Mai me ow--no more!

I was full of enough vinegar that I did concerted, focused, muscle-building exercises: I spent a goodly while curling and pressing all the muscles in my upper and lower limbs. I've been dreaming about running obstacle courses lately, and maybe if I can start recovering some muscle mass I'll one day have enough fast twitch muscles to jog and jump.

So then I went to the massage place, and my usual lady, who has learned to use the baby touch on me, was having dinner, so it was a much more... enthusiastic experience (enthusiastic in her approach, anyway) that left me limping out to the first of two songtaus.

And then it seemed prudent to stagger up to the songtau for the next leg, which had just stopped for a red light.

I should've known the light was stale, that it was dark and raining and my waving might not be noticed.

Which is about as likely as making it through an hour of sixth grade without the classroom of Thai adolescents noticing--and making great ado at the opportunity to make great ado--that your fly is down.

I had just enough weight on the back to haul myself up, but was caught under just enough surprise, just far enough from my center of gravity to drop my ass on the pavement. Especially since I was busy gloating about not having to hail one of the mototaxis, for four times the price of the songtau back.

I should've guessed, but I didn't. And when traffic thinned on the green-light direction, the songtau took the four-second jump on the red light. With me not quite on.

Initially, I was screaming to slow down so I could haul my aching self--along with a backpack holding a couple big bottles of carbonated caffeine, three litres of water, a couple bricks of cream cheese, crackers, and some pseudo-sausage--up onto the songtau: think, "WAIT!"

But then I was screaming to "AAAAAAIT STOOOOOP!" as I started to fall.

And then I was just screaming at this anit-typical, stereotype-busting, renaissance-oriented songtau driver as a backpack strap caught and I found myself on a face-down trip across the intersection.

Good news: I was up and out of the intersection before any other traffic came through.

Other good news: the taxi only charged my dripping wet, bleeding ass the local price.

Even more good news: the souvenirs are limited to deep raspberries on both knees, both elbows, both palms, up my right thumb, across my left toes, and on the top of my right foot (love the sandals).

Bad news: I'm out of happy drugs.

Funny: I could've sworn I was done waking up to the crackle of roadrash.

Is it somehow romantic that every time I come in or out the front door of my building, I see the faucet from Bike Incident the First and think, "That's the site of my First Bike Incident, and I will carry its indentation in my face forever"?

A beautiful day

I couldn't identify the neighborhood where I live. That's just how it is with farangs: unless you live in one of the big three--Smile, SP, Wassana--or a well-defined muban, you never say where you live but where it's near. Same thing in Ayutthaya, Chiang Mai, Bangkok, HatYai, Khanom, anywhere else: nobody knows where you live, or if they do they wouldn't understand your explanation--a cabbie could take a local to the end of any of the smallest, most bass-akward and overgrown singletrack walkways, but if a farang responds to a prompt with "Tesco" (which, within town, is like saying "Take me to the Taj Mahal") odds are 50-50 at best that the farang will have to shout directions.

So I don't know where I live, just that it's near this one place place and across from that other.

In American terms, the neighborhood is about the size of a SuperWalMart and its parking lot. It has one entrance from the main road, which goes one building length--mine's the building on the left--and hits a T at the place everybody knows. The T goes a block either direction--paralleling the main road--before turning "back" from the main road for three extremely short blocks.

I would put ZERO stake in it, but at a guess there are fifteen hundred people living here. And it's one of the nicer--which is to say, more spacious--areas.

I've mentioned my laundry lady. She's a very large, very solid, broke-no-argument mother. You know she has your best interests in mind, but that doesn't change the fact that the merest shade of her discontent scares the hell out of you. And she's the mother of anywhere from 1 to 6 of my students (it's hard to tell with Thai kids--they move like shoals of sardines and herd half as well). I tell myself they're used to seeing people's skimpies hanging out to dry, or waiting to be pressed. And I pointedly ignore that mine are the only skivvies in this hemisphere to sport Monty Python, Superman, and tye-dye patterns (although not concurrently).

It's almost intimidating: I have to pick up my laundry promptly or she gets worried. And there is no waiting until I have a full load of dirty clothes--it takes two calendar days to get a load all washed and pressed, and if I don't have a new bag of dirties by the following morning, she gets worried.

I should backtrack some.

Laundry and I don't get along in terms that would meet my grandmother's approval. Option 1 is to let the stuff pile up until I've run out of key components of my wardrobe, and then go on a laundry bender. Option 2--from a couple of glorious schoolyears--was having a washer and dryer in the bathroom and fluffing what begins the week as seven or eight shirts, boxers, pairs of socks, and a few pairs of pants for a few minutes while brushing teeth, then just dressing straight from the dryer.

I also get in trouble for dropping off laundry without enough hangers.

But I've run out of hangers: somehow, when all but three day's wash is regularly done, hangars become as precious as fresh socks once were.

When I come home from school, there's food most days: a pot of rice with some sort of searing curry. If I do partake, there are frozen yogurt bars and packs of napkins. (No tangent, but it gets old being unable to eat an affordable meal without the skin being burned off my inner cheeks and tongue, not to mention the other cheeks....)

Two doors down is a place where I can buy ramen noodles, packets of deepfried whatnots, and recharge the minutes on my cell phone.

And then there are the ladies who live in between. They do haircutting and reflexology: 60 baht for about an hour with a straight razor flying around your head and terrifying every loose hair into perfect order. Or it's 100 baht for a session with a reflexologist who squeezes your feet and says, "you hurt in your XYZ and BCD, right? Is very bad down here."

There are other farangs here, I think. There have been, anyway, enough that kids don't stare unless I do something wild like walk around without shoes on. And I'm three long blocks from campus, or up to ten minutes from anywhere in town, if it takes that long to flag down a songtau or mototaxi.

Welcome to Thailand?

Here's hoping I get to spend a while in this part of the country.

Game swap

Getting to work no longer involves Super Mario Kart IN REAL LIVING PERIL! I am extremely relieved. Usually. Overall, anyway.

But crossing the street this morning provided some key context.

Start on "my" side, directly across from the main entrance to the school. You can't really stand on the sidewalk because it's full of stackable/folding tables and chairs for the triple-decker breakfast stand. One cart fries chicken and pig, slices it and packs it on rice. Another cart does intestine and betle leaf soup (slow-cooked chicken stock with pig internals and a handful of betel leaves; this is one of my favorite things) or jok (rice porridge) with ginger, scallion, garlic, piggy shallot cracklins, and parsley. The third does kick-your-teeth sweet coffee or tea. And they do both sit down and takeout, so instead of a narrow strip of walkway, the gutter is clogged with either standing students or idling bikes waiting for a bag of breakfast. So there's no comfortable place to either sit or stand without being in the way of someone trying to get through exactly where you are, farang. Just get out of the way as soon as you can, okay?

Well, the nearest lane (which technically goes right to left, remember) holds bikes parked two rows deep, so to walk past, you have to be pushing one shoulder into the second official lane of traffic. But you can't just turn and walk with the flow, because there's the bike traffic: someone on a scooter is almost guaranteed to be driving the wrong way to either park or merge.

