Fish on a Pole

The Curious Case of the Ephemeral Beefcake

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Wed, 19 Apr 2017 18:30:00 +0000

Turns out DC has a storytelling scene because at this point having one is like having a music scene: it's a question of flavor rather than existence. Spectra and I have been to a few shows at a few venues and it tastes very familiar. Once again, anthropology 101 teaches us "people, any people, are far more alike than they're different." Why is this lesson so difficult for me to absorb? A question for a another time.

This story is about the time I was featured in a pin-up boy calendar. If you know this story it'll sound basically the same. I also look the same so, um, yeah.

As always, enjoy... or not.

Farewell My Target Shop Assist: ペチャクチャ style!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Fri, 07 Apr 2017 18:05:00 +0000

You know that speaking format where a person presents 20 slides that auto-advance every 20 seconds? It came from Japan and is called ペチャクチャ which translates to "chit-chat" but is better known by the Japanese which sounds like "pecha kucha." For reasons I won't delve into here because Spectra's parents will read it, that sounds weird to me in an English context.

Whatever you want to call it I did once about my beloved and brief stint working in the downtown Minneapolis Target. Here it is.

Moth Story Slam Final (22 Jan 2016 edition): the story I told

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Fri, 18 Mar 2016 03:24:00 +0000

I'm the guy in front.

#8 Bangkok Doghouse: that dang song was right

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Wed, 08 Oct 2014 20:29:00 +0000

When we got back from Southeast Asia I didn't feel like telling any stories about it or anything else. But then I was struck by a whim and one thing led to another that resulted in my telling a story last night at Story SlamMN about how Bangkok kicked my ass.

NOTE! This is an actual recording of me telling the story in public. The quality isn't great but it isn't awful either.

This may or may not show up on iTunes at some point because I always forget all the persnickety steps required but there should be a player beneath this that really should work.

Evidence of Absence

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 22:18:00 +0000

On the off chance you’ve been hoping I’d write some sort of farewell post about our time in Thailand or Southeast Asia, I’m apologizing to you. We’re back in Minnesota but I’m too depressed or too overwhelmed or too reverse culture-shocked to be able to be able to come up with anything to say.

At the moment I feel like I don’t have anything to say or maybe even that there is nothing to say. Frankly, I’m a miserable git right now. I presume this is a temporary condition and that in time something approaching my usual self will return. Maybe he will have something to say.

In the meantime, as he has at so many points in my life, Pee Wee Herman has found a way to express my feelings when I cannot.

Grenade Go... Boom?

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 17:18:00 +0000

If you are like me—at least in this one small way—the first time you heard gunfire in real life you were disappointed. In movies guns sound menacing. The bass heavy impression of movie gunfire is the bark is only slightly less fearsome than the bite. In reality gunfire is more treble than bass, more pop than BOOM because it sounds like what it is: firecrackers configured to propel a projectile. I've only heard the sound of small-caliber guns—pistols, rifles, shotguns—so maybe it's different with AK-47s and M16s, but I doubt those sound like the movies either. Theatrical gunfire invokes the wrath of gods but real gunfire is encased in a tube the size of my middle finger. That's just not enough room to stuff a god into.

Before last Friday night I had never pondered the perception vs. reality of grenades. I know even less about about them than guns. I've never seen a grenade in real life and they're less prominent in movies and TV shows. The extent of my knowledge is pretty much limited to knowing that some grenades look pineapples and others don't. Are there different "caliber" grenades, so to speak? I don't know but I assume so. The one thing I can tell you about grenades from firsthand experience is they sound nothing like guns.

On Friday Spectra and I were on our way to eat a vegetarian restaurant in the Rama 9 neighborhood. We took the MRT (subway) to the Rama 9 station and then walked a kilometer to Anothai. We'd never walked through that neighborhood before so there was some starting, stopping, and the occasional pause to consult phones. All totally normal.

We were walking along a big street, like 6 lanes, with heavy traffic. There were people sitting on the sidewalks eating. Big construction projects on both sides of the streets. A skyscraper shaped like a G (I can't remember why a G) was under construction. This is typical Bangkok. Behind us there was an atypical BOOM! I'm talking about the kind of boom that flips your fight-flight switch. It was one notch below a "did I just get struck by lightening" boom. I did not care what made the sound, I did not know how near its source had been, I just wanted to get away from it at a healthy but not panicked pace.

Whatever it was, it was bad and if any people were affected by whatever made the sound it wasn't going to be pretty. After we'd put some space between us and the sound Spectra and I speculated about what it might have been and agreed it was probably something heavy falling from a great height at one of the construction sites. We hoped no one was hurt, ate dinner, walked back along the same route and didn't give it another thought.

The next day Spectra saw a story in the news about what we heard. Someone threw a grenade into the intersection and no one was hurt. Who threw it, why it was thrown, or who/what the target may have been were all unknown. There were a couple of soldiers nearby but that's not saying much around here these days. The type of grenade was not described. It was just a "grenade." That was the end of the story and all I'd add to it is this:

Ladies and gentleman, the sound of "just" a grenade will put the fear of gods in you.

Thailand: land of something, anything other than avocado

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Tue, 03 Jun 2014 17:50:00 +0000

I think I mentioned this at some point in the past, but the idea of Thailand as the “Land of Smiles” is overblown. I don’t mean that as an insult. It’s just that the reality is Thai people are human beings and like all human beings they are living lives that are rooted in reality. Some days are good, some bad, and not every moment warrants a smile. Do I encounter more smiles on a daily basis in Thailand than I do in, say, Japan? Of course, but that’s not saying much. This is the land of Thai; not the land of Disney.

While Thailand may not exactly be the land of smiles, it’s absolutely the land of fruit. There’s so much fruit here some of it doesn’t even look like fruit, much less edible. Take a look at this:

Fruit? I thought it was potatoes but it is long-kong. After you peel the skin off this is what you eat:

Does these look edible?

Maybe if you’re a wizard. After you peel rambutan here’s what you’ve got:

I knew lychees existed before I got here but I guess I didn’t know what they really look like:

After peeling this is what you eat:

And then there is durian. Purportedly a fruit, it’s so controversial you’re not allowed to bring it on the metro, in cabs or in our apartment building. I do not have a picture of durian because I won’t get close enough to take one. In short, durian stinks. Spectra tried ordering a durian ice cream once and they wouldn’t sell it to her until she sampled it first. She did not finish the infinitesimal sample scoop. Durian: the fruit so funky they won’t even sell it to you when you ask for it.

I tutor a kid across the street and every time I work with her she sends me home with a bag of fruit. Her name is not Pomelo but that will do. The fruit onslaught is in part because her family knows I’m vegetarian and, as is so often the case with meat eaters, they can’t imagine I eat enough food to be full and healthy. So this fruit attack is their plan to keep my stuffed. It’s appreciated because without their insistence Spectra and I would never have tried many of Thailand’s more alien fruits. Man, I've got to tell you, the fruits above--and many others not pictured--are all ridiculously delicious. Fresh lychee might be the most delicious thing I've ever eaten. Seriously. It's surreal.

Despite the endless array of fruits in every size, texture, odor, and flavor; one fruit that is not so popular in Thailand is avocado. Pomelo had never tried avocado and found the idea off-putting. She had the sense that avocado is a powerfully strange fruit: funky smelling and tasting. I assured her that’s not the case. That avocado actually has a mild taste and very little odor. Pomelo was skeptically. No she’d never tried one. No she’d never knowingly been in the presence of one. And yet, somehow Pomelo knew I was wrong.

A couple days later I walked into the grocery store and what did I find front and center in the produce department? Of course. Maybe the avocados have always been there and I hadn’t noticed because I wasn’t primed to. In any event, I bought an avocado and perhaps stumbled upon the first reason they aren’t popular: one avocado was about $3. Whatever, I wasn’t making guacamole.

I need to step aside and set a scene before I continue…

Pomelo’s grandma lives across the street from our apartment building and her family runs a little open air restaurant in, what’s in effect, the walled front yard. The restaurant seats perhaps a maximum of 35 people. This where I tutor Pomelo and whenever we’re working together there’s a swirl of a family bustling around. Pomelo’s mom, dad, grandma, and at least two aunts. There are also two adult women (ages… impossible to determine, maybe 30 and 40) who work at the restaurant; one of those women has two kids aged 12-ish and 10-ish who are often there; and on top of all that there's a steady stream of neighborhood folks flowing in and out. In other words, I tutor Pomelo in a touching coming-of-age dramaedy coming to an independent film festival near you. I’ll let you guess which character I play. For the record: this restaurant is my hands-down favorite place in Thailand. Its absence from my life will haunt me.

Not a great picture, but this is the pretty much the whole restaurant.

So that’s the scene I walked into with an avocado in hand.

Pomelo spotted the avocado right away and her reaction was unabashed repulsion. She brought a plate and knife and then watched on with morbid curiosity as I cut the avocado and startled at the point I whacked the seed with the knife to extract it. I cut the avocado into nibble sized pieces so everyone could get a little taste.

Pomelo went first and based on her reaction you would have thought I’d offered her a plate of living, squirming maggots. It was hysterical. She tried to refuse so I pulled the classic parent modeling correct behavior by eating a piece and exaggeratedly saying, “Mmmmmm, so tasty!”

The first thing she clearly wasn’t ready for was the texture. As soon as her fingers hit the avocado her apprehension skyrocketed. Again, based on her reaction you would have thought something truly terrifying was happening to her. Like a kid at a halloween party who just plunged her hand into a bowl of “eyeballs.” If I hadn’t been sitting there goading her she would not have actually tried it.

Pomelo was holding a piece of avocado about the size of her fingernail. Did she pop the whole thing in her mouth? Oh, hell no. She didn’t so much take a bite as smear the piece against her front tooth. Her reaction was melodramatic horror. A frozen scream slowly spread across her face as she inferred the taste through her front tooth. She looked up at her mother across the room and pathetically croaked out a description of the worst thing that had ever happened to her.

That was my cue. I picked up the plate and walked across the room to her mother who vigorously shook her head. To an American a strenuous refusal is really just an indication that a more robust invitation would be appreciated. [Footnote: In some ways I am super American.] So I pressed on through effusive pantomime until she trepidatiously took a piece. To her credit, after a couple moments of contemplating the reality of this abhorrent thing, she actually ate it. Her reaction was pretty much the same as her daughter’s though. I’m guessing she thought it was the worst thing she’d ever tasted.

At that point panic broke out as everyone else in the place realized I was going to force a piece of soylent green on them as well. When I’d turn the plate toward someone she would scurry away alternating between saying “mai, mai, mai” and “no, no, no.” Again, as an American I took this as a challenge, hunting each person down until she was cornered and had no choice but take a piece of the accursed thing.

The two ambiguously aged ladies got cornered at that same time and bickered with each other nonstop as they took their pieces. Then they fought with each other about who would try it first. One took a atom-sized nibble and seeing her reaction up close the other refused as though she’d just been handed the gun in game of Russian Roulette.

One of the aunts took a piece and just held it, staring at it, as though I’d just given her a piece of actual kryptonite. If she ever got around to tasting it I missed it. The only person who ate the avocado without fuss was Pomelo’s dad but, in true Thai style, he tried to smother it with sugar.

Puzzled and amused I tried to get Pomelo to explain what was so offensive about avocado. The look and texture are weird, sure, but the flavor and odor are so mild. After several rounds of attempted and failed explanations Pomelo summed up the experience as, “Like durian for you.”

I have to take her word for it. This strikes me as bizarre, and if you’ve smelled durian I’m sure sure you’re puzzled too. Whatever the root cause of their aversion I promise you this: when face-to-face with a piece of avocado none of these Thai people were smiling.

Three Convesations With My Students That Buddha May Have Overheard

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Wed, 28 May 2014 15:12:00 +0000

[WARNING: This post includes an uncharitable hyperbolic depiction of Christians. If this is the sort of thing you’re inclined to be offended by I recommend skipping this post, or at least the section titled "They are sneaky, Needle. Keep your eyes open."]

Recently the subject matter in my tutoring has taken a turn for the, uh, less straightforwardly academic with three of my students. This happened all the sudden, at pretty much the same time, for reasons I can’t fathom. I’d say it’s simply because we know each other better, but I’ve known one student for five months, another for about two months, and the last for about two weeks. Maybe it’s a vibe I’m giving off. Maybe it’s a coincidence. Maybe there is no such thing as time and this is all a kind of false past/present dichotomy. I don’t know. Perhaps you’ll have a better read on it than I do.

Kit Kat is less about fattening and more about evil.

Penny, not her real name, decided that because I am skinny I can advise her on a weight loss regimen. Never mind that I’m a 40 year old man and she is a 17 year old girl. My skinniness is all the evidence she needs of my fitness wisdom. I was inclined to brush this off because it seemed weird territory for us to explore together, but she started pressing me on my opinion on the Atkins Diet, which (no offense Atkins Dieters in my life) is madness. So I couldn’t let it pass.

