Yay! "Imaginary" Christmas!

You know in The Simpsons, the Flanders family end up having to resort to 'Imaginary Christmas' when everything goes wrong and they lose all their money? Well, I think I'm going to have to resort to that notion now.  How about "Imaginary Rewarding and Successful Life"?  It could start with a few things that actually happened, such as being complimented in Czech today for what I was wearing and for the fact that red suited me.  That was a lovely start to the day, along with the surreptitious compliment in my meet-ee's written work that mentioned my being 'clever' but also a bit of a slave-driver.

Unfortunately, it was cloudy this morning, so in my imaginary lovely life, it was actually sunny and warm and I saw the green parrot-like birds in Kensington Gardens on my much needed walk.  And I bought myself a sugary coffee (this is almost close to reality, as I was brought a small coffee I could add sugar to, so this is as near as dammit) and I played songs at the top of my voice that people on the street heard and applauded.  (I did play today, in an act of sheer rebellion over what I should have been doing and the window was open, but the street outside is in fact far too busy and noisy for anyone to ever hear me from there.)

And my imaginary day culminated in a wonderful evening playing the piano in a studio in Manhattan, making my fingers weary.  And my overall tiredness, is one of a satisfied, fulfilled variety.  (Oh would that this bit above all, were true.)  In fact, I actually really fancy a stroll in Central Park.  It should be starting to pick up in temperature soon.  Maybe in April.  What if I imagine I have a wonderful sponsor who loves my writing so much that they are willing to pay for me to spend a couple of weeks there, just wandering around, buying coffees and cupcakes and reading the New York Times and writing, playing piano in the studio and writing some more?  Will my wishes have any impact?  Will my fantasies shift any energy out there in the universe to bring about an extraordinary course of favourable events?  Or am I picking up on my longing for a trip to New York with a dose of your typical New Yorker unfounded optimism?

Clichés, wishes and motorbikes

Today has been a lesson in stating clearly what you need.  I'm not usually very good at this.  Mainly because I loathe the word 'needs' and cannot reconcile myself with relying on anyone.  However, I have had to resolve to ask for what I actually need, for once, instead of putting forward the polite, edited version and I'm awaiting the barrage of emails of complaint as a result tomorrow.  But if you don't ask, you don't get, right?  So far that has definitely proved to be true in about 80% of cases.

I've had enough of burning the candle at both ends to find I don't even have any matches left, let alone a candle, so we're reaching rock bottom here.  But Spring really might be on its way and I have a few wishes.  If I send them out into the ether, maybe one or two might get answered?

Here are my top 5:

1) I'd really like more than 5 or 6 hours' sleep every night.

2) Give me some time to do music again.  Please.

3) Let all those people who've been ill recently be ok again.

4) Let those who crave fine, Italian ice-cream (or Magnums of the classic or white chocolate variety, when your options are limited) get them in abundance.

5) Let me be able to run away with the architect very soon, preferably on his motorbike and with some kind of sunset involved, just for sheer fulfilment of a cliché.  (I actually got to rev up his bike today, and I really rather enjoyed it.)  

Perhaps some clichés are worth wishing for.

Thatcherism and other reasons not to be cheerful

Pretending my day wasn't another hellish exercise in preventing me from ever doing anything creative ever again is getting harder and harder.  

I know they've won.  I really do.  All you have to do is keep throwing more problems, more demands, more hassle, more stress than a person can take in a lifetime so the best they can hope for is to merely survive, condense the worst of it into ten years until it's too late for them to succeed anyway and just keep laughing while they carry on desperately trying to get their head back above water.  This is suffocation.  That's how I feel.  I am fighting a constant battle to stay alive until the next permitted breath.  And I never know how long they'll make me wait for the next one, so I don't know if I'm just going to die trying to hold on for it.

I now realise that what I've just described is not unlike water-boarding.  I.e torture.  You know, the kind they use on terrorists to get them to confess to their evil plots.  But if the evil plot is to make the vast majority of people work so sleep-deprivingly, health-damagingly hard in order to just about scrape enough money to pay their bills (not to mention health insurance) on their rather modest accommodation* that they never get to prove their worth in what they are actually uniquely best at, then it begs the question: who are the real terrorists?  And where is the Guantanamo equivalent for them?

I rest my case.  (And now, maybe I can also rest my head on a pillow and do that unfamiliar 'sleeping' thing, whatever that is.)

*On a completely unrelated note, I realise that I got talking about the similarity between council flats and ,paneláky' in my Czech lesson today.  And, for all the attitude I get from a certain place for my slowness in learning Czech compared to Slavic language speakers, (which is down to not getting paid enough to be able to have fewer meet-ees, so I've no time to do any homework anymore) it dawns on me that I had a conversation in Czech about politics today. (Yes, albeit a slow, laborious and helped-along one.) So put that in your metaphorical pipe and metaphorically smoke it!  I can now moan about the repercussions of Thatcherism in Czech as well as English.  (Well, someone had to.)

