Of Coffee and Breakfast Burritos and Spaghetti and Meatballs

Expectation:  The prospect of the future; grounds upon which something excellent is expected to occur; prospect of anything good to come, especially of property or rank. 

I get myself into trouble when I try to change something or someone into something else.  This is not acceptance - this is an expectation run amok.  Whenever I have problems in my life I can usually trace it back to me trying to remake the world to my own liking.

We walk down to the morning meeting - it's a nice combination of exercise and recovery before the day gets too hot or the commotion gets to intense.  Afterwards we decide "we'll wear ourselves out and make the walk back rather than jumping into a tuk-tuk.  Coffee on the way sounds like a good idea.  We walk some back alleys and some main streets, avoiding a few options because the hygiene looks dubious and a few more that are on busy streets, opting out of a dust and diesel coating on our caffeine.

Eventually we pass a nice looking hotel restaurant with signs advertising breakfast.  We sit down and wait a bit for a server.

"Yes, coffee please?" I say.

"Oh, I'm sorry," says the young woman, bowing.  "We don't serve coffee - only food."

Off we go.  Kind of strange that there's no coffee for breakfast but what the hell.

At our next stop we get coffee ordered and also some food.  There are eight food selections.  The one SuperK orders isn't available.  No problem - she gets something else although this strikes us as a little strange, too, running out of breakfast selections during . . . you know . . . breakfast. My burrito - I know, I know, maybe not the best choice for someone from a heavily Hispanic area who is in Northern Thailand - is salsa and potatoes.  It was good but I'm still hungry.  One cup of coffee, two glasses of juice, two breakfast selections - they come out one at a time.

We eat some lunch in our room, too exhausted by the restaurant selection, ordering, and paying processes which dominate.

Our stomachs are rebelling a little from all of the exotic foods so we choose an Italian restaurant off the main drag for dinner.  Here, I order spaghetti and meatballs, probably the most stereotypical Italian food other than pizza although I do substitute penne for the spaghetti. At 7PM.  On New Year's Eve.  No meatballs.  No meatballs left.  I default to SuperK's selection, figuring that since she was successful in her ordering that I would be, too, not discounting the possibility that she snagged the very last portion in that category.

The meals come out.  Spaghetti, not penne.

I LOVE all of this.   

Jeebus, Save Me!

Gift:  Something given to another voluntarily, without charge.

This morning I look down from our 10th floor apartment onto the entryway of the complex, set in a U shape.  There are a number of tables set up flanking the walkway. Over the course of a half an hour people begin arriving, setting bags of indeterminate merchandise on the tables, then standing behind them.  Uh-oh, I think, some kind of market gauntlet to run later when I want to get out.  This is standard thinking for me - look for any possible bad in any situation.

After a bit a line of orange-robed monks begin to file out of the entrance and make their way down the line of tables.  A group of men with a pile of black garbage bags accompany them.  At each table the monks are given something - I surmise at this point that the items on the tables are the shrink-wrapped bags of food and toiletries that have been accumulating in the lobby of the building over the last week.  Again, I assumed these were impulse sale items directed to the rich inhabitants of the condo.  An annoyance for me, in other words, instead of a gift and a blessing for someone less fortunate.  God forbid I should have something taken out of my overstuffed pocket and given to someone else.

Reminds me of the Biblical story where Jeebus was watching the activity around the offering box at the entrance to the temple.  The wealthy would give large sums of money in a very public fashion, making sure everyone knew how much they were contributing and lingering so that everyone would know they were the donors.  At one point a penniless woman sidles up and drops in her few pennies.

What do you think Jeebus's lesson was?

Anyway, the monks receive enough gifts to fill the back of a small pick-up truck.  The pilgrims then kneel and face the monks who chant a small prayer before heading off.

What a nice way to start the New Year.

 

 

 

Off to Dinner

Back to the 9AM park meeting today.  It's a pretty good group - mostly men - Americans, UK natives, and a few from Australia and New Zealand.  Lots of sobriety, standard percentage of irritating personalities, a few of them on my last nerve already.  