Just past the scooter parking lane, straddling the dashed line dividing the two near-side lanes is the songtau lane. It's not quite a through-going lane because any given songtau is prone to stop at any given time for no reason whatsoever. For a goodly while, it was like playing "spot the deer" in the car with Dad--how quickly after screeching, jerking, or slamming to a halt could I spot the foot-going potential john? But I've come to realize, if not necessarily accept, that they stop for nothing more than the driver's whim--a promising shadow, a group of cronies parked and hoping for a load, a group of cronies parked and lounging, an enticing patch of shade, crosstraffic, the lack thereof, any sort of tremor in the force.

Generally, I find that it's a safe place to walk provided I want to flag down a songtau, but if I'm trying to hoof from here thence, it's like standing in a gutter during kindergarten bowling. Except a songtau, whether moving in a brisk reverse, creeping unmindfully forward, or racing at breakneck, hurts a helluva lot more than even a well-thrown three-pound bowling ball.

But the songtaus aren't alone, by any means.

Scooters, as much as they can be said to adhere to lanes, stick to fringe areas. For the sake of argument, assume you're driving a scooter south: your options, on this road, are 1) far left along the parked bikes if you're moving slowly and trying to park or merge; 2) a half-length from the parked bikes if you're in the slower lane, but watch out for merging songtaus or songtaus flying past or against traffic; 3) toward the middle line, if you're intent on getting there more quickly, but watch out for merging and passing traffic from either direction, especially traffic 4) screaming through a brief gap in the oncoming traffic; 5) in the far right, going against the main stream of traffic, just behind the scooter parking zone. So pretty much anywhere but down the middle of the opposing lane, unless there's a really big hole, say, made by a U turn. But a recap is in order, before joining that stream:

You're on the E curb of a N-S road, crossing directly W to the main entrance of a school. You've just been handed an open-topped two-handle baggie full of coffee syrup, a styrofoam clamshell with deep-fried pig belly, and change, so you're juggling the money, pig, coffee, and wallet at the same time. There's no standing where you're standing because there are two opposing streams of people after their coffee/tea syrup and deep fried wakeup, there's no standing on the sidewalk because it's become what in Europe would be called a bistro, there's no standing just off the sidewalk because it's a busy scooter parking/staging area, and there's not enough room to squeeze even my skinny butt between the back of the scooters and active traffic, which thus far consists of half a lane of scooter traffic, and a lane-plus for songtaus. But it's a two-lane road, so there are two lanes of southbound cars squeezed between the parked mopeds and the area within a quick swerve of being back in the southbound lane.

And the northbound traffic is an exact mirror: bike traffic just past the parked bikes, then two lanes of northbound traffic beginning halfway into the center southbound lane, followed by the songtau/bike lane, two lanes of parking traffic, bikes parked two-deep, and a solid press of people trying to get from the road to the sidewalk or back while singlemindedly charging through the crowd.

Don't forget the school busses--decommissioned Cold War troop-moveres--that roar through with lane-and-a-half widths that give way to no other vehicles, that stop almost as randomly as songtaus, minivan school busses that run the local routes, parents dropping off kidlets, and police standing in the middle of the road tweeting whistles.

It WAS Mario Kart. Now it's Frogger.

What's terrifying is that the safest place to stand while crossing is on the center line--usually, anyone driving down the middle has their eyes open, and nobody wants to hit a farang in front of a school.

in the nethers between manly and lazy

I'm not good about shaving. It took moving to Thailand to replace a razor blade after six months of bi-daily use, and that was with a blade that'd sat since, erm, the Mach 1 first came out--late 90s.

So I was proactive and proud of it, shaving BEFORE the "oops, really shoulda shaved before getting into such proximity with X" stage.

And one of my cheeks turned red.

Great.

Oh, wait, just the rusty blade. It'll rinse off and be good for another week or two.

For once--NOT BLOOD!

The other side of Thai cuisine

I really try with the Thai food. The truly Thai stuff. And it beats me every time.
It's just that, well, okay.
It has to be lukewarm after sitting in a steam tray for a goodly while. It's either greenish brown or yellow. If it's the brown stuff, it looks like something a dog would yak up. If it's the yellow stuff, it's worse because you can recognize components of otherwise palatable cuisine: shrimp, cauliflower, pineapple. Either way, it has enough heat to melt silverware. And no matter what, it smells like something the dog would roll in before slurping it up and depositing it on the street. Or in a pan.
I try. I try and I try. But sometimes it's hard.

Sick, sick people

It sounds good on paper: refillable whiteboard pens. Just screw off the top and add more ink. Great.
And then there's a pot of ink that's been around too long to tell whether it's blue, black, or what proportion thereof, and refill instruments: either a popped eyedropper or a plastic syringe with a hopelessly leaky plunger.

They say it's not permanent, which might be true. Maybe it'll come out in the laundry, and it stands to scrub off the hands before the skin rubs entirely off. But the surface of the desk proved more delible than the erasable marker.

At least I've made my mark.

like a self-conscious bull in an antique china shop

Backstory 1:

After the last wreck, with the combined religious moment and mysterious disappearance of my goddess Guanyin icon, I've been looking for a Guanyin talisman, which I bought last weekend while staying with my Reiki teacher. It's a tiger's eye carving in a rattan necklace, bulky and ostentatious in the local style insofar as the weave is--of necessity--thick enough to be noticed and of an unmistakable design: local, Buddha/Hindu charm.

Backstory 2:

First day in country, from my boss: "Whatever you do, do not touch a kid. You'll see me roughhousing and playing around with 'em, but that's who I am, you know? I'm old. I live here, I have lived here, my daughter goes to school here, and that's just the type of guy I am. Until you have that reputation, DO NOT TOUCH A KID. People come to Thailand for that stuff, and if you are ever accused, you will be held guilty and we will cut your visa, no questions asked."

Backstory 3:

Washoe County's Detective Moen staring me down and saying, "Why did you do this?" without seeming to hear, "I didn't" or assume innocence until proven otherwise.

Cut to action:

I'm at a festival where they release balloons and little round crown-like rafts to let bad mental holdings-on go. They take it pretty seriously with the rafts: the decorations are folded-up banana leaves with marigolds and orchids and look like impeccable miniatures of multi-thousand-dollar centerpieces.

I'm sure it's different elsewhere, but that's how it is with my Prattom (middle school) kids. They spend weeks creating floats, and the floats are absolutely spectacular. Then they light candles and incense and send the floats down the river.

Naturally, I stumbled into this just shy of completely ignorant: I'd been told it's next weekend.

So I'm walking around the riverbank among FULLY done-up Thai regalia (call me lazy for resorting to cliches, but I'm in Thailand where this one is forbidden so my writerly karma neutralizes: picture any of the regal sort of showoffenous scenes from Anna and the King). It's inspiring to see people don the pride of their heritage and display its regalia enmasse.

Just imagine if a Nascar crowd was something to proudly display to the world and history as the finest possible representation of America. That much spirit, but instead of grease-hued trucker caps, hairy beer guts, cheesy plumber cracks, and plastic keg cups, the ladies sport the golden gowns and bodices and jewelry and gold-laced silks and such.

"TEACHER HARRY POTTER! HARRY POTTER HARRY POTTER HARRY POTTER!"

It's an excited student. She's an excited student. Done-up beautifully. And waving. From the middle of a flock of other, equally done-up students, all of whom are thrilled at being done up and out late and celebrating after releasing their kratong.

This bodes ill.

