Better?

6 / 2-3 /09

So I’m sitting at home waiting to be picked up to go to another rocket festival. There are two lizards mating behind a picture of one of the old kings and about a dozen cows grazing through my yard. I started getting mosquitoes from the standing water in my bathroom – I have two big plastic trashcans to hold water for bathing and a 3-gallon-ish bucket of water for using the toilet – so I’ve cut down to just using one of the trashcans, because it has a lid, and then refilling the bucket when I need it. So I just got done refilling a trashcan and taking a bucket shower, which has become old hat by now. Spent the morning going to markets with the nayoke and his family, so going to the rocket festival will mean a day away from the office. Right now I have less than a month to complete my community assessment, so the days off aren’t necessarily good, but I like not being in the office. My last two full days in the office I hit a point around mid afternoon, when the heat hits it’s peak and the fans just won’t turn fast enough and I’ve been staring at a computer screen or a Thai community plan for too long and I just need out. But I’m almost done with a few of them, and even if I don’t finish I’m going to start going into the communities, ready or not, and start working out there. That’s the real way to get to know these villages anyways, and I’ve been reading up on the Peace Corps’ Participatory Analysis for Community Action book and am about ready to go talk to people without wasting their or my time. Peace Corps also just sent me a book about learning Isaan, (I only found out this book existed from other volunteers, they didn’t tell us) so I’ve started a regimen of sorts to learn this dialect.

When I got off of work yesterday I took a two-hour nap and then went to bed early because I was still just exhausted from my weekend in Phisanolok. There was a big meeting there last week and so a lot of people stayed for the weekend and we probably had over 30 people.. [and I was picked up to go to the rocket fest]

…So my friend was telling me about textsfromlastnight.com and at the end of work today I found the site and opened about 10 pages worth and just kept them minimized on my desktop to read after work this afternoon. It’s just a collection of hilarious and embarrassing text messages that people have submitted, but it’s freaking amazing. Part of why I didn’t read them at work (besides the fact that I was at work) was that when I looked at the first few of them I almost started crying I was laughing so hard.. And then after work this afternoon I was looking through them on my front porch and laughing when my landlord/grandma comes across the yard with a notebook and a pen to teach me to read Thai. She asks what I’m doing and I just told her I was reading emails from friends, so she sits down next to me and starts writing things on her notebook to see if I can read them. I can read it all, but there were a few phrases I didn’t recognize, so I switched the language on my computer to Thai and I started to type them on a text doc to keep for later. She sees this and somehow the fact that I’m typing in Thai without a Thai keyboard doesn’t alert her to the fact that I can read. But what’s more is that just below the document, the bottom of the textsfromlastnight page is still open, and I can only see the phrase “Thank God for loud music. There is a circus in my butt right now.” I mean, how do you not laugh at that? And I know she can’t read it, but she’s looking right at it and I’m holding my breath trying not to burst out laughing and then I suddenly needed to go to the bathroom. Some mixture of the butt circus comment and the little fish-meat balls that I had for lunch. Anyways, I’m gonna go run for a bit while there’s light, and then maybe write some more.

So I ended up biking instead of running. I just wanted to cover ground faster and it was starting to get dark. Almost hit a four-foot snake and saw some areas I hadn’t seen before. Got home and did some pushups to try to fight the skinny, and then took a shower. I got my first Thai haircut in Phisanolok this past weekend and a friend had to spend a few minutes evening it out with my leatherman before I wanted to leave my room again. I just spent the last ten minutes in the shower finishing the job and I finally feel satisfied with it. I hadn’t had a haircut in nearly 6 months and my hair was as long as it’s been in my adult life. When I got off the bus Friday night I suddenly decided I hated it, so when I finally made it outside on Saturday, the first thing I did was go to a barbershop. I had a relaxing day mapped out of haircuts and shaving and Thai massages, and I just knew in the back of my mind that at the end of it I’d feel clean and like myself again. Well, all those things happened, but I didn’t get that clean, relaxing feeling I was hoping for, and I think it was because of the damn haircut. The guy didn’t even touch a pair of scissors; he just had a trimmer and used a comb to adjust the length. Not sure what I was thinking… But it was a good afternoon nonetheless and a few of us went and got massages on a barge on a river and there were wind chimes and they were boiling herbs, so it smelled great. The full sensory experience, except for food, but the smell of the herbs made me hungry, so that might count?

