Sorely disappointed that we missed the “real” Muay Thai fights in
We were escorted to our table by a lovely “ladyboy”, looking more feminine in her black halter and floral skirt than I had looked all week. Damn. We paid our 500 Baht (about $15, very pricey for
The fighters were teenagers…boys, really. They seemed eager to get in the ring and show off what they could do. I almost felt bad watching them combat each other…they took it so seriously yet the audience saw it as fluffy entertainment. Everyone who makes it in ring deserves respect. So what if the ring is in a farang bar…it still takes a fair amount of chutzpah to step inside a ring.
The “Ladyboxers” were next on the bill. I did a cartoon double-take when the fighters took center stage. They were pre-pubescent girls and couldn’t have been more than twelve years old. I asked our waitress how old they were and she said “Fifteen, sixteen,”. Uh-huh. I wondered who that older lady was that was pictured on the bill…their Mom, maybe?
One was scrappier-looking, shorter, with straight black hair. I saw her ringside, shadow-boxing, moving laterally, practicing moving in angles. The other girl was a shade taller, her long hair braided in two long pigtails. She had lip gloss on and pink shorts and red gloves. Because the world is so predictably unfair, I knew this girl would win the fight. Naturally, I rooted for the shorter girl to win and if John Hughes were ever to make a movie about little girl kick boxers, she would most certainly would win. I swear to Molly Ringwald!
I didn’t know how to feel about watching these two little girls fight. I waffled between being adamantly opposed to it but then I would find myself peeking through my fingers for fear of missing anything “good”. The short-hair girl was finished the second she started turning her back to her opponent. If I had a towel I would’ve thrown it in the ring for her…poor thing.
We left the bar after Main Event...a rather large German fellow fought and won against a Thai boxer, who looked a little bored during the first round. Not the most exciting matches I’ve ever seen, but then again I’d never been in bar where Muay Thai fights broke out.
I woke up this morning at 5:15 am with a work hangover. My contact lenses have adhered themselves to my eyeballs, and now they have that gravel-y feeling that usually goes away with a good rubbing of the fist. I lift my head, which was resting on the corner of my laptop, and I think I probably have suffered some damage from evil electronic magnetic alpha rays. Feng shui books always tell you to sleep as far away as you can from cords, power outlets, anything emanating evil mojo. I’m probably doomed at the point.
I turn my head and see an empty wine glass and a bowl of crusted-over guacamole, evidence of last night’s lost battle with fatigue and frustration. I should’ve just gone to bed when I got home from the airport. The giant mental Post-it note to myself reminds me never to fly to
It may be psychosomatic but the early stages Carpal Tunnel syndrome are setting in. Trying to type with my wrists bent at a 90 degree angle, with someone else’s head practically in my lap is not conducive to a healthy posture.
Finally, finally home…
To visit The second we hit the streets, we are hungry again. It doesn’t matter if we just ate the free “ABF” (“American Breakfast”) at the hotel. We walk, we pass the vendor selling ready-to-be-squeezed-just-for-you orange juice. We walk further, we pass someone selling chicken, meatballs, and all manner of foods speared on sticks, I want a few of ‘dem hot wings. A few feet down, I want to buy a dozen of those giant, crispy prawns and start tearing the heads off right on the sidewalk.
Food is everywhere and available almost anytime. And portable. Although lobster-flavored potato chips and poxi sticks are accessible at any nearby 7-11, fresh, ripe fruit is always close at hand from a street vendor. You can easily score pineapples, watermelon, and strawberries from any street vendor. Getting your 5 a day in
Meanwhile, the S.O. is like a bloodhound sniffing out vendors selling the holy triad of chicken, papaya salad and sticky rice. He doesn’t have to look far. Entrepreneurship is strong in
Speed up. Don’t slow down. Go to the left. Squeeze between.Everyday, millions of Thai men, women and children of all shapes and sizes, babies to octogenarians, defy death with an easy-breezy non-chalance that would make most Americans crap their pants.
