For whatever reason, I decided to get all fancy this morning. Yep...all fancy-like. I don't know why I needed to fancy up for my nice little Sunday, because I was only going to Bed, Bath, and Beyond* (I didn't know if I'd have enough time!) but there you go. I felt the need.

*I got a new shower head. And two new sets of sheets so I don't have to do laundry.

So I was putting on a little makeup and I was using one of those magnifying mirrors (Dear Self: Knock that shit off) and I noticed that I had a white hair at my temple. Not GRAY, just pure white. I have blonde hair, so I prefer to think that this errant hair is a white blonde hair, not a "Golden-Girls-You-Are-Going-Through-Menopause-at-the-Age-of-21-so-let's just-call-you-Sophia" white hair. Because otherwise I don't know...someone is going down. All the way down to China Town.

After I stopped obsessing about my premature hair whitening and tweezed that mofo, I put on a little mascara. The thing is - if you buy Christian Dior Diorshow Mascara like I did, the wand is about the size of a small child's fist. It's bloody huge, as far as mascara wands go. It's supposed to be good for giving you Fuck Me Eyelashes*, I guess, but it's fantastically bad if you're a clumsy idiot like me, because I stabbed myself right in the eye with that giant mascara brush. Not kidding - right in the eye, like STAB.

* TM (Disclaimer: Fuck Me Eyelashes are not meant to be fucked.)

My eye immediately began watering like Niagra Falls and I didn't have any tissue handy to stop the flow, so I grabbed the nearest thing, which was a pair of panties. Yep...panties. Really cute panties too, which now have mascara and tears all over them, kind of like I'm a lesbian and I had a tragic night of oral sex where something went horribly awry and tears were shed.*

*I'm not, and I didn't.

[Just a little hint to anyone who cares - even after Niagra Falls poured out of my eye, along with some eyedrops I showered in because that Diorshow fucking burns, and even after I rubbed my eye with silky lingerie, my MAC Fluidline eyeliner was still in place as if untouched. The shit did not move. If you are looking for some eyeliner, I'm just saying - the shit did not move. And I think that means that the shit is bananas - b-a-n-a...you know what I'm saying.]

So I poured a ton of eyedrops into my eye, which had the desired effect of stopping the incessant burning but also made my pupil hugemongous. Abnormally large. Nothing makes you look more insane than having one huge-pupiled eye with no mascara on it and one normal-pupiled eye with full makeup on. I was all Brad Pitt-12 Monkeys up in my bathroom. Not a good look.*

*I should get fancy more often. Apparently I'm really good at it. (Sincerely, The Queen of Sarcasm.)

I was staring at my jacked up eyes and I was thinking about the like/hate affair I have going on with them. I don't mind them generally, they're eyes, they do their duty. Some people like them, I'm neutral about them on good days. On my best days I don't think anything of them at all. On my worst days, I can pick out my flaws with the ease of a deranged cherry picker on a drunken, coked-up bender. (Okay, that was a pathetically weird simile. Wait...metaphor? Why the fuck don't I know this shit by now? God, I frustrate myself sometimes.)

I started not liking my eyes when I was in second grade. That was the year I was sucked into the vortex of a Three Girl Friend Triangle, which is the worst sort of triangle vortex to be sucked into, if you're going to get sucked into one. Because, you know - the whole three's a crowd thing. My triangle had LZ and Nicole M. in it. We all got along individually, but if you stuck the three of us together, shit would go down and someone was going to cry. It was usually me or LZ that ended up crying, because Nicole never cried. Because Nicole had no soul. Can a demon cry? Scholars are divided on the subject but my experience says no.

One day Nicole was contemplating me over our shared coloring project and I felt her appraising me as if viewing me through one of those magnifying jeweler's loups. She had a sneer on her face as if I was a cubic zirconia trying to pass myself off as a flawless Cartier diamond. A chill went through me and I thought, "This does not bode well."

[Okay, I probably didn't think "this does not bode well" exactly, even though I was already a giant nerdy reader and often walked around quoting lines out of books like an annoying geek . I think we could maybe agree that any second grader who uses the phrase "this does not bode well" should most likely be slapped up a little and told to stop being so precocious and annoying. Whatever, I knew that she was about to utter something that was going to cut my very soul to shreds, so that I would remember it years later. ]

"You have alien eyes," Nicole pronounced.

My eyes are green, 'tis true. They are a fucking weird color of green that flashes gold and olive and bronze, and you notice them even more in contrast to my skin and hair. But alien eyes? That was a little harsh. To my knowledge, my eyes have NEVER anally probed anyone. They do know how to play the theme to Close Encounters of the Third Kind on the piano, but is that enough to convict? I don't think so.

My eyes are a lot of things, but unless my mother got-it-ON with Alf, they are ordinary human eyes. Which is what I should have said, but my second grade self was such a fucking pussy. Instead of punching Nicole square in the proboscis and calling her "Fucked Up Ski Jump Nose" like she so totally deserved, I decided to take it to heart that my eyes were indeed alien eyes bent on destroying humans so they could steal Earth for its resources and use the murdered Earthlings to fertilize their alien crops. And maybe they were. Just maybe. At any rate, I heard my eyes were "different," therefore "ugly."

Nicole also made me self-conscious about my laugh, my clothes (she was right on this account, they were pretty goddamned awful - see my avocado vest, por ejemplo) and my freakish giraffe height and stickleggedness. Thank god I moved away before she moved on to my ass or something.

It bothers me that I let her get to me like I did. I realize now if someone gets to me like that it's because I let them. These days I just call my detractors "fucking cows" and punch their shit right up. I don't have time for those girls anymore.

I have no idea why I wrote this.

PS - I'm almost done with my next travel story. I probably should have just worked on that instead of this.

[*The title of this post has nothing to do with anything. It's a quote from that show "Blind Date" (yes, I watched it once, shut it) and I thought, "Well, there's a post title if I've ever seen one." The problem is, there isn't really a post that I'm going to write that it's ever going to apply to, so what better time than the present to use it?]

I have a basset hound named Barney and a pen named Jermajesty. I'm a strange woman, yes. Barney is supposed to belong to all the roommates in the house, but considering that I'm the only one that ever takes care of him, and I've never drunkenly tried to feed him tabasco sauce just to "see what he would do," Barney is mine. When I leave this house someday, the boy is going with me. And Jermajesty? ALL MINE.

WhiskeyDickJim has a pet too...her name is PsychoHoseBeast. That's not her given Christian name, but it applies, believe me. She is WDJ's girlfriend. PHB has officially moved in with us, which is fine because she basically lived with us anyway, and she brought her little dog with her. PHB's dog is named Lucee, and Lucee resembles a mop with a face. PHB and Lucee have brought our home total to nine people and two dogs. Yeah, we're a step away from a flop house.

Meet The Lucee:



Where does the bed end and the dog begin? I don't know!



See? Mop with face.

The Lucee is in love with Barney. She follows him around and tries to lay on him and do other various dog activities that are naughty. Barney tolerates her, but I've noticed that he sighs. A LOT. He's not just not that into her, if you know what I mean.

I always thought Lucee was kind of like her owner - sort of nice, sort of annoying, but basically a good egg. I never realized Lucee was a HOOKER WHORE.

