Thai Hooker

3:00 A.M.

In the lobby of the hotel

In Bangkok,

(Where, they say

What happens there must stay)

Stood a bone skinny woman in an ugly purple dress

With no back and hardly any skirt.

Dressed to flirt

Hair a mess,

Tangled, matted, she talked hurriedly,

Chattered worriedly,

Seeking reassurance from a cell phone,

A cell phone half hidden from view by tangled hair.

Tangled hair that also hid as it tumbled down,

Her skinny, angular cheek bone, no longer brown

But as purple as her dress from its encounter with the fist

Of the man with the upper body

Sculpted like an African god.

The drunk man who looks like a god

The sullen man who wonders why we’re making such a fuss

Too drunk even to see the necessity of paying her off

With 5,000 baht.

Whatever.

She was never

That hot.

A bundle of bones in a purple bag

And an ugly temper.

From a well-used position of vulnerability

Reaching out for the only strength available to her,

The strength of the cell-phone,

The strength of wheels and deals made with cops and pimps

And aggrieved solidarity from other working girls

She limps

Through the dark narrow streets of Bangkok.

Limping from one man to another,

One wallet after the other,

As they fly in and out,

In and out,

On business trips,

And pleasure trips.

Lying, standing, kneeling

No longer feeling

Their gnawing lips,

On her face,

Her neck,

Her bone skinny breasts,

And their hands only when they are fists.

Even the body sculpted like an African god turns her on

No more or less than the dirty old European retirees

With their saggy speedos on the beach.

What difference does that make to the whores?

Their money is as good as yours

And they can’t hit as hard.

And I, looking into her lean, angular face

As cunning and furtive as a fox

As she stands

In the lobby and demands

5,000 Baht,

I realize I have nothing to say.

We just need to get this taken care of and catch our flight.

I am coherent because I slept that night

A couple of hours anyway.

And I am sober. I could go get 5,000 Baht

From an ATM but I will not

Insult her like that by trying to pay

For her flesh, now purple, or covering up

For the man who should have been a god;

Who looks like an archangel and sullenly counts her price in slips of paper.

The injury is not bad

The bruise will fade

And after all she has made

A life (as much of a life as can be had)

From selling her flesh to men with the bodies of gods

And men with the bodies of slugs.

Men kind and men savage,

Drunk and sober,

Long or short

Large or small.

Purple flesh just costs more. That’s all.

She is already pained

There is nothing to be gained

In beating senseless the man sculpted like a god

For that will not

Better her life,

Erase the bruise

Or pay his dues,

Or make amends to his wife

Pregnant with their first child and home alone

Who will never know or understand

What stayed in Thailand

And what perhaps came home.

Far away

In America the next day,

In the heart of a woman who knows what love is

I tell the hooker’s story

And offer up my prayers

And tears

For they are all I have to give

And no one else lives

Who will give

Even that.

Thai Women Part VIII

Part eight in a series of eight posts written back in April of 2012 during and after a trip to Thailand to teach advanced first aid. Parts one, two, three, four, five, six and seven are here.

So let’s take this back to the Thai women who inspired this whole series of reflections. Any Americans who thought they were going to sleep with some hot Thai police ladies simply because they flirted heavily through two weeks of class with them were disappointed (I hope) because they still didn’t have that emotional context. Those girls might have been giggly and girly, and they might have been sending all the signals. Some might even have been head over heels in whatever-you-want-to-call-it (I would be loath to use the word “love” for something that grows over a two week seminar). But regardless of any infatuation, there was something else at work. To put it into context I thought about what it would be like for a group of women in America to get a two week class from a bunch of foreign men (insert nationality of choice here) with great builds, exotic looks, and exciting accents, ready to flirt at the drop of a handkerchief. Don’t tell me there wouldn’t be a flutter of giggling, flirting, gossiping and a few scattered sighs. But I very much doubt the majority of these women would sleep with their foreign instructors, and I’m quite certain they would be the first to condemn any of their colleagues who did.

