10%

I didn’t get the best perspective of Bangkok during my week-long orientation. There was no time during the day to explore, and by the time I ate dinner and hung out a little after classes were done, I was exhausted. There were 64 teachers total being trained during orientation, and while I like to think I’m a lover of life and people in general, every group situation I’ve been in in the last few years has led me to the 10% rule. For me, it’s a given that I will love the shit out of 10% of the people present in a group population, which means, usually, the other 90% I could do without. My first day of orientation, I felt like the bumblebee girl at the end of the video—Sweeeeeet, here is a room full of people that love to read and travel and talk, people that are open-minded and funny and self-secure. I was ready to take back the 10% rule! Not so fast, big girl. After the first few days, once people got over the shock of a new place, default personalities emerged and bam, the rule was back. Most of the people training to be teachers are fresh out of college and it seemed a little like some of them hadn’t left, and by that I mean some of the folks with whom I interacted seemed more like the idiots you would find on Real World Thailand than people that actually care about why we’re actually here. Preachy preachy, I know, but my problem wasn’t that these fools EXISTED, I’m prepared to meet douchebags everywhere I go for the rest of my life-my problem was that I had to spend every structured hour with them for a week straight. The upside of the ten percent rule is that, true to the numbers, I fell in with a group of sweet-ass ladies that will most likely keep me sane during the week and will be travel friends for weekend trips. So Bangkok orientation, not a total bust.

Land of the hidden weener...

Sawatdeeeee Ka! Sorry it’s taken me so long to start posting...it has been a crazy seven days and I think I’m still mentally catching up-So I have officially been here for one week, most of which was spent in Bangkok, in a conference room in my hotel, sitting through eight to nine hours of classroom/language/culture training from Sunday to Thursday. The first perk? I fell in LOVE with my orientation room mate, which came as a relief grande given my history of kill-yourself luck where random room assignments are concerned (everyone remember the Amanda Carl debacle first semester at Delaware? Ask me about her sometime). The second perk? They could not stop feeding us. Literally. The hotel was really nice (check out the website here) and so we would have a breakfast buffet every morning and lunch buffet every afternoon, assortments of food that covered the gamut of Thai culinary delights. As if the all-you-can-eat nature of the first two meals was not enough, we also had two 15 minute “tea-times” as breaks during lessons. Tea was served alongside two small snacks, which differed everyday. My favorite snacks usually had some kind of sticky rice in them (and no, I don’t care to know exactly what makes it sticky, I just like it because it reminds me of rice pudding) and my least favorite were the rolls with wieners hidden in them. Yes. This is the land of the hidden weener-Thai people evidently can’t get enough of hot-dog-esque looking meat products, and aside from serving them on sticks on the street, they also hid them inside innocent looking rolls next to my cup of tea. Not pleased with that surprise. I tried almost everything once, and then I mentally decided that I’m not going to eat any kind of red meat or pork while I’m here: too difficult to know exactly what it is and I love my puppy too much to chance consuming one of her kin, so fish and vegetables fo me. Thai mystery meat, no thank you.


Surplus of calories consumed and ass-numbing hours spent in the same seat aside, orientation was useful in giving me the confidence I need to rock in the classroom here. To teach English as a second language (in a country where I am veryyy slowly learning the native language for the first time) is really intimidating. My reflex when I don’t know how to say something here is to resort to Spanish…smart, I know, but the ball-kicker when I try to think about how I learned to speak Spanish in high school is that English and Spanish are both Romance languages…in many cases, the root words for meaning are the same. There’s no parallel for a tonal character language like Thai-The sound and writing of it is as different from English as possible. One of our orientation teachers, Mike, did this great demonstration where he spoke nothing but German to us for a full forty minutes. He wrote sentences in German on the board and taught us how to introduce ourselves and count to ten. Again, German and English have a similar root language so in some cases that made it a little easier to discern what he was saying, but the point of the exercise was to show the importance of energy as a foreign language teacher. You have to be able to exaggerate your words and actions-movement and gestures are paramount in communication when there is a language barrier (minus the visual faux pas I’m pretty sure I committed when I asked for drinking straws in the grocery store this morning and mimed something that was probably a little more questionable). So boo-ya-I finally have somewhere positive to channel all of my crazy gestures and inability to sit still. My first official day of teaching is Tuesday, so I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

Appreciating the bumblebee girl OR How I came to be the well-adjusted Thailand-bound woman writing to you today...

The unspoken agreement fostered by our relationship here, gentle, sweet-ass readers, is such that sometimes I'm going to have to ask you to look or listen to things to get you in the mindset for my ramblings...in this particular moment, I'm going to need you to watch this video.

(Two sidenotes....1) This video still warms my heart like Christmas morning and puppies and imagining a different ending to The Notebook and 2) I'm pretty sure the opening sequence is how I learned to dance...yeah.)

