An Unexpected Matrimonial.

One lazy Thursday morning in World Religions Class in the second desk to the right, a couple months back, I asked June what she was doing later on in the evening, it was one of those space-filling questions, expecting to hear her retort with one of the five local clubs, what more could there possibly be to life on a Thursday afternoon?

I was more than just a little bit jealous when she said she was going to Bangkok for her cousins wedding.

I bombarded her with questions. From the color of the brides dress, to whether they played the funky chicken dance (an American staple), to the place settings. 

I suppose she got my not so subtle hint, because she smiled a wide grin and asked, “Do you want to come with me?”

Quickly calculating the costs of ditching International Relations and Comparative Politics, I weighed the benefits excessively in my favor. 

Although Professor Pelletier’s drawling lecture about globalization with his fancy french accent and pony-tail so frizzy it looks like it belongs on the end of a tooth pick, would be drastically missed, life is about making sacrifices. 

Life. Time. And Then Some.

In short, my life, has looked remotely similar, to this…

Please note the look of sheer enthusiasm of the facial expression.

Turns out that whole physics thing really wasn’t working for me in regards of the suitcase space left up for rent, or lack thereof as the case appeared to have been.

But regardless, packing up to leave the country, and cleaning the room entirely spick and span in a matter of one sleepless night and a single very long extended morning, led to a couple unexpected discoveries.

The first being that I, as the responsible, mature, independent individual that I long aspire to be, or at least intend to prove to my mother that I am, decided to do multiple loads of very large laundry before departure. No doubt with the very intention of ironing and packing each sock neatly in place.

It sounded nice in theory.

The best part of all would be the long loop I could take around the washer on my way home. Knowing that I had managed to defy the law of college students and bring home not a laundry basket toppled of dirty clothes, but instead a single suitcase smelling of springtime and sunshine, with the help of a little laundry detergent.

Madre nature, I suppose, felt it her duty to ensure that my own earthly mom gets to spend a little more time mother henning me. Because she managed to rain one beast of a Thai blizzard all over my happy go lucky clothes all hung up to dry.

Inevitably resulting in that theoretical pinstriped pristine portion of apparel, becoming more like one soggy, heavy mush of moldy clothes shoved into a plastic shopping bag and down into the depths of that extendable pocket on the bottom of my luggage. With hopes of not getting stopped by airport security in lieu of the stench.

Second adventure, more of a pivitol discovery…there is, or, was, I believe is more accurate, a wall in my room dedicated entirely to thoughts.

Letters, notes, doodles, grocery lists, price tags, pieces of paper with what seemed like a really great idea before I woke up the next morning written on them, basic conscious flow of thought. 

It was a really beautiful wall, and what was even more attractive…were the zillions of trillions of pieces of adhesives I’d attached to my wall for stickage, without necessarily contemplating the consequences of removal.

Twas a very poignant moment, however when I was able to witness the finesse of true friendship, as my morning crew stuck around clawing their fingernails up and down the plaster in a means of un-sticking the little black biotches of sticky from my wall. 

The after affect however was less than pleasing, with significantly less paint on the wall than the pre-adhesive era.

We miraculously discovered that shoving the big armoire affront the wall was just the right height to cover up any and all damage, leaving just a couple inches of exposed stickiness atop, bless the lord almighty asians tend to be among the smaller stock.

And most disheartening of all, I had to bid farewell to Matt, my balcony plant.

I’d tediously cared for Matt since he was a young thing, and took notice not to step on him during late night balcony talks,  rants, or flight attempts.

I think the worst part of all was the knowledge that most likely Matt wouldn’t make it through the first official post-tenant apartment cleaning. But I’d push that thought away knowing that with my excessively green thumb, I’d kept him sturdy and strong in my several months of habitation.

This probably, most certainly looks like absolutely nothing to you.

Just another empty hotel room.

Big bed, wide windows, too-small dresser. 

But that’s not it at all, because this is Ed’s room.

