raw octopus with a side of puppy

When I was performing in West Side Story a few months back, I had lunch with several members of the violin section. As I mentioned before, the concertmaster was Japanese, and he was employed by the touring company, while the rest of the section was Thai and was employed just for the run in Bangkok.

Well, the concertmaster got to talking about all the foods he'd eaten while on the tour. He said he thinks Chinese people eat really weird food (and at this point my unruly inner monologue couldn't help but think, "Dude! You're from Japan."), and went on to say that while in China he'd eaten a scorpion (my inner monologue conceded the weirdness of that, but failed to come up with a relative weirdness score for scorpion versus, say, pickled sea cucumber). But now he was coming to his real point, which was that he'd recently learned that some people in Thailand eat dogs. He couldn't believe it! Fuzzy, friendly, companionable dogs. How could anyone eat a puppy?

At this point the two Thai guys at the table started to giggle. One of them admitted to enjoying a meal of dog now and then, and the concertmaster was horrified.

"Not a doggy! But I love doggy!"

The giggle dam burst, and the Thai guys started laughing out loud. One of them replied, rubbing his stomach,

"So do we!"

the ankle bone's connected to the...oh @#&@*$!!

• The camcorder plugs into the wall socket.
• The firewire cable plugs into the camcorder.
• The computer plugs into the... no it doesn't.

We've borrowed a camcorder from some friends. Unfortunately we can't seem to get the data from the camcorder into our computer to burn a DVD, because the firewire jacks on the camcorder and the computer both require the smaller firewire plug, while the cable has one each of smaller and larger plugs. We decided to try USB instead.

• The camcorder plugs into the wall socket.
• The USB cable plugs into the camcorder.
• The computer plugs into the USB cable.
• The data travels from the...no it doesn't.

Well, everything got tethered properly this time, but we still couldn't transfer the data. Why? It turns out that this camcorder (and many others), while it can be attached to a computer with a USB cable, will not lift one lousy finger to transfer video in this manner. USB can only be used to transfer still photos from the memory card.

• Husband and maikaojai get into the taxi.
• The taxi drives us to the mall.
• We walk from store to store, brandishing our inadequate firewire cable and pointing at the small end, personifying the stereotype of the crazy farang harassing the hapless Thai sales associate.
• The mall has no firewire cables with two small ends.

Brother-in-law and Sister-in-law are arriving in Bangkok tonight for a visit, and we've asked them to bring along this kind of cable, which Husband assures me is to be had at the magical kingdom of Fry's Electronics. Stay tuned for updates; if it doesn't work, you may soon find yourself reading a post titled "Do you KNOW how much camcorders cost?"

where have you gone, maikaojai dimaggio?

Where have I been?

Where have I been?

I'm remiss. I've been neglecting my readership (both of you). But somehow I don't think you've missed me--like me, you've been preoccupied by a much more important event:

the birth of NIECE!

thai people top it with ketchup

I have never liked pizza. (Yes. I'm a communist. Happy?)

As a child I wouldn't eat it at all. Everyone said that going to college would cure me of that--how could one go to college without eating pizza?

It didn't.

Going to college, where Little Caesar's had made some kind of back room deal with the food service department, so that students could order pizzas with the money from our meal plans, taught me that pizza delivery places will make pizzas without cheese! Bread, sauce, and vegetables--almost as good as a plate of spaghetti. No grease, no nasty cheese burns on the roof of my mouth. This was the pizza for me.

My friends thought I was crazy; the Little Caesar's guy kept trying to assure me that they had lactose-free cheese and I didn't have to "do without."

I was happy until I discovered the purpose of the cheese: to hold all the tasty mushrooms on the pizza so they don't fall off and splash sauce on your shirt every time you take a bite! This, however, only convinced me I'd better eat my cheeseless wonder with a knife and fork. I was steadfast.

Then I got married.

I married a normal person. That is, one who likes to eat pizza. This is when I decided that pizza, like loud music coming from upstairs and failed internet connections, was one of those things I could put up with on occasion. Marriage is about compromise, right? Well, if Husband could eat my failed kitchen experiments (remind me to tell you about the one he calls "ass soup"), I could eat pizza every now and then. Ah, wedded bliss.

Moving to Thailand has done what college, projectile mushrooms, and marriage could not: I now look forward to eating pizza. I think it's because it's American. Husband and I have also both started eating olives. We used to pick them out of our salads in restaurants; now we both eat them. Likewise, pizza.

Since we've been here, our town has become slightly more farang-friendly in the way of food. A pizza place has opened up near the university. Friends who own a restaurant nearby tell us that this pizza place has been raking it in hand over fist; turns out my relatives were right about pizza and college students, just not about me.

I can't look at their advertisements--they're so repulsive! Pizza with corn. Pizza with squid. Pizza with little hot dogs inside the crust all along the outside edge. But they do make a reasonable facsimile of American pizza: it has mushrooms and green peppers, and you just have to tell them to hold the corn and pineapple. Husband and I have ordered this pizza twice, and both times I've enjoyed it much more than I expected to. This is despite the fact that I can tell that the cheese, the sauce, and the crust are all inferior to pizza I've eaten with much less enjoyment in the U.S. The difference? Now it tastes like home.

(And yes, it does come with little packets of ketchup, which is intended to be squirted over the top of your piping hot slice. I've seen my students do it. Yeccchh!)

the brown bomber he's not

Mother-In-Law sent me an email to tell me she liked the changes to the blog. However, she was a little confused as to the presence of what looked like a theater named after an American boxer on my list of sites to see in Bangkok.

I hope that this will clear things up:

Joe Louis Theater

gold leaf

This is a small Buddha statue at Wat Phra Keaw (the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, on the grounds of the Grand Palace in Bangkok). It looks like the gold leaf is flaking off, but that's not what's happening. The hands in the picture are actually adding a small square of gold leaf to this Buddha's head.

This is one type of Buddhist "good deed" called making merit. Giving alms to monks is another way of making merit; donating to a temple would also fall under that category. But adding gold to a Buddha is certainly the most picturesque. People do this when they come to the temples to pray. It's always the smaller images like this one that get the gold leaf added to them--no one presses gold leaf into the massive Reclining Buddha at Wat Po, for example--but you can see statues like this at just about any temple.

LibraryThing

Here's a web site Husband found in the wee hours last night. It's essentially a catalog of books the site's members own or have read. Based on the data it has, it will make recommendations to you: you type in a book you've read and it will give you other books read by people who've read that one. The really interesting thing is that it will also give you unsuggestions: books that never appear in the libraries of people who've read the book you've typed in. What have I learned?

• Evangelical Christians don't read Umberto Eco.
• Tolkien readers don't like Mary Higgins Clark.
• There are a lot of knitters on LibraryThing, and they don't seem to share my taste in books.
• I am willing to spend 15 minutes (so far) looking at titles and authors of books that don't often appear on shelves next to my favorites.
  

check out my new digs

Yes, it's true, maikaojai is looking a little different these days. Note the shiny new links list; admire the list of things to see in Bangkok; bask in the warm glow of a new template.

No, I haven't suddenly entered the twenty-first century and learned HTML like everybody else; blogger.com has upgraded and so have I. Watch me play with my new toys!

hot, hot, hot

It's not cold.

deee-licious

You may recall Aunt Who Bakes Cookies and her thwarted attempt to ensnackify the youth of Thailand.

Well, she baked another batch and sent them along with our recent guests. I have been dutifully distributing them to my students; the response seems to be positive. Some reactions:

• Aroy! Aroy! ("Tasty! Tasty!")
• Repeated requests for seconds.
• Sooy! ("Beautiful!")

One student admired his cookie for a moment, then asked me if he was supposed to eat the plastic. I said, "Plastic?" He pointed at the purple sprinkles. I said, "That's sugar. You can eat it." His eyes got big; clearly I'd made his day. He said, not sure if he'd heard me right,

"COLORED SUGAR?"

a modern chemical wedding?

Aunt and Uncle have returned to the U.S., but before they left they gave us their collection of airline snacks from the trip to Thailand. They did what everybody does--"I'm not hungry, but I'd better grab this snack and put it away for later"--and they had quite a collection by the time they landed in Bangkok.

Some of these snacks are very weird. They are strange alliances between cookie and candy, and I have to wonder who decided they were necessary additions to the standard snacking repertoire.

For example: an Oreo candy bar. An Andes (as in, the little foil-wrapped mints, not the South American mountain range) cookie. This is food with an identity crisis.

(Postscript: Sometimes typos have real meaning--I originally typed "identity crusis!")

the river is moving / the blackbird must be flying

After a very heavy rainy season in Thailand, the Chao Praya River is dangerously high. There have been floods all the way from the north of Thailand to the coast, and in Bangkok there are still some streets under water, even though it stopped raining in any serious way weeks ago.

These are some pictures I took recently. Note the sandbags; also note the level of the floating pier (at the top of the ramp in the first picture). Normally one walks down a ramp to reach it.

learn thai in one easy lesson

Aunt and Uncle are here in Bangkok for a visit and for a professional conference. Although they've traveled a lot, they've never been to Thailand, and when they arrived they asked me to write down some key phrases in Thai: hello, good-bye, thank you, that sort of thing.

