Fox Life

I eyed the car's dashboard. Whenever we hit a puddle, the emergency indicators would all light up for several seconds. "That's a really good metaphor for this country," I told Len. "This car was made in Japan," he said. "Yeah," I said, "but it was broken here." There are the places that make you and the places that break you, which then allow you to become remade somewhere and someway else. I came here to be broken, even if I didn't realize it at the time. There is a short 10 minute video of the first time the ETAs met their mentors and their foster parents and it makes me want to cry a little every time I watch it. In the interceding 6 months since the video was made, nearly all of us have lost weight and/or muscle mass, aged approximately 5 years, and lost the child-like glint in our eyes. I wish I was making this up. You can actually compare the footage of how we looked then and how we look now and have no choice but to conclu...

Oh Peter, can you teach me how to fly? I get a phone call of a guy speaking in Malay. I didn't know how to say "wrong number" so I just managed to get out Malay for "I'm Ezra. I'm white." "Oh oh oh oh....... okay," said wrong-number man. Turns out he was one of my co-workers who I ran into a second later. But I like how great "I'm white" is an acceptable response to most problems that I've encountered here. It's not so much a get out of jail free card as it is a "get out of jail and get pigeon-holed with a different set of problems" card. But still, it's not always as big of a problem as you might think for people to see you as stupider and richer than you are. I got a chance to pick up some food from the Tuesday night market and I finally got around to trying out a Ramly burger . I had read some good things about it, and it's supposed to be Malaysia's contribution to the burger world. I can...

It's come to my attention that my last post might've been a bit dark. Maybe it was. But it was not a reflection on a general depression. If you're actually depressed, you can't really make jokes about the situation, dark or otherwise. It's not exactly gallows humor , since you get to die pretty soon after that. It might be something more like POW camp humor. Or prison humor. So I will now dub it ETA humor. It doesn't mean you're in great pain, it means that the bad parts of the situation have grown to be so ridiculous that they demand mockery. another way to sum it up might be: "so bad, it's good." So just to assure people again, I'm not unhappy here, it's just really funny how unhappy I could be. However, it is disconcerting how it never occurred to me that people might be worried because of the dark nature of the last post. This makes me wonder how my thinking might have changed while being here. Yesterday Sarah and I wer...

This would be the perfect application for the ETA program in Malaysia. Assuming it will exist in 2010, you're more than welcome to use it to apply for the fellowship. "I want to be an ETA in Malaysia because I am afraid of the world after college and would like an ambiguously defined job in a foreign country to barely keep me busy for the next seven months. I am well-suited to a life abroad because I have proved time and time again that I am able to ignore many key components of reality to convince myself that I am happy when in fact I am barely hanging onto my shreds of sanity and dignity. Furthermore, I enjoy being both mocked and loved solely because of the color of my skin. As a white man in America I do not have the opportunity to hear "you are so pretty today, sir" enough and I crave the attention desperately. While I am unremarkable in my home country, I have the pressing need to amuse and astound the people of Malaysia by performing such laudable feats as e...

Mr. Fix-it was telling me about silat , Malaysia's favorite (if not only) homegrown martial art. He was saying that if you get to a high enough level in silat you can drink a glass of poison and nothing will happen to you. This is as opposed to the effects of drinking a glass of poison on most people where nothing will happen to you... ever again. This claim got me thinking: 1. Do you test your level of silat by drinking poison? Does this account for why I haven't heard of this martial art before? 2. Assuming this did work, how would you ever know if someone was trying to poison you? Conceivably your spouse, co-workers, or rivals could be trying to kill you, unsuccessfully, for weeks while you keep on smiling at them, laughing at their jokes, or carpooling with them. This could lead to some awkward conversations down the line. "Are you sure you feel fine? Really? And you finished the glass? Okay, well, keep me posted." 3. Couldn't you just not drink the g...

Melaka might just be my favorite place in Malaysia. It was the Malaysia I hoped I would be living in before I left America. Multi-cultural, cheap, historical but modern, and in possession of the greatest museum the world has ever seen. The Malaysia Royal Customs Museum might not have a flashy acronym (MRCM doesn't exactly roll off the tongue), nor can it boast being enough of an attraction to merit charging admission, but it was due to this last point (Free!) and the availability of AC (also free!) that had Sarah and me charging past the reception desk worker busily playing flash computer games. We were not to be disappointed. The great thing about this museum is that the people who conceived of it clearly knew what they were doing: Customs Officer 1: "Hey guys, we need to make a museum about our jobs as customs officers. But it needs to be interesting. Ideas?" Customs Officer 2: "We could just make it about all the illegal stuff we had to seize from smugglers....

A few notes on biting the hand that feeds me: Since I only meet with any one class once per week now, I get a week of mileage out of my lesson plans (if you can call an idea a plan). This week's lesson was about the perfect high school. One of my classes asked me to talk a little bit about my high school experience, which I would have to say, differs importantly from Imtiaz in several key ways: 1. Less memorization of the Qu'ran. 2. Less classes. 3. Less living at school. 4. More hippies. 5. Less hitting of students by teachers. 6. Less fish. Given these differences I asked the students to take it upon themselves to design the perfect high school. It was an easy sell, since, as teenagers already enjoy criticizing things they don't know anything about, it stood to reason that they'd take even more pleasure in criticizing things they know a great deal about. Turns out I was right. Likes: The Qu'ran, English, Friends (probably their classmates, possibly the America...