Everywhere the S.O. and I went in
The narrow streets that snake through and connect major thoroughfares in
But it’s the motorbikes that have the all-access pass. They go where cars, túk-túks and săwngthăews cannot. I often saw them driving the wrong direction, I suspect because the next turnaround was a little too far away to bother. (By the way, Thais drive on the left side of the road, the driver’s wheel is on the right side of the car. It’s like landing in Bizarro world for the uninitiated.) Motorbikes drove on sidewalks, on piers…places in the West where pedestrians ruled and where you’d be slapped with a ticket faster than Zsa Zsa slaps a police officer if you were caught driving down the Santa Monica pier. The S.O. didn’t need much convincing from me not to rent a motorbike in
We went up and down the
In Chiang Mai, the S.O. rented a sweet little Honda motorbike. It was a “Jaguar”, grr. I had a blue helmet with a “UFO” sticker on it. Almost brand new, just a few thousand miles on it, I felt okay about riding it as long as I didn’t have to drive it. Less populated, less “urban”, Chiang Mai was a bit safer, but only by the few inches more clearance we had between the bus to the left of us and the car to the right of us.
In the streets, riders protected themselves from the waves of soot and exhaust with surgical face masks and ski masks, their bikes weighed down with the day’s groceries or deliveries at their feet. Passengers were never passive, so comfortable in their spots, they easily gave up their hands to carry boxes, crates, packages and sacks. My hands were always clutching my S.O.’s torso for dear life.
We had worked up enough confidence in Chiang Mai that by the time the boy and I got to Koh Chang, we had abandoned our helmets altogether. It didn’t help that my helmet was pink and made for a 12-twelve year old’s cranium; my S.O. claimed that his helmet messed up his hair. I had to agree. I will only say that the vacation m indset does tend to displace reason. Me and the S.O. raced around hairpin curves, navigated the two lane roads, drove in pitch black darkness and struggled (at times) to climb the steep hills around the island. I tried not to take it too personally that I had to get off the motorbike and walk up a few hills. Our Koh Chang motorbike was not as powerful as our bike in Chiang Mai. For reals. Or maybe it was because it was used to hauling tiny Thai booty rather than my big-American booty, the owner of which had no choice but to start eating carbs again in
We felt completely exposed on the motorbike but for the most part, completely safe. Thai drivers looked out for each other. There’s no such thing as road rage there. No one is chucking any dogs out car windows there. No one gives each other dirty looks and pantomimes expletives at each other. That’s just how they roll. The way Americans drive, I would never elect to abandon my ten-year old Jeep Cherokee with its bumper hanging on by a thread, reminding me of a cigarette dangling from corner of someone’s mouth. In
But there was beauty here…we just had to seek it out.
“Nothing tastes as good as thin feels” Ahh…one of the many mantras doled out so easily-breasily by my “group leader”. I’m sitting in a small group of women (there are three of us this the present a week before Thanksgiving) listening to Sally, smartly dressed, in a tasteful but boring brown skirt, beige blouse and ethnic jewelry, you know, to “punch” it up.
This line, Nothing tastes as good as thin feels, makes me cringe. It makes me want to throw up the three-egg white omelet and two soy patties I had for breakfast. As much as I disdain these attempts to fuse these sayings into our psyches, I had to re-join the fold as I found it more and more difficult to keep avoiding all reflective surfaces and mirrors.
I had to commit to returning because being accountable to me just didn’t hold the same threat as it once did. I’ve put myself (intentionally) back in the OCD world of counting points, calories, glasses of water consumed, ounces, portions and trips to the bathroom. I’m glad, though. Really. It feels good to dip my big toe dipped into the pool again. The best part is feeling like I have a schmidgeon of control over my life while living in a place where I have no idea how I ended up. I feel like I just grabbed onto something comfortable and familiar amidst a swirling mass of confusion and it feels good.
It will be a few weeks yet for my body’s creakiness subsides…why this 36-year-old even has creakiness drives me nuts but it’s a truth that slaps me around every morning when I get out of bed. I feel like an old lady walking around but in the interest of keeping things positive, I’ll think of them as baby steps.