Exhibit A:



Only a loose woman would display herself thusly.

So the other night I got an email from WDJ that said:

"We have Jermajesty. Don't worry. He's safe. FOR NOW. Lucee is watching him. Demands to follow."

There were pictures attached. Supposedly THIS is their definition of "watching Jermajesty."



"So how YOU doin'?" Notice that The Lucee has basically thrown Barney to the wayside, the brazen hussy she is. Barney? Barney who?



Oh YEAH. I said, "HOW YOU DOIN'?? I like your green hat. Oh, my pretty little pet, I love you. So I stroke you, and I pet you, and I m-a-s-s-a-g-e you, hehe I love it, I love my little naughty pet, you're naughty! Then I take my naughty pet and I go... "



CHOMP. I will hold you, and love you, and squeeeeeze you, and eat your face off, and then...



BOW CHICKA BOW BOW. Get out your porn mustaches, people, 'cause Jermajesty is about to be molested. Or do the molesting, depending on your perspective.

At least they cuddled afterwards.



The demands were: "If you ever want to see Jermajesty alive again, post a Jermajesty post by noon on Friday, August 19, 2005." Because I would do anything for Jermajesty, here it is.

Poor cuckolded Barney, though...

[I apologize in advance because the beginning of this post is going to be kind of angry. A little vulgar. You might want to get to fucking off if you have tender sensibilities.]

Have you ever wanted to fuck something right in the ass? I don't mean that sexually, so please put your dick back in your pants, sir. I mean "fuck something right in the ass" in the figurative sense. Don't be literal, James. It's not becoming.

Have you ever just wanted to fuck something up so bad that when all is said and done it's just lying on the floor, writhing around in a pool of its own blood, humiliation, and tears? Have you ever wanted to crumple something up within an inch of its miserable little life, and then uncrumple it so you can stab its wrinkled little heart before crumpling it up again and throwing it into the sea? Hello? Is this thing on?

Before you freak out or call the cops or something, I'm not talking about roughing up a person. Although... No. That would be wrong. The thing in question is not a person. It's god-damned-mother-fucking B-l-o-g-g-e-r. Because something that took me, oh I don't know, a long time to write, Blogger looked at it and said..."Save? What is this 'save' you speak of? I don't think I'll be saving anything you wrote today, brazen hooker. No, I think today I will just give you a big giant error message. How about that? You like that? And then I will taunt you with that whole 'recover post' button, because there won't be any recovering today. I ain't recovering SHIT. Not recovering sheee-it."

Not to brag or anything, but my post was motherflippin' inspired. I'm just saying. And anyone who dares suggest that it's my fault I lost everything I wrote because I didn't hit save after every sentence is going to get fucked in the ass.

It's really early, and I'm really not pleased with the whole lost post thing, and also - I share an office with Stirrups. And it's getting a little out of hand up in here.

SOME VARIOUS SHADES OF STIRRUPS:

Stirrups: "Do you want to hear the funniest thing ever?"

Me: "Nope."

S: "It's so funny... I nearly died laughing."

Me: "Swell."

S: "I was driving, right? And I saw a minivan and I could tell it was being driven by a scrapbooker because it had a license plate that said some form of I LUV SCRPBKING or something."

Me: [WTF stare. ]

S: "That's not the funny part! The funny part was that the license plate frame said, 'No, I'm not a Mormon!'

S: "Hahahahaha! Hahahahahaha!"

[Stirrups breaks into a snorting, phlegmy smoker's cough from laugh exertion]

S: "Tee HEE! Oh fudge, that's funny."

Me: "Seriously?"

S: "What?"

Me: "To you, that is the funniest thing ever? Ever? Think about the implications of that before you answer."

S: "Well, it's funny! You know, 'cause she's a scrapbooker, but she's not Mormon."

Me: "Hilarious."

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Stirrups has a husband. I know, I know...I've no idea how she's managed it, but she has. She got herself one of them there husbands and I'm as baffled as the next person. Only Stirrups doesn't call him her "husband," or call him by his given (awful) name. No, he is always THE HUBBY, or the infinitely worse moniker of HUBSTER, or the vomitous (yes, I know, not a word) BUB.

Stirrups has an unnatural attachment to Bub the Hubster. She has to call him every two minutes or so to give him updates. These updates run the gamut from what outrageous thing some person said on one of her many country music message boards ("Can you believe it? She thinks Rascal Flats is better than Brooks & fudgin' DUNN!" and the absolute jaw-dropping, "Quick, I need the sexiest line in a Toby Keith song - I'm thinking 'There's a blue-eyed blonde in a red hot sweater wants to spice my chili, think I'm gonna let her' - what do you think? Do you have a better one?") to the latest quilt she's going to make (think cats - lots of them). It's weird, wild stuff.

Deep Conversations with Stirrups McStink:

Stirrups: "I'm so sorry I missed your call, Bub! I was in the potty!"

Me (to myself) : "Potty??"

[eight minutes later...]

Stirrups: "Bub. BUB. You know I don't like sausage. I don't like it! I'm picky, you KNOW that. Mmmhmmm. Mmmmhmmm. Yes. Bub, I love that you cook for me but I'll just have some pretzels or something. BUB I LOVE YOU BUT I DON'T LIKE SAUSAGE! Hello? Hello?"

[Stirrups sighs]

S: "Oh sugar, he hung up on me."

Me, heavy on the sarcasm: "That Bub! He's so fudgin' sensitive about his sausage, isn't he?"

S, blinking rapidly at me: "He's the best man in the world."

Me: "In the whole world?"

S, serious look on her face: "Well, next to Brad Paisley."

Me: "Right. How could I forget about Paisley."

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

[UPDATE: Thanks to Anju, I now know that Brad Paisley has a fake ear. That is just so perfect, you have no idea. He probably ripped off his ear so he couldn't hear his own music. That's what I feel like doing. Actually, I feel like ripping off his other ear, too. And Stirrups' ears while I'm at it. I can be an ear ripping machine when provoked.]

*Subtitle: "The Road to Phang Nga is Paved with Ass. And screeching transvestites. And weiners wrapped in pastry."

[If this is your first time here and you believe in things making sense, read these entries first, because this is the third part in a series of travel stories. If you don't care about things making sense...well, you're in the right place. Carry on.]

After a week of hanging around Bangkok, I had made some observations in my little notebook. Because it was so very unbelievably sticky and please-shoot-me-with-icy-cold-water-from-a-fire-hose hot, I dispensed with things such as complete sentences and pronouns and articles and pretty much any semblance of grammar when writing in my journal. I had no energy to spare for grammar.

Some random Bangkok observations:

1. "Hothothothothothothothothot. HEAT. Could face shine any more? Answer: No. Face is reflecting sun with such intensity am sending messages to aliens. Message sent? 'IS FUCKING HOT IN THAILAND.'"

2. "Don't care if grasshoppers are stir-fried and covered with teriyaki-style sauce and only cost one baht - are GROSS. Puked on corner in Patpong. Got dirty look from monk. Am rockstar? No, am pathetic. Made monk sneer."