The women were not simply speaking another language (I am speaking of the language of their actions, not the Thai language.) They were speaking the same language with different meanings. When they shrieked and sighed over our white skin and muscles, they were speaking the same language as the guys when they commented approvingly on the women’s faces and shapes. But with the guys the thought process went something like: “Wow, she’s a hot, exotic looking Thai chick. Let’s have sex.” There requires no mental or emotional gymnastics, no process of consideration, just A à B. It makes sense to us. (Yes, despite my moral and mental and even emotional repugnance to that philosophy, I still speak it fluently. I follow it with no trouble at all.)

With the women the thought process was very different. “Wow, he’s a hot, exotic looking American guy,” yields a whole plethora of possible responses ranging from, “Wow, fluttery feelings!” to “I should get a picture with him and put it on facebook. My girlfriends would totally freak!” to “I bet I could get him to come over here just by batting my eyes.” Mixed in with all of that is the realization that, “Yeah, he’s cute, but I’m going back to my unit in two weeks and he is going back to America.”

Same language (laughing, giggling, flirting, showing off the body just a little) but with a totally different meaning. Some of the guys could at least observe that the meanings were different, and some simply continued to interpret everything based on their own assumptions.

The male model is a lot less work for sure. The female model requires, or at least assumes, that there will be time, and a lot of it. A lifetime in fact, is nearly always the hope, at least subconsciously. Trust is an intrinsic component of it, not just trust in the man that he won’t beat her or leave her, but trust that he will love her, trust in herself that she can love him, and trust in the relationship that it will be worth fighting for. Trust does not happen overnight. It takes time, and once established it isn’t permanent. It may take years of patience really to win a woman’s heart and then it can be lost in one act of betrayal. It has to be actively sought after and maintained for the duration of the relationship. This reality is so foreign to the male thought process that most men, I suspect, never learn it.

I believe it is worth it, though. Those who never learn it will never know what they missed by not learning to listen.

Thai Women, Part VII

Part seven in a series of eight posts written back in April of 2012 during and after a trip to Thailand to teach advanced first aid. Parts one, two, three, four, five and six are here.

I’ve been working on a new theory of the psychology of women. Don’t exit the page, please. Have a good laugh, and then read the rest of the post.

What the adolescent male of any age cannot understand is the need of the feminine mind for context. He understands it in the tactical sense, if he is smart, meaning that he observes the signs and patterns and can come up with strategies to manipulate or bypass those patterns. Essentially he views the particularly feminine part of female sexuality as an obstacle to be overcome, rather than as a complement and balance to his own sexuality.

Context is the word I am using right now to describe the complex psychological and emotional reality that I observe surrounding the behavior of women, sexually. To put it in the simplest terms, in order for a man to get a woman to agree to have sex with him he must create a context in which it makes sense to her, not simply intellectually, but emotionally and even subconsciously. Men don’t really need this. In the male brain, sexually attractive female (whatever he has been conditioned to believe that is) = all the context I need. Women are not naturally like that. This is not to say that they cannot become like that. In fact, a good number of men spend a lot of time and effort ensuring that women do become like that.

I believe this need for context springs from a natural sense of self-worth. To observe it, however, you usually have to go back a long ways, right to the beginning of womanhood, and even before. A little girl instinctively believes in her own worth. All little girls know that they are princesses. No one has to tell them this for them to act like it. It doesn’t matter whether she is a girly-girl or a tomboy, she believes instinctively in her own inherent value. Unfortunately this belief is a fragile thing. It can be affirmed, or it can be exaggerated and blown out of proportion, or it can be destroyed. Usually, however, a good portion of it remains into the teen years in all but the worst cases. With puberty it becomes entangled with overt sexual urges, especially in middle and high-schools in our society in which it is almost impossible for a girl to escape being judged primarily as a sexual object.

This inherent sense of worth, in its most natural state, tells the young woman that she is not an object to be used for someone else’s pleasure. She, of course, has her own urges and desires, but mixed with the purely physical desire (which I have no qualifications to judge) is that intuitive grasp of her own worth and the instinctive fear of being used, or of using someone else. Like it or not, for women self-image and sexuality are inescapably linked. In order for her to want to give herself physically there has to be a surrounding emotional context in which the man’s treatment of her squares with her own view of her own worth.