It's not the babbling flock: that part's pretty fun, if I catch myself off guard. It was that my students brought their friends and relatives--all female--and quickly exhausted their patience with, "Where you go?" "What you do?" "Is fun, no?"

First someone found my Guanyin pendant. And there was much pressing-in and to-do of looking and pulling and touching. Of me. By girls, women, Princesses of the Great Siamese Court, and they are pawing at me.

And discover MY BELT!

It's a Northwest tribal sort of totem design popular among the stateside REI brigade and essentially unheard of here. Especially since it has a secret little zippered money pouch.

Well, in the furor of inspecting this outlandish adornment, the money pouch is discovered. The belt is removed.

Consider: pants didn't fit me when I came here. Then I lost a whole bunch of weight.

And as I reach for my belt I realize that there is someone tugging at my waistband and if I don't get a good, solid grip on things real, real quick, I stand in good stead of losing my pants.

Oh, and did I mention losing weight since coming here, and pant sizes being too big to begin with? That goes for boxers, too.

And from feeling like the bull with his tail between his legs, looking sheepishly up at the British nanny tutting him for being so ungainly and foolish for working himself amid the displays of antique lacquerware, I'm facing a tribunal, and they are not pleased about me gallivanting around their family outing without pants down and my junk bouncing around in front of their gathered daughters.

Here's the good thing about the weeks spent yelling, without benefit of a bamboo cane, over boomy classrooms full of echoing yells of sixty kids: I have a serious Teacher Voice. And maybe it was a little bit startling for those nearest, and maybe a bit curious for the mommies and daddies on the far side of the park, but as I retrieved my belt and made great show of cinching down the extra inches, the idea got across. I hope.

So there you go.

Here's hoping I know with enough notice to bring a camera to the next one, and thanking all the marshmallows in the lucky charms that I did not become the subject of a photo-worthy news event.

It's in the covers

Here's a prediction founded on the inverse of a truism.

It's a shame the Harry Potter movies were filmed during emo culture as opposed to Hello Kitty or Manga fads, because the movies are dark and brooding and impart a serious sort of angst and disturbed aura to the underlying stories. On their own, I'd guess they'd be remembered as a remarkable achievement: so many linked films tracking the growth of the individual actors as well as the story itself. And I would also LOVE to get an unguarded and utterly frank hour with Rowling regarding the interplay between literary and cinematographic developments: how much did the global movie event shape the course of the literary evolution? That one can sit, though, in the face of a more tangible literary consideration, the likes of which is perfect fodder for armchair academia: how much did fame and a global following alter the development of the story?

Book One: pure, fun narrative indulgence. Two: similar spark. Three: losing it. Four, Five, Six: Hmm, if every kid in the world is going to know about Harry Potter, how do I make sure that every mother in the world approves of him?

Seven: oh yeah, here's what good storytelling is about.

And by the last page, what started as a fun story for kids comes back to a killer adventure story for a young audience.

Here's where the prediction comes in.

The Harry Potter books will be what we read our children, where our children learn to lose themselves in narratives.

Chances are, people in my generation will do that reading out of the pastel-colored Scholastic editions we bought on release days, which is where the truism comes into play: judge them by their covers.

In the Scholastic editions, the pastel stylizations are happy, fun, kid-friendly deals. And ultimately, that's what the books are about: a kid-friendly story.

I just hope that the literary culture lives with sufficient strength to occlude the cinematic reinterpretation.

Eureka!

Amid the bender of Harry Potter movies--on which there is much more forthcoming--I had one of the most fascinating experiences in a pig's age: I learned to read.

"PadPakGung"--fried peppers with prawns. And from thence I've been transcribing the menu from the little Isaan stall across the street: it's an F4 sheet with about two hundred items.

Talk about fascinating: I know many of the dishes in farang transliteration, so it helps with sounding out the characters. On the one hand, there's the extent of the menu: half a dozen sizes and varieties of beer right at the top, followed by twenty five soups and three dozen salads (little wonder I get along with these folks). Then sausage, lime cured whatnots, a dozen-plus types of lahb, and an entire column of stuff I'd never heard of but managed to sound out.

On the other hand, it has helped open the printed world: I still miss many letters, especially in the heavily-stylized fonts, but I still manage to catch a goodly number of letters, and each one gets me inordinately excited: Look! It's G! an N! another G! one of the four types of T! an R!

It's invigorating and inspiring, and the cool thing is that I'm now a language teacher. Here's hoping I can impart some of that to my students.

It was a weak moment: late afternoon, low blood sugar, woozy from a battering (massage), assaulted by numerous students while trying to buy noodles, cheeze byproduct, and beer, and I now own all the Harry Potter movies thusfar released.

And I'm not seeing many regrets, yet. Especially since every student I saw brought their family to meet "teacher Harry Potter."

A confession

Two klicks of riding down the beach road with a sea breeze blowing around my sunglasses and tickling through my scalp made me miss driving a motorbike: I could cruise all day, night, and day again in such conditions (bladder permitting).

And then I spent three hours reveling in an enclosed minivan driving through flood-calibre downpours.

Nope. No regrets.

On moichendizing

It turns out Thanksgiving is next week, and I've yet to hear a Christmas carol, an ad for the latest toy, or word one about Black Friday.

Which is more surprising?

Or does the surprise itself--surprise at the absence of exploitative moichendizing in the name of Christian goodness--trump any particulars?

On sweat

I used to be able to say I just don't sweat. Sometimes I'd stink--first day of teaching was always a ripe one--but it was never a matter of sweating through clothes or rivulets running down back, pits, temples, nose, and pouring from the fuzzy crevices.

And then it came to a head with one of those classes.

The guy who teaches before me looks scary as hell when he's not carrying a stick. And his stick is a few centimeters thick and wrapped with alternating bands of red and black tape that's been knicked and scarred through to raw wood.

The nicks are not from missing his targets.

And yes, a small part of me envies the hell out of him when I've seen him walking behind a lineup of guys with their faces to the board, whapping their calves.

The lady who teaches after me is the quiet and reserved librarian type whose blackboard whapping echoes three classes away, and whose students do not mouth off a second time. Ever. Then there's me.

So it came to a head and I pulled my last big straw: I waded into the sea of students to drag the most offensive out by his collar.

It's damn lucky he's a little shit, otherwise I would've had problems. But he's about 4'8" and I was able to lift him up by his collar and encourage him toward the board, where I drew a circle at adam's apple level and pinned his nose to it.

But the problem came when I realized that if any of the other guys stood up, even one, they would all realize they dwarfed me and removed any recourse if they decided not to do what I wanted them to.

And suddenly perspiration became a full-body competition.

Funny--I just typed runny, for what it's worth--how things change.

Wait, huh?

And evidently there was another meeting in the other English Department (so now I'm in 3 different power structures: the English Program, which is farang based, the prattom or primary English department [whose head avoids speaking english whenever possible] and the mattayom department). I was volunteered to judge and orate at a big deal sort of spelling bee next week. Oh, and could I draw up a list of sentences for the competition? Maybe in time for our students to study some, and I'll be able to help them next week, right?

Hmm. Okay. Um. Let's see if you two can work this out over who needs my time more, okay? Oh, but ultimately, the English Program will make the call, so get them over, too, alright?