3. "Suck at bartering. Don't even try - just pay full price for Thai silk boxer shorts whilst shopkeepers laugh and laugh. Why buy Thai silk boxer shorts anyway? Am single." (I wasn't really single at the time, but I think I was mad at the Boyfriend D.)

4. "Bangkok. Hawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwt. tttttt. Beautiful, intriguing, exciting, exotic and god DAMNED hottt."

5. "Cool Blue Shark popsicles taste like toothpaste."

After a week of spreading our sweat around Bangkok, we felt it incumbent upon us to take our sweat and move south. We thought it unfair to subject the Bangkokians to our slick shininess one day longer. It was just plain rude.

We decided to visit Phang Nga and then the beaches of Phuket. I think everyone knows by now that Phuket does not = "Fuckit," but if you didn't know, it's pronounced "Poo-ket." Which isn't quite as funny, but I defer to the Thai people for the proper pronunciation since it's their language and all. But Fuckit would be a funny name for a beach. If I ever had a beach, that's what I would call it.

Because we were poor, cheap bastards, we took a bus to Phang Nga. The bus we took was kind of like a version of a Greyhound bus, emphasis on "kind of like a version," meaning "not at all like a Greyhound bus except that it was roughly the same size as one." We did get little boxed dinners and there were two TVs on the bus, but that makes the whole excursion sound much more glamorous than it actually turned out to be.

First of all, I must mention that before we got on the bus, we went to an Indian buffet. This will factor into things later. I'm not sure why we felt that eating at an Indian buffet while in THAILAND was the best meal choice we could make, but there you go. In a burst of blessed prescience, I didn't eat anything. I think it had something to do with being too goddamned hot to chew, but I could be wrong.

Did I mention it was a bajillion degrees with 100158% humidity the day we left? It really was; I'm not even exaggerating for the sake of humor. I would never do that!

Anyway, the day we left for Phang Nga was hotter than the heat generated by the very face of our great sun, therefore I was wearing the minimum of clothing I could get away with and still not offend everyone forced to view my sweat-covered flesh. I assumed (and you know what they say about assuming) that our bus would be free of airconditioning, so I was dressed accordingly. This will also factor into things soon, as you will see.

A little background so you can begin to obtain a full understanding of just how bad this bus ride turned out to be for me: My cousin T. is, was, and will always be really fucking annoying. Don't get me wrong - I love my cousin. She's a lovely redheaded sprite. But she has the ability to fall asleep anywhere. At any time. Under any circumstances. It's hot? No worries. It's loud? No problema. It's cramped, smelly, loud, AND hot? Zzzzzzz. These things would not, did not phase her.

What Cousin T. would do is she would sit down on her bus seat, very primly and seemingly free of such mundane, pedestrian things as sweat, and she would take out her perfect pillow - a pillow that was unwrinkled, cool to the touch, ensconced in a pale pink pillowcase unblemished by any dirt - and she would quietly and expertly place her perfect pillow against the window, and she would lay her perfect, glowing, auburn head on her perfect pillow, and she would close her eyes and fall asleep in 1.2 milliseconds AND NEVER FUCKING WAKE UP, NOT EVEN ONCE, UNTIL WE ARRIVED AT OUR DESTINATION.

It didn't matter if the trip was ten minutes or fourteen hours, Cousin T. magically slept through every single stupid trip we took. As soon as the plane/train/bus/automobile/tuk-tuk/rickshaw ceased motion, she would quietly stretch her perfect pale arms over her only very slightly tousled head, delicately yawn, sweetly run a hand over her warm, rosy cheek that inevitably had only one tiny, charming crease on it from being pressed into her perfect pillow for eleven fucking hours without moving, and she would say without a trace of malevolence, "Are we there already?"

"Oh, PUNCH." That's what I would inevitably think when I saw her do this ritual at least 5000 times in numerous countries around the world. Punch right in her perfect fucking face. Punch, punch, punch right in her rosy, sleep-sated, delicate fucking face. I would look down at my wrinkled, dirty, crumpled, sweaty pillow (which earlier I had dropped right in a pile of sewage as I walked to the bus stop) that sat in my wrinkled, dirty, crumpled, sweaty lap and rue the day I was born without this magical sleeping gene. Because I could not sleep. Not on a bus, not on a train, not on an airplane, not in a car. It didn't matter if I hadn't slept a wink the night before we traveled. It didn't matter if I took three Benadryl on an empty stomach before we left. It didn't matter if I tried to knock myself unconscious with a ball peen hammer - I would not, could not sleep on any mode of transportation.

We got on the bus. As seemed to happen more than is just and right, Cousin T. and I ended up sitting in the seats situated right over the wheel. What this does, in case you've never experienced it, is it drastically cuts down on a little something called "leg room." And when you have a 36 inch inseam, you need more leg room than is afforded to a regular bus seat, much less to a bus seat situated over a giant wheel. Having to twist myself into a pretzel just to fit into a seat would be, for me, Sleep Killer Number One.

As previously mentioned, on the bus it was hot as bejesus sitting in a handbasket on the way to a massive bonfire located in the bowels of hell while wearing wool underclothes and a muffler. In other words, let's call the climate on the bus Sleep Killer Number Two.

Our trip to Phang Nga started at around 7 pm. The bus company very graciously included a little boxed dinner with the price of our ticket. I actually got two boxed dinners because, you know - Cousin T. couldn't eat while she slept like a motherfucking baby swinging lightly in a gentle summer breeze now, could she? No. She couldn't. The bitch.

The problem with the boxed dinner was that it was um...gross? Yes, that's it. Gross. It consisted of a mysterious little weiner wrapped in a pastry, and a greasy danish with an unknown filling. One was more than I wanted, two was too much. I couldn't eat it, so let's call my intense hunger Sleep Killer Numero Tres.

Now, remember when I previously mentioned that people had eaten copious amounts of Indian food earlier in the day? Somewhere around hour two of our trip, the Indian food hit their collective colon. The good thing? There was a bathroom on the bus. The bad thing? Hour 3 of the trip - the toilet broke. And backed up. And overflowed INTO THE AISLE. Overflowed some fresh um...CRAP.

Did you know that fresh crap fills a bus with a bit of a stench? It does! Really, I'm not kidding. The smell was indescribable. If you've ever stuck your face into a diaper filled with Indian food after the Indian food has traveled through a digestive system, you might be close to knowing how it smelled in the bus. Just add about fifteen more Indian food-filled diapers and then inhale them for thirteen hours straight. Then you'll know. Until then...you don't know as much as you think you know. Thirteen hours of ass stench? Let's call that Sleep Killer Number Four.

Now, when a toilet overflows on a bus, an interesting thing happens: Bugs come out. Yes, bugs. I looked down at the aisle and even though it was quite dark, it appeared that the floor was...moving. Closer inspection revealed little bugs running for higher ground, trying to escape the tidal wave of shit that was filling their tidy little homes. Fear of bugs crawling up my bare legs? Say hello to Sleep Killer Number Five!!

Once it was well and truly dark on the bus, the driver decided it was time for some television entertainment. Unfortunately, the program he decided to show consisted of men dressed up like women, who best I could figure out with my lack of understanding of the Thai language, believed it necessary to screech loudly without ceasing. Apparently whatever the transvestites were screeching was intensely humorous to the awake passengers on the bus who spoke Thai and to the live studio audience of the show, but it only served as Sleep Killer Number Six for me.

