Mama Kelele Says

Back With Nary A Sound

2011-08-25T18:08:00.000-04:00

Yes!

I found my way back to San Francisco and the joy of love in a place called home. The quick rundown goes:

April: Hauled 25 boxes and a New York-weary ass back to the West Coast. Invaded the home of my lovely and generous friend Jen, who let me stay with her in Oakland for three months. Can I recommend Amtrak for all your cross-country shipping needs? It's $0.39 a pound. They don't make deals like this anymore!

May: Internship at UCSF going full speed ahead. All HIV, all the time.

June: Days spent lapping around San Francisco's best outdoor pool. Weekends spent pedaling through the hills of Oakland and the summer fogs of Marin County. Browner and browner I become.

July: Internship ends. Moved to an apartment in San Francisco. Engaged in full-blown love affair with the city. Slowly getting back my drawering mojo (stay tuned, new drawerings to come).

August: Funemployment and all its trappings.

Past bouts of joblessness have gifted me with handy bits of wisdom. Schedules, lists and spreadsheets are a big help, like spoons in a mashed potato food fight.

My latest plot to escape the terrible traffic noise outside my window is to bring my laptop to different libraries to work. They've renovated a lot of the branches in the last five years, so most are bright and modern. Sidenote: These photo galleries of ribbon-cutting ceremonies for various branch re-openings are fun and revealing. Former Mayor and douchey hottie Gavin Newsom pretties up the scenery, as usual, and where else but San Francisco would there be lion dancers at almost every event?

I've been working at my neighborhood library, but it's time to explore farther reaches. They say your senses dull as you age, but my nose can't seem to stop sniffing the complex subtleties of the heavily scented homeless people who hang out in city libraries. Maybe a trip to a different location will yield fewer aromas than my Park branch, only a block away from the malodorized lives of Haight Ashbury.

Back on the east coast...

Something Nice Happened in New York.

Seven Years Of...

2011-01-24T00:42:00.002-05:00

“Break your mirrors! Yes, indeed — shatter the glass. In our society that is so self-absorbed, begin to look less at yourself and more at each other. Learn more about the face of your neighbor, and less about your own.

...You’ll get more happiness and contentment out of counting your friends than counting your dollars. You’ll get more satisfaction from having improved your neighborhood, your town, your state, your country and your fellow human beings than you’ll ever get from your muscles, your figure, your automobile, your house, or your credit ratings.

You’ll get more from being a peacemaker than a warrior...Break the mirrors!

Be peacemakers of the community, and you and your family will be happy.”

– Sargent Shriver, 1915-2011

Sargent Shriver was a career public servant and American politician who was appointed by his brother-in-law and then-President John F. Kennedy to, "Let the word go forth that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans:..To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves…”

By August of the same year, 1961, Shriver had started the Peace Corps program and shipped off the first group of volunteers to Ghana.

I imagine that, true to the spirit of Peace Corps then and now, there was plenty of well-intentioned bumbling and headless chicken flapping accompanying this noble step towards greater international goodwill and cross-cultural understanding. The program has worked out a lot of kinks and paternalistic undertones since the early days, like no longer sending new trainees to the ghettos of DC to expose them to "African culture," but Peace Corps has also in many ways evolved into yet another grinding government bureaucracy. There are deep inefficiencies and heartbreakingly missed opportunities. But while it has major problems as a development agency, Peace Corps stands alone as the only program that gives Americans a chance to break our mirrors.

Peace Corps' first goal is to provide technical development assistance to developing countries who ask for it, and like most NGOs and development agencies, it does a mediocre job at best. We'll not get into that for now. It is far better at its second and third goals: to share American culture with the people of host countries around the world, and to share host country cultures with the people of America. I think those are reasons enough for its existence. (And for more funding. Ahem, Congress. How about some good news for us in March?)

An obituary in the New York Times about Sargent Shriver's passing last week is what sent me googling his name in the first place. What has been more interesting than his life and work has been coming across all the purported ideals behind the Peace Corps program.

Shriver said, with typical American grandiosity, “The Peace Corps represents some, if not all, of the best virtues in this society. It stands for everything that America has ever stood for. It stands for everything we believe in and hope to achieve in the world.”

Seriously, Sarge, maybe not quite everything. But Peace Corps has always been an agent of youthful idealism and satisfyingly nebulous concepts like world peace and friendship. It has also been, more concretely, an outlet for volunteerism, public service, and community giving, all ideals that are no longer high on the priority list for most Americans or the politicians they elect to represent them, if they ever were at all. Informally, Peace Corps has further been a beacon for anyone with restless wanderlust, a sense of adventure, brimming curiosity, possibly a twinge of hero complex, and lots of energy for hanging out with lots of different kinds of people.

An investment banker friend once asked how being in Kenya had changed me. "I now view the world in terms of communities," I said. She gave me a blank look, but paid for my outrageously expensive sushi dinner.

Communities are the organizing principle that I see every society designed around. Ten years ago my trajectory in the world was focused on a sun named Justina and planets called job, hobbies, friends, partners, vacations, parental disapproval and an underlying existential dread about some void I couldn't put my finger on. I was like most people I saw around me -- too self-absorbed, too concerned about acquiring personal status symbols and cultivating an impressive outward identity for others to even notice that we each belong to a community, and most of us belong to many communities.

But it's not enough just to belong. Since coming back from Kenya, I'm deeply convinced that we each have a role and an obligation to participate and engage in our communities. I'm also deeply convinced that few people truly value this participation if it requires an actual sacrifice of their time, money or comfort zone.

I don't fully agree with Shriver, though. The mirror metaphor isn't complete. Sure, break mirrors. I think what we're really striving for when we learn about our neighbors' faces, though, is learning more about our own. Looking in the mirror doesn't reveal as much about ourselves as looking into our neighbors' living room windows. Not that I'm suggesting being a peeping tom. But.

There are so many things I've learned about myself through learning about Kenyans, and Thai people, and my parents' culture, and unemployed men in economically depressed countries and New York neighborhoods drinking outside shops and harrassing women walking by. Ultimately, when you've started to understand people seemingly so different from yourself, you've suddenly started to understand yourself a little better as well.

I recently read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, a brilliant and exhaustively researched account of a refugee Hmong family resettled to California and their struggles with the American health care system. The author, Anne Fadiman, at one point says that she now admires the Hmong more and idealizes them less than she did when she first met them.

There are a lot of things left unspoken in that comment. The frustration that comes with dealing with people who don't have the same values as you do. Who don't communicate the same way. Who don't value your status in society the same way because of your gender. Who think less of you because you're not the same race as they are.

Idealizing a culture is easy when you've never been challenged by the things that aren't beautiful and colorful and exotic and musical and mysterious about it. Admiring a culture once you've been challenged - and defeated - by the unbeautiful things is something that doesn't come automatically. It takes compassion, for one thing. For me it has also taken a lot of time, a lot of distance, and a lot of reflection.

Most Peace Corps volunteers return home with a solidifed commitment to communities as well as a clearer idea of how to build and work in them. When Obama visited Kenya in 2006, when he was a Senator from Chicago and I was in the second year of my service, he said that he was impressed by the incredible sense of community that he saw in the country.

It was supposed to be a compliment, but by then I had figured out that communities aren't perfect social structures. A community is formed around something that all members have in common, but also excludes people who don't meet those requirements. Those requirements are often rooted in being born into a certain religion, tribe, ethnic group, social class or gender. And exclusion frequently comes in the form of institutionalized discrimination, active persecution or violence. I no longer idealize the concept of communities, but I admire places where people value theirs.

I wouldn't trade my two years in Peace Corps for anything. If I had the money I'd go back to visit in a heartbeat which, if you knew me then or if you followed my Kenya blog, was something I was incapable of saying for years after I returned.

People told me before I shipped off to Africa, "It will change you." Of course it will. Duh. Two years in a rural African village? No other foreigners around? Your naive liberal heart bleeding with sympathy for all those suffering women and children? But it doesn't change you in the ways you expect. For one thing, you stop idealizing. You get cynical and angry. And, when your heart softens again and your soul heals, your cynicism eventually turns to admiration.

It's not Peace Corps the government bureaucracy, but Peace Corps the air-drop into the bush that changes you. The program is still based on some vague notions from the era of hippie love. I mean, what does world peace look like anyway? Yet in very concrete ways volunteers bring home a new view of the planet as composed not just of atoms, but of villages.

Participating in a community becomes a lifelong pursuit. We've learned that serving and helping is rewarding, but comes with great sacrifices. Our market system doesn't reward teachers, social workers, public health experts, or anyone else who breaks mirrors. But we do it anyway, because we believe it brings us closer to being citizens of the world.

What Do You Mean You Don't Get Why I Don't Like New York?

2011-01-22T01:02:00.000-05:00

Spaces

2011-01-19T00:59:00.003-05:00

Literally and figuratively, there's not enough space in this city. It's not all that surprising that I feel like I'm constantly trying to create space in this city of tiny living spaces that I can't afford. The world around us designs the world inside us.

Most people have no space for anything except empty crap, those things that they use to fill voids in their lives because they don't have the patience or wisdom or humility to stop and look inside and figure out what's actually missing. There's only room for our things, our status symbols, our pedigrees, our photos of impressive places we've been to, hung up on the wall, posted for all to see, while the wisdom or beauty or truth was left behind because our apartments aren't big enough to fit them, because we've forgotten that the safest deposit box is within ourselves. There's no room in our lives after we've stuffed it full of Facebook status messages and checked-off goals that didn't come from an authentic place. Empty crap taking up space that should be reserved for souls that are lost and souls waiting to be found. Isn't that ironic. Empty crap taking up space. We pay so much for all this emptiness crammed into tiny spaces that we have no room left for ourselves.

---

Let it be let it be let it be let it be.

2011-01-18T23:24:00.023-05:00

This week may be the last time I'll ever see my pirate friend. I've been angry with him for the last few days. I asked him for immense courage in the face of the wound I inflicted. In hindsight, I asked him for the impossible. He said yes anyway. I knew before he did that he was lying. Who doesn't wander there sometimes? Even pirates are flawed human beings. He is who he is. He is where he is. There's nothing I can do. Give him time and give him space. Let it be.
---

I met a Pied Piper. His voice was clear like honey, his music was as red and intoxicating as poppies. His singing made me feel for brief moments the recklessness of falling in love, and how fleeting those freefalls are, where you just lose yourself in the luxury of breathing, where there's no past and no future, only the luscious present. And you realize you've just tasted opium, and you wish you'd loved it more, because a chance to love something worth loving so purely and so deeply doesn't come along very often. And you want more, not just because of what it was, but because you've already forgotten what it was like; all you remember is that you touched something elusive, and maybe that means it was divine.

Entering The Lull

2010-12-26T03:25:00.009-05:00

The week between Christmas and New Years is when a languid pace of life takes over. Everyone is fattened up and content after a month of overeating. Mine began early this year with a two-week vacation to gastronomically wealthy India in November, so I'm definitely well-padded for the winter.

About 8 years ago I came across an essay called Why We Travel by Pico Iyer, one of my favorite travel writers. I've pulled it out for another read with each trip I've taken since, to see the different ways it rings true every time I go to a faraway land. In Kenya I read it once every six months, and I remember thinking by the end of my two years that I didn't relate to Iyer's dreamy romanticized reflections at all. In fact, I found them really irritating and naive.

I realized it was because when I was in Kenya I wasn't traveling. I was living, and it was in a place called home, but not with a capital H. Being abroad was my way of life. It was foreign, but it wasn't exotic; it was exhausting. I was trying to glean resonance and relevance from an essay that wasn't referring to what I was doing.

I reread the essay when I came back from India a few weeks ago, and was one again fully enraptured by the time I got to the final paragraph. I don't suffer from any illusion that my travels are anything but vacations -- escapes from my New York reality, a way to shake myself awake from the sleepwalking I do to the beat of a mind-numbing routine in a soul-asphyxiating city, literally forcing as much distance between me and Here because Here can be seen much more clearly from way over There. My travels are for realigning my brain, rebooting my soul, upgrading my standards, walking along the perimeter to check that there are no breaches in the boundaries, and all of these things are only possible because travel for me creates a change in scenery, instead of being the norm.

I don't insist on "roughing it" for the sake of roughing it when I travel, whatever that even means. I can't stand those who judge fellow travelers who seem at first and only glance to be surrounding themselves with a luxury or two that resemble home, like tickets on an overnight bus that is less likely to fatally plunge over a cliff because it's not built from Frankenstein spare parts discarded by wealthy countries 15 years ago. I've tried to be a hero and discovered, like all wisefolks, that there's no such thing as a heroic tourist, only an insecure one running away from failures at home, armed with a list of ways to prove something meaningless to himself. Thanks to Peace Corps policy, I paid my poser hero dues in Kenya risking my life riding matatus for two years, and the only thing I got out of it was the realization that I had impressed no one.

In India my friend Christi and I were trying to book bus tickets with an agent in the beautiful Rajasthani city of Udaipur. A hippie-ish American guy in his 40s started chatting us up after eavesdropping on our travel logistics. We were showered and wore clean clothes, and Christi was madeup and wore earrings. As the American guy left the shop knowing as much about us as he had when we arrived, he said helpfully, while flies buzzed around his armpits curious about the tasty things that had died under there, "You should try roughing it sometime. It's good for the soul."

I love Iyer's description of Traveler's Snobbery (an infectious disease I named myself, often acquired while away from home but not caused by any parasite, virus or bacteria), delivered with signature understated scorn:

Though it's fashionable nowadays to draw a distinction between the "tourist" and the "traveler," perhaps the real distinction lies between those who leave their assumptions at home, and those who don't: Among those who don't, a tourist is just someone who complains, "Nothing here is the way it is at home," while a traveler is one who grumbles, "Everything here is the same as it is in Cairo -- or Cuzco or Kathmandu." It's all very much the same.

The deeply unfortunate thing about travel, and meaningful life experience in general, is that the most valuable outcomes have no physical form that casual strangers can see. Wisdom, for example. Of course, true wisdom also says that it doesn't matter what casual strangers think.

My halfway-there wisdom says that when some washed up hippie-wannabe's midlife crisis decides that he's got you all figured out because you don't carry bedbugs in your Birkenstocks and tries to rescue your dead soul by suggesting you "try roughing it," wisdom would be a lot more useful as a giant fist that could punch people in the face.

Conversely, the deeply fortunate thing for me is that compassion also has no physical form whose absence casual strangers would notice.

So It Has Been Awhile

2010-12-24T03:10:00.013-05:00

Awhile since I posted. A longer while since I posted anything inspired. Apologies to any fans still out there still faithfully tapping F5 on your RSS feed. You're the die-hards. Thank you for reading.

Another year, another 365 days to reflect back upon and either decide to feel bad about not getting it just right, or to rewrite the story from a more generous point of view.

Recently I've started to suspect that my task right now is to live Groundhog's Day The Movie. Someone is making me do this until I attain a higher state of consciousness, a greater sense of peace and love and forgiveness towards myself, a more sincere acknowledgment of all that's sacred and treasured inside me.

I'm sort of pissed off about that. Let's get on with it, already. Because
1. Everyone else got the green light to proceed to Feb 3 without having to stop being their shitty selves, and
2. By the time I'm done here I'll be so stunningly amazing and beautiful (on the inside, on the inside) that there won't be anyone left for me to relate to meaningfully. Siighh. Life is rough for those of us on the path to greatness.

A sweet stranger introduced me to the poetry of Hafiz of Shiraz, a 14th century Persian poet. What strikes me most about his writing is not the profound wisdom, but the unbridled ecstasy contained in his lines. Life is all a mind game, so pass me that big turkey tray of gratitude and joy. I've gotten good at tricking myself into thinking I'm not angry, resentful and deeply bitter.

Hafiz says, "I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in the darkness, the astonishing light of your own being."

Tears, friends. Tears.

Brief Interviews With Hideous New Yorkers

2010-10-31T23:56:00.001-04:00

Okay, so most of the fascinating individuals you're about to hear from weren't actually hideous. Maybe just the young woman who walked past me this morning holding a sign in her mouth that said something apocalyptic about David and Goliath. I couldn't help it; I stared. She was holding a sign in her mouth.

Apparently she thought I was being rude. "Blah blah blah blah CUNT. Get a job," she said as she passed me, the sign temporarily extracted from her mouth.

Taxi drivers also seem to bring great joy into my life, but usually without the verbal abuse. One guy pointed to his face while giving me change and said, "Your beauty mark is nice."

"Oh," I said. "Well, thanks."

"My wife has one, too. I love it on her!"

This weekend at the farmer's market a friendly old lady came up to me, bright pink lipstick all over her face like a 3-year-old had applied it. "You should try some basil," she said. "The Italians use it."

"Oh, I see," I said, eyeing the sickly bunches wilting in the late afternoon. "Looks like they're almost sold out."

"Here, you should try this bok choy," she said. "You'll like it. It's Chinese."

Well, technically, by that logic, I should hate bok choy. Every pro-Independence Taiwanese person knows that nothing good has ever come out of that undemocratic foreign regime across the Strait, and especially not leafy greens.

My office mate the Epidemiologist recently came back from a trip to Taiwan and now has a picture of a beautiful mountain range on her desktop. One of the attendings wandered into our office and noticed the Epidemiologist's new wallpaper.

"Oh, is that picture from your trip? You went to China, right?" Doctor Smarty asked.

"No, I went to Taiwan to visit my family," the Epidemiologist said. "The picture is of a mountain in central Taiwan that I visited while I was home."

"Oh, okay," Doctor Smarty said. "So then, is that the Great Wall?"

Trick question of the day: What country is the Great Wall of China in?

Work In Progress

2010-10-12T01:25:00.001-04:00

Hey reader reader! I just set up a new blog with some recent drawerings. The template will be less painful on the eye soon.

http://iliketododrawerings.blogspot.com/

The first (and only) post is about the most beautiful man on earth. Enjoy!

Laff (and Cry) of the Day #8

2010-08-24T23:26:00.000-04:00

Art class dude: Do you work in the creative field?

Me: No...

Art class dude: Ah...you use the other side of your brain for work?

Me: No. I don't really need to use my brain for work. A monkey could do my job.

Art class dude: Ohhh I see. You must work in nonprofit.

Digging Through My Oddball Photos, Again

2010-07-30T00:18:00.001-04:00

Bellevue Hospital: Offering patients the most advanced medical technology available today

And the red star means spicy

This looks like the cock that was used to flavor the seasoning. Apparently he's not too happy about it, either.

I finally spotted a piano from the Play Me I'm Yours art installation in June. This one was in front of St. Mark's Church near Astor Place. Somehow I missed the other 59 pianos. I'm just now browsing their website and feeling sad that I didn't know about it earlier. My sheet music is somewhere under the bed, collecting dust.

...And discriminating against half breeds

Engrish: Good at stating the obvious...

Thanks for exterminating the red dragons. Now how about the giant rats?

Food Porn Chronicles: The Shakes

2010-07-29T22:52:00.001-04:00

One of the few things that I get excited about during New York's stifling hot summers spent inside greenhouse apartments is making fruit smoothies. The weather the last month or two has been straight out of Do The Right Thing, without the racial violence. Every morning I get up 15 minutes earlier to spin fruit in my mini food processor. It's the best thing in the world.

Justina's Recipe for Perfect Smoothies

fresh ripe strawberries, cut into small pieces
fresh blueberries
banana
soy milk

Freeze the cut up strawberries and blueberries the night before. I usually cut up enough fruit to last a week and keep it in a large tupperware in the freezer. In a food processor or blender, add a handful of frozen strawberries and blueberries, half a banana, and soy milk. Blend until smooth. Experiment with portions to get the right amount. Pour into a commuter coffee mug and bring on the train. Note: I freeze the fruit because my mini chopper is too small to handle ice cubes.

Variation: Watermelon, strawberries and apple juice. Don't freeze the watermelon.

Another variation: Half an avocado, 1 T condensed milk, whole milk. Don't freeze the avocado. Add ice.

Avocado shake

Another variation: Dragon fruit, blueberries, soy milk.

A word about dragon fruit: There are two kinds, the ones with white flesh and the ones with purple flesh. The purple ones are slightly more tangy, the white ones taste slightly like fresh cut grass. Neither have much of a flavor, but they are full of water, which makes them popular on hot days, especially after an overnight stint in the fridge. Last weekend I bought them for $4/lb on Canal Street. Not cheap, but I wanted to see how they would turn out in a smoothie. I'm mostly a fan of the texture created by the seeds. I prefer the purple ones but they seem less common; I only saw one stand selling them.

Purple dragon fruit

Oh, and one more thing. THIS IS THE BLUEBERRY MOMENT OF THE YEAR. I think for the next week or so blueberries will be in peak season, so keep your eyes peeled at the bodega or sidewalk fruit stand. I bought a pint at my bodega for $2 yesterday and they were perfectly large, plump and sweet. The sidewalk stands are selling them for $1.50 a pint. Stock up!

Oh God I Should Be In Bed But First

2010-07-29T01:32:00.001-04:00

So a little bit of serendipity has gotten me drawing again the last few weeks. Here are a few from the stashes. Some are actually from a year ago. All charcoal on paper.

Serendipity? I don't think I actually know what that means.

Food Porn Chronicles: Who Needs A Garburator?

2010-07-07T21:51:00.010-04:00

But first, Laff of the Day #8, as told by the Eternal Paid Volunteer Temp. He's full of good stories lately.

"This guy went down in front of the ER today. You know those elevators to the right of the entrance to the ER? He went down there.

"There were all these doctors around him, trying to help him. All these doctors, completely surrounding him, right next to the ER.

"And then I heard someone go, 'Should we call 911?'"

This being Bellevue Hospital, the comment could be interpreted two ways:

1. As an example of American robotic stupidity, the same type that makes me devour Popeye's Fried Chicken but get weepy at the thought of the nice homestay hostess at Tiger Leaping Gorge who chased down a fat hen after she asked, "Are there any vegetarians in your group? No? Okay, I go make dinner."

2. As keen insight and a prudent warning from someone who rightfully doubts the competence of Bellevue medical staff, many of whom are on NYU payroll and therefore wear those white coats with the misleading purple NYU School of Medicine patch suggesting proficiency in providing medical care.

And now, onto the porn.
---

I just got back from a long weekend in Texas. The first night home always requires getting reacquainted with the contents of the fridge. Ew, I totally forgot about these mushrooms. Also excavated from forgotten corners of the pantry and crisper: a can of chickpeas, three-month old sun-dried tomatoes, a bag of pita bread. Any normal person would enlist the help of their Garburator. Not me.

Hummus has been on my to do menu for a few weeks, and tonight seemed like the perfect occasion: another greenhouse night in the apartment (but a frigid 85 outside, with a light breeze that refuses to make its way through our windows), no love for any heat-generating appliances with the possible exception of the toaster oven, and plenty of old food to test the limits of edibility.

Sun-Dried Tomato Hummus with Mushrooms

old, sad-looking mushrooms
dried oregano
fresh garlic
1 16-oz can chickpeas
1 1/4 T tahini
juice of 1/2 lemon
olive oil
salt, pepper and chili flakes to taste
2 pitas
garnish: fresh tomato slices and watercress

Sautee mushrooms in 1 T olive oil. Season with oregano and salt. Set aside, do not drain. In a food processor, chop 2-3 cloves of garlic, chickpeas and tahini. Add olive oil and lemon juice, salt, pepper and chili. Continue processing until mixture has the consistency of mashed potatoes - or store-bought hummus. Doesn't everyone know what hummus is supposed to look like? Toast and slice pita bread, if desired. Serve hummus in a bowl, top with mushrooms and mushroom liquid from the pan. Garnish with tomatoes and watercress.

Notes: I didn't have tahini so I used 1 T peanut butter and 1/2 t sesame oil. The hummus has a slightly more Asian taste than it should, but the substitution worked in a pinch.

And of course, it was another Dark N Stormy night.

There is a background story to this meal, for those of you still reading. My mom always packs a ton of food for me to bring back to New York at the end of my visit. Yesterday, as we were leaving for the airport in Houston, she said, "How about this mochi? How about some sticky rice? How about this smoked salmon?"

"All of it," I said.

This evening I stopped at the store to pick up sandwich trimmings for the smoked salmon sandwich I was going to have for dinner. Watercress, a tomato and Laughing Cow cheese because it was on sale...sort of. The hand-written sign pointed to a stack of Laughing Cow wheels that were printed completely in Arabic, except for the part that said, "La Vache Qui Rit," the French name, and "Produced in Egypt."

For some reason, only the Arabic/French Laughing Cows were on sale, at 3 for $5. The ones printed in English with the English name were regular price.

Some interesting facts from wikipedia:

In Arabic-speaking countries (except for Egypt, apparently), it's called البقرة الضاحكة (Al-Baqara Ad-Dahika).

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is often jokingly referred to as 'La Vache qui Rit' because of his supposed resemblance to the cheese's logo.

Anyway, the point of the story is that my mom decided not to pack the smoked salmon, but I only discovered it tonight when I got home. Huge disappointment, with a lonely bunch of watercress and a tomato as collateral damage.

Food Porn Chronicles: It Was a Dark n Stormy Night

2010-06-29T22:33:00.006-04:00

So the saying goes that all anyone ever uses blogs for these days is to post pictures of their cat or whatever they happen to be eating. I guess I've been guilty of both. It's not as extreme as the San Francisco Chronicle's Jon Carroll and his cat columns, but I like to think the comparison is somewhat appropriate. Carroll is more brilliant than me, though, so he gets to be more self-indulgent than me.

But onto the blah blah blah.

Tonight's dinner was inspired by a trip to Dallas BBQ last Saturday, when it was about 140 degrees outside. It's a touristy joint with passable barbecue, but we were more interested in the frozen margaritas. My friend inhaled his large plate of steaming brisket, but I couldn't bring myself to have anything hot. Instead I had a shrimp cocktail on a bed of avocado and lettuce. Crisp, cool and horse radishy. It hit the spot.

Tonight, back in my greenhouse of an apartment, I decided it was time for Dallas BBQ shrimp cocktail, redux.

7-9 large shrimp, peeled
1 ripe avocado
1/4 red onion, minced
1/2 tomato
1-2 leaves lettuce, chopped
juice of 1 lime
salt
red chili flakes
shrimp cocktail sauce

Boil the shrimp until cooked through. Don't overcook. Combine avocado, onions, tomatoes and lime juice. Mash together until smooth with a few lumps (you've just made guacamole.) Add salt and chili to taste. Place shrimp along edge of bowl. Serve guac on top of lettuce. Makes 2 servings.

Notes: I didn't have shrimp cocktail sauce on hand, so I mixed wasabi with ketchup. The wine glass turned out to be hard to eat out of so I recommend a regular ole bowl. If you don't like eating sea poo you should devein the shrimp before you boil them.

A couple of friends recently brought me a bottle of dark rum in exchange for dog-sitting their beautiful, sweet Australian cattle dog while they were on vacation. Perfect for dark n stormys.

The rum, not the dog.

The key to good dark n stormys, according to a quick trawl of the interwebs, is the ginger beer. My favorite is Stoney Tangawizi (made by Coca-Cola??), a standard soda offering available in nearly every inhabited outpost in Kenya. It's not too sweet, has quite a bite and makes me sneeze. A friend visiting from the U.S. even brought a few bottles back to California with him, or claimed he was going to.

Alas, Stoney, like Tim Tams (owned by Pepperidge Farm??) and a limited few other brilliant foreign creations, is not available in the U.S. Would I have to go to Whole Foods to buy overpriced ginger beer?

It turns out that ginger beer is extremely popular in the Caribbean, and that dark n stormy is a Caribbean drink from Bermuda or Jamaica depending on who you ask. Which means that my neighborhood grocery store, which serves a Caribbean and West Indian community, stocks shelves and shelves of ginger beer varieties. There were so many to choose from. I couldn't decide. I finally went with the Diet Goslings. You know, if you're planning to drink as many dark n stormys as I am, you should avoid any sugar you don't have to ingest.

Dark N Stormy

1 part dark rum
4 parts ginger beer
ice

The can of soda expanded in my fridge, resulting in the Tower of Pisa effect you see.

And another thing. Apparently you can suck tea or coffee through a Tim Tam with the corners bitten off, and win contests for your effort.

Laff of the Day #7

2010-06-25T01:43:00.001-04:00

As told by the Eternal Paid Volunteer Temp:

"I was at the vending machine today and this fat lady..." [holds arms out to indicate a 300 lb woman] "...was complaining about how everything is too healthy. 'Why's everyone trying to make us be so healthy? Why can't they put regular soda in the vending machine instead of this diet crap?' So I said, 'Well, this is a hospital. They want you to be healthy.'

And she said, well if we were all meant to be the same size, we'd all be a hundred pounds, wouldn't we?

Then she said, 'I'm going downstairs to the other vending machine to get a real soda.'"

[The End]
---
And then I said, "While you're down there you should also try to get a real gym membership."

I Left My Heart In...

2010-06-23T23:16:00.002-04:00

It's back to the grind after a glorious week in San Francisco, the greatest city on earth. A friend said tonight that there is a marked difference in my mood and energy since I've been back.

"Even your skin looks different," he said.

"I'm browner," I said.

"No, something else," he said.

Love, probably. And life. Something renewed in my spirit and my soul. Something gently shaken and lovingly reawakened. My head tilted with curiosity, my eyes squinting into the sun, my shoulders dipping and legs zipping around people to get a better view. Showered once again by the love of old friends, the kindness of strangers, and all the things that make my pulse race for the place that I call home only because it resides in my heart.