And remember, this is Thailand, and not the part accustomed to farangs. The webs and scaffolds of rank and face and hierarchy are massive and all important. And I'm pretty well completely oblivious and hoping a dumb smile and culturally-literate EP boss will help me through.

presents in absence

And it happens that I am on the committee for and will likely be the (sole?) orator at the uber-important English Competition.

Last week, I agreed to show up early to help the students prepare. Which began today: no problem too insurmountable, and tomorrow will be much smoother.

And then this afternoon, just before I went off to my last push, there was a Thai conversation with frequent mention of the farang. When I made my presence curiously available, I learned that there had been a department-wide meeting on Friday and I had been elected to the committee and nominated to be the speaker.

I had a twofold response (call it simultaneous):

1) I missed a department meeting? When was it announced? How can I learn about them in the future? Am I in trouble?

2) Okay, so what exactly IS this competition? What's the committee all about? And the speaking? Will I have even the slightest chance to prepare?

And then it was time for class and the room vacated as quickly as my calendar filled up.

Would it have made any difference were I at the meeting? Had I known about it and attended, would I have been able to understand any bit of the meeting?

Ultimately, no, no on all counts, so why devote time, energy, or thought to it?

So, uh, here's to thinking on the fly and flying by the gut, right?

Le sigh, le whine, woe is woe.

What's nice about my schedule is that it's downhill from Wednesday: when I go home Tuesday, more than half my classes are behind me. But getting up the hill is the thing.
And of course, the two last classes on Thursday and Friday are the sort that flow as smoothly as a well-executed jump kick to the groin. But at least there's ample padding on either side.
The good news is that I'm almost ready to be literate. I've memorized most of the consonants and many of the vowels, and I've moved on to picking out letters on signs. None of which look like letters in the alphabet books, of course--stylizing script is an art form elevating the existing art form of writing the script itself--but there are occasional victories when I make people nervous while getting all excited about finding a letter: "Look, look, it's a D! D for Deg [little kid]! And a gnu, gnu for gnoo [worm]! No, look!"

Living the Dream

There are two ways to go about it: the tourist way, which gets the publicity, and the long-stay option.
Neither is possible to replicate, stateside (to be expected: no durian, and anyone making fish sauce would be imprisoned for health code violations). But the analogous situations are easy.
For the tourist version, check into a swank spa staffed by people beautiful enough to compensate for their lack of training and pay a third of what you would expect.
For the local version, check into the spa and move everything you have into the steam room, where you'll see a carving of an absolutely beautiful person; beat your head against the carving while a woman who's built like a motherly gorilla--and still somehow as beautiful as the carving--twists and torques your muscles into submission in a way that might eventually leave them feeling relaxed and relieved, except at the same time she's caressing your anus with a birdseye chilli. When she leaves, stretch out and relax on the coconut-husk bench/bed and watch the mold explode across your wilting possessions (it's like a time-lapse of grass growing). For relief, pack yourself into a walk-in fridge full of people hacking a roulette wheel of contagious diseases.

And I'm done.

And then I realized that even if I COULD find the common species in the bird book, it wouldn't mean anything because it's all Western-oriented, so it doesn't matter if I can identify a Whitebreasted Water Stepper, because the Thais who might know what I'm talking about would have no clue what I said.

But like I said, no worries there: common species do not seem to be represented.

I have to say, though, that the Siamese Fireback, Thailand's national bird, IS listed. With no mention of its endangerment, protection, or status.

The Crested Jungle Fowl is mentioned, too. What a glorious name for a banty rooster, huh?

Reluctant linguistics

I confidently opened the new English-Thai dictionary: Now I'll be able to figure out how to say things like "Open your notebook," "Copy this down," and "BE QUIET!" without picking it up from a student.

Dirty, dirty publishing scum: it's all in Thai! Here's, "Amble" followed by a paragraph of sperm at a beachside dance party.

What gets me is the amount of mirth there is at the sight of Teacher Harry Potter walking around with flashcards that have characters of the Thai alphabet in primary colors.

Even supposing I get as far as memorizing the 60-some characters, what the heck am I supposed to do with the sonic production?

So I ask my Thai teacher for help with some of the pronunciations, and she looks, squints, goes, "hmm," and it takes me saying, "On the back it says..." to jog her memory, and it's okay that I'm completely wrong because really, she doesn't even remember most of them most of the time.

And really, even some of the common ones are just stupid tricky: K and D--kor kwaii and doh dek--are the same shape, something like a bullseye in an archway, but the bullseye connects via an opposite direction. Or there's Sho Shu (tree) and ngo ngane (novice monk), and we'll ignore the fact that there is no agreed-upon westernization of the thai alphabet, so anything anyone's ever said is a matter of their hearing a local dialect, and oh yeah, someone from Nakhon (Nakorn, Nakhorn, Nakkon...) speaks an entirely different dialect than they do 80 K South in Hat Yai (Hadjai, Hatyaii, Hat Yay, Haj Yai....)

Here's the stupid thing in its entirety. Really. Sometime during the dark ages--and didn't they spread all across the globe?--some king used a Khmer alphabet to elide sanskrit and pali, and voila, here's Thai.

Really?

You know you've made it when....

Some shots I found on my phone.

On Grading

I finished grading and was contentedly stacking the piles in class order, beginning with 15, when I realized I have another 4 to go--this is only six hundred some. And this stack doesn't include any of my prattom classes.

On armpit humidity

In snow country, there is nothing odd about driving through an April blizzard in partial sunshine with the heater blowing full blast and the sunroof open. There is sun, so you will avail yourself.

One of the issues here, especially with the amount of rain, is the chill factor. Sure, it's 60. It's not that cold. But the humidity's 95% or utter downpour; instead of waking up in nasty, tepid bath water, the atmosphere has turned against you and there is no getting out, toweling off, or drying up enough to warm up.

As part of winter awareness, they taught us, "If your toes are cold, goput on a hat."

Strangely, part of tropical awareness seems to be, "If you're cold, turn on the AC."

Which spawned the very pleasant vision of the AC blasting me from one side and a radiant heating element blasting me from the other. I haven't seen such a contraption, but maybe it's time to hit up the camping store for a few cans of gel fuel to ignite and dry things up....

Disassociation

I woke up in an explosion of mold. Very bizarre.

Think about what it looks like when the dog goes wild with a down pillow: little fluffies everywhere, especially where you wouldn't expect it.

Coating my shoes. My watch band. Most of the clothes hanging on my "closet." My camera case, my toiletry bag, my stack of books, webbing across the walls, down the back of my refrigerator.

This is when you don't think about things like using the first person or toothbrushes.

Below: view from my room during a little rain cell on an otherwise gorgeous day.

Deflation

When I walk into an English class, the board is covered with complex grammatical formulas: subjects + verbs + adjectives + modifiers + massive lists of vocab + tense instructions.

If I think long and hard, I can usually figure out what it all means. But it takes quite a goodly bit of effort.

While I erase the board, I usually console myself with the thought that I can enunciate plurals, possessives, and don't screech to a halt at the phonemes on either end of my name. And I don't blink when I rattle off things like, "Take out your notebook," or "Write your name."

Heh.