Now our lessons revolve around reading Michael Pollan’s Food Rules, which involves many tangents to discuss evolution by natural selection and even more asides for personal affirmation. “You do not need to lose weight {NOTE: she really doesn’t}. But if you want to eat in ways that are good for you, we can talk about that.” She heartily agrees with me. Of course, I don’t believe that she believes but at least it’s got her rapt English attention. That’s the point, I suppose, but I’d happily trade her English ability for her being content with her physical self.

They are sneaky, Needle. Keep your eyes open.

Needle, not her real name, goes to Catholic school. She’s 11 and I tutor in her home with Pole (clearly not her real name but one a Thai person could totally have), her mother, never more than a room away. I’ve been going there for five months and prior to a few weeks ago I had no sense of how they felt about me. They laugh at my jokes and all that, but, for example, Needle doesn’t know the name of their housekeeper and I had no reason to suspect she thought any more of me. I've slowly come to realize that I’m closer to Needle and Pole than I supposed. Or at least that they appreciate me more than I knew. This feeling crystallized last week when Needle and I were reviewing her class schedule that includes, what I call, “Jesus Class.”

Like virtually all Thai people, Needle’s family is Buddhist. I asked if she also had “Buddha Class” and she said no. I asked if she thought that was weird and she didn’t follow. After several rounds of Socratic questioning we arrived at me bluntly telling her, “Christians are sneaky, Needle. They think Jesus is better than Buddha. Do you believe in Jesus? No, but they make you go to Jesus Class. Do you believe in their god? No, but they make you pray to him, even thank him for your food when that’s clearly the jurisdiction of Thai spirits. They do this because they want you to believe in Jesus and their god. Be careful, Needle. They are sneaky. Keep your eyes open.”

Pole was in the room the whole time we were having this conversation. I had no idea how she’d feel about it. After all, she was the one who sent Needle to Catholic school and there I was telling her daughter that, in effect, her teachers had a secret agenda antithetical to her beliefs. Some people might take this as me undermining her education and yell at me (I know this because it has happened). I figured Pole would jump in if something struck her as untoward. Near the end of my blunt warning that “Christians are sneaky… Keep your eyes open,” Pole came over to the table and stood between Needle and me.

Needle and Pole are a hybrid of daughter/mother and best friends. I’ve never seen Pole be stern with Needle. I’ve seen her get flustered. I’ve seen her get upset. But I’ve never seen her strike a posture and take tone that unequivocally conveyed, “Do not frak with me otherwise I will rain fire down on you.” With a stern air Pole looked down at me as I finished my warning. I wondered if she was about to fire me. Then she looked at Needle and said, “Do you understand what he is saying?” Pole turned back to me. “Again, please.”

She wanted me to go through it again! This time as I went through it Pole translated everything into Thai for Needle so she could follow my admonition detail by detail. I got the sense that this wasn’t something they’d talked about before. It’s entirely possible that Pole hadn’t really considered the religious indoctrination aspect of Catholic school. Needle also has a class dedicated to the history of her school that prompted Pole to quip with a degree of sarcasm I'd never before heard from a Thai person, “That will help her a lot in her future career.” But it’s a “good” (and no doubt expensive) school. So maybe Pole figures these befuddling, pointless classes are a small price to pay for a “good” education. I’m not sure but it’s now seemingly clear that while Needle and Pole might not remember my name, they are unlikely to forget me anytime soon.

What’s the remaining 30%?

And then there is Ewan. Clearly not his real name. Ewan is 12 and of my kids he’s the one who most openly resists doing any actual work. Not necessarily because it’s difficult, his spoken English is fluent if slightly sing-songy (we work on grammar), but rather because there’s so much he wants to talk about that he can’t be bothered with mundane drivel. Why review subject/verb agreement when we could be talking about Star Wars, Spiderman, video games, toys, and--as of a couple weeks ago--girls.

Ewan is in the midst of a crush and was looking for guidance. Since being skinny doesn’t necessarily mean I'm a crush expert, he asked me how many crushes I’ve had. “Ooof, dude, that’s difficult to answer. Many. Many, many.” He pressed for a number and I told him we have to get our terminology straight so I introduced him to the Crush-O-Meter.

“The crush you’ve got now is a 10. You think about her all the time. You can’t sleep. You wonder what you should do, how to act around her, what to say, what not to say. That's a classic crush. A level 1 crush is like when you’re getting ketchup at McDonald’s and there’s a girl in the way. You ask her if you can get some ketchup and when she turns to say ‘sure’ you realize she’s cute. Now you’re thinking about the cute ketchup girl. Who is she? What’s she like? Where does she go to school? You think about her a lot while you’re eating but by the end of the day you can’t quite remember what she looked like. A few days later all you remember is the fact there was a ketchup girl but nothing else. That’s a level 1 crush.”

Ewan agreed to the Crush-O-Meter metric.

“If we’re talking crushes 1-10 I can’t even comprehend how many crushes I’ve had, so let’s just talk about level 5 and up. Assuming I started having those crushes around age 10, I’d guess I’ve had about 100 crushes.”

Ewan’s jaw dropped. I should have anticipated this but it caught me off guard. Of course that number would sound inconceivable to someone in the midst of his first or possibly second crush. This seemed to nudge Ewan into thinking I’m a cad. So I explained that crushes are about feelings, but being a cad is about actions. You can’t help how you feel, but you can control how you act. That--I’m sure all of you can see--naturally rolled into talking about Buddhism.

All of the kids assume I’m Christian and are momentarily discombobulated when I disabuse them of the notion. This happened with Ewan and he asked what I am then. “I don’t really know. I’m some Buddhist, up to a point, and then I’m a bunch of other things stitched together from books, movies, and life.”

Ewan accepted that without reservation and without missing a beat replied, “I’m, like, 70% Buddhist, but at night when I think a lot about it it freaks me out.” At this point I should to point out that Thai Buddhism is itself something like 60% Buddhism, 30% pagan polytheist spiritualism, and 10% “other” ranging from Confucian to Hindu. Somehow in that swirl of influences I’ve heard some of my students talk about Buddhist hell and purgatory. I have no idea if these are orthodox concepts for Thai Buddhist in general or a translation hiccup. Whatever it is, that’s what Ewan was freaked out about: Thai Buddhist hell.

I asked, “If you’re 70% Buddhist what’s the other 30%?”

Ewan has a touch of theater in him. He glanced at the door like someone might be eavesdropping on us, then looked at me for a moment as though sizing me up, and then leaned back in chair and cooly said:

“Aliens. I’m 70% Buddhist and 30% aliens.”

Without quite being able to articulate it exactly, what Ewan had struck upon was the idea that if aliens are real then it must at least call into question some of our metaphysical beliefs. If aliens don’t have a hell to go to then why would we?

Contrary what you might imagine, I took a backseat during Ewan’s alien explanation. I merely confirmed that the odds are heavily in favor the existence of some form of aliens, and then made lots of affirmative noises and gestures. There was nothing for me to add because Ewan was already on a path of his own making. As I’ve told one of my students repeatedly, “The only thing I want for you is for you to become the you-est you that you can be. I don’t know what that is, and neither does anyone else. It’s for you to figure out and you’ve got your whole life to do it.”

ET, phone home. And take this guy too.

However these extra-curricular conversations came about they’re about to come to an abrupt halt. Some of my students have already scattered to the wind, gone back to their hometowns, scaled back their tutoring now that school is in session, or even left the country to attend high school in the UK or USA. I’ve got three weeks left with the ones who remain. For all but one that means seeing them, at most, three more times.

Is it vanity to wonder if I’ve made a difference? In the sense of “pride” or in the sense of “futility” or both? I go back and forth on it. I’m just a random stranger in a strange land blundering through their lives for a minute. Maybe I shouldn’t make a noteworthy difference in the lives of these young people because who the hell am I? The truth is I’m not entirely sure. Is that what I’m trying to inoculate them against? Figure out the you-est you because I’m still hazy on who the me-est me is. Does any of this matter? The kid I’ve spent the most time with will add up to about 40 hours in the end. A single work week. It is possible I’m over-thinking this.

Whether I made a difference or not; whether I should or shouldn’t have; I will absolutely cry the last time I see these kids. Maybe not in their presence, I hope not in their presence (too intense), but I will cry. And it’s times like this--when I can see that emotional pummeling rumbling my way three weeks out--that I wish I were 70% Alien, 20% Buddhist, and 10% Other. That way this would all be an interesting diversion, something to file in a report or blog about, rather than what it is: judgement.

Did this elephant get more out of our time together than any of my students?

The Chiang Mai Enigma: death, bliss, same-same

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Fri, 23 May 2014 14:19:00 +0000

Chiang Mai is Thailand’s second largest city and often billed as an antidote to Bangkok (a diiiiiiiiiiistant second, with about a million versus 13 million people). One is overwhelming, hot, and garish. The other is charming, temperate, and quaint. Several people who’ve traveled in Thailand told us they didn’t care for or even disliked Bangkok but loved Chiang Mai. When we first arrived in Thailand Chiang Mai was high on our Must Do list. For a variety of reasons it fell into the Nice To Do But, You Know, Whatever… Life category and was briefly ruled out altogether. Then Spectra got one of her travel itches and used Chiang Mai as the scratching post so we finally got there last week.

While it is true that Chiang Mai plays charming and quaint against Bangkok’s overwhelming and garish, it is a damned lie that it’s temperate. Both cities are unacceptably hot. Chiang Mai is cooler at night—thanks to the thinner, drier mountain air—so the walk home from dinner is refreshing. Alas, Chiang Mai has not shifted life into the evening so things like temples are open during the day.

Have you ever read a book or seen a movie where people need to simply keep moving to stay alive and someone decides to “take a rest” knowing that it means s/he’ll die? That’s always struck me as ridiculous. All you have to do is keep putting one foot in front of the other; why wouldn’t you trudge along until you drop? After walking around Chiang Mai in the dead of day I get it. I remember looking at a temple a couple blocks away and thinking, “I’m just going to take a rest now, here, in the middle of the street, man, that sounds nice.” Still, two out three ain’t bad.

I am not pictured because I was dead.

True to all trips planned by Spectra, our four days there were less than leisurely. We took a night train and stayed in the heart of Chiang Mai, in the “old city” that’s surrounded by a moat and remnants of walls constructed nearly 1,000 years ago (Chiang Mai, or its full name, means “walled city”). We walked through a variety of impressive temples. We ate terrific food. Had coffee at Ristr8to, which is the best fraking coffee shop either one of us has ever been to, hands down… even without air conditioning on a 36c/97f degree day. We went to an elephant sanctuary where we fed and bathed rescued elephants, four of which had stepped on landmines while logging. The pièce de résistance: we stayed in a treehouse hotel that was so perfect in its way that we’re tempted to go back to Chiang Mai before we leave so we can stay another couple nights: Rabeang Pasak Chiangmai Treehouse Resort.

With all that in mind, here are the four things I will forever remember about Chiang Mai: Pinn, AJ, Lisa, and Sci. That’s a Thai woman, the brother of a high school friend of mine, a Chinese woman, and a Thai man. Sure, I saw spellbinding scenery and gazed into a culture’s historical heart, but none it made me feel better about being human. None of it made me think, “Thank Solustron I lived as long as I did and that my life twisted and turned such that I found myself sitting here with you."

The AJ Experience

Before I get to the defining episode of this trip I have to quickly sing the praises of AJ. His older brother Brett and I were core friends in high school. I think I was 18 the last time I saw AJ and he was 15. Had I passed him on the street a couple weeks ago the only reason I would have noticed him is he’s 6’8” (203 cm). Even then I’m not sure I would have put together who he is because when we met for dinner I struggled to assign his face to someone from my past. The truth is I couldn’t quite do it. I mean, I knew it was him, if for no other reason he shares too many mannerisms with his brother not to be, but after a couple minutes I just accepted that the person before me was AJ even though I couldn’t transpose his face onto the person I knew a little once upon a time.

Going to Chiang Mai and hanging out with AJ was one of those things that reflexively sounded like a good idea when Brett mentioned it five months ago on the other side of the world. Only when I was faced with the reality of making a plan with someone I don’t really know did it suddenly strike me as a less obviously great idea. What if AJ was one of the unsavory farang whom I so detest sleezing around Thailand? What if he’s something worse than that (even though I can’t imagine what that would be)? I consoled myself with the fact that we’d only committed to one meal with him and could conveniently forget to make additional plans the rest of our stay.

AJ was lurking within. Ready to charm and produce a special rate on beer.

