Snake Bites and Puppy Dogs

Miléna and I left work at ten of five today because it looked like there was a break in the rain, and riding home in drizzle is way better than a downpour. When I got back it was still misting, and feeling tired and lazy and in a bit of a funk it occurred to me that I could JOG! In the evening! It was raining so it wasn’t too hot!! I was out the door in 2 minutes, only to realize that my legs were like lead and the rain had stopped, but the jog cleared my head and put me in a place more aware than the one I’ve been dwelling in recently. I hadn’t jogged since last Monday because when I was jogging then I went a bit further than usual and encountered 3 aggressive dogs and I literally had to spread my body and yell the most obnoxious scream to get them to leave me alone. I don’t know if they would have attacked if I had kept going, but I didn’t want to test it. I’ve never been that scared by dogs before, and if they smell your fear it  can end really badly.

I was still a bit hesitant when I was jogging today, and when I saw some dogs out by the beach with no people nearby my heart started racing again. It’s so difficult to calm down when you’re anxious, even when you know that being anxious or fearful is making the situation worse (eg public speaking). I ran into the same situation Saturday morning when I felt a weird pain in my lower leg and convinced myself that the mark gushing blood on my ankle the other night was from a snake bite I must have received. Remembering the advice of others to stay calm in order to keep poison coursing through your veins any faster than necessary I bolted to the internet, heart pounding, to look up poisonous snakes in Thailand… never a good decision. In hindsight, of course I was overreacting, but at the time, taking info from various websites on various snakes, the fact that some venom takes 10-12 hours (or 36?) to hit the system and that some snakes have painless bites (so much so that you don’t even notice it?) matched with the snake that I practically (but not quite) biked over Thursday night coming back from the rubber tree plantation and the long stream of blood I found upon returning home from what looked like a puncture wound was, well, reason enough for me to freak. Aung Kyi convinced me that it was a bug that finds a vein and sucks your blood (the kind of bug that doesn’t hurt or leave an itch but produces a shit-ton of blood is beyond me, but hey, in my predicament, I gotta trust him), somewhat relieving my fears. However, despite being relatively comforted, when the conversation at Mars Bar kept returning to snakes and I could feel my arm tingling again (I get the weiiirdest psychosomatic symptoms, I’m like a freakin walking case study for hypochondria researchers) I finally had to interrupt Mars in the middle of a story—“Aright, ENOUGH about the snakes already. So, what kinds of cheese do you have for us tomorrow, Mars?” (always a good choice for a topic change).

Anywho—while I suppose it’s nooot a snake bite on my ankle (but I’d be a pretty BAMF if it was and I’m still here to tell the tale) I do have all manner of oozing bumps and scrapes all over my body. If there’s a scab on my body I will, without exception, attack. This bodes very poorly for my skin because here I am covered with big, ick-tastic bug bites and pimples and the like, and anything I scratch at stays open and oozy, never really drying out in this humidity. When I get home I may look like I had the chicken pox for an untreated number of months, so I hope my parents won’t feel at all disgusted leaving the house with me.

Mmm, tasty wounds aside it’s time for me to grab some grub. We’ve been eating quite well recently, I had my first burger in a year on Saturday, though that was actually not something I would choose to eat again. No, the amazing food has been the banana pancakes (first today!), coconut yogurt, fried garlic rice, and prawns with cashew nuts to name a few. Although with a 7/11 dinner of hard boiled eggs and milk tea ahead of me, I’m really looking forward to Bangkok’s options. There I will be exposed to multitudinous fruit carts and bakeries, and since I’ll be walking around it won’t take much energy to, ohhh veer off the path for a snack or two… I’m also pumped to be traveling with two vegetarians. Here I have been eating what’s put in front of me, and most of the time it includes chicken, and occasionally beef or pork or duck or… crocodile??