The final Sleep Killer for me (Number Seven if you've been keeping score) happened at around hour 7 of the trip: Remember when I said it was really hot on the bus? Well, the bus driver finally got tired of the unrelenting heat at about two in the morning (when, in my opinion, it was actually sort of cooling down to a tolerable level of sweat) and he proceeded to blast the A/C at Arctic Level.

On the face of it, this sounds like a good thing. And it was, for approximately ten minutes. Then it became so fucking cold that meat lockers were actually jealous of our bus. Regular meat lockers watched us drive by, the world's Coldest Meat Locker on Wheels, and were filled with envy at the amount of chill our bus produced. I'm not even kidding. My nipples could have cut your face right off. Because it had been so hot, I had not prepared for icy conditions and therefore had nothing to use as a blanket. All my remotely warm clothing was packed safely away in my backpack, which was stowed in the luggage space underneath the bus.

The bus ride was supposed to last only seven hours, but it stretched out to thirteen beautiful, ass stench-filled hours. I'm not sure why it took so long, but it did.

Bye, sleepy sleep sleep! Bye! I never knew ye!

Of course Cousin T. slept through the whole trip. Every last bit of the nightmare passed right over her without once rousing her sleeping beauty. How does one sleep through overflowing ass-stench? Bugs? Screeching transvestites? The very polar opposites of great heat and intense frigid cold? WEINERS IN PASTRY? How? I don't know, because I had to punch her right in the face for doing it, rendering her forever incapable of explaining how she managed to be so flipping annoying. Cousin T. - the Forrest Gump of Sleeping.

For me, Phang Nga was a blur of sleep-deprived psychosis as we walked through the achingly bright sun from the bus station to our hostel. Were those people selling wooden statues or were they demons sent to destroy my very soul? Was that an elephant on the side of the road, calmly hosing himself down with his trunk, or was that an elephant juggling monkeys and machetes and papayas while laughing at my sweaty visage? I don't know! Look- a new squatty potty! That's all I remember.

Next installment: Elephants and massages on the beach, now with fish head soup!

I'm the worst blogger that ever blogged a blog, aren't I? Yes, I am. I would feel guilty about it if you guys paid me even like a dollar to write this shit - but you don't, do you? No, you do not. Therefore I feel no guilt. Well, about this issue, anyway. I feel plenty of distilled guilt about other things, which guilt fuels me and makes me the fantastic mess you see before you today. Yay for guilt!

[Is it possible to listen to "Jump" by Van Halen and not do scissor jumps off your bed while air-guitaring? I submit to you it is not possible. I like pretending I have red spandex pants on when I jump, but that's just me.]

So yes, I haven't been writing very much and yes, I promised you certain stories like, I don't know, a week ago or something? The thing you need to understand is, if you know me for any length of time at all, I will disappoint you. Ask anyone. This much is guaranteed. The question only lies in when. Hopefully it will be sooner rather than later so we can all get over it and relax. I could hand you a list right now of men you could contact and they would all tell you, "Yes, it's true, she will disappoint you. Perhaps not sexually, because she is a vixen and a lusty one at that, but she will let you down in other ways. She will promise to call and then not. She's a horrible emailer. She breaks hearts without caring. Also, she ..." (at that point, the man listing my faults would trail off because I would be choking him with his own belt because really - he needs to shut up.)

[I like the song "Panama." I think I would probably like the country of Panama too, but I can't say for sure as I've never visited it. They have one helluva canal there, so I hear. I don't really like Panama hats, though. I don't know why, so don't ask.]

Anyhow.

I am presupposing that you are, in fact, disappointed that I haven't finished another installment of my travel stories, or even written anything at all since Thursday, which I'll admit is a huge leaping presupposition even in the history of huge leaping presuppositions. Huge leaping presuppositions are my specialty, by the way. On the off-chance that you were disappointed in my lack of posting, I'm sorry.

The last time I checked in with you all, I was having some issues; issues with my real life messing with my "fake" life here in Magical Problem-Free BlogLand, and with people eating my peanuts, and with assorted other problems that only I can manage to create. I so much want to elaborate on the Real Life issues I'm experiencing right now. You have no idea. For once I can't exactly tell you what's going on in my life because of...reasons. It's soooo hard not to tell you, though.

[Whatever happened to the band Ratt? Did they go Round and Round 'til they could just go no more? Did they have a freak eyeliner accident? Why am I listening to 80's hair bands, anyway? I don't even know! iPod shuffling is a dangerous game!]

[!!!]

I write about pretty much everything that happens to me, even when it doesn't paint me in the best light, because I'm insane like that and probably also because, as one of my commenters so sweetly noted before, I'm a self-centered 'ho. But I can't talk about this thing that's going on right now. And it sucks - 'cause I want to so bad. God, do I wish I could write about what's going on in my life right now. You have no idea what rich fodder I'm sitting on here. I have the best material to write about in the history of writing written things with a utensil designed for the act of writing, ever. Not to put too fine a point on it.

Because Real Life is reading, I can't write about these things - things that would just freaking freak you the fuck out and curl your hair and slap you square in the genitals if you knew what they were.

[Why did Sir Mix-A-Lot let Target use "Baby Got Back" for their back-to-school commercials? We like backpacks and we cannot lie? My god, Sir Sells-Out-A-Lot, what were you thinking? Of course, I would sell out in a fucking second, so I shouldn't point a hypocritical finger at him.]

Okay, how could I tell you what's going on without actually telling you what's going on? It's like Person A did this thing, right? and then they did this other thing, and I suspect them of doing yet another really bizarre, fucking CRAZY thing, but I don't know for sure if it's Person A doing it because it's entirely possible that Person B or even Person C is responsible for the really bizarre fucking crazy thing. Are you with me? No? What? GOD. I wish I could just write in ig-pay atin-lay and the ersons-pay involved wouldn't know I was alking-tay about em-thay.

Then there's this whole subplot going on with Person C. It seems that C. was always crazy but I just thought C. was misunderstood, because I am a dumbassed girl. Or I'm entirely too naive for my own good. Person C. isn't misunderstood so much as they are just batshit, apeshit, rat in an outhouse crazy, and everyone else but me managed to see that glaring fact and I feel pretty dumb about it.

[Do you ever wonder if those Sleep Number beds are really better than plain ol' regular mattresses? Or those Tempurpedic ones - are they really better? It seems like if you have one of those beds, you are automatically better looking and every night you sleep in the romantic spoon position with your partner. I can't put a glass of wine down on my mattress and then start jumping up and down on my bed without spilling the wine. There are so many fucking times when I'm drinking wine in bed, wearing a satin nightie and a fur boa and some shitkicking boots, and I want to jump on my bed but I do NOT have time to worry about wine spillage. I just know my life would be better if I had a memory foam bed or something of that nature.]

Anyway...where was I? Oh yeah, my life is fucked the hell up. It's great. It's really fun. And it's really cutting into my time for this whole b-l-o-g-g-i-n-g thing. So I won't make any more promises to you. I want to say that I'll finish my next travel story and post it today, but if I don't, I'll look like a real jackass. Okay...MORE of a jackass than usual. So I won't promise anything but just know I'm really trying, okay? Doesn't that count?

