Mai kao jai

we had everything but dick clark

2007-01-02T09:53:00.000+08:00

The New Year is the biggest holiday of the year in Thailand. So big, in fact, that they celebrate it three times: Western New Year on Dec. 31/Jan. 1, Lunar New Year, and Songkran. We've passed from 2006 to 2007, from 2549 to 2550, and in February we'll pass from the Year of the Dog to the Year of the Pig.

Needless to say, such an important event calls for celebration. The university's staff New Year party was quite an event. Some pictures:

The appetizer tray, which included very little that Brother-in-Law and Sister-in-Law could eat.

Members of the office support staff performing a dance together.

A colleague from the finance office performing a traditional Thai dance.

yellow is for monday

2007-01-02T09:43:00.000+08:00

I don't think I've mentioned the yellow shirt phenomenon here before. 2006 (2549 by the Thai calendar) was a special year for H.M. the King of Thailand. He celebrated 60 years on the throne, as well as his 80th birthday. He is beloved and revered by Thais, and there was a lot of celebrating. One of the ways in which people showed their support for the King this year was by wearing shirts in the King's color, which is yellow.

In Thai tradition, the day of the week on which a person is born is very important. It's very roughly analogous to an astrological sign. Everybody here knows what day of the week it was when they were born; try asking a roomful of Americans that question. Days of the week are also associated with colors. The King was born on a Monday; Monday is yellow; therefore the King's color is yellow. The Queen of Thailand was born on a Friday, and around her birthday each year the whole city turns light blue. But because 2006 was such a special year for the King, the yellow flags, banners, T-shirts, and other items were in sight all year long, and not just for his birthday.

undercurrent

2007-01-02T09:28:00.000+08:00

New Year's Eve in Bangkok was less than festive this year.

Husband, Brother-in-Law, Sister-in-Law, and I were here and didn't hear about the bombings until the next morning when we read it in the newspaper.

As before, I'm going to abstain from running my mouth off about a situation I don't fully understand. Opinions? I've got them. But I'm keeping them to myself.

raw octopus with a side of puppy

2006-12-27T08:11:00.000+08:00

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 @#&@*$!!

2006-12-23T09:37:00.000+08:00

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?

2006-12-23T09:35:00.000+08:00

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

2006-12-05T08:31:00.000+08:00

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

2006-12-05T08:28:00.000+08:00

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

2006-12-05T08:20:00.001+08:00

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

2006-12-05T08:13:00.000+08:00

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

2006-12-02T11:45:00.000+08:00

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

2006-11-27T08:20:00.000+08:00

It's not cold.

deee-licious

2006-11-26T19:03:00.000+08:00

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?

2006-11-26T18:58:00.000+08:00

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

2006-11-26T18:45:00.000+08:00

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

2006-11-24T08:04:00.000+08:00

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

2006-11-23T08:02:00.000+08:00

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

2006-11-20T08:06:00.000+08:00

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

2006-11-11T20:45:00.000+08:00

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

2006-11-09T09:23:00.000+08:00

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

2006-11-05T12:03:00.000+08:00

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

2006-11-05T11:59:00.000+08:00

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

2006-11-03T06:26:00.000+08:00

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

2006-11-02T09:02:00.000+08:00

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

2006-10-31T10:53:00.000+08:00

Think back. Think back 15 years.

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

"Google my blog."

tragic

2006-10-31T08:12:00.001+08:00

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

2006-10-31T08:12:00.000+08:00

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

2006-10-31T08:10:00.000+08:00

and I've got a lot to say.

bisy backson

2006-10-06T07:30:00.000+08:00

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

2006-10-06T07:28:00.000+08:00

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

2006-10-04T08:10:00.000+08:00

Getting off a plane = deplaning.

it means "golden land"

2006-10-03T08:50:00.000+08:00

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

2006-09-30T23:27:00.000+08:00

How weird is this?

do for yourself kid

2006-09-30T09:11:00.000+08:00

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

mohinga

2006-09-30T09:06:00.000+08:00

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

2006-09-30T08:49:00.000+08:00

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

2006-09-29T20:46:00.000+08:00

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

2006-09-29T17:03:00.000+08:00

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

2006-09-19T07:46:00.000+08:00

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

2006-09-08T08:30:00.000+08:00

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

2006-09-07T19:49:00.000+08:00

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

2006-09-04T09:10:00.000+08:00

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

2006-09-03T17:30:00.000+08:00

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

2006-09-02T22:24:00.000+08:00

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

2006-09-01T08:31:00.000+08:00

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

2006-08-29T08:32:00.000+08:00

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

2006-08-28T14:06:00.000+08:00

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...

2006-08-24T07:43:00.000+08:00

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

2006-08-20T08:01:00.000+08:00

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

2006-08-16T08:12:00.000+08:00

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

2006-08-10T21:28:00.000+08:00

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)

2006-08-08T16:49:00.000+08:00

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

2006-08-05T09:58:00.000+08:00

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

2006-08-05T09:26:00.000+08:00

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

2006-08-02T08:32:00.000+08:00

the rain in thailand falls mainly on...me

2006-08-01T07:49:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-29T10:03:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-28T09:03:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-23T22:15:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-23T21:58:00.000+08:00

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?

2006-07-20T07:27:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-20T07:25:00.000+08:00

This week I met Chen Yi.

(expectant pause)

down came the rain and washed the spider out

2006-07-20T07:17:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-18T12:52:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-14T09:51:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-10T01:14:00.000+08:00

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?

2006-07-09T08:52:00.000+08:00

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

2006-07-09T08:47:00.000+08:00

"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!"

the jane austen of the seven seas

2006-07-08T11:27:00.000+08:00

Since I mentioned Patrick O'Brian in my previous post, I feel the need to explain.

Did you see Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World a few years back? You remember, Russell Crowe in an for-some-reason-always-unbuttoned shirt, pretending he's not Australian. Paul Bettany looking scruffy and wearing tiny eyeglasses. Guys in tights, oh, sorry, breeches. Poignant scene with young blond amputee.

