My Life is a Comedy

I feel like Will Ferrell's character in Stranger than Fiction when he's making tally marks in his little book trying to figure out whether he's in a tragedy or a comedy. Here are the tally marks that I've made in the Comedy column in my little book:

This morning I got up extra early to get to campus because since I was out of the country and out of touch, I had no idea what classes I was teaching or when. I took some extra time to get ready and tried to pull myself together to look like the on-top-of-everything, organized teacher that I was trying to pretend to be. I needed to get to campus and check my mailbox to see my schedule early in case I had to teach at 8am. I am waiting outside of the office for someone to open the padlock on the door so I could get in to my mailbox. (Are you catching the drift of how old school this is?... Paper mail in mailboxes, padlocks on doors...) It's 10 minutes to 8am and I'm wondering why it seems so quiet. I know Thai people are usually late, but this was weird. I come to find out that there is no class because it's a holiday. Go figure. This now explains why no one was driving into the campus gates but rather just beyond them to where all the monks are. People were going to give alms to the monks while I was the only person wandering around campus and not even noticing until the text message from my fellow teacher confirmed. I sometimes feel like this city has its own quirky personality and it knew that I left for awhile, and it gives me this booya of a welcome back. I can hear it's chuckling voice saying to me, "You bail on me for America...you come back and want things to be normal? Take that. Random Buddhist holiday in your face. Booya."

Tally mark number 2 which happened yesterday: My travel arrangements for returning to Chiang Mai from the US were all set up through Bangkok. I still needed to get from Bangkok to Chiang Mai. I booked this flight after a night of no sleep, packing, fretting, etc. Oh and I booked it about 10 minutes before my ride to the airport. This is my disclaimer for what was about to follow. After flights through time zones and across the world, I realized as I was boarding the flight to Bangkok in Taipei that I was going to arrive in Bangkok at 1:00 in the morning. 1am...in the morning. When booked my Chiang Mai flight according to my travel itinerary, I mistakingly read "Arrive in Bangkok at 01:05" to mean 1:00 in the afternoon. 1pm...in the afternoon. Now if I knew how to read the 24 hour clock, if it was arriving in the afternoon, it would have read 13:05. I am an idiot and booked my flight for after this non-existent afternoon flight for 3:30pm. So if you're following this...I arrive in Bangkok about 12 hours before I expected at 1am. I now need to wait 14 hours for my 3:30pm flight to Chiang Mai. I gave myself a 14 hour layover because I can't tell time. "But Mia, this sounds more like a tragedy," you say? One would think, but it turns out I couldn't stop laughing about it after trying to get on an earlier flight and being told no. It gets funnier: I didn't have enough Thai Baht on me to even take the bus out of the airport for awhile. Funnier yet: that afternoon flight was delayed. It's a comedy, I swear.