I reconnected with the people who paint my world there with broad and fine strokes, in vivid and muted colors. I got to know distant connections who are now being recruited to nourish the love and wonder and passion for life that only seems to spring forth when I'm out there. I reconnected with the city itself -- a living, breathing, pulsing mass of rolling hills, crashing surf, dramatic cliffs plunging into deserted beaches and shimmering tidepools, tiptoeing fog, crisp blue skies, sprawling bridges and winding highways and car-free bike lanes.

There have been tiny tiny men who were threatened by the knowledge that I'd never love them as much as I love San Francisco. They have bellowed in their weak, quivering voices that San Francisco is not a living thing and wouldn't miss me if I moved away to follow and prop up their empty souls. They lacked imagination, they lacked self-worth, and they lacked a compelling reason to take up precious space on our planet. So when a tomato truck ran them over while they were wiping their crack with poison oak leaves on the side of Interstate 5, I only mourned for the tomatoes.

So what? I love bloody marys.

In San Francisco, I'm alive. The vitality and passion that were part of my daily wardrobe, tucked into every vein when I lived there years ago, became fiery again. I'm not sure what it is, this match struck against a coarse surface, this beacon through pea soup fog, these hibernating parts of my soul that bound out of bed at the crack of dawn when I find myself sitting on the dock of the Bay, wasting no time.

In New York, those parts of me have fallen asleep. At some point in the last three years, complacency took over. Things started to seem good enough. Monkey dancing for lethargic bureaucracies seems good enough. Doughy, unchallenging, clown-like men seemed good enough. Being surrounded by plodding vapid lifestyles seems good enough, as long as it comes with eye contact and a vague semblance of customer service.

There's an equally valid flip side: The friends I have here are priceless. I'm glad to have a job, and a lovely bike, and a kickass living situation in an endearing neighborhood. I'm young, healthy and don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me.

In this silly thing called life, I'm constantly faced with the dilemma of which reality to use to realign my perspective, how finely to tune my patience and my discontent, exactly what constitutes opening my eyes so I can feel gratitude and what constitutes spin. It's not East Coast vs West Coast, it's Eastern vs Western.

Practice: Sitting still, breathing in until your Buddha belly becomes impressive. Now shed your desires. This is how to achieve happiness. Want creates dissatisfaction. Accept what you have and be grateful, instead of feeling entitled to more and trying to reach for things you don't have.

Versus: How many million times did I want to shake my Kenyan friends in the village and say, "Stop complaining about what you don't have and do something about it. Say out loud what you're thinking and ask for what you want."

There's no right answer to my dilemma. Or rather, the right answer is different every time I ask the question.

There's something missing when I'm not in San Francisco. It's that thing that I know exists, because I remember seeing it somewhere before. Not just seeing, but holding it and breathing it and living by it. Now I've gone for years without tending it, and then it reappears joyful dancing frolicking in the form of the place that feels like home, the place that holds my heart. It's so obvious. But sometimes it comes in other forms. Like in the form of another rich, rare soul revealed to me through uncontrollable laughter, through vocabulary words I never knew, through a conversation full of brilliant ideas I completely disagree with. And then it's all of those things held up to me as a mirror reflecting the beauty of my own soul. Yes, I've seen you before.

It's my lifelong love affair. Like all true love, the feelings ebb and flow. But kind lovers forgive each other for being absent, for taking each other for granted for long periods of time. They do this because their love still lives and breathes and kicks and scratches. It's not going anywhere. They know they've been fools for pretending otherwise.

Back to the complacency. It settled in when I wasn't even looking. It slowly, silently smothered me, stubbed down the embers in my soul's campfire. But I'm still wearing my headlamp. I can see that the s'mores I made awhile ago have cooled too much, the graham crackers are a little dry and uninteresting. Don't worry though. I'll wrap and save them for later. Tonight I'll retire to the tent, bring in my hiking boots so they stay dry, zip out the biting critters. I'll get a lot of sleep, and dream courageous dreams.

I wake up to the sun these days, and it rises early.

Laff of the Day #6

2010-05-19T00:06:00.002-04:00

I share an office phone with Joe the Banker. It's a pretty ghetto setup. One office, two phone lines, five people.

Also, our phones are just phones. They don't have speaker phone, mute, hold, voicemail or volume control. They look like this:

Technically if you turn the phone upside down there is a knob that you can slide to adjust the receiver volume. Or maybe it's the ringer volume.

Either way, the knob doesn't work.

Why don't we have modern day phone technology? It has something to do with the grinding bureaucracy we work for at NYU, and how it's also woven into the grinding bureaucracy of Bellevue Hospital.

Today someone called for me, and Joe the Banker picked up.

"Hello, Peds I.D.," he said. We work in the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, or peds I.D. for short. And it's pronounced "peeds I.D."

"Sure, one moment," J-the-B said, and motioned for me to pick up the line on my phone. Yes, the old-fashioned one-phone, two-lines setup.

"This is Justina," I said. It was the other project coordinator, the Noob. She was giggling.

"Just...wanted...to...let...you...know," she gasped between giggles, "...you...forgot...to...include...an...attachment...with...your...last...email."

"I know, I'm sending it out again," I said. "And stop laughing at me. It's not funny."

"I'm...not...laughing...at...you," the Noob said, still giggling.

"Whatever. I'm resending the attachment," I said. I was sort of annoyed that she thought it was so funny that I had forgotten to attach a file to my email.

A few minutes later she emailed me the following note:

Sorry, I wasn't laughing about the attachment; I've done that a million times. I was laughing because the person who answered the phone said, 'Hello, this is P. Diddy.' 

Don't you have your own phone line?

---
And that's how Joe the Banker became P. Diddy.

New York Moments and Laff of the Day #5

2010-05-07T13:08:00.029-04:00

Jetting over the amber waves of grain on my way to St Paul, MN.

Today has been a constant stream of examples of why New Yorkers should be banned from working in the service industry: They possess the evolutionarily impossible combination of incompetence and a nasty attitude, which you’d expect to eradicate itself from the gene pool by virtue of having no social or biological value. And yet, here we decent people are, putting up with this crap while Nature laughs in our face and spends eons trying to get it right.

I went to check in for my flight and there was no line at all. In fact, all of Terminal 4 at JFK was eerily empty except for rent-a-cops and a few people traveling to a Carribean destination. I had my choice of two equally bored-looking check-in counter staff, and chose the woman because she was young and pretty. Or maybe because the dude was young and ugly. How’s that for successful marketing by Sun Country Airlines?

Any evidence of prudent hiring ended there because the woman rolled her eyes at me when I approached, presumably because it meant she had to do her job. No smile, no fake greeting or fake wishes for a nice flight.

“How many bags are you checking today?” was the only thing she said to me, in the same voice that someone would use to say, “My brain seeped out of my ears years ago, and then I used it to make muffins for my neighbors so I’m incapable of feeling anything but entitlement and disdain.”

Peet’s Coffee in Terminal 4: I ordered a regular Earl Grey from two reasonably friendly baristas. My tea came in a paper cup placed inside another cup placed inside a third cup, which seemed like overkill protection against my burning my hands. She had also put one of those paper rings around the last cup, which sent the burn-fearing buffalo over the cliff's edge.

Then I realized that she had given me two teabags, which made me happy until I started sipping the bitter, tannic, acidic hot drink that would never burn my hands.

For a company that prides itself on being green, Peet's Coffee sure knows how to hire employees who mindlessly ignore their corporate values.

I passed a second Peet’s Coffee on the way to the gate, and stopped to ask for more hot water in my tea because it was too strong.

“Can I get a little more hot water in here?” I asked the barista, pointing to my cup. She stared at me with no smile, no reply, and no firing synapses. Then she dragged her inexplicably heavy yet empty soul to the pastry case, heaved her 1 lb arm with all her spiritual might, and pulled out a pastry for another customer.

After ringing up the other customer as fast as a snail might, she stared at me with the same slack-jawed, mouth-breathing look of hatred, which I had earlier mistaken for low IQ. I still didn’t know whether the answer to my question was yes or no, even after she took my cup from me.

“I’m too lazy and entitled to muster the brain cells to answer your question,” she pantomimed with her lack of a will to live.

After all this, I was left thinking, “Aren’t there health codes that say you’re not supposed to refill a customer’s already-used cup?”

Who knows. I could start an entire blog of stories of dismal customer service in New York. I could call it New York Moments.

There was the one time I was at that sock store on St. Marks Place. They have a huge variety of socks and other apparel for your feet, but everything is overpriced.

I asked the cashier if there were any discounts for buying several pairs at once.

The answer choices are:
a. Yes, or
b. No.

The cashier was a big, ugly, hairy bridge-and-tunnel-type, which is odd considering he works at a sock store on St. Marks, a block packed with touristy tattoo parlors, head shops and Japanese restaurants.

Anyway, the ugly cashier’s butt crack said, “GRUNT HSSSSSSSS.”

Then his ugly face got uglier as he scowled at me and said, “There are people who come in here and buy ten pairs of socks and never ask for a discount.”

So now a customer doesn’t even have the right to ask if a store policy exists that might encourage her to develop a favorable opinion of the business and perhaps come back and spend more money.

Instead, she gets grunted at by an ugly guy’s ass crack and then told to shut the hell up for trying to be a savvy customer in a store whose existence depends on people who are willing to shamelessly consume unnecessary products like overpriced socks.

Apparently this moronic business model works in New York.
---

Wow, I just came across this story:

http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2009/01/29/2009-01-29_nastiest_retailer_in_new_york_barks_at_c.html

Based on the article, this could be the same guy. But I'm not sure because I swear the one I talked to was older, fatter and even uglier than Marty Rosen. You'd have to show me a picture of his ugly grunting butt crack, then I could tell you.

Imagine, two nasty people working at one sock shop.
---

Laff of the Day #5, from Cindy with an S. "I was flying with a friend once and she fell asleep. They came by with snacks and left hers on her tray table. The cookies were so good that I decided to try to eat hers while she was sleeping. She’d never know the difference. But when I started reaching for her cookies she woke up.

Darn it! I wanted those cookies!”
---

Gypsy Cab Charm. “Where you come from, honey?” he asked.

“Texas,” I said. “You?”

“Bangladesh,” he said.

“Oh, where everyone got arsenic poisoning from contaminated wells all over the country thanks to the worst public health disaster in history,” I almost said, calling up the only thing I know about Bangladesh.

Instead I said, “Oh, nice.”

“I want move to Texas, start good business. My friend have gas station in Texas, make so much money,” he said.

“You don’t make good money driving cabs?”

“Ha! No, no money from this. I work so long, then go home and sleep, then go back to work,” he said. “No good money. You married?”

“No,” I said.

“Let’s go to Texas, you and me, start a business,” he said. ‘I’m not married, no girlfriend, no wife. Let’s go to Texas.”

“Oh, no that’s okay,” I said. I had better things to do, like slit my wrists.

“Think about it, honey,” he said.

I already had.

A Plug For My Friend On Savage Love

2010-04-28T02:46:00.002-04:00

My friend Francisco co-hosted the relationship and dating advice show, Savage Love, today! He was so so so amazing. Check it out so you can say you knew someone who knew him when.

Listen to the show here (you'll need Quicktime).

Learn more about Francisco and his free advice Saturdays in Washington Square Park.

The blurb from host Dan Savage's website:

Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Episode 184

Today, Dan is joined by special guest expert Francisco Ramirez! Francisco dishes out free sex advice in Washington Square Park. Hear Dan and Fran double-team on your weekly dose of smut.

Click Here If You're Homophobic

2010-04-28T02:25:00.004-04:00

I was posting some hepatitis screening events to a community calendar at work today, and came across a website for a program in Minneapolis that provides sexual health education and services for men who have sex with men.

The messages on the site are straightforward, sex positive and appropriately tailored to the target audience. But, there are notes all over the site implicitly apologizing for this content.

This site contains HIV and STD prevention messages, safer sex strategies, information about gay and bisexual men's health, harm reduction strategies around meth, and images that may not be appropriate for all audiences. Not seeking such information? [Click here to] exit this site.

"They just mean, exit here if you're homophobic," my officemate Joe the Banker said.

And I think J-the-B pretty much summed it up. The people who designed the site were so worried about offending the sensibilities of intolerant hetero-centrics that they felt compelled to put up signs all over the place.

Why disguise it? They should write something like, "Warning: This website will remind you how terrified you are of gay people."

The program is in Minneapolis, which (I'm told by Minnesotans) is an oasis of liberal white thought in an otherwise conservative, windswept Midwestern wasteland. So maybe that warning could say: "This website will remind you that you are blissfully engulfed in a world of white heterosexuals who think they're tolerant about diversity because they've never actually encountered diversity."

But that's just me being judgmental and sanctimonious. Back to the rant at hand.

The site, and the program itself, delivers fact-based messages that de-stigmatize non-boring, non-Biblically-defined, non sexually-repressed-WASPs-in-missionary-position sex. It candidly discusses the risks of sexually transmitted diseases for people who practice any type of interesting sex. For example:

HIV isn't magical (thankfully)... we know exactly how it is spread! Unprotected anal sex (both top and bottom) and sharing needles continue to fuel the HIV epidemic in our community.

But then they undo all their normalization by putting up a bunch of links that let you exit the site while you still have the chance to save your soul. To me, it says that they're not really that comfortable with their own messaging.

This is in the footer on every page: This site contains HIV prevention messages, strategies around safer sex, and information about gay and bisexual men's health. If you are not seeking this information, click here to exit this site.

On another page they write: DISCLAIMER: If you are not seeking information or images about safer sex, gay and bisexual men's health and other material that may not be suitable for all audiences, please exit this site.

A disclaimer is a statement renouncing responsibility for something. In this case they seem to be saying, look, we're giving you all these chances to avoid seeing things that will potentially offend you, so don't blame us, because we told you so.

By acknowledging that the content is offensive to some people, even if those people are prudish bigots, they are implying that yes, pictures of hot men showing affection for each other, or a shirtless dude with a six-pack pulling on his pants waist to look down his boxers, should be considered offensive.

Hold up, cowboy. Let's do a Find and Replace on that last paragraph.

"By acknowledging that the content is offensive to some people, even if those people are prudish bigots, they are implying that yes, pictures of hot women showing affection for each other, or a topless woman with a gigantic rack pulling down her pants to reveal her hot pink thong, should be considered offensive."

What? That made no sense whatsoever. Certainly no one would ever disclaim that it may not be suitable for all audiences. Audiences have to put up with that stuff all the time. So stop apologizing for images that a few frat boys are going to find too homoerotic to handle.

---
Click here if you're homophobic: http://www.himprogram.org. Hell, click here even if you're not.

Duped, New York Style

2010-04-24T21:56:00.023-04:00

This is the last time I'll talk about Megan and the douchebag in Madison Square Park. Why? Because my friend's theory is that the whole thing was a viral marketing stunt. It makes sense. She said she saw him yesterday too, but during lunch. As she pointed out, there was something just a little too polished about the guy. And something a little too big about the sign. Plus, who stands outside ALL DAY in a suit like that?

Well, I fell for it. I told at least three people about it, and I blogged about it. Fortunately less than ten people read my blog.

Glad I didn't take a picture.

The Scarlet Letter, New York Style

2010-04-23T23:11:00.000-04:00

I saw this dude standing in front of Madison Square Park today, wearing a giant handwritten sign that said, "I WAS VERBALLY ABUSIVE. I'M SORRY, MEGAN." He was a total Wall Street suit, about 30 years old, probably Ivy League educated, and had a grim look on his face.

I'm totally kicking myself for not snapping a picture of him with my camera phone. In fact, half a block later I had already reconstructed the conversation I would have had if I had pulled out my camera.

"No, bitch, you can't take my picture."

"You were verbally abusive. You don't get to choose."

"Don't take my picture."

"Whatever, douchebag. Say cheese!"

Instead, I tried not to make eye contact and kept walking. This Hispanic dude walking in front of me turned to his female companion and was like, "Hahahahaha! That guy's a fucking pussy!"

I told my friend about the suit with the sign, and she said, "I sort of like his girlfriend."

Then she thought about it and said, "His girlfriend sounds abusive too, for making him stand there with that sign."

Who can say how that numbnut ended up there on a Friday evening wearing that giant sign? Maybe his girlfriend forced him to do it. Maybe he decided to do it as a surprise for her, to prove how sorry he really is.

I've been in abusive relationships. Standing in Madison Square Park like Hester Prynne doesn't cure an abuser of his abusive behavior. It's just part of the cycle of violence.

He was probably like, "**!#$$!! YOU #!!**$$ MOTHER#@$$!@#@!! IF YOU EVER #@@$!!!** I'LL @#$@!!! YOUR $##@$$!***#@ #@**!! LIKE !@**#@@@#!! SO DON'T YOU EVER @@*&#&$%%!! AGAIN @!**#@@%#$!"

And in the next breath, after she stormed out and slammed the door, he probably pulled out the permanent market and poster board and started hatching a plan to win her back and prove that this time he's really sorry.

For a few seconds I felt embarrassed for him, that he was willing to humiliate himself to win back this Megan person. Then I hated him, for being so ignorant and lazy that he thought he all it took was a shallow stunt.

Changing abusive behaviors is a lifelong commitment to self-awareness, humility and personal improvement. Most people fail.

Certainly in my lifetime I will never stop being a hopeless procrastinator. And that is so much less complicated than the terror, insecurity and desperate need to control others that abusers contend with.

I hope Megan knows better. I hope Megan dumps his retarded ass. Even in New York, there are better men out there.

Food Porn Chronicles: Tour of Asia

2010-04-20T23:45:00.000-04:00

It was a long weekend of fun and sun, cherry blossoms and Brooklyn Bridge strolls, and battles between winter and spring wardrobes. Mostly it was out of doors and out of the house, in a warm restaurant or in someone else's house.

Now Tuesday so soon? I decided to take it easy tonight, stick my head in the fridge and get reacquainted with the inhabitants. Urgently seeking care: one large chicken breast and a pound of okra, starting to bruise.

I whipped up a Thai basil chicken recipe I learned from Noi, my language teacher in Mahachai. I still can't get it to stop tasting more Chinese than Thai, though. See the recipe below.

Gra-Pow Gai (Thai basil chicken)

1 large chicken breast, sliced thin OR 1/2 lb ground chicken
1 1/2 T fish sauce
1/4 t baking soda
corn oil OR peanut oil
2 cloves of garlic, minced
1-2 Thai chili peppers, finely chopped
1 small onion, chopped OR 3 shallots, chopped
1/2 bunch basil leaves, coarsely chopped (I used sweet basil but holy basil or Thai basil is more authentic)
1 T soy sauce

Marinate chicken in baking soda and 1 T fish sauce. Mix well and set aside for 10-30 minutes, or cover and store overnight in fridge. In a large pan, heat oil. Add garlic and stir for 1 minute. Add chili and onions, cook until onions begin to turn clear. Add chicken. Cook until almost done. Add basil, cook for 1 minute. Add soy sauce and fish sauce, cook for another minute. Serve over rice.

Here is a very similar recipe with better pictures: http://rasamalaysia.com/thai-basil-chicken-recipe-gai-pad-krapow/. "Gai pad gra-pow" just means stir fried chicken with basil, same thing as saying "gra-pow gai" when ordering it from a street cart.
----

Next food resuscitation: Okra. A few months ago I discovered this lovely Pakistani hole in the wall called Haandi on Lexington and 28th, near work. Someone told me it's where all the cab drivers eat lunch. I'm not sure about that, but the food is great and the Bollywood videos are always ridiculous, even if sometimes you'll catch a customer using the communal spoon to eat straight out of the bowl of mukhwas.

Anyway, their okra curry is amazing, and I was inspired to try to replicate it at home. Unfortunately, the inspiration had dwindled to almost nothing by today, and my greatest accomplishment was rounding up every Indian spice I could find in my pantry to throw into the dish. Voila! Meet my recipe for Okra With Insufficient Combinations of Indian Spices, which is nothing like the okra curry at Haandi.

Okra With Insufficient Combinations of Indian Spices

1/2 lb fresh okra
1 T whole mustard seeds
1 small onion, diced
1 large clove garlic, minced
1 in piece of ginger, minced
1 fresh chili, sliced
1 tomato, sliced
1 T curry powder
1 T roommate's mystery yellow powder (Justina's diagnosis: coriander powder)
salt
black pepper

The secret to cooking okra, I learned after googling 20 bhindi masala (okra curry) recipes, is to pat them dry with a paper towel after washing them. They need to be really dry before slicing and cooking, because water makes the gooey stuff inside even gooier. And now, off we go, a-currying okra.

Wash okra and pat dry. Even better, lay them on a dishtowel and allow to air dry for 30 minutes. Trim off the top, then slice each piece of okra lengthwise. Heat oil in a large pan. Add mustard seeds and cook on high for 1 minute. Add garlic, ginger, onion and chili. Cook until onion begins to turn clear. Add okra. Cook uncovered for 3 minutes, stirring frequently. Add tomato, salt and pepper. Stir and cover for 2 minutes. Stir again and cover for another 3 minutes. Add curry and coriander powder. Stir and cover. Allow to simmer another 5 minutes or until okra reaches desired consistency. Serve with rice or naan (you're on your own for that recipe).

---
And finally, Vietnamese spring rolls, artfully and awkwardly hand rolled by yours truly and my friend Kumiko last week, after we finished our taxes. All I can tell you without a video is what to put inside.

Vietnamese Spring Rolls

2 lbs shrimp, peeled, deveined and boiled
1 pkg rice stick, soaked in warm water until soft
1 lb bean sprouts
1 head green or red leaf lettuce
1 small bunch chinese chives
mint leaves
1 pkg rice paper wrappers

Dipping sauce:
Mix together 2 parts hoisin sauce to 1 part peanut butter. Serve separately with Vietnamese chili sauce (sambal oelek).

Take your pick of spring roll Youtube videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfI1wMeDXhg&feature=related, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw-7pYq7wSc

Facebook Flashback

2010-04-09T00:51:00.005-04:00

A Kenyan friend found me on Facebook last week. His name is Paul and he was my tour guide when I went on safari in the Masai Mara in 2006. A Finnish travel writer friend had introduced us before I arrived in Kenya, and at the time I thought Paul was the last Kenyan tour guide on earth. So I promised that I would hire him as a guide during my stay in Kenya.

Anyway, I accepted Paul's Facebook friend request last week, and posted a message on his wall a few days ago. I wrote it in Swahili because I still like to be an annoying showoff sometimes.

"How are you, Bwana? It has been a long time. Greetings from New York. Have you been getting lots of work? I'm sure you will, God willing. Greet your family for me."

A few days later I got a reply from him. It was written in English.

"Am expecting you to give me some businees.I dont have much work to do.Recomend me to your friends.Am doing well though .What of you?"

Normally I'd be happy to hear that a friend from the past is doing well. But all I could think was, he's expecting me to give him business? And not just any business, but "businees." I have not been in contact with this person in over 3 years and the first thing he says to me is, "You owe me something, and I'm entitled to it."

Everything irritating about being a foreigner in Kenya came rushing back to me, especially those 2 seconds after hearing something like, "You give me your laptop when you leave Kenya," or "What did you bring me from Nairobi?," or "Mzungu, why can't you give us something?"

I started banging out a pissy reply to Paul. "The reason you don't have business is because you expect other people to give it to you instead of getting it for yourself. Your business is in Kenya, not in the US, so go out and find it."

I read it over about 15 times. Then I canceled it. Was it really worth getting the last word and putting him in his place? Not to mention sounding like a complete colonialist pig. I wasn't going to singlehandedly reverse decades of a culture of donor mentality that is still being reinforced daily.

Who knows, maybe in Kenyan English, the phrase "Am expecting you to..." has a less entitled and bossy tone than in American English. What point was I trying to make, anyway? That I'm not like every other foreigner who is too nice or too soft-hearted to say no, or too rich to care? That he needs to learn about the naive Protestant myth that hard work, honesty and determination always leads to success, because Kenya is actually a meritocracy?

I've made it all the way to the three-year memory-softening mark in my post-Kenya life, but the crazy-making brain spinning has managed to start all over again. This stuff never leaves you. I have made peace with much of the anger and sadness that Kenya painted on my heart, and have embraced the densely imperfect beauty of the country, the culture and the people. I love that part of me that is Kenya and all the experiences and malaria meds that made me the slightly dizzy person with spotty short term memory that I am today.

But this. Damn you, Paul.
---

After the Masai Mara trip, I met Paul in a cafe in Nairobi to sort out some residual business. We ran into some other Peace Corps volunteers at the cafe, and they joined us at our table. They were two women, whom I will call Jay and May.

Paul tried to make small talk but they weren't interested in having a Kenyan conversation. "Where do you come from? What crops do you grow in your country? Have you eaten our ugali? Jambo. This means hello in our language."

Jay and May rolled their eyes and barely acknowledged Paul's elementary tutorial that seemed so inane and patronizing to us after 18 months in Kenya. I understood where they were coming from, but I was annoyed that they were being rude and short with him.

"Have you climbed Mt. Kenya?" Paul asked. "It's very difficult. You will lose a lot of weight."

He turned to May and said, "At least 2 kilos."

Then he turned to overweight Jay, looked her up and down, and said with a kindly smile, "And you -- you will lose at least 4 kilos."

I had to laugh. Jay's head bloated with anger like a balloon, but didn't explode. We all knew that being told that you were fat by a Kenyan was a compliment, but it didn't matter to her that day. Jay had all the information she needed to hate him.
---

A few months later I got an email from Paul. He said that he had noticed that my friends were angry with him that day at the cafe, and asked if it was rude in American culture to tell a woman that she's fat. And, more importantly, he wanted to learn more about our strange cultural norms surrounding body weight so that he wouldn't offend other foreigners.

It was one of the most culturally insightful observations that any Kenyan friend had ever made to me. I wasn't particularly impressed with Paul as a tour guide. One night during our safari, he disappeared without explanation for an entire evening, and we suspected he had been drinking at another safari lodge -- one that we couldn't afford on our travel budget. Nothing inherently wrong with unwinding after a long day, but why weren't we told his whereabouts and how to reach him if we needed something? You can't leave delicious foreigners unattended on the carnivorous African savannah.

And I'm still irritated that Paul's most recent Facebook message couldn't do better than play into my negative stereotypes of Kenyans.

It was only when I sat down to write this post today that I remembered Paul's email asking about American ideas on obesity. It's a good reminder that while I may be repeatedly disappointed when my own stereotypes about people reside in truth, no stereotype is the full picture.

Obvious, and yet still humbling.
---
"I've always wanted to have a dog and name it Bear. Because then I'd make it watch the Discovery Channel and see if it had an identity crisis from hearing stuff like, 'The bear eats mainly berries and other fruits of the forest. It does not eat meat, but will become aggressive towards humans if threatened.' " - Cindy with an S

Laff of the Day #4

2010-03-09T23:28:00.000-05:00

"It really annoys me when someone snores," said my officemate Cindy with an S. "One time my ex-boyfriend was lying on his back snoring next to me, and I was so annoyed about it that I shoved his head to get him to stop."

"Except that I pushed really hard, and his whole head flopped to the side."

"He didn't wake up."

"I thought I had snapped his neck."

"So I got really worried that maybe I had killed him."

"And I started checking his neck for a pulse."

"And I couldn't find one!"

"So I checked his wrists."

"And finally found one."

"I guess I didn't kill my boyfriend after all."
----

Another story by Cindy with an S

"I love the end pieces on a loaf of bread."

"Yesterday I was at the store buying bread. I was hungry so I opened the bag and ate the end piece, then closed the bag and put the rest in my cart."

"I kept shopping for awhile and forgot about it."

"Then I was going to check out, and I looked down at my cart and realized that my bread had no end piece."

"I was like, that's weird, there's no end piece on this bread. I better go back and get another one."

"So I went back to the bread aisle and put my defective loaf back and got one with an end piece."

"Then I got home and I was like, oh, I ate that end piece!"
----

How to spell Cindy with an S

"When I'm on the phone with customer service or whatever and they ask for my name, I say Cindy with an S."

"And people are always like, where does the S go?"

Laff of the Day #3

2010-02-23T23:59:00.000-05:00

It was 4:35pm and my officemates were giggling about a question on a CDC survey.

"How many times per week do you check you feet for sores?" the Eternal Paid Volunteer Temp read from his screen. "A. daily, B. 3-5 times, C. 1-2 times, D. less than once a week, or E. no feet."

Giggle giggle giggle.

"No feet? Why would that be a choice?" said Cindy with an S.

"Maybe it's a survey for diabetes," I said.

"Ohhh. Maybe."

"My mom and I carried my grandfather's leg home from the hospital," said the Epidemiologist.

Whuuuht?

"He had diabetes and they amputated his leg below the knee," she explained. "In Taiwan we believe that the whole body must be present at the time of cremation. So we put it in a jar and took it home."

At that point it was open season for dumb questions from dumb Americans.

"Did you put it in the freezer?" I asked.

"Did you wrap it in something first?" Cindy with an S asked.

"What? Whaat?? Whaaaattt??" the Eternal Paid Volunteer Temp kept saying.

"Did your grandfather know you brought it home?" I asked.

"It was big. Not in the freezer. It still had some flesh on it. We had to use something to preserve it. In a jar. I don't know if he knew we had it. It was a year before he passed away. This was all in Taiwan."

"If it's a Taiwanese custom then the hospital is probably used to getting requests like that."

"Well if it's part of his body they can't refuse to let him have it, right?"