Well, it was based on a book. A book I was aware of, but hadn't read. When I was working in a bookstore years ago, one of my jobs was to shelve the new shipments of books that came into the store. I loved this part--browsing, perusing, and alphabetizing book after book after book. It took me longer than anyone else because I always stopped to read the back covers, but my manager didn't mind because it meant I could talk intelligently about most of what the customers were buying. And whenever I got assigned to "Fiction" (Yes! So much better than "Sports" or, worse, "Computers") there would always be a copy or two of Master and Commander to replace what had been sold, as well as the other books in what was evidently a very long and very popular series.

So when the movie came out, I recognized the title. I liked the movie well enough to go out and buy a used copy of the book to read on the plane on the way to Thailand. Much to my surprise, the book was nothing like the movie! The movie was (VERY loosely) based on the tenth volume of the series, titled The Far Side of the World, but for some reason the filmmakers decided to use the title of the first book.

Anyway, the book was fabulous. Dry, subtle humor that had me laughing out loud. (Husband doesn't think the passages I can't help but read aloud to him are all that funny.) Carefully drawn characters. A maniacal obsession with historical detail. Obscure, archaic jargon. An old-fashioned structure--it began at the beginning and ended at the end, unlike so many modern novels that present their stories in jumpy, movie-scene-sized segments that can't stay in one place (lousy TV and Faulkner, paving the way for no-attention-span novels!). When I asked Husband to send me some things, I requested some necessities I'd forgotten to pack...and the next book in the series.

He sent the next two, and about a week later I was ready for number 4. When he arrived in Thailand he brought the fourth and fifth books, which I devoured, and when Mom came to visit a few months later she brought me 6-9. When we visited the U.S. a few months ago I picked up used copies of the tenth-sixteenth books, and I've already read each of those...twice. (Yeah. I have a problem. Mango and sticky rice has nothing on this obsession.)

Anyway, reviewers are always comparing O'Brian to Jane Austen, whom I'd never read, though I've seen all those film adaptations of her novels starring people like Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman. I've since started reading Austen, and I've got to say that the comparison is very apt. O'Brian is more modern in his approach, of course, and he's willing to discuss topics that Austen never would have touched, but the language and style are really very similar, and the dialogue could often have been overheard at the same supper party.

helloooo out there

2006-07-08T11:18:00.000+08:00

I've been messing with my blogger profile a little bit. I like the search function. I can click on any of my interests and it will find for me the other bloggers who have listed the same interest. Lots of Tolkien fans on blogger; not too many clarinetists.

I was looking at first for parrot lovers--Husband is always up for a good parrot story, especially if it includes pictures, and I thought a good way to find parrot blogs for The Blogless Husband to read would be through my profile. Then I changed all of my "favorite books" entries to authors, as I'd seen other people do. I clicked on "Patrick O'Brian" (I've read SIXTEEN of the twenty books in his Aubrey/Maturin series, most of them twice. At what point should I enter a 12-step program?). How weird--the parrot lovers were overwhelmingly female, while the Patrick O'Brian readers were overwhelmingly male. What does this say about Husband and me? Probably nothing, but it's sort of funny and weird anyway.

Anyhoo, I'm always looking for interesting blogs to read, so I was hoping to find some interesting people who love parrots and/or Patrick O'Brian, but I was disappointed in my quest. Almost all of the matching profiles corresponded to blogs that either never got started, or petered out after a post or two. Phooey.

So, have I got too much time on my hands, or is this a worthwhile use of my Saturday morning? You be the judge.

i can't believe they pay me for this

2006-07-05T11:55:00.000+08:00

From my recent posts, my faithful readers may have gotten the impression that I am not satisfied with my job. On the contrary, despite the administrative problems and the periodic lack of air conditioning, electricity, and running water, I really do love it. I get to do things I enjoy for a living, which is pretty special. Here's what I'm doing today:

6:15 alarm goes off

6:30 get out of bed

6:31 coffee

6:32-8:19 What, exactly, do I do for almost two hours? I'm not sure, but this is the interval between pouring my coffee and leaving the apartment.

8:20 get on bike

8:21-8:29 dodge traffic, puddles, pedestrians, and dogs

8:30 arrive in office

8:30-9:00 warm up for my rehearsal; check over next week's teaching schedule

9:00-10:45 rehearsal (a trio I've put together for my recital next month)

10:45-11:00 blogging, of course (and from here on out, we're going into the future, baby!)

11:00-12:00 paperwork: the program for the recital, the handout for next week's studio class, some boring admin things

12:00-12:30 teach a lesson

12:30-1:00 lunch

1:00-2:00 another lesson

2:00-3:00 the weekly student recital--this week it's put on by the Thai traditional music department

3:00-4:00 another lesson

4:00-5:00 another lesson

5:00-6:00 another lesson

6:00-7:00 another lesson

7:01 change into my "outside shoes"

7:02 leave the office

7:03-7:10 dodge traffic, puddles, pedestrians, and dogs

7:11 ask Husband, "What should we do about supper?"

7:12 reply, "Yeah, I don't know either. But I sure am hungry."

7:13-8:00 somehow, we solve this thorny problem

8:00-10:30 another block of time in which I'm not really sure what it is I do

10:31 head hits the pillow

10:32 zzzzzzzzzzzzz

from the vault

2006-07-03T14:55:00.000+08:00

Shortly after I arrived in Thailand, I performed in an orchestra concert that included a lot of exposed solos for me. It went well, and all of my students were in the audience to scope out the new teacher.

After the concert, I was approached by one of my students, who couldn't speak English at all at the time (he's conversant now). Before he got comfortable speaking English, he would often ask his bilingual friends how to say "Hello" or "How are you" so that he could greet me in the hallway or before his lesson. This time he came up and said, "Teacher, you are very beautiful."

I was a little taken aback--I'm not used to this kind of compliment, especially from a student. I smiled and thanked him in Thai, but was still feeling just a bit confused.

