Today I am going to cook something. Guilted Motivated into firing up both the stove-top and the long-dormant braincells associated with such a contraption by friends who are always cooking amazing things lately, I have decided today's the day to get them egg shells cracking. (I'm going to teach myself to poach.) (Eggs, not Asiatic bears or civets - how would I even get them into the pot? )
Today was also the day I was going to clean my apartment, run, write my food column, do the laundry, go to my Malaysian friend's house for lunch/dinner, watch the Downton Abbey Christmas Special and read the two-week old New Yorker that's lying under layers of dust and cat hair on my desk, so it makes perfect sense for me to be spending time blogging about doing all these things rather than actually get them underway.
Dawn
The thing I was so agonized about in the last post blew over. Of course. We're good. Things are 'normal'. An infographic of the last three days would include:
- 2 bottles of red wine - 2 baens of Sangsom - vodkas of various flavours - 2 dawns - one pre-dawn cheeseburger and kai jiaow at the (somewhat legendary and seedy) REX Coffee Hall (habit-forming) - 'Pumped Up Kicks' x 1000 - 2 drunken morning calls (inbound) - 2 hangovers (not mine) - xwinez x 1 - Bar 23 x 1 - Wong's x 1 - Soi 4 and gays x 1 - 24-hour supermarkets x 3 - real-life sumos x 3 (all different sizes) - This song, WAY too many times
OK, time to get my to-do list underway... progress report forthcoming.
I’m an idiot. Seriously, what is my problem? Sober, I’m relatively OK, or can at least fake OK, but add white wine, red wine, beer and a repugnant consumerist holiday using love as an excuse to extort money from people and bazoomba: insta-jerk. Like a type of desiccated bitch that on contact with water (or in my case various alcohols) transforms into a full-flavored moron.
You want to know why, and I need to attempt to expunge my idiocy by confessing, so grab a tea and a little pile of Scotch Finger biscuits and I shall proceed to explain.
Let me set the scene…
A month ago, hot guy, late-night drinking establishment, multiple 100THB drinks, exchange of words/numbers, repeat because he was too drunk to remember the first encounter, first date, second date, third date (high fives)…. V-DAY. And oh no nooo, not in the ‘victory’ sense of the phrase at all.
Golly gosh and gee as Holly Golightly would exclaim after being dumped by the Argentinian Ambassador or somesuch, did I really really not make a victory out of V-Day.
There is one thing I strive not to be and that is a headcase temper-trantrummy Mallard-beast who scares guys away with arm-flappy ultimatums, whining and general crazy-assed behavior. And yet I have emitted quack-like noises. I’m sure this is all disproportionately immense and insurmountable in my memory – booze-addled as it is – but for sure I, WAY too soon, faffed in the rear that cool-hearted, chilled-out, relaxed vibe to which I was clinging.
To give you the abridged version of why I suck: he had a pre-existing work deadline that precluded us hanging out on the least romantic night of the year and after too many beverages I decided I wasn’t fine with that and proceeded to less-than-gracefully make this known via instant messaging. Whatsapp + BB – I’m looking at you!!
Replace 'skool' with 'owt in publik'
Why hath technology forsaken me? Furthermore, why aren’t I safe from my own buffoonery? I write for a living for goodness’ sake – should I not be in control of the words jack-hammering out of my fingers? Shouldn’t I have some extra defense against me making a huge text-based asshat of myself?
My Daily Dharma today knew. This is what it sent me this morning: After doing something, forget it and go on to the next matter. Nothing should be taken as ultimately real. As the Vajra Sutra says: "All conditioned phenomena are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, and shadows, like dew drops or flashes of lightning."
My assclownery was clearly so immense it made ripples in the karmic fabric of the multiverse, prompting the DD to go into damage control with a 'please don't overthink it'-genre email, knowing that that's precsiely what I'd be doing ALL FREAKING DAY.
I’m not allowed to cling to this mistake, or to what was before the mistake, or to things that aren’t any of this, or even to the dharma itself, which is really kind of difficult. Mind-bleach please. But we all fuck up, right? We all act stupid then hop on the back of a motorcycle taxi with a beer, lock ourselves up with our cats and sob gallons of drunk regretful single-person tears. We all wonder why we can’t be one of those normal girls with grace and self-control and inner peace and a genuine ability to not smother the things we like, the way Bad Boy Bubby suffocated the cat with Glad Wrap.
