Roaches Are Gross to Eat

I have never eaten a cockroach, but I almost did today. The worst part about this is that I thought I was ordering a pork chop.

There's a small, half-formed grocery store down the road from me. It has pretensions of being a much bigger, more important store than it actually is, and I like their selection of produce. Plus, it's refrigerated and air-conditioned.

So, I was at this supermarket today, and outside the supermarket is a restaurant called Black Canyon Coffee, which apparently serves Thai-Western fusion food despite its Wild West logo (even though this is Cambodia and all.) Because I was in the middle of an intense sugar crash at the time (this was like 11 am because my digestion is so pathetic these days) I sat down and ordered food. Most of it is ridiculously cheap, and I guess what you pay for is what you get.

It was so nice: a large pork chop and fries, a small salad, and four little squares of toast--all for $3.95. I took one bite of the pork and discovered a young cockroach, broken up and flattened, lying just under the slab of meat.

As someone who habitually eats the ants that get into her sugar, I was less troubled about the fact that there was a roach under my pork chop, than I was troubled by the question, Why there was a roach under my pork chop.

If it were a fly, that would be understandable. Flies get into things. The same with ants--I haven't met a person in this city who doesn't have a problem with the ants. Moreover, having worked in a bakery, I know that insects can get into flour and grains sometimes.

But a cockroach? On a pork chop? That's a pretty serious health violation there!

I stared at it so long that finally the wait staff came over (like literally the entire wait staff).

I pointed to the roach and simply said, "This is not good."

Waiter (after sheepishly taking the plate of rejected food): "We are SO SORRY. Would you like to try something else?"

Me: "No. I really don't. In fact, I don't ever want to eat anything from here again."

And so saying, I backed slowly towards the door, then walked out the door, down the road, and directly to the bottle of antibiotics sitting on my dresser. Because lord knows what else that poor pork chop, plate, fries, or salad had on it.*

The moral of this story is, Don't eat at Black Canyon Coffee.

*This is actually the first egregious violation of health standards I have encountered in my 7+ months here.

Good People are Born in May

So what do you do for your birthday?

Picnic in a park? Dinner out with friends? Par-TAY??

Do you get a national holiday, five days off work, and fireworks the night before your big day? Well, DO YA?

I do! I used to hate my birthday, because, apart from Mike Oldfield and the guy who wrote The Wizard of Oz, no famous people have been born on May Fifteenth. No AWESOME famous people anyway.

And guess what? Still no one is! But the king of this country was born on the 14th, and so, as long as I live in Cambodia, my birthday will always within the "birthday sandwich" of time off.

There is pretty much no other equally cool ruler on the planet today (except Sheikh Mohammed). King Sihamoni is the awesome sort of king who has studied film-making in North Korea, taught ballet in Paris, and *ahem* thinks of women as his sisters. He formerly served as Cambodia's ambassador to UNESCO (I AM JEALOUS). A shy and sensitive soul, he was somewhat uncomfortable being named king/demi-god--which ought to be the first qualification for the job! He is mostly apolitical. He radiates goodness.

Most charming picture of a sovereign ruler ever! -->>>

Like I say, Good people are born in May!

AND I got a perfect view of the fireworks from my balcony!

And that is the reason I am now happy with my birthday, May the Fifteenth. Happy Birthday to all, and to all a good night!

This Is What Hypothyroidism Is

Some symptoms of hypothyroidism:

• Depression
• Cold intolerance
• Menstrual irregularities
• Sleep disturbances
• Cognitive impairment
• FATIGUE**

"Fatigue". Hypothyroidism has redefined what "fatigue" means to me. I used to think I felt "fatigue" after pulling an all-nighter. I thought that running a mile was the most physically exhausting thing I had ever done. I now long for those innocent days.

If, for some inexplicable reason, you want to know how I was feeling, go out one evening and do heavy physical labor. Till dawn. Come home and relax for half an hour or so, just until it's time to get up for work.

Can you feel the creaky, aching exhaustion pervading every last fiber in your body? You just want to lie down again, but you can't, because you have the whole day ahead of you, and you must spend it being energetic, patient, and very, very happy.

Throughout your pathetically short four-hour day, you find yourself failing miserably. You are unnaturally sleepy. People are asking you things--important things!--and you can't muster the energy to give much more than an apathetic, half-assed answer based on your flawed understanding of their semi-coherent words. You could be falling from the sky in a burning jet plane, but dammit, who cares? The only thing you want from life is to close your eyes! And thus the day carries on.

When it's all over, you can't actually remember what you talked about, who you talked to, or if any of this actually happened or if it was another one of those vivid dreams that keep you flailing around all night.

You're vaguely aware as you walk home, that some other beings are moving around you, but your swollen, blackened eyes are too overwhelmed by the sun and the non-existent fog for you to properly acknowledge their existence. You're also vaguely aware that the air is much, much too hot and that your body is wracked with nauseating shooting pains.

But it doesn't matter that your body is self-destructing, as long as you can lie down. Your sole purpose in life has become lying down in bed for the remaining 20 hours of your day, eyes closed.

You're ok as long as you do that. But you're not ok if you try to do housework, answer the phone, wash the dishes, grade papers, surf the internet, or even keep your eyes open. You've got to ration your energy to one task per day, and usually that task is finding food to temporarily diminish your abnormal appetite.

Eventually, you fall into a disturbed, shallow sleep from which you awaken every two hours to go to the bathroom, hungry and haunted by your dreams, which are somehow more real than your waking hours.

You wake up in the morning--face puffy, lips puffy, hands puffy, feet and ankles puffy, knees hardly able to bend, your belly distended from fat and water retention--and as conscious thought begins to piece itself together, you slowly realize that today--you get to do it all over again.