"I bet in the US they have all sorts of restrictions on that." (Turns out, not as many as you'd think.)

Super V wandered in to molest the espresso machine. "Hello, everyone. What's so funny?"

"The Epidemiologist says she and her mom put her grandfather's amputated leg in a jar and took it home from the hospital."

"Interesting. Did you put it in the freezer?" Super V asked.

----
In Thailand my Thai co-workers loved to crack one particular joke that was only funny if you had learned English with a Thai accent.

"You want some fruit?" Ahn the driver would ask me, holding out a large cluster of fresh long kong.

"Thank you," I'd say.

"Hahahaha! You want some fruit?" Ahn would say again, pointing to his foot. "You want eat my foot? You say you like eat foot! Hahaha!"

It took me a long time to get that one.

Year of the Tiger

2010-02-13T23:39:00.226-05:00

It’s the eve of the lunar new year. The older I get the more I appreciate rituals marking the passing of time. Out with the old, in with the new.

Out – Bad karma. In – Good karma.

Out – Delayed gratification. In – Living every moment with passion, joy, gratitude and peace.

Out – Selfish, lying, insecure, emotionally stunted, vapid, FUBAR, sleepwalking coward. In – Witty, smart, creative, inspiring, funny, sexy love interest.

There are a lot of different old history/New Year, letting go/starting over, fuck off/come hither, cleaning out/moving up rituals that I’ve only discovered as an adult. There are two in particular - the traditions surrounding Lunar New Year and the rituals of Loy Krathong observed in Thailand - that are much more meaningful to me than the lobotomizing pressure to find an out-of-control party and the Times Square ball drop countdown that we're told are the proper ways to ring in a new year.

Y2K - the new year, the new decade, the new millenium - was so depressingly underwhelming not because of what I did, where I was and who I was with, but because of the expectations that pointed out how those things weren't crazy drunken fun enough.

My parents never really observed Chinese New Year when we were growing up except for the red envelope which, although it was the only custom we practiced, was personally well-loved because parents and older adult relatives gave us kids money in a red envelope for good luck. Beyond that, I was never exposed to the colorful traditions and deep superstitions that underlie a lot of Chinese New Year customs. Instead I've learned them over the years from friends, and Amy Tan novels.

It turns out my roommate, "D," grew up with very superstitious Taiwanese parents, so with her help and that of Wikipedia, I may have increased my Lunar New Year knowledge by 50 percent this year. She and I are both tigers, and 2010 is the year of the tiger. The prediction is that it will be a difficult Year of the Tiger for tigers, though it is said that most animals in the zodiac have difficult years during the year of their sign. Follow?

Anyway, this morning D reminded me that to ward off the year's difficulties I needed to put on a red string before midnight, and wear it every day in the new lunar year. After racking my brain for where I might find a red string in my apartment, I thought of my sewing kit. I also threaded on a few beads for fun.

Then another friend posted on Facebook that tigers are supposed to wear red underwear every day beginning tomorrow. My one red pair is at the bottom of my laundry basket, and I'm not sure what to do about the next 360ish days (lunar calendars are unpredictable that way). But at least I have the string.

I do remember the last Year of the Tiger, 1998, being the most difficult I'd had up to that point. But I was much younger, and compared to the years I've had since, it wasn't really that bad. I don't even know enough about Taiwanese culture to be superstitious, but I figured that I can use all the help I can get, short of 21 new pairs of red underwear.

Chinese New Year is about being with family and friends. It's about performing scores of rituals to appease the gods and ensure all sorts of auspicious things for approaching times. In fact, the list of things you're supposed to do and say, and not do and say, is so long that you're probably guaranteed even more disappointment than when you're trying to find the most annoying party possible on Dec 31.

I made a respectable effort for the Year of the Tiger. I have oranges. I have sweets in red wrappers. I have noodles for longevity. I cleaned my room. I have three types of sticky rice cakes in the house.

D said that an old Chinese woman told her that to keep the Tiger Year's difficulties at bay, my roommate should take an old pair of slippers, stand in front of our building, and bang the slippers left and right at the doorstep while chanting in Chinese, "Old spirits go away, good spirits come and stay."

THEN, after our neighbors have completely flipped out, she should wrap the slippers in paper and burn them, along with paper money and other offerings to the spirits.

If we lived in Chinatown, we'd be doing this along with our neighbors. West Indians are not so understanding.

I didn't find Chinatown much more chaotic today than any other Saturday afternoon. There were still too many people on Canal Street and too many tourists staring and taking pictures at the fish markets. Lines were long. The New Year's parade is not until next weekend. The difference was that oranges, and flowers, and of course all the gaudy red envelopes, red wall hangings, red lanterns and red characters were doing brisk business. I couldn't find many places that had live fish, and I'm not sure if it's because of winter or because everyone wanted their whole fish for prosperity and fortune.

This white dude at the grocery store asked me how to prepare some packaged Chinese buns.

"Do you steam these?"

"I guess so," I said, looking at the package. What, I'm supposed to know because I look Chinese? "But don't take my word for it."

He walked away annoyed and disappointed that he didn't get a good answer. I should have messed with him so we both could have gone home happy.

"Marinate them in soy sauce, put coins inside for good luck and microwave for 20 minutes."

Loy Krathong, a fall lantern festival celebrated in Thailand, has a wonderfully cathartic ritual of setting afloat banana leaf rafts on a current to send away the year's bad karma while carrying coins as offerings to the River Goddess.

To Thai people who do this every year it probably seems commercialized and over-hyped, the way I hate the lameness of the American new year, but around Loy Krathong this past year - almost my first anniversary of no longer living in Thailand - I realized that I knew of no reasonable place to launch a raft loaded with my heavy burdens into a body of water. There are lots of places along the Hudson where you can toss a raft in from high above the water line, and I imagine you just have to hope it lands right side up so your bad karma and good offerings don't sink to the bottom and get stuck in Hudson River muck.

Upon further thought, though, I remembered that closer to the George Washington Bridge you can launch a raft right at the river's edge, with water lapping at your feet, as if you were Huck Finn.

---
We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.

Snow Day!!

2010-02-10T21:08:00.004-05:00

But first, the Laff of the Day, from my therapist:

"He is a man with something seriously wrong with his personality."

She said this in earnest, but it made me laugh. Sometimes the truth stripped nekkid and lobbed back at you is hilarious.

And yes, I have managed to take another reluctant step towards becoming a New Yorker: I am now spending money I don't have for someone to listen to me talk about how a man with something seriously wrong with his personality did something seriously wrong to me.

I think the Laff of the Day is going to become a permanent fixture. Humor cures all sorts of things for me. That's why I still have a playlist on my iPod called "Comedy" that I made in Kenya, and I can quote Margaret Cho like a whiz. Yesterday I laughed for hours with a friend. And after that he paid for dinner. I haven't laughed that much since 2008. I know because I marked it in my calendar.

New York is being snowed in as I speak. I left work early, and lots of people didn't even bother to come in, including Super V. (For Visor). Snow muffles New York - and New Yorkers - until the whole city is soft and peaceful and empty. Like a zen monk.

I have snow pictures on my phone but my computer seems to have deleted the USB drivers so the photos are trapped for now.
----
Last Monday's Laff of the Day: Doctors standing outside the hospital smoking. But maybe that's called "irony." Or "depressing."

Bikes and Boobs

2010-02-09T01:13:00.001-05:00

I get a pretty decent benefits package through my employer. That is one of the advantages of working for a mammoth institution, in addition to watching every agonizing detail of a grinding bureaucracy in motion.

One of the benefits I was most looking forward to while I was job hunting was an employer-sponsored health plan. The other, which I was looking forward to even more than health insurance, was a discounted gym membership.

Our corporate discount is not that much - about $13 dollars a month less than what the masses pay. As cheap as I am, and as wheezy-out-of-breathy as I am after coming up a flight of subway stairs, the discount wasn't a particularly inspiring reason to start working out again. But, the idea of resuming my arm-sculpting project was.

They're not much for a normal person. I have such skinny arms that when I was a kid my mom used to tell me they looked like they were about to fall off, and she'd get nervous if my uncles or cousins grabbed me by the wrists and swung me in circles, in case the centrifugal force snapped me apart at the shoulders and sent me flying, unarmed, into the bushes or something.

Only a few months ago, my brother kindly observed, "My God, your arms are so skinny."

Well, it turns out that skinny arms are partly the result of my body being kind enough not to store my fat in them. That honor is reserved for the Big Tummy. So, with no layer of fat to dilute the visual outcome of my efforts, I almost had no excuse not to develop a rock climbing obsession and pump free weights at the gym.

A few years later, permanently good lookin' arms. Except that they require maintenance.

I tried while I was unemployed and unbenefitted. It's hard to grow bigger, more sculpted muscles without weights. Pushups only gave me elbow problems. There is just no substitute for the variety and endless body-building possibilities of gym equipment. Also, there is something about standing in front of mirrors watching my veins pop out while I do bicep curls in that is not just encouraging, but encouraging of narcissism.

Reason #148 that New York is directly responsible for my limited happiness: It's very difficult to climb rocks, swim, or ride a bike 1. safely, 2. without stopping at every intersection, and 3. through beautiful terrain.

The gym doesn't solve the rock climbing or swimming problems, but I recently discovered that some of the locations I go to (because my membership allows me to go to any of their ridiculous scores of gyms around the five boroughs) have these stationary bike machines that are similar to video games. The screen simulates an outdoor bike ride - or race, if you choose - with different environments to choose from. I'm convinced that some of those routes are from Marin County, where I put hundreds on miles on my bike, back in the San Francisco glory days. Which is redundant, by the way. San Francisco = glory days.

Anyway, each bike machine has handlebars that move so you don't ride off the "road" and into the surrounding rolling hills and coastal cliffs. The screen shows other bikers (usually passing me) and you can catch up and pass them, or set a pacer. It's pretty realistic, except for the part when I tried to run over the biker in front of me. On screen, that person just disappears. In real life, that person jumps off his bike and beats you with his bike helmet.

The first time I used the machine, I got sucked into the landscape and completely forgot that I was in crappy depressing vapid New York City instead of coasting through the Marin Headlands, overtaking a really fit dude wearing a red and blue bike jersey. It was pretty crushing when I looked up and realized I was still surrounded by annoying urban drones clomping away on their cardio machines. The second time I used the machine, I actually got disoriented while I was being convinced that I was "flying down a hill," and had to look away from the screen to avoid falling off my bike. The downhills are the least realistic part of the whole virtual simulation, since it's hard to replicate the laws of gravity, but of course, downhills are the best part of biking.

Well, life's not perfect, and neither is cool gym equipment. But thanks to stationary bikes that act like video games, I can now suspend my intelligence long enough to pretend that Marin County biking has arrived on the east coast. I am in love.

And then, for the big question that has been plaguing me for weeks: Is there some sort of locker room etiquette about keeping your boobs covered that I've been unaware of for 35 years, or is there some weird New York "modesty" going on here? Isn't the locker room a place where women can freely change into and out of whatever articles of clothing or undergarments they need to?

I have seen this happen to the exclusion of nearly any other method of bra removal: A woman puts on her sports bra or tank top OVER her bra, then removes her bra without exposing her breasts. Or, after a shower, she clutches a towel over her breasts and slips her bra on under the towel, so as not to offend us with an accidental glimpse of her boobs.

Are we not all women here?? Is this some sort of ridiculous "courtesy" that only New York women observe, or have I not been paying attention to this boob etiquette all my life? I would love for someone to elucidate this for me. I seem to be the only person, besides the middle-aged obese woman who stopped caring about her saggers 20 years ago, who thinks it's okay to let other women see your boobs in the locker room.

Well, whatever the answer, the women at my gym are going to have to keep putting up with seeing my boobies. Suck it up, bitches.

Food Porn Chronicles: Stuffed Acorn Squash

2010-01-20T23:13:00.001-05:00

This was dinner. You can see that I had already plowed through half of it before I thought to preserve it in pixels.

The verdict: Deeelicious, very filling, but takes for.ever to make, or about an hour. Even so, if I make it again I'm going to adjust the portions to make more servings for the same stomach. Mmmm leftovers.

Here is the recipe, also available here, but why would you want to visit another website right now? I only needed half an acorn squash for the amount of filling this recipe yields.

1 large acorn squash

2 T butter

1/2 c brocolli, chopped

1/2 c mushroom

2 T celery, chopped (I didn't have this)

2 T walnuts (I used pinenuts)

1/2 t brown sugar (I used white)

1/2 t soy sauce

1/4 c basil, chopped

1/4 c jack or meunster cheese

Heat oven to 400°F. Cut squash in half and remove the seeds. Rub the cut flesh with salt and place flesh side down in a baking dish and bake for about 35 minutes. While the squash is baking, sauté onion in butter until clear and add chopped broccoli florets, mushrooms and celery. Sauté about 4 minutes. Stir in walnuts and fresh basil, then sprinkle with brown sugar and soy sauce, adjust seasoning to taste. Toss to mix well. Check baking squash with a fork to see if it glides through the flesh. Stuff with vegetable mixture, top with equal amounts of grated cheese and return to oven for about 5 minutes.

I'm Obnoxious, She's Obnoxious

2010-01-13T01:07:00.005-05:00

The return of the native. I don't get much sympathy from anyone when I complain about looking young for my age* or worrying about my jiggly body parts. But I'm going to try to write this anyway, and maybe some of you thin, youthful looking readers out there will leave supportive comments. No pressure.

I lost a lot of weight recently. A whole six pounds. I looked like an Ethiopian kid during the 80s famine.

No, actually I didn't look like an Ethiopian kid. What an offensive comparison.

I did worry that I was starting to look like this poor woman, though. My arms looked like a starving supermodel's. I lost the belly that inspired names like bigtummyinkenya. I wasn't eating much, or very often, because I just didn't feel like it. Because I was feeling all sorts of other terrible things instead. It had to do with a German, a clown, a coward, and a small yet enormously dishonest man, all of whom turned out to be the same rotten person.

But that's not the point. The point is, I was a little worried. All my life I thought that if I ever lost my big tummy, in Kenya or anywhere else, I'd look great. Instead I looked tiny and weak. I wanted to feed the girl I saw in the mirror, but she wasn't hungry. The holidays came and went and I wasn't overeating or being restored to my normal body size.

Today my officemate noticed me eating a second helping of my lunch - at 4:45 in the afternoon - and said, "My God, you're always eating."

And then I knew that I didn't have to worry anymore. Sure enough, I went to the gym and my big tummy was back, hanging over my elastic waistband in all its bloaty, unsightly glory. Some things just belong on me.

* Like the time a Vietnamese hairdresser asked, "Are you in college?" And I said, "Well, no, not exactly." And he said, "Oh, I see. Not yet?" Good Lord.

Blog this. In addition to collecting fodder for my future hit TV series called The Nonprofit, I think I could also start a new blog full of entries describing encounters with obnoxiously rude, obnoxious and rude people in this finely terrible city. I've even noticed a personal trend of adopting some of these insufferable behaviors, which means it's either time for me to run screaming from the entire tri-State area, which would be immensely satisfying, or go to yoga more often.

Anyway, one thing about being an NYU employee but working at Bellevue is that I can always tell who is NYU and who is Bellevue. One institution employs halfway competent people and indoctrinates new hires with customer service mumbo jumbo during orientation. The other institution hires candidates who were rejected by the DMV for being more than halfway incompetent and too surly. The ones who were rejected by both the DMV and Bellevue are hired by the postal service. But that's for another post.

There is one woman in particular who I'm still trying to find an excuse to re-visit just so I can find out her name and her supervisor's contact info. Or rather, so I can execute some elaborate revenge prank that would irritate her so much that her anger would collapse the unfortunate office chair that quivers precariously all day under her morbidly obese, motionless-and-not-doing-any-work body.

She works in the room where you go to get your picture taken for your security badge. Anyone who works in a Bellevue building has had to go see her to get their picture taken. The room is rectangular and slightly narrow. Her desk is on one end and she sits facing the room. The door is on the other end of the room, but on the side. Here, I'll spend way too much time drawing you a picture:

Anyway, there is this yellow 8"x11" sign hanging on the door frame that says, in 10 point font, something about not standing in the doorway. The only explanation I can think of for this is so that your bag or coat sleeve or other personal item hanging off your body doesn't end up in the corner of someone's ID photo. The sign is bright, yes, but the font is small. Not an attention grabber.

So naturally every single person who shows up for an ID photo ends up standing in the doorway. And every single time, this nasty lady says, "CAN YOU REEEAD THAT BRIGHT YELLOW SIGN?? DON'T STAND IN THE DOORWAY! YOU NEED TO STAND OUTSIDE."

First of all, how do you add emphasis when you're already capitalizing what someone's screaming at you?

Second of all, if I don't stand in the doorway, how will I know if The Horror is in or not? What idiot is going to stand outside the door not knowing whether the person who takes your photo is there to take your photo?

Once she has told you to enter her malodorous lair, which usually sounds like

"Oghhkgghh."

"I'm sorry?"

"Oghhkggh!!! OGHKKGHHH!!"

"You want me to come in now?"

"COME IN!!"

she grunts commands at you in barely comprehensible English. Oh. She is a native English speaker. It's just that speaking clearly isn't one of her goals, because if it were, she wouldn't be able to raise her voice at you for not understanding her the first time.

She doesn't make eye contact with you, until you say anything, especially if it's in the form of a question such as, "Sorry, I didn't hear you, come again?" Then she glares at you for forcing her to do any work. And by work I mean lifting her finger to click her mouse, or inhaling...before roaring an answer at you.

She is infamous. All I have to say is "that lady in the ID office" and everyone knows who I'm talking about. The big question is, how is she still employed? I don't know, but if she must stay employed, I hope it's long enough for me to find a way to annoy the shit out of her one last time. Oh wait. All I have to do is ask her to do her job.

Whoever's On First

2009-12-31T20:38:00.003-05:00

Dad: Dr. Klein diagnosed my high blood pressure and referred me to doctor whoever.

Mom: If it weren't for Dr. Klein he never would have seen doctor whoever.

Me: Doctor whoever? Who's that?

Mom: A cardiologist.

Me: I know, but don't you know his name?

Dad: Dr. whoever.

Mom: Fooever.

Me: His name is Dr. Fooever?

Dad: Fuuulweber.

Fun With The Camera Phone

2009-12-27T00:12:00.003-05:00

This place used to be a Chinatown "erotic" massage parlour. It has been converted into a Lower East Side-style trashy bar and dance club with an equally classy name, Happy Ending. I walked past it one evening and noticed this sign on an otherwise unremarkable-looking side door to the place. The handwritten Chinese says, "No massage, just a bar." (Mei you ah mo, zhi you jiu ba.) Apparently they have problems with some of the old parlour's long-time patrons not getting the memo about the change in their business model.

***

You and me both, bud.

***

Still, not the ugliest or most terrifying rat in Manhattan. And what IS that? An udder?

***

Hahahaha! New York humor.

***

A bug I found in my stir fry at XO Kitchen in Chinatown. When we pointed it out to the waitress, she replied, "Are you sure it didn't just drop in there after we served it to you?" Then the manager rushed over and told us he'd give us the dish for free, and apologized. Finally, someone in New York who gives a crap about customer service.

***

My neighborhood grocery store is Associated. Among New York grocery chains, it's better than C-Town, Gristedes and Key Foods in terms of quality and selection, but prices can be inconsistent - and mostly too high. But I forgave everything when I discovered that they have this plastic bag recycling bin! Also, just outside the store is a large metal bin for used clothes that you want to donate. It works like a mailbox or book drop where you pull a handle and a door rolls open so you can put stuff inside. When I tried to open it, though, it was either frozen shut, or someone had welded it shut to prevent people from dumping garbage inside or just taking a dump...inside.

***

Oh yeah, Bellevue Hospital says Merry Christmas! And right this way to the emergency room.
***

Now, Bellevue happens to be the oldest public hospital in the U.S. (founded before Independence) and is actually referred to as a "Hospital Center" because it's easier than saying Labyrinthine Fire Hazard And Easy Place To Make Someone Mysteriously Disappear And Never Heard From Again. I work in what they call "New Bellevue." This implies that there is an "Old Bellevue." But let me ask you this. How new is a place where there are bathtubs with non-working fixtures in the patient restrooms? I say bathtubs plural because...

In case you need to bathe two patients at the same time who both happen not to mind being naked and taking a bath next to someone else.

---
And why is it called a camera phone? Shouldn't it be called a phone camera?

The Jollies

2009-12-24T23:05:00.003-05:00

So every year in December I pull out my big, fuzzy Santa hat and wear it around for a few days leading up to Christmas. Instead of bringing good cheer, Justina Claus seems to compel people in my life - the ones whom I know by first name or better - to make fun of my Normal Rockwell spirit, or to assume there's a more rational explanation.

"Are you going caroling after work?" one of my office mates asked.

"Is today your company Christmas party?" my roommate asked.

What's wrong with wearing a Santa hat to keep your head warm?

"That reminds me, I need to get a winter hat," my roommate said.

"You can borrow my Santa hat tomorrow."

"Uh, yeah. No thanks."

On the other hand, strangers tend to give me more credit. It seems that if you're wearing a Santa hat, people assume you're jolly and treat you with jolliness.

"Merry Christmas, happy holidays," said some dude coming out of a liquor store.

"Heya Santa," said another dude standing on the street doing nothing.

These people always catch me off guard. On the outside I walk and talk like a normal, well-adjusted person. No one can tell that recently I was viciously and profoundly betrayed by the person I trusted most.

Sometimes I almost feel a physical separation between my body and my soul. Soul Justina sits in a tall swiveling office chair inside my head and looks out at the world through my eyeballs, as if she's the captain of the world's greatest spaceship. Well, let's face it. She IS the captain of the world's greatest spaceship, and we're star-trekking across the universe. But these days Soul Justina isn't paying much attention the world outside because she's preoccupied by the narratives of unbearable anger and disbelief, as well as the vivid revenge fantasies, spiraling out of control inside Brain Justina.

It takes a stranger's jolly greetings to jolt me back to my unified self and to remind me that on the outside I'm wearing a ridiculously fluffy red Santa hat and looking jolly. But on the inside, my heart has no choice but to spend the holidays waging war with bitterness and hatred, and to wonder whether she will ever find a way to open up, make room, and learn to trust again.

Messin' With Bush Country

2009-12-24T21:45:00.002-05:00

The last few times I've visited Houston, I've come across these bumper stickers in traffic:

This Is Bush Country

Bush '04

[In the colors and logo of Obama's HOPE campaign]
HYPE - Vote Republican

I Voted For Sarah Palin

I'm not sure why I was surprised. Houston may have just elected its first openly gay mayor, but it's still Texas.

I think what surprised me was realizing why I was surprised. It takes me almost half a minute to think of two people I know who might have voted for Bush or Palin, and I'm not sure either of them would drive around with a bumper sticker announcing it.

I always assume that not only everyone I know, but everyone I will ever meet, shares my political values and beliefs. That's one of the perils of the various worlds - New York, San Francisco, Peace Corps, public health - I've occupied for nearly all of my adult life: You acquire this 99 percent accurate assumption that everyone around you is a liberal, and experience mild disbelief when you discover that everyone isn't.

Promoted To Glory

2009-12-18T00:15:00.005-05:00

My friend Kumiko called me in distress one night. She had lived less than two hours away from me in Kenya, and now lives two subway stops away from me in Brooklyn.

"I was on Facebook and just saw that Dave posted a new profile picture that has a Kenyan flag and under it says, 'In Loving Memory of Jack Opiyo,'" she said. "Do you know anything about it?"

I didn't, but the news had traveled quickly through the Kenya RPCV community. I scrolled through my Facebook news feed and saw three or four other status messages about Jack. Everyone was stunned.

I called another friend who lives in DC. I thought she might have heard more through the extensive Peace Corps Kenya grapevine down there.

"Yeah," she said. "He died in a matatu accident in Nairobi."

I felt ill as I imagined the gruesome circumstances of Jack's death. I just felt so sorry. What is that called? Sorrow?

Over the next few days, I heard more details. He was hit by a matatu while walking on Thika Road in Nairobi.

Jack Opiyo died on October 19. The three years and half the earth's circumference that had already separated my world from his made the news a strangely muted shock, but still horrifying.

Poverty and injustice are homicidal lunatics, and they prey far too frequently in Kenya. There were times when my co-workers would attend two or three funerals a week.

But epidemiologists and demographers know that the educated middle class are less likely to die. Jack was from a modest rural village near Lake Victoria, but had earned a masters degree. A slight man with the trademark chiseled jawline and high cheekbones of the Luo tribe, he had made his way eastward across Kenya to work for international NGOs in Nairobi. He was not the low-hanging fruit that death prefers.

Jack was one of our technical trainers during pre-service training in Kitui. He taught us what AIDS looked like in Kenya, and deciphered Kenyan culture for us, and shimmied barefoot down a rope to the bottom of a half-finished well to show us how much work it was to dig for clean water. And sometimes he let his Luo accent get away from him.

"There's a lot of feces in Lake Victoria," he would say.

"Feces?"

"Yes," he'd say. "You know we Luos like to eat feces. We are feecermen and we catch feces in Lake Victoria."

My friend Steve explained, "All the guys in Peace Corps are in love with Dr. Patti, and all the girls are in love with Jack Opiyo."

In my opinion, all the guys were also in love with Jack Opiyo. I certainly had my own crush on him. I relished his goofy sense of humor as well as his passionate calls for us to do something. We all had stories about Jack. He was a mini-celebrity among adoring Peace Corps volunteers.

We adored him because he was one of the only trainers who seemed to want to change things in Kenya for the better. I can't fault anyone for taking a job for the money rather than for idealism - unemployment in Kenya was over 60 percent at the time - but Jack always seemed grounded in a vision of an improved Kenya.

"If you get to your community and you see corruption, say something," he said to us in class. "Don't keep quiet. Everyone keeps quiet and that's why corruption keeps happening."

I didn't know what corruption looked like yet, and I wouldn't realize for a long time how immensely courageous it was for him to say that when most people looked the other way or felt powerless to change anything.

Jack had a deep passion and drive to help the vulnerable in Kenya, especially girls. I heard one story of how he was in a vehicle and saw a young girl walking home from school. He asked his driver to stop and give her a ride. As he chatted with her, he said, "Study hard, Kenya needs you to be its president one day." Then he went on one of his rants about how the country would be much better off if women ran it. The girl looked at him in confusion and surprise, then broke into a comprehending grin.

Jack believed in possibilities that everyone else dismissed as foolish or unrealistic. He had a faith in his fellow Kenyans that sometimes seemed naive. Most of us, Americans and Kenyans alike, thought that we knew better. But that didn't stop him from planting seeds. His idealism and hope inspired people.

---

Of course, we also liked him because he was cool. He had a curiosity about Americans and American culture that was free of judgment or even surprise. One day during training, after the sexy Dr. Patti had given a female condom demonstration, we gathered outside for a tea break. One volunteer told us that female condoms were also popular among gay men for anal sex.

"Really," Jack said, not batting an eye. He'd been around Americans long enough not to be surprised by frank talk about homosexuality and graphic descriptions of sex. And a graphic conversation had indeed ensued, which included sharing personal experiences with anal sex between men and women as well as between men. Jack just listened and nodded. I'm sure he was more than slightly amused. After all these years, he was still learning something new.

It was rare for Kenyans to engage with us about sex and homosexuality. Anyone who didn't become uncomfortable, or accuse us spreading immorality to the rural masses, would at least explain patiently that there are no gay people in Kenya.

Jack knew that a surefire way to win someone's affection was to know about popular culture in their country. He loved to imitate characters from American TV and movies. One of his favorites was the comedic supporting character on Will and Grace.

"Guess what?" he'd say, framing his face with his palms turned out. "It's 'Just Jack!'" Everyone agreed that whether or not our Jack knew the character was gay, he didn't care.

"You know," he said another time with a very serious look on his face. "There's more to life than being really really really ridiculously good looking."

Why are we so attracted to people who understand our own brand of humor? Is it because humor is so culture-specific, and someone who gets why something is funny must inherently get something deeper about us? Because I had a crush on him, I wanted to make him laugh as much as he made me laugh. It was as intimate as I dared to be with him.

"Jack, I have something important to tell you," I said to him one day.

He got a concerned look on his face. "Yes," he said.

"Ninakunywa pombe kama samaki," I said. I drink beer like a fish.

Jack stared at me. He was apparently unfamiliar with the American saying. More apparently, it didn't translate well. "Kwa nini??" he said finally, throwing his hands in the air in a colossal shrug. Why??

Clearly my attempts to lure him with my American humor didn't always work. He was far more adept at wielding the humor baton on an audience than I was. That same day we were on a bus going to a field-based training site. He had been bantering loudly with another volunteer about American music.

"Tevin Campbell?" Shinita said. "But he's so cheesy."

"I like his music," Jack said. "He's good."

"You have cheesy taste in music, Jack," Shinita repeated. "You're just so cheesy."

When we stopped for a bathroom break, Jack pulled me aside.

"Justina," he said. "Can I ask you something?"

This time I got a concerned look. "Sure, what is it?"

"What does cheesy mean?" he said.

"Oh!" I said. "It's like, well, you know, like corny."

Explaining an American colloquialism using another American colloquialism didn't seem to help, so I said, "You know Yanni?"

Jack shook his head. No.

"Oh," I said. "Well, he's this cheesy easy listening singer. If someone said they like Yanni, you could tell them they're cheesy."

As we piled back into the bus and took our seats, Shinita was still harping on Jack's taste in music.

"Totally cheesy," she said.

