Derailed in Seattle

A small postscript to my prospective train adventure and a warning to all who buy tickets online from Amtrak: a week before my departure for San Francisco and two weeks after I bought my ticket online, I went to the train station to pick it up. Only after I signed the receipt for it, did the clerk tell me that mudslides had halted the Coast Starlight until February 15.
Since I need to be there by February 8, this was not news that I wanted to hear. Nor was I thrilled that nobody from Amtrak had notified me that my ticket was now unusable. The clerk limped his way through refunding the purchase to my bank card which I can only hope was done with more efficiency than hitherto shown by Amtrak, and I went home to buy a plane ticket, which would have been far less expensive had I done it a week ago.
So take fair warning--we do not have a civilized train system in this country, and those who run it do not give a damn.

New Train of Thought

Flying in this country has reached the point where it makes traveling by Greyhound look good. I could stand taking off my shoes and using those silly little bottles for shampoo and conditioner if I knew that my flight would be on schedule, that I'd sit in a clean plane, and that the flight attendants would have a little more cordiality than what you might receive from a prison guard at Guantanamo. But since these things have all disappeared as completely as the term "stewardess, " I travel on any U.S. airlines as seldom as possible and have decided that, for my next trip to San Francisco, I'm taking the train.
I know the sole trace of bygone days will be found only in the name of the route, The Coast Starlight, but that is almost enough. I'm sure that the dining car serves Nescafe and that any food will have been rapidly thawed in a microwave before serving. The lounge will have all of the elegance of a MacDonald's with a liquor license, and I'll probably be sitting beside small , insomniac children who are not housebroken.
And yet I'm going to travel through three states at a pace that will be leisurely enough that I can savor the different landscapes. Nobody will tell me to take off my shoes. And there will be a liquor license in that ugly lounge.
Call me crazy but I'm looking forward to this--and if it turns out to be dreadful, at least it will be a good story.

Letting Go

I never feel as though I'm truly leaving to live in another place until I begin to give things away. It's become a ritual over the years, one that's painful and challenging and absolutely essential. Although I admire people who are able to sell their possessions, I'm too attached to the objects that make my life pleasant to be able to watch strangers rifle through my treasures at a sidewalk sale.
Months before I buy my airline ticket, I have decided what books go to which friend, and who will get my favorite chair. It's a lot like making a will and then being your own estate executor, or (less morbidly) hosting a potlatch, and once I've decided who gets what, the whole process is a lot of fun.
This time I have a cat and he has made this undertaking a bit more difficult--giving him away is somewhat more complicated than presenting someone with a lamp that they've admired in the past. He's a cat with issues, having been removed from his home five years ago to wait in a pet store cage for someone to take him and become his willing slave, which I did and which I am. He's handsome and imperious and an attention-sponge, not unlike, come to think of it, every relationship I've ever been in with males of my own species. I adore him, of course.
He does not, however, travel well. The mere sight of his very expensive, deluxe cat carrier is enough to turn him into the Invisible Feline for hours, and the pitiful cries that he can produce during a brief bus ride are heartrendingly obnoxious. The thought of spending sixteen hours with him in a confined space with other passengers who are trying to sleep their way to Bangkok is enough to curdle my blood and makes me wonder if the people sitting next to me will kill me or the cat first. Then of course there are all of the viruses and parasites waiting for fresh feline blood once we arrive at our destination, which is the reason why I will be going alone.
My sister has offered to give the monster his next home, thereby proving that blood is indeed thicker than the most expensive bottled water and that I am blessed in being part of her family. It's the ideal solution and the cat and I are both lucky devils. The night that she made her magnanimous offer is the first one in which I had an untroubled sleep for a long time--until around 4 a.m. when I woke up with the realization that my sister lives in Alaska so the cat and I still have the opportunity to win hearts and minds on a mournful airlines flight--but not, thank God, for sixteen hours.

