The waitress at Applebees told me my number one  lady in Thailand is “Trying to manipulate me.”

by Jack Corbett

One of my biggest beefs with American women is they are grossly overweight. And Oh yeah, they can be overbearing. Usually are in fact. And they have American males by the scrotum. Just marry one of them and just watch what happens when your fellow males who are lawyers teams up with one who used to be your significant other. But the weight problem is one most Americans face together. And it’s going to kill vast numbers of men and women both. It’s that fast food diet we are all on that lards us up to grotesque proportions. And if you think American women are fat, have you taken a look at yourself and your pals lately? Face it, you like to drink too much, you eat all kinds of shit which puts the pounds on, and you love to exercise too little. Americans and their Western counterparts whether from Germany, Great Britain, Australia, or wherever live like hogs. They consume too much of the world’s natural resources, overeat, and think that everyone’s entitled to a huge house, his own car, a car for the missus, and a four wheeler for Little Johnny. You are unrealistic in your world view of what the world owes you and believe that everybody who doesn’t acknowledge your rightful place at the top of the cosmos is nothing but an unschooled heathen. And now that we’ve got all this straight, it’s time to get on with the conversation with the gal at Applebees.

But first, let me tell you exactly where I’m at. I’m just forty days from moving to Pattaya and it looks like I’m not coming back. This means I’m leaving my country behind and most of the things I’ve held dear. I have just sold my Miata special edition sports car, which moves as if it’s running with the wind, and which feels as if it’s an extension of my very self. I’m either selling or leaving behind all my guns. I grew up with such things. And say what you will, but part of being a man was all about being able to handle them and to handle them well. I bought my first rifle when I was just 12. It was a 30-06 Springfield World War II rifle and it took me all summer long of hard work outside to be able to buy it in those days for $50.00. Since then I’ve bought all kinds of neat weapons, a Colt Python .357 magnum, an AR-15 rifle which is the same our soldiers are using except its not full auto, an AK-47 which is a fine gun just to blast away at things floating around on the farm pond, and even a Springfield M-1 A, the civilian version of the M-14 which our infantry started the Vietnam War with.

Some of my friends cannot understand why I like these weapons so much. But they didn’t grow up the way I did. I remember on my 10th birthday and all these other boys were at our house in the country celebrating my birthday. And my Dad got out his .45 automatic that he had with him while an officer during World War II. I remember my Dad smiling, as he proudly licked his thumb, then planted it firmly on a board so that it left a slick little thumb print before handing his .45 to me. .And I was lucky because I was able to put a forty-five caliber sized hole right in the middle of the circle Dad had must made on the board. He was so proud of me then, how the other kids looked at me in amazement.

And there were all those fights we were all having in grade school or Junior High. I think I must have gotten into a fight about every two weeks. I could outbox all my friends after learning how to keep a speed bag going from my grandpa Timmerman, who wasn’t actually my grandfather but my step grandfather after marrying my Dad’s mother. He took me to several professional fights when I was a kid. And he set up a platform bag rig in our basement as well as a heavy bag.

There was that military camp I went to for two months during the summer when I was 10. And all the other boys and I were in this cabin by the Lake of the Ozarks. I got into an argument with this other kid so our counselor had us put these boxing gloves on. It didn’t take me but a few seconds of knocking the other kid around before he started bawling. That’s when the counselor started crowing, “Who wants to be next to take on Killer Corbett?” And sure enough one of the boys stepped forward and it didn’t take me long after that to start him bawling also.

Four kids stepped fourth and I beat them all very badly. Then a fifth stepped into the makeshift ring with me. He was thirteen to my ten and we ended in a draw.

Back home there were kids I really didn’t want to fight. Not many though. Just several. But there was only one of them who I knew could clean my clock and that was Sanford Blunker. Sanford was two years older than me which for a seventh grader amounted to a decisive advantage. Sanford wasn’t all that big. He had strong wiry arms but they weren’t all that big around and he was no more than average height. He was slender with a very flat belly, but could he move. He was awfully fast in that ring and wonderfully coordinated. Sometimes in the gym we would all get on a trampoline. One at a time that is. It was all I could manage to do some form of half ass forward flip. And I could barely survive that not knowing how I would always come up. But Sanford could do back flips and front flips and practically anything he wanted to do on that trampoline. But when he boxed he would just toy with his opponent who usually could not manage to land a single punch.

