There were assumptions about cleanliness, refrigeration, cross-contamination. But yes, you do go pawing through raw meat with raw mitts, then pick through a pile of undies in the neighboring stall, and then stick your nose in a mound of rotting fish to decide which suits your mood. And then you eat a stick of meat that was skewered by the same hands that held the same products with a goodly many more financial transactions. This is how it is. Think of the ants like indoor versions of soi dogs: no matter how much you get worked up about them one way or the other, they will neither care nor leave, so you might as well appreciate the cleanup work they do.
If the smudge marks are a little too thick, take your bubble to another climate.
There was also the assumption of a plastic economy. Only the largest, westernized businesses take credit cards. And the machines are out about 30% of the time. There are no receipts, no records, until you're in the upper levels of the bureaucracy and there are people who take care of it after a bump of a couple hundred Baht. Payday is pretty wild: I get a little plastic baggie--the same size that holds a morning coffee or a couple skewers of whatnots--with a thick wad of bills and a little note with scribbles that evidently have an approximation of my name.
It's a joyride for the first bit, while you're still converting things to dollars--Wow! This super cool place/product/experience only costs a hundred bucks! And then one day you do the math and figure out that the hundred bucks represents most of a week of your life, and you don't feel so bad about the minimum wage job you used to work: "Wow, in local terms, that'd be a three-hundred percent raise!"
So much for the easy assumptions.
There were also assumptions about what constitutes "Music" and "Instruction." Which experience drove out just ahead of the idea that 40 is a big class.
There were thoughts about planning and preparation: this week, XYZ will happen, and next weekend I will go to.... But then classes are cancelled for three days in a row and you're told that you MUST turn in grades and there's a tropical depression where you meant to go but the other coast should be nice.
Most weekend plans are made during Friday's lunch.
Impermanence took a different shape after the bike wrecks. Not just the idea that you wait until today to plan where to go tomorrow, but that tomorrow is not a given.
This is something you know but must learn for yourself.
Granted, it's something I've encountered numerous times, but at my own behest, generally, and of an entirely different quality: there's a fundamental difference between spooking a bear in the backcountry and getting T-boned in downtown.
And the idea of mobility: how bizarre that a twelve-step staircase became more daunting than a mountain, and the 3,000' climb that used to be my morning run became impossible. How bizarre that it's a victory every time I walk up to my fourth-floor apartment.
There were the medical tests: of course the hospital knows what they're doing! Protein Losing Enteropathy is a secondary symptom of something, but not in the heart or lungs, liver or kidneys, not anything phlebotic or intestinal, not AIDS or spru or tropical spru or giardia or crypto or any other microorganisms, no carcinogens, and there's nothing wrong with thumb or leg, just go take some tylenol.
And what the hell, once you can't really walk anymore, what is it to lose the wheels? The nice house in the suburbs?
If you have to confront and accept that your blood won't necessarily circulate and your gut won't necessarily absorb what you put down it, how hard is it to accept changes in the world outside?
Which is how I came back to square one and moved in across the hall from my first room.
Hey, look, I can walk up stairs! I can walk to campus! Sure, it's a broken-in auditorium chair, but it beats the plastic lawnchair I was relaxing on, right?
After so many hospital waiting rooms, the dentist's drill, an optometrist, and the trip in the back of a foreign ambulance, what's to fret about with a coconut husk mattress or unheated showers?
A Buddhist would say that I shouldn't be attached to things anyway. Which I would acknowledge as truthful Buddhist doctrine, and then I would try to pin down where the line between caring about things and continuing existence happens to be. But I guess it's a moot point if existence is the perpetuation of suffering, so maybe I'm not ready to be a true Buddhist yet.
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