On every trip of any length we inevitably run into a few days where we've done what the area has to offer.  We're unwilling to throw in the towel so we walk around aimlessly, not seeing much with benumbed eyes.  It's OK; a little frustrating but OK and almost impossible to avoid - we want to give ourselves time to see everything without having to sprint through it but don't want to linger too long.  Hard to calculate 8,261 miles away with only a computer and guide books to direct us.

Dinner is an authentic cultural experience for which we don't have quiiiiiiiite enough patience today.  We take a nap, clean up, and head off the busy main road down one of the side alleys or sois.  There's an open air restaurant full of Thais so we take a seat.  There's a dizzying array of menus - we need some help deciphering them, a service supplied by the waitress, who comes over none too quickly.  She's got a full restaurant so she takes KK's order, explains the menus, and says she'll come back.  She does not.  She appears, actually, to be the cook.  KK gets her food from someone else who doesn't speak English and doesn't take orders, waving vaguely to the open air kitchen.  By the time we share her meal and get my meal ordered we're both thirsty.  God help us trying to get someone over to take a drink order - fortunately, we notice bottles of mineral water and bottles of ozonated water piled onto a corner of the table.  We pop the top on one of the ozones and quaff.  It has a vaguely medicinal taste.  We pay and go home.  

It was one of those nights where we both wanted to understand how everything works instead of sitting there like a couple of dumb asses fingering greasy menus.  

It's Raining

I was talking to my Old City sponsor - who lives in Chiang Mai - about my tuk-tuk adventure at the night market.  The one where I screwed myself.  He interrupted to say: "Hey, it's always hard when you're testing out the waters in a totally new culture."  He shared a story about flagging down a driver that he has used many times, a guy who cruises the village he lives in.  He asked the fare and was given a price three times what he normally pays.  When he protested the guy smiled, pointed toward the heavens, and said: "Raining."

A service is worth what the market will bear, right?

This guy always made sure that I wasn't being too hard on myself.  I like getting feedback from multiple Program mouths because we all have a little different slant on things.  He's an old hippie - a REAL hippie - who refuses, to the best of his ability, to be too hard on himself.

Went to a morning meeting today - my third visit.  Dude annoyed me.  Must be getting calmer in my old age.  Took me three meetings to get irritated and I believe that's a record.

Ta-Daaaa!

Chaos: Any state of disorder, any confused or amorphous mixture or conglomeration.

Yesterday our friends hauled our asses up into the mountains surrounding Chiang Mai.  Very nice.  Very, very nice.  It was much cooler and it was very high mountain junglely which was spectacularly beautiful.  And it was quiet.  Chiang Mai - for all of its charms - is chaotic.  One's senses are under constant assault from cars and bikes and people and just noise, all of which must be navigated on broken pavement and non-existent sidewalks.

We get home about 7PM, happy and grateful for a nice day, the eaten ATM card escapade tucked into dark recesses of our minds.

"Let's go get the name of the bank so we can at least try to make a phone call tomorrow," I suggested.  We're wandering around the outside of the building - a Western Union office or so we thought - when a couple of other Anglos smiled at us.

"This machine ate my ATM," I quipped.  "It's on my shit list."

The guy laughed, stood up, walked around a bit.  

"Are you sure this isn't a bank?" he said.  "There's like a bank name all over the building."  (Ed. Note - Thanachart Bank - Thanon Nimmanhemin Branch.  I am not making this up.)

Hmmm.  About this time a young Thai woman working a food truck parked on the sidewalk - where else? - having overheard our conversation, comes over, taps on the window of the closed bank, and has a chat with a nice lady inside who peeks out the closed security gate.

"She's looking," she said.

 A minute later the bank women comes back, cracks open the security gate, and asks: "What is your name?"

"Seaweed the Dumbass," I reply.

She smiles, bows sweetly, and holds up the ATM card.  It was like a magician pulling a diamond ring out of rabbit's ass.  She won't, of course - hand the thing over without a passport and frankly wants to go home.  I sprint to the condo, get the passports, and make it back in short order.  Forms are signed, bows are exchanged, and the ATM is in SuperK's much more adult hands.

The whole bank card caper reminds me of a nimble-fingered adult astounding a young child by seeming to pull nickels out of her ears and then to make them go away.  God likes to have fun, too, for god's sake.