Most of the time I’d get on pretty well with Sanford but other times I’d just like to tease him. So I’d find the biggest kid in the class and get him to swear he’d protect my ass. Then I’d call Sanford names which would get him running straight at me. Ole Bob would just stand between Sanford and I, and Sanford would either run right through him or around him depending on what he wanted to do that particular day. And then he’d beat hell out of me.

Most of my fights I would win however. I can remember only losing one or two of them and it took years for me to lose them, not counting the times I managed to get clobbered by Sanford. And we had horses then. From the time I was ten I always rode bareback, and there really wasn’t much I wasn’t up to trying on my horse while exploring the neighborhood.

We lived out in the country across from the Staunton Country club, the house surrounded by timber on three sides. And when everybody else was out playing golf which I regarded as a stupid game played by a bunch of lazy guys chasing a white ball around, I would grab a bow and arrows and stand two hundred yards from a green which I would then fill full of arrows as I tried getting my arrows as close as I could to the flag. Those gophers sure must have loved the snotty little kid who lived next to the golf course back in those days.

I’d go out camping in those woods for sometimes a week at a time, and during the winters my dad used to just hand me a .410 shotgun and tell me to go off to shoot a rabbit or any quail I might run into. But when I was 14 and just signing up for my course schedule at Staunton High School, my parents managed to come up with a better idea.

How about taking the entrance exams for some exclusive St. Louis schools they asked me? Some people are betting you can’t get into one of those. Staunton only has a so so school. You would be much better off going to a prep school in St. Louis so you can get into a good college.

There’s nothing like a good challenge thrust to my face to get me to step up to the plate. I took the entrance exams for John Burroughs and a new Catholic School called the St. Louis Priory and somehow managed to get into the Freshman class at the Priory which was about to start up in September. My parents had successfully set the stage for not only getting me to take the entrance exams but also for fully committing myself to the long grueling road ahead of me. They had been able to do this by citing various state colleges in Illinois after which they would tell me stories about certain kids from Staunton who had flunked out while telling me that Staunton didn’t work its students hard enough to prepare them for the rigors of college.


So off to the Priory I went. Our family moved to a small house in Ladue, a suburb well known for having all kinds of rich people living in it. But we lived in what had to have been one of the poorest sections in Ladue, which many of my classmates ridiculed me for. But most of them had never seen the larger of the two houses my parents kept, which was their country home next to the Staunton golf course. Meanwhile my Dad who had just sold a furniture store after selling off the funeral home a few years earlier took up farming. Dad became a lowly dirt farmer while commuting from our St. Louis home to a 160 acre farm just thirty miles north of Staunton.

Those Priory boys would often call me, “farmer”. Back then most of them truly believed they were superior beings and that anybody being born and raised in the country was little better than a barnyard animal. But those boys sure could do well in school. They sure should have–after all, they were two years ahead of me.

The Priory was started by English Benedictine monks from the Ampleforth Abbey. It had adopted the English school system of forms instead of grades such as 7th grade or Sophomore Year in High School. Form I was Seventh grade. I started out in Form III as a Freshman. Most of the other boys had started studying French and Latin, Algebra and high level science while still in the Seventh grade. Even as Seventh graders they were expected to study an average of two or three hours every night and they didn’t even get home from school until close to six after taking the school bus home after five.

To compete against those guys would be like going into High School and entering the Junior Class straight out of the 8th grade. The kids had already taken Chemistry, Algebra, and Geometry along with two years of French and two years of Latin. I was hopelessly behind. But so were a few others because the Priory had also taken in other kids as Freshmen and had dealt with it by placing all of us in track C classes. When we became Sophomores we were all merged together into the B track while the other half went into the A track classes where they started taking Calculus in the 10th grade.

Kevin Kline was in most of my classes from the time I was a Sophomore to the time we all graduated together as Seniors. Most of you have heard about and have seen Kevin Kline, the famous actor, a brilliant and very appealing actor I might add, but back in High School Kevin was not regarded as one of the most brilliant students on the Priory horizon. But then again, out of a class of 33 Priory put seven in Ivy League Schools, and two others in the highest rated engineering schools in the country. One of the boys even had a perfect score in both his Math and Verbal Sat, and one of my Priory classmates had even become an admiral in the U.S. Navy.

Those boys were all a bunch of over achievers. Each term we were given report cards with not only our grades but our class ranks, not only overall class rank but also a class rank in each of the seven classes we had been taking.