We ended up having dinner with AJ twice and then hanging out with him in his home the afternoon before we returned to Bangkok. Practically speaking that means we spent every available moment we could with AJ. We even sat around his home for a few hours drinking beer, eating chips, watching TV and then looking at slideshows of his trips to Ankor Wat and Taiwan. Keep in mind, Spectra “GO GO GO Everything That Can Be Seen Must Be Seen” Myers was sitting on that couch too. That’s how fraking delightful AJ is. Without so much as a grumble or a sideways glance at me, Spectra idled away a whole afternoon when there were dozens of temples left to see. AJ could not have known it, but this is the highest compliment Spectra can pay a person.

My mother nearly lost her feet in Kyoto thanks to the punishing drive of Travel Spectra. She would have been thunderstruck by the sight of Spectra drinking a beer at 2 in the afternoon, watching a reality TV show about how Malaysia trains their special forces, without a care in the world for the “silver temple” across the street. That is to say the easygoing power of AJ is something to behold if you’re ever in Chiang Mai. I suspect no connection to AJ would be necessary but it would make it easier get in touch with him. If you have no connection to him but fancy a visit, let me know and I’ll arrange a meeting.

My friend AJ and me. Looking kind of giant.

Okay, so the defining Chiang Mai episode.

"My movie isn't about Chiang Mai. My movie IS Chiang Mai." ~ Pinn

Chiang Mai is “in the mountains” like Salt Lake City is. That is to say, the mountains are very close but you’re not “in” them like you are when you’re in a ski resort town like Vail. Our final night in Chiang Mai was the only one we spent outside the city, in the surrounding mountain jungle. We spent this night in a treehouse. Had we known what it would be like we would have spent more than one night there.

We stayed here one measly night. We are fools.

On the way we stopped at the Four Seasons Resort to pick up another treehouse guest. Spectra and I were both surprised to hear someone from, perhaps, the poshest resort in all of Thailand (which is saying something) was joining us and were preemptively concerned about what kind of person this would be. It was the mirror image of the anxiety we’d feel if we were picking someone up at the Reggae Backpacker Wild Weed Hostel and Love Shack. Not that everyone who stays in either of those kinds of places is a reprehensible person, but the odds creep up that at first blush she or he will be an obvious bummer.

Our Four Seasons addition turned out to be a Chinese woman of indeterminate age--let’s say 30, give or take 15 years--named Lisa. She sat in the front seat, we sat in the back, so there was a little initial chatter but it was difficult to maintain without her fully turning around in her seat. Since she wasn’t me that wasn’t going to happen. It was not immediately clear that she was deplorable, which was all we could really ask for, and there was even an encouraging sign.

Lisa asked the driver how far it was to the treehouse. He answered, sixty kilometers, or something. Then I immediately asked him, “How far it is to Nirvana from here?” Lisa burst out laughing while the driver was confused. I congratulated the driver on his non-answer explaining that he was right, “Nirvana is nowhere and everywhere. The distance to Nirvana is a secret hidden in one’s heart.” She laughed again. The driver may have attained enlightenment. It was difficult to tell with certainty.

What the driver saw in that moment.

We arrived at Rabeang Pasak Chiangmai Treehouse and were greeted by the owner, Mr. Lee. He’s Thai, probably in the neighborhood of 70 and, we found out later, a Pratt Institute trained architect. Because where else would you get your training to build treehouses in the mountain jungle of rural Thailand but a revered, tiny school in Brooklyn. Have I mentioned life on Earth is brilliantly ridiculous and that we should stop ruining it? If not, consider it mentioned. Mr. Lee informed us that due to cancellations Spectra, Lisa, and I had the run of the place. He even insisted we check multiple treehouses to choose the one we liked most. Spectra’s dream is to live in a treehouse so she was basically out of her mind at this point.

After we settled in it was already time for dinner. We ate on a big patio overlooking a stream and the treehouses. We tried like crazy to get Lisa to sit with us but she demurred. Mr. Lee’s daughter Pinn, who helps run the place, was less resistant to our conversational overtures. Each time she came by to check on us we detained her a little longer and by the end of the meal she pulled up a chair to talk with us. Perhaps Pinn’s inclusion was a sign to Lisa that we Americans wouldn’t get all America on her because she shortly joined our conversation too.

This stream. One night. Again, we are fools.

The four of us took a short walk down to a marsh that looked like a planetarium projection. It was like a Milky Way of fireflies in a narrow band above the reeds extending back into the forest as far as we could see. “Like Christmas,” Pinn said. I feigned ignorance out of fear that Jesus might show up and ruin everything. He didn’t. After the fireflies we returned to the patio. Pinn excused herself to, like, work or something, but Lisa was in. We sat there for a couple hours chatting.

It turned out Lisa was in Chiang Mai meeting with some sort of tea tasting organization. There were 400 people in town to drink tea. Tea from Thailand, we assumed. No. Lisa was in Chiang Mai, Thailand with 350 other Chinese people (according to Lisa, the remaining 50 were from random places like Canada but definitely not Japan) to drink tea from... China. Rare tea, she assured us. I asked if they were in Chiang Mai to drink it because the tea had to be smuggled out of China. She laughed, but no.

So Lisa was a Chinese lady in Thailand to drink tea from China at the Four Seasons Resort. Do you feel a pang of envy? What if I add that she was beautiful, gregarious and sharp? Before you answer, keep in mind she was stunned and openly jealous of the fact that neither Spectra’s nor my mother would ever even casually mention that maybe it would be nice if we’d have a baby some day. She was also in awe of the frequency of our communications with our mothers: Spectra once a week; me haphazardly that probably works out to being once every 3 weeks. Lisa talks to her parents every day. Every day they poke and prod about when she’s going to get married and have children. I’m not sure how many idyllic tea parties she’d trade for Spectra’s parent communication regimen but I’d wager the answer is greater than one.

Spectra and I went to bed knowing know we wouldn’t see Lisa again. Or at least I wouldn’t. Lisa had to leave early in the morning to catch her flight back to China. Early isn’t my thing but sometimes it’s Spectra’s. She didn’t catch her though.

Around 9:30 we went up for breakfast. We ate and then Pinn came over and we got to talking. By the way, the “P” in her name is actually the impossible sound that’s between “p” and “b” and the double-n is to indicate the sound at the end of her name is falling. She swore I managed to say her name correctly a couple times but I doubt it. Like Lisa, Pinn is also of indeterminate age: roughly 30, give or take 15 years. At some point Spectra decided to explore the grounds and the treehouses. Pinn and I kept chatting. About an hour later Spectra returned and Pinn and I were still chatting.

Pinn’s life story is for her share, so I’m not going to really get into it, but she lived in the United States in non-obvious immigrant places for almost a decade before returning to Thailand to help her father with the treehouses. If anyone reading this knows Wong Kar-Wai I think you should mention Pinn to him because he might want to make a movie about a Pinn-like person living a treehouse in the mountain jungle outside of Chiang Mai. If Mr. Wong isn’t available, someone please contact Werner Herzog.

Like her Pratt educated, architect, treehouse building father; Pinn is a walking, talking, laughing, eye-rolling endorsement for the inherent ridiculous brilliance of humanity. If aliens are watching trying decide whether humans should be exterminated to let something more interesting take over, I’m sure they’ve keyed in on Pinn. One Pinn is worth many less sterling types found at the Four Seasons or Reggae Backpacker Wild Weed Hostel and Love Shack. Same goes for Lisa and AJ and Sci (whose story I won’t be touching on, I’m sorry to say, because this thing shouldn’t go on forever).

When Spectra rejoined us Pinn looked at her and said, “He asks so many questions. Every time I think he will forget, but no. He remembers and asks again.”

“This is normal,” Spectra assured her. “He loves doing this to people.”

This moment was a mini-revelation for me. If Spectra is “everything that can be seen must be seen,” then I am “everything that a person can tell must be heard.” I’d been sitting there interrogating a next-to-stranger for approximately two hours while Spectra spent half that time exploring the treehouse valley. She was doing her thing and I was doing mine. I don’t think we’d ever so explicitly bifurcated an experience like that before. As far as revelations go this one would have to count as minor. It’s unlikely to have finally punch my enlightenment ticket, and its utility is of limited or perhaps nil value. Spectra and I were naturally inclined to give the other space to do our inherent self things anyway so this won’t resolve any issues because there weren’t any.

So what does this mean? I don’t know. Why does this make me feel better about being alive? I’m not sure. What is my current distance to nirvana? I have no idea. Is this insight attributable to Chiang Mai? That's the most salient question here but it's no more answerable than the others. At best it's debatable but we've never seen it reported in guidebooks like, “Thanks to less hurlyburly and a more walkable environment than Bangkok, as you meander from temple to temple through the invigorating, sun dappled streets of Chiang Mai you may find yourself gaining new insights into, not only Thailand, but also into yourself.”

Does this look enlightening?

What to make of Chiang Mai then? I honestly can't say. It's not exactly what it's cracked up to be, but it isn't entirely NOT what it's cracked up to be either. Perhaps this is part of its charm. That like your distance from Nirvana, Chiang Mai can only be measured by your heart. You might want to lie down and die in the street. You might find people who make you happy to be alive. These might be the same thing. I have no idea what that thing is but I'd pay to see Wong Kar-Wai (or Werner Herzog) contemplate it in a movie simply called Pinn.

How about this?

Military Declares Martial Law: We Debate Seeing Godzilla in "4D"

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Tue, 20 May 2014 08:25:00 +0000

A very brief post for nervous mothers and, perhaps, Beckett.

You may have notice that martial law was declared in Thailand in headlines and articles that also often include the expression "coup d'état." Here is a verbatim exchange of texts Spectra and I had this morning in light of the news:

SPECTRA: did you read about the military martial law?

ME: Yep. You are living under Martial Law. The military says, "Don't Panic."

SPECTRA: 5555*

ME: No. They really did. They said, "Don't panic." Apparently both sides, Red and Yellow, have issued statements saying, "Okay, we'll back down now. And we won't panic."

SPECTRA: everyone has their towels, huh?

So there you have it. Life under martial law. The most pressing issue Spectra and I are facing is whether we'll see "Godzilla" in 4D or not. 4D is when your chair shakes and wind gets blown in your face, stuff like that. It's 6-times the cost of a regular movie though and I hate 3D, which is part of the 4D experience. We both feel like we should experience this once before we leave but when it's time to buy the ticket will we go through with it?

Alas, the military will not bail us out of this conundrum. We'll have to solve it the old fashioned way: trading punches to the stomach until someone throws up. Because that, Beckett (if you're reading), is ultimately the best way to solve all intractable disputes. Nay, Beckett, it is the ONLY way.

*This is the Thai equivalent of "LOL." The word "five" sounds like "ha."

Truths and Lies about Thailand: “everyone” speaks English

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Tue, 06 May 2014 17:52:00 +0000

At a minimum, Americans (and Germans) have the sense that everyone in Thailand speaks English. Not literally, of course, but we do believe that wherever we go there will be Thai people who speak enough English to negate our need to speak any Thai. That’s pretty much true in the tourist intensive areas, but the moment you step off the Farang Trail the prevalence of English precipitously declines, and without rudimentary Thai you find yourself struggling to order even a cup of tea. This was a rude awakening for Spectra and me because we live nowhere near the Farang Trail. Our pathetic attempts at learning a little Thai were incinerated in a trial by fire as we struggled to do anything that didn’t involve McDonald’s or 7-eleven. It was a humbling and bewildering first month (or two). And one I heartily endorse.

Thailand is not an English speaking nation. It’s Thailand, which is where they speak Thai. Many people here do speak English, which is nice for we English speakers, and considering it’s currently the world’s lingua franca that’s no doubt of broader utilitarian benefit to them. Still, learning any language beyond one’s native tongue should be a choice freely made. If vast tracts of Americans still stubbornly refuse to learn a second language, then that’s a right we ought to endorse in other nations too. I've demonstrated my support by learning a trifle of Thai, and I rather enjoy the painstaking process of slooooooowly finding an understanding with Thai people who speak no English.

Just in case you don’t know, Thai is a tonal language. This is a daunting hurdle for English speakers—who aren’t musicians—and it isn’t the only one. Thai also features a bunch of sounds that are, for lack of a better description, in between familiar English sounds. For example, there’s a sound between P and B. Try and make that sound. Try it. I dare you! I can’t even hear it much less make it. So when I'm attempting to say a word with one of those mystery sounds I make an exaggerated mess of it to convey it’s the sound hidden in here that I can’t make. Tones in conjunction with hidden sounds mean Thai people often have NO CLUE what I’m talking even when I know what I'm saying.

To wit, my home bus stop is “major.” Yes, the English word. It’s the name of a movie theater chain that has a location across the street from our apartment. Convenient, right? How many different ways do you think there are to say “major”? Take a moment. Think about it. As far as I can tell there are at least twelve. Five potential vowel sounds for the A, five more for the O, and at least two for the J because it’s one of those in between sounds. Plus, the R is silent. And the R in conjunction with the O make that vowel sound more like “uh” than anything typically associated with an O. So a simple English word like “major” ends up sounding more like “may-jch-uh.” And that’s without the tones.