The metaphor remains the same

There was a distinct change in the air today.  The weather is hinting at what summer might bring, even before we've fully seen spring.  The scent of warmth greeted me as I walked in my flat.  That faint reminder of what the air is like when you don't need seven layers of clothing.  

I'm tracing my footsteps that brought me back from the brink.  How did I get as far as this?  The shift that occurred, and is still evolving between my old life and the one I now live, lies somewhere between the edge of the platform and the bookshop cafe back on Václavské Námĕstí.  I know I cannot take up residence in the bookshop cafe (hell, I haven't had the luxury of time to even go and have a coffee there) but the metaphor remains the same.  I was practically holding my head out over the tracks before, in the depths of winter that took hold so early in December and didn't stop till the beginning of February, but I seem to be on a tea-break now. 

Back in December I was listening incessantly to MC Solaar tracks, full of orchestral swells set against distorted guitar, followed by soaring but heart-wrenching BVs: "je veux partir d'ici, cette fois je te le dis, je ne veux plus de cette vie..emmenes-moi"  (roughly translated: "I want to leave, this time I'm telling you, I don't want anymore of this life, take me away")  And I remember trudging through slushy snow and being cold to the tip of my heart as much as my toes and barely being able to see somehow, it was all just too bleak.  I remember the fight against that grief, that searing cold front of emptiness and loss; the anguish, the sense of abandonment.  It was all there in the dark skies, the bitter cold, the barren surroundings and lifeless outlook.

And yet, in the days that followed the Bolero concert, there were moments of distraction, if not exactly hope.  And a few good conversations and even..laughter.  The day I walked back from my meet-ee's office, caught the metro and walked home, I listened to another track full of strings and guitars, but the line in it was "I just jumped out in the open, without knowing my parachute'll save me.  It's quiet and peaceful in this emotional nirvana blue."  And somehow I ended up at that Čajovna, a week or two later, hitting my principles against a brick wall because there was no escaping the fact that I knew I felt something and I also knew I couldn't go on without saying so.

But as we walked back, hand in hand through the late evening foggy streets of Prague I wondered what precise change had occurred? What did having someone's hand to hold really mean?  How was it that I had not had the conviction to hold his hand on the way there but on the way back, suddenly, I was walking with a fellow-traveller?  No longer an interested party, a new friend and flickering hope of an ally, but a companion.  A real and tangible one, walking with me.

As spring begins to grace us with her presence, or perhaps is merely hinting at her arrival in the fullness of time, I daren't hope for too much.  Perhaps, inspite of myself though, I shall savour the way it feels to be able to at least envisage the possibility of pleasure.  I shall trace the outline of the spectre of a future and delight in the comfort of being able to imagine if not the best, certainly the 'not-too-bad', whilst simultaneously preparing, as always and as every good English person should, for the worst.

Songs and other addictions

Before I was even properly awake today, I started singing this:

"I took my love, I took it down.  I climbed a mountain and I turned around.  And I saw my reflection in the snow-covered hills.  Till the landslide brought me down.  Oh mirror in the sky what is love?  Can the child within my heart rise above?  Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?  Can I handle the seasons of my life? Well I've been afraid of changing, cause I built my life around you.  But time makes you bolder, even children get older.  And I'm getting older too...If you see my reflection in the snow-covered hills, will the landslide bring it down?" [Fleetwood Mac]

Maybe it was the mountain reference, maybe the sense of being braver about things, seeing as I've had to adjust rather a lot lately, but this song got stuck in my mind and kept coming back to me all day.  I noticed I sang it louder and louder as I gradually woke up while standing at the sink in the bathroom.  (I think there's an air vent above the wash basin, through which you can hear everything, so my neighbours must truly love me today.)

I feel a gentle magnetic nudge pulling me back to my old life, partly to old friends and old music habits but mostly to have a little more freedom over my time. I'm tired of being dictated to.  I'm not good at it.  I need the space to think and plan things properly.  And I also need to feel less doomed.  Here, I'm totally written off.  Though only on paper.  This country is somewhat ageist.  Everyone assumes I must still be in my 20s, ("our survey says: X X") which is hilarious.  So when they find out my real age, they recoil in shock.  Why haven't I got a 'proper life' by now?  (Dull, dull, dull.  ,Nil points' on the originality-front there people!)

The deal here is, you're written off as a spinster if you're still single before you get into your late 20s and they'll start giving up seats to you on the tram when you hit 50.  Haven't they seen actors, who've learnt the skill of pushing yourself to keep going, despite your real age?  It's time people here did this.  Stop assessing yourself according to what other people think are the limitations of a number and find out what you are truly capable of.  At least acquire the evidence that you tried reeeaallly hard, but just couldn't do it.  Hey, I'm the expert at this.  I spend my life acquiring evidence that trying reeeallly hard isn't enough to be able to do certain, 'other-people-dependent' things.  

(This really should be written on my gravestone.  "She tried."  Probably next week.)  

