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.