Now, that is a very important point. It explains how context works, both for the true use, and for those who abuse it by using it as a tactical advantage in a sex-war. A man can bring about this parity between his treatment and her self-image in one of two general ways:

1)    Either by affirming her worth and making her feel secure in the knowledge that he will guard her worth more fiercely and lovingly than she ever could.

2)    Or by degrading and tearing down her sense of her own worth until she feels that she deserves whatever kind of treatment he wants to dish out.

It is important to understand that either of these ways can achieve the end result of getting a woman in bed with you. All the man is doing is putting her self-image and his actions on the same level. It is also important to understand that #1 is not automatically virtuous. A man can lie in order to seem like he loves her and respects her, and then betray her. Or he might actually believe it, and then “fall out of love” with her later on. Either way his honesty is compromised, and the end result is likely to be a terrible blow to her self-esteem, but as regards method he still went by the affirmation route. In fact, I would say that is by far the most effective route, even for a total liar and scoundrel, simply because it bears some superficial, temporary resemblance to the real thing.

Thai Women, Part VI

Part six in a series of eight posts written back in April of 2012 during and after a trip to Thailand to teach advanced first aid. Parts one, two, three, four, and five are here.

There is insight to be had even in the abuse of a good thing. Those with most experience with that abuse should have the most insight, but it never works that way. You have to stand outside the abuse in order to understand it, which is precisely the opposite of virtue. You only really understand virtue from the inside.

But let’s think about that fantasy the “irresistible male” for a bit. What is really at the heart of it? Why is it so specifically a male fantasy? Well, it really is about projection. The man projects his own attitudes towards sex into the woman he is looking at, and then interprets her actions based on his attitude (women do the same thing). I mentioned in an earlier post the amount of work a high school jock has to do to overcome a girl’s natural resistance and get her to sleep with him. The only reason why this is surprising or frustrating to him is because he is assuming his own sexual instincts in a female body. (I am not, of course, trying to perpetuate the myth that women do not have sexual urges, or that they are not as strong as male sexual urges. In fact, the only reason this myth has come about is because we have interpreted “sexual urge” in overwhelmingly male terms.) If she really were a male mind in a female body there would be no problem. They would look at each other across the gym, nervously smile a few times, someone would break the ice, and then they would have sex.

The reality is that this does not happen. This should be all the evidence we need that women are wired differently than men, and yet we go on believing the myth of instant sexual gratification. The teenage jock, whether he is seventeen or seventy makes little difference, simply cannot understand this, because, never having told his genitals to shut up so he could listen, he still believes that women, deep down inside, really do think of sex the way he does. All he has to do is overcome all the guilt and hang-ups society has burdened her with and allow her inner slut to bloom forth and then she will be his for the taking. It may take a bit of effort, but not half as much effort as if he tried things on her terms. No matter how much work you have to put in to overcome a woman’s natural resistance to casual sex, it costs far less than love. Relationship is much more work.

Thai Women: Part V

Part five in a series of eight posts written back in April of 2012 during and after a trip to Thailand to teach advanced first aid. Parts One, Two, Three, and Four are here.

The truth is that women simply don’t operate like that, for the most part. The more of a libertine you are, the more blatantly obvious that truth should be. After all, it should have become obvious in high school. The captain of the football team who has all the local beauties fighting over him might seem to be the irresistible male of legend, but he of all people should know better. He still has to put in the work. He has to argue, cajole, flatter, tease and wear down the girl’s resistance before he can get into her pants. The fantasy on one hand is that sheer masculine perfection is enough to conquer any reasonable woman in a few easy lines, or at most one evening of food and drinks. The observable experience of most men contradicts this, and they all lament the amount of work it takes to get a woman in bed with them, and yet the fantasy is still stronger than reality.

Why?

I think the answer is that it is a cover up for inadequacy and emptiness. The fantasy defines manhood as the ability to conquer a woman with little or no effort. The fact that woman don’t usually play by the same rules is seen as proof that they are weird or uptight about it, but the fantasy is never called into question. No matter how many times it fails it is still believed, partly because it is so all-pervasive and partly because it is so flattering to our egos.