I did, but then I suggested to Aunt that she could make things easier on herself by doing the following:

Mumble something, and follow it with "ka." (The polite particle used by women.)

She's been trying it, and apparently it's been working like a charm!

i'm scratching my head here

My students have really different ideas than I do about when to show up for things.

When Husband and I got back from New Zealand, there was still about a week left before the start of the new semester. We both headed into our offices to make our preparations. The very first day back, I saw one of my students. He was so happy to see me! He said, "Ajarn, I have been coming to your office every day of this holiday. I have been looking for you every day." I asked, "Didn't you get my email that I'd be out of the office until today, and that if you needed me you should send an email?" He responded, "Yes."

They continue to believe that I understand no Thai at all, and when someone doesn't show up for a rehearsal or class they talk amongst themselves about what story to cook up for me. Someone volunteers that the missing student is downstairs eating; someone else says that they should tell me he's sick; I chime in, in Thai, to let them know I've understood the whole exchange. All of them collapse in horrified giggles. Every. Single. Time.

A student informed me this week that she would never be able to come to my 12:00 class. Why? Because she has a class that ends at 11:50 and another one that starts at one. So as I could plainly see (?), there was absolutely no way she could squeeze in another class. I told her I'd see her in class.

A group of students is entering an ensemble competition this week. Yesterday they asked me if they could ALL skip my pedagogy class to rehearse. When I said no, they acted extremely hurt. Turns out, they didn't want just to skip class--they wanted me to cancel class so I could help them practice.

This is after weeks and weeks of this exchange:

• Ajarn, can you help us?
• Sure! Just tell me what time you're going to rehearse and I'll be there.
• Don't know. I tell you again. ("again" is what they always say instead of "later")
• silence

Well, when I refused to cancel class, they talked me into staying at work to hear their evening rehearsal. The plan was, they were going to come to my office and fetch me when they were ready. According to plan, one of them showed up. She said they were ready, BUT two of the six members of the group were nowhere to be found. I said, OK, I'll hear you without them. She led me to their rehearsal room. There was no one there. There were no chairs set up. There were no music stands. There were no instruments. This was not a room that was ready for a rehearsal, even a two-thirds-strength rehearsal.

I went home.

She told me they were practicing again at 8 this morning; I told her I'd be there. We'll see.

yeah, they'll confiscate those at the border

Master's students here have to write what's called a "thematic paper." This is a brief (like, 10 or 15 pages) description of the music they're going to play at their degree recital. It's an uneasy compromise between the college of music administration (who'd prefer a U.S.-style degree that includes only recitals and no paper at all) and the university administration (who mandate that all master's degrees include a thesis). It has to be written in English.

As the only native English speaker in my department, I'm always asked to look at these papers for language. As a functioning member of my very small department, I (along with my colleagues) also serve as a committee member, making comments on content, format, and other issues.

The students tend to forget that second part--they figure I'm the English expert and nothing else.

Recently I read a draft of one of these papers. It wasn't bad. It was cursory, as such a short paper must be, and it included all of the common English errors that Thai people make (verb tenses that don't match, words like articles left out, and, for some reason, writing "c" for "z"--I don't understand that one). But the information was good, for the most part, and I was pleased that the student had done some good research. That's hard to do here, since the library is a big, beautiful, empty building...but that's another story for another day.

Unfortunately there was a really big problem with the paper: it included NOT ONE SINGLE CITATION. There was a brief bibliography (about 5 works, including a basic music history textbook and a music encyclopedia, which, again, is a whole other problem), but nothing in the paper to show the sources of this student's information...most of which, I can tell you for sure, is too obscure to have come from the general sources in his bibliography.

Before I met with this student I showed the paper to the head of academic affairs to talk about citation and the kind of training this student would have had in the proper way to do these things. Turns out he has passed a class in it (like bibliography in the U.S. but called research methods here) and should know very well that this is a big problem.

I met with the student and started to take him through my comments. I pointed out every single place where there should be a citation. He nodded at the first few, but after a page or so he began to look really uncomfortable. He started to make excuses.

He'd learned some information directly from his teacher and didn't know how to cite that. He'd given a bibliography at the end of the paper--wasn't that enough? Some of his sources weren't as well-known as these general books--he thought listing them would make him look bad.

And then, the crowning jewel of bs excuses.

"Footnotes are not allowed in Thailand."

I was speechless.

oh, woe is me

hack, hack, cough

Again.

You know those symptoms on the Nyquil commercial? I've got them all.

Why do Thailand germs hate me?

it's starting already

Dear Students,

Not everyone can have a lesson on Friday. Each Friday contains only 24 hours, you see, and believe it or not I need some of those hours for sleeping, eating, peeing, and PREPARING FOR YOUR LESSONS!!

Are you sure I can't interest you in Wednesday? How about Tuesday? I have some lovely Monday in your size. In fact, you'll even note that Mondays are seven days apart, JUST LIKE FRIDAYS. Believe it or not, that means you'll have exactly as much practice time between lessons as you would if your lesson was on the coveted Friday.

Sincerely,

maikaojai

clarification

Husband informs me that the guy who asked him about drinking beer on a bus wasn't just wondering--he was holding a jumbo bottle of Heineken wrapped in a paper bag at the time. Clearly he faced a dilemma--he could:

• Finish his beer first, thereby staying out in the heat and potentially missing his bus.
• Refrain from drinking on the bus, thereby allowing his beer to get warm (which takes about 30 seconds in this climate).
• Drink the beer on the bus, happily solving his problem but risking the disapproval of the ticket-taker.

Which did he choose? The world will never know.

there are no words

And after West Side Story was finished, I got on a plane that took me here.

(Photo by Husband, as always.)

cut the frabba-jabba

After I came back from Country Bordering Thailand, I jumped right into my next project. I played in the pit orchestra with a New York-based touring company of West Side Story.

By the time they got to Bangkok they'd been on tour for several months. They had been all over Asia and Europe, and Bangkok was their last stop before going home.

The way that these companies usually operate is, they hire a cast, a conductor, a few key stage crew members (I don't know enough about it to tell you their job titles), and a few core pit musicians (in the case of West Side Story, a bassist, a drummer, a pianist, a concertmaster, a lead trumpet player, and three woodwind doublers). Then they fill out the orchestra and the crew by hiring locals in each city they come through. It's cheaper for them, and at least in major cities in the U.S., there are musicians who make a living just by doing these kinds of gigs.

So the rest of the pit (and by today's Broadway standards it's a HUGE orchestra) was filled out by my colleagues and members of the orchestra I used to play in. I played clarinet, E-flat clarinet, and bass clarinet in the show. It was my first experience with doubling outside of a symphony orchestra, which is a whole different ballgame, and my learning curve was steep. After a rehearsal or two, though, I was doing about as well as I was going to do. Until.

In several of the numbers, I had to play all three instruments with very little time to change. I'd have the bass clarinet leaning on my shoulder, the B-flat clarinet in my hand, and the E-flat clarinet on a peg, waiting to be grabbed. I would keep a mouthpiece cover on instruments I wasn't currently using, to prevent the reeds from drying out/getting smacked and broken by me or the guy sitting next to me. Well, in rehearsal, with the bass clarinet ready (on my shoulder) and the B-flat clarinet in my hand, I made a quick change. I picked up the E-flat clarinet...pulled off the mouthpiece cover...and watched in horror as my ligature came off with it. Once the ligature is off, there's nothing holding the reed on, so the reed slid off...and into the bell of the bass clarinet.

This is why I'm not a freelance musician in New York City.

I missed the E-flat entrance, of course, and then my next bass clarinet entrance (only a few seconds later) because I was so flustered, but I made my next one, which was B-flat. For the rest of the number I sat out the E-flat entrances (no time to put on a new reed), and crossed my fingers while playing the bass, that the presence of an E-flat clarinet reed INSIDE THE INSTRUMENT wouldn't affect the sound too much. When the number was over I horrified the guy sitting next to me by taking apart my bass clarinet to get at the reed that had fallen into it while he was too busy doing his job to notice.

Now I want to tell you about the guy sitting next to me. He, and two others in the show, are woodwind doublers. This is a really specialized profession, useful only in this type of musical and in certain jazz situations. These guys can play anything. In this show, one of them played piccolo, flute, clarinet, and alto saxophone. Another played piccolo, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, tenor saxophone, and baritone saxophone. And the third played piccolo, flute, clarinet, bass clarinet, soprano saxophone, and bass saxophone. They were making fast changes just like I was, but they were doing it on six instruments instead of three, and the instruments they were playing were not nearly so closely related as mine were.

("Cut the frabba-jabba" is a line from the show. They say it twice, and it's just such a funny line--what does it mean, anyway?-- that it stuck in my head.)

and we wonder why we have a bad reputation

The other day, Husband was walking down the street in our town. He was stopped by a guy he describes as looking "like an American tourist" (rare enough here--they don't usually venture this far out of Bangkok except to go to the beach), with a scruffy stubble.

