sometimes i feel like it takes all the energy that i can muster just to drag myself out of my apt when i don’t have to go to work or school. i love being in a city, but there are days when it all seems like way too much stimulation. when i first moved here, [...]

this ran in the weekly newspaper for my university, interviewed me about being the only white person studying in the general program and a few other things about my life. the university has over 600,000 students and i think most of them get this in the mail every week.

click the image to download the full [...]

thai newspapers will print just about anything to get people’s attention. they particularly love photos of dead bodies, or when the police force a shoplifter to reenact his crime for the camera (causes the criminal and his family to loose face and let’s the store clerk who caught him gain face).
this particulartly strange photo ran [...]

there are often similarities between numbers, due in part to the fact that thousands of years ago numbers were the main thing that different populations needed to communicate for trade purposes. i would love to read more on the similarities between numbers across the world, but have been thinking about the following one lately.
in sanskrit, [...]

i’m back to studying sanskrit again, this time taking a class at ramkhamheng which is finally forcing me to memorize things that i used to just look up in charts. the thing about the course is that it uses a pronunciation system based on the thai alphabet instead of the commonly used devanagari. i’m not [...]

bush is coming to town, which means it’s time for the thai government to do a quick clean up … make things boring for a week. everything always goes back to normal once he is gone tho. it’s become clear tho that bush’s problems don’t stem from his general lack of competence or the fact [...]

In an organized society we have the hospital, school, police station, the law courts. But after all these things are dealt with there is still a gap inside of everyone which can only be filled by reading, listening to music, writing poetry, making art, looking at art.

When you get up in the morning, sit on [...]

in studying foreign languages, i’ve often wondered about learning words based on usage frequency. if your goal is to get up and running with basic conversation, then memorizing the most commonly used 300-500 words would probably be easiest. it would obviously leave lots of gaps, but you would probably have enough of a foundation to [...]