if you don't have something nice to say...

i have left most of the blogging this month to my good blogmate, who for this january has led a much more interesting life than i, what with thailand and such. meanwhile, work has been such a ridiculous *%$&-storm that i haven't had many funny stories to tell... the month was, however, made much better by an excellent work-partner: bikemyers, who listened encouragingly to my new year's quest for a more zen 2008. what better place to try out a resolution for a more zen 2008 than in a chaotic work environment? so far, so good - although, as i told bikemyers at one point, sometimes apathy masquerades as zen. (and as bikemyers told me, sometimes powerlessness manifests as apathy, which masquerades as zen. but as bikemyers's wife told me, sometimes restrained belligerence is not nearly the same thing as zen but is close enough to get you through the day.)

so despite a pretty busy last few weeks, i've successfully managed to hold onto my new year's resolution. i only broke a little to raise my voice to my boss in the following exchange:

boss: *telling animated story in public setting about his colleague's super-efficiency* it's a good thing she's hindu, because she has so many hands!
me: you did not just say that.
boss: you can tell her i said that!
me: but she's sikh!
boss: oh. maybe you shouldn't tell her i said that.

you can imagine, then, that if my only excitement this month has been trying not to get too excited, that it must have been a big victory for living vicariously when my blogmate finally returned from thailand with not just travel stories, but someone new for me to meet. and even better when i got to meet nb in person! from this reviewer, nb gets two thumbs up: first of all, i got to meet him first (of the friends). second of all, he seems funny and smart and makes my blogmate happy. third of all, he mixes a good bloody mary (who knew that liquid smoke and worcestershire sauce aren't the same thing?)

clearly my priorities are in order here.

integration

bringing a new boy around is a delicate thing.

you don't want to jinx things, or rush him into the circle before he's ready- let's face it, even the most fun, laid-back, non-judgemental group of girlfriends can send a man unprepared for that sort of thing sprinting off in the opposite direction.

but if you're practically the last single girl standing, surrounded by a group of loyal and supportive women who have spent months if not years patiently deconstructing all of you date stories, picking out your outfits, and themselves getting dragged through the emotional wringer of repeated, failed relationships, you owe it to your friends to let them, "examine the merchandise" as my israeli colleagued so eloquently put it.

and let's be honest, by the time it's the tiniest bit appropriate to start introducing the new guy, you're so wrapped up in the glee of "ohmygod-i-have-a-boyfriend," that you're dying to muzzle the little voice in your head that's telling you to take it slow.

but even those prone to excessive analysis of these interactions can find themselves surprised by how things are unfolding.

i wouldn't have predicted, for example, that the first suggestion of meeting the friends would come from him, and that said meeting would be "like ripping off a bandaid," since it would occur at his 30th birthday, to be attended by, as far as i could gather, everyone he had ever met. lucky for me, i got permission to bring my own entourage. open bar also tends to be a helpful backdrop in such a setting - when the somewhat inebriated friend of a friend backs you into a corner, sloshing her martini at you, demanding to know where you are in the 10 steps of love it's helpful to also be a bit under the influence.

to be fair, my fear of this event turned out to be way out of proportion to its scariness. 10 steps of love notwithstanding, i had a great time, and on some level it had to have been easier than having to show up at my friends' brunch the next day, wretchedly hung over, knowing full well that no one was buying the the rumpled shirt and sport coat as a calculated sunday morning fashion statement. it turned out that he was almost as nervous as i had been about the inevitable scrutiny of protective friends. i suppose you'd have to already know my blogmate to realize that you can only score more points by looking that rough and still managing to put down two bloody mary's.

as usual, the moral of the story appears to be that we're nothing without our friends, and that there's always a story to tell.

compare and contrast

there's a very special kind of jet lag that comes with the return home from a country 13 hours ahead of central standard time. since my return from thailand i've spent lots of time lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, wishing i was asleep. in that time i've thought about all sorts of things, but none more commonly than those comparing life in southeast asia to life in chicago. to mark the first time i've actually given up, turned the light on, and logged into the computer, i thought i'd share with you some of the contrast.