Context often saves the day, but even with a word seemingly as simple as "major" it can take several seconds of saying it over and over and over changing the tones and mangling the vowels every way I can think of until the Thai person I'm talking to finally hears it. I love these “oooooooh” moments, and the laughter that usually ensues, but one place it's not fun is the bus. The ticket person on the bus is usually in a hurry. When she (or much less frequently, he) is stymied by the tone deaf, thick tongued, unintelligible farang butchering the name of a bus stop beyond recognition; she quickly scans the bus to find the secret everpresent font of English assistance: young Thai people.

If my experience and recollection are fair indicators, which they are not, then virtually all Thai people 25-and-under on buses speak English. This happens without fail when the ticket lady gets fed up with my verbal gymnastics: She scans the bus to find the nearest young lady in a school uniform. It’s almost always a young lady in school uniform and there is always at least one on the bus (university students wear uniforms too). The ticket lady will say something in Thai to the young lady who will then either simply look at me or say, “Where do you want to go?” I’ll tell her the name of the place I’m going, and then she’ll say it to the ticket lady who will immediately understand… even though I’m sure the student said the exact same thing I just said!

I'd bet my life that someone speaks English on that bus.

I have yet to find this exasperating. It's closer to experiencing a magic trick that seems so simple, and you think you've identified the part where the sleight of hand takes hides the secret, but you can't quite put it all together. I know what the student says is subtly different than what I say but I just can't hear it. We’ll be leaving at the end of June so it's doubtful I'll ever master the tones and mystery sounds. This is a bummer but it’s not a crippling setback. Because while it’s a lie that everyone in Thailand speaks English; it is an astonishing and mystifying truth—every bit as inconceivable as the existence of a sound between P and B—that the young person nearest the ticket lady on the bus most certainly does.

Thailand: it’s not America… or is it

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Sat, 03 May 2014 09:38:00 +0000

Thai schools are in the midst of “summer vacation.” Technically it’s spring, but this is the hottest time of year here so kids get a couple months off (kids in Thai schools, that is, kids in international schools get much shorter breaks). In practice that means lots of tutoring instead of school, but still they have considerably more free time these days. And what do they do with it? If the dozen or so young people I routinely work with are a fair representation, they do not spend much of it with their friends.

In class I always ask students what they’ve done since I last saw them. The answers typically involve movies, games, shows, sleeping, and eating. Lot’s and lot’s of sleeping. Slowly it dawned on me that there was very little mention of friends. At first I wondered if they were taking that fact as a given, like of course they’re watching movies with friends, but then I started asking them about it.

Maybe eight of the twelve youngsters said the same thing: they don't see their friends during summer break. Pretty much ever. What's more, they don't care to. It just isn't a priority. Of course they text or play games together online; but the idea of seeing a movie or eating a pizza or just hanging out isn't on their radar. And of the kids who don’t hang out with their friends, absolutely none of them have ever had a friend over to their house or been to a friend's house.

A few months ago one of my students had mentioned this in passing. She said she never went to friends’ houses and they never came to hers because they have to be “perfect little angels.” I didn’t see the demonic element in going to a friend’s house and pressed her on the point. She said her parents wouldn’t know what she doing at a friend’s house. I pointed out her friend’s parents would know and she said that wasn’t the same thing. At that point I let it go assuming it was one of her parents curious predilections or there was more to the story than I knew (or perhaps should know).

Now, months later, I’ve found myself surrounded by “perfect little angels.” One of whom is 12-year-old Paint (not her real name). I tutor Paint in her home and last week we were talking about the fact that she hadn’t spent any time with a single friend since she’d been on summer break (she goes to a Thai school and has the multi-month extended vacation) when her mother, Time (not her name), entered the room.

Paint’s English is spotty and I wondered if we misunderstood each other, so I asked Time to confirm.

“No, she has not seen any of her friends.”

I was exaggeratedly flabbergasted. “Not once. Will she? Before school starts?”

Time laughed, “No.”

“Not to see a movie? Not to get a pizza? Nothing?”

Time and Paint both laughed, “No.” They found my astonishment amusing.

“What about going to a friend’s house?”

Time stopped laughing. “No.” She was serious. This was not funny.

“Why not?” I asked.

“I do not know her friends’ parents. It might be dangerous,” Time said without a hint of deadpan.

“But her friends all go to school with her,” I pointed out. “And it’s not a public school so her friends’ parents are probably a lot like you.”

Time was unmoved. “I don’t know them. It’s dangerous.”

I explained that when I was a teenager on break from school that every day I couldn’t hang out with my friends was agony.

Time listened patiently, nodding along, and then said in all seriousness, “This is not America.”

Indeed not, but lucky I am American and was undaunted.

“Okay, pretend Paint is friends with the Crown Prince’s daughter, who is about her age, I think. If the Prince’s daughter asked Paint over, could she go?”

Time shrugged and said, “I’d have no choice. She would have to go.”

“Okay, pretend Paint is friends with (Thailand Prime Minister) Yingluck’s…”

“NO!” Time cut me off. “No.”

“Okay, pretend Paint is friends with (opposition leader) Suthep’s…”

“NO!” Time cut me off again. “No.”

“Okay,” I said. Time sighed and frowned at me, having grown tired of this game, but I continued, “Pretend Paint is friends with President Obama’s daughter…”

Time burst out laughing. “Okay, okay. She can can go.”

“She could go to the White House to play with Sasha or Malia, whichever is the younger one? The Obamas’ house is not dangerous."

“Yes, she can go.” Time and Paint both laughed.

I leaned across the table to get in Paint’s face. “When I get home I’ll ask my rich friends and family to request a playdate at the White House for you.” Then I turned to Time, “I don’t know what it’s like in Thailand, but in America when you have lots of money you can get pretty much anything you want from politicians.”

Paint laughed, “Same same.”

America and Thailand, so different and yet so (lamentably) similar.

Ko Si Chang: [blank] Thailand Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Thu, 01 May 2014 16:47:00 +0000

At some point in the last couple months Spectra and I passed into the realm of “subtle Thai experiences.” We’ve had our fill of massive, spectacular temples & sites, and Thai culture is no longer alien (although it’s still occasionally looking glass fascinating; I’ll get into an example in a future post). We’re now firmly into stuff that the very act of chronicling crushes. I think I’ve mentioned this before, but these are the kinds of experiences that would be best captured by haiku. I don’t think I understood the utility of haiku before that last couple months. Our overnight trip last Sunday to Ko Si Chang is a case study haiku experience.

We ended up going in the perfect way. Spectra was itching for a bit of a trip; I had a student cancel on Sunday; and out of nowhere we took an overnight trip to the closest visitable island, which just so happens to be Ko Si Chang in the Gulf of Thailand. Technically this is about that impromptu overnight trip, and I will talk about it a bit here and there, but in actuality this is about two aspects that defined the trip: motorbikes and View.

Not “the view” but rather View: a woman. A 25-year-old computer programmer who is a walking, talking, smiling, laughing, radiating-crystalline-goodness embodiment of what (decent) people think Thailand will be. She was ahead of us in line at the bus station, and before she could walk away the ticket lady commanded her to guide us to the bus. We quickly determined that View speaks just a wee bit of English. Way more than we speak Thai, but still just a wee bit. She led us to the curb and motioned for us to wait. Not a minute later a bus pulled up, View indicated we should get on, and then she turned around and got on.

"Ah, we're on the same bus,” I thought.

Once on the bus it was clear what was going on. It was already 80% full and we were catching it on its way out of the station. We’d arrived in the nick of time, lucky us. And lucky View because it meant we sat together in the last row. View had the window, then Spectra, then me.

The ride to Sriracha (yep, spicy sauce lovers, that Sriracha), where we’d catch a ferry, would take about two hours. After a couple rounds of nodding, smiling, and thanking View for helping us, we all settled down in the otherwise completely silent bus. As our friend Ning pointed out, "Loud music is Sawyer's enemy," because it cripples my ability to converse. T’was an astute reckoning and, in the same vein, silence is my siren song.

During the ride I'd noted that View was still tending to us. She saw we were looking out the window so, without consulting us, she'd occasionally fuss with the curtain to optimize our view. After a fashion she took a rest and reclined back in her seat, folded her arms, and with her right hand pinched the curtain between her fingers so as to keep it open for our benefit; never mind that a closed curtain would have aided her in sleeping (most everyone else had fastidiously closed their curtain).

"She cares about us," I whispered Spectra.

"You're imagining things," Spectra wordlessly glared back at me.

After about 30 minutes the landscape was rural but there'd be pockets of massive condos or apartment buildings. I wondered if the people living out there worked in Bangkok. I leaned over Spectra and said to View, "Khatoadkrap (in this context: I beg your pardon)," View sat up and looked intently at me. "The people who live out here. Do they work in Bangkok?"

The question proved to be at least two orders of magnitude too complicated. View ran through a series of exaggerated facial expressions to convey she was listening, thinking, confused, sorry, and then clasped onto Spectra’s arm and doubled over in mock exaggerated apologetic shame. It was a breathtaking sequence of cross-cultural interpersonal communication kabuki theater. And it initiated a 90 minute conversation facilitated through Google Translate on three phones, one Thai/English phrasebook, a handful of English, a pinch of Thai, and set against a background of laughter, massive smiling and endless pantomime.

There were two rounds of group selfies and by the time we got off the bus View and I were openly teasing each other. I told her she was a liar, crazy, and a bad sister. She told me I looked 50. She tried to get her parents to give us a ride to the pier to catch our ferry, which would have been a life-making experience, but they were unavailable and View was exaggeratedly saddened to hear that she too would be taking a tuk-tuk once off the bus.

Spectra and I talk about superlative culturally specific moments, outings, whatevers as Top ______ Experience. For example, a “Piss Alley” meal with my mother in Shinjuku was a Top Japan Experience; and an egg coffee with Vic sitting on one-foot tall stools in a hidden Hanoi coffee shop was a Top Vietnam Experience. Conversing with View was a Top Thailand Experience. Honestly, the rest of the trip could have been varying degrees of disaster and we still would have fondly remembered it as the Befriending View. Such is the power of View. Here’s our crappy group selfie:

After a harrowing tuk-tuk ride (there may be no other kind) to the pier and a lovely 45-minute ferry ride we arrived on Ko Si Chang. This is not one of the famous islands people fly halfway around the world to luxuriate on. This is a very local island surrounded by shipping vessels with a massive port clearly visible on the mainland nearby. It is not an exaggeration to say the island appeared to be under an embargo enforced by shipping vessels. If that sounds like it’s not a ringing endorsement, well, that’s what I would have thought too. But Ko Si Chang is delightful in it’s own understated it’s a tiny mountain of an island in the ocean... what did you expect kind of way.

There were temples and charming restaurants and incredible scenery, but I’m going to focus on how one gets around the island. It’s a small place, a shade over 17 square kilometers/a shade under 7 square miles. All winding roads up and down the hills and along the coast. I didn’t see a single car, just a couple pickup trucks. This makes it the idea place to explore on a motorbike. And wouldn’t you know it, you can rent one on the pier where the ferry drops you?! What are the odds? So Spectra and I rented a motorbike. This sweet baby right here:

My growing Southeast Asia interest in motorbikes isn’t a secret, but I hadn’t been on one. Now I was not only going to ride on one but drive it. I have never, not one time in life, driven a motorcycle or scooter or moped. I’ve been on one a total of, perhaps, five times. Prior to the moment where the rental guy showed me how to start the motorbike it hadn’t really dawned on me that, you know, there’s was, like, stuff to know about driving one. I’d sort of blithely thought of them as bicycles you don’t have to work very hard to make go. As soon as I was sitting on a motorbike the shortcoming of my notion couldn’t have been more obvious or petrifying.

My bicycle back home weights, like, 20 pounds. A scooter is more like 200 pounds. A 100 times heavier made a 1,000 times more terrifying by the fact that it goes really fast, really quickly. The speedometer went up to 160kmh/99mph, and within a minute I’d gone faster on that scooter than I had on a bike ever in my life. Complicating my learning curve, when we arrived at Ko Si Chang Spectra was wearing a dress so she rode side saddle, which threw the balance of the bike off. The initial ride to Charlie's Bungalows, our perfectly lovely accommodations, was not a life-affirming jaunt fit for Italian fashion magazines. It was white-knuckle nerve wracking. I couldn’t believe they just give these things to people without any proof of having a clue what they’re doing. If you’re wondering whether I was being routinely passed by both the very young and the very old, sometimes on the same motorbike, on that initial ride: you better believe your ass I was.

