One thing I kind of love about living in a medium-sized town is that there's always something going on. It's never so little that you're at a loss for ideas, and never so much that you can't manage to find what you want to do or choose (though sometimes choosing can be a bit tricky). When I was little I wrote a porquoi story about an earthworm that wanted to be at two parties at the same time, which is funny because my understanding of myself is pretty consistently that I want to be where I am. This indicates that even as a young storyteller I was working on developing empathy for characters quite different from myself.

Another thing that I love is that if there's a thing you want that doesn't exist, you can create it without too much difficulty. Imagine starting a theater in a small town or a big city. In one, you'd be hard pressed to generate enough interest to keep it afloat. In the other, the competition would be overwhelming. A nice medium-sized town and boom, in six years you've done twelve plays despite a pandemic, and each show is on some level better than the last.

One thing I'm struggling with a bit is that competition, which I have never understood, feels pretty personal on this scale. I don't mind if things are created that are different, but I don't like the unnecessary introduction of conflict. I'm not even talking about people who compete with the things that I'm doing, though obviously that's uppermost in my mind. But there are three hairdressers on my block. Within a few blocks of my apartment, there are at least five cafes, not including the hairdressers, which also serve coffee. I like a hairdresser. I like a cafe. And if the market can support it, I guess those are fine businesses to have. But I don't see a lot of difference between the hairdressers (in fact, they seem to all be one big business in three different storefronts) and I don't see much difference between the cafes, either, though I imagine I'm just not cool enough. How did the hipster burn his mouth? He drank his coffee before it was cool. I wish that there was more diversity and less competition. I wish that one of them would be, I don't know, a fancy cocktail bar or something. I wish people would imagine things that aren't in my neighborhood yet and then put them here.

One year I decided to go to a different place for a massage every month until I figured out what I liked and didn't like about massages. Maybe I should start going to all the cafes around until I figure out what makes them different. And maybe in the course of that I'll think of something else I want and either will it into existence or make it myself, whatever it is. I'm not changing hairdressers though. One shouldn't mess with perfection too much.

The birds came back to start roosting in the trees in the courtyard behind the apartment. There are several large trees and by the middle of summer every branch will be heavy with them, I don't think they're supposed to be there but they are. They fly around the city during the day and I'm sure it causes actual problems, but for me personally it's just the noise. When they return in the evening the sky is Hitchcockian, the sound of wings beating, the blockage of light, the sense of something impending. They start calling to each other at the first light of day so in the summer it's a full cacophony by 5 a.m. A few of the neighbors have strung shiny paper across their balconies, I assume to keep the birds out, though it's also quite pretty, the flashes in the light. The weather keeps going back and forth between winter and spring, like it is also not quite ready to put away its jacket even while it is definitely longing for the sun. Everything resonates to me with the cusp of change. Two of the trees in the courtyard are in full bloom, white petals. Others are still bare from winter. The building next door is having the facade repaired and the workers all took a long-cut through the courtyard to get to the back rather than go through the building's own doors, so there's a slippery mud slope now where grass might have grown. They were pretty tidy about it, though, considering. Our facade was freshly redone right before we moved in, which means 23 years ago I think; it now looks pretty worn down, though less than most buildings did when I moved here and fell in love with the crumbling beauty of this town, which looked like a black and white photograph, filled with implied meaning where it lacked color. Someone yesterday said that our moving to this neighborhood was gentrification which while I am very gentrified is not, I think, what that word means. The neighborhood I'd been in before translates as Kingsfield, although no kings were present. The neighborhood I've lived in since was filled with students living four to a room and with lots of old people who had lived here through it all, the Velvet Divorce, revolution, before that Communists, Nazis, one woman in our building even before that. There are marks on the walls in the cellar from when they hid from Allied bombs, when they were occupied. But then one of the old people died, and his widow found the place too big for one person and she sold it and we moved in. When we fixed the broken holes in the floor we found newspaper scraps from when it was built. An article about talkies and whether they might replace regular movies. And now we have lived here for decades, longer than I've lived anywhere. I recognize that it is very funny that I will move to a different place on the same street but I do love the street and the neighbors, the convenience of the tram stops and the trolleybus, and I love the life that goes on in the courtyard. To which, by the way, I now have a key. With which to open doors to places that always belonged to me, so to speak. It's not bad.

There's been a bit of a scandal at one of the universities, involving teachers behaving inappropriately with students. A fun experiment is to ask people what they think, whereby you learn some things they might not otherwise volunteer. If I were a better experimenter I'd keep my own thoughts to myself but it's hard. Finally I guess I'll just write them down here. 

