On Rainstorms

During the rainy season, this is an average rainstorm.

It did that for a day and a night straight and the river rose to the brink of flooding. That was two weeks ago.

Since then, we have had at least a couple hours of such rains every single day. Evidently, the surrounding area is pretty flooded. But after the last floods cleared out the channels and gave the guys a chance to troubleshoot the pump equipment, town has stayed above water.

I'm a little bit fuzzy about it in my pedestrian state, but there are a number of pumping stations that channel water through meter-wide pipes to drainage canals that disperse in the countryside or a bigger channel out toward the bay. What's interesting, of course, is that what's pumped from the most expensive muban drains out about two income brackets down. And the top muban really is the top--the only real danger of flooding is around the perimeter of the otherwise elevated properties. Still, those are the first pumps on, and the pumps in best working order, and the drainage channels dump out just above the muban where farang teachers cohabitate, which in turn drains to the muban where farangs who have hitched and gone native live. And so on and so forth until the fields outside of town are ponds too deep for the egrets to wade and the mammalian residents don't have enough cultural clout to matter, so why not keep spouting overspill into the floodwaters?

And just for kicks, here's the site of my last accident. The oil spill is gone, but the mototaxi drivers still laugh about me splattered all over the pavement.

Frying pan to fire?

Receiving a Thai massage tends to be athletic and surprisingly tiring for an activity ostensibly executed while prone and relaxing. And I'll be the first to vouch for its efficacy, it's just an interesting to the western mind that "relaxing massage" is oxymoronic.

And then I started a course in massage. Jump from "athletic and surprisingly tiring" to a point halfway between "exhausting" and "now activating self destruct."

It's surprisingly easy: follow the energy lines up and down with a series of pressures that open things up. Starting from the feet, you work up the calves and thighs, walking up with pole-stiff arms, waking up blood flow with body weight--it's a close cousin of wheelbarrow races at a summer carnival. And then it gets fun: each leg is worked in isolation, bent in various positions.

Here's where the Western audience gets weirded out--the victim's leg is in a figure four the entire time, save during the exciting moments when it's getting flexed and stretched.

It is disconcerting if you're not prepared--first, while you're on your back, your left foot is tucked up in your crotch with the knee splayed to the side in an organic figure four. It's easy, from here, to open up the circulation down the inside of the leg. But then the masseur picks up the leg and starts doing lunges over the poor prone body--imagine standing on the sideline and hugging your knee up to your chest. It's that movement, but you're laying down and someone is lunging your knee to your chin for you.

It's hard enough work when you're on the bottom, but when you're on the top, it's not just that you're holding someone's leg pinned to your hip while you dance around them, it's that you're doing so while on your knees amid the protests of their muscles, judgment, and instinctive self-preservation. And while your right hand is holding their left knee to keep their foot in the crook of your right hip (bad explanation? Yes, but a helluva lot cleaner than the execution) you're doing deep lunges back and forth, and your left arm is posted at various pressure points as you seesaw around.

No mention of the sheer volume of tissue you're digging through to get to the pressure points you're supposed to hit. Really, even if someone isn't Iron Mike or training for a martial arts competition, the thigh has a lot of tissue to penetrate before you're getting to the juicy stuff.

It's one thing to post pole with your arms and dig into something, to go wheelbarrowing around a room, but it's another thing entirely when you have my whopping body weight to penetrate through someone's fat and muscle to hit the sciatic cluster, especially if you're kneeling on your toes and swinging their leg around.

But it's a good thing from any angle: I'm getting to use my arms and body, and in "Help me, Omni-Ibuprofin, you're my only hope!" morning pain. Which is a helluva lot nicer than the aching bones and muscles I've been waking to, not to mention the gastric wakeup calls.

It also gives me another tangible for my time here, with almost as many stories as a good scar.

An interesting turn

Last Saturday, after the English Contest (I guess I should say something about that sometime) I saw a Wal Mart edition of Lord of the Rings trilogy sitting in the office, so I absconded with it.

Generally, I avoid pulp editions: flip over a mass market paperback and check out the ISBN/barcode area (not the same thing), and if there's an X in the triangle, it's what the bibliophilic world calls a strip cover. Instead of returning the book to the publisher to be remaindered and shuttled off to a discount seller, some poor sod has to rip off its cover and send THAT back while avoiding the federal offense of putting the remaining book to any use beyond toilet paper to-be.

But, well, I've read the trilogy once, in the last edition before the movies made a sweep. And I have a second edition, first printing waiting for me. I think. Somewhere.

