Tuesday Night Chatter

Generally speaking I have a point to my blog posts, or at least, I try. But I think I'm going to start a series, called "Tuesday Night Chatter," where I just lay out a smorgasbord of thoughts and short stories passing through my mind.

The first thing occupying my thoughts are the two strange red patches on the inside of my elbow, exactly where the skin touches itself when you bend your arm. Inside each patch, mirrored on both sides, are these little white dots that look for all the world like bite marks.

Naturally my thoughts have run the gamut from "It's nothing" to "It's some horrible disease" and I imagine the truth is probably somewhere between the two and closer to the former. It may indeed be the work of nefarious alien spiders, or just some enterprising bug that got smushed when I bent my arm in the middle of the night. My plan of action is to see if it goes away by itself, and probably shove it in the face of some unsuspecting friend who's been here for awhile and demand, "Is this a problem?"

The next thing is that I really need to remember to wear sunscreen -- my little wander around Phnom Penh reconstructing what was stolen left me with shoulders like lobsters and a weird handlebar tan line just across my knuckles. Oops.

The gecko outside my window -- he's there most every nights -- is croaking away. I think he just gets upset about things and clucks about them to himself, absentmindedly muttering "Geck-o, geck-o" to himself. Sometimes it's more emphatic, maybe an insult to the lizards taking up his wall space, and sometimes more forlorn, a soft 'geck-o' mournfully crooned to the night.

Things have improved since yesterday, where I was having a fit of west-sickness; a function, I think, of a particularly rough weekend including a night of food related yucks and then getting my bag snitched. The blessing was the highlight among all of that but was still a general downtrend. But thankfully everything has been replaced. I'm still cursing when I can't figure out how to use my new phone but the damage could have been much, much worse.

Improved mostly because I'm busier. I decided today to take a new tactic with my four year old tutoring job and it worked spectacularly, and the week is setting up to be busy and interesting and productive, always better for me. I have lots of work to do and am fairly motivated to do it.

I'm now thinking seriously about getting a Khmer teacher -- even though I did pick up a part time job, things are going to be tight this month and I'm worried, as always, about spending extra. But if I cut down on the treats (I confess to going a bit crazy at the supermarket on Sunday night, thinking chocolate was a good way to deal with the annoyance of the theft), it should all work out just fine and September looks to be my most lucrative month here.

In the introspection department, I'm thinking about two things, which will probably appear as longer entries on here sooner or later: 1, the trap of staying because it's "easier", and 2, the thought that however much I am currently teaching, I am not a teacher.

In the crazy Cambodian stories department, I went to the market today and discovered that I really should be going on the weekdays, as they have much more good produce. Though last time my friend the fruitseller convinced me to buy a mysterious fruit that turned out to be a papaya and absolutely disgusting, I let her talk me into buying something that I thought was a coconut but then she peeled like an orange, and later found out must be a grapefruit. One of the sweetest grapefruits I've ever tasted, actually...okay, we're even for the papaya now.

Sometime before I went on my current western food and chocolate kick, which may have changed things, I've noticed that my no-fat, bike-everywhere lifestyle has quite agreed with me, and have shed the post-graduation pounds that appeared on my hips when all I was doing was eating and partying. Funny how that works...

I probably shouldn't crow too much now, as tomorrow I'm heading off on quite a long bike ride to the Tahkmao province, but my legs aren't complaining quite so much about all the biking. I suppose this means that in place of legs I have long, flexible pieces of steel instead, but again, those words will probably have to be swallowed by this time tomorrow, and I will have returned to my usual state. It mostly involves a long monologue of whimpers and curses as I am dragging myself up the very steep stairs to my apartment.

Speaking of which, I should go to bed. If I did it right on my new phone (which is the cheapest model I could find, 18 bucks), there should be an alarm going off at 7:15 AM.

I hope.