My strongest experience with this comes from Afghanistan. At this point I no longer remember what exactly was going on, but I remember that I was having a bad day. A combination of loneliness, physical exhaustion, lack of sleep and inability to sleep (I don’t recommend the combination), left me feeling empty and worthless more than a few nights. When a phone call home failed for some reason that was always the worst, so I would usually go to the gym to work off the angst. I never really felt like working out at times like that, but it works if you can get into it. At least you sleep better. At any rate, on this particular night I walked into the gym and the first thing that met my eye across the room was a girl working out near the weight benches. She wasn’t bad looking. It’s not easy to make Army PT gear look sexy, but she was doing her best. She was wearing her army PT shirt with the sleeves rolled up inside, which is unauthorized, uncomfortable, and not easy to do, but it drew the front of the shirt tight across her ample chest. The reason I noticed her, however, was because at the exact moment I walked in, she looked up and saw me through the mirror. She made eye contact with a cold, kind of appraising look, pushed out her chest a little more, and started stretching her arms behind her back, all the while looking me dead in the eye. Perhaps I misjudged her at the time, but it seemed to me then that all I had to do was walk across the room and say “Hi”, and she would have had sex with me that night. I might have been quite wrong about that, but that was my automatic read of her.

Part of me was a little intimidated and disgusted, but a good part of me at the time was also intensely attracted. The part that was feeling empty and worthless instantly felt filled and validated by the idea that she had picked me, out of every guy at the gym, to flirt with (which was probably not true, by the way.) I was more disgusted by this attraction than by her action, and I went to another part of the gym to work out. When even there she kept watching and I kept half wanting her to watch, I cut my workout short and left.

The attraction, while a real phenomenon that I really experienced, was not a happy emotion. There was nothing happy in her face, and nothing happy in that magnetic attraction that I felt. It was not wholesome at all, but black, ugly and disgusting. I don’t know for certain, of course, but if I had to make a guess I would guess that her mood at that moment was an exact mirror for mine, and she was looking for the same validation that I was. Again, maybe I read her wrong, but that was my assessment. Perhaps I was projecting my own feelings into her actions. It’s always a danger when dealing with women, to interpret her actions in light of my assumptions. Whatever her story was (I never saw her again) what was suggested in my mind was not any kind of personal connection, and certainly not love or even a desire for love, but simply two empty people using each other to fill the emptiness. As I said, part of me, perhaps the most dominant part emotionally, was intrigued and attracted by that idea. Thank God, logic is almost always stronger in me than emotion. The whole analysis I’ve written down in this post was present in my mind at that moment, in at least a basic form, and I chose what logic dictated and walked out of the gym into the dark. I believe someone, somewhere was praying for me at that exact moment.

I suspect that this is the strongest reason why the fantasy persists. Things always work the way they were designed to work, and in moments of emptiness nothing props up a man’s flagging sense of self like a beautiful woman’s affection. Failing that, simulated affection will work in the short term. That’s just the nature of beast. No matter the reality of sin and mutual dishonesty, it will still make the partners feel validated, even if only for a moment, before that wears away and leaves the emptiness worse than before. It takes years and years of abuse and perversion before there is no longer even a hint of that validation left in the act. By then, we will have forgotten that it was ever there in the first place.

Thai Women Part IV

Part four in a series of eight posts written back in April of 2012 during and after a trip to Thailand to teach advanced first aid.

Part One, Two and Three are here.

There is a fantasy that most SF guys have in which they are the stars of the show. They are confident, burly, suave sex-machines, oozing pure testosterone from every pore, deadly to women. The SF guy walks into a party, or a bar, or a classroom full of female students, and they all instantly want him. All he needs to do is lay down some of the never fail Special Forces charisma and she will be swooning in his arms. Then it’s off to the nearest room with a convenient horizontal surface, for a night he will probably not remember, and she will obviously never forget.