I remember trying to figure out who I was ahead of and who was ahead of me. I’d think of Raymond Dubuque for instance and figure out he had barely squeaked by me in English. “Raymond...well he’s not really smarter than I am,” I’d say to myself. I’ll get him next time. And I’d nearly always be number one in History. But I was never put in A track classes, not even in History where I always excelled.

The place is Catholic, but I was a protestant. The fact all those guys went to grade school together, attended Catholic functions together and viewed themselves as hip, together city boys and me from the sticks, conspired to make me somewhat of an outcast. I on the other hand regarded myself as a country boy. I knew what I could do with my fists and what I had done many times before. So I saw them somewhat as sissies.

From the time I was a Freshman I became interested in Cross Country Running and by the time I was a Sophomore I was in the starting five of the Cross Country Running team. I never put in for basketball. So in the winters while the basketball teams were practicing, the rest of us would be lining up for High School P.E. classes. But when we were not in P.E. we would play informal intermural basketball. The basketball players would get uppity and try and kick us off the courts.

Once, this other Freshman named Tony Joynt got too much into my face so right there on the basketball court I let him have it with a one-two punch to the face and he wound up soaking his face in a towel full of his own blood. I had really cut him up.

Once in the library, one of my classmates started smarting off to me. He was and is a brilliant guy, later graduating from Yale and from Yale Law School, and I’m sure he’s worth millions today. He finished third in our class I think, and like me he was a Protestant. So he decided he would prove once and for all he was better than me and tried to kick me in the nuts. You should have seen the guy. The scene was straight from the movies. He was pretty coordinated. His delivery was smooth and in the movies he would have landed a disabling blow. But I was way too fast and way too mean once I set my mind that I was in a fight. I grabbed his hand while shifting my stance and he missed, but I sure didn’t because I knocked him down right over his desk and watched him lying there bleeding.

My Grandpa Timmerman every time I’d ask him about the Martial Arts, such as Karate, would simply scoff and tell me it was a joke. He would always tell me while holding his hands up to emphasize a point, “See where my chin is and how close my hands are to it. Takes just 24 inches. That’s much closer than a kick to a vital area. Jack Dempsey, when he was Heavyweight champion of the world could take a man off his feet with a 24 inch point.....bam...just that fast. Fight over. Those guys out there kicking and playing with all those karate punches are just fooling around. A real boxer will have them down right now.”

From what I saw later I think he was right but you have to have the power to put a man down and you have to be born fast with your hands. I was fast and I could put somebody down with either hand, even when I weighted only one-fifty or so.

I started to get some respect from my classmates but it didn’t start to happen until my Junior Year. The top three runners were Bruce Wilkey, myself and Nicholas Niederlander. Nicholas ran like a machine and had these long legs. He was always good for a two mile run in about 11:50 whereas Bruce and I were thirty seconds behind him, sometimes a little closer than that in the low twelves.

But that summer I decided I would be number one. Our family didn’t spend the summers in St. Louis, electing instead on spending them at the house on the golf course in Staunton. We also spent Christmas there along with many weekends. So I started running about three miles a day during the summer so I’d have a jump on the other guys at the start of the Cross Country Running season. Then, when I finally started school in September I’d start getting up at six a.m. to do two or three miles before getting on the school bus. Then that afternoon I’d run another two or three miles with the team.

Nicholas was still running his 11:50's as a Senior. Bruce had started training on his own nearly as hard I as I was. He was a year behind me and one of the few protestants in the school so while all the Catholic boys were in Mass Bruce and I would sling the shit in the library while going through the motions doing the outside reading we were supposed to have been doing.

In one of the first races, we faced a very strong Sophomore from Lutheran Central. He finished first while doing the course just a few seconds ahead of me. I think I ran it in 11:20 to 11:30 decisively defeating Nicolas while running just a few seconds ahead of Bruce–good for second place. Next race was against John Burroughs. Early on the Burroughs top runner took the lead. The kid kept running like a machine and I knew there was no way I could beat him. Then something got into me in the last quarter mile. I sprinted knowing somehow that I had him and he looked back as I blew by him in front of the whole school which was cheering me on. My time was 11:15 a course record. Soon after that I took another first, this time breaking my own record in 11 minutes flat. I had now joined the list of the school’s heroes. I had become our number one runner.

But my real friends were still in Staunton and it was they I drove around with at night while we managed to ply ourselves with beer that I had usually gotten for everyone even though I was just eighteen and underage. I was the guy who had the balls to walk into a tavern to order the beer and most of the time the tavern sold me what we needed. These were my kind of guys, fun loving boisterous types who didn’t really care what people thought of them.

