Natural disasters

It has rained pretty much every day since I last wrote, and those little lover-frogs have taken up residence just inside the veranda doors.

It has brought the river right up the banks, and it sure is good for the farmers up north; in a country like this, rains that come two weeks late constitute a natural disaster. Farmers, unable to contemplate predictable variables such as late rains, fail to account for this when planting their rice at the time the rain usually comes. By the time the rain arrives, the seedlings are dried up and expired, and the crop is destroyed, leaving the family with nothing. It’s a drought.

Meanwhile, in the past weeks, there has been significant flooding, leading other crops to become waterlogged, and also destroyed. There is also a small flood in the far corner of our yard, and I’ve been sleeping like a baby for the past week, because there’s no washing on the line and nights are cool.

Six-finger discount
Tom and Sophie had a gathering at their house on Friday, and after having been reprimanded for being a crap (read ‘non-existent’) host, and considering I fully intended to drink a large portion of their gin, I thought some flowers were in order.

I’ve always loved giving people flowers, and here, of course, fresh-cut flowers are cheap as chips. The florist near our house is run by a girl who has six fingers, and I like to joke that she can arrange the bouquets extra fast, giving me a ‘six-finger discount’ in the process. Lame. In fact, it’s just an extra limb, splayed and without muscles, which sort of flops just under her thumb, but I can’t stop looking at it.

With child
Ms Noy, who works in the layout room at the paper, is due to give birth next month (she's pictured above, from behind, in red, in the afternoon snack-time photo). Her husband is the features editor and also one of the sports writers, and it makes me laugh the way she orders him around. She’s one of the most serene pregnant ladies I’ve ever seen, and the only one here who has continued wearing her usual sinhs, without resorting to those awful smock-like dresses a la Diana in the 80s that most ladies here rush into by their second month. I would have thought that the sinh would be the most comfortable and practical garment to wear when pregnant, with enough fabric to merely adjust and take out at the waist as the months roll by.

I quizzed her this afternoon about whether she’ll do the hot coals thing - the whole lying over the fire business still fascinates me - and she just shrugged (serenely) and said ‘tamadaa’, which means ‘as usual’. I asked her about what kinds of food she had to eat, and whether it was uncomfortable in the hot season. A slow smile crept over her face then, and she asked me whether I planned to lie over the fire when I had a baby.

My face, on the other hand, darkened. Since when did the concept of me and pregnancy come up in the same conversation? Since I began working in a big, gossipy Lao newsroom, that’s when.

Fashion hypnosis
I’ve been doing some freelance editing for UNDP, reworking a report by the National Statistics Centre written by Lao researchers.

It’s killing me, really it is. My neck is sore, my eyes are filled with statistics and my brain with dodgy and questionable scientific data. The authors are educated Lao people, but as we all know, education here only goes so far when it comes to hardcore statistical analysis:

Surveyed enterprises reported that 75 percent of businessmen have to pay very high taxes and duties. Of these, 13.4 percent indicated that this is a very serious problem while 38.2 percent considered it a big problem. The remaining reported this is just normal problem.

I love the concept of a ‘normal’ problem in Laos, really I do, almost as much as I love the notion of someone finally getting annoyed enough to classify something, anything, as a ‘serious’ problem.

Anyway, I’m over this 90-page report and everything that goes with it, except of course the cash.

Last night, I bought a British Vogue on my way home (something I’ve done when stressed out with work or study for as long as I can remember), and saved it until I’d finished last night’s quota of pages. I don’t know what I’d do without the world of high fashion, without the pages and pages of faces (almost of all which I can put a name to), without the gentle suggestions that it’s time for a new handbag (something ‘vivid’ this time). By the same token, nothing makes me happier when I get home from a late night than turning on Fashion TV and growing mesmerised by the endless catwalk shows. Endless! Guaranteed to put me in a trance.

Related is that I haven’t watched a movie in ages- I keep buying new films and can’t get around to watching them. It’s because I am still, as always, trapped in that all-important institution of pre-adulthood known as Group House Living. My tolerance has all but run out; I can’t be bothered to try to ignore the comings and goings, the ‘What are you watching?’ and ‘What’s happened so far?’ etc. Can’t deal with it. Next time I have the house to myself, I’m holing up with the DVD player for a night.

Boites de Nuits
Riding home from dinner at Tom and Soph’s on Saturday night, we went past the Meuang Lao Hotel, a big nightclub that was recently ordered to close because of licensing issues. Saturday was its last night, and the grounds were swarming with teenagers and Young Adults, absolutely swarming. I dislike nightclubs- they’re another thing I forced myself to enjoy until a couple of years ago, when I finally decided to let go of all my pretenses and actively hate all the things I’d always secretly hated (see previous entries re karaoke, camping, board games etc), but I don’t quite hate them with the same furore reserved for all those other things that I hate to make up for lost time pretending to like.

This is because I spent such a large part of my teens and early-to-mid 20s in clubs, and I can still remember the promise they once held. Heaven, Lot 33 and Academy in Canberra, Unity in Montreal. I put up with them because of the inherent possibilities of a particular someone, or a particular anyone, walking through the doors, just at the moment when I hoped I was looking my finest. Nothing compares to that feeling when the person in question walks through the door, you know?

And I could see it all playing out as I passed the hoards of Lao kids on Thadeua road, carefully not-too-dressed in a way that makes you certain they put a lot of thought into their outfits. They were milling, dancing, preening, hanging off the backs of motorbikes, tossing their hair, popping their shirt collars. It was all so familiar.

And yet, does anyone really get in to clubs, really? I often find it hard to believe. They make me so bored and tired nowadays (and by nowadays, I include the couple of years well before I met my current love, so none of that eye-rolling, thanks). I mean, they’re so loud you have to shout, so dark it hides all the icky stains on the walls and floors, so mundane that you just want to go home to bed. Don’t you? Don’t you?

See, there I go again, willing everyone to agree with me on everything. But then aha, because this morning I was vindicated, yes, vindicated once again by Guardian writer Charlie Brooker, who I’m certain is my soulmate, my brother-in-arms in the war against crap. He published a diatribe this morning about how much nightclubs suck, and how he’s only glad that now that he’s in his 30s, he doesn’t have to pretend to like them any more.

He also did one about Glastonbury last month- he hates music festivals, but the Guardian challenged him to camp out there for two nights, surrounded by mud and hippies. He lasted one night, and then had to go and stay in a serviced cottage where he could get a massage, drink tea and watch TV to fortify himself before he went back in.

Amen to that- did you know I hate music festivals too??? It’s true, that’s another one I haven’t mentioned, at least not on this blog! I did write a column about it, back in my Canberra Times days when I had my own column, complete with a photo of me looking grumpy at the top.

But I’m not going to go into that. Read Charlie to find out how I feel (almost). My point was that those obnoxious Lao kids made me feel nostalgic for the days when I was fraught with anxiety over things that were never going to end up mattering.

Everything seems to matter nowadays. Things have changed.