Nobody Ever Told Me

The past year was one of the most exciting in my life, as I finished writing my first book and preparing it for publication. The day that I received a check for what I'd done was one of the best highs I'd ever felt, while working with a copyeditor was the equivalent of several years worth of formal training. And then--thud.
I was never a woman who suffered, or could even understand, post-partum depression. How anyone could feel dismal about having an uncomfortable lump in their body transformed into a miniscule human being was incomprehensible to me, until now.
Now that Tone Deaf in Bangkok is completed, and belongs to my publisher rather than to me, I feel desperately bereft and in a state of mild panic. (That this state of mind has descended upon me during the season of deepest darkness and formalized festivities is the maraschino cherry that tops the hot fudge sundae.)
When I finally hold the printed book in my hands, my feelings may change, but who knows? At that point it will have become the creation of a designer, a photographer and a copyeditor--no longer those pieces of paper that were mine all mine. It's like giving birth and having your child grow up and away from you in a matter of months.
And then of course there's the challenge that comes with finishing a first book--can I do it again? Now I understand those women who had stair-step children--they did it because they could--and now it's time to see if I can. Nothing will make me happier than the process of falling in love with an idea, thinking it over, and turning out many, many sheets of white paper covered in print. The rest, as Raymond Carver said, is gravy.

follic symbols

Okay, I promise not to be the sort of dreary old broad who bemoans the aging process. My philosophy truly will be if it's that bad, shut up and make enough money to get plastic surgery. However, today for the first time in my life, I looked in the mirror and wished I were a man.
From a physical point of view, I've always felt sorry for men, and the first time that I read about phallus envy, I was honestly confused. Why anybody would want to have such an obviously vulnerable and inconvenient appendage was well beyond my thrteen-year-old comprehension. When I grew older and my level of sexual knowledge became higher, it was still blazingly obvious that when it came to reproductive equipment, women had every advantage, except of course for cramps.
Men also have to wear ugly colors, can't accentuate their better features with make-up, and are discouraged from bursting into tears when they're enraged. They lack the shopping gene, and are often in situations where they have to watch football games. Although I enjoy them, I never wanted to be one of them, until today.
This morning, when I looked in the mirror and saw tiny lines that are beginning to emerge above my upper lip, and the distinct signs of a sagging chin, I realized that these were things that would be impossible to hide--unless I were a man. If I were male and saw these unmistakable signs of age, I would be able to shrug, put my shaver in a dark corner of my closet, and begin to grow a lovely crop of facial hair that would completely obscure my problem areas.
So there we are--men grow beards and moustaches, women either sag or get chin tucks. And for the first time in my life, faced with this indisputable truth, I'm suffering genuine envy of the other gender.

A Special Place in Hell

It's a peculiar little room that we all have created in the very darkest corner of our minds. Mine is accessorized with mildew and car alarms that only go off in the dead of night and the scent of cheap cologne and lots of chartreuse. The lighting is very bright and very bad and the roof leaks. It's a cold, ugly basement room with tiny windows. It's my personal vision of hell and it's where I enjoy mentally putting people who annoy me.
They of course change depending on what I'm doing and where I live. When I lived in Alaska they were women who felt that being seen in public wearing down parkas, caps made from handspun malemute hair, and moon boots was acceptable behavior. When I was in Bangkok they were security guards whose grip on life apparently depended upon constantly blowing their little tin whistles. As a bookseller, I sent to my little private hell everyone who told me, "But I can get it cheaper from Amazon."
But none of these people occupy my special place in hell anymore. They can't. There's no room for them there. That space is crowded with a new breed of transgressor, and I am one of them (although I'm trying hard to change.)
My hideous little private hell is now reserved for everybody who reads another person's blog post without commenting on it. There are few things worse than going to statcounter.com, discovering all of the new people on the map that have come to your blog, and then discovering that you'll never know what they thought or who they were because they didn't leave a comment.
It doesn't matter, I've discovered, what you say. I'd be grateful for "You suck" or "What the hell? I was trying to find out where to buy Glenn Close sunglasses." (For those who were searching for the movie about being deaf in Bangkok--it's the Pang Brothers' Bangkok Dangerous--great movie and I hope you can rent it from Netflix.) But now that I know how little it takes to make a blogger happy, I'm leaving comments all over the place. I have to. I need to
make room in my special place in hell for all of you who fail to leave comments on mine. I hope that you enjoy mildew and chartreuse.