Of course this fantasy is not explicit (most of the time). I make it that way by describing it, but the reality is less a fantasy in the technical sense, than a general attitude. It shapes the way we treat women (I say “we” on purpose, because I acknowledge I am not immune from this fantasy). You see it in the tone of voice, the casually demeaning attitude, the mocking insults that are supposed to be accepted as backhanded compliments, simply because such a man deigned to notice her. Most of all it is evident in the dismissive “You’re no fun,” throwing off any girl who doesn’t follow the program. It is all in the attitude, which we call “Confidence,” or an “Alpha Male personality,” which is supposed to be irresistible to women. I have been examining this attitude, both in my peers and in myself and I have discovered two things about it. First, it has no basis in reality. Second, it comes from emptiness.

When I say that it has no basis in reality, I mean that it is a false view of women. That is not how real women behave. The fantasy of “irresistibility” is very powerful to both sexes, if I may be allowed to extrapolate from the covers of Cosmopolitan Magazine and other women’s magazines in supermarket checkouts. Both men and women are somewhat attracted to the idea of becoming “irresistible” to the opposite sex, but the fantasy of an “irresistible” man specifically is powerful to both sexes, I would say; more so than the irresistible woman, it seems. I don’t know many men who would really be interested in a woman who was truly irresistible. Most men would consider it incredibly damaging to their sense of manhood to be swept of their feet, while I know hardly any women who don’t desire to be swept away on some level. The irresistible man, therefore, is a powerful concept to both sexes. Men want to be him. Women want to be swept off their feet by him (if women’s novels and chick flicks are any indication.) But the fantasy has no basis in reality. Probably less than one man in a thousand has actually had the experience of walking into a room and automatically turning the heads of every woman in the place, and then having his pick of them sexually. Turn heads? Yes. Definitely possible. Sleep with them? Sorry, I just don’t buy it. That’s not how the vast majority of real women operate. Usually it is going to take at least some effort to win her favor, regardless of what the nature of that favor may be.

Yet the fantasy persists, and we men act as if we had that experience of magic sexual influence every day of our lives for years. We have never experienced it, yet we act as if we did. Hmm… Curious. And yet there is something familiar about the fantasy…

Of course! James Bond. Captain Kirk. Brad Pitt. That’s how women behave around them. They surrender to them with almost boring (yet Oh so enticing) predictability, especially Kirk. He only had forty-five minutes to get the babe, and he usually had her about half way through the episode. Then of course there are the pornos. That’s exactly how the girl in pornography behaves. She takes one look at the studly male character and that is all it takes. She instantly exists for no other purpose than to make all his dreams come true.

I have no research to back this up, but I’m willing to posit a direct causal relationship between media portrayals of female sexuality and the warped view of it that most men take for granted. We stick a male mind inside a female body, and call the result the norm. Any woman who doesn’t match up to that norm? Well, we have plenty of sneering names for her.

Thai Women: Part III

Part  in a series of eight posts written back in April of 2012 during and after a trip to Thailand to teach advanced first aid. Parts one and two.

 

The conflict between the ethical reality of the instructor/student relationship and the tension of a mixed group of healthy young people is more than half imagined, I think. The women never had any illusions about their relationship to us, regardless of the amount of flirting they did. I did a lot of people-watching over the time I was there and I think that the American men were often laboring under a false impression of these women, and a falsely exaggerated sense of their own charm. The last night the students threw a party for us, and when we were going out to buy the beer two of the guys were talking about the female students in the van. One of them said, speaking about two of the girls, “I’m going to get both of those chicks naked tonight.”

The other guy said, “Oh I can pretty much guarantee that won’t happen.”

“No?”

“Not going to happen. I guarantee it.”

In which he confirmed a theory of mine that I had been formulating (which I will explain in later posts). I don’t know whether he understood it the same way I did, but he came to the same conclusion, namely that no matter how much the girls giggled and batted their eyes and flirted and played coy, they had no intention of going any further than that. To think that they would was a serious error on the part of the American, an error to which all men, but sometimes it seems especially American men, are prone. We simply don’t listen.

Thai Women, Part II

Part two in a series of eight posts written back in April of 2012 during and after a trip to Thailand to teach advanced first aid. Part one is here.

