Oh, The Woes of Modern Technology

Communication in the Middle Ages must have been hell. I cannot imagine having no television, no telephone and no postal service. Oh, wait. I take that back. I believe I stand a better chance of writing my message on a banana leaf, finding a peasant and sending him off on a fruitless quest to find the recipient, than I do of ever getting a message out by modern technology. While I thought it was annoying to have a 'Very Low' connection to the wireless Internet about a month ago, I am now finding out that a 'Very Low' connection in which it takes 5 minutes to load a web page is better than no Internet at all. I am truly living in that Verizon Wireless commercial, you know, the one where the family walks into the car rental agency and the zombies tell them they are in a dead zone? That's me. Only, the zombies are speaking in Thai, there aren't any subtitles and the nice guy in glasses doesn't sporadically pop up with his minions of connection.


Now, before I go on my rant about living an untraceable life, let me assure you that generally, life in the Land of Smiles is improving. It's not so much a problem of "too much to do, too little time to do it in" anymore. It's quite the opposite, actually.

My troubles in communication all began about 3 weeks ago, when Gift left for university in Bangkok. I woke up that morning, tried to access my email and failed. Hmm, I mused, it must be down at the moment, and I gave it no more thought until right before Gift got in her car and drove into the highway mirage. After she left, I asked my host brother P'keng why the Internet was down. He told me that Gift had taken the wireless with her. To Bangkok. Is that even possible? I still can't figure it out. At any rate, I was taken with a sudden urge to chase down her car screaming, "Don't take it away! For God's sake, don't take it away!", instead of screaming, "Please don't leave me! No one speaks English!", that I think would have been slightly more appropriate. Well, it turned out that I could still kind of connect to the Internet by manually plugging my computer into another phone line. This lasted only a few days, however, before I walked yawing into the dining room one afternoon, to see three computers gutted over numerous tables. What the... When P'keng came home he told me that the connection was broken. Right around this time, I started realizing that the text messages I was sending on my phone weren't actually reaching their destinations, and then suddenly the messages I was receiving were loading without any words. When I logged onto P'keng's computer for a few moments last week, I realized that the snail-mail my parents had sent me still hadn't arrived. And so, my quandary is thus: If I no longer have access to Internet, and if my phone is malfunctioning, and if my mail is not arriving, is where I'm living actually even in existence? I mean, I could have easily gone insane in the early days of September when the modern world began to fail me and been tranquilized and moved somewhere else. Or maybe I've been watching too many episodes of 'Criminal Minds'...

That ranted, without the addicting distraction of Internet, life as I know it has been rather dull. I know... you all have probably been thinking that I'm just growing too busy to write anymore, but sadly, that isn't the case. I think the most interesting thing that has happened to me in these past few weeks, has been chipping my tooth on a glass coke bottle. Or maybe last night, when I saw a Marie Claire magazine with English writing on the the cover in the middle of Lotus (think Thai-version of Safeway) and I flipped out, loudly exclaiming things like, "Omigosh! I can't BELIEVE this!! It's English!! And on a Marie Claire!! I haven't seen one of these the whole time I've been in Thailand!! Holy crap!! This is AMAZING!!". Until I opened it. You know, I really don't understand why they put English on the cover if they're just going to write all the articles in Thai. Talk about Letdown of the Century. Oh, and I suppose I could count two Sundays ago when I was forced into teaching at another English Camp, this time for all the teachers of my school. My station was supposed to be "Asking and Answering Directions" but the English teacher I was teaching with thought it would be more educational if she sat me down on a stool with a microphone and fielded questions. One woman asked me about American culture and then which I thought was better: Thai culture or my culture. "Well..." I wanted to say, "in my culture, when it's 95 degrees outside, I can wear shorts, so I would say, my culture..." but I didn't. I told her (and repeated it twice) that the two were so opposite that I couldn't even begin to compare them. Then another teacher asked me if we ate rice in America.

I didn't have to go to school last week, because all the students were taking their semester exams, and I have the next two weeks off before the next semester kicks off. Last week, like I said before, I pretty much watched episodes of 'Criminal Minds' and 'Numbers' all day and I watched the whole first season of 'The Big Bang Theory' in about two days. I have killed Minesweeper over and over again and I have a 72% win rate at Spider. I have organized and re-organized my music collection on iTunes and photo shopped a lot of my pictures so that now I have green skin and neon hair, or no face and purple sunglasses. I even tried sunning myself on a particularly hot day while I read a book and listened to jazz. I fell asleep and woke up covered in monster-sized red ants. I tried bleaching parts of my hair (apparently my dirty blond color is the brightest color of blond hair dye they sell), I clipped every other nail, and I discovered my bathroom has good acoustics for ghost noises. I wonder what I'll do for the rest of this week and next week...


The last image I want to leave you all with (for it could be another long stretch of no Internet, and using P'keng's computer is totally a guess and click enterprise, as everything is in Thai) is the ceremony I attended yesterday. We left the Namyen Resort at about 8am, drove around Kanthralak in a long procession and then went on some random country lane, inching along like worms. We ended up in a tiny tiny village at about 10:45am, that is actually only about 20 kilometers from Kanthralak. Anyways, we got to the temple to see dancers dancing around the actual building, with a hoard of people following. My host family walked right past them and sat down at some tables and then we began to eat. We ate for like 30 minutes, and the whole time I was wondering why no one else was around. My host mom kept telling me to keep eating because all the food was free. When we were done eating, we got extra bags of desserts, briefly watched them put the Budda up on the podium (part of the ceremony), and then we left. Apparently, (I learned in the car) we arrived late to the ceremony, so we skipped it altogether, ate the free food and then left. When we were walking back to the car, an old man asked P'Guy (host brother who came home from Bangkok for a while) if the bags of sweets he was carrying were a loi ma klap? (very delicious?). I was laughing so hard thinking about how we only came for the free food and now we were leaving with bags of it, that I tripped over a rock and almost fell flat on my face.


Still laughing about how we are now like Crazy Evelyn, but instead of crashing funerals, we crash temple celebrations,

Anchelee