[You know it's going to be a good Monday when some crazy homeless person calls you a cocksucking motherfucker as you walk in the door. How did he know??]

I promise I'm working on my next travel story, but I have to tell you something really fast.

You know it's going to be a good morning when you're starving and you find out that your vending machine, which up until the very day before had been filled solely with food you couldn't eat, now has some gluten-free food you can actually eat. Yesssssssssssss.

So you gather up your last 3 quarters to buy the world's smallest bag of peanuts, and on the way to the kitchen you think to yourself, "I could totally visit the bathroom on the way to the kitchen and save some time 'cause it's on the way." You pat yourself on the back, thinking how things are just falling into place for you today. Peanuts for breakfast, you actually have the $.75 necessary to purchase them, you are going to totally save time "for the company" by stopping at the restroom first because it's on the way, and then you're going to go back to your office and be efficient and work-ish because you have peanuts!

You are an efficient working machine, about to be fueled with protein and the satisfaction you feel from being a freaking working GOD and also you are happy because you remembered to bring your iPod to work and you get to control the music choices of the office today. Kenny Chesney, you're going DOWN! All the way down to CrappyMusicTown where you belong!

So you saunter into the bathroom, whistling a non-Chesney tune, and you realize that your jeans are so tight and low it's too hard to get your quarters in your pocket. You think, "Hey, that's okay! I'll just hold them. I can handle this. Today is my day." So you take care of business, and then you lean over to flush the world's most powerful toilet (a toilet that has literally flushed an entire cell phone and a set of keys out to the ocean) and you actually think to yourself as you lean over to flush, "Don't flush your quarters down! That would suck." and just as you think that very thing, the quarters magically slip from your fingers ... straight out to the ocean. All three of those shiny little bitches. Just like some bad voodoo.

You don't immediately get upset though. You kind of laugh and think, "Well, of course that would happen to me. How funny. Hahahaha." Then you stop by your friend's desk to ask if you can borrow $.75, and she actually has it! And she's actually going to give it to you! "Haha," you think to the thieving toilet, "you thought you had me bested. Ha to you! I am more crafty than that!" Then you briefly wonder about yourself because you are anthropomorphizing a toilet and trying to speak telepathically to it. You shrug off those wonderings quickly, however, because they are harshing your mellow.

So you shimmy down the hall to the kitchen, shaking your moneymaker because you like how it looks in your jeans and you're getting some gluten-free peanuts and you have NOT been beaten by a toilet that fancies itself a Robin Hood of sorts, stealing from the rich to feed to the...sewers. You're better than that toilet. Shimmy and shake.

You walk up to the vending machine, and you wonder - is it just your imagination or does the vending machine have a beatific glow about it today? "Oh giver of gluten-free snackage," you think, "I bow to your shininess!" But...wait! What...why...how? There is an empty spot where the peanuts were like a mere five fucking minutes ago! How...who...whaaa?

You are filled with so many conflicting emotions at that second - rage, confusion, bitter gall, murderous rage... you trudge back to your office. No more shimmy, no more shake. You talk to yourself like a deranged mental patient as you walk back, trying to convince yourself, "It's okay. You weren't that hungry. It's still a good day."

You open the door to Ol' Stirrups' office and step a foot inside. You brace yourself for the expected stench of old cigarettes, coffee, and patchouli. You are greeted with it like a smelly slap in the face from a dirty glove. You're used to this. You sigh and take one more step inside. Then you sense something. You sense it at first on such a visceral level it doesn't even register with your nasal passages but you get it on a very basic PSYCHIC level. It's the smell of (wait for it!) chewed peanuts and treachery.

Stirrups turns around in her chair and grins as she crumples the Planter's bag in her sallow, tobaccoed hand while a bony, patchouli-ed finger from her other hand cranks up some Big & Rich on her boom box. Yes, boom box. Yes, BIG & RICH.

Then you get online and you book a flight to Ayer's Rock ASAP so you can return the sacred rock you took that one time, because this shit? Has got to stop.

I know I'm right in the middle of a series about my backpacking misadventures (a series that doesn't seem very popular but that I will continue anyway because I'm a crazy bitch like that) and I have another entry partially done which I was going to finish and post today but I had to stop writing it because - SHIT.

Blog--------------------------------------real life.

Real life----------------------------------BLOG.

You know how maps have a little key (a legend?) to explain scale because an inch really equals a mile or some shit like that? (I'm not sure exactly how it goes because I am completely map illiterate. North, south - I don't know what's going on. North is up, right? It all seems vaguely math-y to me; I avoid maps at all costs. I prefer the "drive around for hours like an imbecile" method of finding locations, so I might be talking out my ass here with this map stuff. Not that you would be shocked to hear that, of course.)

Anyway, read the above little "diagram" kind of like a map - each dash represents an assload of lightyears. Everything to scale, that means that my real life should be 18984783.6785 light years away from my blog, and vice versa. My original plan (hahahahaha) was that never the twain would meet.

Like most things in my life, however, that didn't go as smoothly as I had hoped. I've been desperately trying to keep the two apart as best I can (which is to say "not really at all" - it's sort of been like trying to stop a volcano from erupting by trying to put a cork in it - not effective) and it's turning into this:

Blog------Me-----Real Life

(See how the lightyear-representing dashes are decreasing rapidly and I'm stuck in the middle?)

Actually it's really starting to look like this:

Blog--DRAMA-Me-DRAMA--Real Life-drama drama drama

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

That's me, whining my ass off.

Now ideally this would be the part where I would tell you everything that's been going on in my life and give you all the dirty details so you could feel sorry for me or make me laugh or kick my ass or feel smug that your life is nowhere near as drama-filled as mine and we'd all be happy and smug here in Happy Goddamn BlogLand. Unfortunately, it seems that real life has gotten too smart for it's own goddang britches and has constructed a rocket ship equipped to cross several lightyear dashes and the Real Life Rocket Ship has landed on this stupid site and now if I write about real life here, REAL LIFE WILL KNOW THAT I'M TALKING ABOUT IT. Hi Real Life! You suck.

It's very strange to me that I have spent 99% of my life trying to avoid drama, yet no matter what I do, I find myself embroiled in giant tubs o' drama. The more I run from the drama, the more it pursues me like a hound of hell. In my happy dream world, things would look like this:

Me-----------------------------------------------------------------------------Drama

See, according to the above diagram, drama would be in a different solar system from me. I would live in a solar system filled with happy planets and happy trees, planets filled with puppies and chocolate rivers, on my own special planet where every night I would sleep in the arms of a well-endowed man with a small but firm ass and a love of mustard. Somehow I can't get it all together to make that happen though. I keep being jettisoned into the Dramiverse. I am not a fan of the atmosphere here.

*subtitle: Welcome to the Honey Hotel - you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave...

[Quick note: I decided to write about my year long backpacking trip. This could take a while. If you want to make any sense out of what I'm writing, you might want to read these entries in order, starting with my Saturday, August 6 entry.]