"Shinita," Jack said, raising his voice so everyone could hear. "YOU. RESEMBLE. YANNI."

---

Not long after we finished our pre-service training in Kitui, Jack took a position in the Nairobi office as a project assistant for the small business development volunteers. It was an administrative job, not a teaching post where he could do what he did best - inspire, motivate, and make us laugh. But it put him three hours closer to his wife and young child whom he traveled to Kisumu to see on weekends.

We attended periodic training meetings throughout our two years of service, but he no longer had an active role in them. We would see him in the evenings after our sessions, and he would sit at the table with us, watching us drink...like fish.

That night he explained the subtleties of gender relations that exist in Luo culture, which were otherwise invisible to us as foreigners. "It's a man's mother who tells her husband to tell their son what to do, so the men save face but the mother ends up getting her way."

I remember doubting whether it was really true, since I had been in Kenya for a year and a half and nearly everything else I'd seen in my village indicated that women never had a say in anything. Instead I had seen every injustice perpetuated against females for no better reason than not being male. But I decided that since Jack said so, it must be true. Few people's words, especially a Kenyan man's, held that kind of power for me.

---

I just discovered a Facebook group created for Jack called The Legacy of Jack Opiyo. I devoured everything posted on that page, and then I clicked through all the photos. I wanted more details about how Jack died, but even more I wanted to know about how he lived.

I started to see hints of hardship and suffering in his life. He was 34, long enough to suffer plenty in Kenya. Friends and colleagues posting on the group's page had alluded to a difficult past two years for Jack. He had been badly injured in another road accident about a year or two ago. Afterwards he had sent out an earnest email brimming with gratitude for God's grace during his recovery, which had made the Peace Corps email rounds. Tragically, it seemed that he and moving vehicles were not meant to live harmoniously in this life.

In a way, this post is an attempt to compile the scattered tidbits that I know of Jack into a single cohesive portrait. But I didn't know Jack in a single cohesive way. He was a teacher, an inspiration and a friend, but also a mystery. Not because he was a private or mysterious person, but because his job required him to enter and exit our lives only a limited number of times.

It wasn't enough times. We miss you, Jack Opiyo.

---
Photo by PhoenixInKenya

The Roomie

2009-12-14T23:51:00.003-05:00

Today I got home from work and there was, inexplicably, a small cockroach racing across the floor.

"Ew, there's a cockroach," I said. "Where did that come from?"

"Oh! Get it! Get it!" my roommate said.

"I can't, it went into the crack," I said. I had picked up my shoe and was waving it uselessly above the cockroach, which had crawled into a crevice in the floor molding. "My shoe's too big."

It was like that puzzle about the tiny ball that rolls itself into a corner of a square room to escape being flattened by a giant ball.

"Use your hand," she said.

My hand? I was using my hand - to hold my shoe.

She crouched down and jammed her finger into the crevice, smearing cockroach juice all over the place.

"Oh, you meant for me to use my bare hand?" I said, as she came back with toilet paper and wiped up the roach pus.

"I know, it's kind of gross," she said. "But I just want that thing dead."

My roommate, ladies and gentlemen. Way more awesome than I.

Slow For the Speed Bump

2009-12-10T23:33:00.006-05:00

It seems that this has never happened to anyone else. The specifics of my particular breakup have seemingly never happened to anyone else. Usually when you tell people about something, they have a similar experience to share. That's how I learned that everyone has had poison oak on some uncomfortable part of their body. But so far few if any of my friends have even heard of my kind of breakup.

That's why it just doesn't make any sense. Every other breakup has warning signs. Every other breakup I've ever had has had warning signs. I have a finely-tuned intuition, and there's no reason why it would have failed me this time.

No reason except that I was lied to. For far too long I was lied to. It's that simple.

He's struggling with what to do with his life, and what career direction to take. How about acting? I couldn't tell him apart from an actual honest person.

Healing isn't a linear process. I'll be making a beeline for strength and peace, then I'll fall into a deep, dry well, and weave among angry thorn trees, and lose a tennis match to hatred and spite, and chant a soul-crushing mantra.

Bob Dylan, that master articulator of bitterness and loss, resonates well today:

I ain't sayin' you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don't mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time
But don't think twice, it's all right

Friends

2009-12-04T00:10:00.002-05:00

I was telling a co-worker about a place I had come across during my apartment search last month. It was in a beautiful high-rise in Long Island City, just over the East River in Queens, with gorgeous sweeping views of midtown Manhattan. Referred to as LIC by hip Bridge-And-Tunnelers in the know, it's an ideal location for midtown worker bees who want cheaper rent but a manageable commute.

"Ohhh, Long Island City," my co-worker said knowingly. "There are lots of amigos there."

I played dumb and said, "Amigos? Do you have a lot of friends who live there?"

She laughed uncomfortably. "Oh, well, amigos is what we call people who come from the south of America."

So there you go. Your daily geography lesson.

The Nonprofit

2009-12-03T00:33:00.004-05:00

So, you know. I'm getting a little better each day. Mornings are still the worst because my body is still in a suppressed energy state, so no endorphins. I no longer lie in bed for 45 minutes wondering if I should barf though. Now it's just 10 or 15 minutes.

But I can barely control the spiral of anger and disbelief and hurt that still takes over whenever my brain has nothing else to occupy it. On the other hand, mind control in itself is also exhausting.

Most of the time I have enough clarity to focus on important things like not getting hit by a car or food delivery guy while crossing the street. But other times, like this morning, I will do something like putting on the same pair of underwear after a shower and going to work. So now you know. And I don't care if you are picturing it and unsubscribing from my blog.

Today was further confirmation that I should actually be writing a TV series called The Nonprofit. For starters, I share a (tiny) office with four other people and if I walk in at 9:10, I will most likely be the first person there. It's not like people work 10-6 or 11-7. At 4:45 everyone is pulling their coat down from the hook and waving goodnight. Fine. I'm no workaholic. It's a 35-hour work week after all, and I won't tell if people shave off another 45 minutes of their day to go home and live their real life.

But the bureaucracy. We arrived this morning to find out that they had turned off the power for half of the outlets in our office. It was a planned power outage for many offices throughout Bellevue, inexplicably during business hours. They had notified all Bellevue employees who would be affected, but because we are NYU employees, they neglected to tell us.

And you'd think that if you cut off half the power in our office that half the computers would be affected. Instead, one computer went down completely while I only lost my internet. Why?

Becausemyinternetcableispluggedintoanoutletontheothersideoftheroomwhilemycomputerispluggedintoadifferent
outletonmysideoftheroomsowereroutedmyethernetcabletoaninternetoutletonTheMoneyMan'ssideoftheroombutitturns
outthateachoutlethastwoportsoneredandonewhiteandapparentlytheredoneisforNYU'sinternetandthewhiteoneisfor
Bellevue'sandyoucan'tpluganNYUethernetcableintoaBellevueinternetportandviceversa so we re-rerouted my cable to a third internet outlet blahblahblah.

We spent hours doing this, while a couple of Facilities guys wearing plaid flannel shirts and tool belts periodically stopped in to ask if everything was working again. Sure, thanks for the help. I'm glad I went to grad school to thread ethernet cables through office furniture.

I'm also glad I went to grad school to get barked at by the mailroom guy. He's this Asian dude with a ponytail who delivers packages that need to be signed for. Since I sit closest to the door, he dumps packages on my desk and shoves a handheld electronic delivery tracking thing for me to sign.

"PRINT YOUR NAME," he barked at me the first time. "PRINT. JUST PRINT. PRINT YOUR NAME. PRINT. PRINT. JUST PRINT."

Okay, so this thing has a full keypad with letters for entering whatever information you're supposed to enter, plus a little plastic pencil thingy like on credit card swipe machines. If someone was screaming PRINT PRINT PRINT JUST PRINT at you, would you think he meant to type in your name, or to use the pencil thing to write your name? The confusion is this: typing causes print, and the plastic pencil thing is usually used to sign your name.

So I didn't know what to do. And the longer I stared at the stupid thing in my hand, the louder he screamed, "PRINT PRINT JUST PRINT PRINT YOUR NAME PRINT PRINT."

I forgot about him because he didn't come by for another few weeks. Like the first time, he handed me the whatever tracking machine and started screaming, "PRINT PRINT PRINT JUST PRINT YOUR NAME PRINT JUST PRINT."

"Okay, we went through this last time and I still don't know what you're talking about," I said irritably.

"PRINT PRINT JUST PRINT JUST PRINT," he barked.

"Yeah, I heard you fine. You don't have to yell at me," I said. "You want me to print with the pencil or what?"

"Print please," he said quietly. "Yes pencil. Print."

And ever since then, he tells me to print print just print your name print print in a quiet voice.

Score!

2009-12-01T22:23:00.003-05:00

So you may or may not know that I finally got a job in October. I'm working at NYU School of Medicine as a research coordinator. Drop me an email if you really want to know what that means. Though I'm an NYU employee, I work at Bellevue Hospital, the nation's oldest public hospital (founded in 1737, even before the US was a country), not at the beautiful, modern, well-lit, spacious NYU Medical Center building a few blocks up the street. I share a tiny office space with four other people, 50 years of medical records, zero windows, seven computers of varying speeds (of which none are called "fast enough"), six chairs with their seat upholstery faded into round patterns by numerous and diversely-shaped pelvises throughout the years, three years of hair sheddings, and an AC vent in the ceiling that we routinely force our Eternal Paid Volunteer Temp to cover and uncover with a page from a 2008 wall calendar for climate control.

I think of movies and TV shows that spoof corporate life, and then I think of my own work environment and am convinced that the nonprofit world makes for much more absurd theater. And so...what do I need this job for if I already have a brilliant screenwriting career ahead of me?

Anyway, today we heard that there were leftovers from a lunch event in our conference room. All five of us who share my office space stood up and shuffled down the hall as fast as we could to survey the fresh prey. The Eternal Paid Volunteer Temp even told me to bring a tupperware. We were the first people on the floor to descend upon the leftovers, and we obliterated them. Judging from the way the buffet table had been abandoned, it must have been a small event attended by people who only eat mashed potatoes. The mystery meatloaf, pasta, chicken, sandwiches and salad were virtually untouched. Such a jackpot. I made off with enough food for tonight's dinner and tomorrow's lunch. A penny saved...isn't worth crap in New York. But those freebie-sniffing skills I picked up in grad school--priceless.

East To Heathens

2009-11-30T00:20:00.003-05:00

The last thing I want to do right now is go back to New York and the highly irritating world I inhabit there. The first thing I'm doing tomorrow is going back to New York and the highly irritating world I inhabit there.

So, Day 7 was also pretty shitty but it's also Day 1 of no longer counting days after or until something. Buddha or Yoda or some other squat fat fellow must have a saying. "Only now matters." I mean, even the most enlightened yogis know that's not entirely true if you are also trying to function normally in the world. But it's nice to have those moments when you make only now matter. It's when I'm like, "Oo, take that, world. I stopped everything but now. I see you as you really are. I've won!" Enlightenment is all about winning.

---
Squirrels are so cute. I adore fat, fuzzy, stupid creatures. It even spilled over into my dating life.

Seafood For Life

2009-11-28T22:15:00.005-05:00

Today my mom, dad, brother and I went to dim sum at a very popular restaurant in town. It has been awhile since any of us have been there, since we were all surprised by how it had been remodeled into a cavernous yet unrepentantly gaudy Chinese banquet hall. Unfortunately their website doesn't have any pictures of the tacky new decor for your viewing pleasure.

Chinatown businesses in Houston are not infrequently robbed by people who know that the owners like to keep everything in cash. (Don’t go getting any ideas there, Gunslinger.) This restaurant was no exception. A few years ago I’d heard that one of the owners, a woman named Nancy, was tragically shot and killed during a robbery.

Except that today my mom said that she overheard some of her friends saying that they’ve seen Nancy around.

"Nancy is alive and well," my mom surmised.

“Are you sure?” I said. “Have you actually seen her?”

“Gossip, gossip,” my brother Nick said.

“Must be,” my mom said. “My friends saw her.”

“Maybe they saw her ghost,” I said, always loving a good ghost story.

“I’m going to go ask for her,” my mom said as we were leaving the restaurant.

“Don’t tell them you just want to see if she’s dead or not,” I said.

Oh, my God! There was a gigantic lobster in one of the restaurant's eight fish tanks holding live but doomed seafood. This guy was the size and shape of a regulation football. Seriously. I don’t lie about this stuff.

My mom reported her findings as we were walking to the car.

“I asked them, hey, where is your boss Nancy?” she said. “They said she drove to the airport to pick up seafood.”

“Maybe that’s code for she’s dead,” Nick said.

“Then they asked why I wanted to see Nancy, and I said that I’m one of her friends,” my mom said.

“You’re such a good friend that you don’t even know if she’s alive or not,” I said.

“She’s alive,” my mom said, proud of her successful sleuthing.

---

Before today's post:
"I know you kids just like to make fun of your Asian parents and talk about us."
"I don't talk about you, mom. You never say anything funny."

It Would Be So Worth It To Conquer The World For This

2009-07-29T02:48:00.002-04:00

For another little ray of urban biking sunshine, I recommend this site that maps the safest bike routes between two points in the five boroughs. Still has kinks, like not being able to show me how to get to my favorite tofu pot restaurant in Fort Lee, NJ, but pretty good otherwise.

Colonizing the Last Banana

2009-07-28T23:50:00.002-04:00

The weather has finally turned uncomfortably warm, and we don't have AC in our kitchen. I've gotten a bit careless about the zero-crumb policy of New York living: More than zero crumbs or sticky patches of evaporated juice on the counter will breed cockroaches and mice in your very own kitchen.

The last banana in the house was sitting on the shelf, and I was looking forward to making myself a fruit smoothie. When I went to claim it, I found that someone had already discovered the banana. There was a large chomp taken out of the side, complete with little mice teeth marks, and an army of drunken fruit flies hovering lazily around the fermenting exposed fruit. The fruit flies had also taken a liking to the mouse poo stuck to things all around the banana. And I dunno. That puddle of liquid under it? A by-product of fruit fly colonization...or mouse pee?

Back In The Saddle. The closest F train stop is a 12 minute walk from my apartment, when going at a brisk pace. Last night I strolled to the station, and then discovered that I had forgotten everything I needed to get on the train: my Metrocard and my money. I actually considered panhandling for the $2 train fare, but couldn't bring myself to do it. I haven't lived in New York long enough, I guess.

So I trekked for 12 minutes back to my house, my eyes, nose and mouth collapsed into a dark, disgruntled, cursing mass. I decided that I would not waste another 12 minutes on the stupidity of my current situation, so I got on my bike and rode back to the station. It took about 3 minutes, and my soul scoffed defiantly at Karma, who rolled her eyes and plotted her next infuriation with my name on it.

New York has taken steps like a caveman towards becoming a more bike-friendly city, but still the only way you can take your bike (or stroller, or wheelchair) onto a train is to go through the emergency gate, which sets off a piercing alarm that is gleefully amplified by the natural echo chambers of the New York subway system. At this particular stop, there aren't even any turnstiles that you can carry your bike through--which is illegal anyway. There are only those revolving bars that would never fly in Texas because everyone is too fat to go through. And a bike won't go through, either.

So what you have to do is:

1. Leave your bike by the emergency gate
2. Scan your Metrocard for the revolving bars
3. Enter through the revolving bars
4. Run to the emergency gate
5. Push the bar that sets off the alarm and opens the gate
6. Look around frantically for your bike, which may or may not have been stolen by now

There should be an accompanying diagram for this complex process.

Anyway, a kind man offered to hold my bike for me while I went through the revolving bars. All sorts of images came to mind while I let him hold my bike against my better judgment. I just know he's going to make off with the bike. I just know it. He's throwing his leg over the seat now. There he goes. Pedal pedal pedal.

He didn't steal my bike. He didn't even try. Isn't that nice?

It turned out to be one of those nights on the subway. You know: the Manhattan-bound F train was running on the A track after Jay Street. What? How is that even possible? They announce it at the Jay Street station and you have to make a split-second decision about whether to get off the F, which is now the A, and wait for a real F, or stay on the F, even though it's an A, because you don't know where else you'd find an F. Since I had my bike, I decided to stay on. I could ride my bike from wherever the F-ing A train dumped me.

Biking in Manhattan only reinforces all my sweeping assumptions about New Yorkers. No one could care less about anyone else. Life is all about yelling at people for how they've annoyed you. Somehow I arrived at my destination in one piece, insane, sweaty, and grinding my teeth into little nubs.

I think it would be so worth it to conquer the world just so I could pass a law saying that cars aren't allowed on this planet and everyone rides bikes.

When There Is Charcoal, Life Is Good

2009-07-28T14:37:00.007-04:00

Don't Leave The Bananas Out. I feel like that could be a great ironic slogan for something involving crazy fun. Unfortunately right now it's just a good rule of thumb for keeping the mice and fruit flies at bay. Ewww. I kept wondering why there was this rotting garbage smell in my kitchen. I took out the trash. I took out the recycling. No food bits left in the sink.

You know, it's a bit cliche to say that Kenya taught me all sorts of lessons that I'm still using today. But like any decent cliche, it's true. There was one night when I was visiting my friends Julia and Emily and their family in Kapkoi village. It was a bit cold out, maybe a little rainy, and we had just eaten what seemed to me a pretty unsatisfying dinner of ugali - unsalted maize flour eaten as a paste - and milk. To the Nandis, though, this was a perfect meal, and Julia, Emily and I sat together in the dark hut making idle conversation. We were huddled around a ceramic stove full of warm coals, and the pungent gray smoke was making my eyes sting and laying the foundation for lung cancer. All the parts of me facing the stove were feeling charred, and all the parts of me not facing the stove were feeling a bit chilly. Julia sighed contentedly.

"When there is charcoal, Justina, life is good," she said.

Strangely profound. My Kenyan friends always had a way of interspersing some great wisdom into their redundant small talk about what kind of crops we grow in America and helpful clarifications that, yes, two years later, "Jambo," is still how people say hello in Swahili.

Paradox: There's something about living closer to survival mode that gives you more clarity on what's meaningful in life, but at the same time, always being in survival mode made many people incredibly obtuse about things that seem so obvious to me, like considering the consequences of an action before doing it, or thinking about the future at all.

Rogue Butter Knife

2009-07-23T18:54:00.005-04:00

Just finished the dishes and kept trying to put a butter knife into the part of the dishrack that holds silverware. The dishrack is one of those stainless steel wire things from Ikea, and the silverware pocket has wider gaps in the corners, where silverware can sometimes fall through. The first time I dropped a butter knife in there, it slipped through the large corner gap and fell on the floor. I picked it up and tried again, and it fell through again. This time, though, it fell into the narrow gap between the counter and the wall, and is now irretrievable.

Isn't there a part of all of us that is actually a butter knife? Life can be such a silverware pocket, and we're all looking for big corner gaps to through which to escape. Only some people have the courage to run off and build a new life in the dark, musty space between the counter and the wall.

Man, I really tried to make this metaphor work. Let's face it. A butter knife is just a butter knife.

Also Possesses Solid Mastery Of Offensive Stereotypes. There are always a few outrageous stories in the back of my head that I always meant to blog about and kept forgetting.

There was the time during grad school when I was at my neighborhood Gristedes in Washington Heights, standing in the chicken aisle. A Dominican man and his 8-year-old son were standing nearby. In my lizard brain I was like, "Oo. Cute man. I wonder if he notices me."

The man looked at me, then turned to his son and said loudly, "Hey, so what do you think about having chicken feet for dinner?"

Uhhh ex-squeeze me? "Hahaha, just joking," he said, still to the boy.

Then the man looked at me again, and he had this unbelievable look on his face. It didn't say, "That's right, go back to where you came from, you yellow slanty-eyed dog eater."

It didn't even say, "Hahahaha, I love making fun of your weird food, Chinkie lady."

No. Apparently chicken feet is also well-appreciated in the Dominican Republic, and what his face actually said was, "Hey, pretty lady, aren't you proud of me for knowing something about your culture?"

Nimepotea sana

2009-07-22T12:49:00.006-04:00

I have been so lost.

And, we're back. No point trying to justify my absence, which has no more interesting explanation than laziness, or being swallowed up by life, or accepting a five-month seahorse harvesting contract in the Solomon Islands.

The quick run down:

1. I graduated with a masters in public health (MPH) in May. I moved out of my apartment on campus at the end of May, and into a sublet in the South Prospect Park neighborhood of Brooklyn. It's a bit like Washington Heights except that in addition to English and Spanish, people also speak a Carribean language or two that I can't identify. Some woman I met at a friend's birthday party was like, "Well, why don't you just ASK what language they're speaking?" Well, why don't you just ASK why I'm about to trout-slap you in the face?

2. I'm looking for a job. It's been two months of pounding out resumes, cover letters, networking emails, and updates to LinkedIn profiles. No luck so far. Something is wrong with our economy when my brilliance and genius and modesty haven't landed me a job, but most people working in customer service in New York have raging attitude problems and IQs like they've lived too long in jars with not enough air holes punched in the lid.

Anyone know of anyone in San Francisco hiring MPHs? Specifically, an MPH with experience working in Africa and Asia on reproductive health, HIV/AIDS, and migrant health issues, with jaw-dropping writing, communications and project management skills. Other skills include qualitative data collection and analysis, needs assessment, literature reviews, community mobilization, health curriculum development and education, event planning, online content development, cross-cultural experience and grantwriting.

3. I've come full circle in my appreciation for New York. I feel like despite starting out with a negative attitude, I started to open up to the possibility that this town doesn't suck. There were months when I'd actually say that New York isn't that bad. I don't hate it. It's growing on me. I think I've given it a fair chance, especially after deciding to stay through this summer, when the weather is beautiful, the free outdoor events are copious, and I don't have grad school getting in the way.

But the verdict is in. This city bugs. Irrevocably. I outgrew it ten years ago, when I was actually earning a decent salary and flying in for business trips armed with an expense account. Now it's just loud, rude, obnoxious and dirty. I don't sound like a grumpy old lady at all. People say things like, "New York just wouldn't be New York without people screaming at each other and being jerks. You just have to love it." What is wrong with people??

4. One of my coping mechanisms, which I developed while rafting in Maine last weekend, is to put my hand on my air mouse and air click on everything in my field of sight that I don't like, which naturally air deletes it.

"Delete. Delete. Delete."

It started out as a way to delete away all the other bright yellow rafts full of life-jacketed, helmeted urban escapees from my view of the pristine river landscape.

"In New York you need to use the Select All tool," says Holger, my co-conspirator in hating on the city that should be put to sleep.

SELECT ALL. DELETE.

Oh, look. I can see Connecticut.

I May Not Post Often Enough, But At Least She Does

2009-02-20T13:59:00.005-05:00

I just discovered this blog about AIDS, gender and health. Despite the dismal and academic-sounding subject matter, it's hilarious, so I spend a lot of time procrastinating here.

Here are some favorites:
Get Money From the Global Fund
Play Public Health Bingo During Boring Meetings

Recycling Is Edible

2009-02-16T21:57:00.007-05:00

Grad school is affording few adventures to blog about lately, unless you want to hear about how the Republicans slashed family planning from the Medicaid portion of the stimulus package.

(What's that? You DO want to hear more! Here you go then...)

Lately my life extends from my bed to my desk to my kitchen to my toilet to my bed to my desk to my kitchen to my

In Kenya I started taking inventories of the food in my kitchen, so I could better plan meals, reduce food waste and save money. There's something satisfying about using every last bit of the goat that you never asked for, but that your well-meaning friend brought you as a gift. (Unfortunately, in the case of the goat, I tried to make wontons and ended up with a very pungent bowl of soup that reminded me of a petting zoo. Goat is gamey, make no mistake about it. I conveniently left it on my doorstep overnight "to cool", since I didn't have a fridge. In the morning it was gone, but in its place was a thank you note signed by a mongoose.)

Anyway, I've imported the inventory-taking habit back to the States with me, and have developed a rigorous system of meal-planning around it. Actually, last year my inventory-taking was occasional and recreational. I didn't become hard core about it until I got back from Thailand. When I moved back into my apartment in January, I found stuff sitting in the back of the fridge, or in the boxes I'd packed away for storage, and decided that if it was still good, I'd use it.

Some of it was easy. Grits, oatmeal, curry powder, spices, dried shitake mushrooms, rice. That sort of stuff doesn't go bad.

I also found some other stuff that seemed questionably promising. Mayonnaise? Olives?

The olives were probably still good, but there were a few white floaties in the jar, so I tossed them. They were purchased as garnish for martinis, and I figured that I might benefit from fewer of those this semester, at least until graduation.

It also turns out that despite mayonnaise being a code word for "lots of eggs that would normally go bad pretty quickly," my jar of mayo was still good. Apparently that's because mayonnaise also has enough preservatives to ensure a half-life of several centuries. Thanks to calcium disodium EDTA, I made a tuna salad last week and a potato salad this week.

It has actually been really nice to cook and eat exactly what I want, and not have to spend a fortune on it.

But first, a segue.

How much would you suppose this juice would cost?

Let's consider what you're getting in this 15.2 oz bottle of 100% juice. It actually tells you. Inside this bottle you will find: 30 blueberries, 8 blackberries, 3.5 apples and half a banana. Also you get an assortment of vitamins and minerals, and supposedly all the ingredients are natural.

The suggested retail price is between $3.19 and $3.79, not cheap.

I PAID $4.25!!!!

What's wrong with this planet? This is why poor people buy soda when they don't feel like drinking tap water. (Which, by the way, isn't filtered in New York. Very clean, but not filtered.)

Last I checked, people were still quoting the liar who said that health is a right, not a privilege. Tell that to the folks who designed our health care system, the only one in a Western developed nation that isn't nationalized and universal.

I've been studying my health policy notes too closely. Switching gears...

Tonight's dinner was a meal-planning, food recycling success story. It's almost like having my own Iron Chef show at every meal. I opened the fridge to find today's special ingredients:

a bowl of leftover chicken broth
white mushrooms, getting old
brown mushrooms, getting old
shitake mushrooms
tom yam soup mix in a jar
half a container of tofu fa* I bought in Flushing** last week, getting old

* a very very soft tofu that is usually eaten as a very very delicious dessert
** better Chinese food than anything you'll find on the island; try Jade Asian Restaurant for dim sum, but be prepared for a wait

I was inspired by this Korean tofu pot restaurant I went to in Ft. Lee, NJ, a few weeks ago. I don't remember the name, but I think it was this one. I don't have a ton of experience with Korean tofu, but it was the best I've ever had, by leaps and bounds. I'm accepting eating buddies to accompany me on a second visit.

Anyway, I had a Thai soup mix, not a Korean one; and Chinese style dessert tofu, not Korean soft tofu. But, throw it all together, add vermicelli noodles and a raw egg, and voila...

A ridiculously delicious recycled meal.

New York in LEGOs

2009-02-04T17:34:00.004-05:00

This is so creative...

I LEGO New York

Next Time I Will Procrastinate More Productively

2009-01-27T09:29:00.001-05:00

So I've been a bit addicted to iGoogle, which is a customizable web page where you can get news feeds and other web content delivered to you in one place. They have some pre-designed templates ("themes") that you can apply to your iGoogle page for visual variety. This is their Classic theme, which I use for my home page:

I poked around a bit and found that someone had designed one for CARE International, and as you know (or maybe you didn't) I was doing my practicum last semester with CARE Thailand.

Anyway, I came upon some comments that people had posted about the template. The description given for CARE was this: "CARE fights global poverty by empowering women and girls to bring lasting change to their communities. Learn more at www.care.org."

It's from their website but I don't think it's their official boilerplate, because I know for a fact that their work doesn't focus exclusively on women and girls.

Anyway, someone had posted the following comment:

Charity for all... Anonymous - Jan 10, 2009 - Report this comment

Males are just as affected by famine and hunger as females. I don't understand this charity's preference and emphasis on the female sex (sexism?). Please explain.

I don't know why I bothered to explain, since the audience for the CARE iGoogle Theme Comments Page is probably even smaller than the one that reads my blog. Usually I write off infuriating comments as the gaseous by-product of ignorant commentators. But for some reason tonight I was compelled to explain. And quite politely, if I do say so myself.

Response to "Charity for all..." Anonymous - Jan 28, 2009

Actually males are not affected by famine and hunger the same way as females. Females, and girls in particular, are more vulnerable to natural disasters, disease, poverty, conflict and every other misfortune that life doles out in developing countries. They have a higher rate of HIV infection, lower levels of education, and fewer opportunities to earn money to support themselves and their families.

This is because in most cultures women and girls do not have the same social status as men. They are not valued as equal members of society. Many men in these cultures will tell you that women are property. They will tell you how many cows you should pay in order to get a wife.

In poor families, girls are passed over for education in favor of boys. Uneducated or poorly-educated females have fewer (no) opportunities to earn money. Without economic power they depend on their husbands for support. If these women do not have husbands or are widowed by disease or war, they're out of luck. If their husbands are abusive, drunk, unemployed or generally irresponsible, these women have no way to escape their situation. In many cultures a woman is blamed and/or rejected, often by her own family, if she tries to leave an abusive or exploitative marriage.

In many cultures, women do 90% of the work in a household (cooking, cleaning, fetching water, taking care of the kids, often even farming) but has virtually no say in how or when money is spent for the household - or when they get to have sex.

Without social status women do not have a public voice; they are not allowed to enter forums where the exchange of ideas occurs that bring about the changes that benefit them, their families, and their communities.

