It's work hours, 10:36pm, I have a million windows open and am trying to learn as much as possible about Sharepoint site design and excited to dive into projects for PETA. My meditation date didn't work out - I found myself on the platform of the BTS, 8 stops on the sky train and 4 stops away on the water taxi at 5 minutes to 1pm. No way was I going to materialize in the Wat by 1:30pm. I turned around and walked home, determined to make it to that class after the new year.
This morning I walked out onto the balcony and smelled morning air, the birds calling in the trees that I can reach out an grab from my perch overlooking downtown Bangkok. I experienced again that excitement of this experience and realized just how disheartening the robbery has been, even if on a subconscious level. Finally, I can get back to soaking up life, or life soaking me up as I sit here half-naked and sweating in front of a fan, eating a vegan Tom Kha soup swimming with red peppers. Pet! (spicy!)
I've read over my journal entry from 12-20-2011 twice today. It is, in my humble opinion, really well written. A brief essay on addiction, loss, and love in a cold winter morning - something I had no direct experience with then or now. The cold, that is. I spent some quality time on the skype phone with family, and even made my first call to my ex-husband. His contribution to this article is with his permission and knowledge. Both he and my father are feeling the strain of multiple threats at both of their high schools from the latest school shooting and it's resulting threats across the nation. Well, at least the ones at their schools. I wonder if any school is exempt.
Andy has me laughing many times. My favorites are "the white people are melting" and when we discuss his multiple party approach to the impending end of the world - the world is ending party followed by the world didn't end party. We talk about diving in Belize in 2010, a highlight in my life, and what I'm going to dive in a few days. He tells me that when we were married and he would think of the end of the Mayan calendar day (tomorrow!?!?), he would think it was all okay, since we were together. But now, since we're broken up... good luck!
I laugh until tears mingle with the sweat, loving the sound of his voice and sharing my walk of the night before past the gold palace buildings of the king of Siam. In as much as I'm happy that we've moved through this experience with this friendship on the other side, I keep waiting for him to realize that it's not worth it and to stop talking to me altogether.
Sunset this evening was spent on the very highest point of our apartment, Shaughnessy, Aaron, and I drinking Singha from cans, surveying our own little kingdom of Siam, sharing adventure stories and arguing about gun laws. Aaron points out the neighbors who, like us, prefer to strut around their apartments as close to naked as possible in these hot nights and we watch them act out our lives just a few hundred feet away, walking from room to room, laying down and standing again, looking for comfort, looking for activity, looking to see what the other occupants are doing. In the field below our place, the motorbike taxi drivers wrap up a long game of football meets hackysack meets volleyball (complete with net and hands free), they pick up their 8 liter cooler filled with melting ice water with it's one communal tin cup and slip between the space between the gates and to their abandoned bikes.
I sit with a grin on my face, taking in all that my senses feed me, the slosh of the cistern beneath me , the BTS rolling through these higher places in the city, circling my neighborhood, soi cats hunting the birds grabbing a late bite in the field beside our place, the ice cold and cheap beer I swig like water. Shaughnessy jumps to his feet, pantomiming a run in with someone and Aaron shares a story of a drunk groomsman tossing priceless records into the Columbia Gorge from the Vista House, I suck down my beer, watch the neighbors, and soak it all in.