So there I was, sweating profusely while taking a cold shower, trying to avoid any unwanted needle sticks while shaving, when the bathroom door started shaking. Someone was trying to get into the bathroom with me, pounding on the door and jiggling the doorknob furiously. I had locked the door, of course, but let's just say that the lock, nay the whole damn door, was flimsy enough that a husky ten year old could break it down with a minimum of effort.

I grabbed for my towel as I racked my brain for the Thai phrase for "Get the fuck out of here!" which unfortunately didn't come to mind being that I speak zero Thai, an oversight on my part that I only became fully aware of at that very moment.

I opened the door before it was physically removed off of its hinges and faced a pleasant looking Thai man who bowed apologetically, smiled, and pushed past me as quickly as he could, scooting me out and shutting the door neatly in my face. First lesson learned for the day: Five minutes is too long to take in the shower when you share a bathroom with an entire floor of people and one of them urgently needs the facilities.

By the time I got back to Room J-402 (a walk of approximately ten feet) I was sweating so bad I felt it was literally impossible to do anything more than simply exist. That kind of claustrophobic heat weighs down on you so heavily, it's like waking up and discovering that gravity suddenly became twice as strong as it was the day before. Breathing takes every ounce of strength. Your hair never fully dries, you stick to everything you sit on, and you wonder how the Thai people look so peaceful and cool and friendly when their weather is so fucking miserable.

I had started my trip fully intending to write down every little thing I experienced into a handy little travel journal. Here it was, my first morning in Bangkok, and I had already witnessed a car accident, had found a used condom in my room and a hypodermic needle in the bathroom, and I had the door almost broken down while I took a shower, and all the energy I could muster up to write was enough for this line:

"August 12- It's so goddamn bloody hot here."

That's all I could manage before letting my pen slip lazily from my sweaty fingers to the once condom-littered floor. (Reminder to self: Buy new pen.)

As much as lying on the bed and not moving for the rest of the day sounded appealing, I hadn't traveled to Thailand to sit in a room. Our little group met in the lobby to decide what we were going to do for the day. Our travel plans for our entire, round-the-world trip consisted of very, very vague ideas of things we wanted to do and see. Today was no exception. Vague, vague, vague. The sweltering heat didn't motivate us much. All we could work up were some desultory ideas.

Because we couldn't agree on what we wanted to do that day, we decided to split up into two groups. The boys were going to go do "some things," which we girls could only hope didn't include something illegal or disgusting. Cousin T, Lola, Holly Hobby, and I decided to "look around," which was a pretty vague plan even for vague planners such as ourselves. We walked out into the blinding sun with zero direction and decided that breakfast would be a good place to start our day.

If you've never traveled, I don't know if you can fully understand this feeling, but if you have traveled, you'll know what I'm talking about - it's the feeling you get when you are jet-lagged and hungry and sweating like an old man in a sauna - everything takes on a slightly surreal aura. You're not sure if you are actually awake or asleep, not sure if the smell of sewage running down the street is really as bad as it seems at that exact moment, or if the people staring at you like you're a blonde alien from Planet NotThailand are real or simply gawking figments of your imagination. It's all a bit overwhelming, albeit exhilarating.

Some people handle the excitement in different ways. Cousin T, Lola and I were handling it pretty well, but Holly Hobby looked like her knees were about to buckle. Her freckles stood out in stark relief next to her rapidly paling cheeks; it looked like someone had drawn all over her paper-white face with a Magic Marker. Her owlish glasses were dangerously steamed up, and her brunette bob was stuck unevenly to her sweaty face. She looked exactly like a very disturbed Mary Engelbreit character:


Without the sailor suit and straw hat, of course. (She did have on Tevas and a fanny pack though.) (Yeah. Tevas.) (Not that there's anything wrong with Tevas and a fanny pack...well, yeah. There is.)

We decided she needed food, STAT, because food always makes things better. Since we didn't have any idea where we were exactly, we stopped at a corner fruit stand for some beautiful pieces of fresh fruit to tide us over until we could figure out what we were going to do.

Holly chose a huge slice of pineapple. For whatever reason, she didn't stop the vendor from sprinkling some mystery spices all over her pineapple slice. I'm not sure what the spices were, but it's a very popular way to eat fruit in Thailand. Each of our fruit slices were wrapped in pieces of newspaper so our hands wouldn't get sticky as we ate.

We continued to walk down the busy road, grateful for the cool, sweet juiciness of the fruit, and turned down an alley that could only be described as "smelling like a frat house toilet with broken plumbing after a weekend bender." All of a sudden, Holly stopped short and made a kind of gurgling noise. We turned around and saw that her pale cheeks had deepened to a scary combination of vermillion and green. She had a hand clamped tightly over her mouth, her knuckles whitened with the effort.

Lola advanced toward her, telling her to breathe deeply and relax, just as Holly puked with such force that her tightly clamped fingers were no match for the flood of vomit, and it sprayed out from in between her fingers and somehow managed to get all over her face, her glasses, her hair, and her Tevas.

Because we were woefully unprepared for anything, much less vomit, we didn't have even the most rudimentary supplies with which to clean up Holly - no baby wipes, no bottled water, not even a sliver of Kleenex. Yes, we were horribly prepared travelers. Since we found ourselves in an alley that was surprisingly devoid of cleaning supplies, we were forced to improvise. We decided to use the newspaper that had been wrapped around our fruit pieces to wipe the puke off her face.

The problem with using the newspaper as a cleaning utensil was the newsprint came off on everything. In addition to vomit and sweat, Holly's face was now covered with huge black smudges, which only got worse the more we tried to clean them off. We desperately wanted to avoid making Holly feel worse by laughing right in her face, but if you had any idea how she looked at that moment, you would have been hard pressed not to guffaw at her, while pointing. You would feel bad about it, but you certainly wouldn't have been able to stop yourself.

Holly's bangs were pushed up, a la Cameron Diaz in There's Something About Mary, her puke being the glue that held her bangs straight up in the air. Her face looked like she had just worked a hard day in the coal mines. The only light spots on her face were her shimmering glasses. She looked utterly (rightfully) miserable.

We sat down on the curb, our sweaty chins resting in our sweaty hands, and sweatily tried to decide what to do. All Holly wanted to do was go back to the Honey Hotel, being that she was sick, covered in puke and newsprint, and (deservedly) pissed at us for laughing at her. As we sat there, looking like the weirdest, sweatiest bunch of foreigners ever to set foot on Thailand's shores, a man drove up in one of these:


This is a "tuk-tuk," which is a motorcyle taxi. For a few baht (the currency of Thailand) they will take you wherever you want to go. Most of the drivers are very nice and have no ulterior motives at all.

If you look like we did that day, however, you might look so obviously like tourists and "easy marks," that you might attract a tuk-tuk driver who has an arrangement with a business owner in the city - usually a jewelry store or a similar touristy-type business. The scam is this: The tuk-tuk driver brings unsuspecting tourists to the business with which his has an arrangement and then gets a cut of whatever the tourist buys there.

