food log

Due to the fact that I haven't posted in ages, I feel guilty. Also, a certain someone keeps complaining to me how the first thing you see when I go to my blog is a disturbing image from Lebanon. Supposedly it's all a big party there now, so I am misrepresenting. So now, with my 15 minutes remaining on my web timer at the hostel I'm staying at in Bangkok, I am going to attempt a quick post. I'm going to be here in Southeast Asia for about a month. Arrived about 36 hours ago now. Mostly been wandering around the city center, and taking an overnight bus to an island far south tomorrow. Due to some stomach issues I've been having, as well as the amazingness of the food selection here, I've decided to keep a food log. Here is Day 1:

(1 US dollar equals roughly 30 Thai baht)

*vanilla bun -- Hualampang train station -- warm, sweet but not too sweet -- 10b
*pineapple chunks w/chili salt -- Siam Square shopping mall food court -- 10b
*minced pork and kale w/white rice and bottle of pepsi -- spicey! -- canal-side stand w/tables north of Siam Square -- 40b
*small bottle of singha -- western-style bar on soi 11 in Sukumvit -- escaping the sudden rain -- 90b
*mango -- tasty white flesh -- from a tiny storefront around the corner from my hostel -- 5b
*pad thai w/shrimp and split a large singha with a really nice lady from my hostel dorm room headed back to Canada -- noodles delicious and beer refreshing -- tiny restaurant near Hualampang -- 100b
*small box of pomegranate green tea -- very sweet -- 7/11 between Hualampang and my hostel -- 10b

day one total: 270b (not quite $10)

in between asleep and awake...

In the past couple of weeks, I have started to remember my dreams. This is somewhat complicated by the fact that a couple of weeks ago I went through the box T. left in my closet nearly a year ago now, and I found that he had left in it his old, paint-splattered clock radio. For a while, I have been using my cell phone as an alarm clock. It's pretty convenient after all, but when I found the clock radio, I thought it might be cool to wake up to the news. So that's what I've been doing lately--remembering my dreams and waking up to the news, on npr, of course. As opposed to my previous muddy morning consciousness interrupted by a cell phone ring tone, I now have a splintered morning consciousness of my own dreamscapes spliced in with whatever npr is broadcasting at 6:30 or 7:30 or whenever I set the alarm for. It's kind of neat. I can't remember what was on the news this morning, but my dreams involved flying on some spaceship-like plane to Australia for a funeral and Argentina with my family, and then acting in a movie on the plane, and being filmed in a sex scene and then criticized for my performance, and a strange resort in Argentina and shopping with my mom at a Trader Joe's (in what was supposedly Buenos Aires but doesn't seem like it in remembering it) where she stocked up our shopping cart like we were staying for weeks when in fact it was simply an overnight layover, and the plane tickets were around $9,000, and that was supposed to be a deal. What is up with dreams? There is a scene I wrote forever ago now but I am using it in a new story, about a character waking up in a semi-dark room, and I'm stuck on the following passage:

"The dogs howl and bark before the sun, their desperate chorus tugging at the sheet of night shrouding the city. The sound invades her dreams, the thrum of animals creeping into the neverland that she will only know wakefully in pieces. Pieces of people she’s known and hasn’t known and still knows. Pieces recurring in nonexistent places: a war-torn pier in Brooklyn, a school in a skyscraper on the Mall in D.C., a swirling ship docked in a coastal city that she has seen from the sky, that she has always lived in and will always live in. Dream-pieces that the dogs tear into smaller pieces and tear and tear again until they are the dust that settles finally here in the room where they fell asleep."

I've gotten the comment from a few readers that they don't understand the part about Brooklyn and D.C. and the coastal city. And I'm curious as to whether other people besides myself have dreams that take place in settings that don't exist in the non-dream world but that are amalgamations of places that do exist in the non-dream world, and are places they dream about again and again. Anyway, that's what happens with me, and I haven't yet figured out the best way to explain it I guess.

In other news, our funny/sexy/sad reading went really awesomely well on Thursday night. Click here to read what Lizzy had to say.

And I found a decent article about Obama's shifting consciousness regarding Palestine and Israel. It is disheartening but also I guess we'd have a better chance of Obama changing his tune once he got in office than Hillary. But there will never, not ever, be a guarantee for that, and that's the problem I'm having today. The American presidential machine sure does make me feel nauseous.

Revision

Revision might be the toughest part of writing. I'm new to this whole short story thing. Revising a poem is different...you just have to keep a few lines. I'm working on a 13-page (and growing) story this weekend.

I just made a list to keep things straight:

sally is 76; sally is 19 years older than richard
richard is 57
he hasn't been to the mall since he was 42 (15yrs)
he was married to juliette for 30 years
richard was 27 when he got married
nadine is 23
sara is 18
richard and sally had an affair for a year
richard was 18; sally was 37
richard and ed are the same age
richard and juliette separated three months ago

How's that for a teaser?