What is so bad about being Filipino? People are always cloaking their “Filipino-ness” with other asian stylings. I was watching the premiere of Medium the other night. As a side note, isn’t there something so endearing about big stars with bad teeth? I love it! It’s so humanizing. For those who are not fans of the show, Patricia Arquette plays a medium who has prophetic dreams and can see dead people. She’s also the Phoenix Police Department’s ace-in-the-hole for solving crimes. Oh, and she’s got crooked teeth.
I feel squinty-eyed right now…like a rescued coal mining worker emerging from a tiny opening in the earth, after being trapped in a collapsed tunnel for 17 days. My body is sore, not from being cramped in a tiny, dark space but more from the inactivity of being chained to a desk (resulting in the dreaded “secretary spread”—those with desk jobs know what I mean). At this moment, I am bathed in the so-called “light at the end of tunnel” and although it blinds me a bit, I welcome the feeling with open arms. For the first time since I moved to
Today, I did very little actual work work and I do not feel guilty at all. In my mind, it’s still not a fair trade for the life I sacrificed. Not to be melodramatic but life maintenance—my maintenance—took a backseat to work. I can’t help but wonder, Would my managers expect as much of a commitment from their married-with-kids workers? The single, female, no kids, no mortgage worker is my company’s favorite demographic. At sixteen months on the job, I am the second most senior employee in my department. The most senior employee started 2 months ahead of me. Do the words “burn out” mean anything?
I just recently decided it would be okay to start listening to my mother again. She had given me pretty good advice up until 1988 but after that it all went downhill. Since I was an irritatingly boring and well-behaved child, I have to say she had it easy. I didn’t hang out with a rough crowd, practiced the piano, suffered no unexpected pregnancies...
She wasn’t your stereotypical Asian mother. She didn’t really pressure me to do well in school (I already did, thank you very much). Curfews? ‘Eh...never broke them because I never stayed out late. Drug problem? Please! The hardest drug I did came dipped in hard-candy shell. She wasn’t the strict, oppressive Asian immigrant mother who felt her children’s success reflected her own success as a parent. Her own mother died when she was a young girl and she was raised by her aunt. Despite her aunt's best efforts, (and by my mother's own account) she was one baaad little kid. I saw a snapshot of her and my uncle once when they were young. My mom looked to be about twelve or thirteen and skinny as a Lucky Strike. Nine out of ten people polled would agree that she wore an afro. She stared stone-faced, her eyes looking straight into the camera and smiled the same no-teeth smile she uses today. She’s not giving anything away, that one.
As I saw it, my mother’s main child-rearing objectives were to feed, house and educate us. And keep us relatively happy. In 1979, we made the move from San Francisco to Vallejo, a suburb thirty miles north of the City. Since my sister AD was just too damn smart, she moved up a year, ending up in the same grade as my sister, AM. They were about to enter the eigth grade and rather than have them miss the chance to "graduate" with their class, my mother let them live on their own in small room, in a converted garage in someone’s house. Those kinds of studio conversions or "in-laws" were very popular in houses in the Sunset. My sisters, ages thirteen and fourteen, were living by themselves in the City, with nothing but the threat of my mother’s wrath to keep them in check.
So what if Social Services may have called that neglect? The Sunset neighborhood in 1979 was a different world back them and lucky for all of us, my sisters were big fish in their little pond, remarkably trustworthy and responsible kids. The sisters of the Holy Name of Jesus Elementary school stayed blissfully ignorant.
Over the years, she did the best she could, making decisions that would make today's parents mouths drop open. Oh, we suffered as we discovered Ponds cold cream had no sun-protective protective properties whatsoever and probably encouraged extra-wicked sunburns. And a prune or two would have helped things along, rather than ingesting those deceptively chocolaty-Ex-lax candies, my mother would feed us after a particularly heavy meal. When it came to my mother’s advice, I quickly developed a filter to sift away the sludge from the gold bits.