Speaking of food, tonight I made my first homemade spaghetti sauce. It was good, but I wasn’t prepared for how many tomatoes I need to make a single bowl’s worth of sauce. About twice what I expected. I also decided I’d try to make tortillas tonight for fajitas tomorrow. Someone told me how to do it quickly over the weekend and I thought I remembered enough of it to feel it out, but I didn’t, and I ended up making pancakes instead of tortillas. Not the worst mistake ever, but a little surprising and definitely not what I wanted. I tried adding eggs too, and I just ended up with egg flavored pancakes… weee! Between that and French toast, I’m definitely buying a ton of syrup the next time I see it. Although I don’t think I’ve seen any yet. I don’t think you can just make syrup, can you? Anyways, I’ve been focusing on making American food so much because I want to perfect something so that I can invite my co-workers over for lunch or dinner one day and serve them something they couldn’t do better themselves. Soon. Side note, after she turned me on to textsfromlastnight.com, I challenged the closest volunteer to a ridiculous text message contest and this is already one of my new favorite things.

Speaking of good times, remember when the light in my bedroom exploded? I was talking with a (Thai) friend today and he told me that last year a single storm ended up electrocuting both him and another villager in our area through their TVs somehow. He ended up spending a month in the hospital, and the other person died. It’s one of those weird parts of development where people have decent tvs and appliances, but their power isn’t even grounded.. If anyone has any experience in this area, I’d sure love some advice on how to ground housing, wires, etc. It sure didn’t make me feel better about the constant huge storms, and it actually caused me to jump off the toilet earlier tonight, just before a storm rolled through, just to make sure my computer wasn’t plugged in. Better safe than hospitalized. Or even worse, computer-less! If you think I’d actually start writing letters, you’re probably right.

I talked to a friend from the campaign really briefly the other day and it’s stuck with me a little bit. She just mentioned that her and a friend were working for the administration in some cool positions and it made me wonder if I’d have made it in and what I could be doing… I feel like I’m constantly busy, but life just isn’t the same pace as it was on the campaign and I miss it a lot when I think about it. It feels like things here move so slow and all those folks are passing me by. I have been doing a good bit of traveling lately, which helps, but it’s not the same. I need to try to take that energy and make sure I keep it focused on my work here. Hopefully I can walk away from here in two years having accomplished a fair amount as well.

Yesterday’s rocket festival had very few rockets, but they had some for sale and I bought them to save for the 4th of July, which will be during PST2, so I’ll have other Americans nearby to celebrate with. The festival was huge though. Apparently they were saving the big rockets for today and I didn’t go, so I didn’t see them, but there were a ton of parades all celebrating Isaan culture, and some of it was pretty cool and some of it was pretty weird, and a lot of it was just pretty. It was in the next big district to the East, and there was a huge wat and about 5 giant golden dragon parade floats, each with about 10 overly made-up pre-teens dressed in traditional outfits and nestled in little shrines built into the sides of the dragon. There were a lot of women dressed in the traditional garb, with a ton of makeup on, I think it’s reminiscent of the fashion of old kings and queens. Everyone kept asking me if they were pretty, and they were, but more in a porcelain doll kind of way. Most of them looked angry most of the time, which was probably just discomfort at the ridiculous shoes they were marching around in, amplified by the makeup, but still. It was weird. I didn’t find it attractive, I found it surreal. I got some good pictures though, especially of a monk watching the whole spectacle from a rooftop, wearing sunglasses and trying to take advantage of the little shade a satellite dish gave off. I thought it was a bit representative of all the contradictions that make up this place, and I like the pictures, but I didn’t get that perfect one.

I don’t know if I have anything else, so I’m going to call it a night. I feel like I’m going to actually complete reading the first entire community plan (I’ve read parts of about 8 or 9 of them) tomorrow, and if I do I’m going to find a way to go buy myself a beer and celebrate. I’ve been listening to a mix of Ben Kweller, Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, Tom Petty, and Peter Bjorn and John. It all feels about my speed right now, except the Petty is hit or miss, but the Kweller is especially good. I never think about his music much but always love listening when he comes on. So tonight the song is “Different but the same,” by Ben Kweller. Alright folks, take care and dtam jai khun. I’ll try to keep you updated.