blah blah blah

I have a lot I want to talk about but I just don't know what to say.





My internet access ran out again today.... so much for the unlimited plan I fairly *begged* to have reinstated last week. After nearly breaking down in tears in the middle of Starbucks I called the call center and figured out how to (in theory) have unlimited access for the next four months (as long as I intend to be in Thailand). I nearly had an anxiety attack walking back up to the DTAC office upstairs. You have no idea.... no idea (I mean, unless you've tried to do something beaurocratic in another country where you don't speak the language) how stressful this whole thing has become for me. But I think *I THINK* I've got it sorted now. We'll see. And now I've officially spent TWICE as much as I pay in rent on internet access this month. Ahhh... the price of addiction.





I'm having intestinal crisis #478 this week. Not entirely sure what I did this time since it's the opposite of my usual problems. I've got myself a couple liters of water and a box of All Bran though, so wish me luck. =/ And honestly I do know what the problem is. I've been more than a little irresponsible with my prescription drugs lately. Somehow I feel like old medical problems don't count in Thailand and stopped taking my thyroid meds when they ran out a couple months ago. No lectures... I went and got some more today.





I hate that everything is a chore here. The first time I tried to get my thyroid meds filled the motorbike taxi guy took me to something like five different pharmacies before we found one that actually had them. And the next time I failed pretty hard at trying to pronounce the name of the pharmacy and ended up walking quite a ways to get there. This time I got lucky... sort of. I showed the taxi guy my empty pill bottle and asked for the "kah yah" (pharmacy) and magically they knew which one I needed.



Once there, I showed the pharmacists the bottle, one of them grabbed the box of meds and consulted with each other for a minute.* They asked me how many pills I wanted... so I asked how much they cost. They said 10 baht, but I wasn't sure if that was 10 baht per pill or 10 baht per sheet of 10... I'd neglected to go to the ATM before we got there so I wasn't sure how much money I had on me and I just about had a math anxiety attack trying to figure the whole thing out. It ended up being 10 baht per sheet, so I could have stocked up... but I just got enough for the month. I don't want to think about next month.





I'm having food hallucinations. Every once in a while I smell something like fresh made bread, or bacon and eggs. I'll be sitting in the middle of class and can almost taste a corn muffin. The most common hallucination is toast.... like *good* toast, homemade sourdough bread toast with butter. It's so odd. They *have* bread here... it's just not that good. If it's not plain white sandwich bread (ala Wonder Bread), it's too soft and too sweet. Oh man... I don't even want to talk about it.





My hair is growing out... slowly but surely. I still hate it. I hate it almost every single day. It's just so.... bizarre, so unevenly cut. Even after two attempts at repairing it. Ugh. Half the volume of my hair is just below chin length, most of the remaining amount is somewhere between chin and shoulder length... then I've got like this scraggily thin layer of fairly long hair in the back. It all bounces up into ringlettes once it dries. It is hands down the most bizarre haircut I've ever had. God I hate it.





I've been watching pirated copies of Battlestar Galactica. Is it just me or did the whole thing go to hell in season 3? And has anyone listened to the podcasts / commentaries? I have never heard such a bunch of self-congratulatory egomaniacs in my life! My lord and if I hear them talk about the 'texture' of the show again I'll scream!**





I managed to convince my bank to reactivate my debit card and I actually tested it the other day. So I'll be buying my plane ticket soon... still trying to figure out exactly when. I haven't saved nearly as much money as I'd hoped (see internet fiasco above) so I'm not sure how long I can afford to travel. Given my current mental state, I'm not sure how long I *want* to travel.





Um... yeah. So that's life in Thailand.




TAG: Code Fish Sauce










*One thing I love about Thailand is the way pharmacies work. You can't buy much more than throat drops or Tylenol in the grocery store. But several maintenance-type medicines that would require a prescription in the States are available without a prescription at official pharmacies. I've been able to get both my thyroid meds and my asthma inhaler without seeing a doctor or worrying about an expired prescription. And when I had foot fungus I just showed my foot to the pharmacist and she gave me a good anti-fungal cream. So you can't just pick a bunch of meds off the shelf and try to self-medicate. But neither do you need to pay for unnecessary appointments with a doctor for routine ailments. It seems like just the right amount of control to me.





**Naturally I will be picking up season 4 next time I get paid. Don't judge me! I need to know how it all ends.