Until I looked beyond him.

Three or four of his buddies were standing in a little group, barely able to contain their laughter. They were turning red, punching each other, and giggling like crazy. Could it be that they were having a little fun with their monoglot friend?

I wonder what my student really wanted to tell me.

I wonder if they ever told him what he did tell me.

Poor guy.

just in case you were wondering...

2006-07-02T13:37:00.000+08:00

...what I look like, I've decided to come out of hiding. This is me. The real maikaojai.

Photo by Husband, as always. This was taken several months ago, when I was feeling sick.

money, it's a gas

2006-07-02T13:08:00.000+08:00

I promise, this isn't entirely a self-indulgent whine about how little money I have, how much I deserve, and how much the university should pay me. It's a set of observations; the whininess is unintentional and I apologize for all whining that made it past the self-pity sensor (censor).

Avid readers will recall that Husband and I indulged in the purchase of a washing machine a few months back. We now luxuriate in the doing of our own laundry. Our clothes are in much better shape, and we don't have to walk all around creation with bags of laundry. However, since buying the washing machine, our electric bills have quadrupled. Yes. Quadrupled. We're now paying more for electricity than we ever did in the United States. Even discounting the initial cost of the washing machine and the cost of the detergent and fabric softener, it's costing us TEN TIMES AS MUCH per month to do our own laundry as it was to hire it out.

We have also been making an effort to prepare more of our own food. This is because I am a whiny, picky eater. We still eat a lot of local food, both in restaurants and as takeout, but I have reached the end of my tolerance for fried food that is covered with sugar. Thai food in the United States differs from Thai food in Thailand in three basic ways:

In America, Thai food is generally considered to be fairly healthy (yes, I know about the coconut milk--but compared to, say, lard, it's not bad). It's stir-fried or simmered with a minimum of oil. In Thailand, though, the curries generally arrive with a quarter-inch of pure grease on top. I haven't been able to skim enough off to relieve the sensation that my food is sliding down a well-greased chute after the first few bites.
In America, sugar is usually reserved for dessert and for those repulsive sweet-potato-and-marshmallow concoctions that some people eat at Thanksgiving. In Thailand, no dish is complete without a heaping spoonful of sugar. Stir-fries. Curries. Fried rice. Noodles. Soup. Everything is like candy.
In America, Thai food resembles American-style Chinese in composition: small pieces of meat with large quantities of vegetables like baby corn, peapods, and cute exotic mushrooms. In Thailand, vegetables are not nearly so widely eaten. Many dishes consist of meat, sauce, and rice or noodles.

I'm really not complaining. Really, I swear. I'm not. I love Thai food. That's Thailand Thai food and American Thai food. Phed mahk? ("Very spicy?") Bring it on! Coconut milk? The more the better. And the person who decided peanuts are for sauces? Isn't there a Nobel Prize for that? But after a year, I've simply reached a point at which greasy, sugary meat no longer holds the appeal it once did. I needs me my steamed veggies!*

Thus, Husband and I have started to acquire kitchen materials and to shop for groceries at a fairly upscale grocery store in a nearby town. Again, this endeavor is much more costly than going for nightly takeout. A week of groceries (which yields 4-5 meals, plus essentials like coffee and snacks), including the outlay for the taxi ride home (because have you ever ridden a bus with eight plastic grocery bags? A thing that other people find to be perfectly possible; I, on the other hand, can't do it) comes to the equivalent cost of about ten takeout or restaurant dinners. Yep. Costs more to make our own food. And again, this is without considering the initial outlay for the oven, the pans, the kitchen utensils, and the kitchen sink.

What am I driving at? Supply and demand. Some resources in Thailand (like electricity, fresh vegetables, and coffee-for-spoiled-farang) are hard to come by, and therefore expensive. Labor, on the other hand, is dirt cheap. In America, service has to be paid for. One of the hallmarks of "having money" is having people to do things for you. Things you'd otherwise have to do yourself. A cook. A laundress. A housekeeper (which we could also have, for pocket change). A nanny. In Thailand, on the other hand, anything that can be done by a person is cheap. It's the things that will cost you. A total reversal.

*I'd like to accept the Oscar for "most first-person pronouns crammed into one sentence."

no one knows what it's like

2006-06-28T12:52:00.000+08:00

I ran down to the canteen today to scarf a quick lunch in between lessons. (Scarfed it even quicker so that I could come back upstairs and write this!)

Generally in the canteen of the College of Music, there is a little knot of pre-college boys clustered around a guitar, strumming and singing Thai pop tunes. I don't know why the girls never do this.

Anyway, today they must have wanted a change of pace, because instead of the usual Thai songs, they were doing "Behind Blue Eyes."

Did I join in? You better believe it.

I think I was the only one who knew the words.

Maybe I should have requested "House of the Rising Sun."

father-in-law to the rescue

2006-06-27T11:08:00.000+08:00

Hyper Text Markup Language

the ballad of husband's class

2006-06-27T07:37:00.000+08:00

Husband is teaching six classes. For those of you counting on your fingers and coming up with 18 hours, please remember that he's also got to do several hours of preparation for every hour in front of students, and also grade literally hundreds of pages of homework a week. It's a lot of work. Watching him struggle really makes me feel for K-12 teachers (yeah, that's you, Sister-In-Law and Aunt), who are in the classroom for so many hours every day.

Husband started the semester teaching five classes. The sixth was added during the third week. That's right, the third week. Husband happened to run into the head of academic affairs while walking through the building, and HOAA informed Husband that he'd be taking over a new class. (Moral of the story so far? Never Leave Your Office.) The class was to start that week.

Husband determined that a room for the class was available, and on the day of class he went down to the administration office to request that the stereo equipment in the room be unlocked for him. (This is standard in music schools in the U.S. too--musical instruments worth thousands of dollars, belonging to students (what are they thinking?) and the university are left lying around all over the place, but that $99.00 stereo the university bought at Best Buy? You need a top-level security clearance to access that, baby!)

