Gaps, patches and in-betweens

Literarily: Don't accept rides from strange men -- and remember that all men are strange as hell. – Robin Morgan After a drink with officemates at Nimmanheimen, we hailed a tuktuk to get me home to the other side of town, Changklan Road. Before I got in, I noticed, even in my beer glazed vision that the tuktuk driver was winking, and I turned to my friends not really sure what the winking was about. We were bargaining for a lower price and how much he will charge me. I said “he’s winking, is that a good sign?” He was short and stocky, a bit paunchy on the face, short haired. I was interviewed on the way home, which is not really unusual for farangs in chiang mai. There were the usual questions: “where are you from”, “how long will you be staying”, and I figured by now, if you’re a woman, “are you married”. But there were also the unusual, or so I thought, question, "what does your husband do". Then the tuktuk driver asked me how old I thought he was. After tiring of the g...

In the middle of the working day, sometimes while walking on my way to work, sometimes in the mornings, as I drink my coffee while trying to focus on the day ahead, “it” hits me. I think about things I wanted to write about, to elaborate. But as such a time as now, I am in bed, with the laptop on, I try to remember what that glimpse of imagined creativity was yesterday, a while ago, last week. It escapes me. The initial idea is gone. It doesn’t even reach the blank pages of the word document. I hope this is not a block. Okay, something is coming to mind… The weather in Thailand. I wonder about the clothes in the night market. The weather here in Chiang Mai seems to be summery hot the whole year round. But I was told differently by people who have been here for years. They say it gets cool during the last quarter of the year, which is just about now. Although the temperature is better than the first two months since I came here, I still find it extremely hot when the sun comes out and s...