Laptop Fixed. Thyroid Down!

I have a lot of stuff to say about pretty much everything, and yet I've posted...what, two times within the last month?

I wanted to do it more often, but first my laptop broke, and I couldn't afford to get it fixed. This is especially true when the technician charges you more than the computer itself is worth because ALL white people have Croesus-like wealth capabilities and generate great piles of cash simply as part of their biological processes.

I speak in bitterness because I finally got a second opinion on the computer this weekend. As a consequence, estimated costs of repair were down-graded from $350+ for a new motherboard to $40 for a thorough check-up and CPU power block repair. My affordably-repaired computer now sits on my lap, its keyboard eager to channel my thoughts and emotions onto the internet.

So for the last five weeks, my laptop's been lying uselessly in a bag in the corner of my room for the ants to explore, unbeloved by friend and foe alike. But that was OK, I could use an internet cafe to write all the posts I wanted, right?

Wrong.

For the last month, starting at about the same time my computer ceased to function, I became completely and utterly hypothyroid. Damaged from months of viral infection and unable to function, my thyroid was finally down for the count. I became tired--debilitatingly tired. Tired like I've never felt before. I had the energy and mental capabilities of a malaria victim.

What this means is that, for several weeks, just getting out of bed was a major effort. Walking down the road to school was a major expedition of gargantuan proportions. Staying awake while teaching class? Forget it. And getting to an internet cafe was simply out of the question.

So that's how I've been this month.

Will, Kate, and Osama bin Laden! Cambodia, China, and the USA! THIS POST HAS IT ALL.

In a covert pseudo-military operation that defies description, Osama bin Laden killed nearly three thousand individuals, instigated massive retaliatory wars that now threaten destroy the US financially, and inspired a violent global jihadist movement. Reviled by most of the world, he yet managed to hide in plain sight for the better part of decade. He was fanatic, a jihadist, and probably a genius. He was also the person who first sparked my interest in the Middle East, the Arab world, terrorism, and Islam.

Al-Qaeda's actions have probably altered the course of my life. If not for the network's regrettable actions, would likely have never majored in Middle Eastern history, Arabic, and International Affairs. I would never have met the people I did or witnessed the events that I did. Nor would I have traveled to Dubai, which has completely altered my world view. I might not even be in Cambodia right now, having never discovered the world outside America.

It was not always easy--Middle Eastern studies brought me a lot of pain. There are elements in my family that believe Middle East=Arabs=Muslims=EVIL, and therefore, my interest in the region was driving my family straight to Hell. Despite the obvious stupidity of this reasoning, I was attacked and virtually kicked out of the house on the grounds of "terrorism" (if reading about the Ottoman Empire and representing Libya in the Model Arab League can be said to constitute "terrorism").

In still other ways, I'm not sure whether or not Middle Eastern studies have brought me ANY benefit--there's no telling where I'd be now if I had chosen another field of study. Would I have majored in Classics, like all of my parents and parental figures? Would I have gone into law? Graphic design? Would I have a lucrative career now, instead of being a struggling adventurer with a semi-defunct thyroid? Or, without a passion to sustain me, would I have become disillusioned with college and still be working in the food industry in small-town Ohio?

For better or for worse, Osama bin Laden and his work decided the course of my young adult life, and it's been hard for me to wrap my mind around the fact that he's really gone.

That said, maybe my degree doesn't matter. I've certainly never done anything with it, and I am now living in Cambodia, which is not a Middle Eastern or Arab country by any standard. The dire warnings worldwide that Americans should be super-vigilant upon bin Laden's death is somewhat irrelevant here. Apart from the obligatory front page on all the newspapers, no one seems to care that America's arch-villain is dead. The most I got was a sentence from one (out of maybe 100) of my students, informing me that "Osama bin Laden was a very cruel man" (vocab word, cruel). The life I once built is now literally a world away, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

I can tell you what is a bad thing, though, at least in my mind. I don't like the American response to it's own victory. I don't complain that they killed bin Laden in a tactically brilliant operation--he was fair game as far as I'm concerned. I don't even much care that they dumped his dead body in the sea like so much refuse. No, what bothers me is what I have seen on the news.

Thousands of college students, most of whom I dare say were too young to really remember or understand the significance of the attacks, and most of whose lives were NOT altered by the attacks, gathered dressed in red-white-and-blue, celebrating the fact that some people were killed. Good job, my younger brothers and sisters--you look just like the folks who cheered when the twin towers fell.

It annoys me, but it's understandable.

What's worse is the way the US government refuses to release key information, e.g. photos. I was especially not fond of the excuses, "They're too gruesome" and "we don't parade dead bodies around like trophies". These statements are ironic in light of the gruesome photos (*trophies*) published of Osama bin Laden's son and two of his couriers--and for that matter, the photos of Uday and Qusay Hussein back during the invasion of Iraq. I find the pretense repulsive.

Then Barack Obama tried to invoke "security" reasons. I maintain that 1) the US should have been far MORE worried about security when they invaded and destabilized Iraq, Afghanistan, and their neighbors, and that 2) this line of rationale sounds disturbingly close to one of my Least Favored Nations, China, which habitually censors everything under the pretense of "stability".

The recent release of muted and heavily edited al-Qaeda videos only confirms this. I would ask my country to stop taking its cues from China.

And last--I have only fate to blame for this one--I ask why, why, WHY this couldn't have happened several days earlier so I wouldn't have to watch Will and Kate's wedding ALL WEEKEND LONG? I had hoped and prayed for something of this magnitude to happen--and it did--48 hours TOO LATE. Damn.