I suspect the hardest part my mother had to do was live apart from us, often finding work that took her to neighboring cities for weeks at a time. I stopped living with my mother at around fourteen. She was my "mother inabsentia". There, but not there.
She’s got her own way of doing things and while her methodology may seem crazy to some, the proof is in the proverbial pudding. My sisters and I didn’t grow up completely damage-free; between the five of us, we have a rack full of issues just waiting for us to leaf through. But, we grew up well-fed, with a roof over our heads, and college under our belts. And at the end of the day, I’d say that’s a job well-done.
My father is sixty-eight years old and owns a pair of leather pants. I suspect he gets a lot of use from them when he goes clubbing in
I always suspected that my father had a “secret” life. Again, nothing illicit or in the least bit pulpy. He and my mother are the permanent stars of a little passion play I like to call, “Everything You Do Irritates Me, But I’d Die If You Were Gone”. And there are no understudies in that production. He’s just always been a night owl. He used to work the swing shift so his internal clock kicks into overdrive right around dusk. He has a penchant for maintaining an air of mystery. But I suspect that if I were to follow him around on one of his nighttime excursions, I’d find him chatting with Sam, his buddy the barber, at the all-night donut shop run by a couple of older Filipino ladies.
On the nights where he’s not “gallivanting” over a few dozen donut holes, he’s most likely in the queue, waiting to sing at one of his regular karaoke clubs. With his chest puffing out just a bit, he’d recount how the patrons of the club begged him to sing “just one more song”. The volume of his voice would inexplicably increase as he would describe how people would ask to shake his hand after a particularly moving set of Filipino folk song favorites. Make no mistake, my father’s not a one-trick pony. He’s a musician, too, through to the skin.
Walk into my parents’ house and the first thing you’ll see is a drum set in the living room. A small, electric keyboard is off to the right, next to the silk flower arrangement. Across from the keyboard are a couple of guitars, one electric and one acoustic. A small amplifier is attached securely to a metal luggage wheely-thing with bungee cords. On some weekends, he loads up his blue Toyota Corolla, packs his guitars and his amplifiers, his mics and mic stand and wheels himself off to “gigs”, maybe church or association functions. He enjoys making music and entertaining people.
He’s a good “play” Dad, my father. If I want to know about what mutual funds I should invest in, I’ll call Charles Schwab. If I start to hear a funny pinging sound in my engine, I’ll give the good folks at Art’s Automotive a call. If I want to know about how the new
But when I need guitar accompaniment and help on how to put my own special spin on Tammy Wynette’s “Stand By Your Man”, my Pops is the only man I’d call.
Yesterday, I held a tennis racket in my hand for the first time in seventeen years. The last time I “played” tennis was when I was eight years old in a park by my cousin’s house near the
Perhaps it’s my poor vision but I think it would help my tennis game if the balls were bigger. They’re just too small to see properly, let alone hit. The bright green color helps but if they were the size of say, a bocci ball, I think I’d stand a chance of hitting them. I feel the same way about most sports with small objects as targets—golf, hockey, baseball. Make that ball or puck the size of a small cantaloupe and I might gain proficiency in this lifetime. Watching the games (or matches, tournaments, what have you) on television would certainly be easier for me to follow if I could locate that puck on the ice as easy and as often as a hockey player swings his stick at another player’s head.
My S.O. and I caught the last hour or so of daylight at the courts at
Less prone to fantasy than my younger self and a bit more (but not much more) grounded in reality, I had no desire to embarrass myself with my lack of tennis acumen. In kickboxing class, I often have to look away from beginners still learning, who flail their arms and kick their legs in funky, jerky ways. I lack a good teacher’s patience, one who is willing to slog through an ear-splitting, chalk-board-scratching version of a novice violinist’s “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”. As much as I know the learning process is often the richest part of any journey, yesterday, I just wanted to skip it and get to the good stuff already.
