Thoughts and Poetry on Scraps of Paper

While volunteering in Sri Lanka, the first two days left me a lot of time on my own with nothing to do, so I began to write on scraps of paper I found in my backpack and on the street. Eventually I'd like to scan and post them up on here but the writing is so small it would be illegible, so this is for my own records...

7/21 Day 1:
Plans fell through to take me into town so I spent a good 2-3 hours reading my Marquez book. Sitting outside drinking tea with my mom wrapping wood and her brother chopping it, I had already obtained the kind of "real" cultural experience I was looking for. Hot sleep fell upon me like a heavy blanket that night.

7/22 Day 2:
Herot is a wiry construction worker up the road with the best English in town an my new best friend. I see him 4 times per day as I walk to the hospital purged from the excitement of the new and embraced by the reality of the mundane.
-He talks to me about herbal medicine over coconut water.
-He takes me to his house. 50% of me thrilled, 50% of me ready to fend of a 50% chance of being mugged.
Later that night I ride on the back of a motorcycle down 1 foot wide paths in the monsoon downpour.

7/23 Day 3:
By the way things are run here, I have come to understand that most of the time here I must spend in waste- staring off into the distance of a very proximal wall or watching the doctor digitally examine lymph nodes, listen to breathing, and scribble prescriptions (all this if I am lucky!). I did, however, observe the doctor anesthetize a woman's toe before tearing off the nail and excise some tissue hindering proper nail growth.

7/23 Side entry:
There is no touch so pleasing as the familiar
No sound so sweet as the expected
I lay in my Singhalese bed calling Thailand my home...

7/23 Side entry:
I (needlessly?) fear the resentment of my presence from my 5'7'' 250+ lb host, Maey.
7/31 Add on:
Turns out it is nothing short of language barrier frustration and jealousy for my time.


7/24 Day 4:
Sticky nights, spicy dal with rice powder, hopeless thoughts of evading Herot, solitude in the evening. Doctor seems indifferent (dare I say aggravated?) by a young child's pain. I observe the largest Buddha in South Asia. My 2 companions purchase 2 snacks each and give both to me. I possess a Sri Lankan SIM card. 500 rupees to the ageless monk watching cricket in the temple. Itch and sting of countless mosquito bites. Exploring new writing! My first thoughts of real failure entertained, boiled and simmered, accepted?

7/25 Day 5:
4 cups of tea and 3.5 rotis all before lunch. Lots of learning and explanations before 11, then one hour with shirtless doctors smoking cigarettes, drinking tea, and reviewing records. Return home at 4 to find myself trapped by drunken Singhalese soldiers. Songs, dancing, vegetables, cigarettes, whiskey, whiskey, ballroom dancing with interlaced fingers with Maey. My own music brings on longing for a God-fearing woman for my own?

7/26 Day 6:
Realities of free medicine in a rural area. Scabies, epilepsy, the terrifying cervix! My first attempt to cannulate a vein. I fail but so does the doctor. Maey takes pains to show me a fish in the garden pot. Did he buy it? Herot gives me a monstrous green papaya. Circus dog!
7/31 Add on:
Turns out the fish are giant catfish in there!


7/27 Day 7:
Analogies of being milked or preyed upon by parasites faded much faster than they had manifested. Two requests to use the internet took me to a Dutch fort in Galle and a large statue of Buddha in Kosgoda. Talk of starting my own volunteer organization took shape for the first time. World's most annoying chicken this morning! I look forward to morning "rounds" quite surprisingly. How masked in uncertainty my future seems to be! An unfrequented box is your fate, dear note!!

7/28 Day 8:
More blood than I've ever seen and more exposure to others in pain. Why do I want to be a doctor? Why does it matter? A woman breathes her last breaths as the doctor struggles and fails to start an IV. No matter. A baby is born. I jump in a random car that takes me to the hospital. Counting pills. Singhalese words dance on the tip of my tongue and flee whether or not I pursue. A letter reveals some of my bitter thoughts. The idea of love. Memories fly by, nostalgia flows from where they pierce.

