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!

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.

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.

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!