Coming Into Independence and with it, free-thinking

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Dear past and future lovers and everyone else,

This will be the second time I've missed July 4th. The first time, I think I was in Munich.

It's funny when you are in another country, you nearly forget about all your buddies spending the night shooting flammables and explosives into the air and at each other because everyone else around you, in that foreign country, for some backward reason, doesn't celebrate the classic American holiday that for one night ignites nouveau riche neighborhoods with stars that are propelled into ominous clouds of the night sky. Meanwhile, across town officers in newly ironed trousers patrol streets for drunkards and late-night revelers. For those that will be lighting explosives bought in the proud state of Washington for our illegal pleasure, I salute you. That means you, Jared.

For everyone else, enjoy the barbeque and cheap beer cans, I'll do the same, light something on fire and chug one for an independent America, however chalk full of contradictions and limits to freedoms it may have to enforce for the time being.

The reason I plugged into the blog today was to forward this message I sent to a friend over myspace. It's a bit negative, but really its just critical of a country that foreigners who come here and stay for a month can really fully comprehend (not to say I can in the least), not long enough to see the reality of its roach-covered roads and eye-averting falang, whose alcoholism and cynicism about the world's future directs their aged bodies to strut the streets in dorky shirts and laughable Capri’s with their slutty bar girls.

"Hey Matt- yeah, things are up and down here, once you stay here for a little while, you get to see that Thailand more than (I think) any other nation in SE Asia (other than Myanmar) is incredibly foreign. The general bloke on the streets has no creativity, no intellectual curiosity due to the despotic conditioning throughout their primary and secondary education. Yet one thing I've found very interesting is that foreigners who've been here for dozens of years still find it to be an amazing and startling place.

So foreign, racist, introverted, family oriented and beautiful are its people, sometimes people ask me why I can't find a proper gf. But the land is rich, it's people comparatively poor, with no real substance of history like what one may find in Europe, Africa or North, Northeast, or Southwest Asia.

I think one of the reasons why no signs are fixed is because the combination of engrained laziness and fear or losing face by noticing mistakes makes the Thais less than apt to hire a sign fixing grammar and syntax business.

I love this country for its faults, and the more I begin to understand, the less makes sense. And I think more than any other 3rd world, tourism oriented nation, Thailand, with its fear of ghosts, its apathy to history, its illogical environmental and economic policy, makes it exciting, shocking and never nauseatingly dull."

The sunsets and diverse foods, my students, the school chef, my apartment manager, the proximity to travel throughout Asia, all my friends, all the potential gf prospects, my job prospects and the beautiful and wild things I see everyday and fail in capturing in print make this country, with all that I've said above, still, a dynamic and unusual place for any non-native to reside.

Here’s lookin’ at you, Kid

Andrew

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Comments

[Miner]

Thank you for your insight
-Just so you know, that first section about July 4th was sarcasm. I tend to plug that in and I regret you thought I was serious at all. Also, I am sorry that I didn't really think about the potential readers for my most recent blog, as that section I'd written to a friend was in confidence and during a time when I felt a lot of racist pressure on me. I agree it's ironic that a privileged white American could even utter much less blog the words racism about anyone except his own people. But you must understand that from my perspective, this world is wrought full of irrational, illogical, racist folk and so as to cover all my political correct bases, as I now know I must do, I agree that not everyone in Thailand are all of those things I wrote and I'm sure most are none of them at all. I personally have met many intellegent Thais. Also many apathetic ones, but it's the same in America. I also must regret that I said lazy. I have many Thai friends who work incredibly hard, struggling through days, even smiling, with hours that no American I know could ever grasp. I still think that there is a sort of apathy to fixing the signs that I have heard the Thais themselves speak about. Everything I have written was not simply subjective opinion that burst from what I think you may believe to be another "American running his mouth", but inferences based on many foreigner's and Thai's opinions. I must confess that many foreigners who've lived in Thailand for decades each, who I spoke with before writing this piece, were incredibly negative about the environment they have voluntarily decided to spend their life amid. I think we got off on the wrong foot and I ended up with my fist in my mouth. Just one thing, each person's personality is based on conclusions they must make about the society in which they are embedded so as to find their place and comprehend such a society. Possibly to you, I am just another young foreigner living here, writing, teaching, learning Thai, but for me, being here has helped me to realize the negative perception of Americans, what we do well in US, what needs to be fixed, what I love here in Thailand, and what my separate rearing and nationality is compared to a Thai. I am not obsessed with the United States, but being a quiet American in a south-east Asian country, I feel compelled to hold onto my values while trying to glean as much as possible from everyone I meet. But, I've never tried to be unbiased, eye-opening or intellectual in these blogs. I've just tried to say what I've heard, seen or learned in a country most of my readers will never visit. Of course that doesn't in the least make up for the libelous words I used. In my other writings, I have only the agenda of the topic at hand, but in these personal journal entries, I scrap the political correctness and speak blatantly, evidently typing with much less sense of readership than I should have. I sincerely appreciate your comments and criticisms, especially it's sharp, sarcastic and artistic presentation.