CARE does not "prefer" women/girls over men/boys; they simply know that giving women and girls the resources to support themselves and their family benefits the community as a whole - including men.

Having said that, if you go to their website you'll see that they have a broad range of projects, not just those targeting girls and women. http://www.care.org.

P.S. The light orange link color is hard to read. Please change.

Subway Diaries

2009-01-19T14:07:00.000-05:00

My friend runs a blog site called Muni Diaries in San Francisco that chronicles the oddities and the banal seen on the public transit system in the Bay Area. I just Googled for a similar concept here in New York, and got a few decent hits. The most compelling one, at a glance, is The Subway Chronicles, which I plan to peruse at some point in the next decade or so.

Anyway, I thought of this as I was riding the C train back home from my friend's place in Harlem tonight. There was an ancient, homeless-looking guy on my car who appeared semi-conscious or drunk, leaning at a 45 degree angle, mouth-breathing and staring at nothing. I walked towards his end of the car looking for an empty seat, but immediately spun around and headed to the other side of the car because he was steeped in pee. Nothing personal, I just didn't care to smell him for the next 50 blocks.

A few minutes later I noticed he was alert and smoking a cigarette, which has been illegal on New York subways for the last 500 years. Strangely enough, everyone on the car was staring at him. I mean every.single.person. No one was staring when he was just this crazy smelly old homeless guy half sleeping next to a spilled cup of coffee.

A woman started scolding him from across the aisle. "You can't smoke on the subway. You're going to have to put that out."

The man just nodded and continued smoking. He was clearly mentally ill and not grasping what she was saying. People started whispering and continued to stare. One woman coughed loudly, several people covered their noses with scarves, one guy rolled his eyes, and about half the people on the train shook their heads and turned their frowns even lower.

The man sitting next to me said, "You know, Obama has never mentioned anything about mental illness in his health care plan."

I wasn't sure if this was true or not, so I said something else that I wasn't sure was true or not. "Yeah, mental illness is one of those things that doesn't get prioritized in health care because people don't see it as a physical sickness."

"Oh my God," the man next to me said. "Now there's someone kicking that guy."

This was true. Someone had gotten on the train, taken one look at the dude smoking, and started kicking him.

I feel like rule number one on the subway is, don't kick mentally ill people. It's not nice, and not really safe either.

The kicker got off at the next station, and the homeless guy started ranting to himself. "Nggh mgh nngh I don't GIVE A SHIT! Fnggn ghnn nngh."

Then he took his cigarette and got off the train.

New York Finally Recycles (Plastic Grocery Bags)

2009-01-19T06:38:00.001-05:00

My subletter moved out and I settled back in to my old apartment last week. I opened the pantry to find a wall of grocery bags packed as tall as me. There were exactly two items in the whole pantry: plastic grocery bags, and an ironing board. I mean, how does that happen in the first place? I've never accumulated that many bags in my whole life, but I turn my back for one semester and you could film a horror movie in there.

All last year I asked around about where you can recycle these bags, and the answer was: You can't. You can recycle most other normal recyclables in New York, but not plastic bags.

It drove me crazy.

Fortunately, New York State recently passed a law requiring certain businesses in New York City to accept plastic bags for recycling starting January 1, 2009. This means that at larger grocery stores or chains there should be a clearly marked bin where you can return all those plastic grocery bags that have been accumulating in dark corners all over your kitchen.

Safeway in the Bay Area has had these bins for years. However, no one ever seemed to know about them, except me. Every month or so I'd take a huge plastic bag stuffed with plastic bags to Safeway, and people would always ask what the hell I was doing.

Anyway, now this brilliant idea has arrived in New York, but a lot of stores still don't have the bins. Stores are supposedly fined $100 a day for not having them, but there's either a grace period for compliance, or $100 a day is less of a burden for stores than figuring out where to get these recycling bins.

I'm happy to report that the Gristede's near me in Washington Heights is on top of their game, and has placed a bin right by the entrance, so now I can go in, dump my bags and not shop there, because their groceries are ridiculously expensive. But kudos to them for the bins.

The Fairway Supermarket on the Upper West Side has a bin, but most of their employees and managers don't even know about it. I finally found one manager who did, and he pointed me upstairs, to their organic food section where there were only about three customers milling about. My friend said to me today, "There's an upstairs at Fairway?" Not a good place for an item that is already so obscure in the consciousness of even the store's employees.

Since there's clearly a publicity and marketing person who's not doing their job on this plastic bag recycling campaign, I'm making it a point to tell everyone about it. (Also, if you'd like to fire that person and replace her/him with me, I do have a marketing background, excellent communication skills, and a fierce hatred of plastic grocery bags that don't get recycled.)

Another part of the problem is that I've only seen these bins with my own eyes in two places in the city. Let's be fair, though, I've only been back in town for a week. I hear that Whole Foods has them, if that's any help. The Rite Aid in my neighborhood doesn't have one, and the employee I asked about it didn't know what the hell I was talking about.

"You're looking for what? Outside. Just go outside."

So good to be back in New York.

---
If you find a listing of stores in New York that have these bins, send it my way.

Cold. Expensive.

2009-01-17T12:17:00.003-05:00

I’m back in New York after five months in Thailand, three weeks in Texas and four days in San Francisco. Coming back wasn’t as painful as it was this time last year, when I contemplated dropping out of grad school mainly because it required me to live in New York. That’s as harsh a review of a place as you can get.

This time it was only painful in terms of regulating my body temperature. It was 23 degrees the day I flew into JFK, and today it was 16. I hear it’s much worse in the Midwest, but I’m not counting my blessings. I’m ungrateful for the fact that it’s not below zero. It’s so cold here that I get angry when I feel the outdoors coming to greet me when I exit the subway or my apartment. I feel violated by how cold it is. It offends me.

But, it does make me grateful for warm things, like a down coat, tall boots, my oddly large collection of SmartWool socks, and fuzzy slippers.

Yesterday I was at Fairway – an “inexpensive” grocery store in New York – and started getting angry. Avocados are $2. Apparently that really is cheap compared to Whole Foods, where they go for $2.50 or $3. I mean, who is stupid enough to pay that much for an avocado? The answer to that – a lot of New Yorkers – only leads me to the conclusion that I’m living in a city of 8 million stupid people. Which then makes me even more irritable, especially because I’m often stupid enough to pay ridiculous sums for ordinary items as well. I just dropped $10 on a tiny box of dried cranberries mixed with dried blueberries. Why? After all, raisins are so much cheaper, and taste much worse. But everyone succumbs to the insanity eventually.

Case in point: In Bangkok I would get annoyed whenever I’d come out of a BTS station and the person in front of me would be walking down the stairs slowly. I'd think, “What are you, a turtle?” Plus, everyone knows it takes way more energy to go down stairs slowly than to trot down and let gravity do the work. Anyway, why does any able-bodied young man or woman need to go slow? Don’t they have a life to get to?

That’s when I realized that New York had seeped into me, just a little. I remember arriving home from Kenya, stepping off the plane in Houston and noticing everyone speed-walking past me. In retrospect they were probably walking at a normal speed and I was walking slowly. But I do remember thinking, why is everyone in such a hurry? Are they so excited to get to immigration so they can stand in line?
----

Like everyone else in the United States of America, I resolved to exercise more in the New Year. Catherine, my brother’s girlfriend, pointed out that in order for resolutions to work, they must be quantified. For example, “I resolve to exercise twice a week.”

Well, more is a quantity. In my case, it means any number greater than zero.

Actually, I had the idea to use the current temperature to guide my workouts, because doesn’t everyone want to merge her disdain for winter with her disdain for indoor gyms? Today when I went to the gym it was 17 degrees outside, so I did 17 repetitions of everything – sit-ups, leg lifts, weights, etc. Sadly, 17 reps at a time are still too many for me. This is either a sign for me to get more fit – or hope for colder weather.

Wait. That can’t be right.

Intro to Impermanence 101

2009-01-01T01:40:00.001-05:00

My co-worker’s husband passed away in early December of lung cancer. He was really young, in his forties, and they have two kids in elementary school. They had a Buddhist funeral at a temple in Bangkok, with monks chanting and giving speeches in Burmese. A guy sitting next to me, a friend of the family, told me that the monks were talking about how life is impermanent and that we should be at peace with death.

At the end of the ceremony, a bunch of the male guests carried the coffin out to the crematorium, which was on the same compound. When I saw them carrying the coffin into the crematorium, my breath imploded into itself. It seemed so final, watching them go up the steps with the coffin, knowing that soon there would be nothing left of the guy except memories and photos.

It also seemed too soon. He had only passed away the day before.

I looked over at my co-worker, his widow, who was keeping it together really well. She and the kids just watched matter-of-factly. Maybe it’s because they are Buddhist, and when you’re Buddhist you know that cremation is part of how you die.

Even though a lot of people in the U.S. get cremated these days, I think the idea of burial and keeping the body around is pretty ingrained in us. I see it as one of the ways our culture tries to avoid the impermanence of everything in life, including life itself. At that moment, surrounded by all my Thai and Burmese co-workers, nearly all of whom are Buddhist, I felt like the least enlightened person in the crowd, with a knot in my stomach knowing that this guy was soon to be a pile of ashes.

Someone flipped a bunch of switches in the crematorium and there were these dramatic whooshing sounds, like pilot lights for a massive, industrial-sized stove. The fire was going. I think that most Asian cultures are all about not showing emotions, which added to the discomfort I felt with everyone around me watching almost impassively as the carriers slid the coffin into the, well, oven.

There was a tray of straw flowers at the foot of the steps leading into the crematorium. One by one we each took a flower and filed into the building. We put our flower into the fire next to the coffin, which was still intact except for a black spot that was starting to grow as one corner caught fire and burned. People wai'd the deceased as a show of respect, placing their hands together in front of their face in a prayer gesture. We continued out the door on the opposite side of the crematorium.

I asked another co-worker, our HR director, how long it usually takes for the cremation to be complete. I’m pretty sure I had to rephrase the question a few times. “How long does it usually take to burn the body? To burn away the coffin? How long does it take…ugh.”

“A few hours,” he said kindly. Thank God Thai people are so polite.

One reason I had asked was because even though the crematorium had been built with a tall chimney, I wanted to make sure to leave the compound before I started thinking there was someone selling barbeque from a food cart. Terrible. Terrible. Terrible.

Dogs In Taiwan

2008-12-26T02:08:00.003-05:00

I was telling my parents about the proliferation of soi dogs in Thailand. At the risk of perpetuating stereotypes about alternative Asian cuisine, I'm following up my last post with my parents' response.

"Years ago, when I was still in Taiwan, you'd never see stray dogs anywhere."

"Why not?"

"People were hungry. They'd catch stray dogs and eat them."

"Really? I thought white people just made that up about Asian people."

"No. Even your dad, when he was in the military, his friends would catch dogs and eat them."

"No, no," my dad said. "Not everyone. Just the officers. They'd never share it with the regular soldiers."

"So, I mean, you'd catch the dogs and then grill them over a fire?"

"No," my mom said. "Stew."

"They'd catch the dog and then chop chop chop," my dad said, chopping at the air with his hands.

"But stray dogs are so skinny," I said, always being practical. "What's there to eat?"

"Better than nothing."

Now I'm in the mood to watch that episode of King of the Hill when the Laotian family moves in next door and their pet dog escapes from the yard. As the wife frantically calls the police to report their dog missing, Peggy spies on them through the window. She sees her strange Asian neighbor in the middle of making dinner, chopping meat while she's explaining the situation to the police.

"Dog!" she says into the phone. "Run out!"

The Miss List

2008-12-22T06:31:00.002-05:00

I’m flying home! My five months in Thailand have also flown by, commemorated only by this rather spotty chronicle of my time here.

The last few weeks I’ve kept a list of things I’ll miss about Thailand.

The only things I felt like I left behind in Kenya were friends. Everything else I was happy to see becoming a progressively smaller dot on the African landscape behind me, getting more wavy and distorted through the trail of jet fuel from the plane as we barreled down the runway towards the US.

Overall Thailand has been much more livable. I didn’t have the same level of cultural immersion as I got from living in an African village, but I also didn’t emerge with the frayed edges of sanity poking through my sweater at awkward angles.

Things I’ll miss about Thailand:

1. I won’t dwell on the obvious: friends. I met some really great people and each of them touched me in their own way. Like all good friends should.

2. The way Thais treat animals. In the States we’d want to vomit a little, because many Thais treat their pet dogs and cats like kids, combing them daily and even dressing them up in barfy clothes with ruffles and ribbons. I came here with the expectation that Thais, like people in many Asian cultures, value animals for their utilitarian worth and not for the companionship and affection they can provide. I assumed that they believed that dogs and cats belong outside and should be grateful for scraps to eat.

In Kenya most people treated dogs and cats like, well, animals. Beating the family dog, keeping him chained up all day, feeding him household waste destined for the garbage pit, beating orphaned kittens on the head with a metal spoon, and throwing rocks at any animal that wandered into a human dwelling were all appropriate ways to treat things with four legs.

So in contrast, seeing Thai people carry puffy toy dogs in their motorcycle basket or letting them ride standing with their hind legs in their owners lap and front paws on the handlebars was pretty heart-warming. Most pet dogs and cats don’t cower and shuffle away when you lift your hand over their head, because they don’t expect to get beaten all the time.

Also, most people in Thailand can claim to have “soi dogs,” or strays that hang out on the lane (soi) where they live. It’s not clear whether these dogs technically qualify as strays since many of them are fed and taken care of by people who live on the soi. No one will claim ownership for the dogs or allow them inside their houses, but everyone makes sure the dogs are well cared-for. At the same time, they bark and fight all night, spreading mange and doggy STIs to each other. One of my first observations when I got to Thailand was that the country needs public health for dogs. Part of the problem is that people feed their soi dogs, so they stay healthy enough to reproduce, ensuring future generations of mangy but loveable strays sleeping like speed bumps on your street all day.

One of my friends says that her soi dogs are really intelligent. I suppose it makes sense if you’re going to survive as a stray in Bangkok. She says that when her soi dogs walk out to the main street, which is a two-way multi-lane thoroughfare, they look both ways before crossing the street. How can your heart not melt seeing that?

I think it puts their IQ higher than some American politicians we’ve known lately. Look both ways before invading a foreign country.

4. Cheap stuff. I suppose it’s not hard to beat out New York City when it comes to having cheaper stuff (or more charm, smaller rats, and friendlier people for that matter).

This was a mixed blessing, though. You usually get what you pay for in Thailand. If a bowl of noodles is 30 baht ($1), it’s not enough for a decent meal. If a pair of flip flops is 59 baht ($2), it won’t survive more than a week of hoofing around in Bangkok. If a cotton shirt is 180 baht, it’s not cotton. But, hunt around for awhile and you start to learn where the bargains are. Plus, $580 gets you a really nice, furnished one bedroom apartment in a centrally-located neighborhood, with a real kitchen and space to lay down a yoga mat in front of the TV or have drinks with a friend or two on the balcony. Three thousand dollars doesn’t even get you that in New York.

5. Obviously, the food. Although I’m a bit tired of Thai food for now, and just asked my mom to have a pot of spaghetti sauce waiting for me when I get home tomorrow, there are certain dishes that just won’t be the same back in the States. One of them is pad thai. The only thing that makes pad thai worth eating, in my opinion, is the sliver of baby banana and sprigs of Chinese chives that come on the side. In the States, they only give you bean sprouts.

Also, Thai food in the States isn’t properly spicy. I’m not even sure if most American Thai restaurants have that four-flavor spice rack that every self-respecting food establishment in Thailand has, the one with 1. chili powder (hot), 2. chilies in vinegar (sour), 3. sugar (sweet), and 4. fish sauce (salty).

And finally, Mahachai was THE place for cheap, fresh-off-the-boat seafood. One night I bought two fat crabs and devoured them both all by myself. I have to admit, though, it was a bit difficult to hear them tapping frantically inside the pot as I steamed them to a sweet, rich tenderness.

The Protests

2008-12-02T09:54:00.003-05:00

The protests are over. Tomorrow at 10am, the anti-government People’s Alliance for Democracy (PAD) have agreed to vacate both airports in Bangkok. Cargo flights are scheduled to resume, and passenger flights within the next few days.

Read up on it here.

It’s a complex situation with a political history that goes back for years – arguably a decade or more.

It’s been tense the last week or so, and although someone could easily change their mind, I feel like after tomorrow things will settle down for the most part.

Mostly I’m left with the observation that the way a country asserts and responds to civil disobedience is such a window into their culture. In many ways I found the protesters’ behavior, and the government, military, police, ordinary citizens and opposition groups’ responses to it to be very Thai.

What struck me as very Thai was the generally non-confrontational nature of the whole protest. In nearly five months of illegally occupying government buildings and essential transportation infrastructure, only two people were killed. This is of course two people too many, but considering the number of people involved, and the fact that the police and military were repeated called upon to do something to disperse the crowds (but didn’t), this is quite impressive. This is not to say that things have been peaceful. Just not as violent as they would be in most other countries.

But this is what also strikes me as very Thai: Throughout the protests, the armed forces were reluctant to do anything. The government would issue a weak order for the military to do something, and in response the military would issue a statement saying they weren’t planning to use force anytime soon.

It was similar with the cops. The (now former) prime minister told the police to shoo protesters out of the airport, and the police announced that the protesters should leave the airport, but nothing happened.

My favorite headline, from The Nation, reads, "Police to launch psychological warfare to weaken public support for PAD."

Psychological warfare? Some friends and I had a good laugh about that.

“You mean everyone’s going to be very passive aggressive from now on?”

“Yeah, everyone’s saying, ‘I’m not talking to you anymore, so there.’”

“Or they’re like, ‘Hehehe. I’m going to tell them yes when I mean no.’”

It turns out police were just going door-to-door telling ordinary citizens not to get involved with the protests. Still, this is what they refer to as taking action?

In some situations, Thai people are known to react calmly, or not very much at all. When you’re backpacking around the country on vacation, this is called The Locals Are So Friendly And Laid Back. When they’re your work colleagues, this is called Cross-Cultural Frustration.

Thai people strive to achieve or maintain jai yen, or a cool heart, based on the Buddhist principle of acknowledging the impermanence of all things in life and therefore remaining detached from things that ultimately don’t matter, like replying to emails or meeting deadlines. It’s a very enlightened view of the universe, but not very practical for working with unenlightened Westerners who want to get things done every once in awhile.

All judgments aside. Well, some judgements aside. Despite some very tense moments, especially during the last week, and a few explosives-related casualties, the overall mood of the protest seemed very jai yen. No one was really itching to physically harm anyone else. The police weren’t too interested in getting injured in the name of defending the rule of law.

There was also the reaction of the general populace during this whole conflict. In the beginning, PAD had a lot of popular support, especially among the educated elite and urban middle class. Bangkok, basically. A pro-government (anti-PAD) group organized itself and became vocal in the past week, with a lot of support from rural areas of the country.

As PAD’s airport occupation wreaked havoc on broad sectors of the economy without appearing to achieve anything, they started losing support. Thais who formerly supported PAD for their anti-Taksin and anti-corruption stance began to get irritated. They had viewpoints that weren’t represented by either PAD or the pro-government protesters. But where was their voice? I didn’t hear of anyone trying to organize a third movement. Maybe something was brewing and I didn’t hear about it. Oe maybe everyone was jai yen. Get pissed off, but then detach. All life is impermanent.

In contrast, how would this have played out in the US? A group of armed citizens take over an international airport and demand that the president step down? I’d say the city’s mayor would speed dial his riot police, and in 45 minutes they would’ve cleared the scene of every last protester and their farts. What does this say about American culture? That we’re results oriented? That we like to throw our (rather obese) weight around every chance we get, especially when it involves firearms? Or that we value the rule of law – and not getting sued – above most everything else?

Oh. Maybe you should scratch all that. Here’s a much more insightful, well-argued explanation, which got this issue of the Economist banned in Thailand:

A Right Royal Mess

And the response that appeared in the Bangkok Post:

An Open Letter In Reply...

The Stories

2008-11-17T10:46:00.001-05:00

Winter has started in Thailand. I was surprised to learn that actually means it’s cooler. In Kenya winter meant dry season, which meant no afternoon rain to cool off the day. Thailand is apparently far enough from the equator that there are subtle temperature changes with the seasons. I no longer need to keep my fan on at night, and there’s a breeze that reminds me of spring time. I no longer take two showers a day.

My language teacher, Noi, has some of the best stories stored up from her seven or so years of teaching Thai to foreigners. I always thought I was pretty good at picking up languages, but I think Thai may have defeated me, at least for now. It’s a tonal language, but it also has so many sounds are nearly indistinguishable to me, and to other foreign speakers as well – apparently.

Noi tells this story of a Japanese student of hers who was trying to buy a bus ticket from a female ticket vendor. He asked, in Thai, if she was selling tickets – “dtua” – but used the wrong tone. So instead the vendor heard, “Are you selling your body?”

Normally this type of story ends in a good laugh and confirmation of foreigner incompetence. This woman called the police. The poor guy was roughed up and forced to leave. I don’t think he ever got his bus ticket.

Noi has another story about a female student of hers who was trying to buy bananas at the grocery store. You can generally find two types of bananas here – the local ones, which are small and sweet, and the larger ones like those found in the States and Europe.

This student asked the sales clerk, in Thai, if they had large bananas. Because the student didn’t know if there was a special name for the large bananas in Thai, she referred to them as “falang bananas” – foreigner bananas.

Of course, she mispronounced the word for banana – “guai” (falling tone) – and instead used a vulgar word for penis – “kuai” (no tone).

So the request went, complete with hand gestures:

“I’d like foreigner penises. The big penises. Not Thai penises. Thai penises are small. Foreigner penises are big. I want the big penises.”

One of the teaching methods that Noi uses is to speak to me in Thai and use non-verbal cues to show me what she’s saying. Because of this, she is a repository of entertaining stories and tall tales.

Once during a lesson Noi told a “true story” about a guy in Africa who stowed away on a plane headed to America. He couldn’t afford to buy a plane ticket, so he waited on the runway for a plane to pass and hopped onto the wheel. As it retracted, he made himself comfortable in the wheel compartment. But since that part of the plane isn’t pressurized, he got cold and suffocated to death, unbeknownst to anyone.

As the plane was about to land in the US, the wheels dropped down and cut off his leg, which then fell into someone’s yard. The woman living there heard the sound of it hitting the ground and went outside to see what had happened, and found this severed black leg. She flipped out and called the police, who came and took the mysterious leg to the hospital, at which point I asked, “Why? It’s a leg, not a sick person.” Noi didn’t have an answer; it was just what she knew of the story.

Meanwhile at the airport police were searching the plane because one of the crew had reported blood dripping. They found the one-legged dead dude in the wheel compartment, a rather unfortunate lesson in what can happen when people think too much about money and try too hard to get to America. (This was Noi’s moral of the story anyway.)

Noi comes up with the most outrageous stories and she always claims “she read them in the paper, so they must be true.” I’m willing to indulge her on this claim because I think that what’s more important is that her stories crack me up.

One of the funniest parts of the story was when she drew a picture of the African guy, because she was trying to demonstrate that “kon Afrika” means African. So she drew this guy with tight curly hair, a broad nose and big lips. To top it off, she drew a bone in his hair so he looked like Wilma Flintsone.

In many cultures, words that embody stereotypes and caricatures of people’s race are just adjectives. They’re as innocuous as telling someone they look fat or old, which isn’t very innocuous to us. My supervisor, who speaks almost as little English as I speak Thai, has initiated two conversations with me, ever.

Conversation 1: “You fat now more than when you come Thailand.”

Conversation 2: “You eat now more than when come Thailand. Become so fat.”

The other day my co-worker’s husband asked why my skin was black and my face was gray. That’s the best question I’ve gotten since arriving here. I’m still working on the answer.

New Photos!

2008-11-13T02:38:00.001-05:00

Links to the right, under Most Recent Photos -->

The M'squitters

2008-11-09T11:56:00.003-05:00

I finally spent an evening cleaning up my house a little bit, mostly sifting through all the weird clutter and oddball dust bunnies that have built up in my drawers over the last four months. It’s amazing how things purchased and not purchased accumulate in different corners of the house, even as I consciously avoid buying anything that won’t be consumed by the time I leave here.

Some of it is necessary. I have a pretty elaborate collection of insect repellent of all sizes and flavors. I’ve sampled a good proportion of the insect repellent available in this country. My friend Nandita recommended this roll-on stuff made in Denmark or someplace, one of those countries you’d think wouldn’t really be experts on mosquitos. It's a DEET + lemongrass formulation, two ingredients that don't work very well on me on their own, but who knows what could happen if you mix them together. I'll never know, though, because I’ve traveled all around the country in search of it and no luck.

The best that I’ve found so far is a brand called Sketolene. They have a few different formulas, but I like the all-natural one that uses lemongrass and eucalyptus. It’s nearly as effective as DEET, but is non-toxic and doesn’t leave that sticky film that DEET does.

I seem to be a special case in terms of my ability to attract mosquitos. DEET-based repellents claim to last 12 hours, but they usually only last about 3 hours on me before the skeeters come a-buzzing again. And a 28% formulation works as well as a 100% formulation. I once used a 100% DEET brand, and it was so humid that 15 minutes later I had sweated through it, and I had three new bites. I hate mosquitos.

I’ve also tried a 100% lemongrass repellent, which lasts a whole 10 minutes. For whatever reason, the eucalyptus in the Sketolene makes all the difference. It must have the same confusing effect on a mosquito’s sense of smell that the menthol in Tiger Balm has, but without the scent of a Chinese grandmother.

So, Loi Krathong begins this week. It’s an annual lantern festival that takes place during the full moon in early November. People light candles, incense, coins, flowers and other offerings on a small lotus-shaped raft made of banana leaves, make a wish, and send it all down the river. It’s also considered an act of atonement to the river goddess for polluting the river, which seems ironic when you start wondering where the rafts and all their semi-biodegradable contents all end up after everyone has their fun. But, it makes for nice pictures and I’m hoping to find a riverbank where I can set up my camera and tripod.

The American

2008-11-06T11:30:00.002-05:00

But first, more on the food thing. Tonight I had an obsessive urge to floss. I'm not an avid flosser, and never flossed until I was 17. In the last few years I've improved to twice a week. But whatever is in the food here makes my teeth feel fuzzy, so I've been flossing nearly every day. It's like drinking Coke and then eating spinach. FUH-ZEE.

Anyway, the last day or so has been very exciting for 52.5 percent of Americans and over 90 percent of the world. I took yesterday off to watch CNN with other Americans in Bangkok. Brady and I both have Obama t-shirts, but mine is in a barely readable Pac-Man font that says, "Bangkok for Obama," while his says "Obama" in both English and Thai. So he gets a lot more attention for his t-shirt than I do.

I get the impression that support for Obama among Thais is nearly unanimous. Brady gets a lot of greetings and smiles and congratulatory fist-waving when he wears that shirt. In contrast, not only can no one read Pac-Man, but no one congratulates me. I'm Thai, after all.

A few years ago this would have bothered the crap out of me. It's mildly disappointing to have strangers congratulate Brady, the white guy, and ignore me, the illiterate Thai lady who can't speak her own language. I want to be congratulated for finally being proud to be American. But I try to set realistic expectations here, and I'm quite content to know that my new president drop-kicks Thailand's new prime minister is the ass. So there.

Until now, I've always cast a vote for the candidate that sucked the least. Today, we've elected the guy I actually want up there, instead of just firing the loser everyone wanted kicked out of there.

I've been scouring the election coverage and came across a reader comment that said, "Today is only the third time I've ever waved an American flag in my life. The first time was 9/11 and the second time was when I dressed up as Condoleeza Rice for Halloween."

My heart brims with joy.

Yes. We. Did.

2008-11-06T11:27:00.002-05:00

The Different Approach

2008-11-03T10:26:00.003-05:00

So I’ve decided that trying to play catch-up with my blog posts isn’t working because I’m now 3 months behind, and I suspect some readers are starting to jump ship. I was keeping field notes for awhile, which became the basis for some of my blog entries, but even those have fallen by the wayside in the last month. So, I’ll just start from today, and fill you in on the recent past as I go along.

Election Day is Wednesday Thailand time, Tuesday American time. Although it looks very promising that the only qualified candidate will win, anything could happen. If it does, don’t blame me. I voted correctly.

Twice, thanks to New York State not being on top of their absentee ballots.

So, I have this way of obsessively focusing on certain themes that recur through my days much the way annoying songs run in your head. In the last few weeks I’ve become fixated on this single observation about Thai food: I’ve got excessive flavor overload.

Actually, the main complaint isn’t the flavor so much as the extremes of salt, sugar and oil that are used to “enhance” flavors. I think one of the theories behind Thai cooking is that different flavor groups are used to balance each other out in a single dish. So in many dishes you have salty, sour, hot/spicy and sweet all in one.

But, finding the correct balance is a finely-honed skill that most Thais don’t actually possess. Instead they are good at salt-oops-sugar-oops-salt-oops-sugar-oops-sour-oops-sugar-oops. Until you get a dish that is way too salty, way too sweet, way to sour and way too spicy. Ta-da! To the untrained palate this passes as delicious. To me, it gives me a headache.

In Thailand I’ve stopped cooking altogether since I’m not allowed to have a gas stove in my apartment, and street food is cheap and tasty compared to the effort of going to the market everyday and cooking dinner after a long day. But when Elsie came to visit a month ago, and now that Brady is visiting, we’ve been cooking our own meals. The verdict? I sure miss eating stuff that tastes like it did before it was salted and sugared to death, or smothered in sauce.