This tuk-tuk driver saw four tourists looking sweaty and confused, and he offered them a ride for a very good price (free). The catch, of course, was he was going to take them to his friend's store and force them to look around and hopefully purchase something before taking them to their requested destination (ours being the Honey Hotel to drop off Ol' "Looks Like She Fell Into Some Shoe Polish and Vomit"Holly and then on to the Wat Pho of the Reclining Buddha).

Being the naive, trusting tourists we were, we didn't know that our driver had a plan for us. Off we went, in the opposite direction of the Honey Hotel.

There is no amusement park ride on earth that could ever be as exciting as a tuk-tuk ride through the streets of Bangkok. If you've ever wondered what it would be like to be in a James Bond-style car chase, take a Thai tuk-tuk and you'll know. Our driver drove like Goldfinger's henchmen were hot on our tail. We drove over curbs, on sidewalks, in between cars, past monks in saffron colored robes and delicate women selling straw hats on the corner...the more we screamed, the more humorous our driver thought it all was and the crazier he drove.

We finally arrived at a covered market area, where our driver stopped.

"This isn't the Honey Hotel," said Holly with defeat.

Through broken English and charade-style hand motions, we ascertained that we were supposed to walk into the dark, covered market to the jewelry store at the back and look around and purchase something so our driver could get a cut of the sale. Holly and Cousin T. thought this was a Very Bad Idea, but Lola and I thought the whole reason we went on this trip was to experience new things, so we were game. Lola and I went in, while Cousin T. took Holly Puke Watch duty outside.

The sun had been so bright outside that the inside of the covered market was nothing more than suggested shadows and unique smells while we waited for our eyes to adjust. People selling all manner of animals, grains, and vegetables were situated around the large outdoor room, and they tried to entice us with their wares as we passed.

We made our way to the jewelry store and walked in, a tinkling bell announcing our arrival into sweet, sweet air-conditioned heaven. I felt like I would buy whatever the owners placed before me, just as long as they would allow me to sit on their soft velvet chairs and bathe my steamy face with the icy goodness of their A/C of the gods.

The owners were gracious and friendly and brought us water and lychees while we looked at their beautiful, expensive jewelry. Because they were so nice and their A/C was so freakin' cold, we pooled some money together and bought something small.

As we walked back through the market to get to our tuk-tuk, I felt something run across my feet. I thought it was a cat. It was not, however, so much a cat as it was a HUGE BROWN RAT, which inspired us to run like the wind to get the fuck out of there. We burst out into the streaming heat and daylight, sweaty again, to be treated to the sight of Holly, puking into the gutter. The airconditioned lychees were but a fading memory now.

Our driver took us to the Honey Hotel, where we left a forlorn Holly, and we continued on to visit the Wat Pho (temple) of the Reclining Buddha. It's the largest, oldest temple in Bangkok.



I wish I could tell you more about the giant reclining Buddha we saw there, or the solid gold Buddha, or the multitude of robed monks who walked quietly among the spires, but sadly I didn't see fit to write about those things in my journal. No, instead I wrote about:

1. The heat ("I just want to die, it's so hot. I just want to die.")

2. A group of backpackers we met who offered us information on where we could score the best marijuana ("Chiang Mai, man, they have the best shit e-v-e-r, makes you fuckin' hallucinate man...")

3. The bathroom ("I had to SQUAT. Squat is a weird word.").

Because clearly those were important things for me to record for posterity.

The marijuana scoring advice wasn't really important in the grand scheme of things, since we wanted to avoid canings and life imprisonment, but my first encounter with a squatty potty was important. I met many squatty potties on my journey, but this was my first, and you never forget your first, as they say.


So what you do is you position your essential areas over the hole in the ground (you can place your feet on the convenient foot rests on either side of the hole, you see) and hope for the best. As you might note, there is no flushing apparatus. See that bucket of water there? You scoop up some water and pour it down the squatty potty to "flush" it. Fun! Excitement! Bathroom experiments! Notice the lack of toilet paper? Yeah...you're on your own there. That's where having some sort of baby wipe or Kleenex comes in handy. If you're a man, you probably think that squatty potties are no big deal, and you can go kiss your own manly ass for all I care, because squatty potties kind of suck for girls. By the end of my trip, however, I had perfected the art of hovering while peeing.

The rest of our first day around Bangkok was fairly uneventful. We took a water taxi on the Mae Nam Chao Phraya, and ate lots of fruit, and continued to sweat. A lot. There is a photo of me from this first day (a picture, incidentally, which no one will ever ever see if they also want to continue living) feeding a banana to a baby elephant. I look like I just emerged from a swimming pool. Except it's all SWEAT. My shirt is clinging to me like I'm on Spring Break, but it's like the Not Hot Spring Break and I just entered myself in a Sweat-Off Contest, and I'm about to win big. The baby elephant has a look on his face like, "What the fuck is wrong with this girl? Can someone help her or something?"

That night, we all met back at the hotel for dinner. The open-air, street-side cafe of the Honey was the perfect place to people watch while eating some of the best food I've ever experienced. Thai food is spicy deliciousness in a stirfried wok. The sun had set, making it cool enough to be tolerable, and it was intoxicating to lean back in my chair and listen to the tinny Thai music from the shitty speakers above as it poured over our table, and watch Surly Front Desk Man yell at the mischievous children playing boisterously in the lobby.

Because we were semi-sort of located in the Red Light District and our hotel rented rooms by the hour, there were plenty of prostitutes around. Many of them were beautiful, and one in particular caught my eye.

She had a thick skein of black hair trailing down the middle of her back, the lights of the hotel sign reflected in its blue-black sheen. Her skin was perfect, the color of coffee cream and peaches and showed no signs of sweat even though it was still quite warm out and she was wearing a leather jacket, of all things. She sauntered confidently back and forth in front of the cafe in impossibly high heels. She was graceful and curved in all the right places and was impossible to look away from. As she passed by, the most wonderful smell of her perfume trailed behind her - complex and fragile and exotic.

As she walked by a man sitting alone at another table, his mouth gaped open after her like a cartoon character's. I thought he was going loosen his tie, shoot hearts out of his eyes, and float behind her on a trail of her perfume, his feet never touching the ground.

This inspired me to write a quick poem on the back of a napkin:

she wore the shit out of that perfume.
where it might have slapped lesser women and left them on the floor, looking stupid,
that perfume caressed her - curve on curve on leather on delicate parts and an iron core
he smelled her and suddenly he was on a ferris wheel
stopped at the top
stomach dropping out from under him
in a creaking car swinging over cotton candy and dizzy laughter
she walked by too fast
leaving only a suggestion of
silk scarf hair and lotus flower eyes
kneeling sadly by a lily pad pool.

After dinner, I was talking to the wife of Surly Front Desk Man, and I mentioned Beautiful Leather Perfume Girl and how attractive I thought she was. Surly Man's wife cackled, "That's no girl! Him ladyboy! Oooo boy, hahahaha! Girl! That's a good one!"

Well, he was a very GOOD ladyboy. Hmph. We live in a beautiful world.

