Living in Bangkok

It’s been a couple weeks, and I feel like I ought to post to catch you up, but where to start? The school year is coming to an end. All last week, the K3 students got dressed in their bright red polyester robes and posed for pictures in the main school building, with their class, and outside with their teachers (the above photo is me dressed in a borrowed shirt and blazer for the photos with the teachers). For two weeks, the parents of the different classes came in to observe us teach and to meet with us. On three separate days, I had a large group of parents watching me work with the students through the windows, and it felt…awkward. Luckily, the students were mostly well-behaved (and in the class where they weren’t, I don’t think it was super obvious). And the meetings with the parents went fine—I would meet with a group of K1, K2, or K3 parents, and would talk about each of their kids, one-by-one. I had no guidance on how to do this, except what I got from talking with my fell...

One of the kids in one of my classes tested positive for Covid last Tuesday, so all the kids in kindergarten didn’t come into school Wednesday through Friday last week, and the kids from that class aren’t coming in all this week. Which means my schedule has been much lighter than usual. For the latter part of last week, I brought my computer to work and spent the days submitting my fiction to various literary journals, writing in the kids’ books that they take home to their parents, and getting a no-notice but positive end-of-the-year performance review. This week I’ve mostly read my book and messed around on my phone in my off-time between classes. I’m feeling some anxiety at the moment—I’m planning to visit the US in April, but the process for reentry into Thailand is complicated and right now the tickets are insanely expensive, so I am waiting…in the hopes…that something…will change. I’m also a little anxious about this play reading, though so far it’s going well. On Saturday, th...

Tiny temple at the corner of an alleyway in Ratchethewi Some notes from this week... So Darren and I are putting together a reading of The Moment—a one-act musical I started writing when I was in Chicago. I had talked to Rory about composing the music for it, and he was interested but then, you know, life happened and Covid happened and I never really followed up. But Darren wants to be working on theatre projects and he is such a tireless networker on my behalf, that I figured it might be fun to put together some readings.  My idea is to do an informal table read with actors only—so I can hear the script read aloud and make changes based on that. After that, we’ll put together another reading with a very small invited audience of theatre professionals (taking all the Covid precautions we can)—so I can get some feedback on the book and lyrics. Last week, I met with Darren and a French guy—Yamine—who rents a small black box theatre near MRT Lumphini, and Yamine said we could do th...