What worked with today's classes was walking to the back, kneeling down at the biggest, densest guy's desk, tugging on his shirt and saying, "What is your name?" He invariably looked relieved when I wrote his name and nickname, and it snowballed. In every class. At least twenty minutes of, "What is your name? What is your nickname? Okay, write this. No, write this. This is your name, written in English. Understand?"

Umm. Okay.

See, my boss hinted that my next test needs to be a fill-in-the-blank test.

1: who has time to grade just under a thousand such tests?

2: who wants to create a test that will look good officially but allow all students to pass?

3: how does one teach to such a test without falling into prohibitions against such acts?

4: How does a test make both the student who can't write his name and the student who's fluent as a smartass look equally successful?

And I have to produce these results in two weeks, after one class meeting?

Umm. Okay.

What my name, teacher?

What my name, Teacher?

I've been giving pre/post tests. I try not to take it hard while grading: 20-24 out of 50 is most common, some push into the 30s, many are in the low teens; the worst was a student who marked 12 answers, of which 3 were correct—so, is that technically a 25%? I tell myself it's to mark progress, so low scores are a good thing; the students scoring in the 40s will be harder to keep engaged than the students in the 28s.

I do sometimes wonder about things though, because there is a constant background murmur of Thai. It's like the smell of fish sauce or durian, or maybe the humidity: sure, try to fight it, but if it's that problematic, you're better off going home. Given my American predilections, were I to be cheating and talking with friends about the test, I'd make damn sure to be talking to the smartest people in class. So why are there still so few “passing” grades?

So I'm sitting in the front of the class after distributing the test and instructing the students to write their names and nicknames on top of the answer sheets. There's always a little commotion while they confirm the instructions, and after that subsides I start shusshing them. But there was a greater than usual hum that built into a knot of boys walking up to the front. (It should be noted that boys of this age are the chattiest members of the Thai population.)

One boy, very small and dark, held out his answer sheet.

I was a little confused and said, “That's for you to do, okay? Fill out the boxes.”

He shook his head and held his pen on the sheet. Then he grabbed his shirt.

It took a few seconds for one of his friends to say, “What my name, Teacher, what my name?”

Blink. Blink. Without a perceptible change in the conversation, the room went very, very quiet. What my name teacher? Do I address the speaker—what's HIS name? Do I address the boy asking the question—what's my name, teacher? If I do that, which I should, how on earth do I confront prompting someone to ask, 'what's my name?'

I take too long and the boy is tugging at his shirt. I realize he's pointing out his name, embroidered in Thai script.

Here's the rub: the poor kid has worked up the cajones to come up and ask me to write his name because he can't write it in English, and his friends aren't faring much better. The best he can do is point at his name, because he doesn't know how to ask, “How do you spell Sawarithaporn in English?”

And I'm equally worthless with the Thai, without having a knot of friends to help me say, “what your name?”

Who's ignorant and who's just dumb?

“What is your name?” in a slow, enunciated teacher voice.

A flurry of Thai.

He says something that gets buried under an avalanche of, “He name......!” No telling which of the 15 versions of something incomprehensible to my farang tongue is the boy's name, much less what he's actually saying as he retreats further into himself.

“What? What? ALL OF YOU GO SIT DOWN AND START YOUR TEST!

“Now, what is your name?”

“Patawataromikukowikut.”

“What?”

He repeats it.

{I know I sound crass and as a teacher I should know his name, but this is the second time I've seen him, and most of my other thousand students. As a colleague said, with twenty some classes of fifty-some students, you get to know the good ones, the bad ones, and the prettiest girls.}

“What is your nickname?”

“Nickname So,” he says.

“Okay. Here, write, S-O, like this.”

But he's worried. He points to the board, to his shirt, “Name Pawasuperunpronouncible.”

“Don't worry, So, just write So. And your number. What is your student number?”

Another deer in headlights look, and the pretty one who sits in front whispers to him.

Encounters with the Thai

He's the guy I met in the back of a songtau rather late at night, the guy who was very happy to meet someone who could help him with English.

He's also the guy who came banging on my door after I had already sacked out.

Enthusiasm: that's a good sign, given that the stories I've heard about private English students generally entail either, "I had to keep reminding myself to keep my hands off" or, "But they all just sort of peter off anyway, so don't get too invested."

He called 15 minutes late to say he'd be there in 15 more minutes.

He said he wanted help with medical terms, so I had a scripted plan that began with my payment.

He showed up with a friend, the one driving the motorbike, and the first question he asked, once introductions were made and a scratch pad was found, was if I could give his buddy a C-note for gas to get home.

"No, I won't give your friend gas money. You can, but I won't."

Slurring through stutters: "But I don't have money. I bought two beers--one for him and one for you, see?" He holds up a can of the cheapest beer available in Thailand. "Here, you drink."

"I don't drink when I teach."

The friend leaves.

"So, how do you pan on paying me?"

"Please write, I don't understand. "

"You need to give me money."

"But I have you beer."

"Right, but pay? Money? Baht? For me?"

"You write."

PAY ME

"I have you beer, see?"

"I do not drink. I am teacher, and you pay teacher. Later, I not teach, I drink. I have beer with you, but no drink."

Owl eyes.

He hands me a manual of prescription drugs.

"You translate, see?"

Much flipping through pages.

Anxiolytics.

"You translate. Write Thai, okay?"

"For free?"

"I give you beer."

*The Look.*

He opens the beer and downs it in two slurps.

"I cannot write Thai, and I will not work for free."

"No, see? I bring you beer, see?" He sticks a new straw in the can, shakes the can. "See? I bring you beer."

An hour later, after someone came upstairs and woke him up so he could resume pleading at my door, I tried to escape by barging straight through.

Too bad my legs no longer have an escape-worthy spring.

In the end, he suckered into sympathy and I rewrote the medical terms into, "heart," "lungs," "anti-pregnant" type terms.

"No, no,no, you translate for me, see? Con, concertives!"

"I did, see? Contraceptive. You can look it up, okay?"

"Okay. Now we're done. I do not work for free."

And I walked off. He was staggering bad enough that he couldn't keep up.

I was after dinner, so I went to the sans-steam steam-tray cart.

"You are teacher, no?"

It was a gaunt older than dirt guy without many teeth.

"You are teacher, no? Srithammarat, right? Spirit, AMC!"

I manage to keep my face mainly blank while I nod.

"Me too! You come, have drink with wife and me. One drink, you have tea, is okay!"

30 minutes into the conversation, the erstwhile student staggered past and spotted me, then staggered up.

Somehow, the couple who'd been retired for fifteen and twenty-five years (her and him) lost most of that age. He went into a tirade. She snapped something. I was cringing and scared, and I was far below the line of fire.

The student left near to tears.

Glory be to longtime teachers.

"Yes, I am."

On eating and expectations

Since coming to Thailand, I've resolved to take things at their appearance and not question further. It's what I saw the students do: if someone's pretty, call them pretty; if someone's fat, call them fat; if someone's tall, call them tall (and anyone over here HAS to operate on about six personalities, so they can legitimately be referred to in the plural). I still have an exaggerated blink when I see "pretty," "beautiful" or "GORGEOUS!" and hear the face spouting some dude's voice, but I'm getting better with it.

Still, I'm stopped by one of the guys in the Isaan family who run the cart I frequent for dinner. It's to the point that I can smile, wave, sit down, and they bring a spicy salad something, a little something of soup, a little cooked veggie, a bit of cooked meat, and maybe one more if I say I'm hungry. Two daughters bring the food, smiling as they say what it is: something special for today, but with long roots in Thai cookery, is the general rule.