Tomorrow's Installment: The Road to Phang Nga

It was August, 90 degrees at midnight, and humidity swallowed me up like steam from a pot of boiling water when I walked out of the Bangkok International Airport. In addition to the hair-flattening, oppressive air, I couldn't ignore the sound of traffic punching me in the eardrums; horns and the roar of muffler-less cars and motorcycles stabbed me in the chest with artery-slicing sharpness. We had arrived.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A while back I took a year off to backpack around the world. I didn't go on the trip to "find myself" because I'm not a dirty hippie. I like leather, and shoes, and leather shoes, and I eschew patchouli in all its forms. No, I wasn't looking for myself when I decided to go on the trip, I was just a girl who a) didn't want to go to back to school, b) loved to travel, and c) believed there was no better time than the present to see the world. I didn't have a lot of money (hence the whole "one backpack, stay in cheap youth hostels and work really odd jobs in exchange for room and board"-style with which I traveled). There were no 5-star hotels or fine dining on my trip, but it was the happiest time of my life.

I didn't travel by myself because I'm a giant chicken. My companions included two cousins and some friends, and a bunch of people we picked up along the way - a strange mix of Aussies, Kiwis, Canadians and Americans. The main players in the story of this epic trip are as follows:

Cousin T. - quiet, Aussie, she could fall asleep anywhere, anytime, which is really fucking annoying, by the way.

Lola - larger-than-life Californian, way too nice for her own good .

Cousin J. - tall, all-Australian boy with a reverence for America, carried a basketball at all times.

The Gnome - Cousin J's annoying little girlfriend with caterpillar eyebrows and Grand Canyon-dimples.

Wizzle - 6'8 Maori with a bad temper and a penchant for hookers.

The Lizard - mean, redheaded Canadian prude, liked to wear prairie dresses.

Boyfriend D. - tall, dark, Aussie skateboarder with a Tom Cruise smile.

OompaLoompa Anne - midgety-short and horrible, a girl with a mustache and a sheep farm, from Goulburn, NSW.

Holly Hobby - bespectacled, freckled granola girl from Oregon, she puked in every country we visited.

More characters will float in and out of the story, but this was the core group that started off from Sydney and landed in Bangkok that hot August night.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The ten of us made our way into the humid soup of the Thailand night to the edge of a busy freeway. There are no words to adequately describe Bangkok traffic. It's meant to be experienced, not explained. Suffice it to say, it's amazing. There aren't rules so much as there are "suggestions" of things - suggestions of lanes, suggestions of laws, suggestions of stopping at lights and of using turn signals. Horns, yelling, fist-shaking and a bunch of heart-stoppingly close calls abound.

As we waited for a taxi van to pick us up and take us to our hotel, the sound of screeching tires grew louder. Out of nowhere, a white van came careening down the center of the freeway - the wrong way. Directly in front of us was a large cement block that divided the road into two halves. The speeding van ran headlong into the cement island and broke in two like it was merely a toy.

We all stood in stunned silence, watching the smoke pour out from under the hood of the van, wondering if the driver was still alive.

"No WAY did that just happen," said Boyfriend D. as the rest of us stared, open-mouthed.

The passenger side door opened and a barefoot man hopped out and ran away from the wreck at full speed, dodging speeding motorcycles as he went. Two seconds later, the sound of sirens wailed in our jet-lagged ears as three police cars pulled up and chased the barefoot man.

"That. was. AWESOME," said Cousin J. And it was.

Two seconds later, a white van that looked identical to the one that just hit the cement center divide before our very eyes drove up. Our ride to the Honey Hotel had arrived.

"We're going to die!" said Oompa Loompa Anne, gleefully.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We didn't die. Riding in a taxi van through the streets of Bangkok at midnight is an excellent way to shake off the bonds of sleepiness that jet lag tries to attach to you after a long flight, however. By the time we arrived at the Honey Hotel, we were high on diesel fumes and fear.

Ah, the Honey Hotel. How I miss you! Your cheap rooms that could be rented by the hour, the "ladyboy" transexual prostitutes that smoked and played cards in your lobby, the surly old man that worked your front desk, the banana pancakes and chicken fried rice served in your streetside cafe...is there any hotel in the world as unique as you?

We got our room assignments and our keys, grabbed our backpacks and trudged up the dark, narrow stairs to the fourth floor, as there were no elevators in this fantastical hotel. We followed Surly Front Desk Man up the shaky steps as he sighed heavily every two seconds. As we rested our sweaty, tired bodies at each floor landing before hoisting our heavy packs back up and continuing, we caught glimpses of gloomy, slender halls filled with an intoxicating blend of shouted Thai phrases and the sounds of people...er... fucking.

Surly Man indicated with a grunt and an imperious flick of his hand that there was one bathroom for our entire floor. One. One bathroom. One bathroom to rule them all. One to share.

"Are you sure there's only one bathroom?" Lola asked politely.

Surly Man knotted his surly brows together with extreme surliness. Yes. Only one bathroom.

Cousin T, Lola, and I were sharing a room. Surly Man pointed out our door and shuffled away sullenly. So excited for sweet sleep we were, we exuberantly opened the door and piled into the world's smallest room.

The room consisted of two single beds pushed together, four walls, a tiny fan mounted above the door, and nothing else. Running along the length of the top of the right and left walls were skinny openings covered with a screen, connecting our room to the rooms on the left and right, enabling us to hear e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g that went on in the adjoining rooms. Snoring, bodily functions, self-pleasurement...all could be heard.

Problem number one: On the white-ish looking wall above the bed was an unknown substance that appeared to be, well - crap. Like actual crap. Problem number two: There were two beds and three people. We had all brought sleeping bags, so it fell to one of us to sleep on the floor. Lola, being the nice girl she was, offered to spend night one on the floor. Cousin T. and I didn't argue with her.

Because the room was so small, there wasn't enough space next to the bed for Lola's sleeping bag, so we had to move the beds all the way against one wall to make room for her. As we moved the bed, I noticed there was something under the bed. Hmmm...how odd...it appeared to be a condom wrapper. Nice.

Oh...what's that next to it? Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! That would be a used condom, limp and soggy.

"I want to go hooooooooooooooooome," cried Cousin T.

"Shut the fuck up." (That was me. I'm helpful in a crisis.)

I ran down four flights of stairs, since we didn't have anything convenient like a phone in our room, to ask the front desk for condom removal service. I was told that I was in charge of Condom Removal, and I was unceremoniously handed a weird broom the size of a feather duster with which to remove it.

Four floors back up and I was sweating like I had never sweat before. Since Cousin T. was a sniveling baby whiner and Lola was the one offering to sleep on the floor, I was elected as Condom Sweeper Extraordinaire. I immediately ran into a problem - it seemed that the condom was "glued" to the ground. Quick removal was not the fate of this condom.

I tried to chisel the condom from the ground with the wooden end of the broom. I dislodged the condom with one mighty chisel, sending it into the air in the direction of Lola and Cousin T, who promptly jumped on the bed and started crying.

Lola and I laughed so hard our neighbors banged on the thin wall to quiet us. I finally managed to fling the condom out into the hall. Lola refused to sleep on a semen covered floor, so we jammed our three bodies into two single beds and proceeded to sweat all night long.

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The next morning, I contemplated our shared, fourth floor bathroom, a dirty affair with a real (used?) hypodermic needle in the soap dish, and wondered if I could take a shower with my clothes on.


Next Episode: Attack of the Squatty Potty!