Blogging is like flossing is what I once read; if you don’t do it all the time then you rarely do it, and for this you end up feeling remorseful. The difference is that with blogging your friends make you feel bad (please read: Carolyn Nash). No one has ever ridiculed me over the phone for neglecting to adequately clean between my teeth. The other more significant difference is that blogging demands a lot of a person. It forces you to think about yourself and about what’s happening to you and who you are meeting and communicating (or trying to communicate) with and what you feel about all of it and what you like and what you hate and what you like and hate at the same time and how you fit in, and how you don’t fit in and how none of it is going to make sense and how some of it will end up making perfect sense.

I’d like to be able to attribute my ambivalence about blogging to an aversion to the narcissism involved in tweeting/facebooking and all of these self-aggrandizing cyberspace tools. What it comes down to in my case is not quite simply avoidance and laziness. It’s my propensity to be overwhelmed. Living in Southeast Asia brings an incessant bombardment of new and strange and horrible and delightful encounters with this place and the people in it. I find it exceedingly difficult to address these encounters within myself and then to regurgitate them onto a blog post in any kind of timely fashion. By the time I’m ready to relay these glimpses into the reality I face here, after I’ve managed to understand for myself how I’m feeling and what it means, I’m already being confronted with the next horrifying or lovely experience and the next and the next.

This isn’t going to be an attempt at redemption of any sort, rather I’m going to try and better note the little things for myself here on this thing as a forum for me instead of penning them in my moleskin, or semen gresik notebook, or any other scrap of paper lying around. I have lots of feelings about what I’m doing on this fantastic journey and I have lots of little notes and reminders I’ve put down for myself. So I begin again.

Fish stomach soup. How is that better than bakso ikan (processed fish ball soup)? Or cow tongue or mie (noodles) with ants or pecel lele (catfish) or belut (swamp eel) or sayur asam (sour veggie soup that has a bau and rasa asam – sour smell and taste, maybe the least appetizing of all Indonesian cuisine)? Its not. It’s probably worse, really. But I ate it at lunch today in my new office in my new home in Battambang Cambodia and I didn’t mind. Fine, I swallowed the pieces hole so as not to endure the chewy innards, and I washed it down promptly with half a bottle of water. But after it all I didn’t walk away from lunch planning my escape from this place. In fact, what did I do? I sat with Livina, my new supervisor/coworker/friend and we laughed about screaming nextdoor neighbors, and the harrows of married life, and practiced saying “We are eating rice” in Khmer.

Eating something I once thought inedible actually has very little bearing on my ability to cope here. I just traded my bakso ikan for some fish stomach soup, and I’m feeling pretty good about it.