possibilities

I’m just dropping in for a second to say that things are getting interesting. On a couple of fronts.

1) The, uh, education outreach project that I came here to work on is starting to pick up. I can’t talk a lot about it, but I’ve made some good contacts at local companies, and a couple of my online buddies from London are interested in helping (sorry for what I said about England the other day, chaps!).

2) I’m pretty sure this Muslim Malay girl the bus was flirting with me this afternoon. She was on the slim side with a very nice ass (sorry to be crude…okay, not that sorry) and her hijab was the kind that just barely covered the back half of her hair, which made me hope she didn’t take things too seriously. The driver kept reading the fucking newspaper while the bus was in motion, and we exchanged these puzzled, inside-jokey looks about it. I was glad she was worried about it too, that it’s not just a local custom to read and drive. She got off before I did and on her way out she gave me a look that I can only describe as straight-up seductive. The possibilities here suddenly seem endless. Although I realize they might not be. All I’ll say is, I’m going to take that route again.

i'm back, and less of an ass today

Wow, that first entry was whiny, wasn’t it? It’s okay, I’m not going to kick my own ass about it too much. I know there’s a whole learning curve to any new place.

Anyway, things are looking up. I think the bank thing is all straightened out, knock on increasingly depleted rainforest hardwood (Sarawak’s main export!). Tingang is pretty cool. We went to a bar last night and he told me about how he’s only a couple of generations removed from one of the upriver (former) headhunting tribes. He said his family photo album has pictures of dudes with full-body tribal tattoos and distended earlobes and penis piercings (well, not in the picture, but he heard they had them—who knew indigenous Malaysians invented the Prince Albert?).

I had this weird vision of one of them being dropped into Silver Lake in LA and asking some tatted-up rockabilly guy with those fat plugs in his earlobes for directions because he’d think he was from a neighboring tribe.

It made me think about how different it must be to live in the place where your ancestors lived. Not many Americans are native to America. Except, well, Native Americans. But the Law family? Who the hell knows? We’re English-ish, I guess. I think my mom’s side is Irish. But way-back Irish and way-back English—mostly we were just the four of us, this little island.

I’ve never been to Europe. Maybe if I went, I’d get all emotional and see my people in every face and every brick of every old cathedral. But it’s hard to get excited about visiting a place that tried to conquer the rest of the world. I mean, there are old English buildings in Singapore if you want old English buildings. You get sick of being everywhere, of seeing jolly, red-cheeked Santa Clauses in tiny Chinese villages.

Also, everything in Europe is just really fucking expensive.

Okay, maybe I’m still a little grouchy today.

terima kasih for nothing

Why a blog? The world needs another blog like American grocery stores need another brand of cereal. But to tell you the truth (and by you I mean you, my blog, because I’m not planning on widely publicizing this thing), I’ve been lonely since arriving in Kuching. Nah, lonely is not the right word for it, because I’ve been too busy to sit around being bummed out. The business of getting a flat and learning a language will take up plenty of time, especially when the money you thought you’d transferred to your new bank was not actually transferred.

But yesterday I took a break from spending hours on hold with my old bank and went around the corner to the mall, thinking I’d get a quick lunch at the food court. There are all sorts of brightly colored, awesome-looking wet markets here. But I wasn’t ready to try eight new kinds of fruit and haggle over prices. Honestly, I wanted a corn dog and an Orange Julius, or the closest Malaysia could get to that combination, which turned out to be greasy fried chicken and a smoothie from this cafeteria-style place. Fine with me.

So I paid my RM7 to the girl in the hairnet at the register and I said, “Terima kasih,” which is pretty much the only Malay phrase I know (it means “thank you”). (Good thing so many people here speak English. Fucking colonialism.)

The girl just rolled her eyes.

Look, I’ve had people be plenty mean to me just because I’m a foreigner. I can handle a little rudeness. But usually people are pretty cool if you make an effort to speak their language, so I was just confused.

Later I asked Tingang, the guy who lives across the hall from me and just about the only person I’ve talked to who doesn’t work for a bank, if he had any idea what that might have been about.

He was like, “They were probably Chinese.”

And I said, “But don’t they speak Malay? Doesn’t everyone here speak Malay?”

Tingang said, “Sure, when the have to.”

That made me think about how things were back at home—and I still sometimes more or less think of the U.S. as home, I guess. Say I went to some international-esque place, like Grand Central Market in downtown LA. Say I got some falafel from one stand and an empanada from another. I’d say “thank you” to both of them, and I can’t imagine either the Middle Eastern guy or the Salvadoran guy getting all pissy about it.

I’m not normally one to think, “Why can’t other countries be more like America?” But yesterday, for that tired, tired couple of hours I was. Hence the blog. A quiet little corner of the internet to put down all my stupid thoughts.