No, Husband was told. We can't unlock that stereo cabinet for you because you can't teach in that room. Husband looked down at his master building schedule, which clearly showed his class in that room, and asked why. Well, it turns out that another teacher had asked to use the room during one of Husband's class hours. Apparently this other teacher has more clout than Husband, or else he bribed the schedule keepers, because his request apparently trumps Husband's CLASS.

Husband then asked the schedule keeper to assign him to another room. Any room. No such luck. Apparently EVERY SINGLE ROOM in the building is busy at the time of his class. Would he like to change the time? (Yeah, that's a good idea--change the time of a required class during the third week of the semester. That won't cause any problems for students.) Husband declined. Wasn't there someplace he could teach?

Finally a room was located. It's a tiny rehearsal room, usually used for jazz, with a huge drum set and many amps of various sizes in permanent residence. And a tightly locked stereo, of course.

The time for the class arrived. Husband stood outside the room he was originally assigned, hoping to corral his students and herd them towards the new room using only a minimum of rope. Time passed; no students appeared. A student not in the class came up to Husband and said to him, "Ajarn, I think those are your students." She led him to the edge of the courtyard, where he looked down . There, in fact, was a loose group of students waiting for him. He got their attention and motioned them up; he determined that they were, in fact, waiting for his class; he led them to the new room and taught the class. Without the stereo, though, as no one had come to unlock it.

At the end of class, Husband assigned some homework. (He does like to give homework.) This was met with confusion. One of the students said, "Ajarn, we cannot come to class next week." Husband said, "All of you?" They nodded. Apparently the entire class (and a lot of other studnets too) is going to be absent for at least one day for a university activity. This is not unusual; our students are always missing school to perform in concerts, to go abroad for competitions, to attend master classes, and for other reasons never fully explained. What was unusual was what followed this announcement.

The students asked Husband to reschedule the class! Yeah, what the office people suggested in the first place. So Husband finds a time when they can all make it. This time may or may not be available in their schedules, as I've found out--the Thai way of saying "I can't make it at that time" without offending a teacher is to say "Yes, it's OK" and then just not show up; apparently if they were to say "no" to a teacher, the teacher would lose face, and the teacher/student relationship is important enough that disrupting it by causing a teacher to lose face is worse than confusing your farang teacher by not showing up when you said you would. But we'll see.

Husband went back to the office to find a room for the new time. You guessed it--no rooms available. He's going to teach the next class session in his office (not big enough for a class--they're going to have to sit on top of each other), then revert back to the old time after one class at the new time.

While in the office, he asked, "By the way, why were my students waiting for me on the ground floor?"

Are you ready for this?

The room outside which the students were waiting had ALREADY BEEN RESERVED ON HUSBAND'S BEHALF AFTER THE ORIGINAL CLASSROOM WAS GIVEN AWAY. He doesn't have to teach in the jazz rehearsal room. He never had to teach in the jazz rehearsal room. The office staff knew this when he was searching for a classroom. They thought it was important enough to tell the students, but neither when he originally came in, nor when they helped him find the jazz rehearsal room, did they think it was important enough to tell the teacher!

I saw Husband immediately after this conversation, and all he could say was, "Beer."

more farang

2006-06-27T07:35:00.000+08:00

I've been reading this blog and thought I'd share it with the masses.

Farang Stephanie in Thailand

(So that's what a blogroll is for!)

it's my one hundredth post!

2006-06-27T07:34:00.000+08:00

and I'd like to thank the Academy.

blog spelled backwards is golb

2006-06-25T08:47:00.000+08:00

Vocabulary words:

Blog (1). n. Etymology: contraction of "weblog." A journal, epistle, commentary, or other serial document, publicly posted on the Internets.
Blog (2). v. To maintain or update a blog.
Blogger. n. One who blogs.
Blogosphere. n. The community of blogs and bloggers, best exemplified by bloggers whose blogs attract many comments from other bloggers.
Blogroll. n. A list of links found in a sidebar to many blogs, leading to other blogs that the blogger finds interesting. This blog does not contain a blogroll because this blogger is afraid of the letters "HTML."
HTML. Abbreviation. (For what, now? Surely not "Hold the mayo, Larry?") What I would have to learn about if I wanted to create a blogroll, thus more thoroughly entering the blogosphere.
Internets, the. n. Etymology: Didn't the President say this or something? Sarcastic, self-conscious, and completely passe way of referring to the blogosphere and other online activities.
Meme. n. Etymology: Fr. "meme" (means "same") or Eng. "me, me" (means "me, me"). A blog entry, usually in the form of a list (e.g. "Ten Things I Never Eat for Breakfast" or "Twenty-seven Reasons Not to Interrupt Me During Buffy the Vampire Slayer") and usually revealing personal details about the blogger. Memes are passed around the blogosphere from blog to blog; the possible French origin of the word highlights the fact that many bloggers use the same memes, while the possible English origin highlights the nature of the content of most memes.

staying in shape

2006-06-24T21:12:00.000+08:00

Whoever said

"Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach."

never tried to teach clarinet lessons to students with whom they didn't have a common language. Some of my younger students also have only the most tenuous grasp on reading printed music.

In the U.S., I could explain practice techniques. Describe phrasing and stylistic points. Talk at my students till their eyes glazed over.

Here, I've got to put my money where my mouthpiece is. If there's something I want to hear, or a point I want to make, I've got to demonstrate it. This is not so hard with my young students, who are learning basic scales and working their way through the massive etude books that will teach them how to get along with their instruments. However, it also applies to my more advanced students, who are working on major concertos. Orchestral excerpts. Really, really tough music. And I've got to be able to pull out any passage of it on a moment's notice.

This job is making me a better player, and even when I fail spectacularly (as in studio class yesterday, when I made an appalling mess of a really tricky passage from Debussy in front of nine students) I am getting better at relaxing, at being consistent, and at not taking my bad self so seriously.