So now we come full circle. I am headed to Thailand–away and out of the country that nurtured me, headed for a land where I don’t even know the language. Just before the last trip to Pattaya, it must have been back in February, I had driven to the farm to leave my accounting records with my C.P.A. so he could do my taxes. I could have driven to highway 55 and taken it straight back to my apartment here in Collinsville. But I was wrestling with whether or not I should move to Thailand. Everyday I had been visiting web sites to peruse the apartment and condo listings for Pattaya. I had also met a beautiful Chinese girl at a Chinese restaurant in Collinsville. Just 27, she had straight off given me her phone number while she waited on my table. Then several days later she called me to tell me she had either quit or been fired from her job and could I pick her up across the street at Wendys.

I picked her up and took her back to my apartment. We ate dinner at another Chinese restaurant and the next day she had me take her to the Greyhound bus station where she would leave for Chicago. Her cell phone had a Chicago number and she had only lived in Collinsville for several weeks.

But I told her I’d be up in Chicago in several weeks and stay with my sister for several days while applying for my Thai retirement visa. I wound up taking her out several times while up there. It seemed we both liked each other very much. Even though she spoke little English it was not for the lack of trying. She had a beautiful figure and liked holding hands while out walking around or sitting in movie theaters.

And I’m thinking about her as I’m leaving the C.P.A’s office, and I’m thinking, “Do I really want to move to Thailand.” I’d have to give up having my guns close by. And thinking on that note I started driving up route four, the long way home, a route that would take me through many little towns and ultimately to the place I grew up at. It would be a trip up memory lane, a trip where I would hopefully newly discover myself and that would hopefully give me the answers I was seeking.

I drove through Carlinville where I had taken my first driver’s test and gotten my Illinois driver’s licence when I was sixteen. As I drove around the town square I remembered how complicated it all seemed back then and how challenging I had felt driving around the square was with other cars coming into it from a couple of side streets and trying to determine who had the right away. And it all seemed so easy now and with so little traffic.

So unlike Thailand with its horrendous traffic and the lack of anyone wanting to follow any particular rules of the road. People driving motorbikes the wrong way and car after car usually so closely packed together as to make the simple act of crossing the street a very hazardous undertaking. And I had not even left the Carlinville town square yet.

After that it was just me, my Miata special edition sports car and the open road. There was hardly anyone else on it. It was warm for February and I had the top down with the windows rolled up and the heater going at full tilt. Whole road to myself with this terribly responsive machine right at my fingertips because that is how the wheel felt to me—ready to turn the car in an instant in order to obey the slightest command from my fingertips on the wheel.

Then I rolled through Gillespie and Benld where I saw Terrels where they used to have big name bands and I had managed to make a fake id out of my Illinois driver’s licence so I could fool the people pouring beer there to sell me and my friends all the beer we could drink.

Then I went past the doctor’s house near the country club where his son and I had pulled his Springfield rifle out from under his bed and how much I had lusted after that rifle. And finally I got one for my own. Then it was the country club and it was here that I pulled off and parked right in front of the club house. Just three months later I’d drive into the country club again, only this time I would end up taking a long walk.

I looked out from the club house at the house I had grown up in. Or at least I had lived there from the time I was four until I was nineteen. I remembered how one of my sisters and I used to sneak out the windows when we had someone babysitting for us and how we had walked over to the country club and watched all the guys who had been out golfing during the day now quenching down their beers. I remembered sledding down those hills when there was snow on the ground and the old cemetery going back to the 1850's or whenever and how spooky it was out there in those woods at night.

And then I drove the 2 ½ miles to Staunton, passing the old train trestle where one of my buddies and I had once foolishly walked through its middle section well below the tracks on two hundred yards of steel I beams. And then I reached the outskirts of town where I saw the sign that said Staunton now had 5000 inhabitants which is 792 more than it had when I used to live there when it had just 4208. I decided to drive down Main Street to see how much things had changed. But for some reason before heading down Main Street I had decided to turn right to once more see the first house I had ever lived in.

It was the old Staunton funeral home. My dad had once owned it where he was the funeral director at the same time as he owned the furniture store. I had lived here until I was four when we moved out to the golf course. But it was no longer a funeral home. Unbelievably it was now a Chinese Restaurant.