Screwing Oneself

 In the "Screw me?  Screw you!  Oh, I Screwed Myself" Department I offer this up.

Last night we went to the famous Chaing Mai Sunday Night Walking Market.  Perhaps long ago on a distant planet in a remote universe it was possible to walk in this market but last night it was more of a huge mass of clogged lanes punctuated by the occasional bottleneck where no one went anywhere, sort of vibrating in place for a while.  It was a constant struggle not to trod on someone or be trod upon so not much marketing was going on.  Lots of stuff, lots of food, lots of people.

We took a little minibus to the old city from our condo - the ride, door to door, cost 60 baht, or about $2.  After being constricted and squeezed and sweated upon for a few hours - a dinner at a Thai restaurant included where we sat just off the main street watching the trodding from a safe distance - we decided to head home.

All of those friendly minibus drivers who are always pulling up to the curb and offering cheap rides anywhere?  Not so friendly.  Scratch that - not so accommodating.  They were out in abundance and still friendly but in the environs of the market they had plenty of potential customers so not one of them was interested in hauling our asses back out to the suburbs for a couple of bucks.  One of them said something that sounded like "No, I'm going to stay parked here until I can load this mother up."  He did offer to help out - in this case hailing a little three wheeled motorcycle contraption.

This guy was happy to take us home.

"How much?" I asked.

150 baht.  Maybe 5 bucks.

"No, too much," I said.

"How much? he said.

I said that I wanted to pay what I did to get down to the market in the first place.  He waved dismissively and drove off.  Fine, you dick.  SuperK and I begin to trudge in the general direction of home.  About a half an hour later - well off the track I had intended to take and with a couple of terrifying street crossings, all kinds of traffic boiling around us thrown in - we finally manage to hire a minitruck to get us home.  This guy makes a stop at a gas station and then pitches us off his vehicle a couple of blocks from home.

I believe that I had what you might call a genuine cultural experience.

Now . . . Where Did I Put That . . .

เพิ่ม Gmail ลงในบัญชี Google ของคุณ

This is the command I got when I logged into to my home page today.  Take that, Seaweed.

And in the "There is a god and he has a hell of a sense of humor department" I offer up this . . . 

We stopped to eat lunch yesterday - stir-fried snow peas, pad Thai with chicken, red chili rice with tofu, two mineral waters for the princely sum of $8.  I pulled out my wallet to try to get my money organized - the highly colored bills with huge numbers on them can be disorienting when one is trying to deal with someone who speaks very little English - when I noticed I was one plastic card short of a full Seaweed deck.

"Where's my ATM card?" I said to no one in particular.  I sat there a minute, going through my very small wallet over and over, hoping that the plastic would miraculously reappear, SuperK sitting there with a blank look on her face.  Both of us are very good partners when we're trying to deal with a screw-up not of our own making - I could see irritation flash across her face before she quickly transitioned into problem-solving mode.  It doesn't help to pile on invective when someone feels bad enough about the screw-up.  And she knows that I handle all of the money exchanges with vendors and cab drivers and the like so I guess that earns me a little capital.

We went back to the apartment and looked through everything we owned about 100 times before deciding that I had either left the damn thing in the ATM at the airport or it flopped out of my wallet during some other money transaction.  I'm sure my Higher Power was in "how about you quit bitching about credit card" mode at this point, and enjoying himself immensely.  I made a few hilarious cultural-experience trips back to two grocery stores I had visited where I had to pantomime losing a credit card to non-English speaking clerks - the technique that seemed to work was to drop my card on the ground and walk away.  "Oh," they'd say.  It made me feel better that both stores had a big stack of lost credit cards for me to shuffle through.

Anyway, we did manage to get through to a customer service clerk in India who cancelled the care, verifying that there were no unauthorized transactions on our account.  The whole thing was frustrating but no harm, no foul, really.

No Credit Cards? Barbaric!

So our trip from Saigon to Chiang Mai takes us through Bangkok.  We're on Asiana Air.  I've never heard of this airline but they had the lowest price which is, of course, the most important thing to consider before getting on a supersonic jet flying at an altitude of seven miles.  I really don't care if they wreck a lot of planes or have like an 85% hijacking rate as long as I don't have to spend too much money to be wedged into a seat fit for a contortionist.

