my favorite parts of thailand: forest wots and tunnels

My first day in Thailand I had to kill some time while my sister was teaching at the university, so I went to a forest wot down the street from where my sister lives.

The name of it escapes me now, but I'm sure Heidi can fill me in the next time she is reading my blog.

At any rate, in retrospect, it was my favorite of all the temples that I visited in Thailand, owing mainly to the fact that it lacked anything covered in gold, was relatively abandoned on the afternoon I visited, and had a lake, by which I could sit and ponder to my heart's content, while feeding the mysterious monster-like fish (below) living in its depths with a bucket of fish pellets helpfully provided by the temple's monks (for, of course, a small donation of 10 baht).



Several of the trees at the wot were adorned with pieces of cloth and sticks. I thought perhaps that anthropomorphizing things like trees and dogs, who all seemed to be wearing odd scraps of fabric, even the strays, was a kind of Thai ritual.

But, I asked the monk during monk chat, and he said that the sticks, leaned up against the aging tree trucks, had to do with supporting the longevity of relatives. And I'm still unclear what the cloth is for, but I saw it on trees all over Thailand, so I'll assume it was important.





The temple also had a series of dark tunnels, supposedly carved out in the 13th century by monks, but which were renovated or finished or perhaps actually started in the late 19th century.

The tunnels were nice, and in the darkness one could sit and stare at faintly lit Buddha statues and light candles without feeling too much like a tourist, as they were mostly abandoned by all, except some of the local wildlife.

Above the tunnels, there was a large outside temple, half-forgotten on a patch of scrubby grass surrounded by sloping woods.

I walked around it for a little while, and sat on the stone wall behind it before lighting several candles, which I think I wrongly approached from the perspective of someone who typically only lights candles on birthdays, or when motivated by the opulence of stained glass windows in Catholic cathedrals.

Still, I watched the flame flicker and blow in the wind, and garnered the kind of satisfaction that must signify a kind of faith in a larger unknown forces from watching the fire spark back to life after almost being extinguished several times.

I also felt compelled to take a picture of this flower, which was growing out of the temples rock face. I'm not sure what it meant, if anything at all, but I liked it on the most basic of aesthetic levels.



The temple also had what seemed to be a junk heap of broken Buddha statues and other kinds of mislaid relics. On a small scale it looked kind of what I imagine a city ravaged by war might look like, but it was also kind of serene, to see the pieces of holy things, broken and misshapen, all collected together in one place, not wasted or forgotten, but revered still.



The last thing that I did before leaving was wander through the temple's museum. I seem to remember reading something in a travel guide about the art having been painted by the temple's monks.

It was vastly different from art I would expect monks to have created. While some of it looked appropriately Buddhist, others looked like murals that could have been painted on Guam, or included references to Christianity, which I honestly couldn't tell if they were ironic or not.

My favorite two images were a painting of a wheel, which so completely reminded me of tarot that I had to take a picture of it, and an image (below) that I think proves even monks watch Battlestar Galactica. (That's sort of a joke).

a chat with a monk

My first day here, Heidi decided to take us to one of the temples for a ritual called “monk chat.”

From what I can tell, it’s sort a cross between an English lesson for the monks, and a sort of Buddhist version of the Scientology stress tests administered in the New York City subways.

Buddhism not involving any extraterrestrial deities bringing enlightenment from planets made up by a failed sci-fi writer (I think anyway), and also being sort of in need of advice, if not, perhaps, a confessional, I decided to chat with a monk.

My monk’s name was Kavi. He was 23 and from Burma. He had been training to be a monk since he was 12, I think. He said he left home then, and returns home to his family so infrequently that they often didn’t recognize him. He wore a pair of thin-rimmed glasses, which I think he exhaustedly took off at some point during our two-hour conversation.

I don’t really know if you’re supposed to ask monks for relationship advice. I sort of think you aren’t. But, after running the gamut of initial knee-jerk journalistic questions, I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

So, I told him about my life, and about the decisions that I have made recently – to leave my life in New York and to start a new one in Guam. And I think, in typical misguided fashion, I was seeking some kind of sign from him about the choices I am facing, and guidance toward the path I should choose.

