Playing God

I flew back to my country last sunday afternoon. I already had my trash packed into my luggage the night before yet I was up early that sunday morning, I usually wake up late sunday mornings.

I only had some oatmeal, bread and cups of coffee for breakfast last sunday, I had been having the hotel’s omelet for breakfast for almost a week that I feel I’d go sick if I had the same morning hors de oeuvre for another week, yet breakfast was the only meal in bangkok where my food wasn’t spicy. I didn't have much to do that sunday anymore so I read the morning news in my room and sunday newspapers are usually better because they’d always put some better story about the lighter side of life than more people getting killed on the front page. There was this article about cloud seeding that was sort of interesting, the article wrote about thailand’s rainmaking project where farmers on the countryside who can’t grow crops because of drought can send a wish list to the government for rain and wait for cloud seeding planes to come and give them rain clouds. It’s more effective than offering dead animals to the skies to some lazy rain god for rain, and weathermen could loose their jobs faster when predicting sunny weather can easily be undone by rainmakers, it was the first time I heard man playing god with the weather.

Anyway I took the plane back to my country around three in the afternoon, I ate and drank some beers up in the plane and slept, I woke up almost at touchdown and as a trademark gesture from the plane crew, stewardess hand out corsages to ladies with their country’s national flower. There was this family across the aisle from where I sat, the husband asked for a corsage for himself from the stewardess, he was trying to strike up a joke up there that he told the stewardess that he needed that corsage for his mother in law, and he was the only person laughing at his line even with his wife and kids around him, it killed me, its those mother in law jokes that you’re supposed to find it funny when you’re doing something thoughtful for your wife’s mother. I could have asked for a corsage myself and the least shut up about it.

I stayed for a day in manila, imer dropped by my hotel the night before I flew back home and he was laughing at how I rated him the highest for alcohol tolerance in this blog a few months back, though we only had a few beers that night. I was also looking forward to going home because they closed down the old airport back home when I was in thailand and I’ll be flying back home in a new airport a couple of kilometers north of our city. I got back home around 8:30 and there wasn’t much to see from the new airport at dark and though I wanted to see how the airport looked like, I wasn’t expecting much since two days ago I was at thailand’s new 6-month old airport too and theirs was like some big hindu space installation that you could get lost in. But anyway the new airport back home is now far better from the old one where I flew from almost two weeks ago, our old airport before seemed like some sweaty bus terminal in the middle of nowhere that right after you got down from the plane, porters gatecrash the terminal and crowd on passengers to let them carry your luggage for robbery prices, and they’d get so disorderly pushing around passengers like they own the airport. And when you get out of the airport, taxi drivers then take turns pestering you to take their cabs, you’d feel like you’re a week-old slab of meat with legs walking out of the airport where these taxi drivers are like flies buzzing all over you.

The new airport just made it felt better to be back home, except that it now takes twice as long to get there from home.

Tales from the Decabiography

8 I love everything spicy

I grew a very big mouth sore on my lower lip last friday and the goddam thing just had to come out when I am taking a flight to bangkok yesterday morning, and if there is something I am looking forward to here in bangkok its eating their great spicy food. I think I have a very good resistance in the scoville scale but hell I just had to have this goddam sensitive mouth sore since last weekend to stop me from getting anything explosive tasting into my mouth. It always happens when I get here, as if the mouth sores are popping out of excitement for spicy cuisine.

I had some things to do in bangkok this week but when I was already about to leave manila, the office back home called that there will be this meeting with this stupid lawyer manager which I had been hoping to come up soon, and hell when it did I was not going to be around. I was going to miss the goddam meeting that it kept messing up in my head up to the time I was already on my seat on the plane. What the heck I tried to make peace with the situation and drank two beers after the plane took off and I went on reading this book I pulled out of a sale back home last sunday, I didn’t know what the book was about really, I went on reading for about 50 pages and I realized that the book’s author is gay and hell he openly wrote about their gay perversions every so often in the story, I tried reading it anyway than bug myself about the meeting back home I was about to miss, though I was wary about the other passengers beside me if they knew the book and think I’m gay and Im flying to bangkok to get transplants or something or be in gay company, there are a lot of their kind around in this place.

