Friday, June 18, 2010

ah-choo

Working at a desk all day is adversely affecting my posture, I think. And staring at a computer screen for eight hours certainly isn't doing my eyesight any favors.

I think yoga would help me feel better, but there's not a sufficiently large, flat floor surface in the house in which I'm currently living.

Speaking of the house I live in: it has a dog. I mean, the house doesn't have a dog. The owner of the house has a dog. I live there with her and her dog.

Anyway, my whole life I told people I was allergic to dogs and cats. My grandmother has dogs and a cat, and she always had to vacuum all the carpets and furniture and lock up the animals before we visited, or else I'd wallow in a sneezing, itchy-eyed state of misery for the duration of our stay.

But I never reacted to my aunt's Yorkies or her Pomeranian. And I didn't react to a high school boyfriend's Sheltie mix. I just put two and two together in the last couple of months and realized I'm only allergic to cats!

To be honest, it was a little jarring to find that something I'd always believed to be true of myself was actually not true at all. Here's to self-discovery and non-allergies!

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

mind boggled

Out of curiosity, I just added up all my paychecks and tutoring money from my 10 months of teaching English in Thailand. I was a little obsessive and kept exceptionally good records of everything I made and spent.

In that time, I earned about $7,300. Not much, right? And I brought home nearly $4,000 of it (in cash, on my person, on three flights, mind you).

My mind was just boggled at the amount of things I was about to do with a mere $3,300 in that length of time. Things like...

- Four weekend trips to various beaches (two to five hours away from Bangkok)
- Daytrips to various parts of the city and other provinces
- Four-day trip to Cambodia
- Three-week trip through Vietnam, Laos and northern Thailand
- Weeklong trip to southern islands
- Bought a professionally-tailored work wardrobe, including a black suit, five pencil skirts, four trousers, five long-sleeved button-down shirts, a tailored jacket and a little black dress
- And, you know, paid electric bills, got massages, ate breakfast most mornings and dinner every night, saw movies, had coffee and smoothies and bought loads of souvenirs and jewelry

If only my American pennies would stretch so far.