Chili dogs = yes, Dressing rooms = no
Sunday, December 17th, 2006After enduring one last unexpected goodbye to Mr. Man (which made three heartbreaking farewell hugs in as many days), I did what any self-respecting, red-blooded American female would do – I went shopping.
It started with a practical matter. I need an electric kettle if I’m going to shut myself up in my house and write for the next two months. I cannot write without coffee. I can barely write my own name without coffee let alone the brilliance I fully expect to produce in the coming months. Leave booze to other scribes, I personally believe the answer lies at the bottom of a coffee mug.
There are kettles at the main covered market in town but I had an accompanying list of things to get that defied my time or patience with Tassadej market stalls: mugs, plates, Western-style broom, dust pan, underwear, and socks. It could have taken years to find all these things at the market.
So I caught a tuk-tuk out to Tesco-Lotus. It’s basically like Wal-Mart and every time I go there I get a sharp slap upside the head that I actually live in Asia. It happens when I am doing something much like today – pushing my cart slowly up and down the aisles humming along to Christmas carols and spacing out on brightly colored packaging in a totally familiar consumerist environment – and then suddenly I look around and notice that everyone is Asian…and there is a strange language being spoken…and all the writing is in an unfamiliar script. I have lost the plot for a brief moment before it all comes rushing back and shocks me. This rather upsetting disconnect happens every single time I go to Tesco. I usually recover with a chili cheese dog from Dairy Queen (so. not. joking.). Thank god for multi-national fast-food corporations.
So anyway, there I am strolling slowly along the aisles, pondering the absurdity of the Christmas show I saw on the way in – with the cast grooving around on an outside stage in the blazing afternoon sun, wearing Joseph and Mary costumes and foot-long smiles, while singing traditional carols in Thai accompanied by electric guitar to a suspiciously enthusiastic audience. I have no idea what was going on but it was weird.
I’m thinking about this while looking at underwear. I already know, before I even enter the ladies department, that this part of the shopping expedition is going to be a problem. I blindly grab at a packet of extra-large panties, throw them in the cart, and try to pretend that didn’t just happen. Moving right along…
The clever bit of cross-cultural understanding I came to today is that dressing rooms are universally appalling. What sort of sadistic asshole invented those lights, anyway? I am going to spare you the details and leave it at this: not even the dazzling engineering feats of Thai bras can compensate for seeing oneself naked under dressing room lights when one has recently quit smoking and gained a teensy bit of weight and, due to certain ethnic variations in body type, has extra-fucking-large underwear beating like a tell-tale heart just outside the door in their shopping cart. Ah-hem.
As I busily – and a bit desperately – distracted myself with brooms, dust pans, and coffee mugs, I kept noticing a tall, foxy hipster Thai boy. Then I noticed his foxy hipster Thai girlfriend. We kept running into each other. He kept overtly checking me out. He smiled at me. I smiled back. I wondered if maybe…could this…ooh…could this work both ways?
I may have extra-large Thai underwear lurking in my (oh what’s the English word?) dresser but my relatively exotic cultural status and my fair skin must have some cache, right? If it works for my male compatriots, maybe it can work for me.
But I let the opportunity pass. I don’t mean to be a complete jerk here but what the hell would I do with a Thai boyfriend? Am I the sort of person who could be happy sharing my bed, let alone my life, with someone who doesn’t know who Steve Martin is? Simply put: No.
It’s important to accept these things about oneself. I will wear ‘extra-large’ underwear, I will drink instant coffee, I will eat chili cheese dogs with white processed cheese and watery chili, but I will not date someone who just looks at me blankly when I come out of the blue with one of my frequent non-sequiturs like, “Oh man, Toonces, the cat who could drive a car – how funny was that?”
Drawing this line in the sand may result in spending the rest of my life alone, wandering the aisles of international Wal-Marts and snickering at my own cultural in-jokes. But honestly, as long as it doesn’t involve dressing rooms, I’m fine with that.
sandra_101