today I am...

1. Sitting in a cafe in Budapest, which is the city I flew to late last night to spend a few months and hang out/do freelance work/write a masterpiece. Well, to write something, at any rate...

2. Feeling delighted to find a site-specific/immersive theatre festival in the offing, and hoping some of the stuff is in English.

3. Feeling slightly embarrassed to be the kind of person who publicly declares excitement about site-specific/immersive theatre.

4. Relieved that the letting agents have finally got round to sending round a cleaner/plumber, although wondering why they couldn't have done it before we moved in, since they had two months notice.

5. Wondering if I will ever be rich enough to buy a house and not have to deal with letting agents. Although not letting it bother me too much...

6. Wondering how long it will take to learn basic Hungarian. (And deciding, er, quite long, probably. It's flipping hard!)

7. Feeling glad to be here. And reminding myself it's all an adventure...

me vs not knowing what I'm doing

There's a myth, I think, that emotional turmoil is good for creativity. As if creativity only comes from heartbreak and absinthe and living in garrets with questionable bathroom facilities.

Maybe it's true, to an extent? Big emotional experiences can certainly feed your work. There's a reason why every second rate indie band and their cousin has a break-up album, all snivelling ballads and 'eff-you' declarations of moving on to better things.

Of course, it doesn't always make it good.

Right now, I'm finding emotional turmoil is getting in the way of getting on with stuff. Because all the time I spend angsting about and staring moodily into the middle distance is time I'm not spending getting on with actual writing. All the mental energy I'm expending on little questions - like what am I going to do with the rest of my life - leaves me much much less to spare for being creative in any way. Thinking of a mildly intelligent facebook status update is a challenge right now.

Hoping for a bit of stability soon. Not so much as to make life boring, but enough that I can happily sit typing up the latest script (there is one, I have ideas, hell, I have notes) for a few hours without stressing wildly over job applications, preparing to move country, wondering what I'm doing with my life/career/everything else...

today I was distracted by shopping

Short floral culottes. Why?

...I say shopping, I mean wandering round the summer sales in a daze and being too overwhelmed to actually buy anything.

I am rubbish at shopping in lots of ways.

I pick stuff up and then I make the mistake of asking myself whether I need it, and whether it goes with anything, and is there honestly a gap in my wardrobe for short floral culottes or whatever the item in consideration. And the answers are usually no and no and no.

(There are a lot of short floral culottes around at the moment. I would like to embrace fashion, but fashion is not making it easy for me. Dammit. )

When I go out on a mission for something I really need: summer dresses, say, or work trousers - I invariably can't find anything, and come back with a black top that cost in the region of £12 to £18 instead.

I have this sense that by now I'm supposed to have a capsule wardrobe, which is to say a set of clothes which can be combined endless clever ways and made into new outfits with the addition of a belt, or a scarf.

Instead, I have lots of tops that go with one or less pairs of trousers that I own. There is no coherence in my personal style. I don't have a look. I just have a load of clothes stuffed in a wardrobe and if I get out of the house wearing stuff that is clean, and kind of matches, that counts as a successful day.

So this is why I wander in a trance-like state around high street shops, and don't quite manage to buy anything.

And this is why the Next Big Project didn't get started this afternoon. The only advantage of being in the, ahem, ideas phase, is that everything is research. OK? All this pottering about is research. Shush over there.

This month I am mainly being distracted by

Matters of the heart: turns out I do have a heart! I wasn't sure for a while. Complicated, as always. These things always are. Especially as it turns out I'm attracted to the kind of lovely arty men who are SO MUCH fun to be with and SO UNLIKELY to be remotely sane and grounded.

All of which is pretty entertaining in any case. But not leaving me a lot of spare energy for writing. All my creative skill is being used up in emailing long and heartfelt and funny missives (this is a long distance relationship, soon to be internationally long distance because obviously I don't do things in any kind of simple way, not me...)

So the writing projects are buggered. Although you could argue that there is no finer writing project to be involved with than this. Playwriting will have to wait, then, for now...

hello lamppost

I met someone interesting a few weeks ago. I don't really know how I feel about this person except it's not like on rubbish dates where I find myself telling my face to look interested in whatever they're saying, cos I'm busy trying to be someone else. It's not like that at all. Beyond that I don't know.

I am being a complete woman about the whole thing by which I mean telling 50 people a day about the latest unexciting updates on the whole scenario. (I am in quite a tedious phase, I can't deny it. Like when someone says 'I'm thinking of moving house' or some such and I say 'oh that's interesting, this bloke I like lives in a house.')

I am also frantically scanning every text and email for every piece of evidence to show that this is great and totally going to work out or this is all rubbish and a total disaster, delete as applicable according to mood.

Do men do all this? I doubt it.

Sigh. We shall see...