One day

I have just had one of the most interesting days, but it does not conform well to a single story or journal entry. I am bound to forget it all if I do not write it down. Here is a chronological listing without detailed explanation.

-Woke up and tried to figure how many minutes it would be before the alarm went off.
-Showered.
-Took out the garbage.
-Bicycled to work.
-Watched my students suffer through an English exam, while they tried and failed to discreetly cheat off each other.
-Wrote two e-mails to some Italians.
-Listened to the department heads of the hotel talk about Cambodian food and karaoke for 10 minutes.
-Ate some scrambled eggs and a croissant with brie. Drank a glass of fresh orange juice.
-Gave some weak platitudes to comfort my general manager, who found out, via phone text, that her dog just died.
-Met an attractive Khmer woman from an organization that specializes in reducing dangers to children, specifically for street children and victims of trafficking. Set up a time for the organization to provide training to the staff to make sure that the hotel is aware of how to act in the face of child abuse.
-Drank a glass of water.
-Walked to the nearby children’s hospital.
-Saw dozens of sick children, mostly waiting in the lobbies and hallways.
-Sat on a bench.
-Filled out a form that says I do not share needles or engage in risky sex.



-A doctor poked me with a needle attached to a bag.
-Donated some blood.
-Received a free hospital t-shirt, some crackers, and a coke.
-Met a young German medical student on a month of practical learning.
-Posed for some photographs.
-Resumed work.
-Stopped working to meet a young Dutch woman who found me on the Couchsurfing website, but neglected to e-mail me to tell me she might stop by.
-Carried out a nice conversation and exchanged contact information to meet again at a later time.
-Met some Canadians who were donating a house to our village projects.
-Ate lunch, which included my favorite Khmer soup – the one with pickled lime and chicken.
-Wrote some e-mails to set-up a meeting on Monday.
-Ordered two bags of rice for a village visit.
-Ordered five bicycles for a different village visit.
-Organized my team to practice games for a staff party.
-Watched my teammates try to dance in traditional Khmer-style.
-Tried on some second-hand women’s clothing in preparation for a drag contest.
-Had two very attractive women from the spa apply make-up, something which had not happened since I was in a musical performance of Annie in the fourth grade.
-Was amazed to see the effects that foundation has on hiding the roughness of skin.
-Was taken aback by seen myself with mascara for the first time.
-Was bored.
-Was reaffirmed in the belief that women waste far too much time making themselves up every day, and yet more appreciative of the fact that they do
-Tried on high heels for the first time since I was dressed up like a girl at my grandmother’s house by my sisters and cousin.
-Was told by four guys that “girls walk like this”, where “this” was their demonstration.
-Washed off the make-up.
-Accidentally put soap in my eyes trying to get off the eyeliner.
-Looked in the mirror a fifth time to confirm that my face had indeed reverted from the drag-queen appearance.
-Met with my low-performing students.
-Told a young woman that if she didn’t improve her effort and performance that I would drop her from the program.
-Met with a rural teacher.
-Talked about buying student uniform and ways to keep track of supplies in a school that has no doors and palm leaves for walls.
-Met with some Americans who live in London and were joining the village visit the following day.
-Ordered some school supplies.
-Started writing this post.
-Looked around facebook and livejournal.
-Met a young man from Malaysia whom I had been in contact through Couchsurfing and treated him to dinner.
-Ate some fried ice cream.

Now I am ready to go to bed, but I am the manager-on-duty for the evening, so I will be here until 10 o’clock, waiting and hoping that nothing goes wrong. Tomorrow, a new day approaches. I can only anticipate it will also be interesting and exciting, but I do not anticipate that I will write another entry exactly like this one.


- Finished this post.

Throwing Down/Up

Prior to this recent stint in SE Asia, I have had the opportunity to experience food poisoning once. Since July of last year, I have repeated the experience three times, most recently on Sunday. In spite of eating a wide variety of foods – water beetles, cow hooves, and fermented fish to name a few– each time I have been poisoned the culprit came from a Western restaurant (I also became mildly sick on my own preparation of macaroni and cheese).

I am not sure if this because my stomach has become accustomed to very spicy foods cooked in lime juice and has forgotten how to digest foods like salads, or maybe this is some sort of cosmic retribution for preferring Asian foods to Western foods. Regardless of the etiology, I wanted to share something that has never happened to me before with an illness: This food poisoning had a gender.

I am not sure how an illness can have a gender. In this case, it was female. Perhaps, I was simply associating the severe stomach cramps with the waitress that I was hitting on earlier in the evening. Conversation was actually going quite well up until the point when this anthropomorphized queasiness set in. I was still able to get the waitress’ name, address, whether she was single, and the next time she was working before I needed to head back to my home and spend some time with my porcelain loveseat.

I tried to sleep the pain off, but that wasn’t much of a solution. Around 1 o’clock in the night, I remember distinctly thinking that there was a small woman kicking from the inside of my stomach. Around 1:30, I recall that the mental imagine of a female kick-boxer also included screaming. I finally verbalized the gender persona around 2:30, while I was clutching the toilet seat, saying to no one in particular, “Get the f**k out, you f**king bitch!” a few seconds before gagging myself with my index and middle fingers.

Sure enough, the bitch left. Granted, it took about four or five times, but sometime things like this take time to break off.

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In happier news, I will be returning to the United States on May 29th. I think I will stop in the Bay Area for a few days in transit, before heading to Seattle, but I need to figure a few things out first, like who will actually be there when I am. In January, both my sisters were living there. By May, I doubt either will be.

Then it will be onto Seattle, where I intended to live it up like a kid on summer vacation for four weeks. Except unlike a kid on summer vacation, I can drink legally, I am not going to camp, and I will probably do my summer reading. However, like a kid on summer vacation, I will be staying at my parents’ house and complaining about how the summer weather isn’t ideal enough.