In the absence of a house landing on my head or mothra lazering me into mere particles of dumb instead of stupid in opposable-thumbed human, text-capable form, I just have to suck it up. Let time - and hopefully on his part more alcohol - Control Alt Delete my craziness into yesterday's news.
But wait! There's more - of course - of me being completely asinine. I'll recount it all for sure, eventually, maybe, but in the meantime, tide yourself over by imagining the episode of Jackass where Johnny Knoxville repeatedly assails himself in the groin with different objects, the groin being my face and the objects my palms.
It's too early to know if the previously held drunken day-dreamy slightly lunatic phase of pre-love bubble will coalesce into something tragic or comic (all signs point to tragic) so I'll leave it dangling there.
hopefully less stupid/more awesome in the next update...
It's been six years I've been writing this blog in some form or another. Isn't that a terrifying thought? We're all six years older (well you are, not me - as I have already established, I age in reverse, like Benjamin Button).
Luckily, because I have little patience for nostalgia at 8.42 in the evening after a buttery Malaysian dinner, I will not wax emotional about all the things that have come to pass. Also because everything is obsessively documented here with no element at all of embellishment or sarcasm or any omission of any fact, and it's all clickable in links and visualise-able via stolen images and doesn't need rehashing ... I have to tell you about... drumroll, please Michael Scott...
... The Best NYE Ever
Phangan! After a rocky start that included the obligatory cab going the wrong way in peak-hour commuter traffic for 45 minutes scenario followed by a panicky motorcycle ride through said traffic at light speeds with no helmets just to make it to the gosh-darned bus station on time, everything went smoothly.
We made it to our destination beach while the sun shone (through some clouds), wading up to it around boulders at high tide, humble enclave of rustic (ie shitty) bungalows that go for 500thb a night (AUD 15). PCF and I were technically sharing the room, but as is true me-in-Phangan fashion I would spend a grand total of no nights at all in that room.
Around the boulder are the bungalows. A bit hard to get to at night.
Day 1 - Haad Rin AKA Don'tsville
I hate Haad Rin, the main beach. I went there to see say hi to a few people I met last year who work at various drinking establishments, serving alcohol in various-sized vessels and twirling various objects set alight. PCF was in no mood for the yobbery, so I met up with Sassy, Lil Bell and Kevin - those last two of those being Sassy's sugar gliders ie. Reasons For Girls to Come Up and Talk To Us or the 'They're Sugar Gliders' 'What??' 'Su-gar Gli-ders' Show.
As all nights on Haad Rin, this night invariably wound up as a tragi-comedy. Tragic examples of humankind or I will say mankind in this instance, because it was really only the penis-encumbered people on the beach who were acting like... (I can't even think of a harsh enough insult here, which is telling, coming from me)... the hate-child of Ted Bundy and Saudi Arabia? Does that paint a bad enough picture? Cro-magnon man would have been dismayed to see his descendants act this way. Everyone there and everything they did was a 'don't'.
Even cartoon cavemen have the decency to club their women over the head before they try to drag them away but there was no such courtesy on Haad Rin beach. Anyway, annoying story short, I crashed at Sassy's nearby bungalow around 4am lest I attempt to make good on my threats of 'glassing' someone with a plastic bucket. I awoke fitfully during the night punching the air, vaguely aware I had sugar gliders launching and landing all over me.
Haad Rin, before the human garbage was washed back ashore. Or woke up, whatever.
Night 2 - Haad Tien calls, I go
Or more accurately, I text my ex in Haad Tien, he texts backs, I go, Sassy follows, we stay and don't come back for three days and then only briefly. This first night ends up exactly as you would expect of a first night back in the fold of your ex-island home. I was so happy to be back, I actually embraced bunking in the stick room, even though it was NYE eve and I had no eye-make up remover. (And let's face it, like we were even gonna blink before dawn).
The island bar/bungalow/beach is the same legendary place as always. Much the same faces and if not, the same kind of lovely tie-dye-and-feather-wearing flouncy folk with their hippy tendencies, lack of proper tethering to reality and awe-inspiring tolerances to natural (as in sourced-from-a-perhaps-nearby-field) highs. I'm happy to be here was on high rotation in my head.
