Last night, in all our holiday joy, Nick and I decided to go out to our favorite classy joint, Berlin, for a drink or two. We were there, minding our own business, when all of a sudden the waiter comes up and hands us a paper coaster and says it's for us. We look at it, and there's a flirtatious message, of course. We ask who it's from, but who won't tell us. We find the whole thing rather ridiculous, so we decide to have some fun with it. The following images are re-creations, in sequence, of those anonymous paper coasters, shadows of a Christmas night rendevous between two dashing (only one of whom is heterosexual) American studs and two unknown Thai women, supposedly named Niel and Daniel. If it's difficult to read/see the pictures, just click on them to open up a bigger version.


Maybe we scared them away? We are truly children.

New pictures up on my photo site. Heads up.

There's not a lot, mostly because I haven't done a whole lot worthy of taking pictures in the past month, and if I have, it was probably at night and I hate the flash. So you gets what you gets. They're actually mostly pictures I've taken of stuff around the city, in a half-hearted attempt to take a quality artistic photograph. A few of these I've touched up a bit on the computer, you know, full disclosure, credit-where-credit-is-due, and all.

Merry Christmas.

So, as you all should now, I've been on break for a week now.

And I've done next to nothing.

But I'm quite okay with that. It's been nice to have some down time to work things over, relax, read, on and on.

But here's what I've done:

I spent nearly every day last week bumming around, trying to stretch "going to get something to eat" into something significant enough to make me feel like I didn't waste a day. All in all, I'd say I did a pretty good job. Sorry, but there's really not a whole lot else to say on that front.

I did see some movies, though. First, the good ones (which we rented): Batman (original, by Tim Burton) and Lost in Translation. I don't really need to talk about Batman do I? I liked it a lot, enough said. Moving on::::::: Lost in Translation was amazing. It was my second time seeing it, though the first time was a few years ago, and, well, in the States. Seeing it in Asia was completely different, and so much more meaningful. The movie expressed so well what it's like being in an Asian country -- how weird, alienating, confusing, and irritating it can be, and usually is. Not to mention the fact that the movie was just beautiful. It really inspired me to try to use the rest of my time on this break working on some sort of creative project, focusing on what it's like for me here and try to express some element (or all) of my relationship with this place. Well, I saw that movie last Wednesday, I think it was, and Thursday I went out and bought a notebook, because you need a new notebook for things such as this, and went to the hip hip cafe next door and set to writing. I wrote for an hour or so, the first time I had done any sort of creative writing in a while. And then, as I was walking home and then on into my night, I was just overcome with disgust for what I had written. It was garbage, sheer garbage, and I wanted nothing to do with it. A start like that has made it nearly impossible to return to the project, though I did spend a little time today taking pictures and writing. But I'll keep it at that.

Yikes.

So back to those movies, the bad ones: Deja Vu and The Holiday. Unfortunately, these were the ones we payed the big bucks to go see in the theaters. The fact that they were in the theaters also brought the plus/minus of popcorn: delicious, but ensuring the fact that I indeed would not luck out and die of starvation in the middle of one of these painful, atrocious movies. Deja Vu clearly was the unfortunate result of Jerry Bruckheimer reading, a little to quickly, a Wikipedia article on theoretical astrophysics. The Holiday was just plain unwatchable. Suffocatingly stupid. Ghha. I can't even bear to think about it. But it did provide some very very very (unintentionally) hilarious moments. Still though, hardly worth it.