Okay so for most of you taking precious time to read this, my humble, homely, awkward beginnings are no secret (especially thanks to the photographic blackmail tendencies of Mrs. Laffey...). In my neurotic selfhood, I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to figure out exactly how to start this blog. I'm no stranger to this problem-I faced it in my days as a pre-teen aspiring journalist. Every-time I got a new notebook, I would gape at the first blank page for days, overwhelmed by the sheer task of a clever beginning. Should I lead-off with the fool-proof but unoriginal “Dear Diary?” AND did I want it to be a diary or….a JOURNAL? Did "Dear Journal" belong in the running as well? Was I cool enough to skip the introductions altogether and just write? Did I want to chronicle the events of my days (busy as they were when I wore a bra a little less than I do now) or did I want to express my thoughts stream of consciousness style? (Had I gone this route, I could have been the next James Joyce. Damn.) Eventually the stress of the whole deal led me to abandon diary-writing altogether and instead live inside my beginning-less and endless head. Sometimes I lose sleep imagining the pure genius of my mind that I’ve abandoned recording over the years because of my neuroses. Examining this process now, I realize that I probably should have been in therapy: the inception of my life as a chronic over-thinker…a trait that manifests itself into over-speaking as well…see numerously unnecessary sentences above and below. Anyway, knowing that I wanted to start this blog before I went away, I’ve been searching the last few weeks for an inspirational opening, a tone-setter for writerly magnificence, a prologue to literary orgasm, if you will. With that I give you….the bumblebee girl.

The bumblebee girl is my personal hero because her role in the video explains the way that I would chart the history of my relationship with myself. She rocks steady on her own awkwardness in the beginning of the video, and what does the infinite wisdom of Blind Melon show us is the reward for rocking steady on your own awkwardness? You discover a bunch of other life-loving weirdos that rock steady on your AND their awkwardness. Forget Mr. Rogers, and the teachings of the big JC-I’m raising my kids in the neighborhood and church of Blind Melon. I’ll find a way to get around the lead singer’s drug-induced death. Small matter. People KNOW this girl. She is an icon. We could all take a lesson. Ask anyone alive and cognizant in the 90s about the bumblebee girl: at the very least, you get a smile and a nod. They may not know remember the band or the song, but that little woman holds a place in everyone’s heart. Why? Because we've all been there, awkward in our heads or bodies, searching for a little understanding and maybe some drag queens to dance with. She's the ultimate expression of total self-comfort, a status that I failed to understand for quite some time. There are a few reasons for this, but enmeshed in all of them is my relationship with the idea of home.


In my pre-college departure naivete, I struggled with the meaning of home. I loved my family and friends, of course, but the idea of home in my mind was a growth-stifling vise to be overcome or escaped. When I actually left for college, my attitude toward home was a big old mental middle finger….and I quickly experienced a mental crash and burn. Boom. Emotional cataclysm, check. I recoiled from the harshness of my original ideals, felt a little guilty for my disloyalty, and used home to rebuild the parts of myself I had lost in the crash. In my final year of college, I felt the tremors of that same defiance…a wanderlust geared toward proving to myself that I could exist separate from the familiarity and comfort of home. Security blanket be damned, I’m woman hear me roar, blah blah blah, so bing bang boom, let’s teach English in Thailand for a year! It’s amazing to me how even now, I can look at myself and the way my brain worked in February and say, “Damn Mis of February past, grow up,” but alas, I am the most work ever of a work in progress human being. (Ask my mom-she will readily concur.)

The Thailand thing, as it turned out but remains to be seen, was a great idea that I approached in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons. The visceral second guessing that eventually got a strangle hold on my heart is proof of that. Here is what I’ve come to realize, and I pride myself on this as what is possibly my most mature life outlook to date…there ain’t no harm in needing to refuel your tank of self at the home pump. I’m LUCKY to have the kind of home that I don’t want to be away from for a year. (It’s taking all my willpower and desire for some shred of decency to not reference a household or two that might have engendered more of a desire for escape…the Menendezes, the Bobbitts….oops, did it anyway…)

I’m LUCKY to know the kind of people that I don’t want to be away from for a year. I have the world’s (Thailand included, and I know this with certainty having yet to set foot there) GREATEST family and friends, and I sure as hell don’t need a year to prove to myself that I can live without these people, because while I’m sure I can, that’s a year of memories and life-loving that I’ll never get back. Limited as life already is, that’s not a chunk of time I can put my heart into. So I am going to Thailand for a six month adventure, the most ballsy thing I’ve done in my life thus far (so says the lady with good faith BEFORE she contracts malaria). Why can I do it? Well, I could wax Cosmo about learning to be my own best friend and blah blah, but we’ve all heard that and it doesn’t quite illuminate the truth. The reason that I am so psyched on going away, the reason that I’m so stoked to spend six months as my own security blanket, is because I have the kind of home (and remember, home for me equals all of you fools taking the time to read this baby) that has made me a person that I love to be around, a person I’m comfortable being alone with, a person I love. So thank you in advance to everyone to whom I refer, be you internet savvy enough to read this or otherwise. I love love love love you and I’ll do my best to make you proud (and in the meantime, I’ll be making the bumblebee girl proud. Man, I would love to meet and be friends with her…)