Tourist Guy: Do you speak English?

Husband: Yeah.

Tourist Guy: Can I drink beer on a bus?

back in the day

Think back. Think back 15 years.

Imagine your reaction if someone had said to you, in 1991,

"Google my blog."

tragic

While in Country Bordering Thailand, I was invited with some others to attend a performance by the national symphony orchestra. The four of us were the first foreigners to be invited to such a performance, and much was made of us. We were seated front and center, and the TV cameras spent as much time filming us as they did shooting the orchestra.

This orchestra was started only a few years ago--apparently when this country was allowed into ASEAN, the government decided to found this group to keep up with the Joneses. The members are mostly self-taught, because there aren't any music teachers in the country. A few of them have studied abroad for a few months at most, and some of the younger members are allowed to participate in the youth orchestra that we host at my university in Thailand.

The concert was the most bizarre musical experience I've ever had. At the end of the concert my hostess asked what I thought, and all I could say was, "tragic."

It wasn't that they aren't a great orchestra--I mean, a new group staffed with self-taught musicians playing on hand-me-down instruments isn't exactly going to be the Concertgebouw, nor should it, and that's just fine. It was more than that.

They had clearly rehearsed the music for hours and hours. Some aspects of it were right on--for instance, I've rarely heard a string section play such crisp, together pizzicato. But other things, like the tuning process, made me want to cry. Everyone played an A in unison, and then no one adjusted their instruments! It's as though someone had seen a video of an orchestra tuning, and said, "We should do that!" It was so clear that they didn't know what tuning was for.

Then there was the repertoire. They did a mix of standard-repertoire warhorses (first movement of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony, the famous movement of Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, stuff like that) and patriotic songs. These included one with the title "The Stronger the Army Is, the Stronger the Country Will Be." While playing this music, every musician in this orchestra maintained a facial expression of despair. I've seen a lot of orchestras, and I've seen a lot of string players make goofy faces while playing. Some of them look ecstatic, some look passionate, some (thankfully) look merely alert and focused, and some look...well, constipated. But I've never, before this concert, seen a string player just look sad. And here was a whole orchestra of them, sawing away in morose concentration.

During the Schubert, the conductor got lost and conducted the wrong beat for a long time. One piece, a Mozart overture (I forget which one), they didn't even finish. They just stopped in the middle, at the point up to which they'd rehearsed.

Now, I don't want to sound like a musical snob, looking down my nose at an inferior orchestra. Let me say again, there's nothing wrong with not being a great orchestra. It's fine not to have a violin section full of Itzhak Perlmans. What was tragic about this concert were the things I've described--

The bizarre tuning process. Clearly they're trying to emulate other orchestras, but they don't understand what they're trying to do.

The absolutely wretched looks on all of the players' faces, combined with the aspects of the performance that made it clear they've spent many, many hours rehearsing this music.

The absolute lack of understanding of even basic ideas (like, not stopping in the middle of the piece) about the performance of Western music.

All of the above, combined with the fact that the government wants to use this orchestra to show that they are just as good as the national orchestras of Thailand, of Malaysia, of Singapore. These musicians are working hard, and no one is helping them (because there's no one in the country who can, and since it's the national orchestra, a foreigner couldn't possibly have anything to contribute), and unless that changes, they're never going to get any better.

she is the only one

So, while I was on my trip to Country Bordering Thailand,* I was lucky enough to have access to a car and driver. (I might never have found the music school, left to my own wits!) The driver is an employee of the woman I was staying with, who is also the owner of the car. He washes the car at least twice a day, either because he's really proud to drive it, or because his job is really boring when there's nowhere to go.

He's about my age and he looks like most of the other men I met: very clean-cut, no facial hair or shaggy haircut, neatly tied sarong instead of pants, red-stained teeth from betel. His father is also a driver for a white family.

On the last full day of my trip he came to work in the morning and pulled the car up to the door, and when my hostess saw him she exclaimed and applauded. It seems he was wearing a jacket (a freaking JACKET! do you have any idea how hot it was?) in the color that is associated with Opposition Party Whose Members Get Arrested All The Time. My hostess was wearing the same color; it turns out that that day was the anniversary of the founding of the OPWMGAATT.

We got going towards the school, and I noticed that he'd taken off his jacket and laid it carefully on the floor of the car. Not long after we'd left the house, we encountered the only traffic jam I ever saw in this country: it seems that on this occasion, the government decided the usual roadblocks and unpaved street (on what seems to be a main road) near Nobel Laureate's house just weren't enough for their peace of mind. They set up additional roadblocks, closing off the street completely, and fortified their position with soldiers. Guys with really big guns. So everyone in the city had to take a detour.

We went by the headquarters of OPWMGAATT (which the driver had pointed out to me the previous day--I think he took "the long way" just so he could show me). On this day, it was surrounded by a small group of people: those brave enough to come out and publicly declare their support for the opposition. He turned to me and started on the longest speech I'd ever heard from him at one time (usually he talked to me in single, staccato sentences that took him a little time to think out in English--this must have taken him a while to translate).

I am not [OPWMGAATT]. For [Country Bordering Thailand], she is the only one. She has such power. She is the only one.

I asked him if he'd ever heard her speak. You know, before they stopped letting her even stand outside her house and talk. He said yes, and the same look came over his face that Thai people get when they talk about the King. He repeated, "She has such power." Then he repeated his statement that he's not a member of the opposition.

That night, I played a concert with my hostess. We were the entertainment at a reception for the OPWMGAATT, presented by the U.S. Embassy on the occasion of the anniversary of the movement's founding. As I think I mentioned before, the guests of honor were not in attendance because they'd been arrested.

My hostess had given the driver the night off--she thought she'd drive us there herself, both so that he could go home to his family, and so that he wouldn't have to be associated with such a politically charged event. Well, he didn't stand for that. He absolutely insisted on driving us there. After a conversation in This Country's Language, my hostess turned to me and shrugged. "He wants to go."

*Yeah, I know, this blog is on no one's radar and it probably doesn't matter if I shout out names, places, and dates, but...well, these people think freaking Yahoo! and hotmail are subversive...I think I'm going to keep being circumspect, if only to remind me (and my readers, if any) just how bizarre this place is.

we're back

and I've got a lot to say.

bisy backson

This couple of weeks I'm working a lot, and then Husband and I are going on a trip to New Zealand (I'm so excited!!!), so I think there's going to be a little blog hiatus. I'll be back around Halloween.

from the comments thread

This is cut and pasted from my response to the comment on another post--once I got going I found I had a fair amount to say, so I thought I would bump it up here for the reading enjoyment of those who don't click on the comments.

Thanks. I've been turning this trip over in my mind, trying to decide what, if anything, more I want to say on this blog. I got some pretty good advice about what to say/what not to say (apparently if I want to get another visa in, which I do, I've got to avoid using certain googlable keywords...not that my blog exactly comes up first on any google searches, but you can't be too careful, I guess) from someone who lives there, but it's still difficult to know how much detail to go into. The government is trying to get tourists to visit this country, but both their own Nobel Laureate and Tony Blair have called for a tourism boycott. The people I met there, though, were so incredibly happy that I was there. Granted, I wasn't exactly the average tourist, but still, the people I met wanted to show me how things are. And I think that going there, and just seeing, can only be good. It's hard for a person who grew up in the U.S. even to imagine what this place is like. It's not that I think everything about the United States is wonderful--far from it. We've got our problems too, and all you have to do is watch the news to see some of them, but I really think that Americans (or maybe it's just me) tend to take things like the First Amendment for granted.

father-in-law comes through for me again

Getting off a plane = deplaning.

it means "golden land"

Suvarnabhumi Airport, that is. Otherwise known as The New Airport. Otherwise known as It's How Far Away?

That means that the airport up north is now closed to commercial flights. That one is called Don Meuang. Otherwise known as The Old Airport. Otherwise known as Where The Heck Is Baggage Claim?

On my recent trip, I flew out of the old airport and into the new airport. It was the first day that the new airport was fully open, i.e. that it was being used exclusively. This after a few extremely confusing days in which both airports were semi-operational.

The new airport looks just like any other major international airport, which in my mind is a huge improvement over the old airport. There are signs. These signs are in English. There are now more than three desks at Immigration. Immigration, baggage claim, and Customs are all laid out in a straight line. OK, so you have to walk a gauntlet of about a half-mile of duty-free shops to get to Immigration, and there don't seem to be any bathrooms, but still, it's an improvement over Don Meuang.

I had an extremely easy time--my flight wasn't delayed, we didn't have to sit on the plane and wait for a gate, I didn't have any luggage to pick up, and I didn't have any trouble finding a taxi. Evidently I was lucky.