And then there was the time that I went to my host family's house and made spaghetti with pesto and baguette and mozzarella and tomato for dinner. Of course they didn't like it. But that's just the kind of subtle revenge I was looking for, payback for eating the horrible food that made me think I hated Thai food for the first five weeks I was here (when now I realize that I really like it, when it's good). This ties in with a major point, here, if you'll bear with me. I might have talked about how we've learned in Thai culture classes how a major element of Thai culture is being kreng jai -- we don't have a word for it, but it's basically the act of saving face. So, if someone asks your opinion, and you don't want to hurt their feelings, you lie, and everyone benefits... some how. We basically do the same thing in the States, except I've found we do it in completely opposite ways: we just lie about different things, and are painfully blunt about others. We're not really taught this at ISDSI though, rather, they just stress how Thais are kreng jai kreng jai kreng jai kreng jai. One of the limits I've found is gifts. If you give someone a gift, or in this case make them dinner, and they don't like it, they will make little to no effort to pretend they do. Even if they get to the point of lying to say they like it, it's still so obvious that they don't. The same goes for conversation. And maybe it's just because I'm not very good at Thai, but it seems that whenever I'm talking about something, even if I'm trying to engage them in a conversation about it, if they're not interested, they just won't have any of it. That's it. Conversation over, not gonna listen. It's really frustrating, actually.

And that is the mini culture lesson.

And that is week one of winter break in Thailand.

So I'm on break now. It's kind of hard to register, after having to do stuff continually for the past four months or so. But hey, time to kick back. So this as much an entry out of wanting to do one as it is out of relishing the fact that I have the time to on a Saturday afternoon.

I figured I'd take this opportunity to talk a little bit about something that's becoming more and more common here: the occassional Larry David predicament. For those uninitiated into the ways of Curb Your Enthusiasm, it is a funny show (a comedy if you will) starring Larry David, the co-creator of Seinfeld, and one of the more absurd people to walk the planet and I love him. I won't bother explaining how my experiences mirror his -- if you know the show you'll get it and if you don't you won't. Deal.

So Larry David predicament one: The past four weeks have been kind of boring, with not much to do on the weekends or at night after work. On top of that, I've had a lot of disposable money lying around, owing to the favorable exchange rate and cheap price of food. Compound that with my temporary shirking of any sort of consumer ethic (kind of ironic, no?), and you've got a situation that just begs for recreational shopping. Well, a few weeks ago I decided I wanted some new jeans. But I didn't want just any jeans, I wanted straight and narrow lowrise jeans. Unfortunately, even in Thailand that's still not the norm for men's jeans, and even if it was my skinny little fram would still not suit them well. So naturally I decided to look into women's jeans. And so I went to the department store (which is just like any JC Penny, Marshall Fields, etc. in the States), and was looking at the Wranglers section. The first time I went, I had a very helpful sales woman who, after I asked if they had any men's jeans that were straight and skinny, directed me to the women's section. She gave me some, I tried them on, and I liked them. But I didn't want to buy them just yet, so I told her I'd come back later after thinking about it. A few days later, I did go back. Except this time there was a different guy working. I pretended to show interest in the men's jeans, just to break the ice, before making my way to the women's section. The guy followed me over, telling me in Thai that they were women's jeans. I said (in Thai), that I understood and that I liked them more anyway. He must have thought I was completely stupid (as do most Thai people), because he kept repeating it, and then said it in English. I was annoyed and told him to not worry about it, and so he just walked away, quite miffed. And so I took a pair, tried them on, found them too short, and returned to find another pair. When I came out, the I said they were too short and he replied curtly "Because they're for women". So so so rude. And so I left, completely bothered. The nerve of this snottly little twenty-eight year old Thai man with bad acne and braces telling me I can't buy the jeans I want. I decided I would just come back later when he's not there. So I went back a week later or so, and scouted out the situation from afar. I could practically hear the frumpy tuba theme from Curb bump-bump-bumping the background. And sure enough, there he was, smuggly lording over the Wranglers section, ready to reinforce prohibitive gender roles on the drop of a dime. And so just like that I left. And then I came back later yet. And he was still there. And so I left. And that's where I'm at today. I clearly can't return and try some more on and try to buy them from that man. It's not so much that he won't let me, but he's just an enemy now, and I'm vowing, with Larry David as my witness, to uphold this spontaneous grudge against this low-level retail worker abusing his power. It's a matter of principle, dammit.

