This morning half my class was missing.  Do I teach a class when half of them won’t get the lesson?  How do I teach the other half later without boring the first half?  I wasn’t sure what to do.  Of course, they just wanted to play games instead of have class.  Then I thought, I’m the teacher, I can do what I want.  I don’t want to teach to half the class.  So, we played scrabble and bingo.  I had two classes in the afternoon and neither class showed up.  Well, that means less lesson planning, but still, where were they?  I texted Noi to tell her they hadn’t showed up since they were her classes too.  She was at a seminar.  She texted back that they went to join the mountain bike festival and they were all riding bikes all afternoon.  She said I should have gone.  They had enough bikes for teachers too.  Then she sent me photos of the students and teachers riding.  And this was the straw that broke the camel’s back.  I am so over this place and the end of September is not soon enough to leave.  There is nothing to do here.  I work too much and when there is something to do, no one tells me.  Pat and I talked about this in February and I told her I wanted to race when the festival happened.  She didn’t see fit to tell me.  Robin knows I want to bike, but he doesn’t see fit to tell me even though he’s already signed up to race in the road bike race.  Noi tells me I should have gone with my class as if I’m some mind reader.  How the fuck was I supposed to know my classes were doing this?  Wouldn’t they learn more English by have an everyday conversation while riding bikes with their teacher instead of me sitting in an empty classroom by myself?  How difficult is to send a text message – “no class today, go bike riding with them.”?  And then everyone seems so surprised to hear I’m leaving.  How is that surprising?  Am I supposed to love living here when all I do is work or sit alone in my house?  I would think people from a communal culture would get it.

Noi just kept sending me pictures of the fun I missed.  I sat in the coffee shop crying for 20 minutes.  I’ve been holding back so many tears.  I haven’t been trying to hold them back, they just seem to hang out beneath the surface and never quite come up.  I decided to go home and see if I could cry more.  I felt like I could cry for days.  I got home and no crying came.  Huh, ok, so we’re done with that for the day.  Then I decided to drive up to the dam and see what was going on.  There was supposed to be a market and other festival activities.  There was a massage tent set up and all four of the masseuses in town were there so I was able to get a massage from the man I usually go to on the weekends.  There was a small child with squeeky shoes running around outside the massage tent.  The shoes have squeekers like dog toy squeekers in them.  She ran up and down the street for about 45 minutes.  Squeek squeek squeek squeeeee squeek squeek squeeeeeeee squeek.  There was also bad Thai music.  So, I found some sort of relief in the fact that I had a massage to the sounds of bad Thai music and squeeky shoes. Then I found Tip and her family and hung out with them for a little bit.  They went home kind of early (little children).  I was intrigued by the shake that Dam (Tip’s son) got.  It had condensed milk, some white cream I can only guess was white sugar in liquid form, ice and grape jello.  She put everything in a blender and mixed up real good before adding the jello.  That she barely hit the blender for so that it was still in chunks.  Then she threw powdered ovaltine in the cup at the halfway mark and on top.  I’m not sure if this would be good or horrible.  I should have ordered one just to see what it was all about, but I didn’t.  I have no idea how to order it now.

I ate dinner alone by the river.  It was kind of sad, but also quite relaxing.  I’ve had enough people for the day.  The lights on the bridge lit up the water below.  That brought lots of bugs and that brought lots of fish.  The surface of the water moved an rippled as bugs moved on top and things moved underneath.  It wasn’t fish jumping.  It was more like snakes or river monsters gliding just below the surface.  It was fascinating to watch.  I vowed never to swim in the river – ever.

There was a beer garden and a stage so I went to check that out after eating.  The beer garden looked very uninviting as it was only groups of people at reserved tables so I stood near the stage for a while.  There’s no place to go hang out at night here so I was determined to hang out.  A German guy walked by me and asked where I was from.  He was kind of creepy and I didn’t really want to talk  to him, but I couldn’t run away either.  I told him I lived here and taught English as Sam Ngao Witt.  He said that was a terrible school.  He lives here and his son can’t speak English.  I asked if his son could speak German.  Oh yes.  He told me about 6 or 7 times that that was a bad school and shook his head like I should leave school before I got killed.  Ok, I’m not a fan of the school right now, but the fact that his son doesn’t speak English is just as much his fault as the school’s fault or his son’s fault and it doesn’t make the school a scary place.  The conversation just got more difficult and awkward.  Finally, he left and I decide that hanging out alone standing next to the beer garden listening to Thai music did not qualify as hanging out. I went home.

