Sometimes I feel like I need someone to pinch me. I had a short dream the other night that I woke up (in the dream) and was back in the U.S. somewhere familiar as if the last 5 years hadn’t passed. I remember in the dream that I said to myself, “I just knew it was a dream!” What is so strange about the place I currently live is the lack of people like me- young (ish), not married but with someone, certainly not a virgin since at least the age of 20, maybe living in sin, no kids (yet), working full time, literate in the English language, American or at the least British or at least some kind of European with a sense of humor. It’s a wasteland. It’s a bit like being back in the village in rural Northeast Thailand where hot weather would render everyone useless (but here it's a glut of money that makes people useless)- I spent 2 weeks lying beneath a fan on a tile floor eating nothing but mangoes, drinking water and reading Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy - except this country has some modern trappings like a movie theater, shopping malls, fancy restaurants- that don’t seem to make a difference in the lack of variety. This could be because the movies are cut to shreds by censors in the Ministry of Interior, malls are all the same with little variety, and there is no wine on the menus. I am certainly describing a redundancy of existence that few other places could match.
Does this mean I have, myself, grown boring and redundant? I hope not and, oh dear, must do something soon! My mother suggested I start a book club. This idea is sound, very sound, indeed. The lack of bookstores, however, as well as people who read, is discouraging to she who is looking to be discouraged (yes, that is me). If I am not looking to be discouraged I would go to the one bookstore I know of and snatch up some extra copies of some Victorian novel (which I know they have in abundance) and start passing them out. Or I would consider just sending out an email to my fellow employees and seeing who’s interested…yes, maybe that’s the way to get a diverse group of people together. Anything to break the monotony that numbs me into laziness.
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