There is a conflict of interests which is all but inevitable when you have a group of mid-to-late-twenties men teaching a class of pretty women, mostly in the same age category as their instructors. This is especially true if the men are all athletic, outgoing, stuffed to the gills with confidence bordering on arrogance (and usually ending up on the wrong side of the border) and very used to getting their own way. The Thai women, for their part, made no secret of the fact that they thought we were all handsome (there is a lot to be said for being a foreigner, in that regard. The man who would be just a face in a crowd in Tacoma is something exotic and mysterious in Thailand.) We are all larger and stronger than most Thai men, and our skin is white (for the Caucasians, at any rate). White skin is culturally prized in Thailand (and in a lot of other Asian cultures) in the same way that a smooth, perfect beach tan is prized in American culture.

The interactions between instructors and students were nearly always colored by this tension, even in my group to some extent. There was much veiled, and some not so veiled, flirting going on. The younger girls were the worst about it. They didn’t even bother to hide the fact that they were taking pictures of use, and trying to finagle pictures of themselves with us. Who knows how many Facebook albums we are stuck in now? (True story, one of my students posted a picture of herself moulaged up as the patient on Facebook, and that night one of her friends commented on it to ask if she was going to be alright. I guess I did a good job with the moulage.)

I wonder, though, whether these women knew how much and in what way their American instructors would speak about them behind their backs. Every detail of their persons was up for discussion, from relationship status, to personal hygiene, to what they would be like in bed. The girl who didn’t shave her legs was an especially frequent topic. None of this discussion was serious, it was all in a casual, flippant tone. Did anyone plan on sleeping with their students? No. Definitely not. But then again, you never know. Why would a team composed entirely of married men, or men in committed relationships (except for me, the only single man in the group) make such a point of bringing a tray of over 300 condoms to Thailand with us? Do we expect to cheat on our wives or girlfriends? No, certainly not, and that tray of condoms came back unopened. But just in case…

For their part, I know the women talked about us pretty freely. Taking refuge in the fact that none of us speak Thai they would discuss us to their hearts content right in front of us. (I may not speak Thai, but I read people pretty well and I got a pretty good idea of what they thought of us.) Sometimes the Americans would return the favor by speaking about them in English in front of them, forgetting that 1) most of the Thais speak at least a little broken English and 2) it only takes one word to clue listeners in. The word “Titties” for instance, even if it is the only word you understand in the sentence, can really color your impression of the persons speaking.

Thai Women

Part one in a series of eight posts written back in April of 2012 during and after a trip to Thailand to teach advanced first aid.

 So here I am, in Thailand, teaching first aid to Thai police officers. Probably the second most awesome assignment I have had in the military.

This last group of students that came through was about one third female. While a few of these women were older, (forties and up) most were in their early to mid-twenties and pretty. They ranged from girl-next-door look, to exotic willowy beauty, to sweetheart smiles and attitudes, all with Thai forms and faces. I must say, in general, Thai women are very good looking. There is the normal variation in shape and face that you would expect in any society, but in general they are a pretty pleasant looking bunch. Either that or I am easy to please. The other Americans tend to be a lot more critical than I am about looks. They notice things that I don’t, certainly. “That one’s eyes are too far apart” or “Her mouth is too wide” or “She doesn’t shave her legs.” It’s a curious spectrum. On one end there is the kind of guy who criticizes all of them and would sleep with any of them.  On the other end is me, who thinks they are all beautiful and wouldn’t sleep with any of them.

At any rate, the class had a very large population of young and attractive females. The four older ones sat in the first two rows, and all the rest sat further back in the classroom. For some reason when this class was divided up into groups, I got the first row and a half with the four older ladies, and the other two instructors got the rest. My interpreter noticed this change in format as well and pointed it out to me, to which I just shrugged. I’m here to teach, not find a girlfriend. Who knows if they even saw that when the class was broken into groups? It’s not like the other instructors assigned seats, they just divided up the class into blocks. Perhaps they saw it at the time, or perhaps they only saw it later. If they assumed I wouldn’t care they were quite correct. If they assumed I wouldn’t notice, though, they don’t know me.

