Goddess, I Am.

I’ve sworn to myself never to post stuff on this blog that I didn’t write, but I think I might have to break that oath. Let me share an email that I received from my own mother.

MENTAL HOSPITAL PHONE MENU

Hello, and thank you for calling The State Mental Hospital. Please select from the following options menu:

If you are obsessive-compulsive, press 1 repeatedly.

If you are co-dependent, please ask someone to press 2 for you.

If you have multiple personalities, press 3, 4, 5, and 6.

If you are paranoid, we know who you are and what you want. Stay on the line so we can trace your call.

If you are delusional, press 7, and your call will be forwarded to the Mother Ship.

If you are schizophrenic, listen carefully and a little voice will tell you which number to press.

If you are manic-depressive, it doesn’t matter which number you press. Nothing will make you happy anyway.

If you are dyslexic, press 9696969696969696.

If you are bipolar, please leave a message after the beep, or before the beep, or after the beep. Please wait for the beep.

If you have short-term memory loss, press 9. If you have short-term memory loss, press 9. If you have short-term memory loss, press 9.

If you have low self-esteem, please hang up. Our operators are too busy to talk with you.

If you are menopausal, put the gun down, hang up, turn on the fan, lie down, and cry. You won’t be crazy forever.

If you are blonde, don’t press any buttons. You’ll just mess it up.

This coming week is National Mental Health Care week. You can do your part by remembering to contact at least one unstable person to show you care.

(Well, my job is done. Your turn!)

Great. And she thinks of me. What does that tell you? Even my own mum thinks I’m, umm, unstable. Me and my fine apple bottom will go crawl under a rock now.

I might have neglected to tell everyone this, but Steve and I had a baby. In fact, we’ve had her for about two months now. Everyone, meet Pepper.

Pepper is a slow loris, a kind of primate common in most Southeast Asian countries. She’s about a foot long from head to rump, has short but soft fur, and big bug eyes that can get her anything she wants. In other words, she takes after her father.

Kidding aside, she was found wandering in an obscure Bangkok soi, obviously lost. They brought her to our old landlord, a man known in the area as a keeper of animals. Seriously, the man has several huge aviaries behind the apartment block we used to live in where he keeps about 30 species of birds, including a beautiful hornbill, guinea fowls, wild ducks and chickens, and several peacocks that seem to breed endlessly. He also has several cobras, Burmese pythons, and huge monitor lizards. All these were caught by the locals and brought to him for safekeeping. Indeed, he’s got quite a zoo out there.

But I digress. Naturally, the landlord took Pepper in and kept her in one of the smaller aviaries. She lives with chickens, doves, and the female peacocks and their chicks before they were moved elsewhere. The first time we saw her, we were in love. We considered settling her in our apartment, and we even went as far as doing the research. Since we lived in a one-room studio, however, it just didn’t seem like a good idea. I, for one, wouldn’t know how to deal with the pooping. The baby is, after all, a wild animal not commonly kept as pets, unlike dogs and cats. Besides, her aviary has trees and foliage and undergrowth where she could forage for food.

The boyfriend, fancying himself the next Steve Irwin, immediately took to his fatherly duties seriously. He has since made two shelters for her out of cardboard boxes and my old pillow where she comfortably sleeps during the day as she’s nocturnal. He’s also taken it upon himself to feed the baby in the cage while I stay outside and coo. He does all this, even when she bit him the first night. She likes cat food, milk, and, her favorite, those deep-fried grubs that they sell on the street.

We have since moved to a new apartment a good 6 kilometers away from the old one, yet we still go there about 3 or 4 times a week to feed her. We’ve actually tried buying grubs wholesale and leaving them with the old landlord’s caretakers with specific instructions to feed her one bag a day. Every time we go there, however, the stash always remains untouched. They can’t seem to get it into their heads that the baby is a carnivore, and she doesn’t like bananas. We assume she’s excellent at foraging because she still seems quite chunky, even when we don’t get to feed her everyday.

We’ve been in touch with the Wild Animal Rescue Foundation of Thailand (WARF), a conservation group that rehabilitate lost and captured slow lorises to introduce them back to the wild. The guy in charge, however, couldn’t come to Bangkok and suggested that we take the baby to Ranong ourselves where the rehab center is based. Unfortunately, Ranong is a long way from Bangkok, and we just don’t have time to do it. Neither does the landlord.

We’re hoping to get around to doing it soon as she really looks quite lonely with only chickens and doves for company. It’ll be good for her to be around her own kind. My only concern is transporting her all the way to Ranong. Slow lorises, after all, are a protected species. If we get caught with her, we might be in some serious trouble. Neither of us can speak Thai to save our lives, so we really won’t be able to effectively explain the situation to a potentially farang-hating policeman.

Here’s hoping that the folks at WARF will still take it upon themselves to come get her in Bangkok, or at least meet us halfway. I’ll keep you all posted.

Since I moved here a year ago, not a day goes by that I don’t read from one blog or another about how intellectually inferior the Thais are from the rest of the world. It’s all good reading, but one can never appreciate the magnitude of such claims until one sees it for herself. A scene that I witnessed earlier this evening is a very good example of the average Thai brain’s, umm, capacity.

On the way to dinner, the boyfriend and I stopped by an ATM kiosk to take out some money. As I waited for the guy ahead of me to finish his transaction, I glanced over at the other ATM where two university students were withdrawing 200 baht. I didn’t think much of it because the guy before me had finished, so I stepped up to the machine and did my thing. Done, I stepped away, and the boyfriend took over.