pro-chicago: hot water

pro-thailand: lack of need for hot water

pro-chicago: getting to hang out with people i actually know, who may or may not share their deepest secrets with me, but probably know most of mine

pro-thailand: getting to hang out with total strangers who share all of ttheir deepest darkest secrets with me, but know none of mine

pro-chicago: good coffee

pro-thailand: cheap coffee

pro-chicago: having access to my entire wardrobe, enough clothes to obviate frequent use of washing machines

pro-thailand: only needing about 6 items in wardrobe, as next-day laundry servie is available on every street corner for 30 to 90 cents per kilo

pro-chicago: "massage" not a euphemism for destigmatized prostitution... but very expensive

pro-thailand: massage inexpensive, occasionally interchangeable with destigmatized prostitution

pro-chicago: absence of swelteringly hot january weather

pro-thailand: absence of sub-glacial january weather

of course, some realities are universal:

thailand for 2 weeks on holiday: insomnia

chicago after 2 weeks in thailand: insomnia

road chicken revisited

as much as i love street food and adventurous eating in general, i have to give credit where it's due and admit that i didn't get here by myself. but for my fearless and inspiring blogmate (and our adventures on st. lucia) i doubt i'd have this kind of palate.

having said that, i'm feeling pretty good about my recent culinary adventures, and am starting to piece together a theory that when it comes to eating in thailand, the answer might be to go for the thing that sounds the most disgusting. i took baby steps at first. it wasn't immediately obvious to me that spicy papaya salad would be so delicious, but now it's one of my daily staples. i then moved on to the fruit-ginger-beet milkshake, another good choice. until today, the reigning favorite was the fish sausage at the sunday walking street in chiang mai, and victory made sweeter by the fact that i successfully got my initially horrfied and disbelieving guest-house neighbors to concede to its wonderfullness.

now i'm on ko samui, where upscale seafood joints are a dime a dozen. i was worried that sticking with my $2/meal and pointedly low-brow standards would relegate me to a week of ho-hum pad thai, but when i stumbled upon the hat lamai nightly market i saw my dining prospects brighten considerably. after warming up with some BBQ chicken (and yes, more papaya salad) and took a deep breath and ordered the fried mussels. i understand that you have to be of a certain disposition to even think such a thing sounds tasty... but imagine my delight when i watch her scramble an egg in and serve the whole thing up with a side of bean sprouts, green onions, and little baggies of bright red sauce. hands down the current front-runner in the best dinner in thailand race.

if this trend continues i may have to reconsider my staunchly anti- pork-ball stance.

unsolved mysteries

as i wander through the streets and markets of bangkok i ask myself many questions.

aside: the more time i spend alone, the more i hear myself asking these questions out loud. mental note: make friends at guest house in chiang mai to stave off insanity.

few of these questions are substantive, past the occasional, "so what's the deal with buddhism, anyway?" more like, "dear god, is that a bin of deep fried bugs?" and, "who knew entire alleys could be dedicated to sale of dried squid and industrial quantities of fried pork skin?"

but at the front of my mind is this looming quesion, thus far unanswered: in a country whose entire culinary custom revolves around street vendors (blog to come on how i will never eat $8 pad thai in the states ever again), WHY ARE THERE NO BLOODY RUBBISH BINS ANYWHERE?

blogger in nowhere

ah, the by-now familiar blog pattern... my trusty blogmate is off having international adventures and eating mystery fish balls and setting off for points unknown and unpronounce-able. meanwhile, yours truly is back at home, doing nothing exotic, albeit pondering the important points of life with friends. (you'd probably rather hear about bangkok. last night over burgers, mb, ck and i debated which was more offensive: asking a non-christian to pray to baby jesus over christmas breakfast just to see what she'd say, or making fun of a man's inadequate grill. we're still not sure. but it's hard to gather lots of opinions on this one... as bikemyers said today in an unrelated but weirdly applicable conversation, "not many people have a good sense of humor about john the baptist.")

except that although i have gone absolutely nowhere special, i still have harrowing travel stories. last weekend mb and i drove to madison to snowshoe with friends before the last of the awesome piles of snow in southern wisconsin melted in record 60-degree-in-january heat. we had a fabulous time, and i can safely say that any exercise that involves romping around at midnight drinking jim beam in a plastic squirt bottle is not something that should be so easily dismissed by our many snowshoe nay-sayers. had a great time until sunday, when we were about to head back to chicago, the car wouldn't start. we called triple a: now enter lots of small-town retired men all conveniently taking the dogs out for walks around the neighborhood so they could eavesdrop on the musings of the towing guy, and there we were stuck with our car at mb's parents' place in the country outside of madison, with no repairs possible until monday morning.