Because we're no longer in Vietnam I don't have any of their money left - the Dong for those of us who think that kind of stuff is funny - and because we haven't got to Thailand yet I don't have any of their money, either - the Baht which isn't as funny but is still pretty funny.  On the plane I find out Asiana is a low-cost carrier.  Whatever.  Don't crash and let me pee if I want to and I'm good to go.  

When the food tray comes around I decide to order some food off of the huge menu they provide. I understand I have to pay for this food.  Cheap seats = buy your own $%## food.  I order some noodles and hand her my credit card.  No credit cards.  Cash only.

"I don't have any cash," I said. "I've been in Vietnam and we're going to Thailand.  Where am I going to get money?  Is there an ATM on the plane?"

"I'm so sorry," the attendant says.

I'm also thirsty but water is not free, either.

We land in the international terminal, shuttle through a maze-like warren of corridors, clear immigration, and are barfed into the domestic terminal for the final leg of the flight.  Short on time, I flash into a 7-11 and load up on drinks, food, and snacks.  The kid runs it all through the scanner, filling two bags up, and then looks at me blankly when I hand him my credit card.

"I'm sorry but we only take cash," he says.

I'm starting to get miffed.  I walk the terminal, stopping in every fucking shop and restaurant in the whole thing - including MAC Donalds, Pizza Hut, and Burger King, food I normally wouldn't feed a dog - and NOBODY takes credit.  This is the domestic terminal of the largest city and capital of an entire country.  Finally, finally, we get to buy two weird mushroom pastry puff things at Starbucks.  These are wolfed.

I want to tell someone about this, that it's stupid.  They undoubtedly want to hear this from me.  They are eager to hear my opinion about why I had to stand in line at immigration for 45 minutes only to hear a very nice immigration agent say: "Why have you been standing here?  You could have just gone through and got your luggage."  They're looking for good reasons to throw people into jail.  I recall the phrase "restraint of tongue and pen."  It is a powerful and useful phrase.  For instance, right now I'm in a comfortable condominium and not in jail.  This is a good thing.

 

Seaweed, Behavior Arbiter

And because I haven't shown the spiritual growth that I would like to be able to show . . . 

There was a group of people on the boat that I didn't like particularly if by "didn't like" you mean "detested."  These were the people that bitched continuously about tipping while dressing up in elaborate costumes for dinner.  On the boat.  Where there was no one there except other similar people.

I was at a gift shop that was stationed right after one of the little handicrafts workshops that we visited.  One of these women had some items she wanted to purchase.

"Eight dollars," said the little man behind the counter, smiling broadly.

"I'll give you five," she said.

"No, ma'am," he replied, smile in place.  "Eight dollars."

She took seven dollars out of her purse, laid them on the counter, and grabbed the items.  The man continued to smile.

"Eight dollars, ma'am," he said.

I took a dollar out of my purse and gave it to the guy.

The woman glared at me.  "It was never eight dollars," she said, forgetting, apparently, that I was standing right there the whole time.  Then she mumbled something about fifty cents and gave the man a buck.

"But thank you," she said to me.

"I thought you didn't have the right change," I said.

Needless to say I didn't talk to her the rest of the trip.

The thing is that this was really not my business.  It's not up to me to be the arbiter of someone else's behavior, no matter how deplorable it is, so I didn't feel that great about what I did.  I felt a little too smug as if I'm a great example of good behavior.

Still glad I did it, the bitch.

Buying Another Yacht

And back in the land of internet access.  Boy, talk about getting used to something then not having it.  Boy.

I'll tell you this after hanging out for 10 days with a lot of really wealthy people: they are some of the most dissatisfied, bitchy, discontented people I've ever been around.  These people are blessed with as much material stuff as anyone in the world and they're consistently no happier than anyone I've run into on this trip, and I've run into some people who don't have very much going for them in the stuff department.  I mean a lot of these folks have money and the casual mention of second homes and boats and high-end travel is tossed out too casually to be anything but calculated.

And then I'll stand there in amazement, jaw slackening in amazement, as they try to stonewall a vendor down an extra dollar on a four dollar pair of elephant pants.  It makes no sense.  It is a disconnect.

