Category: Thai Society/Culture

I had the gnarliest gas at the gym today, but I made it seem like it was this old guy that everybody hates by following him around from machine to machine.
Karma may be a bitch, but I’m pretty sure God thought it was pretty amusing and should kick me down bonus juju points for it or something.
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On less shocking notes, the new term has started at our uni, the weather has suddenly turned cool (21ºC/69.8ºF), Max has become a screamer unsuitable for taking shopping, and we didn’t partake in any Loy Krathong festivities this year because Nam is full of baby and I hate people.

On my way home from the gym about an hour ago, I spotted a familiar silhouette on the side of the road… I saw it after my headlights had passed over, but some primal part of my brain recognized the dark shape and screamed POSSIBLE FOOD SOURCE. I stopped and backed up a bit, and got out of the car.
The rear running lights on my car shine through 38 year old lenses, so they aren’t that bright. But they were bright enough to show that I had found a pretty big turtle with pretty yellow stripes running up and down his legs and neck; his shell was about 9 inches long and he weighed around four pounds. When I picked him up, he tried to pee on me but my daddy reflexes are too well-tuned to get caught with such clumsy reptilian attempts (in contrast, Max has successfully barfed, peed, and crapped on me all in one day).
I decided to take him home instead of leaving him to get run over so far from a water source. I wondered how he had gotten there… Was he an escaped pet? On a walkabout? Or was he the ghost of my dead pink chicken, Pinky, come to say goodbye to daddy once again? (I miss that chicken, godammit!)
I put him on the hood of the Kuj (and he of course peed all over it), then drove home. I showed him to Max, who was kind of impressed, and Nam said I should let it go in the pond in front of our house. So we walked it down to the water’s edge, mumbled some quasi-religious well wishes common to those who don’t really care about religion but sometimes like to acknowledge there are greater forces than ourselves out there somewhere, and I tossed it into the water.
Then I washed off my hood with a half-empty bottle of water from my gym bag.
If that turtle makes it through the winter, avoids being eaten by the workers who net fish in our pond, and doesn’t get run over anytime soon, I’ll be really happy.

In the interest of getting everything on the record, we decided to confront the crazy bitch, at her request, at the police station last Thursday, dependant on a couple of things. We first called in a favor and asked about the officer in charge and got back the answer that he had a reputation for being straight, and a good cop. That was a good sign, because a chance you take when going to the cops here in an unclear case like this one is that the cops are either sided with your opponents for whatever reason, or the cops themselves want something. So I wired myself with a cellphone transmitting to my PC at home.
That accomplished, we brought along Nam’s little sister to help watch Max and went to the station. The entire meeting lasted 30 minutes, because everybody except the crazy bitch wanted it to end quickly. She brought along a female teacher from Nam’s university for whatever reason and even she seemingly wanted it to end quickly. Why? Because in those thirty minutes, the crazy bitch never indicated what she wanted until the very end but did manage to tell everyone how she nearly caused an accident in the middle of an intersection when she pulled alongside me, in the lane for oncoming traffic, and expected me to sideswipe some kids on motorbikes to make room for her… And then got so angry because I didn’t accommodate her that she followed me for a kilometer, pulled in front of my car, and slammed on her brakes to cause an accident – WITH KIDS IN THE CAR!!! (and from what I saw, they weren’t even wearing seatbelts, because both of them were thrown forward, hard.)
By the time the cop heard this, he’d pretty much had enough of her so he kept repeating the same question, namely asking just what it was that she wanted. Because she wouldn’t say what she wanted, I got the strange feeling she was waiting for an apology from me but was somehow too embarrassed to ask for it. You’d never guess it, but… Just for the hell of it, I apologized. And guess what? That was that. Rather, that was it. The whole time, she wanted an apology from me for somehow causing her to almost (intentionally) cause two accidents in two minutes. When everybody realized that, it was like light bulbs went on above their heads. Nam, me, the cop, the crazy bitch’s friend. I mean road rage is one thing, but trying to cause accidents and then admitting it to a cop in a police station because you think it’ll get someone else in trouble, all because you want an apology is… fucking crazy, or as the Chinese exchange students at the good ol’ U of T used to say, C-R-A-Z-I-O-U-S.
So, the situation is resolved. I actually felt good about making the crazy bitch feel good, too (by apologizing). I could’ve really pissed her off by letting it get to the “demanding an apology” stage and then refusing to do so – I had every right to – but even though I intensely disliked her, I felt sorry for her at the same time. Someday, when I get to Buddhist anti-purgatory, I expect some fucking deity to remember the time I was nice to a crazy person, and perhaps just temporarily put out the fire burning my ass off.
That is all.