Sassy had a good time, too. She paraded the rodents about, much to the glee/horror of other patrons, depending on their mental state, she nursed a bottle of top-shelf tequila given to her by Island Ex, I spent some quality catch-up time with aforementioned Island Ex and after finally crashing out in the stick room, Sassy, the fur babies and I slept well into the afternoon in the lead-up to NYE.
Day 3 - Kevin pt 1
On NYE we paid our dues by 'working' in the restaurant, an open-air kitchen/sala area which is our base camp. After that, the usual: we ate, drank, counted down, drank more, danced, walked around a lot, spoke to many, and eventually welcomed the friends we had abandoned on the other side of the island.
In a Small World fashion we met people we know from BKK by surprise, there was revelry and smiling, hordes of people constantly at the bar and general island hedonism without the part where guys turn into disgusting slabs of mobile rape. It was nice to not be at Haad Rin.
At some point close to bedtime I was left in charge of Kevin. At some point after that, I lost him (bitch can somehow wriggle his way out of two bags). And so ensued the not-so-Happy New Year. We all passed out early like Grump Gusses in the restaurant, exhausted and worried about a runaway mouse-sized sugar glider. Sad, sad faces.
They sleep like they're dead. Also off-putting.
New Year's Day Wake up. Look for Kevin. Call Kevin. Feel bad. Hate the new year. Drink wine and jaeger to make it better. Feel better! It's 4pm and it's raining but the bar on campus is still open, there are at least a hundred people dancing there in the wet and, operating as people on holiday on an island who have just lost their exotic pet do, we joined them.
At some point Khun Mehr came looking for us because we'd ordered food from her (come on, she likes cooking) and had forgotten all about it due to white wine and Malibu and whatever else was in our glasses (Don't Ask, Don't Tell clause invoked). Sassy and I pranced about - me in a souvenir-store-bought sarong shirt I had to buy because all my clothes were on a different beach and Sassy in the same outfit but with the sleeves rolled up to make it look like a different outfit (a foolproof disguise).
We made up a single-line song called 'We Got To Pee' that everyone in the queue for the bathroom loved, saw yet another familiar face (and torso) from BKK (who I was apparently - and understandably, come on - flirting with in an inappropriate manner), drank a lot of Malibu and enjoyed the island rain because it was refreshing and you couldn't tell what time of day it was (late) and it made us all feel like jungle witch doctors doing a raindance for the corn crops.
Remote hippy bar on outcrop
At some point, we hiked to a remote hippy bar on an outcrop over the Gulf, walking up and down a thigh-blasting trail in monsoonal rains. We drank more. Stayed awhile. Talked A LOT. Around 4am we trudged back to base camp in the harshest part of the storm, of course.
It had been an epic night, like the first week of Survivor where they're just shivering in the rain like forlorn miniature poodles, clutching palm fronds and wishing for death, only it's Opposite Day for us and we're in love with the entire experience so much we want to marry it and then take it on a honeymoon here, to have this experience with it and share it with itself.
Several times throughout the day I'd thought how cool Sassy had been about me losing her pet. I'd also had a chance to reflect on how the Island Ex is a super being, having accompanied us on our crazy hippy bar crawl through the jungle and only ever seen it as a joy and never once telling us to shut our pie holes (even on the 70th rendition of 'We Got To Pee') and just generally been amarrzing.
Anyway, we're so tired and hungry by the time we get back to base, we're hallucinating. We put on borrowed clothes - I look like a drowned-then-partially-revived whippet in a sweater whereas Sassy in the sala's candlelight looks like a cherub in white fishermans pants and flowy shirt. We're ready to eat the 'breakfast' Khun Mehr had made us 12 hours earlier, and bonus!, by now the kitchen is full of even better stuff - roast duck, massaman curry, tom yum, some kind of other Thai thing, and to top it off Island Ex makes fresh kai jiaow (omelet).