Which is  exactly why I couldn’t help but cry when I stopped outside this room towards the end of my time at Webster.

Ed’s room, all cleared out, all clean and empty and gone of anything Ed.

Ed, I’d like to say, was my bald headed mentor, call him Buddha, call him God, Krishna, he was what he was, and he is what he is.

Ed was the type of guy that revealed himself in slices. 

You’d get the first couple sentences of a story, and then he’d shy off, promising to finish it again later. A few weeks go by, and you’d maybe get a few more details, and then a handful more. 

Ed was like that, every time I learned a  bit about him, he started to make a little more sense.

For gods sake he was so young. But considerably older than the rest of us.

It’s like Ed was never entirely certain what to do with himself, little Red Riding Hood, lost on his way to Grandmothers house.

And there was his room. Blank as can be. As though he’d never existed at all.

And then there’s stories of last suppers, tears of goodbye, maps of meeting points and where to find each other in twenty years, promises of future journeys, and a late night sleepover on the cold airport tile with only the comforting sound of squeaking luggage, and the sweet stench of early morning cigarettes. 

And then there’s home.

It’s prompted me to wonder, must the art of travel cease once we’ve reached home base?

People come here, I go there, it’s all the same difference.

The smallest of site swaps, a modest sized portion of location ADHD, and we’re all jumbled about.

I suppose travel is what one makes of it.

Wherever one makes of it.

The good, the bad, the ugly.

This, the right now, is the impatient part of the journey, the part where I’m back at home base, itching to get out again.

Time to refuel, before hitting the road.

And in the meantime,  let this site act as a thought box, a shelter for homeless ideas, a funnel for the wandering, whimsical wishes.

A reflection on a journey, snippets of travel, a treasure trove of tales to keep the my equilibrium in balance until I set off again humming, knapsack in hand.

And until then, I shan’t let myself get too drastically comfortable.

A dear friend recently asked me, “You’ve still got ants in your pants, and you’re hungry for travel aren’t you?”

I couldn’t help but respond, “There’s a leopard in my pants, and it’s biting my arse off.”

That’s Friendship So I’ve Learned.

Humming absentmindedly to Celine Dion’s, “My Heart Will Go On,” and lathering up my hair with handfuls of cream rinse, I hear a banging on my warped plywood door, again and again, a couple more times.

It’s Pui.

And she looks like she’s about to melt she’s so in love.

She collapses onto my balcony and tells me how he holds her tight.

How he wraps his arms around he as they watch the lightning together and he smells so good.

How he takes her hand softly, and how she just can’t believe most of all, that he likes her too.

And I sit there drenching wet in my hot pink bath towel feeling the conditioner slowly collapse into my hair, laughing, and exclaiming and swooning over her love story.

Because that’s true friendship I’ve learned.

It’s the way I ran into her room at three in the morning after hearing the worst ghost story of all possible time. 

And we crammed three or four of us, oh-so-mature college students into one bed to huddle together and avoid the scary stuff.

And we sang songs, and told bad jokes, and happy stories until things looked like they’d be okay again.

Pui’s the one that always knocks on my door for lunch, or for dinner, or for really late waking up at four in the evening breakfasts.

Or whenever she’s run out of chocolate milk. 

Because friends, they do that kind of thing, they are always there for each other, no matter the time nor the circumstances or the two day late comparative politics homework.

They’re there.

Sunbathing in the nude, and jumping fully clothed into swimming pools

A bit of true friendship that’s waterproof and sun warped.

A Shade of Life and Sunshine on the Open Road.

Thwack. Thwack. Thuuud.

Calculating the crappiness of the karma received from inadvertently killing butterflies, I ducked my head to avoid hitting yet another gorgeously sequined turquoise butterfly.

They intruded in gnat like swarms covering the perimeter of the sixty-kilometer road to Pala U Waterfall.

After the first few thuds vibrating solidly within my metal helmet, I forwent my futile attempts to guide the motorbike in an awkward anti-connect the dot demeanor in avoidance of the butterflies.