I think that there is an emerging perception of women as helpless victims with little to no agency, and I am not a fan of this perception. I think that while men tend to have more power (physically, if nothing else), it's disingenuous to pretend like women do not have access to the tools, including vocabulary, to get out of doing things that they do not want to do, when the playing field is otherwise fairly level. That is, when a man and a woman are at the same approximate social level and a man tries to behave inappropriately, I believe that a woman can usually reject the attempt with minimal repercussions. I don't say always, but usually. I've definitely done things because it was easier to do than to deal with the fallout of not doing them, and I've regretted those choices, the choice of ease in the moment over my own preference, but I perceive it as a choice. I don't think it's helpful to see women as always at the mercy of men, unable to speak up for themselves, but I recognize that not everyone agrees. I'm talking here about relations outside of the workplace/ school, where there is always a power imbalance between bosses/employees and teachers/students.

I also think that there is a view, possibly more prevalent in Europe than in the US, that people in positions of (real or perceived) power are also human beings who want and deserve to be treated as such. That they may be in positions of power in one area but fallible, imperfect, equal or even weaker, in other areas. I think there is a greater tendency here for bosses to socialize with their employees, teachers with their students, etc., outside of the workplace, in an effort to make that imbalance of power in one arena somewhat less crushing. I don't think the intention is to bring the power into the social relationship, but to humanize the powerful.

Finally, I want to acknowledge that some of my oldest and dearest friendships were born when there was a power differential (my boss, my student, etc.). So this may affect my view of things somewhat, because I see the lines between power and non-power as blurry and mutable. 

THAT SAID: Comments on appearance, particularly the aspects of appearance that are not chosen, have no business in the workplace or amongst people who are not otherwise friends (and "socializing" does not make you "friends" and if you are not sure, assume you are not friends). Sex should not be transactional except for sex workers. Extra credit can be earned by doing tasks related to the field, not to sexual favors or even friendship. Friendship can happen, but it can't be traded for advancement in the field; nor can sexual attraction. Power can feel sexual, if you're tilted that way, but using power to get sex is something people do when they can't get it any other way, and that's at minimum distasteful, and offers of sex in exchange for power need to be politely rebuffed. When you are in a position of power, the people who have to defer to that power should be as attractive to you as when my friend's dog was humping my leg last night: they're cute as heck, but they're a different species. Everyone honestly knows this and sentences like "Oh, we can't even say hello anymore?" are the kinds of things a predator says and you know that, so knock it off. 

THAT SAID: I reject on principle the idea that someone who complains some time after an event is somehow culpable for not complaining at the time. I had very bad things happen to me that I thought I had caused and was too embarrassed to talk about for a long time because I would have had to acknowledge that I caused them (I did not). I had men in positions of power tell me secrets that I thought I had to keep. I know better now, but they were (correctly) counting on my not knowing. I felt vaguely sorry for them, or vaguely uncertain about what to do, or vaguely special for drawing their attention. There was nothing vague about it for them.  

Are there gray areas? Of course there are. But I want some people to stop advancing a premise that implies that women never want sex, never want power, never have power, never consider using what power they have, and I really, really want people to stop acting like they don't see lines where the lines very much are, or that they're not in a position to stop things that cross those lines. "We're all adults" they said, in their defense. Excellent: act like that, then. 

Oh, haaaai. Remember when we used to blog like at least once a week? Stupid Facebook which gives me a tiny grazy snack of connection and takes away my appetite for digging a bit deeper into things that actually interest me. It's easy to say "I did this or that" "I thought about this or that" but … motivations, reasonings, responses, feelings, it takes too long. And my own attention is more and more like a hummingbird, so why shouldn't yours be? What right do I have to hold it? Nevertheless, here's what I've done in the last six weeks that I thought about (and failed to write about). Clearing the cache, so to speak. 

The Brno Expat Centre held a fair so that foreigners in the city could find out about services that are available to them and Czechs in the city could learn about what foreigners do. So there were English-friendly businesses run by Czechs and Czech-friendly businesses run by non-Czechs, and it was mostly pretty fun. It was interesting to me that some people who hadn't been here very long complained about the absence of services they simply didn't know existed and other people who had been here for rather longer resented the existence of services that they hadn't been lucky enough to have. Like one side of the room complaining that there are no vaccines when there are, and the other side of the room saying there shouldn't be vaccines since we didn't have them back in our day. Back in our day we all died of the plague and I don't see why it should be different for these tenderfooted fools. Still no vaccine for ignorance and arrogance, I guess. Most of the exhibitors had a bowl of candy out and I enjoyed going around and seeing who had the best sweets. 