At home I wrote a facebook post about how frustrated I was and how, even though there are some wonderful things about living here, I’m ready to move on.  I got a lot of responses telling me there’s no shame in giving up and moving on and a lot of “oh I’m sorry you have to suffer so much”.  This is not the response I wanted.  I don’t regret my decision to move here at all.  I’m angry, but not suffering.  I have no shame in moving on. I never mentioned shame.  So, I realized that my facebook post did not paint the right picture.  Or, people are so use to suffering and drama that they read what they want and use it to feed their need for drama.  Or facebook is just not the right venue for such thoughts.  So, I questioned why I wrote it in the first place.  I know facebook works in this way.  I know that most of the people reading it don’t know the rest of the story because they haven’t read my blogs.  The people who read my blogs seemed to get it and respond in a way that showed they got it.  I didn’t want the pity party or the “look on the bright side” or “here’s my advice because I know more than you”, but I knew I would get some of that.  So, what did I want?  Here’s what I figured out.  1.  I was angry so I wanted to vent and there’s no one here to talk to.  2.  I’m tired of people on facebook that say things like “oh you live in Thailand, how lucky” as if I’m sitting on a beach drinking Mai Thais instead of working my ass off and terrified of my own bathroom.  I’m mad at these people.  3.  I have friends that can’t be bothered to send me a text or email and say “hi, how are you?”.  They only want to see me post pretty pictures so they can like them.  I’m mad at these people.  4. I know I can’t confront Pat directly for the ways she has set me up for failure and for the fact that she can’t be bothered to spend 10 seconds to send me a text to tell me what’s going on.  I know she doesn’t do it on purpose and that she is very stressed, but that doesn’t change the fact that I’m mad about this too.  I can’t confront her because you don’t confront people here and it would do more damage than good.  Thai people deal with negative feelings mostly through passive aggressive behavior.  Most of them truly don’t have negative feelings, but when they do, it’s socially unacceptable to show them.  So, I think I was also hoping she’d see the post and know how I feel.  Punish passive aggressive behavior with passive aggressive behavior.  Well, that’s a shitty plan.  So, no more pity party and no more posting things on facebook other than the pretty pictures.  I deleted the post.  If you really want to know what I think, tune in here.  You’ll get plenty of it.

It is wonderful to be able to have an issue, feel like shit, question it and go “Oh, I was angry, that’s what was going on”.  Then it’s over and there’s no guilt, no regret, no beating myself up.  I have spent a lot of my life beating myself up and I no longer do that.  I didn’t think I shouldn’t have written the facebook post or I shouldn’t be angry or poor me.  This is why I deleted the post.  I figured out why it wasn’t working for me, because people want to see all this drama that I just don’t see.  I was angry long enough to cry for 20 minutes and long enough to write the post, but then once I wrote the words, I’m not angry anymore and moved on.  So, by the time I got the responses the responses didn’t fit the situation anymore because my view of the situation had already changed.  It just seemed silly to leave the post up.  So, in other blogs when I talk about where I don’t think enlightenment is something that happens once and then you live happily ever after, this is what I’m talking about.  I still get angry.  I still have feelings.  I still think things should be different than they are.  Then I notice that something doesn’t fit, something is off and I question it.  Then I learn and the whole body/system/process or what ever you want to call it is reset to a new place of balance or a new point of normal.  Then you do it all again and again and again.  Over time this process happens faster and faster.  By the time you read this you are thinking, “Oh poor Rraine, she is suffering so much” and I’ve moved on and am thinking “What are you talking about?  I’m not suffering.  That was a whole minute ago.  Everything is fine.”  Living in the present doesn’t mean not having feelings, it just means not buying into the concept that those feelings define you.  It means not buying into the concept that something is wrong if your feelings aren’t always happy, peaceful or some other thing we define positive to be.  It’s not buying into the concept that something needs fixing.  There’s nothing to be fixed, because nothing is wrong.  And my decision is still to leave here in October, not because I want to end the suffering or because I’m miserable, or because the grass is greener over there.  If I left for any of those reasons, I guarantee you there would be suffering and misery over there because if there’s suffering or misery, I’m the source of it, not the situation or location. I am leaving because this is no longer where I need to be.

(c) All rights reserved Kimberly Fiore