January – February…. boring, boring, boring

Hello, I came to work about 4 hours early by accident today. Since it’s nearly the end of February and likely nothing will happen in the next four days, I thought I’d give you an update.

I hate to say it though, the thought of typing this pains me. It’s going to be crap, I haven’t done anything since the last time I posted something, probably vaguely offensive, insulting a large number of peoples’ opinions and intelligence (hey, we each have our own way of dealing with boredom, right?).

Hopefully it’ll be over quickly. What happened in the rest of January? Nothing. Oh, I saw Cloverfield and thought it was shit.

http://johnnybermuda.wordpress.com/2008/01/21/cloverfield-my-review-with-a-lot-of-spoilers/

It’s ok though, I know everyone else thought it was amazing. To be honest, to date I only know five people in the whole world that really didn’t like it: me, my girlfriend, Prae Thana-aumphut from Channel 3, a freelance journalist called Manohla Dargis and a random guy called Dave who commented on my blog.

So that was January. Oh and I went to Chachoengsao and Bang Saen again. Big temple, nice food, monkeys. Disappointingly for you, nothing I haven’t taken a bazillion photos of already. I had a nice time though, which should make you all very glad. Are you feeling the gladness? I hope so.

February has also been pretty boring. I turned down the opportunity to go to Jamie’s leaving (from the country) do due to having only earned 16000 Baht in the last 2 months and not actually having any of that left. As for things that actually did happen in February

- I went to Chachoengsao (again).

- I saw the new Thai film Chocolate, by the director of Ong Bak and Tom Yum Goong, staring Jeeja (last name I forgot but it’s definitely not ‘Binks’). It’s good but lacks something from his other films that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Still very enjoyable.

- I renewed my visa. It was over in about 5 minutes.

- Valentines Day happened. I panicked for ages, then decided to buy some flowers and surprised my girlfriend at work with them after pretending that I couldn’t be bothered to go and see her. Then we went for a meal, which was nice.

- I went to Anna (Russian teacher from work)’s birthday do. In true ECC style I got handed a class at the last minute which meant I turned up late. I think the curse of ECC extends to her as well now, most people cancelled, nobody was as drunk as she was and the whole thing ended fairly early. I went to Sukhumvit Soi 38 with her, her boyfriend and Chinese teacher Dingyi and introduced them to awesome food which for some reason none of them had experienced yet. And that was it.  

- All the girls at the front desk decided to quit together about a week ago. Good consequences include my branch manager having to get off her lazy ass and do her job for a change, and ironically the level of incompetence and inefficiency actually being reduced by them not being here anymore. Bad consequences include the fact that the branch manager isn’t a whole lot more competent than them, there are less people to talk to and it looks really shit when you go in and just see one person in reception. Will things get much worse here? I don’t know, they (things) have a way of blundering forward, nose 2 inches from the ground, perpetually on the verge of collapse without ever actually stopping or collapsing. It’s always been like that, and anyway it’s been worse than this before.

- Lots of students cancelled. I’ll be lucky if I clock up 50 hours this month. Interestingly a while ago (maybe back in December) I found a whole load of timesheets from the year before (2006). Good Lord, I used to work! I was doing 120-130 hours every month back then! That was with 2 other full time English teachers and a whole bunch of part time teachers here too. It’s almost a year now since I did even 100 hours in a month. What’s happenin brother? Sorry, been listening to a lot of Marvin Gaye recently. Nowt wrong wi’ that is there?

We (me and Looksorn) are still on course to wrap stuff up here about May time, so hopefully I’ll be all out of here by then, not long to go now. Of course a large number of things could screw up before then, I’m well aware of that. Looksorn’s fine by the way, she’s really knuckling down over her IELTS test in a couple of weeks, I’m dead proud of her.

Tell you one thing that’s been weird recently though, I’m not sure what it is, but my temper’s been really short recently. Oddly enough, I put it down to my MP3 player.

I started wearing it a lot back in January, on the way to work, at work, at home, pretty much everywhere in fact. What I found was that Bangkok is a noisy, noisy f*ckin place. In order to drown out the noise of it all I was having to turn up the volume on my Zen to maximum, and then it just became an exercise in masochism, with background noise + intensely loud music really hurting my ears. Instead of enjoying what I was listening to, it was actually causing physical pain, either that or it would get drowned out by (I now realise) deafening noise of all the stuff that happens on a main road in Bangkok. The listening experience was essentially invalidated (que?), well you know, made sortof pointless. Instead of relaxing me the whole sorry thing was pissing me off royally. I guess listening to music in public also does limit you ability to hear in what is a very intense social situation where you want your wits about you too.

So I stopped listening to it so much, and I felt better. I guess those filthy corporate suits at Apple and Sony and wherever else are lying to us, you can’t really take your music everywhere with you after all. Cunts.

Anyway on that friendly, personable note, I think I’ll sign off on what is probably fast becoming the world’s most boring, inane and utterly uninteresting blog. See you all round. 

Mat