Trees erupted from the mountainside at all angles in toe touching proximity.

 They met in unison with tips arcing across the road, encompassing the torn cement in a canopy of moist nature.

The slightest of sunburns, and a couple liters of water later, my dear Indian friend Ashutosh and I screeched into the pay station to buy our tickets for the national park.

“Cun naksiksa!” “Me student!”

I pleaded with the woman working the booth, pulling out both my Webster University ID card and my best starving college student look in an effort to bargain with the 200 baht entrance fee for foreigners.

Returning victoriously to Ash who waited idling on the motorbike, I informed him of the spectacular 100 baht discount I’d haggled for us.

Approximately three American Dollars.

He beamed and proudly informed me that I was becoming Indian.

Pulling into the steep rocky parking lot, already drenched in salty sweat from the hour long butterfly dodging motorbike sprint we partook journeying to Pala U, we secured a spot between two tour busses, one packed with Chinese, the other, Indians, and we set out to do a bit more sweating.

I knew no more about Pala U Waterfall than the road signs depicted, which was an assortment of Thai lettering, something to the effect of น้ำตกสิบสองกิโลเมตร.

Apologies if that spoils the ending too much.

Needless to say, I was unprepared in the best of all possible ways for the beauty of this mirage.

After a concise bridge-crossing walk, surrounded by every possible shade of green, we ended up at a small pool of water collected from several billowing waterfalls.

With the enormous sacrifice of a pack of coconut crackers I’d purchased that morning on a rest stop to a roadside 7-11 wannabe on the bumpy road to Pala U, we crushed the crackers to pieces and dropped them into the water.

Only to leap back at the hordes of catfish so thick I could have utilized them as stepping stones, that immediately began jumping on cue and hurdling over one another, flopping desperate for a taste of powdered coconut cracker.

Whatever nostalgia I’d originally felt at parting with my crackers evaporated instantly at the degree of coolness with which these fish were freaking out, plus the condoling knowledge that with another twelve baht I could purchase another, considerably drier package of my own.

After the complete consumption of my crackers, the catfish flocked together beneath the water, idle at the edge of the rocks waiting for motive to move and another innocent bystander.

Pala U Waterfall has five levels to it, each plateau a significant hike further uphill and the cascades increasing grander and becoming far more intricate with the augmentation in elevation.

I overheard a couple of hairy potbellied men wheezing on their way up to the third level joking that after reaching the fifth level you’re so high up, you meet God.

It was only after the climb.

Twisting beneath boulders and slipping barefoot between rocks.

In that gorgeous creek bed style of half walking, three quarters running, leaping from rock to rock skimming the icy clear water.

That I realized they weren’t kidding.

Because I did meet him.

God, that is.

It was a nice moment of silence where the sunshine fills every possible spot of any word at all you could ever come up with to slip in the spaces.

I was standing at the edge of the stream on a simple mossy wet boulder that fit precisely into the panorama, identical to every other boulder you’d find up, down, or around for about twenty meters.

Except that I was in a grove of translucent butterflies.

Beautiful beyond belief.

And elegantly graceful in equal proportions of gentle wonder.

Reaching my hand up, I felt the legs of tens of tiny little beautiful butterflies trusting me.

Blue and purple and white and just the most incredible yellow, they were all so delicate and pinky up for a cup of tea sort of dainty.

Skeltering up and down my arms.

Absolutely surrounding me in a thin shelter of beauty.

Not flying, no destination.

Just hovering.

In the sunlight, precisely as I myself was doing.

I reached up into the sun and it felt like it’s only real purpose was lighting up my boulder.

And I saw little raindrops almost as elegant as the butterflies themselves. 

Falling from the sky so lightly that they disappeared before ever hitting me.

And I saw God.

And I felt God.

And above all, I knew that he was there.