When I landed and had my turn at the immigration counter, the officer asked for my boarding pass which I don’t remember being asked from me often in the past. Funny I used my boarding pass to bookmark the pages I was done reading in the book and I just pulled it out and gave it to the officer that I lost track from where I was reading, but I didn’t mind anyway, I wasn’t going back to the book soon or probably even finish it.

I got out from my hotel around six already and there wasn’t much to do at that hour anyway so I just went to some fastfood and eat spicy as how I wanted to write about in the first place. The foodcourt I ate in looked so classy and stylish because it were at some business district and you had all these young urban people eating around in their ties, but the food is pretty cheap though, its those people with their ties that only make it look expensive. There was a sign on the seasoning table that almost sounded like a welcome sign to my taste buds.

I took the note as: everything goes.

The first siamese word I learned years ago is nam which meant water, I learned that word the hard way because I wasn’t acquainted yet with how fiery the food here can get and I just took a mouthful of spices that it left me taste buds burning and asking for anything to rinse it with, I called to the waiter for water and hell he didn’t understand a simple english word like water and the more I couldn’t repeat saying water any longer from my mouth because it was goddam burning. So I had to motion my hand like I was holding some glass and that I’m gulping heavily, and to my relief the waiter exclaimed “oh, nam” and rushed to get me a glassful.

Sea Wolves

They told stories in the news that the third pirates of the carribean movie raked in some grand sum of money only after the couple of days it hit the big screen, so me and my cousins figured out that this must be something great to watch altogether at the break of the week.

Me and my cousins had gone watching some other movie the week before and one of my newly-wed cousin took her husband to join us for the movies, but the problem with this new in-law is that he is taiwanese and every english word doesn’t make any sense to him except hello and paul which is the western name he adopted. So when we went watching a movie with him the week before, all he did inside the theater was eat popcorn and probably wonder what the hell was going on the movie. We did ask him to join us again this week for another movie but he declined saying that the movies here didn’t have any chinese subtitles, like how english movies are probably shown in his country for them gooks to understand. Somebody could have told him why we don’t have chinese subtitles in this country is because there aren’t much monolingual gooks coming to theaters here.

Yet still he joined us again since it was probably more entertaining for him to watch a movie in gibberish and help him learn an english line or two than stay put at his in-laws home that night. I came to him and I wanted to tell him that we were going to see a movie about pirates but I didn’t know how to say pirates in mandarin. Piracy could have been easier because that is what happens when DVDs come in very cheap in the black market that will always have chinese subtitles in it. Anyway I only know 水手 in mandarin which meant sailor, so I told paul that “we’re going to watch a movie about bad sailors who steals from other sailors”, it was chinese rhetoric at its best. My brother then gave me a hint to try saying sea wolves in mandarin to paul hoping it would ring a bell to him but the only thing that made his head rang was the movie poster outside the ticket booth, paul told he has seen the other two earlier movies, yet he's going to watch this one without understanding any goddam thing from the big screen.

The movie went on for about three long hours and most of those three hours were spent on long dialogues, and it wasn’t just the long progressing dialogues that you had to keep up with the story, there was so much twists in the dialogue that screwed up the the whole plot every so often that you couldn’t help but ask what the hell is going on, I could even feel those same barnacles growing at the side of my ears from listening too much. I glanced at paul across the seats and I can see himself more at peace from the whole confusion because there is no chinese subtitles.

The only scene me, paul and every body else found funny in the movie that needed not translation or neither was toilet humor was during this sequence when they had pirates from all around the world to have a get together for the sake of their existence in one table. One pirate who was obviously from the indian ocean because of his sikh fashioned beard held back his speech until keith richards of the rolling stones came out also dressed in a pirate suit when the indian pirate talked and screeched in his funny voice that sounded like a frog was caught in his throat. That was the only goddam thing funny in the movie and a good break from the long dull dialogues next to keith richard in a costume.