After settling into our adorable room, Spectra wanted to go to a beach on the other side of the island. She mercifully changed into shorts and could sit properly on the bike. The “main road” running, more or less, along the coast is a proper, two-lane street. All of the roads that branch off from it crawling up into and over the hills are more like single-lane roads, adding considerably to the charm of the place. Cruising, pretty much alone, through landscapes that look like this:

What that picture doesn’t capture was how steep and twisty these roads were. They were a motorbike skills acquisition trial by fire. A couple of times we reached the top of a hill and I stopped to gaze in horror at the video game death course I had to navigate to get back down. Here’s where I say after inching my way up and down a couple hills I got the hang of it and bombed around corners, gunned it up hills, and toasted some elderly/children motorbikers. But I didn’t. I never got anywhere near any of that.

The next day on the way back to the pier to leave I was passed by a scooter driven by a maybe 10-year-old and standing on the platform between the seat and steering column was a maybe 4-year-old who rubbernecked at me on their way by. So I came up short on the Akira-meter, but I did manage to get comfortable enough to stop dreading going fast enough to pick my feet up off the street (a truly harrowing moment the first few times).

Therein lies the essence of Ko Si Chang: we made a friend we can’t talk to and I can drive a motorbike well enough to be mocked by a 4-year-old.

Ko Si Chang: Top Thailand Experience.

P.S. On the off, off, off chance any of my Thai students are reading this: yes, I know, it's hypocritical of me not to be wearing a helmet. I swear I didn't know they wouldn't be made available. I hear your scorn. But it doesn't change the fact that you should wear a helmet. We'll discuss in class.

Close Encounters of the "Timeline" Kind

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Sat, 19 Apr 2014 18:00:00 +0000

Perhaps you are familiar with my veneration of a little Thai film called Timeline? If not, I made my feelings clear in a post (one of my shortest, by the way). Anyway, Friday night (19 April) Spectra and I were with our friends Belle, Ning, and Mankato--in addition to some of their delightful friends--at the JJ night market. Who else should be at the market that night? None other than co-star of Timeline Toey Jarinporn. This lady:

Ms. Jarinporn contemplates a future chance encounter.

Belle and I found Ms. Jarinporn in a kind of western store--as in cowboy hats and blue jeans--where she was shooting some sort of TV-ish something or another. The crew was small, maybe 8 people, and the production quality looked to be "local news" grade. Here was the scene:

Trust me, Ms. Jarinporn is in there. If you zoom in you can see her little face peaking out from behind that person standing just to the left of center of the photo. This is her face:

You maybe thinking why didn't you get a better picture and the answer is I felt bad about taking a picture at all. I have a strict policy regarding celebrities: leave them alone. So I thought this would be that. We saw her, watched her goof around for a minute, noted she is radically smaller in person than she looks in Timeline, the end. Belle had other ideas.

I don't know if this is a Thai thing or a Belle thing or a combination of the two, but as soon as the segment Ms. Jarinporn was shooting finished Belle said, "Now we go talk to her." I was deeply apprehensive. I don't know if this is a me thing or an American thing or a combination of the two, but you don't bother a celebrity especially when she is working. Belle was having none of my reticence and walked straight up to Ms. Jarinporn with me sheepishly trailing in her wake.

Belle, in Thai, said "Aieongidoaiesnrogbdslandkoengisolsjenogjalskdgi."

Mr. Jarinporn glanced at me and replied, "Engosidsinenof."

Belle said, "NoiwoeginsoseknssodinsTimelineoinglsdingieigbgi."

I heard Belle say Timeline amidst the rest of the Thai I didn't understand, so when Ms. Jarinporn did an honest-to-goodness double take followed by another double take where she looked at me, then back at Belle, and then at me again, I knew what Ms. Jarinporn couldn't believe: that this farang dude was a fan of Timeline. It's safe to say it appeared to be the last thing she was expecting when Belle got her attention.

After Ms. Jarinporn's quadruple take, that left her mildly gawping at me and said, "Chai (yes), Timeline, two times."

Ms. Jarinporn looked at Belle who said, "Bseionfsodinfosienthgis," which I took to mean a confirmation of the fact I'd seen it twice.

Ms. Jarinporn turned back to me and said, "Thank you."

I said, "No, thank YOU for being Timeline."

Ms. Jarinporn made an appreciative noise and gesture again.

I said, "Timeline is the first thing I ask all Thai people about. Whenever I meet someone I ask..." And right here I made a calculated choice. I couldn't tell how good Ms. Jarinporn's English was, but I wanted to convey the sincerity of my appreciation for Timeline, so I used the best option available to me: physicality and intonation. So I leaned over, brought my face to within a couple of feet of hers, and said with Ace Ventura-level exuberance, "...have you seen the movie Timeline?!?!"

To say Ms. Jarinporn lurched backward is a touch unfair, but it's next exactly untrue either, and then she hastily bowed to me one last time, said "thank you," and then quickly walked away.

Part of the reason I have a strict leave celebrities alone policy is because the odds of it being a beneficial interaction for the celebrity are so low. I have a long story illustrating this point involving Jonathan Taylor Thomas that I'm skipping but would tell if you asked: in short, celebrities get praised all the time, so what's one more doofus telling them they're great really mean? Little to nothing, even if it is a farang incongruously obsessed with a teen melodrama.

This is why I went for broke and ended up spooking Ms. Jarinporn. I knew by leaning in and getting animated there was a 99% chance she'd flee and and 1% chance she'd think, "Fascinating! I must hear his thoughts about Timeline." As such I thought her reaction was fair even as I felt bad and thought it was funny. For reasons I'd struggle to articulate even if you've seen Timeline, there's something particularly apropos and completely deranged about the idea that we live in world where Timeline was the source of this interaction.

Timeline is ridiculous. Sublimely and conspicuously so, I argue. Running into Ms. Jarinporn in a city of 15 million people is also ridiculous, and doing so while I was fortuitously hanging out with "Now We Talk To Her" Belle was sublime. This provided no new evidence to validate my Timeline hypotheses, but I'm content with the ridiculously sublime. Whether there's an element of conspicuousness in it is something I'll ask Buddha when we finally meet. Or perhaps Ms. Jarinporn if our paths cross again. Provided Belle is there to interpret.

Songkran: praise Buddha and pass the water bottle

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 14:43:00 +0000

Songkran, in very short, is Thai new year--by the way: welcome to the year 2557--and historically was a mix of Buddhism and one strain or another of ancestor reverence. I say “historically” because as far as I can tell it’s about as connected to religious beliefs as Christmas is to Christianity in America. Sure, some people take it very seriously, and many people put in an extra appearance at church/temple, but when you’re opening presents and drinking boozy eggnog, Jesus is the furthest thing from your mind; just like Buddha and your great-great-great-someone aren’t front and center as you get blasted in the face with a supersoaker and blindly return fire with your helplessly under-powered squirt gun.

If you’ve never heard of Songkran you might be thinking huh? right around now. That’s because Songkran, in addition to being Thai new year, is a three day, nationwide water fight. I sure as hell didn’t know that. This plays out in ways epic and quaint. On the small scale kids lurk in front yards ready to squirt you with water pistols or dudes sit around with garden hoses and buckets ready to absolutely drench you. On the grand scale large areas are cordoned off for various forms of massive water parties. It’s these grandscale water fights that got my attention.

One of the things I’ve relished explaining to people in Southeast Asia is America’s litigiousness. The concept is utterly alien to them and watching them grapple with the reality of suing over things like uneven sidewalks or a pants damaged in dry cleaning is priceless. You’d think I’m explaining that Americans are actually a different species that evolved from dolphins. A Thai friend of ours, Belle, has even taken to making this a running joke. If one of us stumbles or brushes up against low-hanging wires she’ll chirp, “Lawsuit!” and then cackle.

As an American and dolphin descendant, it was well-nigh impossible not to think lawsuit! every few minutes while walking around a couple massive Songkran festivals. At last count there were 248 deaths and 2,643 injured related to Songkran, so I’m not being flippant here (80% traffic related, I should add, making pretty American-like). Tons of water + uneven, slick surfaces + electrical cables + booze + densely packed crowds + revelry = well... here’s where felicific calculus gets mired in impossible tradeoffs and American litigiousness makes my fellow Americans look a bit too much like a late model Howard Hughes.

Unfortunately Spectra’s phone decided to forget our Songkran escapades so we don’t have any personal pictures leaving me at Google’s mercy, but this gives you a sense of the human density I’m talking about:

Brought to you by decree of Buddha and your ancestors!

What you can’t see in the picture is everyone is standing in an inch or two of water and that’s only a third of the masses in this one location. The next major festival location, Siam Square, was only a few blocks away.

True to my nature, I was skeptical of all of this, and while I was willing to check it out to get a sense of the experience, I was planning on going strictly as an observer. Of course I’d get wet and people could throw water on me or blast away with supersoakers, but this was their thing and I was merely a tourist passing through happily getting caught in the crossfire. But a funny thing happened on my way to meeting my lawyer: Spectra handed me her supersoaker and the whole experience changed. It was a classic “DRINK ME” moment and suddenly I was through the looking-glass (yes, I know that’s a Disney-esque mashup of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, but “through the tiny door” doesn’t have the same cultural cache).

As I’ve mentioned on many occasions, I can be a bit thick and, in Mua’s word, “overserious” (she’s known me for, like, two weeks so either it’s obvious or she’s observant or both). It’s true, I admit it, I accept this -- even as I continue to ponder what it means -- and in this case my thick-overseriousness prevented me from properly considering the water throwing/shooting dynamic. Only after I was soaked did it occur to me that the dynamic is optimal when your target can shoot back… for both parties!

Don’t get me wrong, Spectra and I got plenty wet without weapons of our own. But when you can shoot back there’s a reciprocity, a fleeting kinship forged in laughter and simultaneously shielding yourself while trying to fire back. This behavior is sublime and ridiculous. You know it, your target/assailant knows it, and you both love it. This is a thing of beauty.

I imagine I looked something like this when the truth dawned on me:

Sawyer makes a discovery.

Does a massive water fight with tens or hundreds of thousands people that a brings a city of 15 million people to standstill sound fun? How about a water fight that brings a nation of 67 million people to three day hault? Even if you answer yes, of course, duh I can now confirm, Neanderthal Scientist-style, that you don’t know the half of it. It’s not fun; it’s deliriously surreal. I find it bewildering that Songkran isn’t considered one of the Seven Cultural Wonders of the World (this list, in the “cultural event” sense that I’m using here, may not exist… at least that’s what about 30 seconds of internet searching has indicated).

Spectra and I marveled at the merciful and profound un-American-ness of it all. Let’s set aside the idea of crippling our largest cities for a few days. It’s such a simple concept -- massive water fight! -- but good luck getting the necessary permits and insurance to shut down multiple, multi-block sections of a city to set up stages and speakers and concerts. It’s all free and there are no controls on the sizes of the crowds. As a friend of mine once said, “Nevah gonna happen GI.” Yes, it’s a bit mad, perhaps even considerably mad, but it’s also borderline transcendental.

In America it’s definitely “a thing” to want to attend a Japanese tea ceremony, celebrate Carnivale in Brazil, or run with the bulls in Spain, but I’ve never heard anyone long to make it to Thailand for Songkran some day. Either I spend an inordinate amount of time with cultural ingrates or this is yet another example of America’s bizarre global ignorance. After attending Songkran all I can say is it should be one of the Seven Cultural Wonders of the World and -- depending on your inclinations, interest in personal safety and physical state -- at the top.

Spectra and I wandered home exhausted, soaked, with dumb grins on our faces and surrounded by exhausted, soaked Thai people with dumb grins on their faces. Many a knowing glance and nod were exchanged. It all left me speechless, which wasn’t a problem because I let the unerring accuracy of my Avengers (surely officially licensed) supersoaker do my talking for me. But you, dear reader, I can’t spray in the face, chest, back or legs (location varied with a variety of appropriateness factors) so you’ll have to be content with the words of a great, nameless American who unwittingly nailed what you’ll feel like after Songkran:

I can't say I seen London, and I never been to France, and I ain't never seen no queen in her damn undies, as the fella says. But I'll tell you what, after...[Songkran]...I guess I seen somethin' ever' bit as stupefyin' as ya'd see in any a those other places, and [occasionally] in English [here and there] too, so I can die with a smile on my face without feelin' like the good Lord [Buddha] gypped me.

The River Kwai: I went down that river once as an adult

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Tue, 15 Apr 2014 06:48:00 +0000

Spectra and I spent the first two days of Thai new year (aka Songkran) on the River Kwai in a floating hotel deep in the jungle with no electricity. It was hard not to think many Apocalypse Now “Have you considered any real freedoms, Sawyer…” related thoughts on this trip but I won’t get into all that. This post is about my singular favorite moment on this trip. This is not to be confused with my favorite passage or thing about this trip. It’s just my single favorite moment.

