A friend of mine had asked to interview me for her podcast. I was truly surprised. Why would anyone want to interview me? I haven’t done anything that anyone would want to listen to. Even so, I agreed, because I felt so honored to be asked. During the interview she asked me about where I was currently living (South Korea), and where was it that we had met (Prague); and what brought me to Prague (the death of my mother); and what sparked me to travel (an old high school nemesis and a best friend); all the jobs I’ve had in my life (too many to mention in that podcast); was I in love (yes, happily so); and how do I deal with grief (not very well).

If you want to hear the podcast click here A Colorful Life to listen to my interview and the interviews of other travelers who all intersect in one way or another through my friend, Keiko, the creator of the podcast.

I had a lot of fun doing the interview, but soon after we had finished and said good-bye, I began to feel nervous about it. I worried that I had sounded like an idiot. Who was I to talk about travel? There are so many more people out there who are professional travelers and who can offer advice, wisdom, and know how about traveling, and how to live a full and lush life. My insecurity came rushing in and swallowed me up like Carrie from De Palma’s Carrie when she wanted to go to the prom. “They’re all gonna laugh at you!” I hear Piper Laurie’s voice often in my head whenever I want to do anything artistic and put it out there.

Once my friend texted me that the interview had been uploaded to her podcast, I felt my nervousness rise. I couldn’t share it with my friends until I heard it. I had to judge for myself. Did I sound like an idiot, or pretentious? Was I obnoxious? My worst critic, me, was ready to tear me up. But, it was okay. It was okay. Someone out there will hate it. Some troll will write something terrible in a comment to her about me, yes, that could happen, but it’s okay, because my internal critic who can be so mean was okay with it. In Keiko’s introduction she said the kindest things about me. She called me an inspiration, and said that although I had talked about how much I had wanted to be an artists my whole life, that even though it did not manifest as I had imagined it would, I was an artist. I had made my life the canvas. I thought that was so kind and sweet, and a generous thing to say. I don’t if it’s true, but it is true for her. It is her perspective of me and my life, and I have never lied about my life. I don’t lie because what’s the need to lie? I only have my friends and they know the truths, so I’d be lying to them, and they’d call me out.

I’m in the midst of change. My fiancé and I have decided that this will be our last year in South Korea. I just finished a teaching contract and I am in between jobs. I’m burnt out on teaching and want to do something else. But what? I’ve been teaching in one form or another for over 10 years. Yet, with all those years under my belt I only have a TEFL and working experience, but it wouldn’t be enough to teach in the states. I’d need a teaching certificate or a masters, and that requires more time and money for a job I no longer enjoy. I’ve been feeling useless and worthless. My partner loves me, my friends love me, but I feel that this world, that the societies we live in have no use for someone like me. So, I was feeling low. Then my friend asked to interview me for her podcast. She said, I had inspired her not to give up when she was trying to make a move to South Korea. Other people have told me I inspired them. Inspired them to follow acting, inspired to become a writer, inspired to travel, inspired to create a new business. I’ve inspired people, and yet, I’ve never seen it in myself. So, I thought, maybe I should turn some of that inspiration inside out and shine that golden light on myself for a bit. I said, I wanted to be an artist. I said, I wanted to write. So write. Here’s a platform. I have some content. I haven’t been on the sight for some time, and I was never very good at updating, and I never knew how to gain an audience. I never bothered to learn. I was too nervous for people to see what I wrote because like the podcast I thought; what if I sound like an idiot? What if they hate me and say terrible things? What if they call me out for the fraud I am? Public humiliation and shame. The worst. Yet, is it the worst? I can think of worse things. Still, my fragile little ego is, was, and maybe will still be, frightened.

Maybe it’s time. Maybe it’s time for me to really try. To get this out there. To clean up all my mess of random forgotten blogs and try to make this work. Perhaps, some of what I write can inspire others to do things they’ve dreamed. I have try.

It will take time, and I have to learn somethings, but I’ll be back. I’ll get this little Accidental Vagabond on the road again. I still have some time left to learn.