But there's this guy, the oddball nephew. He's about my size--really, we could swap clothes--but he has at least 20 kilos on me. He's lean like a street-tough cat, not like a model, not like he's been to hell and back, and just scrappy. Pick a fight, doesn't matter the opponent, pick a fight to fight, and win or lose, it's a helluva good time trying to wale the tar out of each other.

But then, here he is in a pastel green polo with a pink Playboy Bunny embroidered on the front and emblazoned across all of the back, wearing a flowered apron from which hang keys to a Hello Kitty scooter. It screams for something to be said.

But then the arm that he (or one of his friends) tattooed with swastikas is reaching into the jar of peppers to grab a handful for your padkingkai, and somehow it just doesn't seem right to say anything.

Of course, I didn't say anything when I went exploring, and it proved crippling.

It's a place I've noticed innumerable times and thought, "I should stop," but it took a while to work up the courage. They have a couple of carts lined with steam trays (no steam) full of sundry non-farang sorts of dishes. Most everything is a yellow or green curry with the distinctive, sour stank of Southern Thai curry. (Note: in this context, sour does not mean the smell of rice wine vinegar or the taste of lemon; instead, think, "better toss this salmon fillet, it's getting pretty sour [i.e. gone two stages past rank].)

But I'm not going to be one of those farangs like they expect my skinny ass to be, which is confirmed when I ask for a plate of rice and I point to what I take to be a curry of shrimp and lentils, what I'm almost sure is sweet-braised pork belly, and a complete gamble: it's a yellowish curry with what looks like cauliflower florets. Alas, there is much twittering over the last one--a bad sign where farangs are concerned--and it turns out to be spicy riverfish eggsacks. I can't tell whether they mean catfish or lungfish--either are on the cart in fried form--but it seems like a good time to shut down the senses and work the mouth with a smile while the dozen patrons and half-dozen proprietors watch the lone farang sit to eat the plate of food.

Which he does.

To great intestinal distress.

In America, when you wonder about something, you look at someone who's eating the same and think, "see, he's healthy, so it'll be okay for me."

Maybe one day I could do that in Thailand, but that would mean acclimating my gut to half-fermented seafood stewed in coconut milk and enough spices to bore out a diesel train engine. And as cool as it would be to hang with such locals, how on earth could it possibly be worth it?

So I'll trust the guy who sports a flower apron and swastika tattoos. (And his ordinary wardrobe, which would be utterly unremarkable in a seedy roadhouse or desert biker bar, makes me disinclined to reference the swastika as a traditional symbol of luck.) He's been good to me thus far, and even though he's threatening with tom-yam-cowfoot, at least he's seen me eat enough horseshoe crabs, pickled crabs, fermented pickles, fistfuls of peppers, and plateloads of sundry whatnots to know that I'm not just another soft and spoiled farang if I shy away from something.

And for some reason, that's important.

Thoughts on teaching in Thailand

Somehow, it's not about the teaching, or at least not about learning. Expectations, learning outcomes, and standards are copied from elsewhere. As are tests. And going into the semester, everyone knows everyone will pass.

Here's where I make a point of not calling it a racket. It's just known and accepted coming in that everybody will pass because the teacher will have taught a test the students are already familiar with, hitting each and every point in turn, and if the students don't pass the first time, they will do some sort of penance (hold that thought) before receiving a retest or grade correction. And this will happen after final testing, so a good teacher is one who turns in final grades and goes home.

Here's where it gets weird (at least for me). Say I've taught my way through the following exchange: "What is your favorite subject?" "My favorite subject is [English]." "Why do you like [English]?" "Because it's {fun}."

My test, which must be multiple choice, would use the same principles applied to a slightly different situation: "What is your [favorite, best, grossest name] food?" "[My, Your, His, The] favorite food is fried rice." "Why [do you, you, he, not] like fried rice?" "[Because, After, For, Why] it's delicious."

Such a test question would be an utter failure on my part. Education here is not cognition, comprehension, application; education is rote repetition. And it doesn't matter what preconceptions, expectations, or biases I bring in, that's just how it is. Asking for anything else is forcing the students to fail.

Return to penance: last term, while visiting my new digs during the study week before finals, I couldn't really figure out some of the stuff I was seeing: most of a classroom in the hallway, lined up on their knees, filling out tests on each other's backs; clustered around a teacher's desk, again on knees, drilling answers; lined up outside the classroom getting caned on various locations.

*DING DING* these are the students who did not pass the pretest. *WHACK!* Just imagine what happens to those who have to re-take the final. Naturally, our darlings in the English Programme did not receive such public penance: their parents have enough money for their children's shame to be private. But in the Regular Program, the public shame is an important motivator.

Assuming that actual teaching is a sneaky sort of underhanded inclusion, inferences line up:

This is why Thailand is a great place for the backpacking party-hoppers.

It is also why there is such a high turnover of certified and qualified teachers.

And why I've so enjoyed the RP--a twofold reason.

On the one hand, it is the most basic entry-level position, the meat grinder designed to ferret out people like I was last term. The classes are big and loud and wild and there is little actual expectation of a farang being able to accomplish much, and the honesty does me well, or at least a helluva lot better than the appearance-based expectations found elsewhere. It was hard, or it would've been had there not been so many other issues going on, to come home, look in the mirror, and say, "I am a music teacher" when I knew damn well that 95% of my students couldn't read music.

Now, I am under no pretense of teaching content: grammar, vocabulary, and other mechanical issues are taught in the English classes. I have explicit orders not to go there, so I don't have to worry about the students actually understanding the wretched grammatical vagaries that took a few hours of study before I could teach every semester.

I have a set of learning outcomes and a pre-post test that dictate what I teach, so it's not about creating a killer syllabus and then making sure everyone passes.

What little content I have consists of generally pre-existing knowledge that most of the students have already seen on tests. Otherwise, my job is to find new and exciting ways to get the students speaking English. I'm under intense scrutiny based on my personal history, but otherwise I get the impression it would be a, "Okay, go have fun, we'll see you if you make it to the other side!" type job.

I like that the pressure is internal. Such is my ideal situation, because when someone says, "YOU MUST PERFORM OPTIMALLY!" my automatic reaction is to shut down in the face of the expectation that I am not, have not been, and need someone yelling at me to motivate me to do my job; trust me and I'll grind to the bone for ways to excel.

Hmm, I've gotten so worked up I've lost the other reason. I think it amounted to the nature of my job: on paper, my job is to make sure the students can pass the multiple choice test that outlines a basic conversation. Absolute success would mean, officially, that the head of the school could come up to any of my students and have the typical Thai-farang conversation: what's your name, can you eat spicy food, what will you do next? Where I can excel, where I can sink my retentive teacher fangs, is in the sound of their speech. Which is also about the only thing I can offer in the company of a faculty who've studied grammar and mechanics extensively.

So at the end of the day, if I walk home after hearing even one student say, "What is it" instead of "whad id id" I've done some actual teaching, and compromising my own ideals and expectations is not an excuse to shy from the mirror. And that's pretty cool, because it's some of the most enjoyable teaching I've ever found.

An active imagination....