This led to at least one hilarious day in class though. We had broken down into small groups for practice, and we were going to be like that all day. One of the primary instructors wasn’t able to be there that day, so my assistant took over his group for the day. Then the regular instructor’s assistant pitched in. Then the assistant from the other instructor went over to help. One of the women in my group said something in Thai that made all the other women laugh. When I asked my interpreter what she said he answered, “They say, ‘All the Americans go to that group because the girls are young and pretty. They not want to come here because we too old.” I laughed about it and went back to training, but not ten minutes later in walks our boss, A. You have to understand one thing about A. All the Asian women (and more than a few Asian men) think he is just gorgeous. It’s partly because he always dresses and speaks neatly and respectfully, and partly because he is a little over six feet tall, with an athletic build and long blond hair (always in a boy-scout part over his left temple). He has been likened to Tom Cruise, only not in midget size. He has also been likened to Captain America. He was even asked by two random teenage schoolgirls to pose with them for a photograph outside a Buddhist Temple in Bangkok. (I think they were actually asking all three of the Americans there, but I managed to skate smoothly out of that awkward situation and totally left him to the wolves.) So as he walked past my group all the ladies caught their breath and watched him with adoring eyes, but he did not even glance their way. He kept right on walking up the steps to the next group. All my female students let out a collective yell of mock anguish.

The best part was that A had not a single clue that any of this was going on. Being the consummate professional that he is, he had no intention of singling any group out or offending anyone, and had no idea of the conversation that had occurred prior to his entrance. He just knew that one of the groups was without its primary instructor so he walked directly over to it to see how they were doing, and in so doing, broke four hearts in one fell swoop.

You are what you eat?

One evening I trained with a group of Thai policemen who were Muay Thai practitioners. Muay Thai, for those who don’t know, is the national martial art of Thailand, also referred to as Thai Boxing. It is a kickboxing form that relies on strikes with the fists, feet, knees and elbows, and even with the head. It is the Thai national sport and a large contributor to the repertoire of many Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) fighters. I have been training for years American style kickboxing. Sometimes I have been told that this was Muay Thai, but it turns out to be almost nothing like real Muay Thai, so I was thrilled to have the opportunity to train with a former competitive Thai boxer and his friends and in exchange shared some softer style combative and open hand fighting techniques.

After we were done training they invited me to go out to eat with them and about an hour later we ended up across the street at a restaurant that specializes in sumtam and dongnam. Sumtam is a dish of meat, seafood, fruit or vegetables, minced up together and sautéed in a spicy sauce. It is more a kind of dish than a dish in its own right and can be made with almost anything. One of the best sumtam’s I have had here was made with apple, grape, carrot, coconut, peanuts and hot Thai peppers. Dongnam is a soup made with meat and vegetables.

Since I don’t speak Thai, and the wait staff doesn’t speak English I usually do the pointy-talky thing with the menu. This time, however, I was with locals and the one RTP (Royal Thai Police) officer who did speak some English assured me that they had everything under control and proceeded to order all the food for me. When it arrived I quickly discovered two things: first I discovered why the Thai restaurants never seem to be able to split up the bill unless they are used to catering to Westerners. In Thai culture no one orders a separate dish. They all order the dishes which go on the center of the table and everyone serves themselves from them as they please. (That explains why some of the Thai’s thought we were rude for eating off the serving plate when we dined out.)

The second thing I discovered was why the RTP officers insisted on ordering for me. They had ordered the spiciest, rawest and creepiest dishes on the menu, and were all watching me with huge grins to see if I would eat them. We had a roasting hot spicy papaya and blue crab salad. The blue crabs were simply chopped in half raw and tossed in the dish. They ordered super spicy minced pork entrails and were more than happy to explain exactly what organ each piece came from. They had ordered a plate of deep-fried duck mouths (yes, you read that right), and to top it all off they had a plate of spicy raw minced beef with herbs. (They had also thoughtfully ordered some deep fried pork neck with ketchup and placed it within easy reach of me.)