The newspaper has been carrying stories with headlines like "A Traveler's Woes." Apparently there have been some glitches--the system of gates isn't well-organized yet, and many flights are being boarded and...um...emptied (what's the word for that?) by bus. The baggage handling facilities are so inadequate that some of the soldiers (conveniently in town for the coup) have been assigned to carry baggage from the planes to baggage claim. Most ludicrous of all, the roads, the parking garage, the restaurants, and the bathrooms have been clogged with the ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND PEOPLE PER DAY who are coming up to the airport to sightsee.

they can't be serious

How weird is this?

do for yourself kid

Painted on the wall of the music school where I was giving my workshops.

mohinga

Yum.

This is what I ate for breakfast each day on my trip. My host's housekeeper (whose name is Margaret) went out to the street vendor on the corner to pick it up for me. She was just tickled that I wanted local food. Apparently most of the houseguests that stay there only want Corn Flakes.

It's noodles (rice-based, I think), which you mix with fish soup, lotus root, cilantro, red pepper flakes, fried stuff that used to be some kind of vegetable, and the juice of a local citrus fruit that isn't a lime, and that doesn't seem to have an English name.

Let me repeat:

Yum.

o beautiful, for spacious skies

I love America.

I love the First Amendment.

I love the democratic process.

I didn't know how much I loved these things till I saw what they're not.

Now I've seen the Army take over a government.

I've seen what a press that isn't free looks like.*

I've seen roadblocks and guys with big guns on the road where a Nobel Laureate isn't allowed to come out of her house. Ever.

I've played a concert at which some of the most honored and important guests were absent because they'd been "arrested."

I've seen a decayed and weed-grown university that was closed because the government could think of no other way to stop the students from protesting. (Other than mowing them down in the street like they did 18 years ago, of course.)

I've seen the message "Access Denied" when trying to get to my email because "subversive" websites like Yahoo! are banned.

*The previous comment was about Thailand, of course, but the rest are about the trip I just got back from. Email me if you'd like to hear more, or if you'd like to know why I'm being so circumspect. (If anyone's reading this who doesn't already have my email address, which I doubt, leave a comment and let me know.) I probably don't need to be quite this obtuse, but I'd rather err on this side than the other.

hne

This is an instrument that I brought back from my trip. It's for Husband, who likes to collect and play various wind instruments.

It's most closely related to the oboe, in that it's got a detachable reed that vibrates against itself inside the player's mouth, but that's where the similarity ends.

The oboe reed is in two parts ("double reed"): two thin pieces of cane tied together and vibrating against each other to create the sound. You can approximate this by putting your palms together, fingertips pointing up, and tapping your fingers together very quickly and lightly. Some Eastern instruments have quadruple reeds: two layers of reeds vibrating against each other. (Like having two left hands, one covering the other, and two right hands, one covering the other).

The hne isn't satisfied with two reeds. It sneers at four. The hne has TEN reeds! Five layers of cane on each side, all vibrating together. Before playing, you've got to soak the reed in hot water to make it pliable, then poke it down the center with a special tool to create a gap for the air to come through.

Also, the metal part isn't a stand for the instrument. It's attached by a cord to the wooden part, and it acts like the bell of a clarinet. I've never seen a bell attached in this way, nor one that's so different in diameter from the rest of the instrument.

The sound of the hne is quite loud and reedy. It's nasal and buzzy, and it's quite easy to slide the pitches by moving the embouchure. Apparently it's most often used as a contrast to the mellow, soft, airy-sounding bamboo flute.

betrofent and shubert

Husband and I try to be sensitive to our students' limited command of English. Specifically, we are much more lenient about correct spelling than we would be with native speakers. Call it "dumbing down" if you want, but the fact is that learning to spell "Scheherazade" is not how I'd like my students to spend their time.

So when I give listening tests (in which students must identify music by title and composer, based on a one-minute excerpt that I play on the stereo), I expect a little "creative spelling." I tell them that I have to be able to understand what they mean, and that they have to try to spell the whole word. (The first time I gave this sort of test, I didn't specify this, and for "Rimsky-Korsakov," I got Ri---unintelligible scribble---. Not acceptable.)

Usually I get results like "Simphonie" for "Symphony," and considering that this is a word that is spelled "Symphonie" in French music and "Sinfonia" in Italian music, I figure that's pretty close.

Last time I gave the test, though, I got the most creative spelling yet: "Betrofent."

Can you guess what that means?

Yep. Beethoven.

I gave the student credit, because it was clear that he could identify the music, which was the point of the test. I'm not totally comfortable with this, because I would never give an American student this kind of leeway, but considering that even the alphabet is foreign to these students, I'm not going to change the policy.

Recently Husband gave a listening test. Many of his students answered "Shubert" or "Shuber." I'd bet he would have accepted this if the correct answer had been "Schubert." Unfortunately it was "Schoenberg." No luck for students this time, although the names do sound quite similar.

self-reliance

Did you read Emerson in school? You probably remember at least the title of that essay, I'll bet. It's right up there with the Boston Tea Party, the New York Yankees, and Rosie the Riveter in the twentieth-floor penthouse of the American Psyche.

Quick, what action movie am I describing?

The Lone Hero struggles against the odds. He knows he's doing the right thing, but somehow no one Believes In Him. He's got to Go It Alone. The enemy is bigger, stronger, and better equipped. Everyone tells him he's Making a Terrible Mistake. But he Soldiers On, eventually saving the world.

Oh, wait...that's pretty much...all of them.

I've been thinking a lot about this lately, both as it pertains to my job and in general. My image of learning to be a musician involves hours upon hours shut up alone in a little room, practicing. My students see it differently. They practice in groups: instead of going into the practice rooms, they sit out in the hallway together, each practicing his/her own music, but all listening to each other with at least half an ear and helping out from time to time. When one person is having rhythmic trouble, the others will clap the beat and be his (thinking of a particular student) metronome. They share music too, and all of them spend at least as much time practicing each other's solos as they do their own. But when the time comes to perform (as in juries, which I'll be hearing today), they're terrified to stand up in front of the room alone.

In American music schools, you find almost the exact opposite. Practicing is private, almost ascetic. You don't open the door. You don't practice in the hallway (if all of the practice rooms are full, you wait). You don't practice with your friends (a practice room with more than one person in it? looks like screwing around instead of working to me!). But when you perform--you're the diva, you're the prima donna, you're the Lone Hero Fighting Against The Odds.

Who's to say which is right? American students have bigger egos, and probably practice more efficiently (based on what I've seen my students do). They're more comfortable with performing as soloists. But Thai students understand the value of cooperation. They Play Well With Others. Chamber music (in which you've got to look at your collaborators more than you look at your music, and play so as to match what you hear from them, even if it seems to contradict what you see on the page) seems to come more easily and naturally to them.

Seeing the way they interact makes me realize just how American I am--I would NEVER have lent my clarinet/mouthpiece/ligature/reeds/music to another student; they do it routinely. I would NEVER have shown up to a lesson with someone else's music.

• "This is not yours. Where is your music?"
• *smile and shrug*
• "Whose book is this?"
• "This Dae. I borrow him."
• "OK, where is yours?"
• "Toon borrow me. Then Moo borrow him."

I write in their music. I write comments that are specific to them; more than once I've had a student come in with someone else's music and try to adhere to someone else's markings.

• "Why are you playing so loud there?"
• *points to music, where I've scribbled something*
• "But this is not your book. Do was playing too softly there, so I told him to play louder. But you don't have that problem, so you don't do it."

This sort of thing still surprises me; I still find it foreign.

But, as usual, I've digressed far, far from what I originally wanted to tell you about Self-Reliance. With all my characteristic wit, grace, and total lack of transition and flow, I'm just going to lay it down now.

Back in July I met Chen Yi. (Loyal readers will remember this, I think.) In the course of our conversation with her and her Thai grad student, we asked Narong (her student) how he likes living in Kansas City (where she teaches). He doesn't have a car, and we expressed surprise that he was able to get around without too much trouble--having lived in Tucson, we understand what a city without good public transport is like. Narong said that he just asks his friends to take him where he needs to go. He said that he was sure we'd do the same in his situation. Then he grinned (he's Thai, and so of course he punctuates every sentence with a grin).

Dr. Chen looked at her star graduate student and said to him, in the mother-henniest, don't-you-know-anything-about-the-worldiest voice I've ever heard, "But they're Americans! They don't ask for help."

great big farang lady

I seem to know a lot of pregnant people lately. Talking with one of them recently reminded me of an incident that happened about a year ago. I'll just lay it out for you simply.

Petite Colleague Who'd Recently Given Birth to Twins: maikaojai, would you like to have some of my maternity clothes? I think they're about your size.

maikaojai: Uh...*sucks in her gut and tries not to pass out from embarrassment*

till you make it

Today I introduced one of my graduate students to the ancient and noble art of faking it, also known as Just Play Something.

He's been called in to play a series of chamber music concerts with a group that's been rehearsing for months--he's replacing someone who got a full-time orchestra job and had to quit the group. The first concert is tonight, and the music is really difficult.

He played some of it for me in his lesson today. After giving him the standard I-could-have-been-more-help-if-you'd-shown-me-this-three-weeks-ago-when-you-got-it lecture, I settled in to help him get through these concerts.