“Of all the triumphs of life-haters today, of fun-haters today, of beauty haters today, of thought-and-love haters today, of the Forces of Satan, if you will, the one that most troubles my heart is the inducement of some Czechoslovak politicians and police to behave like cannibals toward the most humane and generous and gifted members of their society. […] These people are rooted like the saplings in a tiny nation whose people have created a major fraction of the Earth’s most important architecture, sculpture, painting, music, poetry, imaginative prose and most recently motion pictures. […] If a flying saucer person were to ask me what Earthlings considered to be their most habitable city, architecturally speaking, I would reply without hesitation: Come with me to Prague.”

Kurt Vonnegut- Taken from an archived article in the Czeský Rozhlas 

Prague truly is a beautiful city. Architecturally speaking, I agree with Kurt Vonnegut (RIP). I will admit that I haven’t been to all of the cities of the world, and that there may be others more beautiful than Prague, but it would be hard to beat this city of spires. Even on a bad day it kept me going; I had a difficult time losing myself into the depressive depths of me because Prague’s buildings kept grasping my senses, and I couldn’t get away from how lovely it was to walk through its streets. I’ve been to Prague four times. Twice to visit and twice to live. The first time was in 1997 with two of my friends. It was a bad trip to tell the truth. It was filled with a lot of fighting. The kind of fighting with friends that I think you only experience in your early twenties. Your twenties are much more difficult then anyone ever lets on. We are supposed to be adults, but adult-ing can sometimes take a lifetime to figure out. You think you know it all, but you still have little control over your emotional reactive responses, and you haven’t picked up the many communication skills that can ease an argument. It’s just a lot of yelling, and the word bitch get’s thrown around a lot (or some other pejorative). Still, the arguments are filled with learning points. What kind of friends and people do you want to surround yourself with, and what kind of person do you want to be? Where do you focus your self-reflections? Do you reflect? It’s all learned as we grow (hopefully) or perhaps it’s learned in Prague. Even amongst the fighting, Prague still left a huge impression on me. How could it not? Its spiraling towers touch the clouds, and its angels reach for the soul.

I went again in 1998. A much better trip, and no fighting with my travel companion. It was a very short trip that also included a visit to Budapest. In 2000, I moved to Prague. It was while I was there that I was inspired to write about this city in a book. Again, I returned to Prague in 2015. This time may have been even more powerful than the last because I felt I had built a family in Prague. A family who is still there. It was the only time I cried when I left a place. In my heart Prague is another home.

What is it that is so spectacular about Prague? So resplendent? Much of it has to do with the architecture. Prague was fortunate to not be bombed and destroyed during WWII (except for the snafu bombing by the U.S. military in 1945- way to go U.S.A) and because of this it has been able to retain the history that has been embedded in its streets, buildings and houses. You can find gothic, romanesque, renaissance, baroque, rococo, and if you visit the Spanish Synagogue in the Jewish quarter you can also see Moorish revival which was influenced by the Alhambra in Spain (another must see).

Nearly every part of Prague has some incredible sight to see, but it isn’t only a walk through the histories of the far past, if you visit the Dancing House or any of David Černý’s strange and fascinating pieces hanging throughout the streets, you will be awarded with architectural modernism, post-modernism and contemporary designs. This building, The Dancing House, which is a hotel and hosts art exhibits, is an amazement of deconstructivist architecture. It was built in 1996 and is the site of the accidental allied bombing of 1945. It is also call Fred and Ginger as it sways like the two famous dancers. It’s crown is a metal birds nest.

Most people when they visit will stick to old town, and head up to the castle district, but in every neighborhood from Vinorady, to Mala Strana, and from Vyšehrad to my favorite neighborhood Žižkov (my heart belongs in Žižkov) there is beauty to behold. So please, take my hand, and come with me to Prague, because I plan to return.