So I started eating. I put some of my sticky rice on my plate and spooned some of the pork entrails onto it and ate that. They laughed at me and showed me how to eat it properly, by rolling the sticky rice up into little balls in my hand and dipping them into the dishes (the dipping is called jom and the popping into the mouth is called but. That’s what they taught me, but they may well have been teaching me dirty words for all I know. I certainly didn’t see any of the classier looking Thai families jomming or butting(the interpreters later explained that this was legit, but it was authentic north-eastern style dining, so not in vogue in my area)).

But I ate everything on that table. I ate the entrails, crunched the crabs and bit the beef and loved every bite of it (except the bite in which I mistook a green pepper for a green bean and ate it. That gave me the hiccups and left my mouth on fire. It was so hot that the snot running down my face was hissing and bubbling like molten lava, and it felt like it was melting my chin. Those green peppers are no joke.) After I had cleaned up all my sticky rice, ordered another basket of it and ate all of that too, and every scrap of food was gone, the guys all looked at each other and shook their heads. One of them said something in Thai and the English speaker translated for me, “They say, if you can eat this, this, this, this, you can marry Thai wife and live anywhere in Thailand.”

To which I laughed and said, “Sweet. Sounds good to me.”

The next day I told the story to one of our interpreters and he looked at me shocked, “What you want a Thai wife for, man, I thought you were the one who really loved your wife.”

I laughed and explained that I’m not married. My reasons for not chasing Thai girls every weekend are mostly religious.

He didn’t say anything for a little bit, and I thought the topic was over. But then I heard him muttering to himself under his breath, “Hmmm. Good job, good face, good personality.” Then he looked up at me and said, “Okay, man, if you want Thai wife you let me know, I hook you up with one.”

The Lady at the Beach

The Thai people, as far as I can tell, tend to be conservative dressers at the beach. Despite, (or perhaps because of,) the influence of Western tourists and ex-pats, most of the locals I have seen at the beach don’t seem to follow the gag-inspiringly liberal beach attire of their European guests. In fact, they seem, so far as I can tell, not even to have any idea of specific “bathing attire” at all. They just go down to the beach and have fun, at least the particular beach that I happened to be living on at the moment.

Today I went down and sat on the rocks and read T. S. Elliot’s “Four Quartets” and watched the waves and the wind and the people. There was a small Thai family who stopped by for about half an hour or so, a little further down the beach, a man, woman and their son, and a little dog. The humans all went into the water and tried to get the dog to go in with them, but that poor little quadruped was having none of it. The dad finally chased after the dog and caught him, and they took him out until the water was waste deep to the humans, but even at that depth the waves can swell up to head height or even higher. He was just a little dog, and as soon as they let go of him he headed for shore with a much put upon attitude.

They were all wearing ordinary, everyday street clothes, (except for the dog, who had no clothes). The man and boy were wearing shorts and polo shirts, and the woman was wearing a dress, and there they all were, splashing around up to their necks at times in the warm salt water. There was something achingly beautiful about the woman especially, quite apart from the beauty of wind, water and billowing hair (which is a magic combination in its own right). It was somehow enhanced by her unapologetically feminine attire, and even more so by her obvious enjoyment of time spent with her family. She seemed valuable, infinitely so, possessed of a playful dignity, not only evident in her but also in her husband and her son. The way the little boy ran splashing through the waves to bury his face in her stomach with a flying leap/hug and the way she returned it struck a powerful chord of recognition in me. When she stumbled through the surf and put her hand on her husband’s shoulder to catch her balance, he caught her around the waist with a laugh and spun her round in front of him as if he had half a mind to send her tumbling into the water and dive after her himself. He probably thought about it for a second. I know I would have. But she took it with good humor (I could see her laughing from where I was) and was not the least bit nonplussed. You just don’t dunk someone with that much dignity.

Why did the dress make so much difference? I am not sure. Certainly nothing would have changed within that family’s inner dynamic if she had been wearing shorts and a t-shirt or a bathing suit. But there it is. Somehow it enabled her to recapture a little bit of the unconscious queenliness that Eve had before clothes were ever invented. The fact that she was wearing a dress to the beach was amazing, and the fact that she wore it to go tumbling in the water with the two most important men in her life was even more so.

Blessings upon that family.

Including the dog.