A what? I couldn’t believe it. No....no one had suddenly transformed the place into a Chinese Restaurant in order to give me some form of divine message: “Jack, stay here. Stay close to your roots and don’t leave for Thailand. This Chinese girl is for you. Take her and have her move in with you. She’s right for you.”

I went up to Chicago one more time, this time to take pictures for my sister, and I took the Chinese girl out a couple more times. I asked her to come stay with me in Collinsville, but after telling me she would she asked me to stay in Chicago just one more day. I told her I wouldn’t but that she should be on the bus the next day. She never came.

Some people won’t understand what I was already thinking. She was not a bar girl. For her holding somebody’s hand might have meant something whereas for the bar girl having a man deep inside her is merely the ATM machine clicking away.

I knew she would call me while I was in Thailand or possibly when I came back. Someone was telling her not to come stay with me. I thought I had a chance on helping her get a work permit. I’d take her to see my U.S. Congressman and see if he could pull any strings. And I had often asked myself, whoever is telling her not to come stay with me, does he or she have the balls or the capacity for original thought to take this girl in to see a Congressman? No way. Cretin. So I sent her a postcard from Thailand just so she would know I was telling her the truth and not a bullshitter the way most people are, who she had already met in life and who she would be meeting later on. Most of them bullshitters and worthless. On this post card I had written, “I am moving to Thailand in August.”

I didn’t want her to think that I could possibly help her anymore. I had too many things to do with the coming move.

It had all been a blast from the past...the beautiful Chinese girl inexplicably insisting that I take her phone number, then calling me. And of our wandering around Chicago in blizzard conditions while she rubbed my hands in order to warm them up. And now I got the second blast from the past. The phone had rung a few times while I was in Thailand from March through early June. And yes, the Chinese girl had called me, but so had Jack Regenhold calling from Florida.

“The Staunton High School is having a class reunion on July 2nd,” he told me, “but I’m coming down a week or two earlier just to help organize it. There will be a special early get together on a Wednesday night at the Staunton Country Club. Want to come?”

“Yes, do I? In a heart beat. My past. My child hood is once again calling me. This is all about who I am, what I had become and perhaps my very future, what little there is left of it that is. This isn’t St. Louis dialing me in. This is the countryside, what people had once fought a Civil War over, and yes, I had farmed 23 years thirty miles North of that country club but up there the land is flat whereas around the country club and the house I had grown up in, there were lots of trees with many huge white oak trees towering upwards 100 feet, and there were hills, and lots of memories–of a boyhood now turned old with my face turned towards, what is it, lust, in Thailand where the girls are slender and brown, both very pretty and endless?

Jack had been the Kevin Kline of my grade school. He was the clown, the practical joker, and the guy whom everybody liked. And I had not seen him in over thirty years. Nor had I seen practically anybody else and yet here I was living in Collinsville, just thirty miles away. I would go to that reunion, at the scene of my childhood on practically the very eve I would leave my country to a place most only dream about where the culture is entirely different which I am sure I will never really understand.

***

Yesterday Jack drove up here on his way to Staunton from Orlando, Florida. He looked great, much older than he once had been which is all to be expected, but by no means a shadow of his former self. Amazingly he had not really changed at all. He was still the ebullient, joke cracking, people loving man I had remembered from my childhood.

“Where can we get a beer?” he asked as soon as he pulled up.

“I really don’t know. I used to go to titty clubs,” I replied. “Come on in and we’ll start to turn that one over.”

We wound up going to Applebees. Although I used to eat lunch there quite often only once or twice I had gone there for beers. It was Sunday night and Club 64 would not be open. And I really didn’t like the idea of paying high dollar at other places nor for putting up with a bunch of strippers trying to dig into our pockets.

We sat in the center of the room at the bar where we ordered two different types of appetizer platters and started having our first beer together. Then we had another beer, and another, well not too many because Jack realized he had to drive all the way to Staunton to his sister’s house and he didn’t want to get so ripped so as to get a DWI.

Jack had retired five years ago so since he was 53, he’s not been working. Divorced once like me, with enough money to live there comfortably he’s an ideal candidate for Thailand...as in to move there permanently. And what a terrific comrade to have there, with his personality, zest for life and wit. Together we remembered there at that bar some of the things we used to pull in Junior High and all the people we used to go to school with.