Little Bell when she was little
We're eating these Michelin-star leftovers, when a Random Friend On Acid (because what would NYD be without one?) appears out of the dark to escape the rain. We eat (hilariously, he grabs the omelet in his bare hand to eat it, then proceeds to introduce himself to all of us, who he knows). We share stories. The night has ended up pretty good. At some point after a few more wines, I literally Got To Pee, and head off for the bathroom, where, crouched and forlorn, a certain bitch-faced sugar glider is sitting on the toilet seat giving me the stink eye!
I resist the urge to flush him down the actual toilet as revenge for the horrific emotional rollercoaster he'd put us all through, but so relieved I was for him to not have wound up as cat food and me as an accomplice to murder that I just scooped him and squeeeeeeed. Hugs all round. Scolding of sugar glider. Tears. More wine. Happy New Year!
The Rest of The Time We felt tired and down because we'd been partying constantly for four days and knew we would have to leave soon.
Everything that happened in BKK since I got back, not that it matters after the NYE we had: - Went out with The Disappointment. So what does that make me? Disappointment-adjacent? A Disappointment Enabler? I don't even want to know. - I caught up with Swiss, who you don't know, but who first appeared sometime in the dying throes of last year and resurfaced this weekend out of nowhere, like an orca circling a seal on an ice floe, only more foreboding. More later? The story wouldn't be as compelling as it isn't if we knew the answer to that now, would it? - My cat just pooed and I need to stop doing this and either puke or go clean it now or possibly both concurrently....
This is the part of my life that doesn't suck in any fashion at all. Christmas Day and the incumbent pressure to not spend the entire thing hungover in my underpants watching anime, is over (I did leave the house, and I wore an appropriately Christmassy dress) and now it's just Boxing Day detox anime underwear day with a fridge stocked full of juice, cheese, various flat breads and ham.
The next leg of Bek's Bachelorette Life circa late 2011 requires going to work twice, shopping for a bikini, fixing my phone so it's camera-ready to document whatever antics lay ahead, then taking a bus with my best friend to a magical seaside destination and partying for 5 days. See? Not sucking at all! Many of our BKK if not exactly friends then party acquaintances will be there, there will be beer, wine, swaying palms, shirtless torsos, lots of music and no 9am fucking BTS to Siam station for a full five days!
This will be our bungalow in Phangan. Yes, we were
so excited we demanded pictures.
I've already lost interest in this post because now all I can think about it the island and not hammering away at this keyboard staring into this tiny screen, so a point-form wrap of the last week/fortnight and any important plot points we may need further along the line.
* wouldn't ya know it ran into one of the to-be-avoided people by accident while leaving work the other day. I didn't recognice him at all, so one of us may be a scary chameleonic freak who randomly dons Groucho Marx-style glasses (sans nose, guys, come on) and shaves his hair to number 3 or one of us might have a bad memory after a night of free-flow Bordeaux. You decide, I can't tell you what to think all the time, it's exhausting.
View from the balcony/hammock of our future bungalow.
* The beer garden in the World of Happiness is sponsored by Chang - the local brew with extra alcohol and chemicals. The after-work pre-xmas party we threw ourselves was satisfactorily boozy - towers were drained, cups overflowed, cups dropped, spilled, crushed beneath the collective force of our inebriation. T'was joy-filled.
*the riverside Pier restaurant, motorcycle emptiness, The Balcony, Tapas and Wong's all featured in the last week of partying in a kind of year-end summary of the last 12 months of gluttony and insobriety. Thumbs up, well-played, us.
* we will be putting our minds to starting a new page soon, which will require us to stop reading the last chapter. Ad with that, adieu 2011 - here comes the Year of the Dragon. Hope it poops out a golden egg for me rather than singeing my little rabbit ears.
2011, that is, much like what the DJs weren't doing last night at the staff party after-party where everyone was completely and utterly smashed and dancing around with their neckties on their heads like Japanese salarymen on a Friday night and making out with anyone within flailing distance.
Actually, the trashiness was almost disappointingly unscandalous. No surprises. IT nerds got drunk and almost plucked up the courage to speak to the mousy girls, managers got drunk and did that manager dance in the middle of the dancefloor, pent-up office chicks got drunk and trans-departmentally flirty, I got moderately tipsy and danced with one of the cute Toms until I remembered my last foray into non-hetero relations and had to edge away uncomfortably. It was general office party-level revelry - the world spun on its axis.