He can't play the music. Can't. That's not to say he never will--it's perfectly well within his capabilities and given some more time, he'll play it great. But he's got to play it tonight. When he played it in his lesson he was doing all of the things I've taught him about practicing--playing slowly, isolating difficult passages, stripping the music down to only a few elements to work on, the whole routine. But (and I think I may have mentioned this already) the concert is tonight.

So I showed him how to cut his losses, essentially: simply white-knuckling and Trying Really Hard isn't going to substitute for the extra months of practice that everyone else has had, so he's got to figure out what's really important and focus on those things. For instance: if he's got to play 7 notes in one beat (and in this music, one beat lasts less than half a second), I told him to get the first note and the last note right, and Just Play Something in between. I told him to make sure that the style and rhythm were correct at all times, even to the exclusion of right notes in the very fast passages. Let's face it: certain mistakes are more noticeable than others, and when it's obvious we can't do everything right, we've got to do the important things right and not worry so much about the rest. I call it pragmatic; I think he felt shocked and a little dirty.

Part of the problem is that playing this way is tantamount to admitting you're not perfect. Even making a statement like, "OK, I've got to get the beginning and the ending of this right" is a tacet admission that there may be some problems in the middle. And it's true that faking doesn't sound as good as real, practiced accuracy, and that discerning ears can tell the difference, but it's also true that it's better to cut your losses than to fall apart completely because you're trying to do everything before you're ready.

Did I mention the concert is tonight?

washing dishes, or, Yes, My Life Really Is This Boring

I often wonder, as I wash dishes, whether I'm not actually making them dirtier by washing them in tap water.

Washing dishes is quite a procedure here. First I pick up the plastic tub full of accumulated dirty dishes...

(Wait, no, scratch that. This is my blog, and I'm going to take you to a magical fantasy land in which I wash every dish the moment it becomes dirty, and never, ever let them accumulate.)

Washing dishes is quite a procedure here. First I pick up the plastic tub full of dishes that have just now gotten dirty and pass it out the window to sit on the shelf of the kitchen sink, which is on the balcony. Then I put on my dishwashing outfit--flipflops and a big apron. The flipflops are because I don't want my feet to get wet, and the apron is because I'm incapable of using the sprayer on the sink without spraying myself. Next I gather up my sponges and dish soap, and head outside.

The first order of business is to clean out the sink--it is outside, after all, and is often graced with...well, bird droppings. One of my sponges/scratchy scourers is only used for cleaning the sink. Instead of a faucet, we've got a spray nozzle on our sink. It's very convenient and very strong, and I'm glad we bought it. We saw it at Tesco Lotus and bought it, not realizing (as we figured out when we got it home) that no Thai person would EVER attach this sprayer to a kitchen sink. It's for...um...a more personal purpose: it's meant to be attached to the bathroom plumbing and hung on the wall next to the toilet, and provides the water for the cleaning that Thai people do instead of using toilet paper. I bet that any Thai person who saw our kitchen sink would think we had truly gone off the stupid-farang deep end. Oh well; it works for us. (We do have these sprayers in our bathrooms too, but we only use them to clean the bathroom floor. Very handy, actually.)

After I wash the sink, I wash the plastic tub. After I wash the plastic tub, I wash the dishes. To keep our sink's drains from getting clogged with old food, I spray the dirtier dishes and rinse the food into the drain in the floor, which has a little trap. Generally I accidentally spray the pigeons sitting on the ledge while I'm doing this, making them mad and causing them to fly away for about 10 seconds before they come back. Once I sprayed a gecko. By the time I'm done washing and rinsing dishes, the floor is soaking wet (and would be even if I wasn't pre-spraying dishes onto the floor--my acknowledgement that the floor was going to get wet anyway was what led me to start the pre-spraying in the first place).

I carry the tub of clean dishes back inside and set them into the dish drainer (which is really just a set of wire shelves), where they drip on the floor.

If I were Thai, this would be a lot simpler: I'd wash the dishes directly in the plastic tub, which I'd fill with soapy water. Then I'd rinse them in the tap in the bathroom. This is actually what I did for the first six months we lived here; believe me, the sink is better.

monitor

I've mentioned before that we have a moat. Well, what would a moat be without a monster?
This is a monitor lizard, spotted in town and chased down by Husband. I hope you can get some sense of scale from this picture--this is an average-sized monitor, about 4 feet long. They can get bigger, though.

There's one really big one that lives near the College of Music. We call it Moatie.

Monitors usually leave people alone and keep to themselves, but it's not too rare to see one walking down the sidewalk or swimming in the moat or one of the other khlongs or ponds on campus. Swimming monitors keep almost their entire bodies submerged--only their heads are visible above the murky water, and they glide along very smoothly like periscopes. Even when they're not in plain view, we know they're there--quiet and graceful they're not, and we'll often hear one crashing along, hidden by tall grass and bushes.

seasons change

Today Husband and I went to see the Thai film Seasons Change. (Here's the movie website and a quick synopsis.)

This movie was takes place, and was filmed, at the university where we work. The main characters are pre-college music students. It's a very cute high-school romantic comedy, and it was especially fun for us because we got to do some people-watching. In addition to being shot in our building, the movie used many of our colleagues and students as extras. Our boss, the Director of the College of Music, was played in the movie by an actor who actually looks a little like him, and the real Director made a cameo appearance as an audience member at a concert. I think that a large proportion of the people who went to see the movie today are either connected with the university, or with the Bangkok music scene, or both, because when this guy's face appeared on screen there was a collective "Ooooh" in the theater.

I don't think this movie is likely to be released widely in the U.S., but if you do run across it it's definitely worth seeing.

robots in disguise

The power was out at the College of Music for two days this week.

This time, the cause of the outage was an exploded transformer. Husband actually heard it from his office.

days of future passed

In order to construct a meaningful sentence in English, you've got to place the event you're describing in a context of time:

I speak English.

I am speaking English.

I will speak English.

I spoke English.

I would have been speaking English.

Verb tenses. Love 'em or...make no sense.

In Thai, on the other hand, every single one of those sentences above translates to:

Puut angrit.*

You can speak Thai all day and all night without ever making a decision about WHEN. This means that when I speak with my students, either in English or in Thai, I have a problem with any question or statement that depends on a point in time.

To my students,

"Have you played this piece before?"

sounds exactly like

"Play this right now."

"How much did you practice today?"

sounds exactly like

"How much will you practice today?"

Even non-verb words like before and after are confusing to them. There must be a way to say these things in Thai, but I don't know it.

There is a word that, added to a verb, means a kind of immediate future:

Ja puut angrit.

is something like "I'm about to speak English. Any minute now."

And there's a word that means something like "already."

Puut angrit lair-o.

is something like "I spoke English already. Finished."

So there is that.

As always, this difference between English and Thai makes me muse. What does it say about us, about how we think? Americans definitely think more linearly than Thai people: First I did this, then I did that, now I'm doing the other, and finally I'll scale that mountain, I'll pull myself up by my bootstraps, I'll use my Yankee ingenuity to be a high achiever.

There just isn't that kind of urgency here. Deadlines are mere suggestions. Appointments, class start times, and bus schedules are vague at best. Linguistically, everything is happening in a kind of constant present tense. Kind of like Bangkok traffic. Now, as always, I'm making the logical leap required to shoot my mouth off about a culture I don't really understand, but I think this question of language is an important one. Did the languages evolve differently because the people thought differently, or do we think differently because we think in these different languages, or does one continually inform and shape the other?

I definitely need another cup of coffee before I take that one any farther.

*The problem of gendered first-person pronouns that I discussed in a previous post evaporates in ordinary conversation, when most pronouns are omitted.

guantanamera

This weekend was Husband's birthday. Only one more year till the big 3-0. And that means only 2 more years till I hit it! Yikes.

We went into Bangkok with another couple for some Mexican food. Now, say what you will about globalization, but any trend that allows me to have a burrito in in Bangkok is worth something. I'm grateful.

The restaurant was called Senor Pico's, and it's in the ritzy expat area of Bangkok. An expat is what I am, I suppose, but I'm not the kind of expat that Senor Pico's is catering to. It's in a fancy hotel with serviced apartments, and the food is almost as good as in Tucson, and they had a Cuban band playing a weird mix of mariachi tunes, Frank Sinatra songs in Spanish, and one verse of "Happy Birthday" every five minutes. And for what we spent on that meal, we could have eaten at our local takeout places 20 times. 20.

My parents were expats for a while. They lived in a 4-bedroom, marble-floored apartment in Singapore. They had beautiful furniture, a membership at the American Club, and a car. The company flew me and Brother out for visits.

My former student joined the Peace Corps after graduating from the university where I did my graduate work. She went to Nicaragua, where she lived in a village and taught the locals more efficient farming techniques. She bathed from a bucket, ate lots of bananas, and spoke Spanish.

What I'm doing here is somewhere in between.