There's a guy here who bought something in a market.  "$4," said the vendor.  He handed her a five.  "How about $5?" he asked.  That's what I aspire to.

There's a lot of looking through the staff.  I suspect the company that runs this high-end cruise - an American company - doesn't pay the foreign employees very well and is probably pretty wealthy.  

On one of the days the Federal Reserve raised interest rates.  I try to get as far away from the humdrum of everyday news as I can when I travel and don't have much interest in something that affects very few people, mostly those buying something expensive like a home.  One of my fellow passengers complained to me, a man standing there trying my best to blot out her very existence.

"Yeah, I'm upset," I said.  "Right when I"m in the middle of buying a yacht."

"Oh, you're buying a yacht," she said, clearly impressed.

Earned me some cheap respect. 

$27 or Two Seventy, One or the Other

A Little Westside Jonny story, just to demonstrate that we're all peas in a pod when it comes to matters of money, power, and sex . . . .

We were on a somewhat stressful trip together to the Middle East that began in Istanbul, Turkey.  As opposed to Istanbul, Montana, of course.  We were on our first day after a long trip. We were jet-lagged and culture-shocked.  Our first little outing was to descend below street level to visit some ancient Roman baths, which did end up being pretty cool.

LWSJ paid the entrance fee and we entered the site.  Turkey is one of those countries where inflation has left the money with denominations in the hundreds of thousands and even millions, permitting the casual traveler to quickly enter the ranks of the very wealthy.  Suddenly, he started to suspect that we had been overcharged.  He began a rant: "That guy screwed us.  He charged us twenty-seven dollars to get in here" and other complaints on an epic scale."  Being easily influenced I felt my dander rise and I, too, began to get upset.  

After a minute or two we figured out that the guy had collected two dollars and seventy cents. We were off by a factor of ten.  We were eager to be outraged and tired enough to be susceptible to paranoia.

I can hear Kenner laughing and laughing.

Off the Hook - Temporarily

Early in each trip the money conundrum rears its personal head and strikes down my serenity.  I think I need to do an inventory on this . . . again.  Our tour company recommended packing light suggesting that we use our hotel's quick and efficient laundry service instead.  Well, we did this - in our ridiculously expensive 5 Star hotel - and wracked up a $35 bill for a few items.  I mutter about this, not caring that much about the money itself (remember the $20 tip at our first hotel?) but objecting to the high cost of a pretty routine service.

SuperK doesn't care for the muttering, rightly pointing out that we're spending so much money on our trip and then letting a small amount become large in my head.

I protest that I don't care that much - suspecting that I do - and partially defuse the situation, skating away relatively unscathed, much to my relief.

After our tour ends, tired, we decide not to go to the streets to look for a dinner place, punting to one of the hotel's restaurants and what did I expect would happen?  I open the menu and am appalled at the prices.  I'm getting ready to suggest that we bolt when SuperK - who knows me too well - exclaims: "What:  You're not thinking of leaving?"  I freeze, caught, exposed, found out, and endure a tongue lashing, well-deserved.

Chastened, I let go of the money.  For a while.  Temporarily.  On the bus today the tour company begins to update the tipping guidelines, and off I go again over the matter of a few more bucks.  I get annoyed that in these poorer countries tourists end up paying for the services that I think I'm paying too much for to the tour company.  I'd rather they pay their people and tell me what it's going to cost up front.

Plus, I bit down on something hard at dinner last night and I'm sure I destroyed a tooth.  Worrying about weird health matters always trumps trivial money matters.

Ha Ha Ha

I have been in the habit of greeting my mother and my old sponsor Kenner every morning to start off my Quiet Time.  It has been a helpful way to ease into and through the pain of their loss.  My loss actually.  The sting of the deaths has ebbed but I soldier on with the good mornings.  I wonder how long I'll do this? 

Anyway, I was worrying about something stupid this morning and I thought of all the times I'd call Ken and tell him what was on my mind.  He never judged; he never gave advice; he laughed a lot.  Uproariously.  He was a silly guy with a big belly laugh, almost shouting.  So I'd come up with something stupid and he'd laugh and laugh and laugh.  I got the point.  I think I started to make stuff up just to hear him laugh.