7/29 Day 9:
Chip! Chip! Get that cat out of here. Another papaya from Herot, far from ripe. 100 Rp for cigarettes or drugs, I don't care. A very satisfying "good job today" after taking blood pressures of all the women at the prenatal clinic. "It is better to die after eating" as they say here. The perplexing yet truly simple decision to take a 2 day journey for 26k Rp alone or just remain here doing my thing at the hospital. Boredom vs. danger vs. adventure vs. spending! Hopes of attempting another cannulation weigh heavily...

7/30 Day 10:
After breakfast I was already satisfied with my decision to stay. An average morning then tea with the minister of health. Drinking a king coconut with Herot. Later, joking about climbing a 15 meter palm tree, a boy scales it dropping down a plethora of the golden fruit. I drink and consume the tropical treat amidst the herbal garden. Beli fruit smoothie for 7:00pm snack. After 2 weeks I'm just starting to feel comfortable here. Why so anxious for solitude? So desperate to be "away"? In my own defense I am not needed nor do I need anyone Perhaps I'm drawn to the dramatics of it? I feel no guilt. What can possibly come from all these unique experiences? Who can understand how alone it makes me?

7/30 My first poem entitled: Worth a Shot-
Eyes wide open to an impenetrable darkness evokes the seduction of simplicity
Texture smoth, sound a clear ringing, unmistakable the sickly-sweet scent of nostalgia
A voice beckons, without reason, startlingly unprovoked, languageless
Novelty and profanity seem equitable opponents
Yet curiosity remains a clay jar riddled with the cruelest cracks

7/31 Day 11:
Once again the blood pressures of the entire maternity ward are my responsibility. Instruments: 1 stethoscope, 1 mercuric sphygmomanometer. A trip to the rocky beach to Maey's brother's donated house. More food than is comfortable to eat. Delicious. Handfuls of sugar in everything puts Thailand to shame. Explains Susy's diabetes. Herot's darkside revealed in a tense residential encounter. A dangerous man to the naive, a possible splinter to the experienced traveler. Playing with children never fails to make me happy. Another cup of buffalo curd?

On a roll

"...I never stopped dawdling like an eight-year-old on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn. I am a very happy man..."

There's a life-goal

False Dichotomy

Which is the better advice?

Say unto others as you would have said unto you.

If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.



I'll continue to hold my tongue... and alcohol in contempt while I'm at it.

Thoughts and Photos

I've been looking through old pictures and having a great time, listening to the new music Liz sent me from the other side of the planet.



I gotta grow my hair back, man.





You better believe I rocked that mullet for over a week at school, hehe.



Camp is hecka fun. My two favorite kids are Gun and Beam. I'm not sure what grade they're in, maybe 3rd or 4th? 2nd? I really don't know, they're hilarious though. They both have energy forever and like to sing to themselves and run around. Great kids.



I got skrillz.



My best friend, miss that guy.



Snapped and developed by yours truly.



I was in the one on the left, and I've got the surgical scar on my shoulder prove it.



In my sleep.



Youngest, oldest, middle.



Zoolander.

Peace.

Whetstones and nerve conduction

I was just reading my old journals due to boredom and discovered I'm something of a witty little fellow, eh?

Hehe, I was reading about how my mind tends to wander in such funny ways. Holding someone's hand and starting to think about nerve conduction and electron manipulation, then forgetting I was holding someone's hand and moving my fingers around. Hehe.

I was beginning to wonder if I'd lost that silly sense of random scientific curiosity when I remembered I read about how the degree of amylopectin branching determines the "stickiness" of short grain rices just hours ago.

I also stumbled upon something I had been meaning to write but never got around to it. I've always been fascinated with our ability to talk to ourself in our heads. That is the most incredible thing. Firstly, language is symbolism. To paraphrase someone smarter than me, we use sounds to represent objects and actions and link them together with more symbols. Tiger is just some sound to represent that large striped thing that you need to run away from. So the fascination begins when we create language symbols for things that don't even exist concretely: love, justice... Now that's bizarre...