And the party itself, if we replay the tape, was enjoyable. Amazing cheese gnocchi and free-flow alcohol all night. Coming from me, Princess JadedAboutEwents, 'OK' does not denote a half-assed thing, it's actually a stupendous compliment, and means the night - as my Facebook feed attests - was nigh on fucking life-changing for 500 or so of my less social colleagues.
There was (were??) even fireworks. iPads were prizes. People were flown in from other continents. Celebrities were booked to perform. Someone won a trip to the Maldives. I am not kidding.
my husbands
The problem with these things is always the aftermath. I was scarily well-behaved and barely made a ripple in the fabric of inappropriateness (if you don't count the proximity of me to someone who, how-shall-we-put-it, chaperoned me until they could no longer form sentences due to alcohol intake, with no discouragement at all from me), but I think it was a significantly narrower escape for others.
Actually, the most embarrassing moment for me was realising the DJ at the afterparty was the same DJ who, two Valentine's Days ago, I made out with on the dancefloor at Route 66 after being presented with a plastic rose. Mercifully, he didn't appear to remember this.
Amazeballs at our staff party - a pretty big shindig
I also might have been vaguely sleazy while talking to someone from a nearby department, but whatevs peeps, let's just be thankful I didn't fall over backwards into the shrubbery after mistaking a shadow for a seat (I have done this before, only the shrubbery was the floor of Q Bar) or get obnoxious about not being personally thanked in the CEO's ppt presentation (I accept his later-on commandeering of my Santa hat as endorsement of my role in the company) or smack-talk someone from senior management (not that there's a reason to) (disclaimer disclaimer disclaimer) while they were standing right behind me.
The thing I most dread are the FB photo uploads, happening as I type. Thais are your typical itchy trigger finger Asians when it comes to documenting every moment, meal, breath, cell division by digital means, so there was a ratio of 1:5 people to cameras last night -- much of the photo-taking happening after the official thing had devolved into the sweaty, pelvic-thrusty dance mayhem portion of the night.
Thank Judas for wedge heels that make it unbearable to dance after a point. Still, I cringe in anticipation of seeing 'xxx has tagged you in 75 pictures' ... all of which depict me with a new drink in hand, half slung over some poor colleague or another.
Oh yeh, we also went to Koh Tao- me and PCF and some other island associates, and I made friends with this dog. Check out her feet! Cute!
So it's been a while since the last blog. This is the point in the post where I start losing interest and do point form. Thus:
- Guy I wanted to see then hated has been lingering in the periphery - unsolicited and unencouraged. I was accidentally nice to him on the phone yesterday when the biatch of a thing failed to identify caller and the background noise made me not recognise his voice. It clicked 30 seconds later after I was my usual convivial self and by then it was too late to backpedal into snipeyness. He was the last person here at the Diamond. No great concern trying to fit anyone in - no pun intended (ew) - before the EOY.
- Nice guy is still nice. Ergo, it ain't gonna happen.
- Lately, I've been responding bluntly/rudely to people who are annoying or dense. If someone's too imperceptive to realise I'm not into them, won't buzz off, or is asking me daft questions at work or elsewhere, I feel justified bitching them out/alerting them to their asshattery/abandoning they punk ass (said in a black woman accent).
- Speaking of ego-maniacal attention-whoring adult babies, The Disappointment is swiftly becoming The Desperado. This is not all together bad, since I have emerged from this a clear winner, but it is baffling. We had a dinner together, which was tedious because he has a knack of telling anecdotes that make you feel terrible about the world. Thankfully he's barely audible over the sound of his own self-absorption, so when I see him out and about sleazing over someone, I'm more alarmed that I must be losing my edge ever having associated with his ilk than remorseful about anything.
- I saw someone I hadn't seen for a long time - a super being, I am realising too late, from Bangkok prehistory - the Belair Mansion era. We realised we both harbour post-traumatic stress from all the crazy stuff that went on during that time and can't really work through it because there's no one around from then to understand what it was like. Anyway, we drank a lot and hung out a bit. He's spoken for, but if he wasn't, I could imagine myself applying for that role. Not that, given the way our histories overlap, anything good could come of it.