The problem with an active imagination is that it takes its best cues when you really, really wish it'd just switch off, i.e. after barking your ankle and then having to walk through knee-deep flood waters that teem with visible live, reek with swamp and sewer water, and, and, GACK! Can't go there!

More doctor stories

I can understand it, especially after spending an hour in a standing-room-only waiting room. Most of the people seemed associated with the H1N1 outbreak, but a goodly number had parasitic sort of screaming or toxically-yellow-faced illnesses I'd rather not think about. Still, there's something disconcerting about meeting one on one with a doctor who's wearing an anti-viral surgical mask. Really? Am I that toxic? Or is your medicine just that weak?

He looked at my chart and turned to his computer. As I scratched my food, I saw him looking up "Malabsorption" on Wikipedia. Then he read up on "Protein Losing Enteropathy." Really?

After he read through the rest of my chart, he looked at me and said, "Nothing wrong with you. Everything works good. Go home, we have sick people.

Unfortunately, pushing past that becomes a matter of face: were I to point out my current weight and ask him to classify it as normal, as nothing wrong, I would be making him look bad. This we cannot do.

When I hinted about being too skinny, he said, "you in Thailand; is only little below normal for Thai."

I didn't blow a guffaw in his face, but it was tempting.

Once the flooding abates, off to greener medical grounds, I guess.

On Legs

Legs are legs. By the end of the summer hiking season they're wiry and strong. On curvier sorts, they're lythe and beautiful. And they are conveyance up mountains, across countries, through cities, to meetings, from chance encounters, through throngs and markets and fields, they are the contact point with the earth enroute to life. Maybe they attract attention with cool scabs, but otherwise my legs are as intrusive as breathing: present, powerful for their size, and generally an unconscious tool of life.

Or they were.

On September 19th, I walked up a four story building in the morning and then again in the afternoon. Between, I walked up and down the stairs outside the library--the stairs where I tried to fly--three or four times.

What I wonder is whether I was more impressed by walking that far and climbing that much or by the absurdity of such pissant efforts being significant.

But it's the first time I'd been able to do that in a very long time.

Backtrack.

It starts around the ankles because the feet never drain; each has a swollen sack of fluid like a gel insert, but floating on the top, distending the tan lines from my sandals, giggling and disorienting every step--ever try to walk with waterballoons in your shoes? At night, I wrap them as tight as I can with ace bandages, but the bandages mainly make my toes swell and worsen the sores burned in by the camphor and peppermint in medical grade Tiger Balm.

But the ankles, they get insidious. Sometimes, in the morning, after sleeping with my legs on a stack of pillows on top of a duffel bag, my ankles would drain to almost normal size. Even so, the ankles filled up first.

You don't feel it, any more than you feel blood circulating, but suddenly your ankles are stiff and thick as though they had just been worked extraordinarily hard except that you've done nothing beyond wake up and shower. And instead of being stiff from an abundance of lactic acid, they are flooded with lymph and swollen stuck in their own juices.

It slowly creeps up from the ankles. It's not painful, just a realization that my legs, too, have giggling waterballoon sleeves that will neither drain nor pop, that just swell and stiffen and stretch the skin taut and pink and make me wonder what it takes to get stretch marks--what do people do to themselves if the roadkill hog skin on my legs isn't rippling into scar tissue? And it bottlenecks at the ankles, stretching socks to bruising tightness, blowing the straps on my Chacos to the full extension (really), stretching the leather on my Danskos to gaping.

Stateside, I bought women's shoes whenever possible because my feet had so little volume. Whoda thunk I'd stretch a pair of Danskos until the leather uppers are stretched to ripping?

Nothing insidious or subtle about the knees as they swell stiff and puff into strangely bulging and dimpled things I remember from my grandmother's eighty-plus legs (although she had me beat in the varicose department). Doughy dimples on the back side are almost cute in a grotesque way--babies have such dimples. When I lay on my back and elevate my legs for an hour or so while some of the fluid drains, the infantilization is hard to ignore: it's my afternoon leg-up time, and all that's missing is someone to bring milk and cookies and the accompanying sense of wellbeing.

At work, I sit with my feet on a desk. In this culture, it's about the equivalent of sitting bare-assed on someone's Thanksgiving dinner place-setting, but I have only to point at the fleshy masses bulging out and around my shoes to explain why it's important for me to keep my feet up.

Tests and tests and tests pass: a doctor eventually recommends a university hospital in a town half a day's drive away. Meantime, I'm left with "protein losing enteropathy," and good luck with it.

I gave up on water. Juice. Soup. Salt. One soda. One coffee.

One day, I barked my shins--a common occurrence when your legs are as nimble and graceful as giant carnival prizes--hard enough to crack the skin open. No blood came out. Just a flow of clear fluid. Enough to run down my legs and soak my shoes. It was such a relief I kept the scabs open by scrubbing them with napkins a few times per day. And with such a volume of outflow--my shoes and socks would be soaked within an hour of standing upright--there wasn't much danger of infection.

At a pharmacist's recommendation, I started taking huge doses of protein: half a dozen eggs with whole milk in the morning and evening with supplemental protein shakes noon and night. I concentrated my diet on protein: easy to do for someone who's sick of rice when rice is as prevalent in Thai food as corn byproducts are in America.

My food pyramid inverted strangely. A colleague helped me calculate my nutritional requirements: someone my size and weight needs 1800 calories per day. To lose the amount of weight I had lost since arriving in country, I'd been operating on a daily debt of 1500 calories. My mega-protein diet consisted of approximately 2000 calories of protein, 1500 of fat, and under 1000 carbs, depending on the day's munchies. It was enough to stabilize. Barely. Provided "stable" also "level but teetering badly."

But the big thing is the legs.

Stable means the legs start to work again.

It was a shock to wake up with my legs back--real legs, like I used to have, without the waterballoon casing. It'd been a while since I'd looked at them--or myself--in the mirror. Actually looked.

Here were these stringy little twiggy things, the legs of which I was once so proud. Scarred, yes, but not the scrapes and scratches of summertime hiking. Scarred with the sores and pustules, with big angry lines from the drain slits I'd irritated open, and otherwise pale and pasty--but no stretch marks, somehow--I kept thinking about walking-corpse prisoners rescued from tropical incarcerations.

If I reached around the widest part of either ankle, the fingers on my right hand would almost touch. If I reached around the narrow part just up my shin, the shorter fingers on my left hand overlapped almost a full knuckle.

At any other time, it would've been embarrassing. I had to plot an extra three minutes into my commute from office to class because it involved 22 stairs, and descending a staircase involved clutching the rail with one hand while lowering the right foot, establishing contact, and then lowering the left. Call it meditative: there is no thinking or doing anything else. And when I tried, I went flying down the staircase.

Call that the end of things: the third accident, no more, I survived, now I can get back to trying to live. And it's easy with the newfound significance of focus: there is no walking and talking, walking and chewing gum, walking across town while reading (was that only a year ago?). Walking is the careful selection of a landing pad, placement of the shoe, a slow transfer of weight, and then a repetition.

I decided I would be better off in Reiki land than doing my morning walking meditation, given that I now MUST be fully conscious of each step. And with that consciousness comes the pleasure of stepping at all, of moving through the world, of being present in the world, here in Thailand.

