Wednesday, March 17

Day Three. I woke up at 4:00am, alert and thirsty and hot.

I don't sleep with the AC on, because I kinda feel about air conditioning the way an Italian grandma feels about ice—I suspect it isn't that good for your health.

I don't mean that. Well, I don't entirely mean that. But I do think the AC dries you out, and I do think keeping your living space very cool can prevent you from adjusting to weather that's 91 degrees with 63% humidity.

So I mostly keep my AC around 26-28 in the mornings (my remote of course has degrees in Celsius, but that's apparently 78.8-82.4 Fahrenheit), turn it off some time in the afternoon, and then turn it on for a little bit just before I go to bed. But that's with constant fiddling, plus turning the AC up when I'm doing yoga or drinking tea and turning it off when I'm meditating or lying on the Lounging Bed, which is directly in front of the AC.

Fascinating stuff.

Look, if I was letting my internal editor keep me from including details people might consider MUNDANE or TRIVIAL, then I wouldn't have a quarantine blog, would I?

Can you tell I write this in episodes throughout the day? If I waited until the evening and was like, Hmm, what happened today? I suspect all I'd have to write would be I know. Nothing.

So...breakfast. I laughed out loud when I started opening up the containers that had been left outside my door. Did they give me an extra breakfast by mistake? Or five extra breakfasts?

They gave me: cornflakes, milk, scrambled eggs, roasted potatoes, a tiny container of baked beans, bacon, ham, sausage, two pieces of white toast, a croissant with jam and butter, orange drink, and watermelon.

I was totally overwhelmed. I wasn't sure how to make a breakfast out of this banquet of food, and was already feeling guilty about the food waste.

Thankfully (?) a lot of the stuff wasn't very good, which helped me out. I don't really like eggs (especially in the morning) and these scrambled eggs were particularly strange—they looked more like grits, and tasted slightly sweet. The bacon tasted good but had a limp texture, and the ham and sausage were both super processed—more like lunchmeat and hot dogs. I didn't open the little container of beans—I lived in England. I know what that is. The watermelon was mushy (though I don't usually eat a lot of watermelon, I had so much yesterday I've learned to be discerning) and the orange drink has become a pass for me.

Oh man, am I complaining too much? You have to understand, the meals are the only surprising thing that happens each day! Thinking about what to order, wondering what will arrive (and when), and then experiencing the food takes up a LOT of my time and mental space.

So, I don't even mind some of the food not tasting very good. It all just seems very interesting to me.

Anyway, I kinda figured out how to eat my meal. I had a few bites of the good part of the watermelon, ate the roasted potatoes (which were actually really good and made me think of my mom), and I made a little half-sandwich with some of the toast and bacon, and another with some of the ham and the croissant. I saved the sausages and the rest of the ham, as well as the cornflakes, milk, butter, and jam for future uses.

Then Roman and I texted—about how we slept, about our breakfasts and what we thought of them, and what we might have for breakfast tomorrow. The usual.

Then I read for a bit, did some fiction writing, texted with friends & family, and did a yoga class that was “designed to support you during times of transition in your life” and did so by utilizing “the breath as a guide for moving from one posture to the next with ease, grace, and control.” The class was for the most part constant movement! Because it's about transition! I thought that was kind of cute, anyway.

For lunch, I got Roman's favorite: #11 “stir-fried spicy basil with chicken served with jasmine rice.” And it was delicious! It had a lot of flavor, and actually had some heat from the chilies. I even liked the egg. It kind of made me wonder, why can't the other dishes be a little more like this?

Ah well, there's always #11.

After lunch I watched a few Youtube travel videos about Bangkok. I just feel like I have so little sense of where I am, what country I'm in. I stand on the balcony and look at the few things I can see—the 7-11 parking lot with a lone street foot cart in front, the lush little backyard garden, the backs of several restaurants (I think), the vast construction site, the parking lots, the freeways, the many empty hotel rooms staring back at mine, and I tell myself, this is Bangkok.

And then I try and remember and I think, what is Bangkok? What is it like? What does it smell like? What does it feel like? I try and think of Lumpini Park and a durian milkshake and a heavy snake around my neck but it all seems a little elusive right now. What is Bangkok? What do I really know of this place? I spent so long thinking of Ho Chi Minh City—researching neighborhoods and jobs and apartments, reading novels and looking up different street foods, and I haven't really spent much time contemplating Bangkok, except to think, I liked Bangkok, I could imagine living there. I don't regret coming here, I am just trying to grasp what here is again. The Youtube videos didn't really help.

If I remember food, I remember Bangkok. Cold, tart and spicy papaya salad with grilled pork collar. Whole fish cooked on a rotisserie. Tiny crispy crepes filled with meringue or hot dogs. Sweet sticky pork floss. Sliced ripe fruit in cups, bought on the street—guava, melon, pineapple. Mango with sticky rice. Duck soup. Seafood omelet. Fried chicken and shumai dim sum in Chinatown. Soft sweet milk buns. Freshly-cooked shrimp pad thai, stir-fried water spinach, cheap and filling bao buns. Soda water in cold grenade-shaped bottles. Thai iced tea.

I meditated and did a yoga class of all standing postures, because my knees needed a break from doing yoga on the hard linoleum floor without a mat (a folded up towel or scarf isn't really cutting it).

I got carbonara pasta for dinner (!). Well, pasta in a cream sauce with bacon. It was actually pretty satisfying. Not a real carbonara, way too much food to eat, and pretty unhealthy, but satisfying.

After dinner, I finished my book, What She Ate. The book looks at six famous (or famous-ish) women through the lens of food and cooking: Dorothy Wordsworth, Rosa Lewis, Eleanor Roosevelt, Eva Braun, Barbara Pym, and Helen Gurley Brown. Reading it has taken me to Edwardian-era dinner parties, a Nazi retreat in the Bavarian alps, and crowded cafeterias in post-war England. It's been fascinating to read and I only wish the author had taken on another 6 (or 12, or 18) women.

Then I watched an episode of The Victorian Way on Youtube, and went to bed.