I'm a very preparation-oriented player. I've got a solo recital coming up in August, and I've been actively preparing for it for more than two months now. I programmed it in February. This is partly because I am not one of those blessed souls whose hands seem to know what to do without too much effort. I've got to drag my fingers through everything with painstaking care, and I'm insanely jealous of the many, many people for whom this just isn't a problem. Unfortunately my practicing, necessary though it is, also begins to seem a little idolatrous at times, and having to have the entire repertoire of my instrument literally at my fingertips at all times is teaching me that maybe that ironclad practice schedule isn't absolutely necessary for every single passage of every single piece I ever hope to play.

winter and Romanticism

2006-06-21T19:38:00.000+08:00

This week we were treated to a performance of Die Winterreise (Schubert's monumental song cycle) by Colleague. For the uninitiated, a song cycle is what a concept album would have been if it was recorded 200 years ago. Die Winterreise means "the winter journey," and it consists of 24 short songs based on a related cycle of poems by the German poet Wilhelm Mueller. There is a lot of snow and ice imagery, and the poems are meant to be understood on at least two levels: a literal journey that the narrator takes through a winter landscape, and the metaphorical winter of his soul as he mourns his lost love and (what else, in a Romantic poem?) Descends Slowly But Inexorably Into Madness. There's a third level of meaning too, as I learned by reading the program notes: the political winter of the Reign of Terror in France and, later, the tyranny of Napoleon, following the "springtime" hope of "Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite!" In other words, whatever close reading you give them, these poems are about D-E-A-T-H.

Musing on this as Colleague was singing, I began to wonder if the students were getting anything out of the concert at all. First of all, many of them have never seen ice that wasn't in a drink. Can they conceive of being cold for months on end? Can they put the images together like we do? Bare winter trees, bleak snow-covered plains, dark shutters rattling in the freezing wind...these are images we cold-climate people take for granted. They're even a little hackneyed. And then there's the French Revolution! These students have never heard of World War I, for heaven's sake!

But luckily for the students (and the rest of us) Schubert really was a master of his craft, and the songs are beautiful and moving even without any textual points of reference at all. Just in case they were trying to find some, though, Colleague provided extensive program notes in English, which one of his students translated into Thai and read aloud. Some highlights:

Regarding the third song:

"The poet stumbles on through the winter landscape, with the hot tears turning to ice on his cheeks. How remarkable, he thinks, that the winter's cold can freeze the tears, rather than the heat of his passionate regret."

Regarding the fifth song:

"He still seems to hear the promise of peace. Is it the peace of the grave? Draw your own conclusions."

Regarding the ninth song:

"All rivers run to the sea, all mortal woe to the grave."

Regarding the eleventh song:

"His dream was of green fields and bird song, but the cock's crow wakened him to the reality of cold and darkness, and the cawing of ravens."

Regarding the twelfth song:

"I drag my way along my lonely road, totally ignored, even as I pass through bright, joyful life."

Regarding the thirteenth song:

"The poet hears a post-horn, and his heart leaps. Why, he wonders. There can be no mail for him."

Regarding the fourteenth song:

"...forcing him to recognize how long it still is before he can expect the peace of death."

Regarding the fifteenth song:

"Are you planning on making a meal of my carcass? It won't be much longer now--so show me an example of loyalty to the grave."

Regarding the sixteenth song:

"As the wind plays with [the last leaf clinging to the tree], I tremble with fear, and, when it falls, I too, collapse on the grave of my hopes."

Regarding the twentieth song:

"I see one signpost in particular, pointing to the road from which no traveler returns."

Regarding the twenty-third song:

"I saw three suns in the sky, and watched fixedly. Ah, you are not my suns--shine on other people. Yes, I too had three suns, but now two have set. Oh, that the third would set too!"

Regarding the twenty-fourth and last song:

"All ignore him, apart from the village dogs, who growl at him."

knitters smarter than me

2006-06-21T09:36:00.000+08:00

I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm related to many people who will think these pictures are really, really cool. Go ahead, click on them. You know you want to.

Knit Theory

Orientable Knit Surfaces

For persnickety folk: The objects in the first article are actually crochet. The authors decided, for some reason, to title it with the word "knit." Pretty cool nonetheless.

And from the "Orientable Knit Surfaces" page, be sure to click on the links for "Nonorientable Surfaces," "Mobius Bands," and "Klein Bottles."

four years of bliss

2006-06-21T09:18:00.000+08:00

Last week Husband and I celebrated our fourth anniversary. What's the traditional gift for the fourth anniversary, you ask?

We didn't know either, so we looked it up. According to one website, it's APPLIANCES. Now, if that ain't romantic, I don't know what is!

This is the cake Husband bought. I think the turtles are us. (And no, those aren't maraschino cherries. They're some gelatinous substance not found in nature, molded into the shape of a cherry. Imitation maraschino cherries.)

re: that whole embassy thing

2006-06-21T09:17:00.000+08:00

Good heavens, I'm long-winded!

the bureaucracy has expanded to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy

2006-06-20T14:51:00.000+08:00

Today I had to pop over to the U.S. Embassy to pick up my new passport. ("Popping over to the embassy" involves a two-hour bus ride, a half-hour train ride, and a ten-to-fifteen-minute walk.)

I got up extra early so that I could take care of this in the morning and be back to teach lessons this afternoon. Somehow I made it back on time.

Just wanted to take a few moments to share some of the highlights of my visa-getting, passport-renewing, work-permit-obtaining experiences here in Thailand.

Avid readers will recall The Incident last February. No need to go into detail about that again, I think.

But the last time we ewnt with our intrepid office staffer for a visa renewal (this time with a gaggle or herd of other farang teachers), there was almost another Incident. We got to the visa office, paid up, and sat down for the waiting. I've always wondered why we have to be there in the first place--once we've handed over our money, our role consists entirely of waiting. We don't sign anything, we don't fill anything out, we don't even appear at the counter. We just wait. But I digress.