The hotel we stayed in is called The River Kwai Jungle Rafts and what that name lacks in poetry it recaptures, and then some, in reality. The River Kwai Jungle Rafts hotel is literally a flotilla of rafts tethered together, floating in the River Kwai. The whole complex runs, probably, 200 meters. It looks something like this:

This is the downriver half of the hotel.

The leading forms of entertainment are lounging and floating down the river, which they probably would be even with electricity. While “floating” is technically accurate it gives one a false impression because that terms carries the connotation of languidity. In fact one races down the River Kwai because it is in a hurry, dude. That wouldn’t be a big deal but it turns the floating into a minor thrillride because you have to time your own extraction by grabbing onto a deck and hoisting yourself out. If you miss that last dock then you’re racing toward a bend another 100 meters downriver and then out of sight. We asked the guy at the frontdesk what you do if you miss the last dock and the response was, “Don’t miss the last dock.” He may as well have rhetorically replied, “Are our methods unsound?”

True to her nature, Spectra couldn’t wait to get in that river; true to my nature I was considerably more trepidatious. We float raced down twice the first day, each time scrupulously keeping the docks no more than a body length away. That’s easier said than done because there’s a current that pulls you toward the opposite bank so you have to fight to stay near the flotilla. We hauled ourselves out 3 or 4 docks from the end rather than leaving us a slip from discovering if we’re little more than errand boys sent by grocery clerks.

I should add that hauling yourself out of a rushing river while wearing a lifejacket isn’t quite like gliding up the stairs in the shallow end of a pool. It’s takes effort and calculated movements: get your knee wedged there, and then a foot there... Granted, 70-year olds and children were doing this too, so it’s not like it took Olympian strength and coordination, but it took some doing.

Anyway, two rounds of “floating” was plenty for me on day one and then I easily slipped into concerted lounging. That looked something like this:

"Leave me. I'm lounging."

The second day Spectra befriended a German couple, Sarah and Andre. I’ve always said my favorite accent is Indian-British, but now I’m not so sure. Perhaps I’ve been downplaying the charm of German accented English, especially when it’s punctuated by brief exchanges in German to find the right word. Might this be because Nazi’s are the Eternal #1 Movie Bad Guys of All Time? We did not discuss this with Sarah and Andre. Instead we made fun of Russia.

Spectra may have targeted Sarah and Andre for friendship because they were clearly into floating so she’d have more floating company than I was willing to provide. Unwittingly, I presume, by hooking us up with them Spectra activated Social Sawyer. This Sawyer refused to jump into the river, preferring to gently lower himself down the ladder; Social Sawyer saw Andre jump in, took it as a challenge, and jumped further into the river. Even though I know Social Sawyer exists his arrival always catches This Sawyer (Social Sawyer never writes) retroactively off guard. I wonder if he’ll ever go away and never return?

Sarah and Andre are serious adventurers. They’ve been skydiving and Sarah has run down the side of a skyscraper suspended by ropes like a ninja. When it comes to risking life and limb they’re not messing around. After we’d floated down a few times with them I decided it was time to see what happens if you don’t fight the current to stay closer to the rafts. We were all already floating when I announced, “Let’s just ride the current and see what happens. I think we’ll have time to swim back even if the current takes us all the way to the other side.” I looked back to get their responses assuming they’d be into it, they’d jumped out of airplanes after all, but that’s not what I saw. Here’s what I saw and this, 800-ish words later, is my single favorite moment of his trip:

Sarah and Andre’s heads and shoulders floating along. They looked at each other, didn’t say a word, made the raised-eyebrows-&-frown face, shrugged their shoulders, and simultaneously brought their hands out of the water with palms up. The beats me expression. Here’s one of its famous demonstrations:

The '92 Finals: How I loathed Jordan while wearing his shoes.

That’s it. That was the moment. Sarah and Andre’s little heads bobbing out of the water as they shrugged and uneasily decided to follow me into the unknown, even though they were never in my frakin’ army in the first place. I suppose it’s what the jungle wanted and that's who they really took their orders from anyway.

Wooden Toy Skateboards: I’m an errand boy, in search of a mockingbird

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Tue, 08 Apr 2014 15:56:00 +0000

If you are like me--and you might be (whether you know it or not; whether I know you or not)--then you’re looking forward to the one sublime moment where you feel like you’ve been shot in the head with a diamond bullet* as you realize that human beings are just fine, thank you very much, and don’t really need you. I imagine in that that moment I’ll feel a hand on my shoulder and it will be Buddha, or perhaps ¡SOLUSTRON!. I’ll look at her, she’ll look at me and give a single nod, maybe a little wink; that will be that. My work here, whatever the hell it was, will be done and I’ll become one with whatever we fade into when we fade out of here.

For the purposes of this post let’s call this moment “mockingbird.”

This morning I was watching NHK World, as per my custom, and I brushed up against the mockingbird. There was a story about a Japanese guy in Yokohama who designs and builds temples in addition to... custom, handmade skateboard decks (i.e. the wooden part you stand on).

This guy was a skater, gave it up for a while while he was getting his temple designing and building business established, and when he returned to skating he was surprised by how uniform the decks had become. So he made his own deck, and then a friend asked him to make one, then another friend, then a stranger, and slowly his temple business evolved into a temple/skate deck business that employs a small team of temple building, deck creating, skateboarders.

The company is called Wooden Toy and here’s an example of their work:

Does this move you to tears? Does it? DOES IT, godamnit?!?!

I wish I could give you a surefire link to the video so you could surefire watch it for yourself but, thanks to NHK’s bizarrely anachronistic website, I can’t. There’s a video about Wooden Toy on vimeo, which is beautiful but not in English. I can’t tell if Wooden Toy has a website (and if they do I imagine it’d only be in Japanese) but this blog features their work.

To summarize: there’s a guy in Yokohama who started a temple building business that transmogrified into a custom skate deck/temple building shop that’s run by a team of temple building skateboarders. This man, his business, the team of skater/craftsmen and I live in the same world. Had you told me this a couple days ago I a) wouldn’t have believed you and, after you proved it, b) been certain this would be end of Sawyer Blur, as this me is known here. Certainly Buddha or ¡SOLUSTRON! would gently squeeze my shoulder and give me a nod and wink after that. But she didn’t.

So I’m still here. Waiting for the diamond bullet. It’s here somewhere but--and I hate to tell this but it’s true: I won’t get the chance to tell you when it finds me.

*An ode to Francis Ford Coppola, who has provided more than his fair share of near miss mockingbirds.

A Little Thai Is A Dangerous Thing: 2 for 1

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Tue, 08 Apr 2014 03:12:00 +0000

I was at the hospital today having a mole checked out (and eyeballing the plastic surgery rates) and had some time to kill while my bill was being determined. This took a good while because in Thailand they don't go in for this "we'll sort it out with your insurance and send you a bill" nonsense. Oh, no, they'll sort it out while you wait so you can pay before you leave. I'd already been waiting about 20-minutes when the charming clerk lady said, "Maybe you should get some lunch and I'll call you when your bill is ready."

No problem.

In part I was happy to oblige because I consider hospitals, like airports, "international food waters." As such all restrictions on reason and, er, global fare are lifted so I can finally eat at Au Bon Pain again. I stood outside ABP considering my glutinous, pastry options but couldn't help guiltily notice the unambiguously local food court right next to it. A brief internal debate ensued and a minute later I was standing at the vegan food stall (ABP will have to wait for my next international flight).

Unlike everyone else I briefly talked to in the food court, the vegan food stall guy spoke zero English and showed no sign of even vague comprehension. Not to worry though because I speak a little Thai (na krap). The menu was numbered so I held up two fingers and said, "Song (two)."

Looking a touch perplexed, he held up two fingers and said, "Song?"

"Chai," I assured him, "song." Then I pointed at the menu board above his head and slowly said, "Song, tom yum mushroom soup."

He looked at me in confusion again, then turned and talked in Thai to the lady at the next food stall.

The lady said to me (in pretty good English), "Two. Tom yum soup."

"Chai," I confirmed. "Song."

Then she turned to the guy, spoke really fast, and then back to me. "Just a few minutes."

I got a beverage and dealt with payment before sitting down. A few minutes later this is what he brought me:

Should I have seen this coming? In retrospect it sure seems like it, but I cannot stress enough the degree to which I didn't. As he approached with two soups I thought, "Hey, someone else ordered the soup when I wasn't looking... oh." But being a good Midwesterner who grew up worried about starving children in other parts of the world, I couldn't let the extra soup go to waste so twenty minutes later this is what was left:

It was delicious, certainly better than whatever I would have had at ABP, but I didn't eat dinner that night. It was well worth it though because as a reward for my patience (i.e. not saying "this isn't how it's done in America, I'm out of here") the hospital and my insurance company ultimately determined I would pay... nothing.

On a totally unrelated note, when I get back home people might be surprised how full my lips are and how rakish my nose is. I can assured everyone I've always looked like this and all that's changed is your perspective. Perhaps you've simply grown to appreciate me more in my absence and see me in a handsomer light as a result. It's difficult to say.

Money, It's Gotta Be The Shirt

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Sun, 06 Apr 2014 15:54:00 +0000

I’m a sucker for many things and I’ll cop to guffawing at a good t-shirt cross-cultural malapropism from time to time. As an American I feel fortunate because the United States and U.K. dominate this market; so t-shirt absurdity, intentional or not, is readily available to me and quickly absorbed at a glance, even in the chaos of a throng. Today, for the first time, one of these t-shirts stopped me in my tracks, literally, in traditional Thai life-is-for-stopping-on-a-busy-sidewalk-with-no-room-for-people-to-pass fashion:

Fans of early '90's professional basketball and/or break-through independent film will recognize the combination of brim upturned hat, over-sized black spectacles, and basketball jersey as Mars Blackmon, Spike Lee's alter-ego. Mars was a prominent character in Mr. Lee's debut film, She's Gotta Have It, but is radically better known for costarring in a series of Nike commercials with Michael Jordan. These were massively famous commercials (but if you enjoy halcyon recollections of them I'd suggest avoiding a stroll down video-memory-lane), and considering basketball is the world's #2 sport, I can see Mars popping up on shirts Thailand.

But for some reason Mars is a skeleton and his hat, which always said "Brooklyn," says MARCHZ. Why is Mars dead? What is Marchz? Is it a coincidence that "Marchz" sounds a bit like "Mars"? Five minutes with the internet failed to answer these questions, although I found other images of skeleton Mars Blackmon because humans love skeletons.

Had that been all there was to this shirt I probably would have pondered it for a long moment, assumed Marchz refers to something Thai that I'm not familiar with, and walked away bemused. But there was more. What really sets this shirt apart is the new-age aphorism at the bottom:

Live as if you were to die tomorrow

Learn as if you were to live forever

I've never seen that specific permutation before, but I've certainly seen it's intellectual siblings. As far as pithy advice goes, it's a rather nifty juxtaposition and paints a more-complicated-than-at-first-glance ideal to strive for, AND gets bonus points for nailing the subjunctive verb tense. Fair play to it, but for the life of me I can not fathom what it has to do with Mars Blackmon.

I idolized Spike Lee back in the Mars Blackmon days and still hold him in such massive regard that I proudly have a personal Quinton Tarantino ban as a sympathy vote for Mr. Lee in their feud. So I feel comfortable saying that quote isn't remotely Mars Blackmon-like. Nor can I say it's antithetical to Mars Blackmon because he'd certainly agree with the hedonistic half of it. As such it appears to be an utterly random quote attached to a randomized utterly random image.

I'd been standing there for a solid, real world minute gazing at the shirt before the proprietress stepped toward me to see if she could help. She never told me her name but I'm going to call her Jolie. I took the opportunity to grill her about the shirt. Jolie has no idea who Mars Blackmon is and had a vague, perhaps feigned for my benefit, notion of who Spike Lee is. In other words the shirt meant nothing to her beyond "it's interesting."

Jolie's shop had many cross-cultural mash-up t-shirts (if that's what you'd call "Inspirational Dead Mars"). Another was a silhouette of Kiki and her cat, from Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki's Special Delivery Service, flying on a broom before a full moon with a smattering of trees below. I'm reasonably certain it's supposed to evoke ET and Elliot's famous bike flight, which served as the logo for whatever Steven Spielberg's production company used to be called (Amblin?). Jolie didn't even feign getting any of those references. It was just another interesting shirt.

We talked through the images and mixed up connotations of several shirts in her store. I should add these were properly branded "art t-shirts" at properly branded "art t-shirt" prices so I feel safe in assuming they'd qualify as satire, and thus protected speech, rather than piracy. I should also add that Jolie was a pretty lady in a frilly outfit and gamely engaged in my "nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition" style repartee.