I realized very quickly, however, that telling a monk, who has eschewed all worldly and emotional entanglements on a path toward enlightenment, about the ways in which I have done the exact opposite, and lived to find happiness through people and things and new places, was not going to get me the answer, or any answer, that I wanted.

Instead, he told me the basic principles of Buddhism, about how life is suffering, and that love is suffering. And that the more people you love, the more suffering you will undoubtedly have.

And he told me that everything changes. And that I cannot live in the past. And that he tries to live in the here and now, with no attachment to things and people he has loved in other days.

I knew all this vaguely, having a very cursory understanding of Buddhism, from like, having read Siddhartha in high school.

And to some degree that is very attractive, to give up past things and live in the moment.

I don’t really think Buddhism is about living in the moment, however. I think it is about transcending the moment and getting to a place where you no longer feel or want or need or love or cry.

And my current relationship drama notwithstanding, I like all those things. I am greatly attached to feeling and wanting and crying and missing things and people.

And I have made a lot of mistakes, undoubtedly, because I have sought out those things with impatience and a flurried impulse toward self-gratification at the cost of many things. And in those moments, the days I have lived with other people, marveling at the world and feeling loved, I have found a kind of peace that I never really thought possible.

So maybe I will be paying for it karmacally, in this life or the next. But I am not sure that in this life, at least, there is any enlightenment worth having that does not come with pain and love and the impulse to connect with other minds and bodies.

The monk also told me that no meetings are accidental. And that people meet again and again, in different lives.

And to some degree, I feel like lives must be like days. And if that is in any way true, then the people we love will always come back to us.

So, while I am waiting to once again be reunited with my love forlorn dog, now buried underneath a sapling tree in my parents’ backyard in Nebraska, I will also trust that no love is lost, just changed.

And maybe on another day, things will work out differently.

same same

I don’t know if Thailand is one of those places where western tourists go to find themselves. Even if it is, I doubt Chiang Mai, a bustling, polluted urban center, where university students and dreadlocked backpackers share exhaust-spewing red trucks to hotspots around the city, is the place to go for that kind of thing.

I certainly can’t pretend that my experience here is one of particularly revelatory nature.

Since I’ve arrived, I’ve mostly been following my little sister around through markets and temples, eating frequently at a chic expat-friendly vegetarian restaurant with a quaintly misspelled English name, buying funky used dresses at the one vintage clothing store that will fit my massive European frame, and getting lost, fairly regularly, as my sister tries to navigate the grid-like moat surrounding the old city.

She’s teaching English here, at the university, with her boyfriend. Like most 22-year-olds, she is just starting the process of setting up the rest of her life, and making decisions about who she wants to be and where she wants to go in her life.

She has a cluster of adult friends, some young like her, some older. And they invite her to dinner parties and for cocktails. And she rides around on the back of a motor scooter with her slight boyfriend, a sandy-blond-haired poet with a lilting, throaty voice that pleasantly winds its way into conversations like a piece of string between your fingers.

They live in this abandoned, too big, almost-mansion on a quiet little road near the university. The house is full of all sorts of remnants of the adult lives previously led here, Teak furniture that was here when they moved in, a grand wooden staircase, and a second-floor balcony, which overlooks a still fairly well-kept rose garden. And it is full of little kid things brought by the seven barely adult college graduates now inhabiting the place. There’s a hookah in the living room, a (presumably) ironic poster of an animated basketball movie from the 1990s starring Michael Jordan, plastic deck chairs and scattered, opened bottles of wine on the veranda, as well as a place in the backyard where drunken bonfires have been built – I am told.

We are six years apart, my sister and I. And I have always shared a particularly fraught sisterly relationship with her -- as I been both more motherly than my other sisters toward her, owing perhaps to the fact that we were born on almost the exact same day -- while I have also been somehow less prepared, less grown-up, and ultimately less decisive about the life I want to live than our other siblings.

She resents me -- because I am older and tell her what to do when I barely know what to do with myself.

And because I make her cry, unintentionally of course, whenever I call into question her ability to handle things by herself.

And still, I think I must also be the sister she most relates to, in some ways, as we share a sort of pathological disorganization, a wandering spirit that seeks chaos over order, and the occasionally self-destructive need for independence that I am often quick to lecture her about, despite my own impulsive tendencies.

