tuckova

i have accumulated more gray hair in the last two months than i had
over the whole year. there are maybe 20 now, i think. it’s not like a million but it’s more than i can count anymore. i almost can’t
pull them out to get a closer look at them, so tricky are they
with the light. i think they are very pretty and sparkly and when i am
a few years older i imagine that crows will drop from nowhere to have a
look at my pretty shiny silvery business. if they made a nest there, i
think it would be a bit much, but maybe they will like, take some hair
home and make sparkle nests.

i want to take a hairbrush to the cottage and leave little
gifts of silver and copper for Friar Tuck’s birds. he wants to build a
birdbath for them which is very cute but it’s like: babysteps, my
friend. first we build the cottage. "we" meaning "Friar Tuck" since i would
have run down to the foreign employment office and hijacked myself some
hardworking ukranians about six months ago, if it were up to me. i am
good at planning and measuring and carrying and i will go where you
point me until your fingers fall off, but i am not a constructor. a boa
constructor, maybe. but not of buildings.

i have learned to pitch a tent faster than a hissy fit, though.

i’ve
been thinking a lot this past month about how i define love and how
really, really hard i am on people, how high i set the bar. it is one
thing to set the bar high for oneself but it is a bit messed up to
expect other people to feel like jumping over your standards. i tend to
need to learn the same lesson a few hundred times, as my czech teacher
will sadly confide to you, which is partly the fault of czechs
for saying cottage differently depending on whether it is a cottage or
whether you are going to a cottage or whether you went to a cottage.
but it is largely the fault of my brain. it’s probably because i used
to see the same movies 10 or 20 times and i’ve got the idea that like,
wow, i felt so good when i learned that lesson: let’s learn that lesson
again! which when it’s czech is bad enough, but when it’s like, life lessons, again and again is brain-gnashingly hard sometimes.

my father once told me that i like to punch myself in the face because it feels so good when i stop.

so
anyway about love, and it was friday night, and i was crying in a pub,
which is always so awkward. but i feel like i’m finally making the
things i learned five years ago actually stick, which things boil down to: i am going to
keep the bar right exactly where it is and i am going to keep trying
really hard to clear the bar of my own standards and i am going to keep trying
really, really hard to quit watching to see who jumps over the bar as well or better than i want to, and
eventually i hope to bits that i will stop wanting anybody to notice
what a good bar-jumper i am, because it’s that moment when you turn to
check your audience that you inevitably crash into something.

there was this book published here, it was written by a
lawyer, and the bio section had translated "he stopped going to bars in
1987" but they really meant he had passed the bar. i don’t mean either
of those kinds of bars, though. nor gold bars, which are also called
bullion, with which we make gold soup.

i’m older. i feel okay about it. i have a better family than i
deserve, a better job than i ever hoped to get, a better life than i
planned back when i thought you could make everything happen by
planning it. and i am not myself perfect but i still feel young enough
that striving for perfection seems like a worthwhile pursuit, like not
in sight of the finish line but well enough clear of the starting line
that it seems worthwhile to keep running.