Oleanna Price and the Cake Mix

Last week was really tough. It was the perfect storm of physical issues (a cold on top of other TMI things) and the most demanding week at work yet. The stress was thick. Nick and I have gone through stretches of several years where we fought less than we did last week. We ate a lot of pizza, our “I can’t think of anything else” meal. I am tentatively saying that the worst is over, but it’s hard to know when you’re truly past a rough patch. 

I’ve mentioned this before, but I am constantly reminded of Barbara Kingsolver’s “The Poisonwood Bible,” one of my favorite books. If you haven’t read it, it’s about a Baptist missionary who moves his wife and four daughters to the Congo in the 1950s. There is a lot of culture shock and constant adjustments. The mother, Oleanna Price, had brought four Betty Crocker cake mixes so that each of her girls could have a proper cake for their birthdays in the coming year. When she goes to use the first one, the humidity from the rainy season had turned it into a solid, unusable brick. This is a final straw of sorts for her, and she loses it. 

I haven’t had a breakdown as big as hers, but I’ve come close. I think about all of the tiny straws that led her to that, and all the tiny straws we’ve had here. It took me a month to find bleach in a store. We have an order from Amazon (gel deodorant!) sitting in a post office we can’t find. We still have that blasted #@*&%ing car we need to sell. Just like straws on a camel, none of them are big, but they do accumulate. For me, a good ¾ of it has been the staggering workload at school. It’s one thing to be in a new school, and to plan lessons for a new class. It’s another thing to plan for four new classes every day (one which I am literally making up as I go along), and I am barely keeping up. I know it will get better, and we do have a killer island vacation just over a month from now, but we’re only three weeks in. 

Enough whining… Let’s do some Thailand Bullet Points. 

I found out that one of the students at our school is a verrrrrrry important person. He’s an heir of sorts in a politically unstable country, and I guess he’s going to school here because it is so remote and safe. Crazy, huh? There are videos on YouTube of him addressing stadiums full of people, surrounded by armed guards. It’s surreal. He’s just a regular kid at school (albeit a very nice, unusually self-confident kid with impeccable poise). I hope it’s okay that I’ve said this… I don’t think I’m giving away too much information. God knows there are plenty of politically unstable countries in the world. 

One thing I miss: my wood floors. Everything here is marble tile. It's cool to the touch, looks nice and cleans up easily, but it’s hard to stand on for long periods of time. And remember, no shoes in the house in Asia-- I’ve had to buy a pair of indoor shoes just for the cushion. The marble-floor moment I’d been dreading happened last week: Sophie dropped a plate. The sound it made was so loud it made my ears ring (hard crash plus hard acoustics). Painfully loud. I yelped like a stupid little dog and Sophie cried. Of course, the plate didn’t stand a chance, and the pieces skittered quite far on that slick surface. I’m glad it wasn’t a glass, but that’s only a matter of time. That was a great way to start the morning.

Nick and I have noticed that the sun rises very fast here. It seems like it’s 15 minutes from total darkness to daylight. It must be because the angle of the sun is more direct down here near the equator, but it is dramatic and noticeable. 

I have started to lose a little weight, but very slowly. Slow is good! It means permanent change! I haven’t made any special efforts, and I certainly haven’t been exercising at all in the last two weeks, but I found a scale in the science lab at school and I sometimes sneak in there to have a peek. Who knows how accurate it is, but when I saw 66 kg on there (hah! You’ll have to google that) I actually broke into a sweat of excited disbelief. Oh who am I kidding… I’m sure I was already sweating. I am always sweating. Everything I wear smells like a foot at the end of the day. Anyway, I think the weight loss is because I’m eating less sugar. Baking is a challenge here for many reasons. Actually, it’s a challenge for every reason, from finding ingredients and pans to oven size and heating the kitchen. I’m not sure how this is happening, but we used to buy 5 lb. bags of sugar and go through them pretty quickly. Here, I bought a small bag – maybe 2 lbs? We’ve been here two months and it’s about halfway finished. Almost all of that has gone into iced tea, which I don’t even make that sweet (nodding to all Yurkoskys here, I’m continuing Grandma’s legacy here in Thailand). I can’t remember why or how we went through so much back home. I don’t remember baking that much, but I guess I did. I used to buy flour quite often, and here I have one bag that I only just opened this morning for sub-par pancakes (and no syrup here). Yes, of course I still crave sugar, but sometimes it’s just not available. The convenience foods I loved, notably granola bars and Goldfish in Costco quantities, aren’t here. I am drinking, but both the beer and wine aren’t great, so that’s keeping me from going back for more (I’m one of the few people who drink more for the taste than the effect). Most of the candy or desserts here don’t appeal to me. I’m forced to deal. I am getting very excited about the next six months when the weather cools off and I get a handle on work, and I can work out more. Mama’s gonna be in awesome shape!