It's funny now to be here, at the intersection of several emotional crises in my own life. I have typically made a mess, or several messes, of things in my life. And instead of being the older sister with wisdom and advice for her -- I am seeking a kind of reassurance for her that I cannot give myself.

Seeing her newly in love, giddy with the prospects of setting up a house and traveling to far-off places, I am understanding for the first time the difference between 22 and 28.

I have made mistakes, but those bother me less, as I have typically learned from them, and honestly, they make better blog posts than anything I could make up.

But it’s the choices, from all the accumulated days that I have lived since I was 22 and first seeking independence, love, happiness and my dreams, that one way or another have brought me to the place that I am.

And it’s those choices that I am carrying with me here -- to a place where I thought at the very least I would clear my head and see straight away from the multiple lives I am a part of.

I’m not quite sure how that is working out so far.

An Open Letter to Grace the Cat...

Dear My Cat,

I met you on the top floor of an East Village walk-up, during a particularly ill-conceived group research session lacking internet, functional computers and a well-defined mission.

What little work I may have gotten done, had the internet been working, you prevented by sashaying over to me, with your low-hanging stomach and train-like purring, head-butting me until I gave you attention.

This was the first time I considered that you and I might be destined for each other, your neediness generally matching a level of aggressive placation that I had become accustomed to providing all of my pets.

You came home with me a few weeks later, and poured out of a rickety cat carrier covered in dandruff, or, it seemed to me at the time, dust from neglect.

The first weeks were hard. You didn't speak for days. You slept in the closet. You didn't trust me, or Keith -- who wanted to send you back home to He Who Shall Not Be Named, whose phone number I conveniently misplaced for several crucial weeks.

You purred and purred at night in our faces, and scratched too early and often for food. And generally you seemed to have a miserable and discontented disposition.

But you grew to love us, and trust us. And after a while it became clear that you weren't miserable and discontented permanently, but had just become used to unhappiness over time.

At night I would come home and find you waiting, shyly in the closet, for someone who would feed you and pet you.

And while I watched bad scifi (Syfy) or jittered at my computer, you were always there.

And you trusted us when we left that eventually we would always return.

Until one day, I left and didn't come back. And then Keith put you in your case and drove you far away.

This was not a decision I made lightly, but I made it, nonetheless. And I am sorry.

That doesn't matter to you, however, because you are a cat and all you know now is that you live in a cozy Nebraskan basement and get petted by similar, but not quite the same, people.

And I know I broke my promise to take care of you, but I will come back for you. You will have a home again, and someone to love you, someday, oh darling kitty.

Some thoughts I think to myself while reflecting on the last decade...

My whole life I have kept a journal. I say "a journal" -- but it's more like 30, or so, differently tattered, miscellaneous books, notebooks, pieces of paper stuffed in envelopes, that contain my daily, if somewhat repetitive, ruminations on my life.

I started my very first journal, an 80-page, Stuart Hall wide-rule notebook inscribed with awkward, cartoonish girly handwriting, in March 1995 when I was 13 years old. I think, at the time, it was meant to be a place to discuss my adolescent existential questioning of God, the universe, et al, brought on by a series of unfortunate events -- family tragedies, visits to concentration camps -- combined with the inevitable reading of the Diary of Anne Frank in my 8th grade lit class.

But, like most of my journals it contains an even mixture of self-deprecation and disdain for the world, longing for an impossibly romantic life I had yet to achieve, and what can only be described as fan fiction starring my crush of the moment.

There are a few advantages to keeping a journal, or many, namely that you have an exact record of where you are and what you are doing on various days of your life. Or it would be, if I had ever actually bothered writing down the details of my life, instead of simply using it as an undending soap box for indulging in vague, clunky, clause-overladen prose.

The handwriting has improved, that's encouraging.

At any rate, I am trying to formulate a summary retrospective of the last decade, based on my chicken-scratch journal entries, and struggling, partially because some journals have been hidden away -- in my parents' house, and elsewhere -- and partially because I never really write about my day in my journal.

I write what can only be described as "things I think to myself while driving in my car" -- or while riding the subway, or sitting in parks, or wiling away hours at temp jobs and retail establishments, or most often, while sitting on my bed in the middle of the night.

I was once in a fiction-writing class, back in college, during which I was publicly chastised with that phrase exactly (with a white board chart) for writing about a fictional version of myself wandering around Manhattan looking for something to do. Also, there are no Wal-marts in Manhattan, a fact which had escaped me even after living in New York for a year and a half.

