Survival

"The creative artist, who must transmute the everyday for the sake of poetry, is unfitted, by his imaginative gift, for work requiring constant attention to mechanical precision."  Michael Tippett

Oh how true.  How will I survive this relentless learning of the minutiae of the specifics of my day job?  The jargon, the methods for persuasion, the necessary planning.  It threatens to overwhelm me daily.

But the architect is here and we'll have some fun to make up for it.

A Piece of Advice

Seriously, I haven't got time to go into how lacking in perception a certain person was today...  To be honest, I had expected better from this person.  My only advice is: if you see a girl who normally wears make-up and eccentric earrings suddenly wandering around with her hand on her tummy, hair in a mess, no make-up, no earrings and a tired, anaemic look in her eyes, you would do well not to ask too much of her.  It would serve you best not to badger her with unnecessary questions and requests.  It would even be a good idea to be nice to her.

I came THISCLOSE to snapping at said person.  And I don't even get that kind of PMT.  I get the unbearable, debilitating and excruciating pain kind.  So I'm simply going to try to survive tomorrow, not excel in it.  And I shall pray from the depths of my soul that the architect will have a warm spot on his sofa for me, or better still, in his arms, so that come what may, I can run away to another world by evening.

Warmth

One, warm hand.  

Placed on my chest.  

And I am forced to breathe deeply again and drink you in.

Safe From Harm

It's another dull, cloudy day and I feel like the weather is doing this on purpose, or ,,schválně", as they say here, just to dull my mind.  (As if the hormones and period pain were not doing that perfectly well already.)  No, I will not be sedated.  I will push through the threateningly tedious work that awaits me, still the anxiety that is bubbling within due to the date and fact that ex-partner decided today was a good day to get in touch, and listen to more Liz Phair if that's what it takes to get me through the day.  

I want to scream a pain-derived and gut-wrenching "f*** you!" to the forces that keep pushing me, through physical and emotional pain time and time again to the brink of my own demise and the edge of what is tolerable.  I don't understand why everything always has to be this much of a struggle.  But I'm so used to it, I almost forget that it isn't necessarily normal.  

I must try and remember the sentiment from L-Star, reminding me that in Finland this is a day for friendship.  ,,Přátelství", as we say here.  And I am grateful to those who are still out there, though distant and sometimes unavailable.  Thank you to the Faerie Godmother trainee for such delicious-looking chocolates (I haven't eaten one yet, but I know they'll be excellent) and to those who've remembered me lately.  I don't know where Madame C has got to, but I'm thinking of her.  And so too, the tea and cake friend who sent me such a lovely birthday card.  I'm missing all of them so much now.

But more mind-numbing slavery awaits today and I will have to brace myself.  Perhaps armed with a few songs to get me through.  The best one for today, in the state that I'm in, would probably have to be an old Massive Attack classic.  Just as I'm battling and thinking to myself, 'whatever happened to 'fun?', Massive Attack can sing to me, 'what happened to the niceties of my childhood days? Well I can't do nothing about that, no, no.  But if you hurt what's mine...I'll sure as hell retaliate."

God bless those people.  That was a damned good song.

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'?

Losing my resilience

That's twice in a row now.  Waking up in the wee small hours with tummy ache.  I'm floundering again under the strain of this unrelenting timetable which keeps changing on me weekly, keeps demanding I think entirely of others' needs when none of my own get a look-in.  I'm desperately trying to cling to anything creative that I can, but I feel like someone keeps ripping it out of my hands, just as I feel I've got a comfortable grip.

I fear I don't have the resilience this time.  I need to be able to at least sing my way out of it, but the blocked ears and headaches are returning and I'm battling that on top of sleep deprivation.  I'm almost on my knees now.  What is this?  Am I meant to surrender?  If so, who the hell to?  And what then?

Hairdressers, phones and shoes

So this is the first long absence from writing and I'm feeling suitably ashamed about that.  But it was my birthday (the first to get through since ex-partner got settled into his new life) and I knew I had to make an effort to socialise and not be a miserable old so and so.  

First necessity: sort out getting my hair dyed again.  Not an easy task in a foreign language.  In fact, I used to dread every feeble attempt I made at getting a decent set of highlights and cut for a reduced price, i.e. one I could actually afford, because most turned out less than desirable, though one had actually been the best ever and that was totally free!  But no such luck here.

I bravely explained what I wanted with photos and my pre-looked up vocabulary, but even then, hairdressers always end up doing what they're used to and it really wasn't a terribly successful result.  I had an insane hope for the best when 'West End Girls' came on the radio, but about 30 minutes later it was Erasure (I think) singing "run away, turn away, run away, turn away, run away".  Not good.

Time to be ever so mature about things, as usual, and try not to burst into tears that I really don't have the confidence left to deal with another disappointment, but rather find another way to look at it.  So I decided to embrace the hispanic ghetto look and curled my hair and put on the ole' hoop earrings and dark lipstick.  Not terribly sophisticated, but on a salary like mine, maybe sophisticated is long gone and I should stop trying to cling to the champagne packaging that tried to help me feel otherwise.  (By god, I don't know what I'd do without the Faerie Godmother Trainee...) 

And one of my 'meet-ees' remarked that I looked 'beautiful'.  A linguistic error, but a rather nice compliment nonetheless.  And even though strange and unfathomable things befell me (mobile phone dropped on ground, switched off, naturally wants PIN number to reactivate, but PIN number is at home in a drawer, long trip home to get PIN number just to ring friend number 2 of the evening to find out where she is because her number was stored in my phone not in my brain...ach jo...) it turned out  kind of fun.

I ended up seeing in the beginnings of my birthday with Czech friends and Czech pop songs that I'd never heard before but could start singing along to almost immediately due to how catchy they were.  Then, home by 3am.  Then sleep.

There followed a box of chocolates, champagne and beautiful shoes!!!!  See below.

The evening of my birthday comprised a good Mexican meal with a glass and a half of red wine and some fine company.  For a birthday expected to be lonely and sad, I think I did pretty well actually.