I relegated myself to playing on the “Siberian” courts, lest someone view my tennis playing as unforgivingly as I viewed a beginner’s kickboxing. My goals were simple (“See the ball. Hit the ball.”). But increased in complexity (“Hit the ball, over the net”) and specificity (“Hit the ball, over the net, in the court you’re playing on!”).
By the end of it, I hadn’t done as badly as I had anticipated. At least I made racket-to-ball contact, more times than I had when I was eight, anyway. I secretly declared it a worthy sport in my mind and one I wouldn’t mind trying out again despite the fact that I have absolutely no hope of being the next Filipino Serena Williams.
What Should I Wear Today?
I wear my heart on my sleeve and I’ve always wondered how that expression, came to be. My sleeve is sometimes long with large cuffs, sometimes blue, sometimes has dry ink or wet snot running down it. Perhaps a stain the dry cleaners (what is Martinizing anyway and can someone PLEASE explain why it costs three times as much to dry clean my slacks as it does the same slacks as a man?) cannot remove and if so, I get a little, colorful sticker placed around the hanger, announcing the inability to remove said stain.
My sleeves can be cotton, silk, spandex and linen, etc. When I wear linen, can you see that my heart worries about the fine lines appearing around my eyes? For example, can a stranger tell what’s in my heart at that moment and I fear aging? Or do they just see a wrinkled, linen sleeve? Do women who wear cotton sleeves have or had (once or twice) the opportunity to use them to absorb semen dribbling down their thighs after making love on a swing set at 2 am in the park? Thank God it’s dark at
Occasionally I roll my sleeves up to the elbow. Does that mean I only want you to know half of my heart and I am hiding the precarious part which folds up my deepest secrets? Sometimes I have no sleeves, does that mean I have no heart or does it simply mean for today, I am going to make a brave attempt to let as little emotion be revealed as possible? I think I will try this: sleeveless vs. sleeve – heartless vs. heart – emotionless vs. emotion, as an experiment, yes, a secret experiment. Oops, too late, I’ve just “sleeved” myself and divulged my plan.
It would never work anyway as my girlfriends know my heart. Nice try they would say, but your sleeve is snagged on your ex-boyfriends heart. But don’t worry, once we pull the red thread, it will unravel itself, not only until the snag is gone, but as women together, we continue to gently pull, and the thread un-loops itself enough times that your sleeve will no longer be caught, causing the same rippling and damage as the last blouse you loved so dearly did. The only piece left will be the red fluff reminding you that once you’ve cut the damaged sleeves off (and your best seamstress girlfriend sows the seams together), spring is here and you’re fucking glad that snag was there to begin with (even though you thought you could fix it by yourself, silly girl) because going sleeveless in spring is as wonderful and necessary as wearing sleeves again in the fall!
How have I managed to go eighteen years without learning how to drive a stick? I have been trolling Craig’s List for the past few days, searching for a replacement for my trusty Honda, and am discovering that, goddamnit, my choices are severely limited when my only option is an automatic. Or as I like to call them, the multi-taskers.
Growing up, we owned several family-type cars, mostly station wagons and vans. Made with the family in mind, our cars were not for the single-girl-or-guy-about-town commercials often showed, zipping down curvy highways, smiling and laughing, all the while shifting smoothly into high gear.
Instead, our cars were marketed for fathers who needed an occasional hand to yank a kid back into the car as they stuck half their body out the window, pretending to be a dog. Or, moms who’d chuck mini-juice boxes behind her with one hand, shove a Chicken McNugget into the mouth of a picky five-year old with the other while still managing to make that next left, turning the wheel with her knee.
When I was growing up, we owned a commercial van, pre-mini-van era. It was a white, very plain, no-nonsense van, not the mini-vans you see today, decked out with luxury features like individual video screens and audio jacks, and (oooh!) cup holders. This van could easily seat fifteen adults or my entire sixth grade volleyball team. When my whole family traveled in it, I imagine we looked like orphaned Asian girls, sponsored by a Christian group, on our way to
Don’t get me wrong, there are definitely advantages to driving an automatic. It’s perfect for a lazy driver (like me) who’d rather devote her higher functioning skills to programming radio stations or eating a salad versus worrying about that extra pedal down there, the clutch, I think. My friends with stick shifts swear by them! They would often say their cars are “so much fun to drive!” immediately after making a vroom-vroom sound with their mouths and miming kickin' it into high gear.
