Little's changed since last May when I whinged about the form-without-function bag checks at the entrances to the MRT stations. I bet nobody in the upper echelons of the MRT even remembers the original raison d'etre of this inane exercise, if indeed one ever existed. In any case, whatever the obviously bored to distraction security "guards" are looking for--or more aptly NOT looking for--could never be found during the millisecond of scrutiny they devote to the bag checking procedure.
Yet woe betide anyone who attempts to bypass the bag check for the sake of convenience. A few times when schlepping a computer-laden daypack I tried striding purposefully past the "guard" rather than laboriously taking if off and on. But I only ended up feeling guilty because my blatant violation of protocol utterly discomfited the poor guy whose job depends on casting a pseudo glance in the direction of each passenger's bag.
So now, with the speed of a flasher undoing his raincoat, I unzip a section of whatever reticule I happen to be carrying and present it for inspection. Both the "guard" and I know he would no more rifle through my bag than I would carry anything illegal. All that matters is that we dutifully play our parts in this futile exercise.
I much prefer the approach to passenger security adopted by the BTS Skytrain pooh bahs. At each station they've set up an umanned "Security Check" table near the ticket machines. Like a surreal art installation, the white formica-topped table epitomizes the actual Thai attitude toward transportation security.
15 March 2008
First Drunken Taxi Driver
My usually infallible taxi-suitability radar failed utterly a couple of Tuesday nights ago on a desolate and dusty stretch of Rama IV near Chua Pleung and the Expressway.
From afar I could tell by the shape of the headlights that the oncoming taxi was a newish model. The rooftop Taxi-Meter sign was turned on, the headlights functioned, and the driver wasn't out to set any Daytona Speedway records. My admittedly subjective exterior criteria having been met, I hailed it (arm held out at waist level, palm facing down, wrist moving slowing up and down). As the car approached, I peered into the cab to determine whether the driver looked like a reckless teenager or a catatonic septuagenarian. (My equally subjective interior criteria.) The driver's face looked ordinary enough and as always, I climbed in the front seat.
The driver immediately began asking why the beautiful younger woman waiting on the sidewalk with me hadn't come along too. I muttered that he could turn around and pick her up if he wanted only gorgeous creatures in his cab. And on a dangerous six-lane road near the onramp to a flyover he prepared to do just that!
"Are you drunk or what?" I screamed at him.
"Oh just a little," he replied with a lopsided I-could-give-a-shit grin.
My heart started pounding. "You pull over and stop this car immediately!"
He made no move to do so. "You pay first," he sneered.
Though I had no intention of paying him, I fumbled inside my pack in a show of doing so. He slowed down, pulled over and came to a rolling stop. But as I opened the door and tried to jump out, he sped up. Nobody who's had four hip replacement surgeries in the past three years and could finally walk normally again would be stupid enough to try exiting a moving vehicle. I put my left leg back in the car.
"OK, OK, here's your money." I threw two 20-baht bills at him. "Now you stop!"
I've only been that terrified in a taxi once before; when a sober but erratic idiot tried to force me out of his car in the middle of a freeway.
2. Insane Public Transport Security Checks Continue
Little's changed since last May when I whinged about the form-without-function bag checks at the entrances to the MRT stations. I bet nobody in the upper echelons of the MRT even remembers the original raison d'etre of this inane exercise, if indeed one ever existed. In any case, whatever the obviously bored to distraction security "guards" are looking for--or more aptly NOT looking for--could never be found during the millisecond of scrutiny they devote to the bag "checking" procedure.
Yet woe betide anyone who attempts to bypass the bag check for the sake of convenience. On the days I'm schlepping a computer-laden daypack I've tried striding purposefully past the "guard" rather than wasting time and energy offloading my heavy pack. But then I end up feeling guilty because my blatant violation of protocol utterly discomfits the poor guy whose job depends on casting a glance in the direction of whatever zipped pocked I choose to open. (Of course he'd no more rifle through my bag than I'd carry anything illegal.) So I play along with his futile charade.
I really love the approach to passenger security adopted by the BTS Skytrain pooh bahs. At each station they've set up an umanned table marked with a "Security Check" sign near the ticket machines. Like a surreal art installation, the white-topped table honestly exemplifies the true Thai attitude toward transportation security.
From afar I could tell by the shape of the headlights that the oncoming taxi was a newish model. The rooftop Taxi-Meter sign was turned on, the headlights functioned, and the driver wasn't out to set any Daytona Speedway records. My admittedly subjective exterior criteria having been met, I hailed it (arm held out at waist level, palm facing down, wrist moving slowing up and down). As the car approached, I peered into the cab to determine whether the driver looked like a reckless teenager or a catatonic septuagenarian. (My equally subjective interior criteria.) The driver's face looked ordinary enough and as always, I climbed in the front seat.
