Bankok to Bedford
So I stumbled across a blog this morning called FIGHTING AND OTHERWISE. It's about the American author's adventures in Bangkok at a Thai fighting gym. The writing is awesome (in a post-modern sensibility, moms be warned) and you should totally go read it if your up for something completely different from this blog. Like other-side of the world different. Yes, it might be a jump, from baby videos to broken jaws and prostitutes, but it's well worth it. And me and the author do have something in common after all. We used to be high-school lab partners.
For those of you who didn't grow up in Lexington, lemme just tell you that Dan and I attended a very weird public high school. It might be the high school itself (built above an Indian burial ground?) or the breed of rich intellectuals who tend to inhabit our hometown. Either way, this school has produced a generation of very extraordinary individuals. I am rather the anomaly, me, sitting here writing about how much I enjoy normal parenthood. Look through the aggregate of my friends' facebook pages and you'll see more photos of Indian or African children than you will of the sort of bouncing white babies that fill my photostream. My former classmates (if they failed to become doctors or laywers or captains of industry) are all off somewhere in the nether regions of the globe shaming me with their impossibly good/interesting/uncomfortable lives.
So I scraped my intended post about appliqued bags for electronic chargers. You'll have to wait till tomorrow for that.
Look. I'm not cut out for the kind of interesting greatness that sells subscriptions to Wired Magazine. All those genes got distributed to other members of my family. My brother spent a summer in China learning to become a Ninja. Dan's brother did four years in the Peace Corps and came back with a Gabonese bride. Me, I sit at home and think to myself "Thank God SOMEONE ELSE is doing that stuff. That really frees up my schedule for knitting and surfing the web."
Back in 1995, whoever would have guessed that my lab partner assigned by alphabetical order of our last names would be one day writing sentences like this one:
He asked me how many women I’d slept with, and I gave him a rough number, and then he asked me if I really hadn’t paid for any of them....
Anyway, it's a good read. Go to it if you're interested. And alls I've got to say is: Thank God I turned in my half of the homework.