Sadly, I can’t relate. My trusty Honda was fuel-efficient, solid, very reliable, but never fun. And I could use a little fun right now. So, I have two action items on the docket in the next few weeks. One: Buy a car. And two: Learn how to drive it.
We’d been there before and since we had an “in” (my brother-in-law knew the owner), we always were treated extra-special-nice, often scoring a free sweet red bean dessert after dinner. The northern
I thought to myself, Who am I kidding? I can’t bluff worth a lick. Earlier, I toyed with the idea of downplaying the news of my impending freedom (call it unemployment, if you’d rather) to my family, who I knew judged my actions to be less than wise. Could I possibly contain my emotional grab bag of terror and excitement and keep them from rallying together and issuing a group finger-wag? Could I possibly bluff them into thinking I’m cool, calm and collected about this whole quitting-my-job-business?
They already knew, it wasn’t a secret, just my first family “public appearance” since the event. I told A.J. immediately after I had given notice at work and assumed (correctly) that the news would trickle down. Later, I remember speaking to A.B. about it only to immediately regret it. “I should have kept it a secret.” I told her. “You can’t keep anything a secret in this family. You may think you can but we would have found out.” She replied so matter-of-factly that it pissed me off. But in truth, I conceded she was right. Secrets have a way of spilling out in my family. The tricky part, though, is that when we find out a secret, we won’t let on we know. It turns into a game of Who’s-Gonna-Fess-Up-First? Currently, I am wringing the shit of out my hands, sitting on a big secret about one of my sisters. And no, I wouldn’t tell you, even if you promised you wouldn’t tell a soul.
Toward the end of the evening, I scanned the dinner table, looking into the eyes of every single family member there. I knew in my heart, that even if I could act as though I wasn’t terrified I’d fall flat on my face, they would never let on they knew. In some weird way, if they were to acknowledge the fear and doubt they see me trying to hide, they’d be legitimizing its power over me. That’s something they’d never knowingly do. I know they know I’m scared shitless. But they know me well enough to trust that I’ll always land on my feet and that’s good enough for them. My family’s a pretty safe bet that way.
Friday night, my friend C hosted a “girls’ night in”. It was obvious C had put some time and consideration into making M and I feel at home. We had three courses with two different wines. The cheese course included a selection of French cheeses (and a Spaniard): double-cream brie with green peppercorns, camembert, roquefort, chevre and manchego with sweet baguette, walnut levain and water crackers. C made Boeuf Bourguignon that took four hours to braise. Oh, it’s pronounced “buff” not “beef”, you philistine. And coconut sorbet with kumquat coulis for dessert. Fresh kumquats have only just recently made it into my fruit repertoire but never in its coulis incarnation all tangy and sweet…sublime!
I love good food. I have been known to bookmark certain restaurant’s websites just to track when my favorite dessert (chocolate budino with vanilla ice cream) makes it on their rotating menu. I can sit for hours leafing through beautifully photographed cookbooks, imagining what small miracles I can produce in the kitchen. I can keep a circle of dark chocolate between the roof of my mouth and my tongue for a good two minutes, savoring its crazy-good mouthfeel. I look forward to an evening’s promise of gastronomical adventures almost as much as the company I am about to keep.
Almost. In the case of C and M, the company will always be the main course.
For the last two days, I have been conscious of my breathing. A faint asthma-like wheeze had developed in my chest since my Valentine’s Day car wreck. I suspected that my belabored breath had something to do with the accident but later I decided it was due to good ol’ fashioned life stress. I had made my mind up that I would quit my job (without a new one lined up) and give notice to my boss at the end of the day. Because that’s when people quit jobs or fire people, right? At
It’s