Driving back from Pala U, several significant hours later, sopping wet from so much sweat and too many dunks in the waterfall to count, our clothes exhausted from all that drying out, only to get drenched yet again and again, we sang an off key top of the lungs assortment of Beatles tunes whenever we could remember the lyrics.

Halfway through a unique rendition of “Eight Days a Week” artistically merged with “Yellow Submarine,” Ash stalled the motorbike with a thwacking of it’s ancient brakes.

I peered around him mouth open in mid-“Yeah yeah yeah shanananana” to see an elephant standing in the middle of the road.

Standing isn’t necessarily the best word in this case.

It was more like, venting, or, needing to vent, as it appeared to be.

There was one extremely enormous, very pissed off elephant in the middle of the road.

Oh.

Hey.

Didn’t see you there.

Something like that, more or less, describes my conscious stream of thought.

Ash’s must have taken a more neanderthalic approach, with the fight or flight route running rapidly through his skull. As he floored it.

No really, I was impressed because even with the extreme lack of floor in the motorcycle, or, presence of open air where a floor potentially could have been, Ash really did manage to floor that beast of a motorcycle.

Heading precisely and directly towards the elephant.

I, in addition to the elephant as it turned out, assumed that Ash’s plan was to swerve to the right, fitting neatly into that little slice of street that the big grey guy hadn’t yet covered.

However more full of ferociousness than of not, he stampeded towards that empty space of road and, more frighteningly, towards us, in one powerful trot of a tantrum. 

With a screeching skid, Ash turned the motorbike around and we fled backwards, in a horrified mixture of shocked laughter and disbelief that there was indeed an extremely pissed off wild elephant that seemed to be have knighted himself king of the road and wanted us to Billy Goats Gruff it across the asphalt.

He also seemed fond of stepping on us with those big old wrinkly clubs of feet of his and grinding us into oblivion, but that was a thought I slipped out the side of my brain for dwelling on at a different time.

Waiting for several other cars to pass, and watching the elephants benign reaction to their presence, we decided to try to slip in behind an automobile and quickly, and painlessly cross by the elephant.

It was a nice plan in theory.

As soon as he spotted us, the interracial motorbike, he set out stamping and guffawing to keep us from crossing his blessed asphalt.

In a shriek of sound and speed and the smell of too much confusion and a lot of petroleum.

We somehow managed across that blasted barrier and away in a flash of Hindi curse words that had sprung a leak from Ash’s mouth.

A couple kilometers down the road, we spotted a few more innocent Thai passer byers on their motorbikes and honked at them shouting and pointing, “CHANG!!!!! CHANG!!!!!”

ELEPHANT!!!!!!

ELEPHANT!!!!!!!!!!

Fortunately that was one of the few Thai words floating around in our foreign vocabularies, thanks to the way in which the cheapest laundry detergent in Thailand is brand named “Chang.”

Essential knowledge for any college student.

Mai Mi Thang.

Perched as the perfect doppelgänger to a cardboard cutout, I was almost tempted to splash water on them to see if they crumble into a soggy clump of cardboard, as the small Thai vendors sat folded on the edges of their boats.

With an assortment of clutter from engraved candelabras to rhinestone adhesive nails, all for the small price of first impressions.

Or namely, how much green they think you’ve got lining your pockets. 

Ratchaburi’s floating market at  Damnoen Saduak packs one tightly, knee to jaw into a slim wooden boat.

The boat proceeds  to row down the narrow aisles of vendors fastened at the sides of the canal, bobbing amidst the water.

Each vendor totes a menacing hook used to clamp onto the edge of the oncoming boats and draw them towards their merchandise.

Holding them prey until the tourists either see the precise monogrammed  doilies they’d been searching for, or they’re guilt tripped into purchasing the nearest hand towel in hopes that the vendor will unattach their hook and release them back into the chaos of the open water. 

I could feel my wallet gradually begin to decrease in weight as my trinkets grew larger, an eclectic stash of obligation as each vendor stared me down.

That is until I learned the perfect simple sentence of all time, guaranteed to slide you cleanly from any possible entanglement. 