It was my birthday and my friends took me out to dinner but I was so tired I almost fell asleep in my sushi. Still, aren't friends the best? I've been doing the "review and measure of my life by decades" and I think in my 20s I worked on developing myself professionally, and in my 30s I focused on being a mother, in my 40s I focused on how to be a good friend, and in my 50s it seems to be (so far) how to build a sense of community. Not like I've completely sorted myself professionally, but while I love my work, thinking about its meaning is no longer my primary focus and I feel like I've got a pretty good grasp of my skill set. Similarly I think I did okay at being a mother, and my friends are clearly the bomber type of people who love you even when your head lolls to the side before you've finished your nigiri. So here's hoping I figure out what community means in the next 8 years.

One of my oldest and dearest friends got married in New York and Squire and I went to the wedding as if we were proper jetsetters who will hop across the pond for a weekend. But it was so magical! My sister came from California and having the three of us together seemed like a perfectly reasonable explanation for enduring a four-hour delay in the Philadelphia airport. Also the wedding included gorgeous weather, Adironack chairs, fireworks, and the most intensive test of "waterproof mascara" I've been put to in recent years. I don't know how I feel about weddings or marriage — it depends on the wedding or marriage itself — but two people deeply in love and surrounded by people who love them is a pure good. I was glad to be there.

Next week I'm going to do standup in an actual venue, rather than in a corner of a bar, in Vienna and I'm extremely pleased and honored and terrified.

The play we've rehearsed for two months with the theater group is happening now and makes me think about honesty, art, creativity, stress, process vs. product, and how much sleep I'm not getting. That's about all I can say about that. 

I went to a musical/opera thing last night. It was the Czech version of Leonard Bernstein's "Mass", performed in the DRFG arena. Here are my thoughts:

Good:

• The curtain speech was short, clear, and to the point. Some shows I've seen, these speeches last long enough for me to do my taxes, and are about as interesting, so this was nice. Like a good introduction at a party: Audience, meet play. Here's an interesting detail. I'm sure you two will hit it off. 
• The songs were all in English. The subtitles were presented on screens behind the stage (functionally the backdrop) and the presentation of some of the subtitles was really fitting to the music — like watching a good sign language interpreter for music. I saw a presentation of "West Side Story" that projected the translation of song lyrics very creatively, and I'm happy to see this becoming a part of how English-language production is done here. 
• I liked the simplicity of the costumes and the set.
• I liked, although I found it weird, that people seemed to wander off and back on the stage. It felt super casual and I liked that in some ways although I felt like where do they keep going, anyway? bathroom breaks? 
• Gratuitous male nudity! I'm sorry no it was totally intrinsic to the story.
• The acapella songs were lovely. 
• Some of the film clips projected on the screens were nice and seemed to complement/further the story, especially the ones that interlaid footage of the actors.
• The dialogue parts, which were in Czech, were mostly well-enunciated enough that I could understand them and follow along for those parts of the story.

• If there was a narrative to the pictures and film clips on the screen, they could have slowed it down so that uncultured people like me could understand it. It was incredibly fast and distracting from the action on the stage and it made me feel jumpy. They slowed it down for one whole song to focus on a woman's chest, with a crucifix. Sure.
• The orchestra was louder than the singers; as a person who cares about the words much more than the music, this was not ideal for me.
• The doors to the stadium don't close, so I got to watch the well-lit doorway across the way with ushers milling about, plus people walking out of the performance (sometimes in groups; sometimes I think these were just bathroom runs). 
• The pronunciation on some songs was … poor. 
• The number of things that were distracting to me were over the top, and left me thinking snarky Anne-narrative thoughts, like:
  • I have issues with children performing in any high-pressure situation (school groups on stage for concerts is fine, but "carry your country to the Olympics" is, in my opinion, a form of evil) and I felt.. problematic about how much of the turn of this story rested on a child under 10. 
  • This is a hockey stadium. Hockey players are well paid. I wonder if these performers are as well paid? Oh, are we doing sports vs. arts now? That always ends well.
  • Uhm so all the characters were unhappy when they were wearing gray sweaters, and all they had to do was take the gray sweaters off and then they were happy? Seems like they could have thought of that a lot sooner. Those sweaters are pretty cool, though, I wonder if I could get one.

My friend is visiting and we are having adventures all over Europe. Bus from Berlin to Prague, its relentless beauty and complications. The exquisite detail in the stained glass window in St. Vitus representing the biblical disasters for which insurance can be purchased, turn of the century corporate sponsorship.

Train to the ghost town of Brno, stumbling over stepping stones and stopping at stumblestones. I love my town more than I've loved any place and it's a weird possessive feeling when I'm showing people around, but we spin in the square with our arms out and drink cocktails named Liza Doolittle, Mary Poppins, Alex Owens, and I think my love does not make mistakes.