For a few weeks the Chess playing craze took over the Staunton Junior High. Most of us bought chess sets and sat there in our school room playing chess against one another. Then there was our informal writing club. Many of us got bored in class as the teacher kept trying to keep the slower members of the class up to speed. Speaking for myself, I had always been reading ahead and then had gotten bored. So someone, I’m sure that had to have been me, came up with the idea of our writing science fiction–horror stories. There must have been about half a dozen of us doing it with three or four of us really into it. We’d write about vampires and giant ants and cannibalistic tramps out roaming the countryside. Then right there in class we’d pass our notebooks around to the others to share our latest master creations with our friends.

And so we talked on and on about how things had been, who had died, what people were doing now from our class, only Jack had kept up with them whereas I hadn’t. I had gone elsewhere to High School then gone to college far away and after that had moved too many times. I had nearly forgotten my own boyhood and the things and people who were most likely to be most responsible for who I am today.

Suddenly a woman came up to us and said, “I find you two to be terribly interesting.” She had been sitting just a few seats down from us at the bar eavesdropping the whole time.

What she looked like and why she suddenly started talking to us doesn’t really matter. What is important is what she had to say. Much of our conversation had been about Thailand although the largest share of it had focused on our boyhood. One of her comments about my number one lady in Thailand was: “She’s trying to manipulate you.” Which she probably is. And she probably thinks I don’t know it.

I started to make a comment about controlling me. Yes, to all you gentlemen reading this. More than 50 % of you are controlling ass holes. The rest of you are probably pretty good guys. But right off this woman said to us: “No, it is we women who are controlling. We are in control. How many times have you guys had a woman try to withhold having sex with you in order to get what she wants for instance?”

Now this was getting to be pretty deep, and quite a bit like one of my conversations with Angel who tells it the way it is with no apologies. Jack, however, was getting anxious to get back. Feeling if he’d have just one more beer he’d be risking the DWI a little too much he was in no mood to have anything more to drink. The woman did offer to buy us both a drink so that we could remain and talk with her longer. I wound up giving her my business card with my web site and email address on it.

One thing she did say that I think is terribly important was: 3 % of all people are intellectuals and it doesn’t matter if they are white, yellow or brown or if they are women are men and what language they speak. You guys are intellectuals and in the long run you are not going to keep clicking with someone unless that person is in that 3 %.

Which is very well said, and I do believe her from what I’ve seen. For all that can be said of we Americans for our being creatures of excess. We drink to excess, we eat to excess, we drive cars to excess, we spend to excess, we tend to be a nation of straight shooters. This woman seemed to be a straight shooter. She had come right up to us and said, “You guys seem very interesting. Care if I join you.?” There was nothing secretive or false about the way she had handled us. And later she had said in so many words: “We women are bitches. There is something wrong here.”

Then today, the next day I was talking to Angel who was telling me about her husband’s mother. Her husband is half Philippine and whereas practically all my friends and I are terribly attracted to Asian women, he has no use for them whatsoever. It turns out that his mother who is Filipino who married his Dad who is American has been collecting Social Security on all of their children. And yet they are separated or divorced and the American father has had custody of the children. And she’s also been taking the tax deductions on those same children she hasn’t been taking care of. Angel thinks the woman is a heartless manipulative cheating selfish lying thief. And her husband pretty much agrees in the sense that he feels most Asian women do not share the same value set of fairness many Americans have.

It’s an entirely different culture out there, and I’m sure most of us are going to have many rude awakenings. But I concur with the woman’s 3 % rule she was explaining to us at Applebees. Somehow I can’t think that the average bar girl from Pattaya is going to see me only as an endless ATM machine on which she can keep pushing many buttons as she watches the money roll out. By pushing buttons we mean saying the things I want to hear which includes many lies. Meanwhile she is going to maintain the appearance of being exactly what I am looking for.

But how many of them are going to really care what I am all about or learning more about me, my culture or my country? And how many of them are going to care about even learning about the countries and cultures of the lands surrounding them. I certainly want to learn all I can about their cultures. And I do want to better understand the ladies I am closest to. But the people here are very poor. And practically everything might very well revolve around money, and if something should happen to me and I am lying dead in the street in a pool of my own blood I’m afraid the tears from my own future girl friend will be very brief...unless that is she finds herself left out of the will. Again...there is that 3 % and there are going to be women in Thailand who will thirst for knowledge of the larger world surrounding them. It is they who might be willing to forego present gratification whether this is in terms of money to be sent home to their parents, getting and staying blissfully drunk with their friends, or material possessions so that there is plenty of money left over for travel and other important activities. And for this 3 % wherever in the world we shall find each other, language is not really going to matter, is it?