This whole realization about Thai food makes me understand why most Thai people don’t like Japanese food. “Too bland,” they say.

In contrast, I love Japanese food. It tastes like it did back when it was alive. Chinese food is similar. The principles of Chinese cooking, I think, are based on the idea of appreciating what the food actually tastes like, instead of matching it with the most appropriate flavor counterpart. I’m told that there are all these different types of basil that have specific purposes in Thai cooking. So, pork gets one type of basil, chicken gets another, shrimp gets another and so on. Amazing.

Anyway, this weariness of Thai flavor overload has informed some of my recent cravings. Not so long ago I was hoping that the hotel buffet where I was eating would serve French onion soup with lots and lots of melted cheese on top. No such luck of course. It was a Thai hotel with a mostly Thai clientele, and I had to settle for shrimp tom yum.

Then today I was at Tops Super with Brady, looking at salted peanuts, and I said, “Right now I would really really like a baguette with brie, salami, tomatoes, fresh basil, cracked black peppercorns, watercress and maybe some hickory smoked turkey breast. Because it would be nice to eat something that tastes like its original food source.”

“But you said salami,” he pointed out.

“Salami tastes just like a pig,” I said. “And that’s really what I need right now.”

The Mime

2008-08-10T12:10:00.004-04:00

Thursday morning my coworker was supposed to pick me up at 7am to go to Mae Khlong for a workshop on migrant rights. At 7:30, she still hadn’t called to say she was waiting for me outside, so I called her.

“Ohhh!” she said. “Jahteenahh! I forgot to come to your house.”

Great.

“You go with Ahn,” she said. “Eight thirty he come. Sorry. I already drive 10 kilometers.”

Caroline called me at 8:30. “Oay told me you needed a ride. I’m at the 7-11 waiting for you.”

There’s a 7-11 on every block in Thailand. They’re more ubiquitous than Starbucks in the States.

“Which 7-11?” I asked, of course.

“Next to city hall,” she said. “Next to the police station.”

Well, those are two landmarks that every resident should know in their own town. But not me.

After a lot of walking around and calling Caroline, we found each other. City hall was not where I thought it was. There were some other Raks Thai staff and a few other people I didn’t recognize.

Caroline and I rode in the same car as a Thai woman named Wii (actually spelled Wi but for the Apple generation it’s more fun to spell it with two “i”s) who is doing a PhD in nursing in the northeast. When she learned that Wii spoke English, Caroline waved her fists excitedly.

“Good good good,” she said. “Now I can talk to someone in English.”

My sentiments exactly.

The workshop was held at a riverside resort near Amphawa, a town famous for its floating markets, fireflies, and homestays in stilt houses on the river. Caroline and I lassoed Wii into sitting at our table and translating for us. She didn’t seem to mind, as most Thai people are excited to meet English speakers so they can practice. I was grateful to have a translator because everything was in Thai, including the signs for the bathroom.

Caroline leaned over at one point and said, “How is here different from where you come from?”

For some reason people love to ask me this when I’m in other countries. I don’t know why. I’d never ask such an open question because the obvious reply would be, “What do you mean?”

Which is what I asked.

“How is this workshop different from if you were in the US?”

Ah. “For one thing, there would probably be a lot more talking,” I said. “Americans love to hear themselves talk, even when they’re not saying anything intelligent.”

Caroline laughed. “Asians aren’t like that. We don’t like to talk,” she said. The irony, of course, is that Caroline can’t stop talking. She is the chattiest person I know in Thailand. She said that if it weren’t for her uncle threatening to kill her if she ever became an actress, she would have become an actress.

Actually, I don’t find Thai people all that shy. I think this is actually a pretty gregarious culture, and women are just as chatty as men in mixed-gender situations.
----

According to Buddhist tradition, monks are only allowed to eat food that lay believers give them as alms. If you’re up early enough almost anywhere in Thailand, you’ll see monks walking around with their alms containers, and people offering food as a good deed.

The resort where we stayed was a teak wood number built on the riverbank. The monks in the Amphawa area traditionally collect alms by boat, and are now a tourist attraction. Friday morning I was up at 6 hoping to catch a glimpse of saffron robes floating down the river with their empty containers. There is a small dock where resort patrons can wait to give alms to the monks when they paddle by. If you give advanced notice, the resort will organize food for you to give the monks. How’s that for no-hassle alms-giving? You don’t even have to go to the market yourself.

Photos here.
----
Last weekend Francisco and I were in a 7-11 looking for something for his wonky stomach.

“Do you have Pep-To-Biz-Mol?” he asked the woman behind the counter, enunciating each syllable. It was a long shot but it couldn’t hurt to try.

She stared at him blankly. I tried pantomiming, one of my favorite ways to communicate with Thai people.

“Do you have…” I began. I held my stomach, frowned as hard as I could, and moaned like a person with diarrhea.

The woman’s face lit up. “Oh!” she said. “Test baby?”

Hmm. I hadn’t intended for my sign language for “diarrhea” to translate into “pregnancy test.”
----

A pantomime success story. A few weeks ago I saw a cockroach in my bathroom. A lot of Thai bathrooms are a single open floor with drains. Shower runoff goes down there, as well as runoff from something called the “host spray” according to signs in the mall – a short hose with a spray nozzle that you use to hose down the toilet after you use it. Of course, having a “host spray” makes a lot more sense when you’ve got a squat toilet rather than a sitdown toilet. I’ve also wondered if some people use it as a personal bidet as well, but I’d rather not know. I just avoid touching the “host spray” in public restrooms.

Anyway, one night a cockroach had crawled up through the drain and was nosing around my bathroom. How rude. I didn’t invite him in. I flipped the lights on and off trying to scare him back into the drain. It was one of those things that makes me realize how dumb humans are.

The guy eventually crawled back into the drain and I stuffed it with a jar cap that happened to fit perfectly. A few days later, the cockroach found its way back out – through the drain in my balcony. It was time to do something.

I accosted one of the apartment managers in the elevator.

“Do you have bug spray?” I asked, making a pumping motion with my index finger. “I have a cockroach.”

Blank stare.

“Um…” I clasped my thumbs together, wiggled all my fingers, and scuttled my hands close to the ground while making a high-pitched humming noise, because that’s what a cockroach sounds like, according to this mime.

“Oh!” he said, his face brightening. “I have. One moment.”

The Chinese

2008-08-06T09:32:00.002-04:00

Oh my God. I found out that the woman who cleans the building (and now my apartment unit) speaks Chinese. We were heading up the elevator to my unit when she said, “Can speak Thai?”

“Nit nawy,” I said. A little. Then, to avoid any confusion, I showed her how much by putting my thumb and index finger as close together as possible without actually letting them touch. “Nit nawy.”

“Speak China?” she said.

“Nit nawy,” I said again, but this time I could actually claim some space between the fingers.

“Can you speak Chinese?” she said in Chinese.

“You speak Chinese?” I blurted out in Chinese as my jaw fell off and dropped to the ground. “I can speak Chinese!”

I had to bite my lip from cracking my face open grinning. Instead of only being able to communicate like a 2-year-old, I could now communicate like a 4-year-old. Hooray for college foreign language requirements!

Francisco’s Taiwanese coworker would go around asking Thai people if they spoke Chinese, especially if he was having a sudden communication breakdown. He didn’t have a ton of luck with it, but once in awhile someone would know a little Chinese. It's a clever idea since a lot of Thais trace their ancestry back to China, but I've never tried it myself.

Later today, I was buying food from my favorite cart at the night market. I had an awkward exchange with the vendor about what was in the curry I was about to buy.

“This chicken?” I asked in Thai.

“This thai thai thai thai,” she said in Thai.

“Chicken?” I asked again.

“This thai thai thai thai,” she said again.

I just nodded and bought it, figuring that as long as it wasn’t fried termites I’d eat it. The vendor looked at me for a bit and said in Chinese, “Do you speak Chinese?”

Man! Where are all these Chinese speakers coming from? I know it’s perhaps the most widely spoken language in the world, but still.

“Where are you from?” she asked. I told her.

“Oh, so you speak English, too,” she said.

Yes. Unfortunately, not a language that gets me very far in Thailand.

I’m glad that once again I remembered to pack my Chinese phrasebook with me. When I first arrived in Kenya I told another volunteer that I had brought it with me to Africa, and she laughed and rolled her eyes. But when I got to my village, who were the only other foreigners there? A Chinese construction crew, paving the road.

Incidentally, it wasn’t chicken in the curry. It was fake chicken that was either made of tofu or fishcake. A Thai person could probably say which it was. In fact the vendor did, twice.
----

I went swimming again this morning. Again, there was no one there. Like every other outdoor activity in Thailand, the heat was a bit oppressive even in the pool. I think the trick is to go early, around 8 or 8:30, when there’s still one lane that’s shaded, and the water hasn’t started warming up yet. Afternoon swimming is impossible in this pool, unless you like swimming in 90 degree bathwater.

The Heat

2008-08-05T12:05:00.003-04:00

Even though I don’t understand anything my coworkers say, my initial impression is that they’re all pretty nice, and they love to laugh. Our finance officer, Jaep, asked me yesterday how my work was going, and I told her that I felt a little neglected by Bangkok, and that some guidance and support would be nice.

Today she told me she had talked to Caroline and Dr. Khin, and they agreed to help me with my work and be my translators. Jaep gets stuff done. She’s the Thai version of that person who whips out her cell phone everytime she needs something, and 30 seconds later it’s taken care of. The Thai version because she’s always laughing, and never in a hurry.

Also, she, like everyone else, refuses to walk outside for even 100 yards. Thai people don’t walk. They drive to avoid generating any body heat that would add to the heat already generated by the climate here. Makes a lot of sense, but I feel ridiculous piling into the car and driving 100 yards to go to lunch. If everyone else is doing it, I won’t make a spectacle by walking alongside the car (since we never actually leave the parking lot when we do this), but a few days ago I was alone in the office and had to find my own lunch. Usually someone orders out, or sends Ahn to pick up something, or cooks something. So I walked about 150 yards to a restaurant across the street that served chicken and rice – two words I know how to say in Thai.
----

I joined a pool! There’s this small resort-type conference center across the street from our office, and it has a lap pool. Last Friday I harassed one of our field officers, Pak, to help me get a membership (by being my translator). The best part of the whole incident, of course, was that he drove me there. It’s literally about 70 yards away. I even said, “We can walk together.” And he said, “No, too hot.”

Which was true. It was two in the afternoon and just a sauna outside. So he got the keys to one of the Raks Thai vehicles and we drove for 20 seconds across the street. Twice, actually. The first time we just went to the membership office to ask how I could join the pool. Then, since I didn’t have my wallet, he drove me back to the office, which took about three minutes because the parking lot is one-way so he had to circle around and go the long way.

The pool is gorgeous. It’s outdoors, which I find to be a luxury after all the indoor pools built for cold climates like San Francisco and New York. But if you think about it, an outdoor pool is probably cheaper to build than an indoor pool. You don’t have to put a building around it.

Pak had pointed out the women’s locker room to me last Friday, but this morning when I arrived I’d forgotten which one it was. The signs above the entrances were all in Thai. Fortunately there was no one around, so I ducked into the locker room with the coral-colored tile. Lockers, toilets, showers, sinks. I ducked into the locker room next door, the one with the blue tiles, and took a quick spin around just to make sure I was in the right place. The blue tiled locker room had urinals. My first guess was right.

The One Two

2008-08-02T09:47:00.003-04:00

One thing that drives me crazy about Thai is that the word for "one" sounds almost the same as the word for "two" in Taiwanese: Nung in Thai, nun in Taiwanese, same tone.

So whenever people are talking about one of something, I'm always wondering, where's the other one?

Actually, come to think of it, the numbers one through ten in Thai are strangely similar to Taiwanese, even though the languages are supposedly not related.

Thai:       Taiwanese:

nung         ji
sawng       nun
saam         saa
sii           shii
haa          go
hok          la(k)
jet          chi
bpaet        bpweh
gao          gao
sip          tsa(p)

The () indicates a sound that may or may not be there; I always thought it was swallowed, but I'm not sure. I don't actually speak Taiwanese.

The Water

2008-08-01T03:49:00.002-04:00

Purifying drink water is much easier here in Thailand than in Kenya. Turn on the faucet and water comes out. Technically you can drink it without getting sick, but my friends have advised me against it.

“Water I think not so good,” Oay said. “Water come from ground, not good. Better you buy bottle.”

Actually, ground water sounds a lot safer than water pumped out of the river, especially in this town. I’m pretty convinced that the Tha Chin, which flows through Mahachai and brings the fishermen home, is much more polluted than any other body of water I’ve lived near – including the Chicago and Hudson Rivers. One reason I think this, and I might just be overreacting here, is that the water in the river is black, often coated with a layer of rainbow oil slicks, and is a fertile home for invasive water hyacinths.

Anyway, so I was thinking, groundwater sounds a lot safer than Tha Chin sludge, until I thought about that massive public health disaster in Bangladesh: arsenic in the groundwater.

Well, I bought bottled water for the first couple of weeks here. It tastes terrible. I think the word for it is brackish. It’s salty and metallic. The water from the faucet tastes exactly the same. I’m wondering if bottled water here isn’t just straight from the tap.

The reason I think this is because I’ve boiled bottled water and tap water, and I get similar results: a bunch of crusty white floaties. My water boiler – one of those electrical appliances found in every Asian household that boils your water then keeps it warm as long as you want – is always lined with the crusty stuff after I boil water. I’m not sure what it is. Probably just mineral deposits. But why is it also in the bottled water?

At least I learned a few things in the Peace Corps. If you let water sit for an hour or so, the debris sinks to the bottom, and you can pour the clear water into another vessel. The taste is noticeably improved.

Editor's note: I've since switched to bottled water that's delivered to my door in 20-liter jerrycans. No brackish taste, no white floaties. It's a winner.

The Tops

2008-07-30T09:17:00.000-04:00

My life has taken a turn for the more convenient now that I’ve discovered a Tops Super in the mall next to the night market. Now I can get all the things that are comforting to me and whose appeal confuses Thai people: cereal, milk, peanut butter (crunchy only though) and of course, Tim Tams. Also, I don’t know why I haven’t gone yet, but there’s a Swensen’s ice cream shop in that building. I think it’s because of the logistics – I go to the night market to get dinner, but I take it home to eat (because of the mosquitoes), so why would I then go back to get ice cream? I mean, it wouldn’t be impossible, just inconvenient.

Editor's note: A few days later I actually ate at the Swensen's before dinner because I had an ice cream craving and I didn't want to walk back there after dinner to get it. This girl manages.

The Soup

2008-07-28T13:59:00.012-04:00

They sell these do-it-yourself tom yum kits at the market for like 5 baht (15 cents). It comes with a few stalks of lemongrass, a few stems of kaffir lime leaves, and a small piece of galangal root – all together enough to make a family-size pot of tom yum soup, and then some.

Tom yum kung is a Thai hot and sour soup with shrimp. My co-worker gave me the recipe a few days ago. It was DEE licious, just like what you get at restaurants here. I sent some pictures of my food to Brady because he’s in Sudan, where there’s talk of a famine.

“Oh my God!” he said. “I’m licking my computer screen.”

Here's what you put in it, if you're a real Thai:

Lemongrass
Kaffir lime leaves
Galangal root
Fresh chili
Lime juice
Soup stock (pork is preferred here)
Meat of choice: shrimp, chicken, beef, pork, fish or anything else you feel like throwing in

Also, I've been getting friendly with the mangosteen again. They're expensive considering how much of it is just fibrous gristle. Forty baht per kilo is the market price these days - more than a dollar.

There's this quirk though: Ants live under the leaves, so when you break the mangosteen open they rush out onto the flesh of the fruit to gulp down the sweet juice before you become an unsuspecting anteater. Because if you eat a mangosteen, one day you'll eat an ant.

I had these mangosteens in the fridge for two days, and when I went to fetch them tonight, the ants were still there, tearing around waiting for me to break open the fruit.

The Lazy Saturday

2008-07-25T23:28:00.003-04:00

Woke up this morning very slowly. The weather outside was gorgeous – overcast and cool, for this place anyway. I haven’t needed to turn on the AC yet this morning. I had a hard time getting out of bed because I didn’t really know what to do all day.

From my living room balcony, I can see the corner of a shimmering aqua blue swimming pool in someone’s back yard. I look at it every day, to see if anyone is using it, because there’s nothing I’d like better than to live in a swimming pool for the next six months. This is surely the hottest country in the world.

As far as I can tell, this neighbor of mine with the swimming pool has never used it. It’s gotten to the point that I’m no longer convinced that it’s a swimming pool, except that I can see the house reflected in its surface, and when the sun shines in the afternoon I can see its ripples reflected off the house. It’s torture. I want to scale their wall, jump in and start splashing around. In this picture you can see it in the lower left corner. I'll try to take a better picture on the next clear day.

Oay called me this afternoon with a phone number for her friend, Mary, who might be willing to be my Thai teacher. This has been a source of constant debate for the last week: Where can I take Thai classes?

Oay suggested that I take a Thai class with Burmese migrants, because there are plenty of schools in Mahachai that teach that crowd.

“But I don’t understand Burmese,” I said.

“No problem!” Oay said. “Teacher speak Thai!”

Well, I insisted that if I was going to pay good money to learn Thai, my teacher was going to at least speak English well enough to explain Thai to me.

“Maybe I have neice,” she said. “She in high school. Maybe she teach you.”

Just because someone is actively studying English in school doesn’t mean they speak it any better than an adult.

“I ask her make time teach you.”

I told Oay that I wanted a real teacher, not some poor teenager who got her arm twisted by her aunt.

So this afternoon, at Oay’s urging, I called the mysterious Mary, who was expecting my call.

“Hello?” I said. “May I speak to Mary?”

A man’s voice on the other end said, “Thai thai thai thai.”

“Mary,” I said.

“Thai thai thai,” he said. “Thai?”

“Mary, please,” I said.

“Mary?” he said.

“Yes, Mary.”

“Hallo?” said a woman’s voice.

“Mary?”

“Hallo?”

“Are you Mary? I am Justina. Friend of Oay.”

“I don’t know.”

“You are Mary? I am friend of Oay.”

“Sorry. Don’t know.”

“Um…”

The man came back on. “Thai thai thai. Sorry. Thai thai thai. I don’t know you.”

“Okay.”

All I can say is that Thai people are really nice about wrong numbers. In the U.S. it would’ve been, “You got the wrong number, lady.” *click*

This poor couple actually tried to conjure up some English to explain to me that I had the wrong number. They were probably smiling the whole time, too.

The Phone Call

2008-07-25T10:48:00.002-04:00

At lunch today, Caroline was telling me about her place in Bangkok. She rents a room for 1,500 baht, which explains why Noreen was so appalled that I pay 6,000 baht for my place. Unlike most Burmese migrants Caroline has mostly Thai neighbors.

“So I have a lot of privacy,” she said. “Thais don’t care what you do. My people, they’re so nosy, always come to see what you do, see a man come visit and talk who is this man, is he good, just talk talk.

“I think Thai people, they are higher developed than Burmese.”

I thought of yesterday’s dinner in the Burmese hood with all the neighbors sitting in the doorway staring at me while I ate.

This morning I started regretting giving my phone number to Lad and Bot. Someone kept calling at 7:30 this morning. I picked up, thinking maybe it was Caroline since we had arranged to meet up this morning and go to her drop-in center together.

“Hulloooh?” I said, trying not to sound sleepy.

I heard a bunch of Burmese chattering on the other end and occasionally, the word “English.”

“Nnghh…” I said. “Hullo?”

More Burmese chattering, probably about how they didn’t know any English and couldn’t communicate with me, which didn’t occur to them before they dialed.

I hung up on them and tried to go back to sleep, but they called three more times, and I hit “ignore” three more times. It was too early for me to find any humor in the situation. In their hands, my phone number had turned into a toy that they were determined to break before 9am on Christmas morning.

When I saw Caroline later she said she had met those guys at the market on her way to town. They told her they had tried to call me this morning but didn’t know how to speak to me in English.

No. Kidding.

The Burmese Dinner

2008-07-24T11:44:00.002-04:00

Caroline let me tag along on one of her community outreaches this afternoon. She organizes informal small-group meetings where she and a few health volunteers she has trained lead discussions about family planning, condoms, dengue fever and STIs. Most of the people who attended were migrant women, although there were a few men.

After the session she took me into one of the housing communities where Burmese migrants live. She introduced me to a bunch of guys playing takraw, that popular kickball-volleyball game played with a bamboo ball. Some other people were loitering around and started getting interested in me after they noticed me fumbling with the one Burmese greeting I know. There was the usual confusion about where I come from and why I look Burmese. I’m pretty convinced that people in Southeast Asia can’t tell their own people apart from any other ethnic group.

A couple of the guys who were watching the takraw game started getting chatty. Through Caroline, they fired questions about where I come from, what I do, if I’m going to give them money, if I can take them back to America, and if I’ll marry one of them. The conversation alternated between tiresome and engaging.

Lad, Mr. Super Chatty, invited us to have a look inside his house because Caroline had explained that I’m a total dumbass and have no idea how Burmese migrants live. I felt like I was intruding on them, but they all seemed eager to share their world with me. Lad was actually complaining that I hadn’t brought my camera.

The housing block is a bunch of small rooms in a row much like the one we went to for the mobile clinic. Each room serves as the place where a family eats, sleeps and cooks.

We went inside Lad’s house and he and his sidekick, Bot, started pulling out food for us to eat. It was odd that they had all this food already prepared for us, but it turned out that everyone had already eaten, so these were leftovers.

We sat on the ground, barefoot of course, and suddenly a grand spread materialized in front of us. Fried fish, fried "cockroach shrimp" pancakes, raw vegetables, various chili sauces, rice, lily flower fish soup, steamed cockles…mm mm.

The extended family and neighbors gathered at the door to see if I could eat Burmese food, which reminded me of the slack jaws and zoo-animal prodding from my first day in the village in Kenya. (“You know how to use flip flop? Then show us.”)

I was a little thrown off because I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to eat with my hands or not. (The answer: No hands. Spoons and forks.) They brought a basin of water for us to wash our hands in, which we shared and which was subsequently used to rinse off spoons before we ate. I see a health education session right there.

While Caroline and I ate, Lad, Bot and the Peanut Gallery neighbors peppered me with questions. How old am I? Am I married? What kind of work do I do? Do I have siblings? My stomach is still on fire a bit from the chili fish paste sauce.

Most migrants in Mahachai live in pretty basic quarters like Lad and his family. But they also have a lot of modern amenities. Lad’s house had electricity, a large TV, a pretty fancy stereo system with big speakers, and a fridge. He and his family have been in Thailand for more than ten years, so they’ve had some time to save a little money.

By the end of the meal, Lad and his wife were inviting me to stay the night. Their room was a bit small for guests, and even though Lad speaks Thai, I don’t. Plus, Bot had been much too interested in my marital status for my taste. Caroline had to catch a bus back to Bangkok so we made a hasty getaway, but not until Lad had put me on the spot and taken my phone number. It will be interesting to see what the Burmese version of phone stalking looks like. Stay tuned.

The Migrant Hood

2008-07-23T11:09:00.009-04:00

Today was the first time since I arrived here that I was reminded that some parts of Thailand aren’t like Bangkok, or even idyllic Thai villages.

We hold a mobile clinic every Wednesday with the help of some staff from Samut Sakhon Hospital, the provincial hospital in Mahachai. Today we went into a migrant neighborhood with rows of low concrete buildings divided into small rooms by thin plywood. Dr. Khin and some nurses set up shop in one of the hallways.

I didn't get photos of the row houses, but one family stays in each room, and although you can close and lock your door, there’s not a lot of privacy from your neighbors’ prying ears. However, some families had TVs and refrigerators.

Other houses in the neighborhood were corrugated tin boxes on bamboo stilts, sitting over a black, fetid marsh full of garbage and toxic waste. The smell got worse once it started to rain.

Even without Lake Trash, the constant smell of fish drying in discarded fan cages is unmistakeable.

The Translators

2008-07-22T01:48:00.008-04:00

I forgot my list of interview questions at home. I was at one of the Child Learning Centers run by my organization, located in a neighborhood called Krok Krak Nai. I wanted to interview some teachers for a report I'm writing about the child centers.

It turned out that I didn't need my list of questions. The interviews ended up being one big exercise in how to lose everything in translation.

The original plan was to conduct structured interviews with each teacher, and turn the data into a well-researched document about how the child center intervention model is being used to achieve the project objectives.

I love how grad school brainwashes you into thinking that systematic, analytical approaches to problem solving work.

I interviewed Yi first, a Burmese woman who taught high school before coming to Thailand. I was accompanied by a small team of interpreters. Oay translated my English into Thai, and then a ten-year-old Burmese kid tried to translate her Thai into Burmese.

My first question was very simple: In your opinion, what are the objectives of the child center?

I knew we weren’t going to get very far. When I was ten, I don’t think I knew the word “objective.” Oay and the kid discussed it for awhile, then he translated it into Burmese. There was only confusion on the other side.

I tried again, trying to use simpler language. What are the problems that the child center tries to help with?

The question was passed down the line like a bucket of water down a row of firefighters, a little bit of meaning sloshing out with each new person handling it.

A light bulb seemed to go off on Yi’s side, and she sent her reply back down the line.

“She says…” Oay began. “Sometimes kids fight, and the teachers try to talk to them, teach them not to fight, or they talk to the parents to try to help the problem.

“I think maybe she didn’t understand the question,” Oay added.

No kidding. Our Thai-to-Burmese interpreter is a 10-year-old.

Oay picked up her phone. “I call someone else to come translate.” A grown-up, I hope.

While we waited, I tried to ask the question again, simplifying even more. How does the child center help the kids?

“We teach the kids how to brush their teeth, how to eat, to clean themselves,” came the answer.

A little closer, but not quite the big picture response I was looking for. To provide free day care services and teach basic language and life skills to children of Burmese migrant workers in the Krok Krak Nai community. That sort of thing.

Man, three days into this project and I could already invent objectives without interviewing the teachers, and be right. But that wouldn’t be a systematic or scientific approach, would it?

The new interpreter, a grownup, arrived and the poor kid was excused. We fared a little better, but the question about objectives just wasn’t surviving the gauntlet of translation.

It made me think of some of my professors who go into complex emergency situations in Africa or Eastern Europe and do rapid assessments. They interview people who not only speak a different language, but people who in many cases have just run for their lives, are sick and hungry, and have lost homes, livelihoods and family members.

And I was sitting barefoot on the floor of an air-conditioned office, ants zipping circles around me, feeling extremely awkward and reflecting on the absurdity of my situation, which was not so bad compared to what it could have been.

Again I'm struck by how silly it is that my organization agreed to take on an intern who doesn’t speak Thai. I’m sure they know something I don’t. They have a steady stream of foreign interns who don’t speak Thai. There must be a secret to this somewhere.
------

I’ve discovered the ancient Thai secret to eating – buy more than one meal. I see people at the market carrying at least five bags stuffed full of food. It’s possible that they’re feeding their whole family, but still, there’s no way that people can survive on the tiny portions that they serve here. I think most people snack throughout the day, but my variation is just to eat two servings at every meal.

There’s a reason my tribal name in Kenya meant “the girl who is always hungry.” Gobble gobble.

The Mundane Monday

2008-07-21T12:05:00.006-04:00

Back to work today after a long holiday weekend that included a successful excursion to Khao Yai National Park and an impromptu visit to Ayutthaya, one of the many former capitals of the kingdom that was burnt down by roving Burmese armies.

I really hate when people experience something like a sunset or a national park and instead of appreciating it at face value, write it off by saying, “Whatever. Such-and-such place had a better one.” But, I’m going to do it anyway.

Khao Yai is quite nice. But the Masai Mara had tons more animals.

Of course the two parks weren’t designed for comparison. Khao Yai is more about monkeys, birds, vibrant teal-colored scorpions, and a handful of elephants. Nevertheless, jungle foliage and leeches seem to be a good deterrent for crowds of shopping, eating people, and that was what I needed.

The leeches in Khao Yai were tiny. Borneo had bigger, thirstier ones.

Ayutthaya is popular on the tourist route because of its historical significance as well as its easy access from Bangkok, but one of the most notable landmarks in the town, in my opinion, is a rather unremarkable bridge with a very remarkable name: Pridi Damrong.

See photos in the sidebar there, including the Pridi Damrong bridge -->.
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Language is a gateway to so many things that I’ve always taken for granted. I went to the night market to get dinner last night, and even though it was nice to walk among the light Sunday night crowd listening to the night market sounds, I felt like an outsider. I didn’t understand a word anyone was saying. It’s weird blending in and knowing that everyone sees you and assumes you’re the same as them, but feeling completely different, and alone.

I haven’t seen another foreigner in town, except the one woman who was waiting for a minivan to Bangkok. Good call, lady.

Actually, that’s not true. I met this Indian dude who lives in my building. He’s the guy I call the Dude on the Internet, because he’s permanently attached to the computer in the lobby, always checking his email. He was there the afternoon I moved in, he’s there most evenings, and he was there yesterday when I went to drop off my laundry. And of course he was there two hours later, when I went to pick it up. This time, though, he stopped me.

“Excuse me,” he said. Do I hear English? “Were you at Victory Monument this afternoon?”

Why, yes I was. I had a deceptively simple task there: to transfer minivans. I was coming from Ayutthaya and trying to get on a van back to Mahachai.