There's another similar predicament, but I'm running out of time on this computer, so I'll have to save that for another day, of which there will be plenty, as I ain't got nothing to do.

Before I dive into this tail of seismic happenings, I feel I have to preface it with some zoological background (if you don't feel like reading this opinion piece on the virtues of certain birds and would rather get to the part of how I almost died (YES IT'S TRUE!!!) then skip ahead). It's become common knowledge among the people I'm with here that I'm an outspoken opponent of animals. That's right, I said it, I don't like animals. None of them. I can tolerate certain ones, and I am interested in them from afar, but as soon as the start interacting with me, affecting my life in anyway, I generally, without qualms, just dislike them. Cats, dogs, mice, birds, bats, you know, the usual suspects. But since coming to Thailand I have a new enemy, who has quickly climbed the list to the top: the rooster. I'm pretty confident that there's no animal more annoying, more purely, excrutiatingly bothersome in its general comportment than the rooster. In the States, where we don't typically live with roosters, we are privileged enough to maintain the romantic illusion that roosters are Nature's Kind Alarm Clock, that they crow once a day, at sunrise, of course. After living with roosters, I now understand that they are alarm clocks in a way, except instead of being able to be turned off, they are endlessly put into snooze mode. Thus, not only do they give a proud cockadoodledoo at sunrise, but they give the same, gut-wrenching, Lord-Take-Me-Now squeel consistently for the first few hours of the day (usually beginning around four or five AM), and then continue at irregular intervals for the rest of the entire day, in addition to the crows they frequently emit in conversation with the other local roosters. I had to deal with this at my host family, as our neighboors raised them. And then when I lived in the villages I witnessed it on a whole new scale, as everyone in the village raised them, so when morning came I was typically woken up by painfully loud and dischordant orchestra of crowing. With the move to my apartment, an eighth story number in the middle of downtown Chiang Mai, I thought I had seen the last of my rooster mornings. But no. There's one lousy bird that lives across the street, and nobly carries on the tradition of his forefathers. Amazingly enough, the crow is able to cross the street, rise hundreds of feet in the air, penetrate concrete and glass, and still be loud enough to wake me up in the morning. I hate it, naturally, but I've learned to deal with it in the morning. Last night, however, the rooster decided to start crowing at around midnight, issuing his screach every ten seconds or so for a good five minutes. So there I was, awake in bed, unable to fall asleep, and now on top of it all I had to deal with that rooster.

And then the room started to shake. I wasn't so sure at first, as I was a little in-and-out of it that night, but sure enough, yes, the room was shaking. My bed was shaking. The bed next to me was shaking. Well, not so much shaking as eerily swaying.

It was an earthquake.

We were having an earthquake.

We were having an earthquake and I was on the eight floor of a concrete building. Once the swaying stopped, which only took fifteen seconds or so, and I had my wits about me, I ran into the main room, looked out the window, didn't notice any widespread devastation / rivers of lava / mushroom clouds billowing in the background, and went through the catalogue of saturday morning public service announcements I keep in my brain. Despite growing up in Michigan, the "What to do in case of an earthquake" card came right up: a) stand in a doorway, bracing yourself, or b) get under a table. I did neither, but I was proud that I had that sort of trivial capacity. Instead I threw some clothes on and went in the hall, where I found the other students. We all double checked to make sure the others felt the building shake too, and of course we all did. So we talked a bit, calmed down, theorized the possible large scale sources of such a tiny tremor, and of course joked about it. For the record, we have now joked our way successfully out of 1) a coup d'etat, and 2) an earthquake. So long story short, I've asked around and looked on the internet and it seems it was no big deal at all. It was an undersea earthquake in Indonesia, but was too far below to cause a tsunami. So all is well.

So what do roosters have to do with all of this? Why did you waste time reading about them when you could have been reading about my lived experience with complex tectonic processes? Well I was just thinking that the rooster was probably predicting the earthquake (you know how animals can do that, right?), and so thought it should go in the story. I also really do just hate roosters.

