the old-school guestbook archives
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a day of spiritual adventuring... ~ April 20, 2003 - 6:33 p.m. hey, it's 4/20 y'all... something of a holiday back in santa cruz. I'd celebrate it, but hell, it's a school night. I go back to school tomorrow after a week of holiday. hard to say if I'm prepared for that or not. today was funny, though. I did something really, really weird. I went to mass. curiosity, basically, and the fact that johanna wanted to go and was happy to have company. she's not a very hardcore catholic, but it is easter, and she's been thinking about going back to church for a while. curiosity for her too, about what catholic community means in a buddhist country. I've never been to a catholic mass, and haven't set foot in any kind of a christian church for many years. I'm not carrying a lot of baggage about christianity, it's just not deeply relevant to my life. but it's always good to check out how other people experience god, and I was curious, so I got up early and put on some nice jeans and met up with johanna for mass. here's my favorite part: in the courtyard as we walked in, there was a table being staffed by a couple of lao-style church ladies, selling snacks and soda and beer. mass was okay. I liked that we sat by images of two of my favorite saints, joan and francis. the incense smelled nice. some of the ritual was okay. but mostly, it was just really, really boring. in lao and english and french. that's about what I remember about most traditional christian churches. they don't make me feel a dang thing. they don't move me. and anyway, I had to leave after an hour, because I was invited to a basi being thrown by le', my deeply sweet landlady. le's name is pronounced like "let" without the "t". she and her family live in the house behind me, and I dig the hell out of her and her kids, joe and coffee. (there's just no accounting for lao nicknames). her husband, on the other hand, never even acknowledges me. not even when I say sabaidee. luckily, he wasn't there today though. I don't know where he was. le' sat on the floor with me and cuddled baby coffee and told me it's good I'm single. husbands give you headaches she told me, in a mix of lao and english. that's mostly how we talk, patching together conversations out of our common knowledge. everyone was friendly, and sweet, and seemed to like the enourmous boquet of purple orchids I brought for le's mother, who the basi was in honor of. this basi was smaller and less formal than the last one I went to, prayers said by the matriarchs of the house rather than monks, the ceremony punctuated by laughter and accusations that great-grandma with her betel-brown teeth was very drunk. I was happy to realize that I could occasionally understand something someone said in lao, or get a joke, or make one. I've still got so long to go, but it gets a little easier to understand and be understood every day. people joked with me and about me, puzzled by the strangeness of my non-meat-eating-and-alcohol-drinking habits. again, they pushed glasses of beer at me, again and again. the guy next to me, loi, kept trying to get me to drink half of his, and I just kept laughing. baw die! cannot! I was deeply intrigued by a beautiful woman, a jewelry maker, who looked like a lesbian to me. I haven't encountered such things in lao, but of course we are everywhere, so there must be queer folk here too. you see "ladyboys" with relative frequency, and they don't seem to be much stigmatized, but I haven't seen anything like a gay bar. it's a scene I'd love to discover, to see how it manifests in a land like this one. so I have many basi strings now, blessings given me by four generations of le's family. it's been a day of adventures. and now I have work to do, lessons to prepare... because tomorrow it all begins again.
(((rings))) |