Mind you, I can still do the splits, I'll have you know!  And I can lift my leg to head height.  At the weekend, when I did this, the architect insisted I was like a ballerina, which launched me into a tirade of information of why I most certainly am NOT a ballerina.  (Some of which should have been obvious, surely?) 

Oh, and if living and staying young is all about 'change', then it will stand in my longevity-seeking favour that I've started a new addiction.  Pribináček yoghurts.  They're so good, they were made before the end of the communist era.  (Resounding endorsement, eh?)  You can tell they're really yummy because the cat on the front sticks its tongue out in lip-smacking glee.  This is entirely the architect's fault.  "This was probably my very first real food", he tells me.  Real food, it is not.  But it is comforting and after the first pot, I thought I'd never acquire the taste, but the second really reeled me in, just like all the best drugs do:

(I'm currently most addicted to the 'kokosový' [coconut] and 'perník' [gingerbread] flavours, pictured.)  

It may be International Women's Day, but I shall still behave like a child.

Monday Musings

Going away for the weekend does seem to wreak havoc with my capacity to keep up with ,blogeček'.  Not only is it impossible to write over the weekend, but I can't even write on Friday, due to the necessity to work (and plan work) like the clappers from 8am till about 7pm in order to have a weekend free in the first place.  This is of course, ever more tragic, in light of the fact that I had a spare hour or so this morning to go and get some food to replenish my empty fridge with, but the local Tesco is so useless, I had to go again in the afternoon to the big one in Anděl.  Not only that, but then even the big one still didn't have about three main things I needed (for a healthy and varied diet) nor about three other things I can hang on for but would have liked to have got in one go.

Bloody shopping.  I hate it.  That's today's problem in a nutshell.  ,,V kostce", as they say here.  And it gets worse.  Last night, I dreamt about buying a new bag and then finding that it came with a brilliantly reduced, sale-price wallet.  I think my brain has finally lost it.  I mean, who the hell dreams about shopping?!!  And for a bag and a purse?  Heaven help me.  Seriously.  I know I still mourn the loss of my oh-so-delightful fake green leather wallet, that I could quickly pop under my arm whenever I needed to have my hands free, which cheered me up unfathomably, but that purse is long gone.  As is my capacity to buy anything nice.

Maybe that's what it is.  The knowledge that all this recent flat-out work leaves me unable to buy anything delightful and frivolous, or even nice-but-practical.  I had to dip into "birthday money" just to get a magazine and some blank CDs.  ,,Ach jo..."  (This is a common Czech expression meaning, "oh well", which is followed up with a sigh and a sort of 'resigned to despair' kind of look.)

This wasn't how my return to blogeček was supposed to turn out.  I was meant to be revealing the details of my weekend.  Not all of the details, such as my musings on what the hell being in love is anyway, and am I not merely mistaking it for a hormonal imbalance of some kind, but just the ones I have photographic evidence of.  Which is merely, walking up a big hill, known affectionately as a mountain here.  How high does a big hill have to be, before it qualifies as a mountain?  I just don't believe that it is possible I climbed up a mountain this Saturday.  It simply cannot be linguistically accurate in English, even if the Czechs say 'byli jsme na výlet, na horách" all the time.

Anyway, this was the view of other ,,hory" (mountains) from the one I walked up:

And this was the view of the receding sunlight over a hill at the bottom of Milešovka, on the walk back to the car:

And lo and behold, with this, my precious free time is nearly up and I must away...my apologies for such a confused and almost deliriously tired entry today.  But then, I did climb a mountain at the weekend.  That's got to count for something.

Baby, I Don't Care

I have been caught up in a lot of anguish and distress of late, as I always do when someone tries to dictate to me how my life should work, without an ounce of appreciation for my attempts at adaptation.  So I have resolved to think of all the good things that are keeping me going, despite this:

1) My meet-ee's colourful jumper this morning

2) The free coffee delivered thanks to said meet-ee that I SO DESPERATELY needed

3) Transvision Vamp's "Baby I Don't Care" (no-one does pop-rock quite like Transvision Vamp, even if they were irritatingly arrogant idiots) discovered at such a pertinent time.  ("You don't have to say you love me, baby IT'S ALRIGHT, cause honey I don't care...")

4) Cherry-filled chocolate.  (Oh yes..!)

5) Left-overs from the architect's stay, such as a yummy Danish pastry and wine.

6) The kindness and tolerance of the Faerie Godmother Trainee

7) A long and thoughtful email from L-Star, though painful to read how he's suffered of late

8) The Swedish teacher's email noting her recovery from an operation

9) The Czech language.  It may be killing me, but by learning some of it, I'm actually beginning to feel I'm gaining insight that other, less diligent people, do not have a hope in hell of understanding.  (Oh sense of superiority, how fleetingly you grace me with your presence...)

10) The fact that the architect mentioned 'trip to London' and 'May' before I ruined it by questioning if he'd really still want to be with me by then.

Oh and, the fact that my meetee this morning laughed so much when I answered his question with, 'I'm an Aquarius'.  To which he replied,  "Hahahahahaha...that explains EVERYTHING."