Days Since Swear-in: 469
Days Until Projected COS [1]: 229
Hanukkah is in the rear-view mirror, Christmas is nigh, the temperatures are dropping not only in Charlottesville but also in Newport Beach and even in Cambodia as we experience “the cool season” [2], and I continue my self-imposed reflection upon my first year in the Peace Corps, ending on either July 15 or September 7, 2013.
2. Highs of mid- to upper-80s and low 90s last weekend, but lows in the mid- to upper-60s. There’s speculation that it might get as cool as 55℉, which is pretty damn chilly here. A couple of days ago, I actually wore my fleece pullover for the first time ever in Cambodia.
For your convenience, I’ve divided what was meant to be Part II into two parts itself, mostly because it was pushing 10,000 words, and ain’t nobody got time for that. I realize that when you call up my website for your reading enjoyment, you aren’t expecting Lonesome Dove. Also, trilogies are pretty cool.
I won’t bore you with yet another apology for my tardiness, which was covered relatively well in Part I, along with the exciting, enthralling details of my travels around the Kingdom of Wonder and my planned journeys for the remainder of my stay here. Suffice it to say that right now I am as busy as I’ve ever been during my service: to my standard load of eighteen classroom hours a week, I’m now adding an additional three for observation of peer teaching and an additional two for an English (Teaching) Club, and also have two two-hour workshops planned before the month of February [3]. Fortunately, it’s not reached the “all work and no play makes Nick a depressed boy” level, and miraculously, I’ve somehow learned to stop procrastinating until the last possible minute [4]. I’m still exercising, I’m still reading [5], socializing when possible, and traveling to a certain extent [6]. With all of the easy, fun recapping out of the way, it’s now time to delve inwardly a little deeper and get to some introspection.
3. Of course, there are also additional hours at home planning and creating materials for each additional classroom hour.
4. A nasty habit I developed in high school due to a similarly busy schedule and a sub-conscious urge to provide myself with an intellectual challenge where none existed.
5. Recently finished Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, currently in the midst of Che Guevara’s The Motorcycle Diaries and a guide to the Angkor Monuments first published by a Frenchman in 1944.
6. I recently returned from my third trip to Siem Reap and my second trip to the Angkor Archaeological Park. At some point, there will be a post with photographs.
What I’ve Missed
7. Which, apparently, has increased greatly over the last five or six years, according to the snarky comments from RPCVs on our PC-C Facebook group.
There are tangible things that I miss, and many of these cravings were somewhat satisfied during my extended trip back to the United States. But sometimes, getting a little taste of something is worse than going without it altogether because then you remember what you’re missing about the thing you’re missing. Kind of like how sometimes it’s better to pull an all-nighter than it is to only get 25 minutes of sleep. You force yourself to wake up in the middle of your deep sleep cycle, and you’re disoriented, groggy, and have trouble remembering who you are and where you are, let alone what important things you were supposed to do and why you’re up at such an ungodly hour.
8. Co-ed junior high softball.
9. Was it jealousy? Yeah, it was probably jealousy.
10. Not included with the season ticket packages.
My mom has been good enough to retain my awesome seats [11], but it’s incredibly hard to describe how incredibly happy it made me to go through the ritual of “Friday Night Lights.” My friend Matt, my mom, whoever I was dating at the time, or, on rare occasions, my dad [12] would meet me at my classroom in Fullerton; we’d drive across town to the Cantina Lounge (née the Off-Campus Pub), to Kelly’s Korner Tavern (my favorite), or to Mikey’s Pizza; we’d drink cheap beer, we’d eat Irish nachos or pizza, we’d shoot the shit, then we’d head to Goodwin Field at Langsdorf Stadium [13]. My guest was obliged to purchase me a 44 oz. Pepsi at one of the snack bars, preferably from Vickrum in the old Carl’s Jr. trailer on the first base side between Goodwin Field and the Anderson Family Softball Complex before they moved everything to the Titan Food Court; that was the deal...the total deal. I’d have a big bag of sunflower seeds, typically barbecue-flavored, and we’d feel the heat of the day evaporate into the shockingly cold evening, because Fullerton is, for all intents and purposes, a California desert town and that’s what happens during baseball season. My mom would always have a print-out of the roster from the website so she’d know which player was which, and she’d quiz me about the names and numbers and where they came from and where they played high school ball. I’d talk strategy, trying to call pitches and locations, and whether or not there would be a runner in motion. More than a couple of times, I successfully predicted a home run, and on one very special evening, Stephen Strasburg and his dad sat right behind me and Matt. He had pitched for SDSU earlier that day in a tournament hosted by USC in Compton, and he made the trip down to scout CSUF, which his team would later play in a mid-week tune-up game, and TCU, a team he and the Aztecs would eventually see once Mountain West Conference play began. In my version of the story, he was incredibly impressed with my knowledge of the game, and learned a thing or two from listening to me that night. Of course, later that summer he was the number one overall pick in MLB’s amateur draft, taken by the Washington Nationals.
11. Four rows back from the field boxes, just between home plate and the home team’s dugout…NBD.
12. Before he retired and moved to my brother’s house in Maryland, his work schedule made weeknight social events an improbable possibility.
13. That’s not what they call it, but maybe they should.
Outside of his impressive freshman year, I missed the entire collegiate career of Michael Lorenzen, a hometown kid who roamed the outfield with reckless abandon, who had gap-to-gap power with speed and aggressiveness that led to hustle doubles and triples, who was the kind of player who’d be dead before he asked for a day off. And then, after all that, he’d dust himself off, change gloves, and take the mound for the top of the ninth inning as a shutdown closer with a mid-90s fastball, an electric slider, and a devastating change-up that has become the hallmark for CSUF pitchers in the modern era. It was Shakespeare the way it’s meant to be played, and I didn’t see it enough. He’s now a pitcher in the Cincinnati Reds organization.
I miss the hell out of all baseball, but especially Titan baseball. It will be incredibly tough to leave behind if, when the dust settles, I decide to relocate to central Virginia, especially now that they’ve signed a kid from Newport Harbor High School. The Cavaliers are great and everything, but they can never replace the Titans. For one thing, they play an ass-ton of Dave Matthews between innings [14].
14. The University of Virginia is in Charlottesville, which is where the Dave Matthews Band formed. In a casual conversation with one of my roommates, a British Literature doctoral candidate who was also from southern California, I mentioned that I was never really into DMB. He replied, “You’d better not let anyone hear you say that around here,” because apparently it’s a grave sin in ‘Hoo-ville...right up there with referring to “the Grounds” as “the campus” or calling college students “freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors” instead of “first-years, second-years, third-years, and fourth-years.”
I could launch similar panegyrics for both ice hockey and professional wrestling, but I’m sure your tolerance for reading diatribes over-sentimentalizing sports that are highly insignificant in the overall scheme of life is running about as low as my own ability to wax romantic about them. Consider yourself spared...at least from that. When my internet connection can muster the conviction, I’m able to stream the radio feed of important LA Kings’ games, and I’ve got a source stateside who keeps me well-stocked with episodes of WWE’s NXT. So let’s just keep moving.
15. I had 3/4 of a dark chocolate truffle bar from Trader Joe’s disappear last spring, and no one ever ‘fessed up. That’ll make a man mean.
And speaking of beer, I miss PBR. Yes, there’s beer here...and it all sucks. That certainly doesn’t stop me from partaking here and there, but it is not particularly high quality. Now, I’m sure some of you are thinking to yourselves, “Wait a minute...but doesn’t PBR suck, also?” First of all, shut up. Second of all, no it doesn’t. In real life, PBR is my “house beer,” an every day beer you always have on hand in the fridge, preferably long necks but cans are also acceptable. I actually enjoy the taste of PBR, and why shouldn’t I? It was named America’s best beer in 1844, after all. It’s made by union labor on American soil; in a real sense, it’s my patriotic duty to drink PBR, and it also happens to support my union brethren. Finally, the cans are made from recycled materials and, as I learned from a sign posted above a urinal at Sea World, recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to power a television for three hours. So basically, with all of the cans of PBR I’ve drunk in my career, I’ve saved enough energy to power the television sets in my house here in Cambodia for about two and a half days of average use. There are television sets in every bedroom except mine, a television downstairs in the workshop, and a television downstairs in my host dad’s storefront [16]. They begin at about 6 AM, and continue until about 11 PM without any significant downtime. Lately, as my lovely living quarters have been turned into “The Home for Sick Grandchildren,” the set in the living room has been constantly blaring the Disney Jr. channel. Their programming consists of the same two episodes of the same three shows on a continuous rotation: there’s “Hi-5”, a god-awful variety show starring an Australian version of “Up With People” that sings and dances and performs heavy-handed skits in front of an audience of absolutely bewildered toddlers; there’s “Jake and the Neverland Pirates,” a cartoon that is refreshingly hand-drawn featuring a group of three junior pirates and their pet parrot who are constantly foiling the evil machinations of Captain Hook and Mr. Smee; and there’s “Doc McStuffins,” a little girl who gets high on mescaline before serving as a general practitioner for all of her toys, which come to life and talk about their medical problems. Usually, all of these shows are broadcast in English, but sometime last week, the channel cut out for about fifteen seconds. When it came back on, everything was being overdubbed in Vietnamese, which I initially mistook for Thai because it was close enough to Khmer than I could almost understand it but couldn’t because it wasn’t Khmer. The more I heard it, the more it became obvious it was Vietnamese. Anyway, I miss PBR. And for all of you beer snobs out there, I also miss Starr Hill out of Charlottesville, Yuengling, which is only available in eleven states and is produced in the oldest brewery in America, and the Raven from Baltimore, which has Mr. Edgar Allen Poe on the label. So get off my ass.
16. And probably an extra two or three secret televisions that I don’t know about stashed in rooms I’ve never been in, too.
17. Webber knows what I’m talking about.
18. Free food, though!
19. I guess that they name their restaurants stupid things? To be fair, they also have a cocktail called “Kidnapped in Juarez,” so maybe she has a point.
20. I did, however, take some guilty pleasure in listening to the poor Khmer waitress try to pronounce “guacamole.” Somehow, it came out sounding like “gumby.”
I miss the beach. I grew up on the beach, and the closest thing to a beach that I have around here is a river front. First of all, I’m probably never venturing down to the banks, and second of all, if I did, it’s not the same. I miss the beach, but I should get my fix in during my Khmer New Year travels next year.
I miss being able to control the temperature of my showers. Yes, I’m incredibly lucky that I have my own bathroom, and I’m incredibly lucky that it comes with a flushing, Western-style toilet and with a sink and a shower head. But the water gets piped in and directly onto me without any interceding heating or cooling. Most of the time, that’s fine because this is a tropical country with relatively steady temperature patterns: i.e., it’s usually pretty hot. For several weeks a year during the cool season (like right now), it makes it incredibly difficult to wake up at 5:30 in the morning to take a cold shower so that I can get ready for my class at 7. During the rest of the year, it makes taking a shower to cool off in the middle of the day, when it’s incredibly hot, pretty much a waste of time, because the water is coming out hot. It’s freezing too cold when I want it to be hot, and it’s burning too hot when I want it to be cool. It should be up to me what general temperature my shower is, dammit.
Sure, I’m a logical man, but my longings don’t start and stop with concrete items; there are plenty of abstract concepts I’m missing while I’m in Cambodia, too. For one, I miss convenience. Yes, this is a developing country, so I shouldn’t be surprised [21], but nothing is convenient here. Every month, I need to renew not only my cell phone plan [22], but also my 3G USB mobile internet [23]. If things were convenient, I’d have a credit card, and that credit card would get charged those rates every month, and there wouldn’t be an interruption of service. But things aren’t convenient; I’ve got to go to a store every month and buy phone credit. At $5 and $20, those are relatively big ticket items, so I don’t pay for them with riel. That means, first of all, I have to go to an ATM to get American dollars. I used to go to the shop of my host sister, around the corner from the house, to buy my internet credits, but not anymore. She’s never personally at the shop, and her lackeys can’t operate the machine properly to sell me $20 worth of credit. So, I tried the shop across the street from her shop, which is exactly the same as her shop except that it’s across the street and not owned by her. Their machine never worked either, but they’d sell me scratch-off cards. One time, she didn’t have enough scratch-off cards to sell me $20, so she made me sit on a stool in front of her shop for fifteen minutes while she went down the street to a third shop to buy the cards for me. Meanwhile, I’m “enjoying” the company of an old dude in combat fatigues and a rotating cast of shiftless teenage boys who should probably be in school but instead seem to have a lot of free time during the day, all of whom are talking about me in Khmer before finally getting around to talking to me and asking me if I can understand Khmer. Not super pleasant for me, so I don’t go to that store anymore, either. There are many phone shops downtown, so I figured I’d give them a shot. I tried a few different ones, and eventually settled on a guy that’s easy enough to deal with, once he got over the shock of a big white dude speaking Khmer. He’s only got scratch-off cards, and usually they’re in denominations of $5. That means to charge my modem for the month, I have to scratch off four cards and enter four fourteen-digit codes before I can log on. Today, he only had them in $2 denominations, but fortunately he sent someone to go exchange $20 worth of $2 scratchers for $20 worth of $10 scratchers. So, great...that’s that, right? And it doesn’t sound too inconvenient, right? But wait...there’s more.
21. And I’m not saying I was.
22. $5 a month for essentially unlimited texting on the same network, and a 100 minutes of voice calls or something. I don’t think I speak for 100 minutes total in a month, let alone having 100 minutes of phone calls.
23. $20 a month for unlimited data.
24. Not Giant, the brand, but giant, the size.
25. That’s just for you, Andy.
When I pulled it out and dusted it off and checked it out, the tires were both low on air. Understandable, since it’s been doing nothing but sitting for three months, so I pull out my bike pump and get to work. I inflate the back tire without incident, because it has a normal valve stem in it. On to the front tire...it’s got some weird French valve stem which requires a pump input that I imagine looks similar to the thing you use to pump up basketballs, and I don’t have one of those. So I monkey around with it, trying to figure out if I can work my way around it...at which point the whole thing comes out of the tire, and whatever air was left in it rapidly vacates. So now I’ve got two bikes with two front tires that are completely flat. Fine, I guess I’ll just fucking walk [26].
26. I’ll admit that I could hire a tuk-tuk to get downtown with my flat tire and make my life easier, but I refuse to hire tuk-tuks at my site because it’s usually unnecessary and they change all foreigners exorbitant rates...even us Volunteers who speak the language. Furthermore, the drivers are always really rude and aggressive in trying to get your business, and I don’t appreciate it. Alternatively, I probably could take Mike’s loaner bike to a roadside guy and they probably could pump it up, but in the throes of frustration, I’ve been avoiding that particular situation for the past couple of weeks.
This whole process must be repeated to buy a $5 credit for my cell phone. Back when I didn’t have the XG Unlimited $5 a month plan, I’d get $1 or $2 worth of credit from my host dad’s store, which is conveniently located in the downstairs portion of my house. Unfortunately, the balance on my phone would expire every thirteen days, and I couldn’t access leftover funds until I added more credit. Eventually, it got to the point where I had about $12 of credit on my phone because it would expire every thirteen days and I’d have to load another dollar on to use my phone. That sucked, so I enrolled in the XG plan. But, my host dad doesn’t have $5 of credit, he has $1 of credit or $2 of credit. So now I’ve got to find a new cell phone credit guy. After trying a few places downtown, I found the aforementioned guy who provides me with my internet credit. He sells credits for both the company I use for my internet and also the company I use for my cell phone [27]. My phone plan and my internet plan don’t link up, chronologically, so it never occurred to me to make one trip to his shop and buy both of the credits at once...until last week. Because I had to walk. So now I’m all set for the next month, but hopefully you see my point. The simplest things here are simply not that convenient.
27. Did I mention they were two different service providers? They are.
28. It is my understanding that living with host families is standard Peace Corps practice in most, if not all, posts during training, but we are one of only a few countries that place Volunteers with host families for the entire two years of service. We’ve heard tell that this will become more common in other countries in the future. We’ve also heard that applicants will have far more say in what country they are sent to in the future, which I think is kind of bull shit. There’s a conversation from season four of The West Wing where Sam Seaborne is complaining to Will Bailey about how expensive it is to rent a car for a one-way trip. Sam argues that if people just drive one-way and leave the car, eventually someone is going to drive it back to where it started and everything would even out. Will’s reply was that every rental car in the country would probably end up at the Grand Canyon or Las Vegas. So, I feel like letting Volunteers choose what country they go to is going to mean that every Volunteer ends up trying to go to the Grand Canyon or Las Vegas, if you catch my drift. Shit, I would’ve chosen Belize based only on the fact that it has amazing beaches and that the country was founded by British pirates. I’m not sure that would’ve in the best interest of anyone involved.
29. Although I admittedly went through a phase earlier this year.
It’s a similar process for staying out late. For obvious historical reasons, personal/familial safety and security are often times a strong concern for Cambodians. At my house, it means that at 5 PM, after the women downstairs stop working and leave the workshop for the day, the heavy metal gates at the front of the house are locked. The gate at the top of the stairs is shut and clasped. The doors to enter the front of the second floor are shut, locked, and dead bolted by means of metal bars that slide into the cement on the inside. Now, I have a key to the front gate, but I need to reach inside and open the lock from the outside, which is challenging under the best of circumstances, especially now that the lock is getting rusty, let alone when it’s dark outside and let alone when I’ve indulged in a beer or two. I can easily reach over the gate at the top of the stairs and unclasp it, it’s merely inconvenient and designed to keep the dogs out. I have a key to the standard lock on the doors to the second floor, that’s not a problem. Usually, my host mom remembers not to lock the dead bolts if I’m going to be out late, because if they’re locked, I can’t get into the house. Sometimes, she doesn’t remember and she locks them, which means I have to knock on the doors and hope that somebody somewhere in the house can hear me over the television, or hears me and wakes up, and can come let me in. On more than one occasion, it’s taken about ten minutes. One time, only the dogs barking at me and a wayward cousin saved me from sleeping on the verandah. Aside from these physical barriers, I also get an inquisition if I stay out too late, kind of like a kid in high school who’s been bad. Before I leave, I let my host mom know I will eat dinner out, not at home, and I try to estimate when I will be back. Unfortunately, I’m usually wrong about when I’ll be back. So, the next morning [30], it’s “What time did you get home last night? You said you’d be home at this time. Did you have a lot to drink?” Again, I point out that I’m going to be 32 years old in a couple of months. Please don’t read into this that I’m not grateful for my host family and everything they do for me, but I am an adult. I don’t feel like I should have to ask for permission to be out later than 8 PM, or face accusatory questioning if I am. So, I miss being independent.
30. Or that night if the dead bolts are locked and I have to wake someone up.
Hey Cambodia: it won’t hurt to turn off the damned television and pick up a book once in a while...in fact, it might even help.
31. We’ve recently added a cousin from the countryside who moved in to “study” at the near-by high school. I’m trying to reconcile that with the amount of time he spends working in my dad’s shop and/or doing housework while being yelled at for doing something wrong.
32. “What was the worst lunch of your life?” you ask? Not too long before the second worst lunch, my family decided to host for two days about 30 students who were taking entrance exams at the RTTC where I work. So, there I was, at the table silently eating my lunch while staring out the window as thirty 19- and 20-year-old kids who might end up being my students gawked at me. Awwwwwkward.
33. Which means I eventually get sick, too, no matter what precautions I take.
34. Or other Volunteers texting me before 6, or in one recent case, before 5! I guess they don’t read Emily Post on the Chicago-side of Indiana.
What I Haven’t Missed
35. I’m not saying I’m Daniel Webster or anything, but I certainly don’t want to sit around a table of people staring at screens saying nothing.
You probably figured out toward the end of my rant there that I also don’t miss the traffic in southern California. However, I do miss being able to drive, and I do miss my truck, which is mothballed in storage under the carport at my brother’s house in Maryland. It’s turning ten years old in August next year, and it’s only got 56,000 miles on it. It’s a Toyota, one of the few models that’s never had a recall, and it’s going to run forever. Winning.
I sure as hell don’t miss being unemployed, but that’s mostly because of the lack of professional fulfillment and feelings of self-worthlessness. Ironically, I made far more money when I was on unemployment than I make now, and, believe me, I wasn’t making much money when I was on unemployment. We aren’t called Volunteers for nothing, and we knew what we were signing up for, but still. I miss that aspect of life where, when you see something that you want, you can buy it, because you have enough money. What's that called again?
Oh yeah…being an adult.
Q: What’s the best part of a Khmer wedding?
A: When it ends and I don’t have to fucking listen to it anymore.
Until next time,
- N