Birthday thoughts

Before submitting this blog entry, I would like to say a huge thank you to all of you who have managed, one way or another, to wish me a happy birthday! 48 is an auspicious number. Not sure why… but let’s just say it is, ok? ?

The following paragraphs were mostly written in the middle of the night – so please forgive their melodramatic nature. Day has dawned, and life marches onward. Birthday or no birthday. demons or no demons.

XOXOX…

My birthday, 1 am

Reflections on the nature and timing of alarms…

I’m kind of unsettled… too much caffeine, I think, now that I’ve rediscovered the pleasure of café-clope, as David puts it. I’ve had trouble falling asleep for the past two nights, and since the morning here has a way of arriving rather relentlessly, this is a problem. If I’m not at breakfast by 7:15 or so, one of the children will come by the screened porch – or worse, the screened window next to my bed – and shout “Bonnee! Haup bai!” (“Eat rice!”)

Of course, I could do what most of the adults and younger children here do and take a nap in the afternoon. But when I nap I wake up as grumpy as in the morning, and believe me, going through that ONCE a day is more than enough.

I was just lying in bed finishing “Eat, Pray, Love” by Liz Gilbert and wondering, yet once again, just how many of her adventures and discoveries would be paralleled by my own this coming year when the dogs in the compound went wild. From their howling and moaning you’d think that a demon was loose. It happened twice – and in fact, as I’m typing, they’re starting up again. I keep expecting someone next door – Wayne or Sari – to climb out of bed to see what’s going on, but then again I’m usually asleep at this time of night, so perhaps this isn’t an unusual occurrence. I do know that chickens have been mysteriously disappearing from one of the two chicken houses (but not the other, oddly enough… or not…) so perhaps their demise hasn’t, in fact, been due to human intervention. Perhaps some medieval Cambodian wolf-like creature has been raiding the roosts in the quiet hours of the night. Or perhaps the dogs are just hosting a slum riot. Who knows.

To make matters worse, while I was lying there I distinctly heard the floop of a small body throwing itself from one part of the kitchen to another. I had been harboring hopes that Mr. Rat had had *his* goose cooked, because it’s been miraculously quiet in here for the past couple of days, ever since Baing was seen flaunting a rat that he had caught and killed somewhere in the vicinity. So either Mr. Rat is back from a two-day sabbatical, or someone else has taken up residence in his absence.

Or – just maybe – I should shut off all of this nervous speculation (Monkey Mind gone savage, like the poor creatures in “The Hunger”), ignore the dogs and just go to sleep. Let’s give it a try.

In spite of the fact that one of the dogs is making really scary growling noises just outside the porch. Quick. Turn off the computer, “they” can see you sitting here, glowing in the greeny light cast by the Klondike game twitching behind this TextEdit window.

Egads. What a start for a birthday! Can’t forget to set my alarm clock. Alarm telephone, I mean.

1:21 am

Postscript: as I’m sitting here playing Klondike, waiting to feel sleepy, I can hear distant dogs wailing their panic too. Whatever it is moves fast… and just now the frogs started up again – I hadn’t realized they had stopped. Yet another reason for not eating dogs: they make a wonderful alarm system! (I suppose I should follow my line of reasoning through to the end and say that the same goes for frogs – but I have to say they do taste delicious, grilled and stuffed with mysterious Khmer herbs and spices…)

1:37 am

On Klondike

More than 20 years ago, living in the rue Ste. Isaure in the 18th arrondissement in Paris, I played the very first version of Klondike on my Mac Plus every morning. When I was finally able to get into the rhythm and maybe win a hand or two, I knew my brain was sufficiently awake to face my professional obligations.

Years later, here in rural Cambodia, I’m still using the same card game, but in reverse: I play at night until I can’t win any more because my brain is too sleepy to concentrate. Now I have a MacBook Pro running Leopard, and the Klondike I’m playing has 21st century graphics; and sounds. The cards fly around the screen all by themselves, and there are very convincing shuffling and card flipping audio effects which I usually turn off so nobody knows I’m messing around and not working. The games aren’t timed like they were on that first version – that bit of added pressure helped me wake up in the morning but would be less welcome in the wee hours of the night, trying to relax. This version is called “Klondike Forever”, and I must say that I find the title very “a propos”!

1:55 – not sleepy enough yet, obviously…

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

8:30 am

Kind of whacked out this morning – naturally! I read until about 3 am and was up at 6:30, thanks to Sony Ericsson.

But at breakfast, at least one of the night’s mysteries was solved for me: that of the peculiar strident noises I heard along with the dogs’ barking in the night. It was the geese. Two of them were fighting this morning in the pond in front of the schoolhouse, and they sure do sound nasty while they’re going at it. So whatever got a rise out of the dogs put the geese into a state, too. A more experienced countrywoman (which I am very slowly becoming) would have known that instantly. Not, of course, that I wouldn’t have imagined the demon wolves anyway, knowing me…

Last night I plugged the inverter in and *thought* I put it on “charge” to re-juice the car battery, but it turns out I didn’t have the switches set right – so today my surfing will be limited to the battery time left on Wayne’s computer. That’s just as well, as I should be out there at some point to help get the place ready for the visitors from Taiwan tomorrow.

It’s overcast this morning. I never imagined that I would wake up on my birthday happy to see that the sky was cloudy and the air was cool! Maybe it will rain. Maybe we’ll have a REAL thunderstorm. What’s frustrating to me so far about the weather here is that, when the rains come, there’s lots of wind and excitement – but I get the impression that the sky is holding something back. I’d love one of those Illinois or Vermont thunderstorms, where you jump nervously when you see the lightning, and count the seconds until the “boom” to see how far away the storm is. A mile a second, they used to tell us.

Poor Thoeun is having problems with his eye. When he came to Wayne, his right eye was just a deformed, white orb in his head. Doctors placed a false eye-front over the orb, and this is what gives him that odd half-focused half-trembling gaze. It’s actually the eye that trembles that he can see with – the one that keeps still is not a real eye.

This seems to have worked for him, but as he’s grown the shape of his eye has changed, and the false eye is giving him trouble. Recently he’s gotten an infection, and went to the doctor, who took the false eye out temporarily. A new one will be fitted, but meanwhile, he’s back to having nothing to hide behind, and so is keeping to himself until that happens.

The Wat is being musical again, and I can hear the little ones in the schoolhouse reciting their alphabet. It appears that teaching methods in this country, at least for the younger children, mostly involve memorizing and repeating things. I suppose a little of that would do me some good, too – I keep meaning to go sit at one of their wooden school-tables and shout out the alphabet along with them. But that would probably be doing them a great disservice; they’d spend more time laughing at my accent than actually learning anything themselves.

Time to go online; Wayne’s finished with his email.

Kisses!!!

B (9 am)