Naturally I left her shop with a pair of shorts--which is what I was looking for in the first place--in addition to two the Mars and Kiki t-shirts; plus I made a solemn promise to return so she can beguile me out of more money in exchange for things I vowed not to buy any more (so... many... T-SHIRTS!). Remember when I said I'm sucker for many things? Very high on that list is flattery from a pretty lady. Here's the Kiki/ET shirt:

That's an inspired but understandable combination. It took me a fraction of a second to get the Kiki/ET connection, and it took noted non-film buff a full second. Kiki's even got an adorable little creature in front of her on the broom, a cat in place of ET. You can see how someone would put these together and now that they have you can see additional permutations: Eve and Wall-E, the Enterprise, Iron Giant, and so on.

Inspirational Mars Blackmon is not readily understandable to me. I might be over thinking it, or it might be the kind of genius produced by a thousand monkeys on a thousand computers with Photoshop. While the monkey thing would cool, provided the monkeys are happy, that's not what I hope it is. I want it to be work of a is it/isn't it artificially intelligent web based application reaching out to we humans (Last Starfighter-style, if you will) through the most powerful and beloved medium on the face of the Earth: the humble t-shirt.

I'm listening to you, computer/monkey/self. I don't understand yet, but I am listening.

Slowly Losing My Culture: "seeing" street dogs and urinating in public

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 17:34:00 +0000

This morning I was walking down the street and I had to avoid stepping in some dog excrement that someone else hadn’t avoided. There was considerable smearing and clear signs of deliberate scrape-age, so it took several steps to be safely beyond the scene of unpleasantness. During the navigation I was fully locked in on avoiding a similar fate, but after I was sure the danger had passed my first thought I was, “I don’t even notice all the street dogs anymore.”

That was a mildly stunning realization because one of the things Spectra and I found charming and striking when we first got here was the street dogs. They’re all over the place, but they aren’t exactly strays because people tend to these street dogs by putting shirts on them and feeding them. We liked this and frequently noted it--”Look, she’s got a new shirt”--but somewhere along the way it faded into the background and now we don’t even “see” them.

I’m now going to pivot to a related experience and at a minimum the juxtaposition is likely: 1) callous, 2) apropos, or 3) callously apropos.

Another “we aren’t in Kansas" recurring experience for me was using the men’s room while a woman was cleaning it. In the US the men’s room is closed when someone of the opposite sex is cleaning it but not in Thailand. So I’d be standing at a urinal “exposed,” as it were, and there’d be a lady shuffling around behind me mopping the floor. To be honest, I found it unseemly and, if I’m being really honest, demeaningly sexist.

Perhaps it’s my puritanical roots, but the idea of men standing around holding their penises while women have to work in the same room just felt wrong. This might be painfully convoluted logic, but it seemed a double injustice by denying the fact they were women through assigning them jobs that rob them of their humanity, a cornerstone of which is their sexuality. As far as I can tell, the typical Thai person wouldn’t approve of their adult daughter going into the men’s room to stand behind her male friend while we was peeing because it would be inappropriate (substantiating evidence: I haven’t seen it happen). Make that young lady a janitor instead of an interlocutor and suddenly it’s okay? That feels off to me.

“Maybe it’s progressive,” I argued with myself. “Perhaps it’s seeing beyond sex. People are so in control of their sexuality that they can purposefully expose themselves in the presence of the opposite sex with nary a contextually inappropriate thought. It’s like science fiction!” I tried believing that but the next time I went into pee with a lady standing behind me it felt wrong again. I’ve tried waiting to use the toilet, but it’s hard to do because there’s no indication that it’s being cleaned and it feels even weirder to walk in, see the janitor lady, and then walk back out. So I’ve been peeing with ladies walking around behind me for months now.

Does it go without saying that Spectra hasn’t reported a male janitor shuffling around the lady’s room? I’ll assume so and move on. Interpret this and factor it in as you will.

This evening Spectra and I were killing time in a swanky shopping mall (scoffing Americans should check Bangkok's weather report for the last, uh, 2 months; then try telling me you wouldn’t indulge in a little air conditioning while idling away an hour between dinner and a poetry thing you’ll ultimately skip). This mall has several location themed levels—Tokyo, San Francisco, Spain, London, etc—with amazing restrooms. The London level looks like you’re entering “The Tube,” that sort of thing. Tonight I was peeing in Japan and midway through the process I realized there was not one, but TWO ladies cleaning the bathroom right behind me. Or rather, I noted it, thought nothing of it, and then a moment later noted my lack of reaction to it and reacted to that.

Apparently I can now pee in a room with ladies and think nothing of it. How long has this been going on? I don’t know. Is this personal progress? Or have I become more demeaningly sexist? I honestly don’t know. I don’t feel more demeaningly sexist and hope Spectra would point out if I had become more so. Worse or better yet, this is a purely intellectual question. I’m not torturing myself over it. That’s not like me, but is it progress? I have no idea

The Poetry of Vietnam: cromulent it is not

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Mon, 31 Mar 2014 14:08:00 +0000

I appreciate the aims and existence of poetry but have no taste for it. I’ve given reading poetry a go a few times in my adult life but haven’t been able to get into it. Opera has suffered the same fate. Prior to visiting northern Vietnam I hadn’t lamented this cultural gap, but now I’m kicking myself for it.

A run-of-the-mill moment in Ha Long Bay {yawn}

Spectra and I spent six nights in northern Vietnam: two nights in Hanoi, one night in Ha Long Bay, one night in Bai Tu Long Bay, and then two more nights in Hanoi. We’ve been back in Bangkok for five days now, and I’ve failed to write a single word about Vietnam because I don’t know how. I want to make a bunch of hyperbolic, superlative declarations about how thoroughly delightful it is; then commence preemptively shaming everyone I know for not visiting, but that wouldn’t do northern Vietnam justice. This is where poetry would rush in were I capable of unleashing it.

The allure of northern Vietnam is a delicately poised thing. Like a movie you want people to see but would ruin by saying too much about. No, wait, better yet, come to think of it… it’s sturdily captured by Vietnam’s national flower, the lotus. It’s revered for its beauty, yes, but also because it grows in muddy water. It’s been a while since I took a poetry class, but I’m pretty sure that juxtaposition is poetry 101: My only love, sprung from my only hate! Sorry, that example is perhaps a bit too apt for Americans and French reacquainting themselves with Vietnam.

Here are three poems about Vietnam I wish I could write.

“The Four Sacred Animals of Vietnam Transcend Reality and Form”
Vietnam has four sacred creatures: dragon, phoenix, unicorn (although it’s not what we think of as a unicorn), and… take a moment to think about what creature would round out this list. Perhaps something like a griffin or a mermaid, but certainly something fantastical. Nope, the humble and decidedly real tortoise rounds out Vietnam’s sacred quartet. Naturally every Vietnamese person we talked to about this found our fascination with it bizarre because of course the tortoise belongs side-by-side with dragons, phoenixes and unicorns. Duh.

That begs to be delicately rhapsodized about in a poem that weaves together Hanoi’s mind-boggling street culture; the ethereal majesty of Ha Long and Bai Tu Long Bays (especially the later); the cohabitation of austere, imposing, brutalist “Soviet-style” buildings/statues along side the dense, almost Inception-style impossibly-intertwined, human-scale buildings that make up the bulk of Hanoi; and, finally, the proud but humble spirit clearly evident in virtually all of the Vietnamese people we interacted with, which Spectra summed up as, “Vietnam is going places, man, these people believe they’re awesome like Americans do, but they still work crazy hard.”

“Charley May Or May Not Surf, But He Sure As Hell Skates”
There were a couple of skateshops in our neighborhood but--thanks to streets and sidewalks teeming with scooters, people, and an eternity of tiny-scale commerce seemingly bubbling up from every crack, seam, nook and cranny--I couldn’t figure out where one would skate in Hanoi. I went into one of the skateshops to ask. “Lenin Park,” the two guys working told me. Yep, as in that Lenin.

A few days later, on our way to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, we passed by Lenin Park. Sure enough there was a big statue of Lenin in a classic Lenin-y “wind-swept, gazing into the future” pose. In front of it there was a nice long curb with plenty of smoothly paved space and raised concrete platforms that made for a perfect skatepark, which it clearly was as the area bore skateboarding’s distinctive scars. I mean, come on, that tableau may have been on a t-shirt some kid wore in the original ‘80’s version of Red Dawn. Come to think of it, Animal Chin could easily be Vietnamese.

"Time Makes Jebediah Springfields Of Us All"
You will kill ten of our men, and we will kill one of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it because the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. ~ Ho Thomas Chi Jefferson Minh.

There is something natural and embarrassing about Americans wanting to ask Vietnamese people about living “under Communism.” It’s natural when that concept is your only frame of reference; it’s embarrassing if you’ve walked down a street, any street, in Hanoi’s Old Quarter and experienced the cacophony of small businesses the breadth, width, and multitude of which would bring tears to Libertarian eyes.

Upon learning that her town’s founder was a pirate and George Washington’s arch enemy, in a thunderous speech delivered to all of Springfield, Lisa Simpson declared, “I, um, just wanted to say that I've done some research, and, uh he was great. Yeah.” We sneer at the reverence of other peoples’ heros to the detriment of our own because; as the great pirate, anti-patriot, founding father, and inspiring icon himself said:

“A noble spirit embiggins the smallest man.”

Kaonashi patiently awaits the honor of seeing Ho Chi Minh.

We Were Popular Once; and (one of us) rich

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Sat, 29 Mar 2014 14:32:00 +0000

Frivolous Post: Spectra and I went to Vietnam last week and it was such an astonishing experience that I’m struggling to find an approach to write about it. I’m working on it but in the meantime here’s a silly little ditty.

I had a new student. I'm going to call him William but that's not his name. He's a high school junior in the United States, was home for spring break, and all he wanted to work on with me was his accent. William is Thai and went to Thai schools (as opposed to international baccalaureate schools) before going to America. As such, he has an accent, but I could understand virtually everything he said, and he understood virtually everything I said. Our occasional communication gaps were due to vocabulary and culture, so as far as I was concerned there wasn't anything for him to worry about. Time would narrow those gaps if he minded them.

William didn't buy it. He blamed his original English teacher for having a weird accent that messed up his accent and wished he could unlearn English to start over with a better teacher. I told him that was categorically mad. That his accent wasn't bad, and that the reason he has an accent is because he grew up speaking Thai. I pointed out his accent, such as it is, lies almost exclusively in the sounds that bedevil all Thai ESL speakers: TH, CH, V, and the dread R. I thought this would reassure him by making him feel normal. I was wrong.

William did something no other student has ever done to me, either in the United States or in Thailand: he lashed out. Not physically but verbally. In a curt, heated tone William informed that his accent most certainly is not of the variety common to Thai people. He knew that because he also speaks Chinese with no detectable accent.

Okay. William was radically more sensitive about his accent than any of the other Thai people, much less kids, I’d talked to. I assured him I believed his Chinese was perfect and then did what I always do to help Thai people feel like their accents are nothing to be embarrassed about; demonstrated the lamentable state of my ridiculously tone deaf, thick-tongued Thai. That calmed him down, and we spent the next hour saying words with the bedeviling English allophones with intermittent sidebar conversations about our lives.

Through these sidebar conversations I slowly came to understand that William’s family must be properly rich. All of the kids I tutor are at a minimum upper-middle-class because, well, that’s who can afford to pay for tutoring (I am an excellent, top-notch, perhaps world class, tutor… obviously), but over the course of two hours it became clear that William was a socioeconomic notch or two above the others. Like his sister goes to university in perhaps the world’s most expensive city, so his family bought a condo there. And if William opts to attend university in the same city, he won’t live with his sister, he’d get his own condo. Sure, he could have been lying, but it didn’t seem like he was lying.

With 15-minutes left in our two hours William called it quits. He declared he was too frustrated to continue and just wanted to chat for our remaining time. I’m sure I laughed before saying I’d love to.

“Are you looking forward to going back to America,” was his first question.

“Oof,” I said, “That’s complicated. Yes and no. No, because I have a few friends here I’ll sorely miss, and saying goodbye to my students will be heartbreaking. Yes, because, obviously, I have friends and family back home. But the biggest reason I’ll welcome going home is being in Thailand has taught me just how American I am: I’m loud, I’m deliberatively provocative (in the annoying, angering sense), and I generally go out of my way to make people feel uncomfortable specifically so they’ll appreciate it when I turn around and embrace them… unless they hate me by that point, but what are you going to do about those kinds of people?”

William needed an example of my American-ness, which I provided by making him uncomfortable about his political beliefs through lots of slamming my fist on the table and leaning toward him to emphasize the unassailability of my point (and the fact that I’m, perhaps, 5-inches taller than he is). He quickly understood what I meant and agreed that I wasn’t Thai.