It turned out that somewhere in the big mess of people at Victory Monument, I walked past the Dude on the Internet, and he recognized me but couldn’t place my face right away. What a very bizarre coincidence. That place was a total madhouse yesterday. I suppose that’s a dumb thing to say. It’s a total madhouse everyday. In fact, most places in Bangkok are a crowded disaster, especially if they’re designed for shopping or eating. And everything in Bangkok is designed for shopping or eating.

Bangkok, like New York, has too many people. In fact, Bangkok has even more people than the five boroughs: 9 million here, compared to 8 million in New York. That is about 7.25 million too many people.

Anyway, I’m not sure if all the stands are set up at Victory Monument everyday, on Sunday afternoons hundreds of stands selling clothes, watches, jewelry, makeup, bags, food, food and food pop up all around the Monument.

It turns out that the guy, my neighbor and new English-speaking friend, has been living in Thailand for three years, working for an American seafood company. He started out in India but was transferred here. I was curious to know what exactly he does for his company, since my organization works with the migrant laborers that these companies hire in droves. His card says "quality assurance." Is that IT-related or shrimp-related?
----

As I was checking out of my hotel in Ayutthaya yesterday morning, I started chatting with another guest at the reception desk, also an Indian dude. He was also heading for Bangkok, but was going to have breakfast before boarding his minivan. I said, oh, okay, well good luck finding the minivan station, I’m headed there now. And I left, grateful for the only 35 mph English conversation I’d had in 24 hours.

In Bangkok a couple hours later, after circling Victory Monument at least twice on foot with a heavy backpack and no more bottled water, I finally found my minivan station. I stopped at one of those fruit carts that always look like a gift from God on a hot day. The fruit was flying off the vendor’s stand, everyone was so hot and thirsty. I stood and waited for the fruit man to slice a new watermelon, and noticed the guy from Ayutthaya standing next to me, also waiting for fruit.

I don’t know how to capture exactly how random it is to run into someone at Victory Monument. This place is massive and chaotic, and people bustle around like ants. Not a small, orderly place. I wonder what the probability is of crossing paths there with two people I know on the same day, especially given that I know about four people in the entire country.
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Lunch was a little embarrassing today. I ordered rice with duck, and the portion was so small that I was still hungry after licking my plate clean. Oay encouraged me to order a second meal, and offered to wait for me to eat. No one else was having seconds, even though they had all each eaten only a tiny bowl of noodle soup. But if I didn’t eat something else, I knew I’d still be hungry. So that’s me, Two-Lunch Justina. No one made fun of me or even seemed to think it was odd that I ate twice as much as they did. But then again, no one’s English is good enough to say, “Wow, fat lady, you sure can pack it away.”

I usually try to learn one or two new Thai phrases a day, so I asked Oay how to say “rice with duck.” I probably should have asked her how to say, “two orders of rice with duck.”

There was a hair salon in the shopping center where we were eating called “Porn Saloon.” First, why is it that so many countries refer to hair salons as saloons?

I asked Oay what “Porn” meant in Thai, because I see it a lot. She said it’s just a name, and doesn’t mean anything in particular, which is no fun. I wonder if there was actually someone named Pridi Damrong?

“Hi, my name is Pridi. Pridi Damrong.”

“Yes, you are, in my opinion.”

The Tones

2008-07-17T10:07:00.003-04:00

Greenleaf Guesthouse and Tours, Pak Chong. So I managed to find my way here, which was an unexpectedly arduous feat. This may seem obvious, but EVERYTHING IN THIS COUNTRY IS WRITTEN IN THAI.

The northern bus terminal in Bangkok is massive, with several floors of ticket windows going to all northerly corners of the country. There were about three windows with destinations written in English, and luckily Pak Chong was one of them, presumably because foreign tourists like me travel there to get to Khao Yai National Park.

The bus to Pak Chong was standing room only. It was the Thai version of the Latin American chicken buses or the rattletrap Kenyan matatu-buses, which means it had a little rotating fan buzzing from the ceiling, passengers with all sorts of food in their laps, and ticket takers in tight uniforms droning in Thai. I got stuck sitting on the stairs, which wasn't so bad because I got to sit down, especially after I discovered that my Lonely Planet guide put just enough distance between my butt and the scalding metal steps.

For some reason I assumed that if Pak Chong was written in English at the bus terminal, then it would be written in English somewhere in the actual town. So I didn't bother to ask where we were when we pulled into a town and some people got off the bus. After all, there was no sign anywhere that said, “Pak Chong.”

An hour later I looked at my watch and realized that I was three hours into a 1.5 hour bus ride. I tapped the guy next to me.

"Where is Pak Chong?" I said in Thai.

Blank stare. Thai is a tonal language so if you use the wrong tone people don't know what you're talking about.

"PAK Chong," I said, trying a different variation on the tones. "PAK CHONG?"

More blank stares.

"Bok Jong?" I said. "BOK Jong? Bok CHONG. Bak JONG. BAK Chong."

"Buck CHONG?" he said, his face lighting up. "Buck CHONG! Buck CHONG!"

I nodded vigorously.

"Buck CHONG!" he said, pointing behind the bus. "Pass already."

My standing-room-only neighbor started discussing my predicament with three other men, and after every head had managed to turn and stare at the idiot foreigner cleverly disguised as a Thai lady, they decided that I needed to stay on the bus until the next stop on the route, a city called Khorat (in Thai, goh-LAHD, if you ever want to find out if you’ve passed Buck CHONG). There I could catch a bus going back to Pak Chong.

Well, Khorat was another hour away. By the time I got there, found the right bus with the help of my kind and generous new friend, and took it back to Pak Chong, my 2-hour trip from Bangkok had become a 7-hour trip into the heart of Northeastern Thailand.

I think trying to get around in a country and culture and language I don't understand makes me realize how well I knew Kenya, and how comfortable I was getting around after living there for so long. It was really helpful to know Swahili, but I also knew how everything worked, and I could predict how people were going to behave. And because of that I knew how to navigate my environment to get what I needed. If I wanted to wash my underwear? Ask for a basin. If I wanted a hot bath? Ask the guide to boil water. The matatu tout will always remember to tell you where to alight if you ask him to. As much as Kenya infuriated me, it was very familiar place and I'd never be lost there.
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So, thumbs down on the people’s bus in Thailand. Yesterday evening I took a minivan into Bangkok with Dr. Khin, who makes the 1-hour commute to Mahachai everyday. Thumbs up on minivans. They are new, clean, air-conditioned, and only one person is allowed to sit in each seat. The entire vehicle still has all its original parts from the factory, instead of being a Frankenstein vehicle created by welding together the remains of four or five different dead cars harvested from accidents that happened 20 years ago in more developed countries. There are no rattling windows, no missing rearview mirrors, no touts hanging out the window trying to recruit more people to stuff inside, no passengers with teargas-grade body odor reading your book over your shoulder and holding your wrist to stop you from turning the page because they’re not done yet, no drivers falling asleep at the wheel, no rusty door sliding off its rails and clunking onto the ground while unemployed men on the street leap from their drunken stupor and run over to try to force it back into place.

Minivans here are a lovely ride. Still, my other car is a matatu.

The Recovery

2008-07-16T05:02:00.002-04:00

I’m feeling a lot better today. At Dr. Khin’s suggestion I took a second day off from work. My coworkers have been great. Dr. Khin and Noreen just stopped by again, and of course the good doctor came with food--a brilliant four-part loaf of bread, to be exact. Each part has something different embedded inside. It goes, prosciutto (or its Thai equivalent), pork sung, hot dog, and raisins. It’s such genius, especially the hot dog. I love being in such a food-obsessed country.

Earlier this morning Jaep and Ahn stopped by. I was still wearing my glasses and padding around in sleepwear - wee boxer shorts and a shrunken t-shirt. I still don't know what's considered modest here, but they were polite enough not to stare or seem bothered. They didn’t stay long though. Maybe the shorts were like, “Go away! Go away!”

Dr. Khin is fond of asking about my poo. The first thing she said when I opened the door today was, “So how many times did you have diarrhea today?” And this morning she called to ask if it was watery or solid.

Other than that, I’m planning an excursion to Khao Yai National Park for the four-day Big Buddha weekend that starts tomorrow. Fortunately there are more public restrooms in Thailand than in New York City.

The Sick Day

2008-07-15T10:54:00.001-04:00

I felt a lot better yesterday morning so I went into the office. Oay took me to see the drop-in center at Tha Chalom, a neighborhood a 30-second ferry ride across the river from the market. The site also houses a child center, so I wanted to see what they do as well.

Noreen is a Burmese nurse who manages the drop-in center at Tha Chalom and sees clients seeking basic health care. We chatted a little about the child centers, since my primary project is to compile a report to donors and partners about them. I found it more interesting to ask Noreen about Burma, though, and I have a feeling I’ll be collecting bits and pieces of people’s personal stories throughout my time here. For a country whose government restricts contact with the outside world with such a heavy hand, there’s a lot of information that gets out. For that matter, there are a lot of Burmese people that get out – millions in Thailand alone.

After a couple hours of trying to have a coherent conversation in a hot room with a fan blowing on me, I was starting to feel a little feverish again. Noreen laid a thin comforter and pillow on the ground and told me to take a nap.
----

I decided that being instructed to take a nap at work yesterday was reason enough to stay home today and try to get a little better.

Dr. Khin visited me this afternoon and came bearing ORS and fish. I really think the Asian obsession with food is a bit much; she asked me literally six times if I had food to eat. I told her, each time, that I had some rice and some vegetables - and now some fish. She also asked me all about my diarrhea, which was sweet. I like talking about my poo.

It was really a day of trying to get better. I laid in bed, then on the couch, then on my bed, checked some email, turned the AC on and off, turned the fan on and off.

I finally ventured out to the night market around 6:30. I must have been really thirsty because all I wanted was fruit or juice. I got three trays of pre-sliced fruit – some papaya, pomelo and mango, the last of which may not be great for a funky tummy, but it looked pretty tasty. When I got home, I could only eat a bit of papaya and a slice of pomelo. The idea of fragrant rice and fish just didn’t appeal to me.

Oay came by to see how I was doing, and said she was a little worried about me. While she was here, the HR director in Bangkok called me to make sure I was feeling better. I have to say that everyone has been so wonderful with making sure I’m okay. It’s nice that there’s a doctor and several nurses in my organization. I definitely feel like I’m well looked after here.

The Barfies

2008-07-13T09:35:00.005-04:00

My coworkers Ahn, Oay, Muu and Arom were kind enough to plan a day of sightseeing for me, with a stop at a human rights workshop that Raks Thai was hosting for migrants at a wat (temple) in Mae Khlong, aka Samut Songkhram, the next province over from Mahachai.

We got a late start on our trip to the floating markets at Damnoen Sanduak, which is in Mae Khlong. Guide books recommend getting there as early as 6am to avoid the masses of tourists, but we didn’t arrive until nearly noon. By that time there were more tourists than fruit vendors on the river, and they were stuck in a floating gridlock because there was no room for the scores of boats to pass each other in the narrow waterway. My recommendation: heed the guide book, get there early.

We had lunch at the Raks Thai office in Mae Khlong. Muu and some of the Mae Khlong staff ordered an elaborate meal including tom yum soup, som tum (green papaya salad), and fried rice with eggs. They spread newspapers on the floor of the office and we sat around it picnic style and barefoot.

I’m sure the food was delicious, but my stomach was starting to get angry with me about breakfast.

“I didn’t like those eggs you ate this morning,” it said.

“Justina,” Oay said, pointing to my food. “Delicious?”

“Yes,” I said.

Muu looked at my half-empty plate, then at her own, licked clean. “If delicious, you plate like this,” she said.

“It’s delicious, really,” I said. “But stomach feel bad. I think eat bad eggs for breakfast.” I’ve started to speak in simple English to get fewer non-comprehending stares.

Sure enough, two hours later, as we were parked in town and waiting for Oay to run some errands, the eggs staged an uprising and evacuated themselves onto a small plot of grass in front of someone’s shop.

Muu had followed me out of the car and was murmuring and patting me on the back. “Okay,” she said, handing me a tissue. “Feel better?”

Everyone was so great. Oay came back with some medicine and put me back in the car, directing Ahn to take me to his house. I was still dizzy and faint so I barely remember walking through a small jungle with wooden planks spanning across a marsh to get to his house.

Ahn’s mom padded out to greet us as Oay and Muu helped me through the house. No one had said anything about Ahn living in a wooden stilt house on the river, a common style of housing in this area. It was a small and simple wood structure, but picturesque and breezy.

We walked through the house to the back porch, which looked out across the river. Their boat was docked at the foot of the porch. Ahn’s mom laid a blanket and pillow on the floor and everyone encouraged me to sleep. No problem. I was on my back and snoring 30 seconds later.

Oddball Photos, Volume 1

2008-07-12T12:35:00.002-04:00

Branding That Wouldn't Fly In the US. Darlie Toothpaste, originally made by a Taiwanese (some sources say Hong Kong) company that was bought by Colgate in the mid 1980s. At the time, the toothpaste was called "Darkie," and today the Chinese name still translates as "Black Man Toothpaste."

This brand was also popular and widely available in Kenya.

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I bought this mop at Tesco and didn't notice the branding until I got home. And nothing says "Black Man" better than stereotypical Chinese fortune cookie lettering.

Too Much Exoskeleton. I went to the market here in Mahachai to buy shrimp, and this being one of the biggest seafood markets in the country, I was presented with about 15 different kinds of fresh shrimp to choose from. There were several different species, further separated into various price tiers based on size and, I'm guessing, freshness. There was one stand selling live shrimp out of basins being pumped with a constant supply of water. The shrimp were moving around, blowing bubbles and looking pissed off about being there. These guys were the most expensive - 180 baht per kilo.

I usually buy the greyish shrimp that we're used to seeing in the States. Today I saw some big blue shrimp with long claws. What ARE those things??? There was only one way to find out. The verdict: Stick with the familiar shrimp, unless you like eating the head. The claws were a lot of work for tiny morsels of meat.

(below) Blue shrimp with long claws from the market lined up on my counter for inspection.

The Market

2008-07-12T04:42:00.003-04:00

I don’t know what they were thinking at the pillow factory. Maybe they get paid according to how much polyester fill they can stuff into a single pillowcase. The pillows I bought at Tesco are like tall bricks, and last night my body finally rebelled.

Lying in bed this morning in a half-conscious stupor, I decided that I would cut open my pillows and remove some of the stuffing. An hour later, I had two somewhat flatter, softer pillows, and a new third “bolster” pillow that I made out of the extra stuffing.

Bed-in-a-bag sets in Thailand come with a comforter, fitted sheet, two pillowcases, and two bolster pillowcases – long, cylindrical log-shaped pillows. That’s right, no flat sheet, but two bolster pillowcases for I’m not sure what. Maybe people use them as body pillows, which sounds like bad back alignment waiting to happen. But I’m no chiropractor.
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Today I decided to explore my neighborhood on foot, and apply some of the community mapping skills I learned in Peace Corps, which basically involves wandering around looking for landmarks in English so I can find my way home.

I set out for the market around noon, the perfect time of day for idiots who want to get heat stroke. My apartment is in a pretty central location. There’s a night market down the street that pops up around 5 pm everyday to feed hungry workers pouring out of their office buildings.

This morning, a Saturday, the street was lined with tarp-shaded stands full of clothes, random knick-knacks, plants, and cages full of rabbits, parakeets, gerbils, kittens and puppies for sale. As pets.

As pets.

I wandered further without purchasing anything live, and ended up at the park where Ahn took me yesterday. I had mentioned to Jaeb that I wanted to go running, so she stuck me on the back of Ahn’s motorbike after work yesterday and told him to take me to the park, where he was meeting some friends for sepak takraw, a popular game in Thailand that appears to be a combination of volleyball, soccer, and hackeysack using a loosely woven rattan ball.

<-- A sepak takraw player kicks the ball so fast that you can't see the ball. (Lumphini Park, Bangkok.)

The park here in Mahachai is a tiny spot of paved sidewalks, stray cats and manicured bushes that wind for a solid one-eighth of a mile next to a temple that seemed to be broadcasting a monk chanting over loudspeakers. Though ridiculously small, the park seems to be a popular place for runners, perhaps because it’s the only place in town that isn’t lined with shops, highways or factories.

Yesterday afternoon the air was thick, hot and still, and 15 minutes of heaving my feet one in front of the other was plenty. Half of my water content was now on the sidewalk. Amazingly, there were at least fifty women gathered around a small gazebo for a vigorous aerobics class set to loud techno, which was competing with the chanting from the temple.

My co-workers have been advising me to take motorcycle taxis everywhere, but there are a lot of places that are really accessible on foot. I don’t get the sense that people walk a lot in this city. I guess it makes sense – it’s hot as hell. Today I discovered that both the market and the temple are less than a ten minute walk from my house.

Right next to the park is a long pier where you can catch a commuter boat across the river. For 3 baht per crossing, it runs day and night ferrying migrant workers who work odd hours. You can even take your motorbike on the boat.

The river appears to become a port at this point. There are fishing boats docked all along the water’s edge, appearing to be in varying degrees of working order. The river also has tons of water hyacinth, an invasive aquatic plant that tolerates pollution really well and is known to wreak havoc on the water’s ecosystem, killing off fish, breeding mosquitos and water-borne parasites, and blocking sunlight from reaching other aquatic plants. As if the unfortunate smell and garbage floating on the surface weren’t enough.

I wandered away from the pier and into the market. It’s really quite amazing. There is so much fresh seafood – shrimp, squid, fish, eel, crabs of all sizes, lobster. And if the fresh version is too perishable for your taste, just walk a little further to find stand after stand selling the dried version. I came to the market armed with a very important phrase: thao rai. How much? Next time, I’ll also plan to be armed with its counterpart: numbers.

I wonder if most of the mamas selling seafood at the market are Burmese or Thai. I am so thrilled at the prospect of being able to get anything I could possibly want right here in my town. Need a pet turtle? Need a turtle for soup? Need a washing machine? It’s all here. I mean, except cheese and quality chocolate. I still haven’t found a supermarket nearby, only the Tesco that’s a bit of a drive from my place. I’m starting to miss bread.

People are generally pretty nice about my not knowing any Thai, despite the initial confusion. There are always some blank stares, some giggling and embarrassment, but always an attempt to help out the weird Chinese lady.

I know that my sense of urgency about needing to learn the language to avoid awkwardness is a bit unnecessary. Lots of expats live here and never bother to learn Thai. They’ve learned to manage the language gap. My brother’s high school friend, a Taiwanese American, has lived in Hong Kong for eight years and still doesn’t know Cantonese. If he’s shrugged off the constant assumptions about what language he should be speaking for this long, I’ll survive a few months while I learn some basic Thai.
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The other night, over dinner with Francisco, I was marveling about the TV screens all over the Bangkok SkyTrain stations and on the train cars.

Francisco said, “Those things wouldn’t last five minutes on a subway car in New York.”

I said, “I wonder why people are so respectful of property here that they wouldn’t think to steal a TV screen.”

He said, “The question we should be asking is why people in New York aren’t respectful that they would think to steal one.”

And then we laughed at how ridiculous we are as Americans.

The Motorbikes

2008-07-11T10:15:00.008-04:00

I took a motorbike taxi to the office for the first time today. This seems to be one of the main modes of public transport here. There are also buses, and what I think are called song-thaews, buses with a large pickup truck bed in the back with two benches along either side where lucky people sit while everyone else crowds in around them.

Motorbike etiquette is still a mystery to me. When you're the passenger, what do you hold onto? There are the bars next to the seat, but they're not very ergonomically useful. If you know the driver, you could hold onto their waist, but if you're just taking a bike taxi with an old sweaty guy driving, do you really want that kind of intimacy? I'm getting a motorcycle helmet and learning to hold onto the bars really tight, even though no one really drives that fast.

Thais don't hold onto anything when they ride a motorbike. I've seen people holding babies in one arm and steering the motorbike with the other. I've also seen dogs with their hind legs in the driver's lap and their front paws on the handlebars, zipping down the street happy as can be.

Thai drivers are so laid back. I think Thais drive better than anyone else in the world. They are safe, courteous and slow. No one floors the gas. No one slams on their brakes. There’s no complete stop for traffic that has the right of way, but when a critical mass of vehicles builds up at an intersection, everyone just goes together, and the cross traffic slows down to let them pass. There’s no road rage here, either. I can't imagine Thai people raging about anything. Part of it is that expressing emotion is considered a loss of face in Thai culture.

I really think that I could ride a bicycle around town. I've seen a few people on bicycles, but it seems to be the poor man's motorbike. Also, pedaling makes you sweat, and Thai people hate to sweat, so I imagine that anyone who can afford it opts for the cool breeze that you get from zooming around on a motorbike.

My coworker said riding a bicycle might be dangerous, but she doesn’t know that I've ridden a bike in Manhattan. Nothing compares to the danger and stupidity it takes to do that. Except maybe riding a bike in Nairobi.
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Ahn took me to Dr. Khin's clinic and I spent a few hours there asking questions and observing her work. She can provide basic care and medicine, and the clinic distributes condoms and family planning (pills and injections) but she has to refer patients to the hospital for more complicated procedures, including births and HIV testing. The services are 30 baht but no one is turned away if they can't pay. Sometimes if a client can't afford transportation, the clinic arranges and pays for the cost.

Dr. Khin was really interested in the work I did in Kenya. She asked me about the public health system there, and whether people got good health care. I didn't lie.

"It sounds like things are worse in Kenya than for migrants here in Thailand," she said.

As crappy as migrants have it here, I think she's right. In Mahachai the health infrastructure is pretty good. Nearly everyone gives birth in a hospital. Migrants are regularly referred to the provincial hospital here, and the quality of care sounds pretty decent. No rumors about disgruntled nurses in the maternity ward abandoning their patients for days, as there were at the district hospital where I lived in Kenya.

The barriers to access among migrants here are more about their legal status and language and cultural barriers than about a lack of available facilities, services or trained medical practitioners. It's a completely different level of problems than in Kenya, where systematic failures could be traced back to the inaction, incompetence or mismanagement of a few powerful people.

The Office

2008-07-10T10:27:00.004-04:00

Today was my first full day in Mahachai. Ahn the driver came to get me at 9am, as we agreed last night. He doesn’t speak any English, like about half the people in my office. But I like to remind myself of my own unique status as the only person in the office that doesn’t speak Thai.

The office is equipped as any well-funded NGO should be: AC, computers, printers and wireless internet. Of course, we are talking about Asian people so no one turns on the AC. They just run about eight fans all day long, partly for the heat and partly for the mosquitoes. Like in Bangkok, we take off our shoes at the door, which means mosquitoes bite me on the bottom of my feet. I HATE THOSE BUGGERS.

Our office is in a complex that looks like a strip shopping center. There are other organizations renting the other spaces, including an NGO called the Labour Rights Protection Network, and some seafood companies. There is also, I’m told, a pool nearby! I am planning to join, assuming it’s longer than the 20-yard joker at the campus gym back in New York.

Like almost every building I’ve seen here, ours is four stories high. Each organization's office occupies all four floors, with a stairway leading up to the other floors. In our office, the first two floors are where everyone sits. My desk is upstairs on the second floor, and I have access to a printer, photocopier, fax machine, etc. We have a conference room and some important person’s office on the third floor, and the fourth floor appears to be used for storage.

As expected, there’s nearly a full kitchen in the office. The only thing missing is a stove. But we have a rice cooker, an Asian hot water heater thing, a fridge and freezer, microwave, electric crock pot, a sink, dishes, silverware, cups, instant coffee and tea. And of course someone brings food to share nearly every day.

Ahn, Oay and Muu took me to visit a few of the drop-in centers. We went to Tha Chalom, a neighborhood across the river from the office, which has a child development center on the ground floor. It's managed by Noreen, the Burmese nurse who I met at the conference in Bangkok. The kids are really energetic, and the floor is a bit sandy with all the youthful hyperactivity. One of the teachers is a Thai guy who is always barking at the kids with his high-pitched voice. Maybe this is considered educational.

We also stopped by Talad Kung, an area of town aptly named for having perhaps the largest shrimp market in Thailand. There is another drop-in clinic here, where Dr. Khin works. She provides basic health care services in Burmese, and refers clients to the local government hospital for more complicated issues or for lab tests. There's brochures and posters in Burmese about HIV and STIs, pregnancy, family planning, dengue fever and other health information, and plenty of condoms and birth control pills. My favorite is this display with samples of unsafe "condoms." The sign is in English, Thai and Burmese.

So far the people who speak the best English are the Burmese staff – Noreen and Dr. Khin. They’ve both been in Thailand for years – Dr. Khin has been here for ten years and both her kids were born here – but their Thai is not very fluent. Like in Thailand, Burmese students study English beginning in fifth grade. I’m told that the Burmese language isn’t related to much else, including Thai. So Noreen and Dr. Khin can both speak it conversationally, but they can’t really read or write it. Migrants from Cambodia generally have an easier time learning Thai because it’s related to Khmer.

The New Apartment

2008-07-09T09:47:00.006-04:00

I went back to the conference in the morning hoping to hear something more insightful about migrants in Thailand. It was more of the same: NGOs complaining about the poor health and employment situations of migrant workers and advocating for more tolerance and openness, and government officials patiently explaining why migrants aren’t welcome in Thailand (they’re poor, uneducated and disease-ridden), despite the fact that the economy depends on them.

I was really proud of our executive director yesterday. He was one of the two people in the room, out of several hundred, who went up to the microphone to ask a question at the end of the program. He began by saying, “This whole discourse makes me very uneasy,” and complained about how the government ministries were being intolerant and closed-minded, and that they needed to do more to help migrants.

I skipped out on the lunch that was provided at the conference because I had told Maem, the HR assistant, that I’d be back at the office by 1. I was starving by the time I got back to the office.

“Didn’t they serve lunch at the conference?” Khun P asked.

“Yes,” I said. “But I told Maem I would be back here at 1, and I was already running late.”

“Oh dear,” Khun P said. “What kind of intern are you? You should always eat a free lunch.”

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A lot of places in Thailand have two names – one used by local people and one found on maps, street signs, and any official publication about the place. Even Bangkok is known as Krung Thep to Thais.

Mahachai is the local name of my town, which is officially called Samut Sakorn, or Samut Sakhon depending on who’s spelling it. The next province over, known for its winding canals and floating markets, is called Mae Khlong by locals, or Samut Songkhram by no one.

Mahachai has one of the highest concentrations of migrant workers in Thailand. Most people who know about migration to Thailand have never heard of it in that context, though. People know about Mae Sot and other border areas, but this musty fishing port, situated an hour southwest of Bangkok on the mouth of the Tha Chin river as it spills its creamy brown silt into the Gulf of Thailand, remains unrecognized for its dubious honor of attracting and hosting legions of migrants, mostly from Burma, in search of better wages and less oppression than in their homeland. These laborers usually end up working in the seafood factories or on the docks.

We packed up the car with my luggage and a lot of food and supplies for the Mahachai office. The Mahachai staff had reserved an apartment for me based on a budget and some simple requests I had given them over email, but I hadn’t seen pictures or even received a description. My biggest fear was not having a kitchen. It conjured up memories of the stunt that my worthless lying bum of a supervisor pulled on me in Kenya, where I was shown a palatial two-bedroom house on a hospital compound and told I would be living there, and when I arrived in the village they said I’d be living in a tiny room that was big enough for me to put up a bookshelf to demarcate my bed from my stove.

On the way out of Bangkok we passed several colossal, ornate temples. Each time I asked Maem if they were famous for anything.

“No, just temples,” she said each time.

“But they’re so big and fancy,” I said.

“There are many temples in Thailand,” she said. I learned later that nearly all temples are built using funds donated by the community. The government doesn’t fund the construction of temples.
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So, it turns out that my apartment is much to my liking. It’s simple but has all the amenities I need – AC, hot water, a flush toilet, spartan 70s-style furniture, two balconies, and most importantly, wireless internet. There’s also a massage spa in the building, and washing machines.

A few days later I would learn that there are no dryers, however, when the woman who provides the premium laundry service (which I don’t have) handed me a pile of my clothes fresh out of the washer.

“Dryer?” I kept saying in English.

“Wash already,” she kept saying in Thai.

After a few minutes of this, I finally understood that her nodding and smiling meant that I should take my wet clothes upstairs and hang them on my balcony.

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DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF you don't like hearing about other people's poo. Peace Corps friends, karibu.

So I tried out my toilet for the first time, armed with the knowledge that toilets in developing countries can have rather anemic flushing capabilities. The lesson is: put the toilet paper in the garbage can.

Sometimes it’s not toilet paper that’s the problem. Sometimes people forget to eat a balanced diet that includes fruits and vegetables when they’re traveling in a new place. Sometimes there appears a turd that becomes a formidable challenge to the average flush toilet in the host country.

Flush again. Flush again. Flush again.

Flush again. Flush again. Flush again.

Sometimes, after digging through their garbage can for a suitable tool, people find a way to poke the turd down, but only after wishing that David Sedaris were there to commiserate.

The Conference

2008-07-08T12:51:00.004-04:00

7:24 am. I’m about to head out the door to a conference on migrant workers and health. The main attraction of this conference, of course, is that I get to scope out the big names from WHO, UNIFEM, and the Ministry of Public Health.

It’s day three here, and I’ve been trying to get my brain switched to living-in-a-developing-country mode again. Except there seems to be no evidence that this is a developing country. There are these massive, sleek, hi-tech malls that are all nicer and more carefully and artistically designed to maximize your shameless consumption than any mall in the U.S. People from Japan, China and Malaysia come here on “shopping vacations.”

