Kornography

I biked down the road to my neighborhood wat, Wat Suan Dok, and again, while wandering around, started chatting to a monk. Gee, who turned out to be a high school English teacher, talked with me about Buddhism and Thailand and the King, and invited me to come visit him at his wat, on the other side of the city. Our interaction ended with him giving me his cell phone number and email address and telling me to contact him when I wanted to come by.

I cannot describe how amazing this past week has been, living in a new and exciting place, but doing so without any attachments—and don’t worry the Buddhist implications are not lost on me. I’ve had no schedule, nothing I HAVE to do at any given time. It’s truly wonderful, and feels as if I am a kid again, but a kid free to go beyond the backyard as fate takes me, and conscious of just how lucky I am. Now I know plenty of nay-sayers (the same ones that insisted I was unemployed all summer…its SELF-employed, jerk) will call BS and say that since graduating I haven’t had anything concrete that I had to do, but this is so much different. I can wander, and, upon meeting a stranger, I can speak with him for as long as the conversation goes, and especially when that stranger is a monk, the two of us are completely absorbed, never checking our watches or pardoning ourselves to another required engagement. When riding my bike, I can stop at a stall to try a fruit that I have never seen before, or to take a picture of something beautiful. I can ride along, choosing streets at random, and upon finding an interesting place, explore it until my heart is content. I feel truly free.

That being said, I used my newfound freedom to take this weekend to start to explore the nightlife in Chiang Mai, and ended up learning more about just how lucky I am. Ending up at a party largely of expats—thrown by the only English language radio station in Chiang Mai—I found a group of writers/journalists/NGO workers, and learned a lot about some of the key issues affecting people in the area. One guy was working on a photo essay about Burma, and taught me a lot about the dictatorship there and the politically motivated violence that it was perpetrating. As the night wore on, with all these ideas rattling around in my head, a friendly conversation turned intense as Ko, who is from Burma, started to tell me the amazing story of how he ended up in Chiang Mai. He had been part of a student demonstration in Burma when he was younger and as a result, was incarcerated for almost two years. He told me of the horrors that go on in a Burmese jail, and about what he was doing now, in Chiang Mai, to tell his and others’ stories—indeed there are people who were arrested alongside him at the student protest, who are still in jail today. With tears welling up in his eyes, Ko said that he could not return home or he would be forced to rejoin them in jail. If anything, this whole night made me realize how real this all is, and how amazing my work here will no doubt be.