I have high speed Internet at home and in my office, and that alone makes my life so much easier than it would have been, had I been doing this even 10 years ago! I can pay bills online, stay in touch with people, learn about world events that don't involve business or cricket, and, of course, maintain this sparkling literary gem of a blog.

I get around Bangkok on public transportation that didn't exist 10 years ago--the BTS Skytrain and the MRT subway, not to mention the metered taxis. Before these innovations, it was all tuk-tuks, sawng thaews (pickup trucks that you hire like taxis and sit on benches in the bed) and samlors (bicycle rickshaws, still used in smaller towns).

But a lot of things are just different here--for instance, I make a really good salary for Thailand. Husband and I are doing quite well, and our pricey burritos this weekend aren't going to cause us any real financial angst (imagine the price tag on a dinner in the U.S. that costs the equivalent of 20 takeout meals for two!). But my student, who wants to go to the U.S. for a few months and work at McDonald's while he visits his uncle (can you do that?), will make more money at that job than I do at mine.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Maybe nowhere. It does make me wonder about the factors that affect something like the cost of living for a certain area, or an average salary.

4 more...3 more...2 more...1 more...

We have cable TV here, which means that in addition to the many Thai stations that we don't watch, we get a small selection of English-language TV. We get BBC Asia and CNN Asia, both of which report exhaustively and incessantly on business and financial news. This is generally pretty boring, but I did get to hear a BBC guy reporting on commodities say "nipple crisis" when he meant "nickel prices," so there is that. (Yeah, my sense of humor is still in the third grade. Wanna make something of it?)

We also get Star Movies, which shows a very strange mix of movies. Every movie The Rock has ever made, for one thing. Steven Seagal's complete oeuvre. "Baby Geniuses," "Three Men and a Little Lady," "All Dogs Go to Heaven 2," "Agent Cody Banks," and other movies aimed at kids. And a perplexing collection of romantic comedies starring Jennifer Love Hewitt doing a fake British accent and weighing about 70 pounds.

We also get two Australian channels. One of them looks like a cross between American network TV and PBS--there's a drama about a hospital, there are cop shows and travel shows and documentaries. On the other Australian channel, they seem to show nothing at all but this. This is not like the aerobics shows in the U.S. For one thing, the instructors all seem to be wearing thongs. (And, of course, those great big gleaming white aerobics instructor sneakers.) They do strange exercises too. There's one in which two hot chicks in thongs stand opposite each other and pretend to fight: in rhythm, one punches while the other one ducks, and then they trade positions, going up and down like pistons. There's another one in which male volunteers are pushed and pulled by the hot chicks in thongs. Presumably this has some aerobically sound premise. Husband and I wonder who, exactly, is the target audience for this show.

Anyway, we tend to eat our supper in the true traditional American way: in front of the TV. So each day we flip through our channels to see what our choices are. Generally we've got: Steven Seagal running in front of fire; CNN World Business Report; hot chicks in thongs; BBC Sport (which reports on things like cricket matches between Bangladesh and South Africa, and the interminable Juventus football scandal); and whatever is on the other Australian channel.

We're reviving the lost art of conversation.

she walks like a woman and talks like a man

Lo-lo-lo-lo-lola....

Gender roles are a little different here in Thailand than they are in the United States. Painted broadly, there are a lot of similarities and Thai culture could be seen as conservative in terms of gender equality.

For example, at the university, my female students defer to my male students. Before the first student concert I organized here, I asked the students what they'd like to wear. The men decided what they were going to wear, then told the women what they should wear! Being at the same time aghast and very concerned about my cultural sensitivity (because how big a deal is this, really?), I timidly asked the women if this was OK with them. They said yes.

But in other ways, women have just as much of a chance to succeed as men. For example, again at the university, there is a pretty good mix of women and men among both the farang and the Thai teachers. And this university, at least, I think things are actually better organized for family life (read: women not having to quit their jobs to have kids) than at some universities in the U.S.

All of this is just a preface, though, to what I really want to talk about, which are those little, day-to-day differences. They start with the language.

In English, we have one first-person pronoun for both sexes, but we differentiate male and female ("he" and "she") in the third person. We also have only one second-person pronoun, having done away even with the familiar "thou."

In Thai, though, things are different. Men and women speak differently about themselves. A woman might say,

"Di-chan choop ni nang-suu ka."

A man, on the other hand, would say,

"Pom choop ni nang-suu krup."

"Pom" and "Di-chan" would both translate in English as "I." "Krup and "ka" wouldn't translate at all--they're polite words that get tacked on to the ends of things, and they vary by sex. The rest of the sentence is inane, like most of the things I say in Thai: "I like this book."

But to talk about someone else, in English we've got to know what sex the person is:

"He likes this book." "She likes this book."

In Thai, both of these sentences translate to

"Kao choop ni nang-suu (ka/krup)." (The word at the end still varies with the sex of the speaker.)

I won't get into Thai second-person pronouns, except to say that there are a lot of them, that they vary according to the status of the speaker and the listener, and that (thankfully) there is one that is always appropriate for conversations between farang and Thais.

Anyway, the lack of differentiation for other people means that Thai people, even those who speak very good English, sometimes get tripped up on "he" and "she." "Mr.," "Ms./Mrs./Miss," "Sir," and "ma'am" also all translate to the same word in Thai: "Khun," which also means "you" and is the second-person pronoun used by farang. This means that when Thai people speak English, titles like the ones I've listed get confused. Everybody is "sir." Everybody is "Mr."

There are also some differences in what is considered to be socially acceptable behavior.

In Bangkok you'll see teenage couples holding hands, but this is a new trend and is still considered to be a little trashy. What's completely acceptable, though, is same-sex friends holding hands or walking with their arms around each other. Imagine two teenage boys walking down the street with their arms around each other in the United States! "Friends" isn't the assumption we'd make.

There is also a much wider range of adornments and tchotchkes acceptable for Thai boys and men than to Americans. It's not unheard of to see male students at the university wearing makeup, for example. Thai men aren't afraid of the color pink, or of cute little cartoon characters: one of my male students wears a huge Hello Kitty watch, and many of them carry pink pencils with little charms dangling from the ends. And while it's not so uncommon for American men to have long hair, their range is styling options is very limited compared to Thai men. Thai men wear plastic hair bands, barrettes, ponytails, pigtails, French braids; essentially all of the styles that women use to keep long hair out of their faces are available to men as well. And this is just for regular guys.

Going a little farther are the katoey ("ladyboys"). These are men who dress like women. Shaved legs, tiny little miniskirts, lots of makeup. And at least to my farang eyes, they're a lot better at it than American drag queens. For one thing, it's a wardrobe choice and not theater (though they have that here too), so there's nothing over the top. A katoey and his female friends will look very much the same. Also, again to my farang eyes, there's less difference to make up in terms of body shape between Thai men and Thai women than there is between American men and American women. More than once I've been surprised by the deep voice that comes out of who I thought was a teenage girl.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised, though--after all, the Thai language teaches us that others' (people we'd talk about in the third person) gender is none of our business, and that it's our job to articulate our own.

for inspired journaling

Notebooks with cute pictures and English phrases on the front are very popular here. Usually the pictures are of Japanese cartoon characters (or original designs that look like Japanese cartoon characters) and the text says something like "Happy is friend I feel. Life for love." Mushy sentiment, questionable syntax. I'd imagine that many of the items sold in the U.S. with Chinese or Japanese characters on them (and, I've heard, the tattoos that people get) mangle those languages in the same way. Anyway, one notebook stood out from the rest. I just had to buy it.

The picture is a series of photographs of a stuffed dog wearing a powder blue track suit and standing on its hind legs. There are ten poses, each about an inch high. The dog waving. The dog sad. The dog with a fanny pack. The dog with a giant plush bone. I'm not sure what the dog is supposed to be doing in some of them.

The eleventh picture is about four times larger. It is clearly the centerpiece. It shows the dog standing on its hind legs, wearing only the top half of the track suit. Its front paws are clasped in front of it, and it is standing before a toilet and turning to grin at the photographer. The text reads as follows:

Whenever I wrap the urine with
the trouser, too ashamed.
I am tiny unpleasantly.
A tear lot hates,
but I have a dream to want to
consist surely.
It is secret what I dream right now.
I have important dream.

and the karmic wheel keeps turning

My last post was a little over the top, I think.

I was tempting fate.

I was fey.

Today all those holes in my schedule got filled in. And then some.

money for nothing (and the chicks for free)

The workload of a musician always ebbs and flows. Whether it's a recital, a particularly busy concert season, or guiding (dragging) my students through their performances, every event is preceded by a steadily increasing number of time commitments: extra practicing and rehearsals, plus meetings with building administrators and publicity people, if it's a concert of mine; extra lessons, schedule juggling to accommodate accompanists, and supervision of rehearsals and performances if it's a student event. The event is generally succeeded by a brief period of relative calm, when the holes in my schedule from things I don't need to do anymore haven't yet been filled with preparations for the next thing. It's during these times that I try to excavate the dunes of paper that accumulate in my office when I don't have time to think about being organized.

Last night was The Recital. It was a given that today would be a fairly easy workday for me--I practiced only a little, I had no rehearsals to attend, and not a lot of lessons to teach (it's only Tuesday--my students seem to think that the later in the week they can have their lessons, the better. Somehow it's escaped them that there are just as many practice days between Mondays as there are between Fridays). But the actual experience of this day has made me wonder what, exactly, they're paying me for. I've never had a workday quite like it.

Recently I posted a day in the life of maikaojai; this is a little different.

8:30-11:00 DIDN'T practice

11:00-12:00 practiced

12:00-1:00 DIDN'T coach the student quintet I normally have at this time

1:00-2:00 DIDN'T teach the lesson I normally have at this time

2:00-3:00 DIDN'T teach the lesson I normally have at this time

3:00-3:30 DIDN'T go to the administrative office to straighten out recital details

3:30-4:30 DIDN'T coach the student quartet I normally have at this time

4:30-6:00 DIDN'T practice

6:00-7:00 supper with Husband

7:00-8:30 attend a student concert that I had absolutely no part in organizing (YES!)

I'm no stranger to student cancellations, but this is the first time that EVERY SINGLE STUDENT has cancelled lessons on the same day. Too bad they didn't give me any advance notice; I could have been writing this in my pajamas.

What have I been doing all day? Well, I've been shoveling paper off my desk; working on the draft of a book segment (it's not really a chapter; more of an appendix) I've been asked to write; trying to figure out how I'm going to herd everyone into their appointed jury preview time slots at the end of the semester (already the tide has turned; I'll be at high water again soon enough); catching up on some correspondence; and harassing Husband.

clarification

An alert reader (hi Mom!) has asked me what that dog picture is doing on my blog.

It's one of the College of Music dogs; I just thought that after hearing about them, you'd like to see one.

it's shagadelic, baby, yeah

When I was in the U.S. in the spring, Cousin gave me a great haircut. It was really good. And it took her about a minute and a half--I couldn't believe it! Anyway, when I got back to Thailand, I waited as long as I could before getting another trim, and when I did, I made sure to say "Same same. Only trim." The stylist did his best, and I wound up with a reasonably similar haircut.

Last night was the End of the Good Haircut.

It was getting very unkempt, and I needed to have a trim. Husband and I went to our usual hair salon (in a mall, of course). I must digress, now, to describe the process of getting a haircut in Thailand.

First your hair is washed. The chairs that dangle your head over the sink, though, are much more comfortable than in the U.S. The shampoo girls are trained in Thai massage, at least a little, and after the shampoo you get a little scalp and neck massage. Very nice. Lots of attention to comfort; no attempt, though, at heating the water. Yikes.

Then you are placed in a chair and given a glass of water and some Thai fashion magazines to peruse.

Fifteen minutes later, the haircut begins. Thai haircutting technique is really, really different from American haircutting. There is NEVER a time when the scissors cut straight across my hair--instead, the scissors are always angled so that the point is directly aiming at my head, and the person doing the cutting sort of stabs at my hair, producing a layered, jagged effect and only cutting about one hair at a time. This takes a while, as you might imagine. The scissors are followed up by the razor, which is used to further randomize the lengths of each individual hair. After the razor, more scissors, used on very small pinches of hair which the bestower of the haircut pulls up from various places on my head.

After this, there is a second shampooing. Usually it's just Husband who gets this; for me it's another period of waiting. A stylist once explained to me that Husband has to have his hair washed again "because his head is so big." Hmm. Well, my head must have grown, because last night I was treated to the dual shampooing as well.

After the washing, you're returned to the chair for more waiting. Then the stylist (not the same person who cuts the hair) shows up with a blow dryer and dries your hair. The haircut person (Cousin, what's the right word for a person who only cuts and doesn't shampoo, style, or dye?) returns for another round of stealth cutting (sneaking up on one hair at a time and poking at it with scissors or a razor). After this, the stylist comes back and puts styling wax in my hair.

The whole process takes about an hour and a half, and that's if they're not busy.

Anyway, back to the haircut I got last night.

The woman who was going to cut my hair asked me, "Same style?" I nodded vigorously and replied with both "Yes" and "Ka," thinking, "Oh please oh please just cut it like the guy last time, even though you think it's a weird kind of haircut and doesn't involve any razors or jabbing motions." Then she got to work.

Now, when I'm getting a haircut I have absolutely no idea what I look like. What I can see in the mirror with my glasses off is a pinkish blob that's probably my face, covered with a brownish blob that's almost certainly my hair. So every haircut is a surprise and an adventure. But this time, it didn't take me long to figure out that what she was doing to the brownish blob bore no resemblance at all to "Same style."

She gave me the Thai style deluxe.

On Thai people all of this random cutting and razoring actually looks good. It adds body; they look charming and pixielike; they've got a hip, tousled thing going on. Me? I look like a Muppet that got caught in a lawnmower. I don't know if it's my big pink round farang face, or if my hair is a different texture than that of most Thai people, or if the hairstylists I've seen are united in doing this to me on purpose, but every haircut I've gotten in Thailand has had the same vertical effect. For the first couple of weeks, until it grows out enough to calm down, I've got to plaster it with styling wax just to keep it from sticking straight up like some freakish cartoon.

Oh, Cousin, you'd make a killing cutting farang hair in Thailand!

it's a dog's life

the rain in thailand falls mainly on...me

Remember this?

Father-in-Law, fount of information on such things as HTML, has come through for me again.

Your body is intercepting drops that are falling, and the impact area you present to the falling drops depends on your posture on the bicycle and the direction that the drops are coming at you. For example, lets say there is no wind so the rain is coming down vertically, and you are sitting upright and not moving. The impact area is then essentially the same as the area of your shadow from vertical illumination. So the rate at which you would be getting wet is less than if you were moving forward (you are presenting less impact area when intercepting vertical rain). However, you are making no progress so while the rate of wetting is low, the time of wetting is ridiculously long. You are making no progress and you will keep getting wet until the rain stops or until your reason for biking is gone.

If you were to proceed through the rain, you would likely present a bigger impact area (given an upright posture) and the speed of the drops relative to you would increase so that your rate of wetting would increase but the time would decrease. At the extreme case of going so fast that the time is negligible (essentially instantaneously moving from start to finish) the rate of wetting would be very high from both an increase in impact area (your larger horizontal shadow) and the extremely high horizontal speed of the drops relative to you (from traveling so fast). Your total wetting would be from the drops contained in the volume swept out by your horizontal impact area multiplied by the distance you bicycled (at super high speed).

One can draw intermediate diagrams that show the swept out volume of rain for different travel speeds (assuming vertical rain at a given rate and its vertical speed). If you draw these diagrams from a side view you will have a very tall, almost vertical column for very slow bike speed, a series of parallelograms for intermediate speeds, and a horizontal rectangle for super-high speed. With the usual rules for calculating volume, one finds that the higher the speed, the less the volume. You can further decrease the volume at high speed by crouching and decreasing the horizontal impact area.

This analysis was based on vertical rain. With rain not vertical, the advantage from going faster will generally still be there, but the payoff from incremental speed increases will depend on windspeed and direction.

Safety was ignored in this analysis. Clearly there is a danger from speeding in the rain. Also, going faster might kick up more water from the puddles.

so, tell me about thailand

One of the reasons I started this blog is that people, people about whom I care a lot, want to know about my life in Thailand. They ask me, "What's it like?" "How do you like it?" and other variants of those questions. And invariably, my response is, "It's hot."

What is it about that question that makes my brain freeze up? I honestly can't think of anything to say. Here I am, to all appearances living this exotic expat lifestyle, full of lizards in the house and cheerful, picturesque Foreign Scenes, and I can't think of a damned thing to say about it.

During our trip back home this past spring, I sat mutely through more than one dinner, knowing full well that the people I was with were expecting me to honor them with witty anecdotes about my globetrotting life. And there I sat, mind blank, not knowing where to begin.

On the blog, though, I don't have this problem. I can think about things in advance, carefully extract the Entertaining from the Mundane (or at least that's what I'm aiming for), and present a groomed and vetted version of my life to my adoring readership.

Does this create another problem? Am I Disneyfying my own life, doing the equivalent of excising the nastier bits from "Cinderella" (I'm thinking of the stepsisters' mutilation) for the entertainment of those who won't know the difference?

Yeah, kinda.

But I like it this way--I get to present myself exactly as I choose to, which is a luxury I don't get in Real Life. I get to skip the awkwardness of Small Talk and get right to the Good Part. I get to inflict my (perhaps mistaken) conviction that overuse of capital letters is Somehow Endearing on all who choose to read this blog.

You'll just have to trust that I'm leaving out the Boring Parts.

let sleeping dogs lie

Thailand is full of dogs. On the street, on the sidewalk, in elevators, everywhere you look.

There are several families of strays that live in our town; I say "families" because I think they're all related. They're medium-sized dogs, short-haired, and they're almost all the same golden-brown color. We've gotten to recognize several of the dogs that hang out near our condo and near the College of Music.

