A Day in the Life of Chaos

Bangkok is a city of a million faces and a million stories.   Each person lives a life independent with his or her own complications, anxieties, depressions and laments.   Joy often gives way to a daily existence of life and work interwoven in a fabric of traffic and noise.   Every day when I awaken I feel like I want to explore and understand.   I want to comprehend what drives each individual.   I want to learn about their lives however joyful or miserable.   I think in a hidden voyeuristic sort of way it encourages me to look beyond myself and discover a world I might otherwise never see. One day while walking down a busy Bangkok street the city of a million stories decided to give me a glimpse into a very different life. One of the great curiosities of Thailand for the Western mind is what here is known colloquially as the “Third Sex.”   In the west we view transgender issues as interwoven with gay rights.   It exists as a subset of the society.  Most people when confronte

Being a foreigner in a new land takes great humility.   Every day is a new challenge.  It requires a fresh mind and a new set of guiding principles.  It can feel at times like the rules are constantly changing yet in fact, you are the one changing, most everything else is constant. We are the odd ones here.  We feel it every day as life buzzes around us in a chaotic yet seemingly synchronized pace. Meanwhile, we walk around like a duck out of water.  Our webbed feet don't seem quite right to navigate the land and our quack seems to have no meaning excepting our own ears. For some reason the phone in my house has started to ring.  Honestly I didn't even remember I had one.  Now it rings and rings.  My first impulse is to hide.  Some how my mind seems to think that if I try to conceal myself the ringing will go away.  When I pick it up there is a recording.  It sounds happy but I have no idea what it is saying.  All I know is it finishes, I hang up and awhile later the phone