My armpits are whiter than your armpits
Winter has been particularly vicious the past couple of days and I shivered at breakfast in the garden and again at lunch. In between meals, I dealt briefly with email [JdB: I don’t check your blog very often because I pay for Internet by the minute] and spent the rest of the time bundled up on the couch devouring an April 2005 issue The New Yorker. Sadly, it’s not the date that makes it seem like an artifact of some fascinatingly foreign culture. “There are places in the world where people go to the theatre and to art exhibits? Really? How strange.”
Work did offer some entertainment value. Jeddar’s fun new hobby is throwing things at me. In response to a barrage of colored pencils aimed at my head, I spoke sternly to him, but I’m not sure he registered this since he was laughing himself senseless at the time. Then I collapsed into laughter. The problem of course being that this is the sort of thing I also find incredibly funny. In addition to his sophisticated sense of humor, he is also surprisingly fast and strong and unpredictable. I am, however, growing somewhat concerned that his next parroted English phrase will be, “Knock it off!” Most likely spoken as he pantomimes a dodge.
After Jeddar, I did the thing I choose to call an ‘English lesson’ with the four shrieking girl monsters otherwise known as The Cousins. So exotic, so demure. Only two of them burst into tears today so that was cool. A disproportionate amount of lesson time gets consumed by them screaming at each other in Thai, then glaring and pouting. Whatever. I seriously don’t care if they learn English or not.
The important business of the day, though, was my evening run to 7-11. As I searched the stock of cute miniature bottles of deodorant, I noticed that they were all, inexplicably enough, labeled as ‘whitening.’ I understand whitening moisturizer, whitening facial cleanser, even the redundantly-marketed whitening sunscreen, but whitening deodorant? Oh well. As I always say – when in Rome, use the weird Roman deodorant.
And so ended another day in Nong Khai. In the immortal words of Built to Spill: “Takes a lot to make me crazy, and a lot is always going on.” I can’t say I’m regretting my decision to leave for Laos in two weeks. If nothing else, I look forward to showing off my lily-white armpits to an entirely new country.
Tags: Nong Khai, Thailand
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