I've always been bibliophilic, collecting strange and rare and interesting reads, but in recent years I haven't been much of a reader. Grad school and multiple jobs and life sucked up most of the time and interest I had in anything requiring more investment than a comic book.

But, well, I just finished the trilogy, and found that I actually enjoy reading. Again.

Fortuitous timing, too: the bag I schlepped up the stairs yesterday? A goodly part of the weight can be explained by War and Peace and a beautiful hardbound edition of Les Mis (which will be making a one-way flight home with my tuba, hopefully: the rest of the books I can leave to mildew amid an appreciative audience, but that one, and some of the more obscure small-print local history books, I want to save).

New system

For years and years I carried calluses and scars and scrapes and scabs as physical badges of office--my tuba chops, my hiker legs, my waiter hands. And when there weren't marks, there were muscles: the defined forearms, unusually large ribcage, bizarre lip muscles. And now, now there are none. After the swelling abated, after the wrappings came off, after I hit bottom, there was nothing; stripped to the bone, to be melodramatic about it. Now, the defining marks, the characteristics that shaped who I was, the physicality shaped by who I was, are gone. The funky muscle from tapping my toes inside my shoes, the strangely defined tibialis anterior, the rock-hard diaphragm under ill-defined abdominals, fingers that could dance over tuba keys, the ambidexterous lips and tongue have been wiped clean by asphalt and malnourishment.
Now there are no defined muscles, and the painfully worming veins are receeding. Now I have angry pink scars: starburst around the orgin of my right deltoid, something near to a swoosh mark on the outside of my right elbow (already did it, thanks), uneasy skid marks on the inside of either elbow and along each wrist, a small nova on the back of my left hand, an angry and upraised line down the back of my ring finger, a deep mezzaluna chunk crushed from my left pinkie finger, the cheshire-cat smile on the right side of my waist, the cell-phone-shaped patch of skin that rubbed off my right hip, little novae on either knee, and a line shooting down my right shin.
Who knows what happened to the insides as I hit the 40 kilo line.

I miss running and jogging, but yesterday I carried my tuba and a similarly-heavy bag up the four long flights of stairs to my room, so that's an improvement. And that's the regret I allow myself.

What I have instead are beacons for curious little fingers. Students--mine or otherwise--are fascinated by the whitish skin, blond hair, and especially by the bright pink scars. Even more so by the scabs, but here's hoping those stay at a minimum.
What I have, if I allow it, are beacons that draw curious students and open up rudimentary conversations. And even if I don't have the muscles to show that I'm other than a skinny white teacher, I have the memories, and the hope to one day be such again, and in the meantime, I have a crowd of people trying to figure out who I am, where I've been, and what I'm about, and it's my job to foster that.

Widdershins sort of approach, but I'll call it a win.

On Songtaus and Acculturation

Funny moment:
There was a songtau driver standing on the sidewalk. He had just finished pissing on the curb and blowing his right nostril. He was mining for gold in the left when he burped resoundingly.
He saw me picking at a chunk of something in my teeth.
And I was the one being uncouth.

There's a lot to be learned from songtau drivers, actually. I keep flashing to a scene in Ayutthaya: in the middle of the historic park, between Khmer-style ruins, there was a lineup of songtaus sitting out the afternoon doldrums. Most of the drivers were in hammocks slung between the trees lining the avenue built in time immemorial. A few sat in folding chairs around a folding table scattered with lunchtime detritus.
I walked past the next afternoon. A peach of an afternoon thunderhead was billowing up. It appeared that the same drivers were parked in the same spots, but the hammocks were slung in the backs of their rigs.
And otherwise they spend the full day--anytime from an hour before dawn to whenever the farangs quiet down--in their rigs, trolling for ten-baht rides.

Call it the tough love approach to Buddhism.

My biggest lessons have been in letting go. Letting go of expectations. Letting go of assumptions. Letting go of givens. And in letting go, learning to embrace what remains.

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.

What's in a name

Part of this week's entertainment has been creating rosters for all of my classes. Daunting, with 1200 data points to decipher from student scratch and enter into spreadsheets, but surprisingly quick work with the novelty of the nicknames. What I found most interesting was the contrast with the names in the English Programme. EP classes had at least one Gem, First, and Bright of each sex, and a Boss boy and Jewel girl. My current rosters have Aom, Bank, Arm, Hand, Fist to redundance, with the remarkable addition of at least one Beer in every class.