I’m still reeling from the overstimulation of being in a new country and hemisphere, as well as being 11 hours ahead of New York time, but if I had to choose one message that stands out most from everything I’ve taken in so far, it’s this: JUSTINA MUST LEARN THAI, LIKE YESTERDAY.

Supposedly everyone learns English in school here, and I don’t mean just in high school. It’s taught starting in fifth grade. But much like in China and Taiwan, the emphasis is on reading and writing, not on speaking. So basically, I can’t understand a word anyone is saying to me.

Yesterday I was at an internet café and the woman at the desk kept saying, “Conserve foon.”

What?

“Conserve foon.”

What?

“Foon.”

What?

“Foon.”

Whuh-ut?

“Foon. Foon.”

Finally I figured it out. She was saying, “Computer full.” All the computers were taken and I should hang out a bit until one opened up. Thais sometimes pronounce L as N. But they also sometimes pronounce R as L, or L as R.

So how about some nooden for dinnel?

11:05 pm. I got lost trying to find my way to the Ambassador Hotel off Sukhumvit Road this morning, but I did learn how the whole Thanon-Soi thing works. A lot of thanons (roads) have side streets coming off them that are called sois, which are numbered. So Soi Sukhumvit 1 is the first side street that turns off the main Sukhumvit Road.

This is apparently a pretty large conference. It’s called the National Migrant Health Conference or something like that. There were a bunch of display tables and booths from various NGOs and government organizations that supposedly support migrant health and rights in Thailand, and some of them were giving away freebies. Mostly, though, everything was in Thai, further solidifying my resolve to learn Thai reo-reo: fast fast.

At the welcome table I got a little radio-like thing with a belt clip and earpiece. It receives a feed from the booth where two people were translating the program from Thai into English and vice-versa, which I thought was pretty cool. They could offer personal versions of these for super lazy people, where you hire someone to follow you around and keep inconspicuously out of sight while their translation of everything around you is constantly transmitted to your ear.

I met some people from Mahachai at the conference – my supervisor was there, and I met a Burmese doctor and nurse who are based at the drop-in centers. There were also a few peer educators and Burmese translators from a migration NGO in Mahachai, all youth, and some staff from the Mae Tao clinic in Mae Sot, of Dr. Cynthia fame.

One of the early speakers was the head of UNIFEM based here in Bangkok. She gave an energetic speech about migrant rights, especially for female migrants, who are more vulnerable to exploitation. The rhetoric was nothing earth-shattering, just very familiar. There were a few other speakers from NGOs around the country who said more of the same thing, but then the government officials got up and started talking about why migrants were a menace and should be stopped from coming into Thailand.

Whuuut? No one seemed to react. People just kept taking notes. During the coffee break I ran into our executive director, who said, “The ministry people said all the wrong things.” He was irritated but not surprised. It sounds like this is the standard party line every time the government is invited to talk about migrants.

For dinner I met up with a PopFam classmate, Francisco, who is doing his practicum with UNAIDS here in Bangkok. It was great to see a friendly face, one that speaks English at 35 mph instead of 2. We sat in an air-conditioned noodle shop in the mall, slurping down noodle soup and stir fried chicken with vegetables, and comparing notes on Thailand through expat eyes and non-Thai ears.

Francisco ordered an iced chrysanthemum tea, I ordered a Thai iced tea, and we made a special toast:

“To being interns in Thailand. Because you know our classmates working in Africa aren’t eating like this.”

The First Day

2008-07-07T23:26:00.003-04:00

I’m still rusty at this blogging thing. Apologies for yesterday’s play-by-play drivel.

I reported for “work” today. But first, I was up at seven looking for breakfast in the neighborhood, and feeling inexplicably apprehensive about it. I found a couple of stands with steam coming from them in an alley, so I bought some barbecued chicken-on-a-stick and some rice. Everyone snickered about my inability to speak Thai, which is probably the last time I’ll find it amusing.

I went back to my hotel room and inhaled my lovely savory breakfast. I made a mental note to ask someone what people normally eat for breakfast here. Chicken and rice for breakfast is delicious, but a bit odd, even for someone who grew up eating leftover Domino’s Pizza for breakfast.

Just before I came to Thailand, I combed the aisles at DSW for several hours agonizing about what kind of shoes would be appropriate for working here. Flip flops were obviously out, but what about open-toe or slip-on sandals? I didn’t want to wear closed shoes without socks in the world’s hottest country, or closed shoes with socks for that matter.

It turns out that people take off their shoes before they enter the office. Barefoot is the proper footwear here. People also take off their shoes anytime they enter a temple or someone’s house, or if you go upstairs in many buildings, like at a hotel. (However, this was not true at The Palace. I guess if you pay that much money, you get to keep your shoes on.)

I met with the Director of HR, my project director, my on-site director, and the executive director of my organization. We had a meeting where half the attendees spent the first ten minutes giggling because they couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak Thai. It is rather odd, I think, that the organization has agreed to take on an intern that can’t speak the local language. Would this ever happen in the States? Highly doubtful.

My organization has implemented five drop-in centers around Mahachai, just one town where an ambitious HIV prevention program for migrant workers is being implemented around Thailand, with a primary focus on laborers in the fishing industry.

The drop-in centers are basically a safe place where migrant workers can go to get culturally-appropriate information in their native language, as well as basic health care and condoms. They’re staffed by Thai and Burmese employees and volunteers who provide health services, referrals, legal advice and other information to help migrant workers understand and assert their rights, whether or not they’re registered to work legally in Thailand.

Even though Thai laws restrict illegal migrants from accessing basic services like health care and schooling, international human rights instruments protect migrants from abusive situations. This doesn’t stop employers from exploiting them, but through the outreach and education provided by drop-in center staff, migrants learn what recourse is available to them when they need it.

Four of the drop-in sites in Mahachai also have child development centers, which are basically day care centers for the children of migrants. The centers give kids a place to socialize and develop life skills among Burmese children their own age. They also attempt to prepare kids with language and cultural knowledge so that they can eventually enter Thai schools.

From what I can gather, I’ll be documenting the child development centers, including activities, best practices and lessons learned. That's a lot of nice buzzwords that make my project sound important, but so far it seems like my supervisors are much more skilled at NGO-speak than at communicating exactly what they mean by those things.

The HR director, Khun P, took me to lunch because everyone else in the office had ordered food and eaten already. We walked down the block – wearing shoes - to a small restaurant where he ordered tom yum soup, fried fish and vegetables. He also taught me one of my first Thai words ever: pet. It means spicy, and will probably be one of the more useful words I learn.

Khun P also gave me the lowdown on tipping in Thailand. It’s not expected, he says, although at “finer” establishments, especially those that serve a lot of wazungu, they give you your bill on a tray, which means “it’s okay to tip and place it in the tray.” Also, you don’t tip 15 percent of the bill. You just leave an extra 10 or 20 baht – which is often more than 15 percent. This is true at restaurants, hotels, in taxis, nearly everywhere.

I told him about the Malaysian restaurant in New York that I went to last week where the wait staff completely ignored us except to run after us as we left because we didn’t leave a tip. We hadn’t intended to stiff them; we had simply counted the money wrong. But the service was so bad that we really shouldn’t have tipped, except that tipping isn’t about rewarding good service anymore; it’s about avoiding finding your waiter’s loogie in your food.

“I hear that’s how it is in the States,” he said. “But not here. You won’t be chased for not leaving a tip. It’s just appreciated.”

Thailand is supposed to be less developed than the US?

The Arrival

2008-07-07T00:26:00.001-04:00

Look at me! I'm in Thailand! I'm spending six months in the Land of Same Same But Different working for an NGO as a requirement for my masters degree back in New York.

I arrived in Bangkok Sunday morning bright and early - like before 6am. My luggage arrived forty minutes later, on Thai time. I stepped out into the hottest country in the world, armed with a single Thai greeting and a map to my hotel.

Lesson one: Thai people have a hard time understanding that I don’t speak Thai. Ten minutes into the cab ride from the airport, the driver looked at me in the rearview mirror. He had been mumbling in Thai, and must have suddenly realized:

“You speak Thai,” he said. No, I said.

He chortled in deep embarrassment. “You tourism?” he said.

I just said, “Yes,” because I doubted that the phrase “six-month practicum” was in his English vocabulary.

We got lost. We got found. Some very friendly bellhops greeted me in the lobby of the Karmanee Palace Hotel. It was indeed a palace compared to the backpacker guesthouses that I’ve always stayed in most of my adult life. There was granite, or maybe marble. There were chandeliers, and tablecloths, and elevators. There was a complimentary breakfast buffet.

“Sawatdii khap!” they said.

Well, I know that phrase: It means hello.

Unfortunately I didn’t know what the appropriate response was, so I just smiled awkwardly and proceeded to the reception desk. Again, the women behind the counter could not register that I didn’t speak Thai. When they finally did, confusion ensued.

Name please?

I told them.

Write down, please. I did.

They read it as “Jushna.”

No reservation under Jushna, or Justina for that matter. I gave them the name of my supervisor, who had made the reservation. Nothing. I gave them the name of my host organization, Raks Thai. After more confusion, more blank looks, more staring back and forth at me and at each other, they checked me in and summoned the bellhop.

I was finally alone in my hotel room. I had no idea where I was, or how to get around. Two hours in Bangkok and I already felt trapped in my hotel. It was a tiny bit lonely, a tiny bit terrifying.

I needed to call my supervisor to let him know I had arrived, but I didn’t even know how to make a phone call. The bellhop had said to use the phone in my room – and explained it in a voice that suggested he thought I was an idiot for not knowing that there was a phone in every hotel room. But where I come from hotel phones are for people who never went on vacation with their family and watched their mom accidentally use the phone in the hotel room to make a local call and get charged $8.

So I sat on my bed, wondering how to make a phone call. I decided to ponder this question in the shower instead. Ten minutes later I was clean, and my room phone was ringing.

It was my supervisor. He was worried that I hadn’t called earlier. I told him I didn’t know where I could make a phone call. He said that I could call from my hotel room, you know, on the phone that I was using to talk to him. So, in Thailand, hotel room phones are not the world’s lamest scams. Only in America, apparently.

I finally got myself out the door of my hotel room to explore the neighborhood. But not until I had finished examining the mini wet bar, which always reminds me of that line from Blood Diamond where Leo is dancing with Jennifer Connelley and says, “How about we go check out the wet bar in your hotel room?”

And she says, “I’m a print journalist. I drank it.”

Anyway, the wet bar in The Palace only had sodas. And I’m not a print journalist, or a soda fiend. I later learned that the two bottles of water were free though.

I started walking to the Big C. The entire road along the way was lined with food carts. In case none of them offered anything you wanted to eat, there was also a pretty decent market in one of the alleys. I found rambutan! And mangosteen! Mangosteen seems not to be in season, but I made a mental note to come back for some rambutan.

There was also a meat market on the opposite side of the alley, and if you hung a right at the end, you came upon a small clothing market. Man, there’s no shortage of ways to whet your consumerist appetite here. This is a developing country?

The Big C was massive, both on the inside and out. Even if you didn’t see the giant sign that said Big C, there were stands set up selling clothes and food starting right in front of the door and continuing for several blocks. It’s comforting to know that I’ll never go hungry or naked in this country.

Big C is basically like a Walmart Superstore. Groceries, clothes, beauty supplies, electronics, home furnishings, and of course, carts with prepared food.

I needed moisturizer. I left my extra-emollient New York wintertime moisturizer at home, figuring it was probably overkill for a tropical country.

Observation: Every lotion sold in this country wants to turn you white. I really had to search hard to find one that didn’t advertise it’s magical whitening properties. All I wanted was something with sunscreen, not bleach. It’s a bit mysterious, actually, why women wouldn’t fear ending up looking like a Chinese opera singer with all the face-whitening products they’re slapping on.

I finally found one that didn’t say anything about making me look like porcelain goddess, and shelled out a whopping $9 for it. I still haven’t stopped converting prices back to dollars in my head. After all that careful perusing at the store, I got home only to find on the inside packaging: “Naturally lighten your skin.”

Next stop: Chatuchak weekend market, known to tourists as JJ market. Once off the SkyTrain, I saw a sign that said I could get to Chatuchak by cutting through a park. Anything to make time spent frying in the sun shorter and sweeter.

I was approached by a couple guys trying to sell me straw mats so I could sit on the grass next to a rather stagnant-looking pond. They were speaking Thai, obviously, so I shook my head at them and kept walking. They kept following me, speaking Thai and holding an armload of mats. This was awkward. Ignoring people doesn’t work here as well as it does in Kenya, apparently.

"I don't know what you're saying," I said to them. They stopped to let their jaws bounce off the ground a few times. I made my getaway while they looked at each other and discussed why this Thai lady couldn't speak Thai.

Chatuchak market is a bit overwhelming, full of winding stands selling a lot of handcrafted tourist goods – clothes, jewelry, home furnishings, textiles, art, books. And of course, food. Thais never miss a meal, and apparently there’s nothing wrong with having two meals during one meal time.

Note to all: Chatuchak market has tourist prices. A bowl of soup that would normally cost 25 baht cost me 40 baht, and they skimped on the noodles. It was quite disappointing, and I was still hungry.

It was only 4pm and there were still two things on my to do list that would make my day complete: getting a SIM card for my phone, and finding an internet café. My supervisor had said that I might need to go to the mall to get a SIM card, so I found my way to Siam Square.

After marveling once again at the possibility that this might be a developing country, I finally found both an internet café (called True – quite an elaborate internet café experience, and priced to match) and a SIM card. Mission accomplished.

I retreated back to my hotel, with only a pit stop for a bowl of dinner noodles – larger and cheaper than at Chatuchak. I was exhausted, and my feet hurt.

But they were still clean. This is a developing country?

There ARE Biker's Ed Classes In New York

2008-06-20T10:54:00.001-04:00

...but they're only for kids. Why?

http://www.bikenewyork.org/education/classes/bike_driver_ed.html

From what I can tell, being over 18 doesn't automatically make you smart enough to ride a bike in the same direction of traffic.

I likeNY in June, How About You? I Smell Jizz Trees In Bloom, How About You?

2008-06-19T22:43:00.000-04:00

Successive themes of obsessive focus carve this landscape that is my conscious mind.

Huh? What did I just say? Basically, I fixate on something for days, weeks or months at a time, and I just can't let it go until the next theme of obsession comes along that even more urgently needs my pointless obsessive attention.

Right now I'm obsessing about two things, because I've learned to multi-task. One is about biking in New York, and the other is ... hm, I seem to have forgotten.

Summer has arrived, so I'm bothering to leave the house more often. I got back on my bike a few weeks ago and have been experimenting with commuting in the city. Technically, there are bike lanes in Manhattan. New Yorkers think the bike lane is where you drive when you're looking for street parking. And if you can't find street parking? Just double park in the bike lane. There are neighborhoods where even cops park in the bike lane.

I used to think that people who rode their bikes in NYC were pretty hard core. Now I just think they're stupid. I'm convinced that cycling in the city is dangerous not just because of the low IQ among drivers in this town; it's also because of the low IQ of cyclists. Especially those guys who deliver food on their bikes. Is it a job requirement for those idiots to ride the wrong way on EVERY street, sidewalk and bike lane to get to their destination? Are they forbidden to put a light on their handlebars at night?

City cycling culture is so different here. It's not centered around a sense of community. I think that's what I can't get used to. Bikers really feel no sense of connection to other bikers. I ride safely and defensively mostly because I'm not an idiot, but also in part because I don't want to make things more difficult for other bikers by being that reckless ass-wipe who pisses off drivers for no reason. I don't get why other bikers don't see it this way - oh, classic narcissism! But seriously - a lot of bikers here don't see that any stupid thing they do, drivers will project onto all of us, and it just makes them want to run over anything between two wheels and a helmet.

Uh oh. Here come the inevitable comparisons to San Francisco...

In San Francisco, I always felt this sense of solidarity with other bikes on the road. Bikers, for the most part, cooperate with traffic and don't do stupid things like go the wrong way on a four-lane, 45 mph thoroughfare when it's dark and you're wearing black and have no light on your bike. I felt like we looked out for each other, in the sense that we knew that the way we rode affected the way cars treated all bikers. If we rode safely and didn't antagonize cars, then cars would view us as a normal part of traffic, and stop thinking about how to run us over or, at the very least, how close to get before pegging us with their Big Gulp full of Mountain Dew and ice. This is rather idealized and over-simplified, because there were plenty of bee-tard bikers in SF who gave the rest of us a bad rap...but the ideal was there.

When I'm president of the planet, driver's ed will have a major "biker awareness" component, where drivers learn to respect the rights and safety of bikes on the road. And bikers in New York will have to attend a biker's ed class, because obviously ensuring one's own safety is not an intuitive concept to everyone. And most importantly, I would make New York and San Francisco car-free cities, and tell everyone to get off their fat asses and start pedaling.

YES. There are exceptions. Public transportation vehicles like buses, trains and subways would still run. Casual carpool and other private carpooling would still be allowed. Anything that doesn't burn fossil fuels, like those pedicabs and the horse-drawn carriages in Central Park, are fine. There would be special exceptions or discounts for the elderly, disabled and anyone else who has legitimate reasons for not riding a bike everywhere. Also, commercial delivery vehicles like the ones that deliver food to your grocery store would still be allowed. I haven't decided what to do about cabs. I still have a few years to work on this idea.

There was an article in some local pop culture magazine that basically summed up the road biking culture here: bikers and drivers will never get along. That just isn't good enough for me. I don't care to be resigned to drivers who feel like bikers aren't entitled to be on the road, and bikers who think that their jerkoff riding habits exist in a vacuum instead of eventually trickling down into a giant communal pool of seething driver hatred towards all bikers.

Therefore, I'm going to get myself elected President of the world and make New York a car-free city. As per above.

Oh, Critical Mass. So I've ridden in a few Critical Masses in SF over the years, and although I like the sense of community in participating, it always made me a bit uncomfortable. They always announce at the beginning of the ride that we're supposed to obey all traffic signals and not be aggressive bee-tards towards cars, but inevitably some people start to feel invincible because of our sheer numbers, and bikers start taunting drivers. Arguments ensue, fights break out, everyone else keeps pedaling towards the bar. These pockets of confrontation always bother me because they negate the spirit of Critical Mass. Yeah, it's a protest and a political statement and a social movement, and most of all it's just powerful. But like most things, it doesn't quite live up to its ideals. It's an imperfect phenomenon, created to bring together imperfect people, and maybe in truth, that's why I like it.

Oh, now I remember my other theme of obsession: Disgusting specimens of the male species. So now that summer is here and I'm bothering to leave my house, I've created strategies for minimizing the probability that I cross paths with any of the drooly, grunty, armpit-scratching, mite-picking, mouth-breathing, glassy-eyed organisms that loiter in my neighborhood. Being on my bike helps a lot, because I flit across their field of vision in a fraction of the time it takes an electrical impulse to fire across a synapse in their little drooly brain.

But running is a different story. Mainly because I'm a slow, slow runner. Old hunchback men waddle past me when I run. That's how slow I am. So I had to devise a route that avoided the worst concentrations of drooly organisms in my neighborhood. So far, pretty successful. So successful, in fact, that yesterday I started to wonder if maybe I'd exaggerated the drooly organism population in my head. I ran past a high-rise apartment building overlooking the Hudson, one of those places that I could never afford to live in, but whose building manager is kind enough to allow people like me to pass by on the sidewalk. The security guard for the apartment building was wandering around outside, and when I ran by he surprised me by saying, "Good morning."

"Good morning!!" I said, too enthusiastically. I realized then that at best I had expected him to ignore me, and at worst I had expected him to drool and call me his baby. I definitely did NOT expect him to greet me like a normal person.

Man, no one says good morning anymore. Certainly not the drooly organisms. Not people I see on the elevator everyday. Not the security guard in my building. I feel like even a simple smile upon eye contact is unheard of among New Yorkers. Hell, eye contact is unheard of. More evidence for my theory that there are way too many people on this tiny island, and everyone here hates dealing with everyone else. People actively tune each other out. I was on an elevator in a subway station, and seven of ten people had iPods stuffed in their ears. I could hear what at least three of them were listening to, and I must say that too many people have really bad taste in music.

And Jizz Trees. Admit it, you've smelled them too and thought the same thing. Peeee-yew! They grew all over the Peninsula and South Bay, and I could never figure out what kind of tree it was because I was never sure if it was appropriate to ask, "Where do you think that sperm smell is coming from?"

But a few weeks ago, the jizz trees were at full stinkiness here in New York, and they were EVERYWHERE. I finally went on the internet and discovered that there are several types of trees that could be the culprit. Here in New York, I think it's the Bradford Pear tree, which doesn't even bear edible fruit. It's an ornamental pear tree that was planted all over the island for its ability to survive New York City pollution. It explodes into gorgeous white blossoms in the spring and, apparently, quickly explodes into noxious clouds of jizzy odors in the summer.

I think the jizz blooming has ended because I haven't noticed the smell in a week or so.

I Procrastinate, Therefore I Post

2008-04-27T00:26:00.000-04:00

We have this assignment for one of my classes to comb through our hometown paper for mentions of Iraqi and American deaths since the beginning of the war in March 2003. My true hometown paper, the Houston Chronicle, had already been tallied by another student, so I’m scouring my adopted hometown’s paper, the San Francisco Chronicle.

It’s been interesting reliving the war, or rather the media coverage of the war. I felt like I’d reached a point, probably like most Americans, where I just had to stop caring THAT MUCH about news from the war front because it was pointlessly upsetting. It was pointless to get upset that I was right from the beginning, that so many Americans so mindlessly and obtusely embraced all the meaningless words pouring out of Unpresident Idiot and Co’s bungholes – words about how we are being attacked by people who hate freedom, about how we are nobly bringing democracy to a country of helpless victims, UGHHH!! I can’t go on.

But reliving the news, day by day, starting from the first shock and awe campaign, tracing the evolution of anti-American sentiment and deliberate attacks on U.S. troops, the capture of Saddam…Well, at this point I’ve only gotten through the end of 2003. But the point is, I’m left with a lot of old emotions dredged up from a deep, formerly quiet place. Mostly what stands out for me, reading week after week of reports about people dying, is how profoundly yet incomprehensibly pointless all of the dying has been. I’m even more struck by this feeling when I read about Iraqi civilians dying, especially when it’s some kid or woman who is accidentally shot by some 19-year-old American soldier who thinks he’s in a video game.

"'We had a great day,' said Sgt. Eric Schrumpf of the U.S. Marines last Saturday [April 5]. 'We killed a lot of people.' He added, 'We dropped a few civilians, but what do you do?'"

…Schrumpf had said "there were women standing near an Iraqi soldier, and one of them fell when he and other Marines opened fire. 'I'm sorry,' said Schrumpf, 'but the chick was in the way.'"

Every other article talks about how Bush declared an end to the war on May 1, 2003. Five years later, that is beyond ironic and insulting.

The sad thing is that not only do extremists now feel more justified in hating anyone who falls into the category “American,” but people like me feel so much hatred and disappointment in human nature. Ideally no one should assume that Shrubbery is an accurate representation of human nature, but how can you not hold a world leader up to some reasonable standard of integrity? I wonder why, knowing how poorly most world leaders score on the human decency scale, I expect more from the monkey on our Hill? But I do.

I was talking to one of my professors yesterday, who served in the Peace Corps in Cameroon in the seventies. She says she still uses the lessons she learned in Peace Corps every single day. And I think she’s right. Combing through these articles about bumbling American soldiers and angry Iraqi insurgents, I impose judgments based on things I learned from living in an African village.

You can’t go into another country and another culture with no clue or intention of being culturally sensitive, and expect people not to resent you.

One article described an American soldier, armed with big scary G.I. Joe weapons, yelling at an Iraqi civilian. “Stop where you are!” the soldier said – in English.

It just amazes me that Americans are so dumbfounded that they are being targeted and killed by people in a country they stormed into without permission.

Our military regularly issues apologies to Iraqi families when they accidentally, or even intentionally, kill one of their members.

Hello? That is just not good enough. I feel the Iraqi who said, “What kind of compensation do we want? We want one of your people to die.”

Well, on a lighter note. ...Let’s return to my favorite pastime – ripping on New York.

What is the deal with people giving kisses on the cheek when they greet each other here? I just confirmed with two friends who are also from San Francisco: we don’t do that on the West Coast.

Why? Because the only people who are allowed to do that and still be taken seriously are people from other countries. Europeans can do it; they are European. Latin and South Americans can do it; they are not North American.

But we are not a touchy-feelie culture. We are the land of the sexual harassment lawsuit. And that means people are - or should be - careful not to lean in so they can make over-exaggerated sucking noises with the side of their face pasted to another person’s after having met them for three seconds. Ew.

About a third of the people in my program are international students. I don’t care if they greet me with a kiss on the cheek - or two, or three, depending on where they're from. It’s just another person's cultural practice, and I accept it.

But when an American greets me that way, I’m like, hey man, that’s not normal or sincere or flattering or comfortable. And I have to make that fake smackie-kissie sound so that it sounds like I’m returning the kiss.

What’s even worse is when people don’t actually make a fake kissing sound, they just fake the fake kissing sound, like this: “Mwah.”

What kind of unattainable level of sophistication are we trying to achieve? Americans are not particularly well-mannered or sophisticated compared to most of the world. We chew gum and talk too loud and smile too much when things aren’t funny or happy. Kissing people on the cheek isn’t going to change that. What’s wrong with a nice, asexual, dispassionate hug?

Actually, New York is the only place in the U.S. that I’ve lived where people greet with kisses. I never saw it in Texas, and I never saw it in Chicago, and I never saw it in San Francisco.

Anyone have a theory about this? I’m perplexed.

Everything I Didn't Need To Know I Learned in Sixth Grade

2008-02-21T18:16:00.000-05:00

There's a headline in the New York Times today (which I have become addicted to because it's a less pathetic way to procrastinate than Facebook) that reads:

Protesters Attack U.S. Embassy in Belgrade

And I thought, "Belgrade is the capital of Yugoslavia."

And I was quite satisfied with myself. It's amazing how things you learn in sixth grade geography stick with you, for better or for worse.

Oh Carmen Sandiego! Yugoslavia no longer exists, and hasn't for between five and 17 years, depending on who you ask.

Brussels is the capital of Belgium. Budapest is the capital of Hungary. Belgrade is the capital of Yugoslavia.

No, Belgrade is the capital of Serbia. So what's the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina? Croatia? Macedonia? Montenegro? Slovenia?

Back in my day, we only had to learn one south Slavic country, and we liked it that way.

We Had A Guest Speaker In Class Today. And he was hot. Normally this would not be notable enough to be announced to my roommate as soon as I get home, much less be mentioned on my blog. But the sad truth is that I don't see enough attractive men on a regular basis. My program in school is perhaps 90 percent women. I rarely leave campus, especially in the last two weeks after a virus knocked me flat on my back.

There's a void in my life and it's in the shape of eye candy.

New Year's Resolution Monitoring and Evaluation. As many people know, my New Year's resolution was to have a life outside of school. So, I gathered a couple friends and got student tickets to a show at Carnegie Hall. Student tickets, let me just say, are God's gift to grad school students. He likes when your seats are so high in the upper balcony that you can almost touch his face.

Carnegie Hall is everything you've heard. We saw the National Symphony Orchestra and Leonard Slatkin conducting Ravel's orchestration of Pictures At An Exhibition. Most classical pieces are not that interesting to see performed live, unless you have a special appreciation for the hypnotic redundancy of sawing strings. But Pictures requires a pretty elaborate collection of instruments, and combined with the dynamic, dramatic musical score, becomes a riveting performance for people like me who claim to love the symphony but usually find themselves wondering why they didn't just stay home and listen to the CD.

So, the subtext to this story is that I am also beginning to hate New York less. There's certainly a lot of stuff to do, and some of it is even affordable. The legendary Carnegie Deli (not affordable) has a lot to be legendary about, including the two pounds of corned beef and pastrami they put in each $20 sandwich.

But this town still feels like a sprawling asphalt prison that purposefully separates me from everything that's natural and green and sky and sunflowers.

I said as much to Jesse today, and he replied in his deliberate, thoughtful, deadpan way, "So, if, I'm, hearing, you, correctly. Your, feelings, about, New, York, are. About, the, same, as, mine."

These are the things that keep me sane. People who understand why I will never find New York as great as everyone says it's supposed to be. People who itch to get off the island because it feels confining. People who are counting down the days until it gets warm enough to go climbing and camping. And people who at the same time dread the planning and car renting that will have to take place to make that happen, because no one successfully escapes from prison without a good plan.

Her Neighbor Is a Homo Genius

2008-01-11T03:53:00.000-05:00

I'm staying at a friend's apartment in the Castro, the heart of San Francisco's gay community. The first thing I did when I arrived at her place was search for wifi.

I miss this town so much!!

Video from Kisumu and Eldoret

2008-01-04T03:31:00.000-05:00

I don't even recognize Kisumu in this footage. It looks like a ghost town except for looters going crazy and everything on fire. If the whole country is falling to pieces, who do they think is going to buy those microwaves they're stealing?

Is it ironic that Kisumu's main drag, shown in the video, is named after Raila Odinga's father, Oginga Odinga?

Oh my God, why have I never watched You Tube before? This one is heartbreaking.

The guy in the green shirt is in tears as he walks past gutted storefronts in Kisumu. The reporter greets him, "Habari ya mzee?" How's everything, sir?

The guy says, between sobs, "Salama." Peaceful.