The driver immediately began asking why the beautiful younger woman waiting on the sidewalk with me hadn't come along too. I muttered that he could turn around and pick her up if he wanted only gorgeous creatures in his cab. And on a dangerous six-lane road near the onramp to a flyover he prepared to do just that!
"Are you drunk or what?" I screamed at him.
"Oh just a little," he replied with a lopsided I-could-give-a-shit grin.
My heart started pounding. "You pull over and stop this car immediately!"
He made no move to do so. "You pay first," he sneered.
Though I had no intention of paying him, I fumbled inside my pack in a show of doing so. He slowed down, pulled over and came to a rolling stop. But as I opened the door and tried to jump out, he sped up. Nobody who's had four hip replacement surgeries in the past three years and could finally walk normally again would be stupid enough to try exiting a moving vehicle. I put my left leg back in the car.
"OK, OK, here's your money." I threw two 20-baht bills at him. "Now you stop!"
I've only been that terrified in a taxi once before; when a sober but erratic idiot tried to force me out of his car in the middle of a freeway.
2. Insane Public Transport Security Checks Continue
Little's changed since last May when I whinged about the form-without-function bag checks at the entrances to the MRT stations. I bet nobody in the upper echelons of the MRT even remembers the original raison d'etre of this inane exercise, if indeed one ever existed. In any case, whatever the obviously bored to distraction security "guards" are looking for--or more aptly NOT looking for--could never be found during the millisecond of scrutiny they devote to the bag "checking" procedure.
Yet woe betide anyone who attempts to bypass the bag check for the sake of convenience. On the days I'm schlepping a computer-laden daypack I've tried striding purposefully past the "guard" rather than wasting time and energy offloading my heavy pack. But then I end up feeling guilty because my blatant violation of protocol utterly discomfits the poor guy whose job depends on casting a glance in the direction of whatever zipped pocked I choose to open. (Of course he'd no more rifle through my bag than I'd carry anything illegal.) So I play along with his futile charade.
I really love the approach to passenger security adopted by the BTS Skytrain pooh bahs. At each station they've set up an umanned table marked with a "Security Check" sign near the ticket machines. Like a surreal art installation, the white-topped table honestly exemplifies the true Thai attitude toward transportation security.
22 January 2008
Don't Be Slender in America!
Nobody could ever call me fat. The most I ever weighed in my life was around 130 pounds back in the late 1960s when I lived in London and smoked too much of that hunger-producing substance Bill Clinton never inhaled.
I now weigh 50 kilos (110 pounds) which is perfectly OK for someone 5'4" tall who stays in shape with Qi Gong exercises and a good fishetarian diet. In Thailand where I live no one ever tells me I ought to weigh more, although lately friends do say my cheeks look a bit sunken. You can't tell the aging process where to take its toll and if it wants to suck face, I'm glad that someone--or something--still does.
On the 17th I celebrated my birthday morning whale watching on Bodega Head with Annie and Thea, two fabulous women I've known since the late 1970s when we were pounding pillows in Lois's gestalt group in San Francisco. The terrible storms of the previous week had given way to a perfectly clear blue sky, a cool crisp temperature even someone who lives in fetidly sticky Thailand could enjoy, and a mini-bouquet of hardly wilted pink and yellow roses stuck mysteriously into a small outcropping of greenery on the cliffside. (I think it was a birthday present from my mother who died in 2003....a roses-on-the-beach tale for another posting.)
Anne and Thea told me later that while I chatted up cute Christopher (a 35 year-old tree pruner from San Francisco), his mom asked if I was a cancer survivor because of my short hair and slender body. She probably didn't want her son messing with such a stylish example of the aging process!
Two days later in Santa Rosa, Thea was showing me around her co-housing abode, introducing me to many of her co-residents, all dressed in their drab blue, green, or gray sensible winter clothing. "Are you a Buddhist nun?" one frumpy older woman asked me. "Your hair's so short."
I'm so happy to be back visiting my oldest and dearest friends in the world, but these kinds of stereotyping remarks remind me why I left in 1990. Thanks to the two hip replacement surgeries I had in Belgium in July and August 2007 to revise the two bad ones done in Thailand in 2005 and 2005, I feel better than I've felt in YEARS.
And just for the record, I understand lesbians too have short hair (dunno about their body size) and not that it's anyone's business, I'm not a lesbian either.
I'm just me and for the first time in ages, I really celebrate that!
04 January 2008
Not Another Useless New Year's Resolution
I am going to write something creative every day. I am going to write something creative almost every day. I am going to write something creative whenever. I am going to write something whenever. I am going to write something. Sometime. Hopefully.
31 May 2007
Bag It!
Would somebody please tell the annoying security checkers at the MRT entrances that I’m not a New Year’s Eve bomber! Although nobody in Bangkok knows, or claims to know, who planted the bombs that killed three and wounded 38 on December 31st, I can say definitively that it wasn’t me, an aging style-conscious western woman with no science skills.