I'm not going to say what I'm worrying about today. I can hear him in my mind's eye, laughing and laughing.

The Anxiety Gene, Beefed Up

I don't know what it is about me and money.  I spend it like a drunk - like an active drunk - and then I go apoplectic over the littlest things.  Today was Move to a New Hotel Day, a day fraught with all kinds of useless anxiety over the smallest things.  First of all, I was pretty sure the hotel wasn't going to acknowledge the fact that I had prepaid my bill.  Second of all, and third of all and many, many more of alls the move required a few taxi rides.  I'm obsessed with getting screwed by unscrupulous taxi drivers despite the fact that I don't think I've ever . . . you know . . . gotten screwed by a taxi driver.

Worst case scenario - really the only kind of scenario that I envision - is the whole screwing and non-acknowledging would cost me a few bucks.  Not that I like to get screwed, mind you, just that the amount of angst and anxiety worrying about the few dollars far outpaces the pain of the screwing over.  If you said: "Seaweed, if you give me this amount of money I'll remove all angst from your mind" I'd knock you the hell over getting out my wallet.

So the sidebar is that I asked the hotel manager if I could add some extra money to the bill so that he could parcel it out as he saw fit to all of the staff: bell hops, front desk personnel, room cleaners, cooks, etc.  I thought he was going to break my arm shaking my hand.  He really seemed a little flustered at an amount of money not much larger than the amount I was going to lose in a full-on fleecing.  The day door kid said: "Sir, I'm going to miss you."  I think he teared up a little bit.

So it's not the money per se, I don't think.  I don't know what it is.  It's a microbe living inside my head that has totally beefed up my anxiety gene.

The bill, of course, was copacetic.  I took three cabs that day where I was treated honorably for fares that averaged about $4.  I tipped like a hundred percent.

Tomorrow, however, it will all be different.

Mr. Head, Troublemaker

As we made our way through security at the airport our carry-on bag was pulled aside for a more thorough inspection.  Fair enough - there are so many rules as to what you can and can not take on the plane, and they seem to change every time I fly and they change according to destination and airline, that I mess something up every time.  The agent roots through our stuff, eventually opening my toilet kit and extracting Mr. Head.  She looks at him for a minute, turning him this way and that, feeling his heft, all with a bemused look on her face.

"What is this?" she asks.

We try to give an abbreviated history of Mr. Head, World Traveler.

"Where did you get it?" is the follow-up question.  We don't go into the particulars of stealing him from a cabin we rented in Northern Michigan 25 years ago but give her a sketchy background check.  She's openly laughing at this point.

"Can I show my supervisor?" she says.

Absolutely.  Mr. Head is a bit of a diva.  He loves the attention.  We see her talking to her manager, other travelers paying attention to the commotion at this point.  Someone asks the security guard about him as she returns him.

"Well, thanks, I'm never going to see that again," she says.

On we travel.  First time that Mr. Head caused a ruckus at security.

No More Middle Seat!

So I'm always in this existential battle about the correct way to pray.  I know that I need to pray - and I do - but the technique can be quite the mystery to me.  I used to pray for specific things - usually to get something I wanted or avoid something that I didn't.  My Higher Power - Joker Extraordinaire - always seemed to corrupt these self-serving prayers, granting me some of what I wanted but warping the whole thing so that the result was just kind of . . . off.  I felt like I needed to keep calling back to the Help Desk to clarify the specifics of the prayer.  For an omnipotent, omniscient being to require this level of detail was really quite vexing.

So I got a lot more generic with my prayer.  While this may have been a touch more noble - praying to be of maximum service to my fellow man and other useless bullshit - it wasn't as satisfying as asking for a big, fat, juicy steak for dinner.  I figured the golden loophole - laid out in wonderful detail in our Book - was to add the qualifier "if thy will be done."  Still, it seemed a little shaky to ask for a red Ferrari or the winning number in the lottery and make it right by tacking on this otherwise noble phrase.  Shallow generosity.  My Higher Power probably has more pressing problems than to consider my requests for Italian supercars and it would be more productive for me to pray less selfishly in the pittance of time I dedicate to prayer and meditation.  Plus, I should probably buy a lottery ticket if I want to win the lottery.