Get Over It

Colds usually mean nothing more serious than spending more money than I would like on Kleenex, but every once in a while, one of them hits me with the force of a John Deere tractor and turns my life into the week of the living dead. Faced with the conventional wisdom of "Get lots of sleep, drink lots of water," I buy lemon grass, lime leaves, Thai chilis, a jar of chili paste and make soup, spicy-hot enough to make me hiccup, slather my skin with Tiger Balm and do my best to burn the virus out.
In Bangkok, I did exactly the opposite. When a monster cold laid me flat, my friend Rod would come over with Alka-Seltzer for colds (unpurchasable in Thailand, brought from the States, and hoarded for emergency use only) and a bowl of Campbell's chicken noodle soup, bland, salty, and completely comforting.
Maybe these momentary health lapses of mine are simply exaggerated attacks of homesickness for one of my two homes, and are cured only by edible memories of whichever place I happen to be away from. It's something to keep in mind when I'm packing to return to Bangkok next year--make room for the Campbell soup cans and boxes of Alka-Seltzer.

The Globalization of Levis

"The whole world is becoming one homogenized mass, with everybody eating at MacDonald's and wearing Levis," is a complaint I frequently hear from people who wouldn't be caught dead eating a Big Mac or wearing jeans that cost under two hundred dollars. When I'm presented with this dire assessment of exotic cultures crushed by capitalistic juggernauts, I do my best to look sympathetic, stop listening, and remember my friend, Somsak.
A Bangkok boy born and bred, Somsak has style that James Dean would have envied--highly polished motorcycle boots, teeshirt, sideburns, carelessly held cigarette, and the best-fitting Levis that I have ever seen on any human being.
"Where do you buy your jeans?" I asked him, after many weeks of envying their perfection.
"Every year when I go to Paris, I buy a pair of Levis. They fit me, but you know, they're never quite right. So when I come back to Bangkok, I take them to my tailor, and he copies them. He makes me six pairs of Levis, just like the ones that I bought in Paris but better, because they're made just for me. Every year I have new Levis made when I return from France, and I put the ones from last year away for my sons, so they'll have them when they grow up."
"But your jeans even have the leather Levis label, and the little red tag. How does your tailor make those?"
At that point Somsak looked at me with the benign pity that only a Thai person can convey properly, and that never fails to make me feel as though I should go away to drool quietly in a corner. "Oh, Janet," he said gently, "those things are very easy to buy in Bangkok."

Living Without Limes

I live in a country with so few flavors that at times I feel as though I’m wandering through a landscape that is made up solely of primary colors. Imagine a place where everything is red, yellow or blue, and you’ll know how I feel about having my tongue enveloped only by sweet, salty, hot, and sour, with a dash of garlic. It’s like eating baby food with the taste kicked up a couple of notches, completely unsatisfying, which is what probably accounts for the vast obesity epidemic in America.
While I’m in exile from the food that I love best, I spend a lot of time eating in Thai restaurants, and slaving over Southeast Asian cookbooks, with lackluster results. As anyone who has lived in Thailand will tell you, eating Thai food in the U.S. is like eating with a condom on your tongue.
Americans eat the way that they have sex, with safety taking precedence over sensation. The dubious benefit is that any poverty-stricken peasant living on a dollar a day in the third world eats better, and probably has better sex, than anybody who lives in the U.S.
I recently saw a picture of a woman in Yangon, sitting near a road, selling limes, and I wanted to cry. She had what I cannot buy, a green orb with bumpy skin that is smaller than a ping pong ball. When it is cut open and squeezed over a plate of food, the lime emits a lovely fragrance and a flavor that is a mixture of sour, and a fresh, tangy sweetness. For me, living without this is like living without salt, in a culinary world gone flat, and I hunger in the land of plenty.

Myanmar on Our Minds

Donald Gilliland is a writer, photographer and Bangkok bookshop owner who has spent a lot of time in Myanmar, with his last visit a week before the protests began. His weblog http://BangkokDazed.com is where I have gone every day for information and background about this beautiful and misunderstood country, and I cannot recommend it highly enough for people who want to go beyond the newsflash. Donald's photographs are worth thousands of words of political analysis in showing the heart of a city that he loves, and his stories about the people he has met and made friends with are both affirming and heartwrenching. For a glimpse of the people behind the politics, there is no better guide than the talented and generous Mr. Gilliland--go and see for yourself.