GEOLOGY LIVES!!!!!!!!

It's been a while, no? Sorry, I've been busy activating. As in, that which is done by an activist. Work has been great. Great and mundane. But delightfully mundane. As this is my last week, I'm working on compiling all the research I've done over the past three weeks into (what will eventually become) a hefty ten page (single-space) memo, for use by the staff here. It's really satisfying putting it together, though writing a paper on "The Processes and Related Environmental Effects of Mining [confidential]" sounds like one of those absurdly hyperbolized papers that teachers on television shows assign kids for screwing up. One of those "you owe me ten thousand words on [mundane topic of your choice] by next week" / "but it's the weekend of the big game!!!" sort of deals. For all you teachers out there, I openly endorse such assignments. They students will hate you, but come on, it's really funny.

But I have been doing other things as well. As far as work has gone, I got to attend a conference and workshop type event for a current campaign. It was very interesting, seeing how all these different activists came together and started hammering out a cohesive plan. And then when it was all over we all went out to dinner and I got to split a bottle of brandy with [identities and ethnicities withheld for confidentiality] (Prize awarded to the person who can come up with the best joke. Points will be determined based on the degree of clever and incendiary social commentary, not on shallow, colonialistic maintenence of stereotypes surrounding marginalized and ethnic peoples [this is gonna be a lot harder now huh without me saying what the were]). But I won't suffocate you with details because: a) I don't want to bore you (even though you shouldn't be bored and if you are you're a touch on the cold-hearted side), and b) I'm kind of unsure about how much it's safe to divulge, given the sensitive nature of the people involved. This last part goes to a lot of my work here. And I'm really not trying to build it up as some sort of espionage adventure, I just don't really know what's kosher as far as writing things in a public space. That's all.

Aside from work, though, it's pretty much been anotherday-anotherdollar sort of life for me. I don't have a whole lot of time and energy to go out and explore, and I don't even really want to that much anyway. I don't really have any Thai friends or anyone to help me get into the culture here a little more, which is unfortunate. It also means my Thai is really starting to suffer, going unpracticed save for the rare time when a salesperson engages me in Thai rather than broken English.

This week also saw the official passing of the "90 days left" point. My program will end in less than sixty days, but I will be staying in Chiang Mai for a month extra, probably doing some work back at my organization. It's weird though, seeing myself pretty neatly in the middle of my time here. I'm sure I've written it before, and even if I haven't I'm sure you can all assume, that it's passed remarkably fast (see the December 1 entry of juliainecuador.blogspot.com for a terrific account of how repetition and routine have affected the passing of time abroad).

And then there's the upcoming holidays. From the look of things, you'd think Thai people love Christmas. But really it's probably just another case of them being all about some fragmented and diffused concept from Western culture without really having a damn clue what it means. And can you blame them? It's also an issue of a lot of the businesses decking the halls (read: malls piping out the Christmas tunes to get shoppers in the spirit for something completely irrelevant), while everyone else doesn't really pay attention, except for the loads of tourists here on their holiday vacation. It's kind of frustrating, but it's really cool in a sick sort of way. Just seeing how such a vapid and senseless holiday can be seen for all its vapid-senseless-ness once its taken out of the normal cultural context. That being said, I look forward to having the loneliest, most prototypically pathetic Christmas imaginable, hopefully spending it in an empty restaraunt eating a too-small portion of noodles. I only wish that I could walk past the warmly lit homes with the views of the families reveling in love and holiday cheer inside, and then listen to the faint echoes of carollers down the street as I chew my food and mull over the painful alienation from it all. But unfortunately that won't be here, so I'll have to make it up. Regardless, I say that because, even though I know you'll now pity me, I think the whole thing will be very funny. After all, how often could something that splendidly pathetic and cliche happen to me? I know! It's hilarious. But I'm jumping the gun a little bit on the holiday writing. I should have saved it for the Very Merry Christmas edition of the blog.

And with that I've effectively killed the last hour of work and it's time to go home.