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What's going on in Bangkok?

Well... I'm all by myself here in the office, for one. Mike has left for a month-long trip to the U.S. and Ross has also gone back to the U.S. to be with his wife, whose sister just died. Pete is off doing Pete things... in Australia, most likely, which means it's just me and the secretary, Gail. Does that mean I can relax for a while? No, not really. I've got a month to write the first draft of a report on the Thai data set. We've finally completed (almost) the analysis... just a few formatting changes to make (which I should finish today) and one more discussian with the statistician that created the sample design and we'll be done. With the completion of the analysis, it's time to write the report... so that's the next task. We had a meeting with some foks at UNICEF yesterday and Mike told them the first draft would be ready in a month; these are people that were originally told it would be available last November, so they are ready to get some results.

It was fun to go to UNICEF, though. My work the past few weeks has involved doing the statistical analysis and then exporting the results into Excel for easy viewing. I created a pretty neat spreadsheet that automatically graphs the data based on user-defined selection criteria. It's somewhat complicated but nothing anyone that knows Excel couldn't do. Nonetheless everyone that sees it is blown away... it's nice to have one's efforts appreciated, but it's good to remember that the real value was created by those that went out and collected the data. All I'm doing is moving numbers around.

Shannon is coming in about 3 weeks. That'll be fun. I'm taking a few days off to go to the beach with her and the kids. Other potential ideas for the itinerary include a trip to the Grand Palace and to Chatachuk, the weekend market. I just hope I'm able to leave work here when I leave... I don't want to have to write a report while on the beach at Hua Hin.

Not much progress on my future here; Mike has had a single email exchange with the Tulane chief, in which he agreed to discuss it with Mike when he gets to New Orleans. I have to say I'm a little less confident that everything will work out. Yesterday Mike and I chatted about it. Mike discussed finding funds for me, and all of the options he mentioned were for a fellowship position. I reiterated that I would prefer a professional position. I thought I had made that clear in our last discussion, but either I was not as clear as I believed or it's just much easier to find funds for a fellow than for a permanent staff post. Nonetheless, there's a donor's meeting in the fall, and Pete is trying to push some money through Congress which could eventually benefit me. How odd is it to have my potential salary dependent upon a Congressional vote? Discomforting... Anyway, the whole discussion left me feeling less than secure.

Odd things I've recently seen:

A 20-something man showing a young boy (~8 yrs) how to put a clip into somekind of automatic machine gun (had to be a replica, right?).

A Thai woman with blue eyes (had to be contacts, right?).

A older woman, 60+, walking down the sidewalk, hand in hand with a 20-something Thai girl (had to be her friend, right?).

An older man, 60+, dressed up as a woman, complete with sundress and lipstick, hanging around the hospital neighborhood (the hospital is famous for its quality and affordability of plastic surgery, including transgender operations).

I helped this brown-skinned fellow one night about 6:00 who had obviously had wayyy to much to drink. He kept saying, in English, "I like Thai people, but I am not Thai. I am Filipino." Over and over and over... he wanted to go to the busstop, but his English was too nonsensical for the Thais to understand him and he didn't speak any Thai, even though he looked Thai. He likes Thai people, but he is not Thai; he's Filipino.

Thupt!

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