- Now that I think about it, I did say some outrageously suggestive things in the throes of white wine abandon at the after-party. White wine does this, it turns me into some relentless flirt with a seemingly inexhaustible trove of double-entendre and suggestive puns that to me are hilarious. I remember putting a glowstick I had somehow acquired into some dude's shirt pocket, which to me seemed like a completely everyday thing to do, but had my gay husbands in stitches because apparently that is terribly unsubtle. It's not, is it? (Yes, there were glowsticks, too, and a flash-mob type group jumping scenario when that Black-Eyed Peas song came on, of which I was not a part.) (Oh, i just remembered in my white wine fervour I also had a tequila shot. That I can still taste.)
I would murder you and your grandchildren for a plate of this right now.
I think that sums up the last month. Here, in place of a decent outro because I need to treat my post-wine/bourbon/vodka/whiskey (jeez I can drink a lot) stomach with some fatty carbs or carby fats - an ellipsis...
Why is it that I have to do something at least half-a-dozen to scores of times before I realize I don't really want to do it? Such as: eat that seductive fried-pork-patty-and-something sandwich the lady in front of the 7-11 sells for breakfast. Or have "just one more" drink with Grandma Highkick (of getting-me-paralytic-on-soi-4-during-the-week notoriety). Or, for-Judas's-sake, seeing people I do not really want to see for a variety of reasons.
My scene at the sea
I just had a great weekend by the sea - two freebie nights in lovely resorts with a lovely person. Me. Hehe, and someone even more lovely - Person I Don't Really Want To See #1. This guy is the loveliest of lovelies - but in my evil field of vision this renders him a Nice Guy and if we check the Terms and Conditions of People Who I Want to Be With, Nice Guy is not in there.
He was so polite and respectful and sincere and ... nice... the entire time that he, like sunshine on a vampire, almost burned me to death just with his presence. He was just so effortlessly nice - as if that kind of thing comes naturally to him. Can you imagine? For me, accustomed to total douchebags, it's quite scary and surreal -- kind of like spending the weekend with a chupacabra.
Sarcasm aside, this was detrimental to the self-improvement modules of my 'solo' weekend - and not just because I needed that time in Beksheadville, but because truly, madly, deeply, I only like assholes, and having him around being all amazing and gentlemanly and not staring at his phone constantly but and actually engaging in conversations with me that weren't about any of his millions of 24 year-old ex-lovers, was irrefutable proof of this. Ergh.
Which brings me to Person I Don't Want To See#2: The Disappointment. Who, somehow, with his extra-sensory asshole powers, could tell I was with a nice guy and sought to Whatsapp me out for a drink this week. To which I did not say no. Seriously, what is my problem? Can a doctor fix this? Is there a pill or can someone hit me on the head with a hammer whenever he messages so at least I can legitimately claim brain damage when I reply? (Additionally, is he high?? Does he not remember our last conversation???)
Person I don't Want To See#3,4 and 5: Guy who vanished into thin air last Monday night after, well, after doing "an Angel" (please refer to Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode: Surprise.) Let's give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that guy was also cursed by gypsies so that after a moment of pure bliss he turned into a soulless homicidal demon who, in the remaining moments of his humanity, flees to save my life.
Guy who was rude to me in Glow the other night. And Finally, Guy who saw me in a bar once who I exchanged BB Pins with and keeps BBing me and is probably nice (in which case, that's an automatic disqualification) but a decade too young for me (yes, he's 16, in case you were wondering.)
And because I am Libran and also can never keep these things short:
Person I Do Want To See#1 My Japanese husband. Here I go again with this thing, yes, but it's true. TUT... Notes from the Universe told me to visualize, and without going into too much detail, I am visualizing like a mofo.
Let me recap back to here, when my BB got switcherooed at that awful model's night afterhours urban Top 40 nightmare I used to go to a lot. And the reason why I fled in such a hurry and mixed up the phones, which I omitted from the story, was because I was fleeing home to make the most of my future husband's final hours in BKK before he went back to Tokyo.