On January 27th, the 19 Thai suspects picked up shortly after the attacks were cleared for lack of evidence. And after a couple more months of pseudo-serious checks at hotels and ad hoc public spaces, the bomb brouhaha pretty much died down. Like so many important issues—cracks in the new airport runways, Thaksin Shinawatra’s multitudinous malfeasances, the current coup makers’ gross ineptitudes—the bombings got relegated to wherever intractable Thai problems go to die…or be ignored.
So why are the folks at the Mass Rapid Transit Authority of Thailand still “inspecting” their passengers’ handbags and backpacks? Assuming I even wanted to carry a bomb on the subway, how could I ever squeeze one into my thin A4-sized reticule? As it is there’s barely enough space for a wallet, PDA, scarf, makeup, cardholder, notebook, pen and the latest New Yorker.
And what if, hypothetically of course, I’d actually secreted some miniature explosive (if such a device exists) within the bowels of my black bag. Not a single so-called “guard” has ever peered inside for more than a millisecond before pronouncing me Bombless in Bangkok and sending me on my way down the escalator. The smiling and saluting component of their job description takes up way more time than security checking aspects.
Oh well, now that TRT has been disbanded I’m confident the answers to all life’s mysteries will be forthcoming.
On January 27th, the 19 Thai suspects picked up shortly after the attacks were cleared for lack of evidence. And after a couple more months of pseudo-serious checks at hotels and ad hoc public spaces, the bomb brouhaha pretty much died down. Like so many important issues—cracks in the new airport runways, Thaksin Shinawatra’s multitudinous malfeasances, the current coup makers’ gross ineptitudes—the bombings got relegated to wherever intractable Thai problems go to die…or be ignored.
So why are the folks at the Mass Rapid Transit Authority of Thailand still “inspecting” their passengers’ handbags and backpacks? Assuming I even wanted to carry a bomb on the subway, how could I ever squeeze one into my thin A4-sized reticule? As it is there’s barely enough space for a wallet, PDA, scarf, makeup, cardholder, notebook, pen and the latest New Yorker.
And what if, hypothetically of course, I’d actually secreted some miniature explosive (if such a device exists) within the bowels of my black bag. Not a single so-called “guard” has ever peered inside for more than a millisecond before pronouncing me Bombless in Bangkok and sending me on my way down the escalator. The smiling and saluting component of their job description takes up way more time than security checking aspects.
Oh well, now that TRT has been disbanded I’m confident the answers to all life’s mysteries will be forthcoming.
12 April 2007
Bitten and not by the botox bog
I woke up at 4 a.m. to a horrible stinging sensation in my upper lip. Peering groggily in the bathroom mirror I watched the left half swelling up faster than I could say "Oh shit, please don't let me end up with a face like Melanie Griffiths." I stared for as long as it took for the left half of my upper lip to become so engorged it seemed to be dragging my face to the right. Ice cubes did nothing. Neither did vigorous squeezing. Out of options I watched powerlessly until the stinging subsided and went back to bed.
By morning my lip resembed a bad outcome of a Nip & Tuck procedure. Fortunately it's a national holiday today in Thailand so I don't have to go out into the world today. The swelling is gradually subsiding so I'll probably be "normal" by tomorrow.
I'd be lying to say I'd never nurtured thoughts about a wee injection of collagen or botox or whatever to perk up the no longer sharp edge of my lip line. Or the eyebrows and eyelids that are moving inexorably downward and turning my face above the nose into a fair copy of my mother's. The increasing flacidness of the below-nose portion isn't particularly felicitous either, especially first thing in the morning.
With that teensy bite, the botox bug brought me back to the reality of accepting reality. My body isn't 20 any more. Or 30. Or 40. Once again this fascinating and frustrating country has served up another practical lesson in the in the Buddhist concept of impermanence.
P.S. However not for a second am I gonna give up the idea that sleeping on a small curved wooden fold-up pillow will somooth out those neck sags!
By morning my lip resembed a bad outcome of a Nip & Tuck procedure. Fortunately it's a national holiday today in Thailand so I don't have to go out into the world today. The swelling is gradually subsiding so I'll probably be "normal" by tomorrow.
I'd be lying to say I'd never nurtured thoughts about a wee injection of collagen or botox or whatever to perk up the no longer sharp edge of my lip line. Or the eyebrows and eyelids that are moving inexorably downward and turning my face above the nose into a fair copy of my mother's. The increasing flacidness of the below-nose portion isn't particularly felicitous either, especially first thing in the morning.
With that teensy bite, the botox bug brought me back to the reality of accepting reality. My body isn't 20 any more. Or 30. Or 40. Once again this fascinating and frustrating country has served up another practical lesson in the in the Buddhist concept of impermanence.
P.S. However not for a second am I gonna give up the idea that sleeping on a small curved wooden fold-up pillow will somooth out those neck sags!
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