Sandy Does Southeast Asia

I am having a confusing week. Or should I say: more confusing then usual, since confusion sometimes seems to be my natural state. Anyway.

So remember my novella? Remember how it was 90-something pages of blood/sweat/tears that I was going to turn into a novel? And how I spent weeks building a chapter outline around it and sorting out how I would use it as the foundation of this Really Great Book because there really was some beautiful writing in there?

Yeah, well now it’s somewhere around Cambodia if it hasn’t already been eaten by fish. Because I flung it into the Mekong yesterday. I know it was ridiculous – honestly, I do usually know when I’m indulging my Dramatic Artistic Temperament – but there was something so immensely satisfying about looking through it and remembering how much time, how much effort, how much emotion, how much of me is in there…and then flinging it away into oblivion. The pages scattered into a white raft that bobbed brightly on the muddy water. I watched them until they were out of sight. They say that with kratongs, if you watch them until they are out of sight then your troubles will be carried far away from you. I thought perhaps the magic would work for all the heartbreak and loss that had been poured into the novella. I watched intently and kept watching long after I had lost sight of it.

Partly it was a temper tantrum, I admit. But mostly it was because there have been a lot of things happening recently that are making me question assumptions that I have held for a long time about myself. About my writing, mainly, and thinking maybe I shouldn’t be writing at all. Maybe this is all some stupid idea I got in my head when I was a child. Even as a small child I was fascinated by the fact that my first and middle names mean ‘helper of mankind’ and ‘defender of mankind’ (yes I believe I was actually born taking myself this seriously – sad isn’t it?). And I knew (or thought I knew?) from as far back as I can remember that I was supposed to do something to contribute to humanity, and that how I would do this is writing fiction.

Now I’ve told myself that for so many years that it’s an integral part of who I think I am. But the fact is that I hate the act of writing most of the time and I don’t get any of the recognition that people who put in half the effort get, so I must be doing something wrong. If you keep trying and it keeps not working, eventually you have to admit you’re on the wrong track. I simply must not have any talent. Maybe it’s time to let it go. It’s just that I have no idea how life could possibly be satisfying or worth living at all without having this sense of direction and vocation. I guess it’s something I will have to start thinking about.

In the meantime, I am still not sure if I feel like laughing or crying when I think about all of those white pages fluttering like birds over the water.

It finally happened yesterday. After a month and a half away, I finally got homesick. I knew yesterday was going to be a challenge because it was (would have been?) the one-year anniversary of the first date with my ex-boyfriend. So I had that running in the back of my mind, imagining what we would have been doing in LA. Imagining going to the bar we spent that first night in, having beers, then walking home late down Sunset, talking, holding hands. I got to feeling very lonely and very far away.

I had to distract myself. Unfortunately, I chose to do so by reading a book a friend lent me the day before – Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck. I was pretty much begging to get sad about being away from California, right?

My next distraction was significantly more successful. Since yesterday was Loy Kratong we had a long table set up in the garden for shrine-making. Loy Kratong is a very important festival here in Thailand. For it, each person makes a little round shrine (called a kratong) out of a slice of banana trunk and decorates it with banana leaves, flowers (we mostly used orchids and marigolds), three sticks of incense and a candle. When it’s finished you float it down the river as a thanksgiving for rain and irrigated crops. But you also get to a make a wish!

So yeah, major arts & crafts time in the garden. The Thais made gorgeously complex arrangements of flowers and folded leaves. My kratong was pretty lame in comparison but I had fun making it. After dark, Caroline and I sent ours off from the side of her floating bar. The water seemed calm and happy beneath the full moon. There were dots of candlelight all along the river as the ones sent out further upstream drifted past. Perhaps it was the magic of the moment or the magic of the Mekong – and I know it’s silly – but there is a small part of me that wants very badly to believe that the spirit of the river heard my wish.

Or to be more accurate: Halloween at Surreal. Surreal is the bar here in Nong Khai that hosted the Halloween party we went to. Halloween was a stressful day by my new standards. By 1pm Caroline and ... [Continue reading this entry]