While waiting for him to finish, I managed to glance over at the other ATM again where the same two university students were clearly struggling with their transaction. Curious, I surreptitiously took a peek at what they were up to. They were still trying to withdraw 200 baht, except that the machine had run out of 100 baht bills, as what was apparent from the on-screen message telling them that it was only dispensing 1,000 baht denominations and asking them to enter another amount. They keyed-in 200 baht again, and naturally, the machine returned with the same error. They did this over and over and over and over and over. And just for the record, the on-screen message was both in English AND Thai, so there could be no doubt about what it was trying to say.

By the time the boyfriend finished his transaction and we were leaving the kiosk, they were still at it. Considering the fact that they were already there while the guy ahead of me started his transaction and they were still there when the boyfriend and I finished ours, I’d say they’ve been going around in circles for almost 10 minutes. And these were university students – clearly, with the uniforms they were wearing. Obviously, those two will not be qualifying for any Business Analyst Jobs anytime soon.

They say two heads are better than one. That seems to be true anywhere but in Thailand where two heads don’t even equal a brain.

My hair is phenomenal. Oh, it’s not because it’s pretty and shiny. You won’t be seeing me in a shampoo advert anytime soon. No, my hair is phenomenal mainly because it never seems to run out.

Allow me to explain. My hair falls for no reason. In fact, “fall” is an understatement. My hair literally drops. In clumps. With roots. I would run a hand through my mane or brush it, and end up holding what looks like a dead rat. I estimate that I probably lose about 300-400 full strands every day. Slob that I am, I used to just ignore them when I was still living alone until they sort of gather in one corner, looking like a discarded toupee. Obviously, I can’t do the same now that the boyfriend and I live together. The poor man has tried sweeping and mopping them away, but they still turn up in weird places such as his amplifier and the freezer. Why, if we had a barcode scanner, my hair will probably end up there, too.

He spends at least 20 minutes a day on his hands and knees picking up the ones that didn’t get entangled with the broom one by one. So do I sometimes, but the general upkeep of floors is mainly his responsibility. And before you think I’m a lazy cow, I have my own responsibilities, too, such as doing the laundry.

But I digress. Disposal is an issue. Putting them in with the rest of the rubbish in bins doesn’t work because they somehow escape and scatter with the slightest hint of a breeze. The most effective method, we found, is to throw them into the toilet. That way, they get wet and heavy and don’t blow off. They can be easily flushed away, never to be seen again – something that my mother strongly warned me against. Still, convenience won over sense, so a’dumping in the toilet we went.

That is, until we woke up yesterday with a clogged toilet. After the boyfriend’s hard pumping (it’s not that kind of pumping) and a hell of a lot of those toilet “declogging” liquid things, our toilet is now working normally again. Of course, my hair is the main suspect, though there’s no way of proving that for sure. So just to be on the safe side, I’ve taken to dumping my hair over the balcony with the romantic idea that the wind will blow the strands away to a better place. I suspect our downstairs neighbor is suffering for it.

Of course, I’m very much afraid that I’m going prematurely bald. But after having my scalp repeatedly inspected by anybody brave enough to do so, it seems like I don’t have alopecia, or any other hair loss conditions. And because I have full strands dropping off with the telltale roots, they’re obviously not brittle hair breaking mid-strand. It’s like I’m an overproducing hair mill.

Maybe I should look at donating my hair to charity, or better yet, make a fortune out of selling wigs. Or maybe, I could use the strands in knitting. Hairy socks, anyone?

They say bad things come in three’s. If that’s true, then it looks like we might have one more to go.

On our way home from dinner, the boyfriend and I were waiting for our songthaew to turn up in our usual bus stop. This stop has a bench where we usually settle in for the long wait as the songthaews in this particular route tend to be few and far between. Behind the bench, there’s also one of those wooden platform-cum-beds where motorcycle taxi drivers rest during the day in between trips. Tonight, however, there were no taxi drivers. Instead, there were two bums lolling around on the “bed”, both drunk or stoned or both.

I was a bit wary with having them behind us, but they seemed lost in their own world, so we pretty much just ignored them. We must have been waiting for about 30 minutes when a songthaew across the street unloaded a gang of little boys, probably aged between 9-11. These weren’t nice little boys, mind you, but rather khlongies, a term the boyfriend made up to refer to those awfully grubby people who squat beside the khlongs (canals) and their generally tacky, obtuse, and rude behavior. These little misfits ran across to where we were sitting and started horsing around, disturbing the bums from their chemically-induced stupor.

Next thing we knew, one of the bums was chasing them around, waving around a whiskey bottle, trying to drive the kids away. While the others were running around and laughing their heads off, tormenting the bum in question, one awful little boy stood right in front of – you guessed it! – ME, staring. The boyfriend sort of waved him away. The boy then hollered at the bum and pointed at – you guessed it again! – ME. For no reason. He spoke something in Thai to the bum. I imagine he was trying to get the bum to mug us, or something worse. Thankfully, as the bum advanced on us, bottle in hand, our songthaew turned up. We hurriedly got on.

I shudder to think what could’ve happened if we were there for another minute more. After the “beat-age” a little over a week ago and now this, I’m completely scared to death of dodgy-looking Thai men, and even khlongie children. I will definitely be picking up a can of mace as soon as humanly possible. Or, one of those taser guns. Or, better yet, a cattle prodder. I don’t think I can survive this place on my wolf charm alone.

I find myself hating this place more and more. Fuck, mai pen rai.