The condo dog can usually be found sleeping somewhere near our building; poor, furry creatures that can't sweat are understandably lethargic during the day. Sometimes, though, this dog gets adventurous, and sleeps right in the street, or else gets up and trots into the elevator for a ride up and down. I've ridden in the elevator with the dog, but I've never seen it walking around any floor of the building other than the ground floor, so I have to assume it rides up and down, then gets back off at the ground floor. During the "cool season" last year, someone (I have to suspect a student) got this dog to sit still (not a difficult task) long enough to slip an orange T-shirt over its head and front paws. Because, you know, the frigid "cool season" temperatures (and we're talking lows of 75 degrees Fahrenheit here) can be dangerous for dogs with only a thin layer of fur.

The College of Music dogs sometimes sleep on the rickety bridge over the canal that runs in front of the building (yeah, we have a moat). They'll lazily lift their heads as we pass, but no more effort than that seems to be required to acknowledge people they know. At mealtime, though, these dogs spring into action. They saunter into the canteen area and go from table to table, tongues hanging out, tails wagging, trying hard to give the impression of incipient starvation. "Feed me! Feed me! No one ever feeds me! I know you're eating! That looks so good! I never get to eat anything that good! Oh, won't you please feed me?" You can see it in their eyes. But their eyes are lying eyes--these dogs are nothing if not well-fed. They get scraps from people's lunches, scraps from the kitchens of the little food stalls, scraps from the trash, and probably lots of other things too.

There are many other dogs in town; I've often wished I had a camera with me as I bicycle to work, so that I can take a photo of each sleeping dog I pass on the side of the road. There are usually at least 5 or 6, and sometimes more like 10 or 12. They get more active at night, when it's cooler, and sometimes I get a little nervous. I've never seen one attack a person, but they do roam around in packs, and they fight each other at night. Call me skittish, but if I'm walking home in the dark and there are 3 or 4 dogs following me, I sometimes get a little concerned.

the whole roethke shebang

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

i learn by going where i have to go

I'm not a huge fan of Theodore Roethke, but I've always liked that poem ("The Waking," quoted in the title of my post).

Now, no one would ever mistake me for a person with a sense of direction. I have to be told how to get to places I've been visiting since I was a child. I quickly lose touch with the cardinal directions if the sun isn't in a particularly helpful position...and if I'm inside? Forget it. If I was a lab rat, I'd starve before I ever found the cheese at the end of the maze.

But I have always tried to improve. I take Brother's advice and try to draw a map in my head. I pay attention to landmarks. I rehearse directions in my head: "Left at the gas station. Right at the market." Routes that I travel often gradually become less mysterious.

In Thailand, I have given up. I don't even try anymore to figure out where I am or where I'm going. This is because the roads are constructed in such a way as to make navigation much more difficult.

Outside of the central part of Bangkok, there are very few intersections. Instead, whenever two roads meet, there is a system of entrances and exits. The idea is ostensibly to keep traffic moving at all times, using merges and uber-cloverleafs instead of traffic lights to keep collisions from occurring. It's complicated by the fact that most roads are divided, so if you're trying to get to a place on the right side of the road, you've got to make a U-turn. This is done via a U-turn bridge: you exit the main road on the left, make a sweeping turn to the right, crossing over above the road, and wind up on the other side of the road. In addition, main roads have several divisions: the three or four left-hands lanes are for local traffic, and are only intermittently accessible from the three or four right-hand lanes, which are the equivalent of "express lanes" in the U.S. Generally there is also an elevated roadway with even more limited access. All of these different roadways are accessed via the same tangle of ramps that allow right and left turns. The interchanges are works of art.

Someday I'll have to figure out how to take a truly expository picture of the interchange that leads into our town.

I do not learn by going where I have to go.

what, you mean you've never heard of chen yi?

Chen Yi is the composer on whose music I wrote my not-a-dissertation-thank-you-very-much.

She's a Chinese-American composer who has won many awards and received many important commissions. I won't list them here because you can check out her website and see them for yourself. Her music is very interesting to me (obviously); in the 1980s she was part of the Chinese New Wave (the first generation of composers to emerge from the People's Republic of China after the Cultural Revolution), and like the other composers in that group she doesn't feel constricted by the boundaries of different musical traditions. (STOP READING NOW IF YOU THINK MUSICAL ANALYSIS IS BORING.) She writes music that combines Western modernism (and by "modernism" I mean a free approach to dissonance, a rhythmic sensibility that is post-Stravinsky, and an interest in extended instrumental technique, in a nutshell--this is lowercase modernism, not uppercase Modernism) with certain elements of Chinese traditional music (and by this I mean programmatic works based on Chinese ideas, instrumental effects intended to imitate the sounds of traditional instruments, and the occasional use of Chinese sources for pitch and rhythmic materials--nothing so overt as the harmonization of a folk song).

(YOU CAN START READING AGAIN.)

While I was researching and writing, I corresponded with her by email but I'd never met her. So when I heard she was going to be in Bangkok I was very excited--after all, you don't spend a year of your life learning about someone, without you get curious about what they're like in person. In addition, it was another of those small-world moments that are so common in the world of academic music (maybe a future blog entry should trace some of the improbable connections I've encountered):

One of her doctoral students at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, is Thai. He's a part-time faculty member at a university in Bangkok--since the Thai academic calendar is so different from the Western one, he can come back here in the summer and spend almost a whole semester teaching before returning to the U.S. in September. The university where he teaches is holding a small composition festival, and he thought, what better opportunity to bring his teacher to meet his students? So here she is.

And there I went.

Husband and I were able to make an appointment to meet with her in between the official events of the conference (lectures and concerts, punctuated by frequent and mandatory snacks), and she was nice enough to spend several hours with us. I'm so glad I met her.

famous is a relative term

This week I met Chen Yi.

(expectant pause)

down came the rain and washed the spider out

Our apartment overlooks the football field of a private high school. This is our view when it's sunny and when it's raining.

the recital loometh

and the blog languisheth.

When I was living in the U.S., I performed a lot. I had a "job" (nothing that pays as little as this did deserves to be called a job without the quotation marks) in an orchestra, a chamber ensemble that played fairly often, and I had been living in one place long enough that I was on most of the concert organizers' radar for various ad-hoc kinds of gigs. I was doing solo recitals also, of course, but they weren't my sole performing outlet.

Here, on the other hand, I don't have an orchestra, I don't have a chamber group, and I have yet to be called for a single gig. This situation has allowed me to program two truly massive recitals so far, and I'm planning a third for November. It has also allowed me to reach an unprecedented level of preparation freakout. T minus three weeks and counting. This really isn't healthy.

because i need it for my photosynthesis

I have a package of mints in my purse. The other day I fished it out and ate a mint, and I noticed something on the front of the package that I hadn't seen before:

a little red circle, similar to the writing on the fronts of cereal boxes that says "Fortified with vitamins and iron!" or something. But this one, on my mints, said "With chlorophyll."

Really?

Why?

Husband and I were intrigued. We went to the internet (source of instant gratification and easy, nonrigorous research) and were soon rewarded with this information:

Chlorophyll is sold in liquid form in health food and alternative medicine stores. You take it by the spoonful. It's recommended as a treatment for halitosis (which I suppose explains its presence in the mints), constipation, fibromyalgia, and cancer (!).

hey there little red riding hood

Another object knitted by me. I made this in excited anticipation of a trip we planned to take to...a place much colder than Bangkok. Now it looks like the trip is off, much to my dismay, but I've still got the hat.

It occurs to me that if anyone reading this blog doesn't already know me, they'd assume I'm a lot older than I am based on the songs I tend to reference.

Knitting details, for those who care:

• Pattern is here (from knitty again).

Of course, I made some modifications, because who am I to follow a pattern?

• Knitted with #8 needles (#9 is called for in the pattern) in a nameless red acrylic I found in Chinatown.
• The cords are not knitted but braided. I didn't like the look of the 2 stitches in stockinette stitch, and I considered I-cord until I realized that would involve buying some (expensive, hard to find) dpns (I don't have any larger than #4), so I took the easy way out and threaded four long strands of yarn through the first row of knitting, then braided them together with the yarn tail (9 strands total in the braid on each side).
• I added a garter stitch border.
• I added one extra increase and four extra rows worked even; not sure if this makes it bigger than the pattern calls for, or just compensates for the smaller needles.
  

like my new look?

Old site template, with green color scheme and thin strip of text running down the center?

New site template, with orange color scheme and wider text area?

Couldn't care less?

Wish I would just learn HTML already and make me a custom template like everybody else?

Maikaojai wants to know.

eating my words

"Definitely bigger than a breadbox. Not that I have a breadbox. Who keeps bread in a box?"

Faithful readers will recognize that.

Well, yesterday I bought a breadbox. It's true.

Husband likes to bake bread, and we have been trying to find a good way to keep it: leaving it out all night made the bread stale (and sometimes bug-covered....yeccch). Keeping it in a Ziploc bag made it soggy (and sometimes moldy....yeccch). We started thinking, "If only we had some kind of box!"