While technically we're not yet married, he has proposed to me at least twice while drunk and is constantly telling me via Facebook inbox that he loves me - and because there's a clause in the Douchebags Only policy that says I'm allowed to like guys who I've only ever met once, spoken to twice and for whom I require the translation/dating services of my Japanese colleague, I know he's the one. There has never been anyone more perfect than this person I will probably only ever see again on my FB wall.
Apropos nothing, n'Sassy just bought one of these at the markets. Yes, it's a minuscule sugar glider.
Scoff all you want, but I am visualizing my tiny woman's brain out and in a few years, when we have of course exhausted all possible love hotel/ramen/J-Pop/cosplay scenarios, I'm gonna be shacked up Yoko-style with the handsomest model's night random in Asia, in our minimalist-yet-cosy urban apartment, half-caste kids and cool designer dog competing for attention with Justice and Sylvia. He's gonna have to learn how to surf, otherwise I won't be able to compare us to the lovers in Scene From The Sea, but if he's really the one, he'll do it gladly.
There are other people I want to see, of course, but it's late, I'm lazy, there's a SS and.. checks fridge...water with my name on it and then I need to crash into sweet sweet duvetblivion.
This one's for you, everyone who ever hurt my feelings:
I will attempt to be brief but brevity ain't my super power, as evidenced by all the extremely long rants here. I shall begin with Saturday night's events and their cumulative effects on today.
Today was the cliched dreaded Terrible Tuesday of yore -the type that ensues as a result of brain chemical depletion - the type that seems to have no flood-related shortage of despair and self-loathing and the type that scoffs in the face of bananas, turkey and tryptophan, and doesn't abate in its harshness even though you anticipated it with open arms. It feels like Chernobyl melted down in your chest cavity. You knew you would feel like this, you remind yourself. You even said something like, bring it on...
sexy cute Indian soft-porno
a bar called wtf My friend J plays an instrument in a band in this bar - and it was the second time this week I'd trotted up and down the soi in front of it in my ridiculously high wedge heels trying not to fall face-first on what is a comically uneven pavement made even more untrottable with gravel, sewer grates, muzzled dogs (for real) and other people's exposed toes.
So I met him there are we were all - me, him, and n'sassy - chilling out, chatting with cute, arty strangers, swilling 120bt Tigers, going upstairs to chin-stroke about art, making drunk googly eyes at cool faux-glassed hipster types (me), trying inappropriately to crack onto the musician's J's blonde ex-girlfriend (sassy), and being super cool and popular (J).
Early on in the piece N'Sassy did what she always does and introduced me to some cute guy friend of hers in the most embarrassing manner possible ie. Hey Guy! (across the room, yelling) This is my friend, she's single!!! Hey Bek, (still shouting, unnecessarily) this is my friend, Guy, he's single!!! Ergh. That brings us to the final chapter of my stop-over in Sucksville, but we'll get to that in due course.
who the fuck is this twat and why is he bombing our photo with attention whore?
Some hours later we are on our way to Wong's (but where else?) and we get stopped by the boys in brown. They shine torches into the cab. I know they stop everyone on this corner, because I used to live in this part of town for 3 years. I get out. I am obnoxious but OK. N'Sassy is drunk but OK. J is drunk but not OK, as in he's got a microscopic amount of something on him that he shouldn't have and this is Bangkok and the BIB see it and at that very point in time we see the baht signs ching ching in their eyes and we all collectively go fuuuuuuuuuuck as we trundle into the police vehicle.
the police station This plays out the way we expected it to. Hours of them faffing about in their too-tight uniforms with serious faces on. Five minutes where they accused us of stealing back the minute particle of the thing they confiscated before they found it again. An hour of waiting for friends to show up with CHC (cold hard cash). Two minutes of them insisting we pee into tiny containers (nah-uh, buster, I do that for doctors because I want my urethra to stop stabbing itself with what feels like tiny acid knives), and intermittent flirting between me and the young guy in charge because I'm obnoxious, he's susceptible and kinda cute, and in some twisted combination of evolution and hormones, it helps our case. At dawn, our cashed-up friends arrive and we are let go.
Wong's We figure we have earned a fucking beer, and a medal of honor, and a letter from Queen Elizabeth, so we go straight to Wong's for a beer. It's pretty empty but! My astrological twin is here! We all drink cold cold beers of freedom!! We cheers to freedom a lot!!! We cheers to liberty!! And to corruption! And to J learning to hide things in his underwear. Wong is super tired and not drunk, for once, or has sobered up and wants us to GTFO, so we move on...