We were waiting (and doing it admirably, if I do say so myself) when our university staff member came to us in a bit of a panic. Panic and visa office are just not a good combination, you know? Anyway, apparently they changed the rules on her since the last time she was there. She had to run around the neighborhood looking for a place that would let her receive a fax (because God forbid she could actually do this at the visa office), and then she called the university and asked her officemates to fax her lots and lots of extra documents.

We waited. Eventually the extra documents (what were they, anyway? Dental records? My Permanent Record from elementary school?) resulted in one-year visa extensions for all. Yippee.

And then there's the American embassy.

The U.S. Embassy in Bangkok is located on Wireless Road. Supposedly Wireless Road is so named because at some time in the vanished past it was totally free of power lines. That day is long gone. Before arriving at the U.S. Embassy, one must walk by the embassies of Bulgaria, New Zealand, and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Each of these is, like the U.S. Embassy, a forbidding compound surrounded by a high brick wall and lots of pointy metal spikes. However, the U.S. Embassy stands apart from these others in the chaos outside it. There is generally a long line of nervous-looking people who are trying to get visas into the U.S., and also a smaller, less line-like group of bewildered-looking U.S. citizens.

Why are we bewildered? Well, there's a big sign on the wall that says U.S. citizens don't have to wait in line. So we walk to the door, which is shut and guarded. A guard tells us. "You have to wait." We look at the line; we start to walk to the end of it. The same person says, "You don't have to wait in line." We turn back towards the door. You guessed it; "You have to wait." So...we wait, but not in line? That seems to be the gist of it. Hence the loosely formed mob of confused, sweaty Americans.

Eventually we are allowed in (before the nervous-looking visa seekers--I guess this is what is meant by not waiting). We show our passports. Our bags are searched. Our mobile phones are confiscated. With the mobile phones, we must leave an alternative I.D. We follow the signs to "American Citizen Services." This is a tiny room containing a few chairs, lots of blank forms, and two service windows.

Here's how to get your passport renewed.

You show up, fill out the correct form, and get in line. Why are you filling out the form here in the office instead of at home, having downloaded it from the website? Why, because the link marked "Passport Renewal Form" doesn't work, of course! But, as it turns out, that's immaterial--there's no form for passport renewal. You just go ahead and fill out the form for passport application. But wait, there's a long form and a short form--fill out this preliminary questionnaire to determine which one you need! Now, remember, This Form Must Be Filled Out Completely Or Your Application Will Be Rejected. Check out this item: "Address to which you'd like your passport mailed." Hmm. Didn't the website say they wouldn't mail the passport? That you had to come back to the embassy to pick it up? You look up, momentarily puzzled, and notice a great big sign on the wall: "Passports will not be mailed." So, this mailing address they're asking for: is that just a hypothetical question? You ponder for a moment on the "you'd like" part of the question. Maybe this is a "How can we serve you better" kind of moment--the US Passport Service must genuinely care about each and every citizen, to insert a question about our preferences into this kind of questionnaire, no?

Anyway, after filling out the form, you get in line for the service counter. Once you've been seen, you sit down and wait for the clerk (the same one who's dealing with the people who are still in line) to go into the back and perform some kind of voodoo with your paperwork, then call your name again. You return to the counter, where your paperwork is returned to you, and are directed to wait in line at another counter. After waiting in this line and paying for your renewal, you go back to the first room and wait again, where you return the paperwork (yes, the same paperwork) to the clerk (yes, the first clerk) and are told to come back in two weeks to pick up your new passport. Oh, that's two weeks, not counting U.S. holidays, Thai holidays, or the last Friday of the month. Check your calendar!

Still worried about that form, and whether it's Filled Out Completely? Sorry, the clerks at the embassy can't help you. They just take your money. You've got to wait until you come back in two weeks to find out if the Passport Service has accepted your application.

chick drinks and dude drinks

2006-06-19T19:49:00.000+08:00

Waiters and waitresses in Thailand seem to have definite opinions about the appropriateness of beverage orders. These opinions are based on gender.

Last year, Husband and I joined many of our colleagues for an American style Thanksgiving dinner at a fancy hotel in Bangkok. Engaged Colleagues Who Are Getting Married This Week both ordered Shirley Temples; Husband and I each ordered red wine. The waitress brought all four drinks at once. Without asking or hesitating, she set the wine in front of the men and the Shirley Temples in front of the women.

Evidently a Shirley Temple is a chick drink. Or maybe wine is a dude drink.

Husband really enjoys a vile Thai concoction called cha yen, which consists of a miniscule amount of iced tea (I'm convinced it's just food coloring) mixed with a pound of sugar and three gallons of sweetened condensed milk. He often orders this when we go to lunch at a particular cafe (several times a week). I generally have coffee, water or Coke. Two to three times a week for an entire year, the waitress has set the cha yen in front of me and my drink in front of Husband. Is cha yen a chick drink? Why? Are coffee, water, and Coke all dude drinks? Why?

Cultural anthropologists, I smell a research paper.

elevator etiquette

2006-06-19T19:36:00.000+08:00

Proper elevator deportment in Thailand can be summed up by a few simple rules.

1. No elevator can move with fewer than ten people inside. If you are standing in an elevator containing fewer than ten people, you must press the "Extend Open" button and wait for a few more of your friends to arrive.

2. If a full elevator stops at your floor, you must not decide whether or not there is room for you until the door begins to close. When this happens, you must leap into the elevator.

3. Never, ever stand in the middle. No matter how many people are already in the elevator, and no matter how crowded the perimeter already is, you must find a space there.

4. If you are standing closest to the buttons, you are the de facto elevator operator. When the elevator stops, you must immediately press the "Open" button and hold it until everyone has exited. At this point, you can either press "Extend Open" (if fewer than ten people remain in the elevator) or "Close" (if there is already an elevator quorum). Note that after pressing "Close," you may choose immediately to start pounding on "Open" because through the closing door, you thought you saw your friend looking like maybe she would want to get on an elevator sometime this week.