But, you know, the MIDDLE SEAT!  I really didn't want that middle seat so I went full-blown selfish on my morning prayer today.  I kept asking my god to handle the seating situation for me and - if possible - get me out of the %$!! middle seat.  I had been stung enough by the not winning the lottery while not buying a lottery ticket that I knew I had to do some work.  I lept into action at the airport by asking the nice lady at the ticket counter if she could possibly arrange things to that SuperK and I could sit together.

She smiled sweetly - really - and said: "The flight is full. But I will pass your names along to the gate agent in case someone doesn't show up for the flight.

Yeah, right.  Reminded me of the time the cop who investigated the violent and unauthorized removal of my car stereo system told me that he'd get in touch with me if anything turned up.

"Does anything ever turn up?" I asked.

"No," he said.

I even waved off a middle seat - window seat combination if one became available.  I wanted the aisle.  Bad.  We made our way to the gate, cheerfully, resigned, no hard feelings against anyone.  I mean it's not like I was asking my Higher Power to get me a seat on the plane so I wouldn't have to row to Hong Kong.

After a short bit I heard our names being paged.  I made my way to the check-in counter and gratefully accepted our new seat assignments - together and on an aisle.  I'm still not sure what to make of the mechanism of prayer in this instance.  

My kooky god, anyway.

The MIDDLE SEAT!

I do confess to amusing myself.  I have been rigorously, tirelessly trying to figure out the loophole in the middle seat tragedy.  I am going to ask my seat mates to switch seats, well aware that no one is going to vacate an aisle seat and occupy a middle seat; if there is any hesitation, I'm going to offer money - maybe a young kid who's going to screw with his pc would rather have cash, begging the question as to how he could afford to fly to Hong Kong; I'm going to work the stewardesses; I'm going to go to every help desk and reservation counter I see; and I am STILL GOING TO BE IN THE MIDDLE SEAT!

I have always liked the tendency of alcoholics to surrender only after they have exhausted every other opportunity.

Here is some advice I've gotten from friends over the last few days, all of it comforting:
LWSJ: "You'll have Kenner and your Higher Power with you every step of the way," and replying to my comment that I was at the point of the trip when I was getting really worked up: "I know it well."  It made me feel less alone.

Spandex: "LAX stands for reLAX."  That was a good one.  Just relax.  Just fucking relax.

One of my grouchy, dear friends from Vacation City Fellowship, agreeing that he gets all worked up, too.  And why, pray tell?  "I don't know - it's just the way we are."

Next stop: SE Asia.

Definitely at That Point

Definitely the point of the trip where I'm saying: "Why the $%#!! am I doing this anyway?"  It was pointed out that the late, great Kenner would have said: "This, too, shall pass."  I hated that expression when things were going my way but found it more soothing at times like this, when I'm nervous and jumpy and edgy.  Prone to anxiety, as LWSJ would say.

I can tell that the anxiety is getting free-floating when weird stuff leaps to the forefront.  For instance, both SuperK and I get injured and sick right before a big trip bad backs, head colds, and the like, none of which ever seem to be . . . you know . . . real.  A few days ago I must have bumped the big toe on my right foot - it got sore, a little red and swollen.  Infection!  Bad infection!!  I imagined myself in the jungle in Cambodia watching a witch doctor hack off my gangrenous foot just above the ankle with a saw fashioned from the bones of a water buffalo and I was not going consider the fact that I'm going on a pretty nice tour and staying in pretty nice hotels and I have antibiotics and my fucking toe isn't infected, anyhow.  I never let facts get in the way of what I want to believe.

Another thing that was gnawing at me was the possibility of getting stuck in a middle seat on a 15 hour flight in a plane where the internal space was designed by the Marquis de Sade.  I'm an antsy guy, I'm a tall guy, I hate the lack of control and claustrophobia of being trapped in a small space.  Because I'm cheap I got a great fare where one of the drawbacks was not being able to choose my seat earlier than 48 hours before the flight.  Guess what?  Middle seat.  I was moderately freaked for a while before transitioning into the "It is what it is" phase of my mental preparation.

I can hack it.  I can hack it.