we were both sad about missing a day of work, and even sadder about being foisted upon mb's parents for that sunday evening, which happened to be their 40th wedding anniversary... until mb's brother called us later that evening to report that at the very time we would have been headed back to chicago there was a huge 100-car pile-up just south of madison and the interstate was closed for hours. had the car started, we would have - at best - been stranded along i-90 with a totalled car waiting for the red cross to come find us a hotel and a wrecking crew. never have i been so overjoyed about a broken-down car! instead, we spent a comfortable evening with mb's gracious parents, an uneventful monday morning watching food network waiting for new spark plugs, and were back by monday afternoon in time for me to try out the new recipe inspired by my food-network morning (oooh, roasted poblano peppers with sweet-potato-and-black-bean stuffing!)

i'll take uneventful non-travel for a bit. but looking forward to the next installment from across the globe... living vicariously is good.

breakfast in bangkok

so screwed up from time change and travel, i was wide awake at 3 this morning, up and out by 6:45. perfect timing for the first batch of the thai version of friend breakfast dough (is it universally true that all cultures have some donut equivalent?) and iced coffee. also good timing to catch the dregs of the banglamphu party scene - so far i've abstained from the beer (singha) and nightclub circuit, perhaps for good reason given the legions of still drunk frat boys staggering around the street with skanky thai women on their arms. ew, but good for me, as the companionless drunk boys apparently feel compelled to make idle conversation with bright eyed bushy tailed sober people like me.

not as weighty as carbon footprinting, perhaps, but who wants to leave memories of such poor taste and judgement in his wake?

blogger in bangkok

it's not that i don't have anything better to do in thailand than tell you all about it... OK maybe it is... or maybe internet access is just so cheap and easy to come by that i can't help but rub it in a little. here goes: ha ha! i'm in thailand.

the stories started compiling before i even left chicago.

not everyone manages to wear their elite frequent flier status gracefully. in line at the security checkpoint at 5AM on sunday i watched the struggles of what was obviously some kind of retired, "now we drive our RV around the country" couple nearly get mauled by popular rebellion. they apparently mistook the employee line for the delta platinum line and just weren't willing to accept the fact they were going to have to slum it with the masses if they wanted to get to their gate. after going a couple of unsuccessful rounds with the increasingly impatient TSA lady they finally decided that the next best strategy to avoid waiting in line was to simply shove their way in between people at the front of the queue. go figure the non-platinum regular folk weren't having it, and no amount of insistence, "but we're platinum" made any difference. it wasn't a total loss - as the loud, indignant couple angrily worked their way to the back of the line the rest of us had a really good time laughing about it. anything to take the edge of a 6AM departure...

also, anything to take the edge off a 14 hour flight from atlanta to seoul. like the unbelievably nice and helpful flight attendants who helpfully provided printed instructions on how to assemble and eat bibimbop and actually wandered up and down the aisle over and over again with their little trays just in case anyone should need anything. i also made taking back the arm rest from the unpleasant little man sitting next to me a sport - especially after he had decided that the best way to optimize his movie viewing was to put the headphones around his neck and turn the volume way up.

so now i'm in bangkok. it's amazingly easy to get acclimated here, especially if you're not picky. it seems if you just walk up to the soup lady on the street and nod she sits you down in front of spicy delicious soup. another nod gets you a little bottle of mixed fruit juice, and a third brings the news that this cost of this feast is about a buck twenty five. i'm a little worried that negotiating the river taxi tomorrow will be a little more complex, but so far the lonely planet is batting 1000 and i'm going to continue to blindy do what it tells me to do.

i think the moral of the story so far is that when you're traveling alone in southeast asia anything you don't royally screw up is a triumph. score one for me and stomach of steel.

2008: a preview

i suppose it's kind of trite to post about new year's resolutions, but i needed an excuse to make some...

1. further explore the world of top-shelf bourbon
2. get eyebrows waxed more regularly, thus avoiding disapproving scowls of eyebrow waxing lady
3. settle screen-writer's strike... want pushing daisies back on the air... desperately
4. resist urge to buy brittany spears' new album
5. befriend person who owns a wii
6. befriend person who owns a boat
7. rehang poster that has been half hidden by bookshelf since july
8. acquire snow boots
8a. play in snow
9. find and root for sports team that doesn't totally suck

your turn.