I finished the thought by telling him that while it would probably sound ridiculous, and definitely immature, what I missed about America was my popularity. Not that back home people were burning up my mobile minutes, or clogging my various internet communication nodes with offers of dates or hang outs; I meant when I went to the grocery store or coffee shop or work people were often happy to see me. I put a lot of effort into fostering that reaction. I remember facts about people (although rarely their names, which is something I unfortunately struggle with), keep tabs on past topics of conversation, and generally act like I’m happy to see them. So they look up, see me, and think something along the lines of “Sawyer!” or perhaps “That Guy!” I derive a considerable degree of my satisfaction with life in that moment, seeing that look on peoples’ faces. I get none of that in Thailand.

This perked William up, "I know exactly what you mean."

So this was the source of William's accent sensitivity. Sort of but not really. He went on.

"In Thailand all that matters is money. My family is rich so I'm very popular here, but in the US nobody cares. Here I could do anything I wanted and if I got in trouble I could just bribe someone. Money is everything here but it's not like that in America. I'm so popular here but I'm nobody there. It's really frustrating. You know what I mean?"

This was a hidden camera moment. Was my abject horror evident? Or did I manage to conceal it through lots of head nodding and affirmative-sounding mmm's. And how long did my "moment" of response calibration actually last? There was a lot to weigh.

Should I assure him that, while there isn't a lot of naked bribery in the US—although there is some—there is a correlation between wealth and, shall we say, the impartiality of the law. That despite his experience, Americans most definitely do worship at the altar of money, we just like to pretend to pretend like we don't. And that the American demographic most likely to act as though art and attitude is more important than money are people ages 16-24. In other words, that if he just hangs in there for a few years the tide will turn and his wealth will make him popular in America. Perhaps not quite like in Thailand, but still.

That should sound ridiculous because of course I wouldn’t tell him something so abhorrent... even though it’s true. But you weren't there. I'm telling you, William was in pain and visibly relieved to find someone who understood him. I took the middle road and sidestepped the money-as-basis-of-sense-of-self and the pesky social inequality issues.

“I feel your pain, dude. We were popular once and, spirits willing, we will be again.”

William returned to America and I never saw him again. I couldn’t tell if he was comforted, exactly, but he was definitely rich.

Bangkok + English Tutor + Three Months = Vietnam

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Mon, 17 Mar 2014 11:14:00 +0000

This might be filed under Only Interesting To Me, but it’s short so it can’t hurt to share.

On Wednesday Spectra and I are going to Vietnam for a week. We probably would have visited Vietnam on this trip regardless, but we’re going this week in particular because our three month VISAs are about to expire, so we need to leave Thailand to get them renewed. In travel parlance this is called a “VISA run.” I’m not sure when I first encountered this expression but it’s safe to say I was closer to 30-years-old than 10.

This trip means I’ll miss a week of tutoring. I’ve been telling my students and giving them extra homework, should they choose to accept it, to do while I’m away. Over the course of Saturday and Sunday I worked with four kids whose ages are 12, 13, 14, and 14. The conversations went exactly the same way with all of them.

I said, “Hey, I’m going to be in Vietnam next weekend…”

Before I could finish he or she would reflexively interject some variation of the combination of “VISA” and “three months.” Something like, “Your three month VISA run.”

Pin is 12, speaks English like I do French, and barely tolerates my existence (the power behind her silent resistance of my presence in her life is equal parts admirable, frustrating, and adorable). When I told her, I’m pretty sure all Pin heard was, “sdk feaon fo VIETNAM oinwe aqena,” and she LIT UP. You would have thought she’d just been granted a wish. Come to think of it, she may have: “Please, Buddha, make the farang go away, even if only for a little while.”

The first time a kid made this Vietnam/VISA connection I thought it was funny. The fifth time it was spooky.

So many English speaking foreigners turn up in Bangkok on three month VISAs, and wander through these kids’ lives, that all it takes is the mention of Vietnam for them to connect the dots. What notions does this hodgepodge procession of ragamuffins and bohemians conjure up for these kids? Is there a general consensus? Is it positive or negative? I’ll ask my most precocious kid about it next time I see her and report her utterances as though from on high.

In the meantime I’m doubling my efforts to find ways of conveying to these kids that I care about each one of them, for the nascent, evolving human individual each one is. That I’ve had the honor of getting to know each one, if only a little bit. I will do this the only way I know how: t-shirts! I’m going to look for t-shirts in Vietnam that say My Tutor Claims To Care About Me And All He Got Me In Vietnam Was This Stupid Shirt. I’ll let you know if it moves any of them to tears.

As do I, my friend. As do I.

Three Small Things: the rise & fall of an empire, laughing our way to the food court, and a cultural apology

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Fri, 14 Mar 2014 03:49:00 +0000

This Is WEDNESDAY! (but there's nothing to see)

As I've mentioned in the past, Spectra and I take full advantage of Wednesday's 100 baht movies. The institution was nearly derailed by the lamentably stupid Shadow Recruit but we recovered from the setback and hadn't missed an available Wednesday. Despite the theater across the street having 14 screens we knew the day would arrive when there wouldn't be anything playing we were willing to see. I'd assumed that would happen through the process of attrition: we'd simply see everything that looked good or interesting and the replacements wouldn't arrive fast enough.

Wednesday it finally happened. Spectra and I strolled up to the box office (technically a digital display on the wall), took a look and mutually agreed there wasn't anything worth seeing. Yes, in part because we'd seen some of the movies, but the problem was the arrival of one movie. A movie that extirpated its rivals for screen space with stunning and unexpected ruthlessness. One movie occupied 8 of our 14 screens and we looked its overwhelming force in the digitized eye and meet it with a shrug.

"300 Rise of an Empire? Meh. Let's go home and watch the Syfy channel."

I guess movies come out on Thursdays here because I checked the listings the next day to make sure I had the correct screen count for 300 Rise of an Empire but its hegemony has already given way. It's already been relegated to one screen and timeshare on a second thanks to the combined onslaught of Non-Stop, Mr. Peabody, The Lego Movie, Delivery Man, Vampire Academy, and a Thai comedy-romance that might also be a horror movie where a woman has to decide whether she wants to date a jerky man or a charming demonic spirit. No points for guessing which we’ll see first and which we’ll see over our own dead bodies.

What Are You Doing Up Here?

Spectra and I have an official favorite dinner place now. It's a kind of outdoor food court hawker stall mini-complex across from our bus stop. A dish is about 30 baht ($1) there so it's proper street food and I’ve seen one other farang there one time so it’s heavily local. On Thursday a lady sitting next to us asked where we're from and we got to chatting with her. After a spell she asked, "What are you doing up here?" She meant, “What are we doing so far away from where I’d expect to find farang like you?”

"We live just around the corner," Spectra replied.

She was visibly taken aback. "Oh, usually people like you live further south, like in Silom."

We laughed and agreed but said we didn't like it down there, "Too many farang tourists." She laughed.

After that she was advising us about places to see in Thailand, we dutifully took notes, and then she stopped and said, "You're from America. It's so big and there's so much to see there that Thailand must be ugly for you."

Spectra and I both fell all over ourselves assuring her that wasn't the case and that there were many ugly, pointless places in America (Chicago, Florida). She took the opportunity to point out that there's all manner of dangerous weather in the US. "You have tornados, earthquakes, wildfires. BUT," and I swear she paused for dramatic effect, "you have great government."

We laughed again and, despite our laundry list of issues and quibbles, we didn't disagree.

For Those About To Wash Their Feet, I Apologize

One of the things I found confounding about the Northeast Library was how often the sink in the men’s room had paper blocking the drain and water all over the floor. It was as though people were using it to bathe. That didn’t seem right though because as far as I could tell there wasn’t a sizeable homeless population frequenting the library and this watery mess happened all the time, perhaps even every single day. It was a mystery and I left it at that.

Then one day, for absolutely no reason, it occurred to me what was probably going on: ritual ablution. The Northeast Library may not have a notable homeless contingent but it does have a sizeable Muslim population. I don’t know what percentage go through the full ritual washing process including their feet before prayer, but it wouldn’t take many to consistently turn the bathroom into a soggy paper toweled mess.

This will be blazingly culturally insensitive and I’m apologizing for that upfront and will again later, but I found this annoying. Not in the sense that I was going to complain or harbor a grudge. I found it annoying in a fashion similar to how I feel about, oh, I don't know... our federal government. I certainly don't want to abolish it but it also seems like some reasonable reform is in order. Something simple like "clean up after yourself in public restrooms when using them for extracurricular purposes” which applies literally for ablutions and metaphorically for a host of dubious governmental actions ranging from wars to leaving no children behind.

Bangkok is the first hot, dirty, dry place I've ever lived in. More specifically, Bangkok is the first hot, dirty, dry place I've cleaned a home in and it's turned my feelings about feet washing around. Even in a pair of shoes it's astonishing how dirty your feet get here. At home I strictly enforced the "no shoes inside" rule and I'd like to add "and walk on your tiptoes to the bathtub to wash your feet before setting another foot in my home."

It's madness, I tell you, MADNESS! Perhaps time will make this seem normal, but I will never again question anyone emphatic about feet washing and I apologize for every moment of judgmental irritation I've had about it. So wash those feet, I’m right there with you, but you should still take the paper towels out of the sink when you're done because that’s rude and gross.

Bangkok Normal: we just, kinda, live here now

noreply@blogger.com (Sawyer Blur) — Wed, 12 Mar 2014 02:50:00 +0000

{pre-footnote: I'd forgotten the post preceding this one was about normality so I guess this is an issue that's been bubbling away in the back of my mind.}

Last week Spectra and I independently had the same realization: we simply live in Bangkok now. We’re no longer wide-eyed tourists or explorers. We’re no longer frazzled immigrants, stumbling around in a daze. Our Thai, minimal though it be, is enough to navigate the vast majority of daily transactions (I can count to 100!). We're mystified by people finding the buses excessively complicated. We know roughly how long it takes to get anywhere in the city off the top of our heads and can adjust that estimate based on assumed traffic conditions. Froggering through cars and motorbikes to cross an intersection or walking down a sidewalk-less alley as all manner of transport careen around us doesn’t even register. When we go out to eat we debate choices rather than fret about whether we’ll eat at McDonald’s. We typically avoid the places farang tourists congregate because we find them gauche rather than a lifeline. Whatever you’d call a person who’s not a local but not really a tourist is what we’ve become.

Spectra had this epiphany while walking home from work. She realized she wasn’t wondering about what she’d find when she got home or what we’d do because she knew exactly what she’d find and what we’d do. Her life had become normal. I had it while walking down our street to catch the bus and was struck by the idea that it’s going to be weird to not walk down our street to catch a bus; that there will be a day, in the near future, where I’ll be back in Minnesota and I thought of that as missing the people I know in Bangkok rather than seeing the people I know in Minnesota.

Don’t get me wrong. For health related reasons afflicting not one, not two, but THREE people I care very much about back home I’m deeply frustrated about being so far away from my family and friends right now. Griffin, the younger half of the kids I nannyed, is turning three next week and I’m annoyed about missing his birthday. For the first time in my life I’m aggravated by the fact that my brother and his wife and their ludicrous child live in Japan. In short, for the first time I feel like my mother.

Yet, despite all of that, now I find the idea of leaving Bangkok melancholy. Three weeks ago that was unthinkable. I was still very much struggling with day-to-day existence and wondered if I’d ever adjust. I wondered if I was just too “American” to ever socially fit in. I wondered if the language was too nuanced for me to pick up on short order. I wondered if the rules or lack there of governing walking down the sidewalk were just too chaotic for me to be at peace with. In short I wondered if Bangkok was simply not “for me.”

Anyone who’s sought advice from me about finding their way through a turbulent or uncertain situation has heard me say something along the lines of, “Sometimes there’s no substitute for time. You want to predict the future—how will it all end so I know whether I should continue?—but you can’t. Things will work out or the they won’t. The problems will overwhelm you or they won’t. The kicker is if things work out you won’t even notice when the problems pass. There will come a day when you realize oh, hey, that thing that used to drive me crazy doesn’t anymore. We live going forward and understand looking backwards. It’s frustrating but there’s nothing you can do about it so remember the most important advice in the universe: DON'T PANIC!"

Easier said than done. I knew that but it had been a good while since I’d fully experienced it. I suppose there are few surer signs that you’ve settled into a new place than finding yourself re-learning old lessons. Come to think of it one of my hallmarks is forgetting lessons I’ve already learned and finding myself making mistakes I’ve already made to re-learn things I didn’t realize I’d lost track of. So this re-experience is even more comforting than I’d initially realized.

So Spectra and I live in Bangkok and it’s wondrously, fantastically and utterly normal.

Nothing to see here. All's normal.