“Mai Mi Thang!”

As the Thai girl sitting nearby enlightened me, “I don’t have any money!” 

Hot.

It’s too hot to move.

It’s too hot to write.

It’s too hot to exist.

It’s too hot to think of a creative name for this blog post.

Vocal Lettuce.

“I find life works better when I just stay silent.”

He confessed.

“Most people are much to busy talking to intrude on my quiet.”

And while I thoroughly respect his astute philosophy.

I can’t help but wonder if every now and then he gets a bit of vocal lettuce stuck between his teeth on picture day.

Independence.

I drank straight out of the milk jug today.

I’ve absolutely never done that in my life before.

I always thought of it as gross.

I was so taken aback, I had to drown my condolences with Oreos and peanut butter.

Or perhaps it was the other way around.

But it turns out that the Oreos here are actually really nasty and horrifyingly unchocolatey, I call them Asian-O’s.

However I am not completely certain as to the politically correctness of that statement.

So I just smother them in more peanut butter and the improvement is instantly noticeable.

That’s pretty much a universal tactic for all life’s little boomerangs of difficulty.

Anyhow here I was standing out on the balcony chaperoning the highway traffic below chugging milk straight out of the carton.

What an enlightening experience.

It turns out that you can do that when you live alone.

And there’s no one to make choking noises of disgust, or give you the squinty little evil eye.

There’s just yourself.

And a dinner of banana, tuna, yogurt sandwiches on whole wheat bread.

Keeping you company as you clean out the fridge.

And realize that expiration dates are the most impatient devils you ever came close to eating.

ประเทศไทย.

ประเทศไทย.

Thailand.

Literally translates into freedom.

Because in all their years as a country.

They have never once been under foreign rule.

Wake Up Call.

They were after me, they were climbing balconies, and toting guns and all I could do was try and try and try to run away with my wooden legs and foggy thought.

5:40 on a Saturday morning and my phone omitted that obnoxiously piercing frantic ring tone.

One thing I’ve still got to get used to about college is the strangest sleep schedules.

If I call anybody at any given time throughout the day, I have the potential to wake them up.

I’ve caught a couple of groggy “screw you” voices at seven thirty on a Wednesday afternoon, and at four PM on a Tuesday.

Therefore, I’ve honed more of a dial and wince tactic.

Dial, and close your eyes for that moment of anticipation, hoping they’re conscious.

“This so grants me permission to call him at whatever time I desire from here on out!” I thought, while grappling to answer my phone mid slumber.

At least the zombies had evaporated.

I’d been expecting to hear from Ed anyways, just maybe not so….you know…early.

He’d had a big date planned in Bangkok the night before with some posh girl he met at a beach party.

While June and I were walking around Sala Apartments the other evening, heading over to play the violent Thai card game known as, “Signal.”

Ed grabbed us with a desperate expression on his face.

Holding only a wrinkled shirt and a miniscule palm sized iron, the message was clear.

June and I set to work ironing his entire ensemble and making him into a man.

As I pressed the steam across his thick black socks, he recounted to us just how great she was.

A gorgeous mix between ridiculously kinky, and high class society with a few dashes of irrelevant knock-knock jokes bridging the distance.

And the best part of all, he said with a grin, “She’s got these great tits! I mean, I know when she gets old…but live in the moment right?”

We sat around thinking of the most romantically possible scenarios he could conjure up.

Flowers? Too cliché.

Me mentioning flowers? Even more cliché.

After much debate, during which the preferred shirt was selected, and Ed was advised to stay far away from the plaid, a warning he would no doubt ignore and proceed packing right on into his suitcase.

We all decided on a picnic.

A nighttime one, with champagne and sandwiches(Ed’s attempt to “keep it casual”)  right next to the moonlit water.

It was gonna be good.

“She’s a man!!!” Ed yelled horrified into my ear on my wake up call that groggy Saturday morning.

Ladyboys.

Yet another reminder as to just why I love Thailand.