Eggs have a funny role, something beyond the daily dozen. I will swear by the Korean Farms eggs that Tesco imports after a flat survived intact after skidding across the road in the front basket of my bike. I do not think about the chickens who might be laying the eggs—if humans receive treatment as bad as is reported, I just can't consider the poor chickens—but then I discovered a produce market where local eggs cost about half as much. And maybe the local conditions are no better than those in Korea, but at least the money's staying local, right?

Along with straw mushrooms, wood ear mushrooms, galangal, beautiful tomatoes and garlic chives, I bought a small bag of eggs: about a dozen brown eggs in a liter-sized bag with a rubberband sealing off a bubble of air.

And I am enjoying the sensation of having navigated the market and once again feeling somewhat competent, somewhat alive, taking pleasure at being the only farang in the place and not just buying apples and grapes, when I get T-boned.

A Yamaha Mio came screaming through traffic, weaving from the far side of the road, and nailed my right footpeg, which ripped off the crankcase before the impact diffused on my right calf. I felt the leg crush and resolved to be shipped home where physical therapy might get me walking again one day, but there was a religious moment and I hit the ground with the leg intact. And that's all I can really say.

I don't think I need to further elaborate in this venue: y'all's been through enough of my misery.

And then a vacation, which began with regular foot-up time, many hours a day, and ended with day-long explorations, stumping around with a half-assed shuffle that felt glorious. To be able to spend almost all of a day upright, walking, present in the world, engaged with life, in Thailand!

After months of supplementary protein and vitamins, living the most sedentary life I ever have, I am strong enough to teach seven back-to-back classes. My limbs are still covered with a web of protruding veins, but now there are stringy bits of muscle perceptible on the tendons. I no longer pound my daily dozen eggs, and I no longer have edemas. Many of the scars, what my boss called the Thailand Tattoos: a half-moon on my pelvis from sliding face-first across a road, the moons rubbed into my shoulder, skid marks on my elbows and legs, but there are still the divots where skin without functioning nerves outline the tread of a front tire, the cylinder head of a Honda motor, and those scars, left behind by the divine force that mended my leg, weep. I'll be sitting, standing, walking, any time, any temperature, and I feel a drip running down my leg. I'm getting used to it, but it's bizarre to stop and see clear fluid seeping out of a shiny, purple scar and condensing into a drip and sometimes a stream. Still, how glorious to feel

Rejoice! I'm back to square one in so many senses, but here I am. I am here, right back where I started. But I've already made the trip to hell and back, and I know I don't want to do it again. I might not be singlehandedly supporting a small-scale chicken farmer, but I know how to do it. I carry antibiotic ointment and rubbing alcohol in every bag I own. I know how and where to get a massage, and that I must warn the masseur in advance, which I know how to do in Thai: “big pain, right here. Motorcycle. Understand?” To universal laughs: farangs and motorcycles, ha!

The twiggy wonders themselves.

Believe it or not, the photo below is of me after rebounding almost ten kilos. Next trick will be putting on another 30.

On flooding, laundry, and hope for more

Nakhon Flood

During morning assembly, school was closed for today and tomorrow. I had grand plans, but I sat down with a book, a jar of peanut butter, and a box of local-grade Ritz crackers, and suddenly it's dark and dinnertime.

And I don't even feel guilty.

I still managed to get up at 6, out the door at 6.45, print off and get approval on

came home, grabbed my camera, took some shots, and then tracked down a laundry service.

I want to say more on that later, but, well, might as well: last time I lived here, they wrote my room number on every garment using a permanent marker. Not too happy about that. Plus a plastic bag cost about 150, which seemed more like a room-service price. So I went for a walk down the street and found a jolly sort of matron with racks and racks of laundry hanging in her entryway/parking area/driveway/neighbor's driveway/street. I asked, through gestures, if she would do my wash, and she started yelling for her kids. Students at AMC.

"Oh, Teacher Harry Potter! Yes, she do laundry for you!"

So for a flat fee of 450 I can bring her as much laundry as I want, and she'll have it done the next day. Two days, tops.

I guess I'd rather not have my tie-dyed or Superman boxers hanging outside a student's window, but then, well, what the hell. Beats having the same given to the student living in my old room, right?

So there we go. What a productive day.

Even better, I have tomorrow off, too. And here's hoping for enough rain to close school Friday without doing any further flood damage.

"Teacher, teacher, I came to school in a boat!"

Very tempted to bust out a camera with the new, protective umbrella. Then the image of the sucker collapsing under the downpour.... bad news.

More on the rainy season

I have become an umbrella owner.

When I was in third grade, I went for a walk down a road in rural Bavaria with my mom and great-great uncle. It was a typical (spring) day in Germany: gray with intermittent showers, and Uncle Alfred brought along an umbrella. For a mountain kid, an umbrella is a novel toy: we have coats, mittens, all sorts of protective garments, but we just don't carry umbrellas. I discovered that if you spin around real quick the umbrella feels really strong, and that if you spin even quicker, the umbrella pops inside out. And I very quickly discovered that you do not conduct such experiments with Uncle Alfred's umbrella.

I have had an aversion to the things ever since.

Well, up until last summer, traveling through urban Europe with stuff I didn't want to get soaked in the afternoon showers. At that point, an umbrella struck me as a handy enough tool to make me not resent using one, and actually wish for one here in Thailand, where I have a commute of about 3 long city blocks without much shelter, and where I carry a computer and papers and run around hither and tither once I'm on campus.

So I seized a temporary lull in the downpour to get to town and buy an umbrella.

I did not buy one with a sword in the handle. (Don't worry, I looked. Something about rust.)

I bought the only telescoping model I could find without Disney characters or Hello Kitty emblazoned all over it.

In retrospect, especially since they were the same low price from the same bad factory, I should've bought one of the (unlicensed) Disney models, just out of principle.

I was at a crossroads, and rather than cross via the diagonal, I decided to cross via two of the four streets; lately, especially after dark, scooter captains have been lifting their feet out of the spray and ducking their heads against any oncoming precip while exhibiting an especial sense of urgency to arrive at their destinations, no matter what the obstacles.

It started raining as I crossed the first street, so I opened my new, blue, telescoping protect-o-shield.

It was one of those rains that starts out like the punishingly humid air condensing into a stupidly-pervasive shower: it's not that aggressive, but it feels like the air you inhale turns into water as soon as it enters your windpipe.

Now imagine that air column stacking up about three miles, maybe four, and the entire lot condensing at once: while it starts out pleasant enough, the shower soon turns into a pummeling of fist-sized grenades hurtled at terminal velocity from the frigid heights.

Cheap, telescoping umbrellas telescope before collapsing entirely.

A spacesuit would probably protect against a soaking, as would an Arctic-calibre drysuit, but that's about it. And neither of those alleviates the proportionally punishing weight of a heavenly firehose spraying full bore from on high.

The greatest irony, though, is that it's downright chilly. Consider that 70 degree water sucks heat as quickly as 40 degree air; then consider what happens when the air plummets from 68 with 98% humidity and a steady breeze to 60 with a 45 degree downpour and howling winds. I wouldn't say anything, given that I no longer have the mass to judge temperature, but the Thai people are walking around in puffy jackets with fleece pullovers and silk scarves.

When I first touched down, I would've said it's just shy of hell freezing over. But here we go, welcome to Thailand.

Love it.