But then we can actually create words in our head. While brushing my teeth I considered that creating words in our head is the same as creating an image in our head or performing simple arithmetic. Or is it? Research actually shows that the same nerves fire when we see an object and imagine an object. So it's not the same. Broca's or Wernicke's area must fire when we put words together, opposed to the occipital lobe going to town while picturing an object. I wonder what happens when you perform mental arithmetic. 5 + 2 is most likely a recovery of memory from the hippocampus, but what about 27824/12?

What is so interesting to me about talking in your head is the ability for thoughts to flow so fluidly and orderly, opposed to the concentration and deliberation it takes to crunch numbers or attempt to continually construct mental images. I can talk all day long without pause in my head.

So what happens? When I think the word puppy I open and close some sodium membranes in some nerves in the language center of my brain. Some action potentials fire, but where do the efferent nerves terminate? Where does that potential get carried to? If I move my arm I'm sending an impulse to the arm, ya know, it terminates in a muscle that twitches my arm. If I speak puppy well then the end of the line is a collaboration between my vocal cords, mouth, tongue, lips, etc... but what about when you think something? Where does it go?

That oughtta keep me busy for awhile.

Reflection Eternal

It's rather surreal, or just plain hard to believe that I am about to give a speech at a high school graduation as a teacher. I only graduated from high school 5 years ago and now I am the teacher at the podium presenting awards to the graduating class. How strange. Tomorrow is graduation.

I remember being in high school with dreams of becoming a teacher. I think every student at one time or another wants to be a teacher, to make up for their own teachers' shortcomings or to be like that one great teacher they had. I remember watching one of my teachers one day in high school and thinking "I don't want to do that". Now here I am as a high school teacher, graduating my first class. Who would have thunk?

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I submitted my primary medical school application and now I'm waiting for my transcripts to be verified. Once everything is ready to go, secondaries will start to come, first from the schools that send them to everyone and then hopefully some after I've been screened first.

I don't like when people ask me what school I want to go to. I really don't care. Not because I'm a poor applicant or that I'm apathetic, it's just that I want to go to school. I don't care where because I'll be just as happy at an unranked school than at a top ten school in California. I just want to learn. Honestly.

Unfortunately there is a whole year before I can actually do that, but one step at a time. Complete all my grades by next week, go SCUBA diving on Koh Tao, work summer camp, go volunteer in Sri Lanka (maybe?), complete the first quarter, move back to the United States, then a whole flurry of things to do once I'm back there. Not like it's a chore what I'm doing here, I love it, in fact it's the returning to the US thing I'm not thrilled about.

Ow kanuun mai?

Well I've gathered more phrases which I quite like, and I've also embraced new fruit experiences.

So over the weekend I went with Paula up the road to try our hands at purchasing a giant jackfruit (kanuun). We bought a jackfruit which weighed about 10 kg, and I hung on to it like a baby on the back of the motorbike on the way back. We weren't too sure how to cut it and had absolutely not idea what would be inside. We chopped it down the middle and went to work digging through the vines and pulling out little jackfruits which look like yellow parachutes and have a slight rubbery consistency. The fruit wasn't perfectly ripe, but it was tons of fun going for it. Later that night I started talking to the Thai staff about jackfruit and learned that there is a ghost that lives in the jackfruit trees, much like the ghost that lives in the banana tree which brings us to our first phrase.

Ong ja ton klooey rue? Which means: "did you come from the banana tree"? It's a phrase used when people are either wearing green or are in traditional Thai dress. The ghost that lives in the banana tree is green and so if you're wearing the color, you might be the ghost.

Phrase number two: bai lai quia rue? Which translates: "are you chasing a buffalo"? This is a phrase used when people are walking too fast, which are usually farang.

The weather up here is fantastic as the rainy season approaches and last night we had the most spectacular lightning show. The only downside is that any time a storm blows in the power goes with it, and since my building is on a hill, the water pump shuts down meaning no power or water. Sleeping in the heat and then waking up to no shower is not fun, but hey, I can't complain.

Enjoy some pictures: