It happens every once in a while… someone in my life changes behaviour or does something out of character and I wonder why.
And then I think about the blog. And I wonder if they found it.
Today it was the nurse.
Over the past three weeks or so we’ve established a rhythm in our developing relationship. Her work shifts are all over the board… four to midnight one day, eight in the morning till 4 pm the next followed by a day off then perhaps a double (16-hour) shift. I’ve learned to figure out when she’s working and when she’s sleeping or awake by the pattern of emails, SMS messages and phone calls.
She doesn’t have a computer at home, so she can only email from work. Her break times follow a certain pattern, so when I see the time stamp on emails it tips me off to the latest shift.
Because she’s as likely to be sleeping at three in the afternoon as at three in the morning, I generally don’t call her unless I know for sure that she’s awake. If I send an SMS and don’t get a quick reply it’s usually because she’s asleep. She’ll typically call soon after she wakes up to apologize for not answering the message.
So, in arrears, I know what she’s doing all the time.
At lunch yesterday she told me that she’d be working the midnight to 8 a.m. shift overnight.
Last week she asked me to please send her an email in English every day so she can practice reading. Rather than write every day “I went to lunch, I went to work, I’m going to sleep” I have been copying interesting things off of the internet, a paragraph or two long, and sending it to her to read. I make sure that the grammar is within her abilities, but also that it has two or three words that she has to look up in the dictionary.
Last night I sent her an email with two photos of the city where I went to university, and a paragraph describing each photo.
As I said, usually she replies to every email I send.
And she has an endearing habit of putting an adjective in the subject line of each email.
She put “happy” in an email where she wrote how pleased she was to receive an email from me during a busy night shift.
She put “confused” in an email when she realized that she’d written the wrong word in an earlier message, leading me to ask what it meant.
She put “sleepy” in an email to tell me that she’d been working a double shift.
When I woke up this morning I was expecting another email with another adjective acknowledging the photos that I sent.
But nothing.
Nothing at all.
It’s probably the first time she’s ever failed to reply to an email on her work shift. It’s the first time in about three weeks that she’s gone to work and not sent me an email.
The most logical answer seemed to be that, for some reason, she didn’t work the midnight shift last night.
If she’d worked, I’d expect her to be sleeping today, but if she didn’t then there was a good chance that she’d be awake and off duty. I had a 3 hour hole in my schedule starting at noon today, and I was going to be across the street from her building, so I sent her an SMS inviting her to join me for lunch.
If she was awake, I figured to hear back from her; if she was asleep, the SMS wouldn’t wake her.
When she’s sleeping she almost always gets up around 3 p.m. On her days off she watches her afternoon drama. When she has to work at four o’clock, then she showers and gets ready for work.
So — either way — I was pretty sure that she’d call me right around 4 p.m. to acknowledge the email and SMS messages.
But she didn’t.
Hmmm….
Around twenty past four I started to wonder why I hadn’t heard from her for about 24 hours.
It was completely out of character for her.
And that’s when I thought about the blog.
See, when someone like the nurse acts out of character, I sometimes think about the possibility that someone has pointed her to my blog.
And now she knows all about me.
She’s read about my sexual exploits with the bar girls of Bangkok.
She’s read about herself on the blog.
She realizes that I’m probably not the person she thinks I am. (According to Billy Joel’s “Stranger” album none of us are….)
I start to get a bit nervous about everything I’ve written for three years. I become afraid of my own blog, and I wonder why I do it. Why do I write all that stuff and post it for the world to see? Why am I so fucking stupid?
It’s happened several times before:
A girl I know well doesn’t answer the phone for a couple of days when I call.
Another one misses an appointment without calling to apologize.
But, so far, my fear had never been justified. Each time there was some simple reason why the person’s behaviour changed, and that reason had nothing to do with the blog.
Each time I was safe.
But each time I kick myself for the stupidity of writing this sort of blog and posting it on the internet for everyone to see. Surely it’s just asking for trouble.
And so it was, that by 4:45 p.m. this afternoon I was once again chastising myself. It was tough to imagine the nurse finding her way to the blog, but all it would take is one person she knows to recognize the story of the movie, the ice cream or some other detail, and say to her — “hey, I read about you on a blog yesterday!”
I was, once again, wondering if it was worth the satisfaction I derive from writing the blog.
And then the phone rang and everything was okay.
The nurse started off by saying “sorry”.
She was sorry that she hadn’t answered my email last night, but the shift had been too busy for her to reply.
She was sorry that she hadn’t answered my SMS lunch invitation today, but she had been sleeping.
She was sorryt that she hadn’t called earlier, but she overslept a little, and had to race to get to work on time.
She was at work now, and she reported that everything was “smooth”.
We chatted for 20 minutes or so until we both had to get back to work.
My fears about the blog were — once again — unfounded. The worries that I’d had seemed suddenly silly and unnecessary. It was simply goofy to think that she would find my blog. There’s no way that was gonna happen.
I knew then that writing the blog is the right thing to do and that there’s absolutely no reason to worry about my Thai friends finding it and reading it.
I’ll feel that way until the next time one of my friends suddenly changes behaviour.
Then I’ll fret, bite my nails and ask myself again, “why do you do it?”
How strange to be afraid of my own blog.
17 responses so far ↓
Red X // Wednesday, 11 March 2009 at 10:04 pm |
No need to worry WW, if she had of read the blog she would of only read the good things you’ve written about her. All the other stuff about bargirls, your FGGD and such, well, everyone has a past, i’m sure she’d understand this, and if not then you’re better off without her.!
gavinmac // Thursday, 12 March 2009 at 2:50 am |
RedX,be realistic. If any girl he’s pursuing reads his blog, he’s screwed. No woman wants her courtship to be the subject of the idiotic internet ramblings of a neurotic, sewer-swimming whoremonger. I mean that with the greatest respect, WW.
Now, I absolutely agree that there’s virtually no chance of a Thai girl ever finding the blog on her own and connecting it to you, WW.
In fact, as I was reading your concerns about the nurse seemingly ignoring you, here’s what I was thinking: “There’s no way she found his blog. No way. She’s just lost interest in him. She already demoted him from dinner to lunch and turned him down to watch TV just a few days ago. He’s a talkative guy. He was probably boring the poor girl to death standing outside talking to her four hours. He should have been more aloof. Chicks dig aloof.”
Anyway, I’m glad I was wrong (for now) about the nurse losing interest in you, although I do think that: (a) aloofness is always a good strategy with women, and (b) if a woman asks you to email her every day to help with her English, she’s really just testing to see whether you’ll do it, to see how interested and obedient you are, you schmuck. You passed, which means you really failed.
Back to the blog issue, while there is basically no chance of a girl finding the blog on her own, there is a potentially evil force you need to be worried about. Cockblockers. Think about how many Westerners know both your blogging and real identity. Never introduce any of them to any girl you are interested in, unless you are absolutely certain they will not use the blog to cockblock you. If you are ever in competition with a Western guy over a Thai bird, you’re going to lose if the dude ever finds out about the blog.
Lastly, just to be on the safe side, you should start dropping nuggets of disinformation in the blog to throw off any Thai chicks who might stumble across it, and to thwart any lurking cockblockers. Just change insignificant facts that don’t affect the overall truth of the story, like names of people, bars, dates, etc. So if you take a nurse who works at Bumrungrad to cinema x on Wednesday, you could blog that you took a nurse who works at Bangkok Heart Hospital to cinema y on Tuesday. That will preserve the important nonifiction aspect fo the blog, but it would be more than enough to convince the average Thai girl that you’re not talking about her.
Oh, and delete the photos and partial photos you’ve put up over the last few months that kind of show your face and distinctly unshapely body.
You’re welcome.
// Thursday, 12 March 2009 at 5:21 am |
GM: Your daily contributions are quickly becoming the funniest part of my day. I wake up earlier and earlier to see what nuggets of wisdom you’ve cooked up overnight, and I wake up with a chuckle every morning. Your comments are also expanding in length to the point of almost being blogs in themselves… maybe I should take Penfold’s name off of the blog and put yours on instead.
I knew SOMEbody would bust me for following directions and emailing daily. As Paul Newman said just before he was gunned down by Tom Hanks in the movie Road to Perdition, “I’m glad it was you”.
Thanks for the ongoing pearls of wisdom. Today I woke up 17 minutes ahead of my alarm, just knowing that you would have had fun with this one.
Cheers,
WW
// Thursday, 12 March 2009 at 5:47 am |
BTW, for anyone who might wonder:
(a) why I would make the effort to improve her English; or
(b) how it is that I don’t know her schedule in advance
I offer this email that she sent me last night just before the scheduled end of her shift at midnight:
“…i should duty for speacial nurse to care patient outward.”
I dunno. Your guess is as good as mine… probably better. But the part about “this night, I’m not sleeping” makes it sound as though she has to work a 16 hour shift, which would be a change from her schedule.
And that’s the way it is… in hospitals and restaurants the place doesn’t run without people. So if it’s very busy, or if someone on staff calls in sick, you may find yourself working an extra shift just because you have to.
Maybe that’ll answer the questions you didn’t ask.
Finally, although the email previous to this one had continued the string of Adjectives in the subject line with “surprised”, she finally broke her string with this email, which had the word “thanks” in the subject line.
swampthing // Thursday, 12 March 2009 at 7:55 am |
She actually knows you by your nickname??!!(arguably among the most famous in the Bangkok farang scene).
And you don’t think that one day it might just occur to her to google it…just for fun??
You are most certainly going to get yourself up-ended, m’lad. Maybe not this time, but sooner or later your little nipper is going to be sliced off and fed to the ducks.
DiscoboyDeluxe // Thursday, 12 March 2009 at 8:52 am |
swampthing: Mate, one beer says he replaced his name with his alias.
Riodon // Thursday, 12 March 2009 at 10:36 am |
I often recognize people by what they write or what is written about them on the blogs, but then again it is normally BBB or YP but that’s easy because they always doing weird shit I mean they are not normal people like wot you are!
// Thursday, 12 March 2009 at 10:37 am |
Yes, my real name is Alphonse, but like Garfunkel’s ex-partner used to say, “you can call me ‘Al’”.
Since she calls me Werewolf, then you won’t be surprised by the fact that she signs her name “the Nurse”.
swampthing // Thursday, 12 March 2009 at 3:55 pm |
ok ok. I’ll crawl back into my hole now.
swampthing // Thursday, 12 March 2009 at 3:57 pm |
Two other thoughts just came to mind:
1) I bet she’s a bloke, and
2) I’ll pay her barfine for you
// Thursday, 12 March 2009 at 9:12 pm |
ST: not intended to embarrass you. Your name is neither manny nor jonbanger.
If you want to pay any barfines, the girl in question would be Kung at Rawhide….
The nurse is what she appears to be.. a truly lovely Thai girl.
Radicalron // Friday, 13 March 2009 at 5:39 pm |
I am known to post on TFSTM every blue moon or two. About a year ago, I had began a fling with a little cutie I had met. Things were going along fine with her for a few months. Then , slowly I began to tire of her. I was trying to find an easy way to get her off the program. Without breaking her sensitive little Thai heart. – Me being the sensitive type. I told her that I had an old GF from up north thailand that was working her way back into my life, It seemed to be working, My teary eyed Thai girl was not happy, but she seemed excepting of the idea. She even wanted to just “see me sometimes” – her way of keeping me for some future plan no less. – a week later I had invited her over to my place for a night out, then back to my room where she would spend the night. While I was in the shower, The little bitch got on my computer, Looked at all my Photo’s, Read my Emails, and found out that I posted on TFSTM. Reviews of GoGo bars, Bangkok nightlife etc… The sneaky bitch said nothing at the time, another week went by, She called me saying she really wanted to see me etc. I caved – and invited her over. This time she came packing evidence. She had printed out all of my TFSTM posts on paper, She confronted me on all of it. I was stunned. I didnt care about the loss of face with her, I was pretty much done with her anyways, But was very surprised that this little Thai girl had the mental capacity to link me to my posts on the naughty nightlife in BKK. She ended up leaving in tears, Never yo be seen again. I thought about for about 5 minutes, then called another girl – end of story!
= What is made public can definitely rear its ugly head, Least when you expect.
swampthing // Saturday, 14 March 2009 at 2:04 am |
I still don’t get the thing between you and Kung. But I have a cunning plan to shake you from your stupor. Economic theory suggests the best way to spur demand is to create a shortage. So next week, how about I drag you along to Rawhide where I flirt outrageously with Kung and barfine her in front of you. Affronted by the audacity and nerve of this dashing foreign imposter, you immediately get all hard over Kung, profess your undying lust for the girl and drag her off to the lair for a deserved seeing to.
DiscoboyDeluxe // Saturday, 14 March 2009 at 3:09 pm |
I’m with swampthing re: Kung. I mean you can play hard to get for only so long…
On the other hand, if your instincts are getting in the way of doing the dead then you better dig a little deeper as there might be a very good reason that hasn’t become clear yet. Look out for danger my friend, rarely is the little voice wrong.
// Sunday, 15 March 2009 at 4:46 am |
You will eventually hurt the nurse if you think you will. Is it worth it?
I’ve found that Thai women are very good at saying “sorry.” They are usually very sweet when they do this (although not always).
This is yet another aspect of Thai women that is very different than women in the West. Women in the Western world do not generally like to apologize to men (for whatever reason). They’d rather just get even and move on.
It is endemic in Thai society to shirk some responsibility, (albeit usually minor in many cases), and quickly smooth it over later with “sorry.”
I often wonder if any women in my Flickr photostream have found themselves online?
OK, I’ll crawl back in my hole now, too.
RaiulBaztepo // Sunday, 29 March 2009 at 7:43 am |
Hello!
Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language
See you!
Your, Raiul Baztepo
// Saturday, 1 August 2009 at 6:33 pm |
Sandra Dalene VanAlstine – Wanted to introduce myself
Thanks