12 hours in a van for 3 hours in a Mosque.

This past weekend, my brown-knee sidekick and I took our first visa run to Penang, Malaysia. A visa run basically consists of 12 hours in a van with strangers who must also jump the border to a neighboring country in order to prolong their stay in this tropical paradise. Through a visa run company the border jumper in question pays a set price, which includes transport, hotel accommodation and (clearly the most anticipated inclusion) food. After drugging ourselves into a comatose state compliments of the local pharmacy, doing the border cross shuffle at 4 am required effort equivalent to a triathlon in Antarctica. I’m not sure whom I handed my passport to, where it was taken or how I managed to wake up in a completely different (yet the correct) van in Malaysia. Regardless my passport returned to my possession in the morning unscathed.

We arrived at our hotel around 8 am and were immediately funneled to the dining area and fed. We decided to explore Penang a bit, walked 5 blocks to get on a bus that took us basically four feet from where we started. Still delirious from our trek, we somehow wandered into a random mosque, where the women were instructed to put on graduation gowns as to not scorch the eye sockets of any Muslim men with our temptress ways.

I’d never been to a mosque before, so the fact that we were 1. Allowed inside during prayer and 2. Given endless information pamphlets and an impromptu tour courtesy of an overzealously talkative Muslim man was something new and different. In his lengthy sermon, which bordered on a fervent Islamic conversion attempt, the man explained any and every question I could’ve possibly conjured regarding the practice of Islam. Within the course of an hour, I learned every possible scenario in which Islam could and should be considered the paramount outlet for religious vigor.

At about minute 95 and Quran passage 12 my stomach begins an attempt to consume the rest of my inner organs and I fight the urge to disrobe and bolt to the “Best Naan Around!” place down the road during the listing of each of the 130 some Islamic prophets. Luckily, we wrapped up the discussion before transitioning to the overaggressive Jihad pamphlet and made our way to the accurately marketed Indian place, consuming a hungry man portion at warped speed. 

After less than 24 hours in Malaysia, we all itched to return to the island ecstasy we call home and back to a place where women have the opportunity to grace the streets after nine pm without risking legal ramifictaions. It was a nice change of scenery, but I’m glad to be back. 

I'll try and keep this as updated as possible. Due to discontinued use of the amphetamine cheat code for life known as Adderall that's been my (prescriiiiibed) crutch for the past decade, the completion of projects has fallen by the wayside and my blogging has suffered. I'd apologize for de-medicating myself, but I sweat in this hotbox enough as is without consuming small doses of speed in a futile effort to keep my room orderly and not creep people out. 

Got Some Hairs Cut in Asia

The time has come, the Walrus said, to cut that freaking mane. Through many years of self-discovery, I’ve come to find that extravagant things like haircuts and showers find themselves in my repertoire of things I’ll relentlessly delay until deemed completely necessary or someone forces me into a vat of soapy water. And although the severe arid moisture has involuntarily spiked an increase my in time spent under running water, I proudly vowed not to limit my post as creepy longhaired friend to a statewide region. Lindsay and I collectively have let our hair grow longer than Dumbledore’s beard and it’s reached the point where my locks double as a woolen neck shield when worn down or contribute to splitting headaches when worn up, due to the dense furry mass atop my skull.

I’ve never enjoyed haircuts, maybe because a terrible hairdresser once gave me a very unflattering mullet in middle school during a time when I already shirked lesbian comments from my brothers who committed to their idea that basketball-playing females are by design homosexual. Or maybe I just found myself looking more and more like an Olympic softball coach after many visits to the thrifty barbershops as a child. Once at a young age, I even took matters into my own hands and butchered my hair to army buzz cut length while my sleeping grandma did an ace job of babysitting. So I’ve vowed to maintain Rapunzel length by promising to death by hedge clippers to any stylist feeling cheeky enough to take that extra inch off.

So the idea of communicating through hand gestures and charades to a Thai hairdresser that I’d pretty much like the exact opposite of the feathered Wayne’s World dos they usually produce seemed rather taxing. But the unwavering heat and humidity gave way to a choice: suffer mild heat stroke because I’m consistently wearing a fleece scarf or put my precious locks in the hands of some foreigner with shears. After months of wringing out sweat drenched locks and breaking countless comb bristles after a day of floating in the salty sea, we headed to the tourist haven shopping mall for a hair cut. I’d never been there mostly because everything exceeded my price range by about 90%. For a brief moment in that stuffy heathenistic display of collective greed, I forgot we were anywhere outside of the US. We found two upscale salons upstairs and compared pricing.

 After reaching the consensus that we’d rather cut each other’s hair with kitchen scissors than spend a weeks worth of lunch on a potentially botched scissor clip, we headed to the Thai equivalent of Wal-Mart, Tesco Lotus. The First Choice type salon littered with heaping piles of dark unswept hair offered a $10 haircut, so we cut our losses and sat for a shampoo. The woman shampooing my mane obviously didn’t realize that with its thick course texture, it needn’t be shampooed more than twice and an entire flask of conditioner is usually the key to detangling. So after entwining my hair into a nest fit for an extended vermin family with a kitchen sprayer, she turned me loose to a pale man with a potbelly and skinny jeans whose shirt read: “Hey Bastard.” The Thai people have a knack for wearing clothing that advertises proverbial sexual innuendos like see you in the morning, absurd statements such as: I Love Pooping!, or sometimes just your average screen print of Sean Connery’s mug, but that’s a story for another day. And two combs, four pairs of arms and two frustrated Asians later, my hair was ready for a cut.

Boom (In this case, Boom is the name of a flamboyantly homosexual asian hairdresser, not an attention grabbing introduction to this segment), Lindsay’s eccentric hairstylist refuses to chop any more than an inch or two because anything else wouldn’t make her “look sexy,” so I point to Linds and mined to my non English speaking stylist that I’d like the “same same”. Still expecting a bleached faux hawk, we were both pleasantly surprised to be given one of the more decent haircuts of our lives. I left with the Asian special: a heavily feathered look with thinned layers that come to a sharp V down my back, clearly designed for naturally pin-straight Asian hair, but I’ll go with it. So I guess the moral of the story is: I may not have a mullet, but I’ve got a pretty attractive rat-tail going.