5. The de facto elevator operator is also responsible for floor selection. No one else may press the buttons.

6. Don't stand near the buttons if you're not ready for this responsibility.

7. Of course there is room!

8. If the elevator is overloaded, the people standing near the door must each step in and out of the elevator in turn. The de facto elevator operator holds the "Open" button during this procedure; when he or she is satisfied with the configuration, he or she switches to "Close." The people stepping in and out have no control over the situation.

complainy lists

2006-06-16T12:30:00.000+08:00

Things that are leaking in my apartment:

1. The toilet.
2. The other toilet.
3. The kitchen sink.
4. The sprayer for the kitchen sink.
5. The water cooler.

Things that are broken at the university:

1. The air conditioning.
2. The running water (not really broken, just entirely absent).
3. The window in my office.

Things the cafe didn't have today:

1. The lunch Husband ordered.
2. The drink Husband ordered.
3. The second drink Husband ordered.
4. The third drink Husband ordered.
5. Soap in the bathroom.

lookit, lookit! look what i did!

2006-06-16T08:57:00.000+08:00

I can't tell you how pleased I am with myself. I actually finished something!

This is Norton the Nautiloid (named by Husband), from a pattern I found at www.knitty.com

The designer suggests that the nautiloid can be knit in one evening while watching television. Not too far off--it only took me two months!

ice prawn

2006-06-11T12:38:00.000+08:00

What more can I say?

is there anything better

2006-06-11T12:30:00.000+08:00

than pieces of dark chocolate with Ritz crackers?

Try it. You'll see.

the best joke i've heard all week

2006-06-11T12:29:00.000+08:00

What's brown and sticky?

A stick!

the rockets' red glare

2006-06-09T20:49:00.000+08:00

I heard them before I saw them. Pops, booms, bangs. Since the party has definitely started (the 60th anniversary of the King's ascension to the throne), I suspected that there might be fireworks afoot. I headed out to the balcony, still hearing them, and started to look around. On most holidays, we can see distant fireworks displays from our balcony, but I've never seen anything like this.

All across the sky, far enough away that they were just above the horizon, at least six or seven different simultaneous fireworks displays. Everywhere I looked, they were going off. The entire horizon was lit up. As soon as one rocket faded, another would catch my eye in a different place. And on top of that, there was some truly spectacular lightning in the distance. It was amazing. This continued for a while, and then I got a real treat:

Avid readers will recall that the police station (source of the very loud public music) is directly across the street from our apartment. They've set up a big party area on their grounds, with a stage and a huge likeness of the King, not to mention the obligatory bright lights and loud music. After a stirring rendition of the King's anthem, they started on their own local fireworks display. I had the best seat in the house.

There are four more days and nights of partying ahead--I look forward to them.

game on

2006-06-07T20:14:00.000+08:00

School started up again on Monday. So far:

Classes have been cancelled for next Monday and Tuesday, in honor of the massive celebrations commemorating the 60th anniversary of the King's ascension to the throne.

Morning classes for this past Monday were cancelled due to an administrative error: no one told any of the academic departments that all freshmen were required to get their student ID cards Monday morning. The teachers showed up to class, but the students didn't.

I was informed that some of my students will be playing in the newly formed student orchestra.

Classes have been cancelled for this Friday, because the party will have already started (the King's 60th).

Husband was informed that he wouldn't be teaching a particular class he's been preparing for.

I was informed that my students will not be playing in the newly formed student orchestra.

There have been the usual number of people registered for the wrong courses, not registered for the right courses, or some combination thereof.

Husband was informed that he would be teaching that class after all.

Saddle up!

things to ponder on the way to work

2006-06-03T07:23:00.001+08:00

If I stand still in the rain, I get hit by all of the raindrops that fall in a certain spot.

If I ride my bicycle in the rain, I move through space and thus get hit by only a few raindrops in each spot.

If I ride slowly, I get hit by more raindrops in each spot; if I ride quickly, I cover more ground in the same amount of time and get hit by raindrops from more different spots.

Is there an optimum speed at which I can ride so as to get the least wet in a given amount of time? Is it drier to stand still for, say, a minute? Or to ride slowly for that same minute? Or to ride quickly?

This is, of course, discounting the effects of the water that's already on the ground and that goes shooting up my skirt as I ride through it.

overworked: really, officially, overworked

2006-05-27T10:58:00.000+08:00

This week I got the preliminary information about my teaching load for the coming semester. As it turns out, I'm scheduled for 5.5 more contact hours than I'm contractually allowed to work. I could do all this work. I could even do it well; but the university would have to pay me overtime, and they're never, ever going to do that.

The solution is to find me a TA to take some of the work--it would put me right at the maximum number of contact hours, the university can pay this person a lot less than they'd have to pay me, and the TA will get all of the much-talked-about benefits of being a TA.

I remember these. "Experience." "Real-world teaching." "Career preparation." "Mentoring."

All of which translate to "Working for almost no pay."

Not sure how I feel about that. It will really be good for this student--I will do my best to help him out, observe him, give him materials, do a lot of prep work for him, that sort of thing--but it's still going to be a lot of work and a lot of pressure for not a lot of reward. And he could definitely be using his time for practicing.

I hope it works out.

here on wild kingdom...

2006-05-26T09:38:00.000+08:00

Can you tell what that is? It was curled up next to our door yesterday. (In the hallway, not in the apartment.)

Look closely.

It's a bat.

We got home from work yesterday, and as I was putting the key in the door I noticed our friend on the floor. I really couldn't tell what it was--it was dark, and the little guy was scrunched up pretty tight.

I asked Husband (who saw it immediately and knew what it was), "Is it alive?" Not wanting me to have some kind of girly-squealy freakout (and who does he think he's dealing with anyway?) he said he didn't know. I said, "Did it used to be alive?" Again, he said he didn't know. Mind you, I still can't tell what it is at this point--he knows very well that it's a bat.

I opened the door, and the bat revealed itself by lifting its head and watching the door open. "It's a bat! It's a bat!" I said. Husband at this point revealed that he'd known all along. We decided that the best course of action was for us to go out and do our errands as planned; certainly the bat would be gone by the time we got back. If, however, it was still there, Husband said he'd "deal with it." Sounded ominous.

