetheless, the pain and loss that I read between those lines (real or imagined) had a profound effect on me, especially as, if my hunch is right, she had put a positive and optimistic slant on it that I would never be able to achieve nearly as successfully, nor that perhaps, I would I want to.

It's also strange, to read about someone being able to be spontaneous (something she's an expert at, and I'm only good at on 'good days') about travelling.  I wish I could feel that the world is open to me, that I could travel whenever I needed to.  (Or that I would ever have the option of moving abroad again.)  I suppose it helps if you have friends or family in far-flung places who have somewhere to live so that you could stay there too, if funds do not cover accommodation as well as travel.  (Which is ALWAYS the case for me, and I'm sick to death of that being the problem all the bloody time...) Even so, I still marvel at her bravery, her sheer 'force of nature'-ness.  I just hope she's ok and that she has far more support than I do to get through whatever difficulties she may be facing.

I sat and looked up at the clear blue sky in Prague this morning and even though I was crying, from sheer exhaustion and feeling trapped, I thanked Prague for getting one up on London and being consistently sunny for so many days in a row.  And that made me think, hmm, I can see why Gaby would want to move to LA after years of being in London!  There's only so much rain a girl with a sunny disposition can take, and there are limits even for those of us with no such predilection.