That being said, a cursory look at my ramblings from the past decade shows me essentially what I am already been aware of -- that I have spent most of my 20s recording the painful -- if somewhat obvious -- revelations of someone doing everything for the first time.

In 1999 I was possibly the most clueless long-haired college freshman who has ever embarked upon a journey of enlightenment at an upstanding east coast liberal arts college, who just as unconsciously went through the obligatory Felicity identity transformation by getting a dyke haircut, the first of several I would sport in next decade.

By my sophomore year I definitively reached the stunning conclusion that the U.S. political system was a horribly corrupt shell game, mainly inspired by having spent a semester unironically reading political analysis on Slate, only to cast my first vote for political office (for Nader) in the 2000 election fiasco.

In 2001 I lived in Paris, and would have struggled to understand the importance of the "cultural experience" I was supposed to be having visiting movie theaters, listening to the BBC and being trekked around on tour buses to various artists' ateliers, even if I hadn't spent most of year watching the world catch on fire.

I discovered Virginia Woolf in 2002, and not realizing that entire latter-era sexual revolutions had put her on t-shirts and in songs, took her message of a "society of outsiders" to heart in a way only someone who chose a college based on the selling point, "you are different, so are we" could.

I marched against things in 2003, or more often watched others march against them from the sidelines. But the start of an unnecessary war affected me deeply, nonetheless, and I still get PTSD-like flashbacks from decade-in-review montages of Colin Powell presenting bogus intelligence to the U.N., which bring back memories of watching horses walk into crowds of pedestrians on Lexington, and witnessing "shock and awe" on cable news stations, and of the feeling of utter helplessness and depression that came with attending a rainy, late-night protest of defeated antiwar protesters corralled by NYPD barricades the night after the war started.

By 2004, it's all subway poles and sex, as I was sure that no one in the history of the world had ever experienced either in the way I had just discovered them, with fresh eyes on a commute full of strangers, and with a boy who tempestuously loved me and broke my heart, to a soundtrack of Arcade Fire and Ani DiFranco.

After 2005 things became more complicated. I settled down to an ongoing blur of domestic squabbles with filmmaker roommates in a dirty Brooklyn apartment, traded political rants with like-minded fellow travelers, worked shitty office jobs because it was no longer cool to work in retail, and wondered if there was any beauty to be found outside the grind of subway commutes.

I found beauty later in the decade, impossible, unlikely beauty, in the corners of dirty activist spaces and rickety elevators, in shoddily converted lobbies closely resembling The Shining, and at monuments to fallen martyrs and mythological creatures.

I started writing in 2006, or at least, taking my writing seriously, and by 2007 tried by hand at organizing, with occasional moderate success, and looked forward to changing things, because, well, that was the only thing I could do.

By 2008 I was stuck with the creeping feeling that the path I was taking would only lead me toward a kind of irreparable brokenness, evidenced by the fact that I was often surrounded by a motley crew of people who long ago had traded rational perspectives and domestic happiness for the chance to rule over isolated kingdoms of political dysfunction.

But, in between all of it, I got tired, and a little older. And suddenly I didn't feel like I was seeing things for the first time, but as if I were on a loop. And by 2009 my journal became a series of sighs and regrets over people sacrificed and opportunities lost. And I no longer wanted to go back and read any of it again.

I spent the first moments of 2010 sitting in a crowded hole-in-the-wall sushi place in Tumon, Guam's downtown tourist playground.

The overly enthusiastic wait staff handed me a plastic noisemaker in the shape of a hand, and one of those cylinders you blow in to make noise during such occasions, I'm not sure what they're called, while some kind of culturally incomprehensible Japanese variety program played in the background.

Then I walked through back lots past half naked dancers who were taking a break outside of strip joints, and sat on a sandy crowded beach to watch a lackadaisical fireworks display over the moon-lit bay.

It was nice, probably the nicest New Year's I have had in a while, involving actually leaving my apartment to interact with the world.

Still, like most people hung over from the night's revelry, I am now sitting on my bed in pajamas, eating banana pudding, surrounded by the familiar piles of books covered with my handwriting, glad to have a place that is still mine amidst all of the changing scenery.