In Budapest, I walk across Liberty Bridge and am unstuck in time. I am 26 after a night of hitchhiking and I am in my 30s, 40s, different visitors and reasons for coming to this diacritical city, but this is the first time I visit the thermal baths so it is new again, different, like every time you step in a river. Or walk over one.

And today, the view from an airplane window of clouds, fluffy and white, the blue horizon snapping in the distance. I experience the same irritations as anyone I guess, the man in line behind me kicking at my bag when the line moves forward, the rush and halt of travel. But here I am on a plane, going from one country to another, the beauty of waking up in Budapest, a cigarette on the balcony at sunrise overlooking the city, and knowing I will sleep in Berlin.

It rained last night, the kind of deafening, soul-clearing rain that I love the best. We watched the storm coming in from our bench outside the wine bar, the faraway blue sky gradually replaced by low gray clouds that grumbled at us and took flash photos. The waitress came out and set up an umbrella so we could continue drinking outside when the storm hit. Then the rain the rain the rain. When it stopped, it was past closing time and I wanted one more so we hopped across the street to the bar with more expensive wine and a later closing hour. The wine tasted like pear juice and after I spilled the first glass all over I felt like I could get pretty used to sweet wine after all.

I left the bread I bought for breakfast this morning in the first bar, apparently. Rice for breakfast, oh asagohan, how've you been.

Sometimes it takes a while to figure out how unpleasant someone is. It would be neat if I could spray people who come aggressively close to me, the way skunks can. Then other people would only need to be downwind of them and say, "Oh hey, this person gets aggressively into other people's spaces." Saves time. Once, I warned a woman when I saw her on a date with a skin-covered bag of excruciating boredom, and I have thought about getting cards printed that say RUN to hand to people on obviously toxic dates, but now what I really want is the ability to mark somehow, as a courtesy to the next passenger, the people who should be avoided.

Although of course then I want to code it, what kind of bad they are. Like my spray paint for cars — one color for people who get too close to bikes, one color for bad parking, one color for the ones who drive through crosswalks, my upcoming and certain demise. 

It's summertime officially now. One friend gone, another friend gone, and one more to go next week. Ghost town. I'm going to get my closet so organized. I might even learn to play The Specials on the ukulele. 

I'm remembering the feeling of Sunday mornings at the end of a long weekend at the cottage, anybody's cottage, the comfortable stupor of a three-day weekend of eating and drinking and eating and drinking, playing cards or watching old Czech movies until late at night. How as the slivovice bottle got emptier the jokes got funnier; the warmth of shared laughter. Or in other places, waiting for the children to go to bed, the hushed conversations in the dim light, secrets. How in the morning we would start making gestures towards packing up, going back to city life, and the inevitable scrap of paper with the train and bus schedules would emerge, or one of the teenagers or more overly energetic kids would be sent down to the station to write down the upcoming connections, always different on Sundays, sometimes extra different on the long weekends. Stealing a few cold potato wedges from the pot, still on the stove from last night's dinner. The sway of the bus on the ride home, the feeling of having been away for years. 

There are many plates spinning in the air which is sort of my usual except a little more than that. The cat died, we sold the cottage, I got dual citizenship. None of these things are bad but all of these things take extra time and attention.

My parents are coming for the party to celebrate my new Czech citizenship, and one of my oldest and dearest friends is here from California, too, which is great. Also people coming from Vienna, Prague, Berlin. And of course a lot of the people I love here in Brno. I've never thrown myself a party (I've thrown plenty of parties but never in honor of my own personal awesomeness) and it feels weird. A few days ago, I tried out the idea that this is not a party to celebrate my 22 years of living here, raising a child in a language I was just learning to speak, memorizing important facts like the birthplace of Mr. Cimrman, and generally just rocking the Czech life. I mean it IS but also this makes me feel wayyyy too self conscious. So actually this is a party to thank all the people, old and new, who have made my life here the amazing thing that it is, and that makes sense and felt better. People have been incredible to me and I am so ridiculously lucky it makes my head spin, so this is a good place to mark my gratitude. And buy the first round or so.

Sometimes I get really bogged in feeling sad because there is ugliness in the world, casual ugliness like selfishness all the way to downright brutality. Last week I was crying about it, about how hard it is to live in a world where we open ourselves every damn day to indifference, to egotism, to cruelty. Sitting in your little kitchen at night smoking down another cigarette, tears streaming down my face, because how can we go on in a world with so much horror, how can we tolerate it and push past it and keep our faces and hearts open to beauty and love, and if I, so honestly blessed and lucky, can barely do it, how can anyone who truly suffers manage? How can we keep going? 

The answer I remembered then is the same as it's ever been: Friendship. Good food. And poetry. Over and over again.

good old Uncle Walt