Hlavní Nádraží’s station was stunning. The prodigious dome, with its illuminated stained-glass windows, and the colorful matted walls with winding plants that undulated in whips of movement had caused me to pause for a moment. There were statues leaning from the corners of the walls. Their faces with carved blank eyes, all more than a century old, stared down at me. I was crossing platforms that had been crossed by hundreds of thousands of strangers. People just like me, and people nothing like me, but we were all traveling. The colossal doors with sweeping archways were framed by statues of supine women draped in stone fabric that looked to flow and breath. The marble women, with their down-turned mouths and closed eyes, curved like open yawns over the arched windows of the doors. The station was a reminder of a time when travel was ostentatious and reserved for the wealthy.  And here I was. I had decided to move to Prague because someone had told me that the Prague of the nineties was like the Paris of the thirties, and I was a romantic.

As long as we can love each other, and remember the feeling of love we had, we can die without ever really going away. All the love you created is still there. All the memories are still there. You live on–in the hearts of everyone you have touched and nurtured while you were here.

(Morrie Schwartz) tuesdays with Morrie, Mitch Albom

There is this line in the movie Poltergeist, the 1982 version, that the psychic, after they get Carol Anne back from the other side of the ghostly closet world, says out toward the camera, and hence to us the audience. “This house is clean.”

That sentence keeps circling in my head, this house is clean, this house is clean, this blog is clean. That’s pretty much how I’m feeling about this blog right now. I’ve been on about a year hiatus, which truthfully is not that unusual. If you’ve followed this blog at all you know that there are blog traffic destructive gaps in the writing. If you stopped following, I don’t blame you. I also don’t care. Not to sound like a jerk, but the only reason I am back here is because it finally occurred to me that I need to stop caring about you. Of course not in the real sense of not caring about people, but in the sense of trying to please you. The great big YOU out there in the audience. I will never be cool, hip, exciting, interesting, intelligent, or whatever other thing I need to be to impress you. I’m not going to build my audience. I’m not going to create a fan base, or a following, I’m not going to make any money here or some kind of a living here. I’m too overwhelmed and sometimes depressed (because I have depression so, you know, that’s the result of depression- gotta roll with it) to research how to have a great blog. Sometimes I look things up, like SEO’s and keywords, and I just can’t do it. I can’t. And finally, I’ve accepted that I don’t want to. This is because I discovered something while I was cleansing my blog. You see, I scoured through every single post I had ever written over the past- eleven years. I reorganized the entire thing. New categories, new template, and new focus. I reread many posts, and I trashed some posts (many posts) because they were not needed, and they did not fit into what it is that I have finally discovered I have been doing over the years.

This is a memoir. I hadn’t realized it till now, but it’s my memoir. It’s my history of the past eleven years of my life (and on till my death). I’ve decided, well, hell, I’d like to finish this book. So I reorganized, and I deleted, and I created categories that are really chapters, and I enjoyed the cleansing. I got rid of all of the pleading, because I could read it in my writing. I could hear the pleading in my voice. Please like me. Please like what I’m writing. You. You out there like me. Please save me and tell me I matter. All of that. I felt it come off the internet pages of this blog, like a noxious gas. A little sickening and a little sad. Palpable, tangible and so subconscious.

All of that was important. I needed to plead, and I needed to read and reflect on it all these years later with a kinder more compassionate self -perspective. I’m just a human. I needed to see that I had wanted to be more then just a simple human, and I wanted you to tell me; tell me that I was special. But, you never did. And I’m glad you didn’t because how would I learn? So, it’s changing. The voice is changing, and you, audience will either grow or remain the same or get smaller, but it doesn’t matter because I’m just here to write some stories. I’m on a journey to find out how I got here. How did a kid raised on welfare, with seemingly no chance of a decent future end up traveling and living in foreign countries? I want to know. I need to find out how. I’m curious as to know what happens next. Is it true we can write our lives? Let’s find out.

If you are reading this please forgive the mess. If you have ever seen Poltergeist you’ll know that even though she said the house was clean- it really wasn’t. There were still ghosts. Many ghosts. So, so many ghosts. In fact the entire family had to flee the home. They even got rid of the t.v.

Perhaps one day when I’m long dead this little time capsule of my life will resurface, and someone will learn something about what it was to live this little corner of my life. Perhaps not. Either way it doesn’t matter because I feel relief at finally seeing what this is all about. It’s about writing my own story.