The rest of the morning Is full of random happenings. You only want the highlights, I know:
- my astrological twin and I sharing a hammock on a terrace roof, drinking cask wine and pontificating about how inappropriately not gay he was acting at the time (cosmology is a strong force, kids) - everyone being chastised for saying 'awesome' (ergh, we don't say awesome, darling) - everyone rifling through a big basket of girls sunglasses before deciding on the most hilarious pair, undocumented because by that stage everyone's phones had run out of battery. - N'Sassy cocooning herself in a big hammock and being dubbed 'chrysalis' - midday swim! wearing random pieces of wardrobe in lieu of proper swimwear! with wine! and sober neighbours!glad I don't live there!
The final chapter, when all the chooks come home to roost Yesterday was fine, I guess I was still in the slipstream of the weekend, propelled along by its momentum. I even went on a date with Guy. Unlike boy, who I have re-christened The Disappointment, Guy seemed normal. Nice.Seemed, madam, nay, tisn't! I don't even know why for Pete's sake I still used words like 'normal' and 'nice'. I know these words behave as if in a time vacuum when used in the vicinity of a possible love interest.
Was expecting (and there's another mistake) a casual Sangsom-esque cheap-ass Thai dinner in a student dive with a student band (still in uniform), Thai omelet and tom yum goong but instead was tractor-beamed into a five-star restaurant, I'll-pay-for-you, free-flow-Bordeaux, fresh-sashimi-and-wagyu scenario. I can deal with this. I've had expensive wines and plum-mouthed conversations with bouffant-haired hi-so peeps ad infinitum, and even more lately thanks to boy and am now ready to slum it for a while. But I'm here and I can deal. Free-flow Bordeaux helps. And what sort of ungrateful white bitch complains about free fine dining (me).
make of this what u will
So, red wine, nice restaurant, great conversation, a Guy who has to stay at his office because his house is flooded and hey whaddya know that office is actually just across and down the road from The Diamond, which is my apartment, in fact we can see it from my balcony, didn't you know? Of course you're going to 'send me home', that's Thai Guy for 'I'm going to try to sleep with you'. And somewhere after the balcony and the dim lighting and the jokes and the playing with cats but somewhere before him heading in the direction of the door because he's got more work to do at 3am and needs to go back to the office, there was the moment where it was too late to go back in time and not be Me.
Me doesn't have the same limits as Perfect Me and Perfect Me likes to beat Me up about it when shit inevitably and theatrically blows up in Me's face. Case in point: Today, Guy was not in contact with Me. And Perfect Me thinks that maybe if Me had been more Perfect, the barrage of Guy's Monday's texts, wooing and charm would not currently be extinct, decimated by the melting of the polar Me-caps, struggling for breath under the lack of oxygen and excess ME-thane. Did Me fuck it up? Does Me instinctively cause extinction in suitors as if they were stegosaurus - like a gigantic Me-teorite shower? Did Me not be Perfect enough for Boy, or for 23, or for Cinabbon, or for blah or for him or for so-and-so who all came before?
Questions too lung-puncturing to contemplate right now. So I will leave them up here, watch some terrible sitcom and allow myself to be swallowed up in duvet, cat hair, and stuffed animals (I think there's an IKEA catalogue in there too somewhere).
Update: have received weird, scant, non-committal probably guilt-motivated half-assed texts from Guy. I should cut him some slack as a) I am a not awesome... um...fierce thing to reckon with maybe? and b) he had just as large a weekend as I did and c) he also doesn't have you, Farang Girl blog, to vent to...
And finally... we are going to Koh Phangan this xmas/nye, come hell or high-water (we already have that, btw, and so far it isn't impeding me personally at all). Much the same crew minus certain players and exes. Koh CHang Island DJ, the unrequited one, will have to remain so for another 6 months, as his wicked evil captor (ie. cute blonde Scottish girlfriend) is back in town for the high season. Hopefully to be broken up with by him.... anyway full steam ahead for a festive season in paradise... :) (that totally brought my serotonin back huzzah!)