Boring haircut, boring shopping, life-threatening taxi ride.

On the way back to the apartment in the elevator, we said to each other: "Bat...or no bat?" (in the menacing voice of that guy from the TV show "Deal or no deal" that Uncle likes so much).

The answer was "Bat."

It was still there.

Husband went out into the hallway with a broom, hoping to shoo it away. After a moment or so, he called me. "Hey honey! Come take a look!" Not at all sure I really wanted to know what he was doing, I went out to join him.

He had the bat clinging to the straws of the broom, swiveling its little head around with its ears perked up, scared out of its wits, I"m sure. I have to admit, it was sort of cute. But I didn't let that affect my knowledge that this was a BAT. A bat that could FLY AROUND IN OUR APARTMENT. I'm not sure why I thought that would be so awful, but I did.

Husband brought the bat down seven floors in the elevator, still clinging to the broom. On the way down one of the maintenance guys got on to the elevator, took one look at the bat, and burst out laughing. Of course, as this is the default response of Thai people to anything and everything farang do or say, it may not mean much.

Husband gently released the bat into a bush by shaking the broom until it let go.

Think it will be back tonight?

wives' tales

2006-05-22T10:16:00.000+08:00

Recently there was a small gathering chez maikaojai. I proved definitively that, while I can lay out a good spread (and I was particularly pleased with the salsa I made), I am no kind of judge of the amount of beer that some of our friends can drink. I guess I'll have to stop using myself as a guide ("let's see, I'm good for about half a bottle*, and there are ten people coming, so that's five bottles").

*Beer in Thailand is sold in largish bottles that are roughly equivalent to two cans in the U.S.

Said gathering was a success, despite the quick trip to the convenience store to buy more beer. It did divide rather sharply by sex, though: while the men huddled intently over the Risk board, either playing or "helping," the women retired to what would be the kitchen if we had one. We sat around the table, ate most of the food, and chatted. Since one of our number is pregnant (rare enough in this cohort--to the shame of the Second Wavers, I'm sure, very few of us are currently trying to "have it all"), our conversation centered around the blessed event to come. We talked about ultrasound pictures, about nutrition, about names, and of course, how to determine the sex of the baby without the aid of modern science.

First I learned that in Japan, it's considered best for the first child to be a girl and the second child to be a boy.

Then I learned that in Asia (or in Japan and Thailand anyway), if the mother-to-be carries the baby straight out in front of her, without gaining much weight in her sides, she's generally supposed to be having a boy. If her belly doesn't stick out so far, but she expands at her sides, she's supposed to be having a girl. Interesting. Time will tell. The particular baby we were speculating about is due in September--time will tell.

how to get a job as a professor, part 2

2006-05-20T10:26:00.000+08:00

February.

The search committee starts calling the references of those candidates whose applications haven't already been thrown out. They call everyone on my reference list. Then they start calling everyone they know at the schools I've been associated with, regardless of whether or not I've listed these people as references. Then they start calling other people whom they think might know me for some other reason. If I'm one of the candidates being asked about, my references generally call me to let me know. Those candidates whose references manage to paint a sufficiently rosy picture make it to the short list.

If I'm one of the shining few shortlisted candidates for a job, I receive my second communication from the search committee. (If not, I wait by the phone with my hands folded neatly in my lap.) The communication I receive is a request for a telephone interview.

A week or two later, the telephone interview takes place. Sometimes this is with the entire search committee on speaker phone; sometimes the committee divides up the short list of candidates and each committee member calls two or three people. It lasts about a half hour and is quite possibly the most difficult part of the whole process, at least for me. The search committee compares notes on the telephone interviews and shortens the list again. Those who remain are finalists.

I wait.

March passes into April, and interview season is upon us. The search committee may make a second round of calls to the finalists' references (who, at this point, have now written a letter and taken two phone calls in my praise--are they really saying anything new?), after which they decide which two or three finalists they'd like to interview. By this time, some of the top candidates may no longer be in the running, having gotten orchestra jobs, so there are generally one or two other "finalists" in reserve to be interviewed if necessary.

If I'm one of the chosen few, I receive my next communication from the search committee. This is to set up an on-campus interview. I pull out my credit card and book a flight and hotel, for which I am promised reimbursement at some vague future date. I pull out my suit (yes, I have one) and cry because the pants don't fit anymore. I make an emeregency shopping trip for new, larger pants. I amass more paper proof of my excellence: worksheets I've made, an academic paper I've written, programs from recitals I've played. I have this neatly bound at Kinko's and copied for each search committee member.

I get on a plane. I get on another plane. I arrive at a Holiday Inn. I sleep, maybe.

Then, the interview begins. Generally there are several things that need to happen during an interview day: an actual face-to-face interview with the search committee, another one with the dean, sometimes (if it's a small school) yet another with the president or another high-level administrator. A recital, performed by me, for which I am given half an hour to rehearse with the university's staff accompanist. A sample lesson with a member of the university's studio. A sample lecture on another topic I'm prepared to teach (for example, music theory). An "informal" meeting with students. And, of course, breakfast, lunch, and dinner with the search committee.

I return to the hotel. I call Husband and cry tears of exhaustion. I fly home, and I wait.

I wait and wait and wait.

May.

The search committee, the dean, and the provost agree on which candidate should receive the offer. That person is called with the good news, and is given some time (usually 2-3 weeks) to make a decision and to negotiate an offer. The rest of the finalists hear nothing.

Finally the chosen candidate accepts or rejects the university's offer. If s/he accepts, the department secretary sends a form letter to all rejected candidates (including those who didn't make it to the phone interview, and who haven't heard anything since December) informing them that the pool of candidates was exceptional; however...

If, though, the chosen candidate rejects the offer, the negotiation process begins again with the second choice. The third interviewee continues to wait. The rest of the candidates have been assuming they were rejected for months now.