Slavs and House Signs

I have been thinking about a lot of this. Vague enough?
About my life, about this place. Still muddy.
I just graduated from college. I am a starving artist.
When do I get to teach?

The other day I found this bug bite on the back of my knee. It was raised and wine-red. I've never had a bite that looked like this before. I started getting horrible thoughts like "what if something laid eggs in me?" and I imagined it bursting open and a million little creatures just spilling out of me. Happy thoughts.

When Nick came, I had to take him to a doctor to get vaccinated. We found a clinic that caters to expats and is surprisingly inexpensive--another nudge nudge for me toward living here. One the way out, I noticed a flyer urging patients to get vaccinated against tick-borne diseases. I immediately turned into quite the hypochondriac. I went home and started googling pictures of tick bites, having Nick compare them to mine.

Then one of my roommates came in an intervened. He said his degree is in basic medicine. Then he looked at my knee and said it was a normal bug bite that bled underneath the skin a little bit. Clean bill of health. Needless to say, I felt much better.

This sent me on an entirely unexpected train of thought. He has a degree in Basic Medicine. Does that make him an expert? I have a degree in Screenwriting and Playwriting, but am I an expert in that field? Can I claim to have any more knowledge than anyone else? Am I a playwright? I mean. I took 4 Playwriting courses at Drexel. Two of those were independent study (and I mean independent, like there was no teacher...). Most of my coursework was in Theatre Performance/study and Film. Can I claim that my degree is in Playwriting?

In Old Prague, there were no address numbers, only house signs. Every family would hang some memorable image above their door to distinguish their residence. A red lion. A white swan. Often it would relate to the person's occupation (i.e. A fisherman would have a fish, a locksmith would have a key....) So when do I get to hang a quill on my door?

Oh the vagueness of a creative life. Whoamiwhatamiwheredoibelong?

A rather foreboding sky over the Vltava. National Theatre, paddle-boating.

Today I visited the exhibition of Mucha's Slav Epic at the National Gallery. It's twenty monumental paintings detailing to journey of the Slavic peoples from a mythical genesis through golden ages and dark oppressive times, toward a brotherhood, and a united future. It includes a triptych entitled "The Magic of Words." The whole collection follows an inspiring journey from a mysterious, unknown landscape of dark myth and magic to solidity, violence, hardness and death, and then emerges from a tunnel of oppression into celebration, exultation, the rebirth of the spiritual. A final "Apotheosis" empowering a humanistic message, in which all of the past generations live inside and burst forth from the impassioned modern man. Fantasy, reality, fantasy. Much like my relationship to Prague.

Apologies for the deeply introspective entry. Travel writing always turns into personal essay with me.

House of the White Peacock.