Of course, I am only at the very tip of that iceberg. I got a little Thai-style fat-shaming yesterday when I went to buy a t-shirt. She charged me more because I needed such a BIIIIG SIIIIIZE. *eye roll* I paid my four dollars instead of three and slinked away. The exact same thing happened about a month ago in a different market with a different shirt. Ehh, that’s what I get for moving my Russian beer-keg body into the land of tiny lotus-flower women. 

I was riding my bike around town yesterday and I kept getting blasted by some pretty rank exhaust from cars and motorbikes. I wonder if the air quality up here is worse because of that, or better because of all the thick jungle everywhere, underdeveloped for several hundred miles in every direction? Or is it a wash? I think about how careful I was back home with organic food and local meats, watching for chemicals in my products. Here, there’s almost none of that. I think it’s a chemical free-for-all. But on the flip side, all of the meat and produce is local with no Monsanto weirdness and plenty enough bugs in the produce to make me think they're not heavily sprayed, and the diet is almost entirely whole foods (like I said, I can’t get my daily Kashi chocolate chip granola bars… chia seed and sea salt… sigh), even though it is very meat-heavy. I wonder what the net result is. 

I gave my health class a project to report on foods of other countries, so to show them what I wanted, I made a report of my own on the US. Part of the report is to give a quick background of the country and how that has influenced its foods. I said that the US does not have the cleanest history, what with the Native American genocide and slavery (both of which are relevant to American cuisine), and I showed pictures of people on Rascal scooters (uhh, non-handicapped people) and families around Christmas trees all proudly holding their guns… all cringe-worthy and uniquely American things. But then I countered with pictures of rock & roll, baseball, old Hollywood, cowboys, muscle cars (that was a Steve McQueen picture in Bullitt)… We invented cool. As I was putting the pictures together, I cried. 

There are things I miss about the US, and I do get sad. We all do; Sophie is in a particularly fragile state right now. A few weeks ago I made spaghetti & meatballs and put on Pavarotti, which always reminds me of my father. When “Nessun Dorma” came on, I sobbed. I had to go in the other room just to clean up my face and get it together. But I recognize that being sad doesn’t indicate anything else. It doesn’t mean we made the wrong decision. It just means we miss people and things we love.

In the thick of last week, I wrote a bleating e-mail to a few friends who are like-minded about travel and wouldn’t say “well you shouldn’t have ---“ about anything. With all the things we’ve had to deal with-- sad children, sugar withdrawals, constant language barriers, lice, my still-itchy scalp, relentless sweating, the huge workload, a possible intestinal parasite (dude, I told you there was some TMI involved), critters, the threat of dengue fever—I still think it’s worth it. I have never second-guessed this decision. Is there something wrong with me that my need to travel still outweighs all of those things? Am I mentally ill or just pathologically selfish? What is it about traveling that has this strong a pull on me?

Yesterday I was feeling a little restless. I took off on my bike for an hour or so, just poked around downtown. It was an hour-long vacation. I got physical activity, mental stimulation and entertainment. Every day, all day long, I feel like I live in a National Geographic magazine. This occurred to me on Friday night as I watched the decked-out ladyboy smoking on the terrace of the pub where we had dinner. There was a split second where the smoke was curling around her mouth, the rain was behind her, and the colors in her clothes were bright. She had a happy but self-conscious look on her face. It was a perfect picture. I couldn’t grab my phone in time to get the picture so it will have to live in my memory, which has much better photographic skills than my hands anyway. I don’t know how to make my phone accentuate those vivid colors and soften the background. My photographer friends would lose their entire minds here. 

Living in National Geographic pictures is the subject for an entirely separate blog post, as I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my position as a privileged, white observer here. These are people, not just beautiful photography subjects. Lots to dissect. I also want to write about some common threads I’ve noticed in the expats here, which I think are unique because of Chiang Rai’s isolation. It makes a great hiding place. That will have to be a very carefully written post…

One last thing. One of my friends who helped me back away from my stress ledge said I shouldn’t feel pressure to keep up the blog. I do feel pressure, but it’s from me! This is my journal, and there’s so much to write, I want to remember everything. I’m just letting you read my diary. I keep a list on my phone of topics I want to write about, and it’s cathartic for me to put words to my thoughts in a place I can save them. 

No pictures or video this time… sorry. Next time.