I’ve recently registered for membership at a local gym—a rather swanky, incense scented local gym—so in order to get my card, I hate to have a portrait taken. No problem. I headed down to the local photosweatshop, a store that takes and airbrushes mostly wedding pictures on maybe twnety computers they keep humming in a dark room. The workers can use the magnetic lasso tool like true photo-editting cowboys.

So I get the picture taken. I look like I’m sulking par usual and I’m waiting for the prints, but they have to put it through the photoshopping process because this is what they do. Fine. They change the background color to a light blue and then change my eyes to match. I happen to have blue eyes—something they coo over a little—so this is a minor change. Then they highlight my skin area, reach into the color preferences section and, viola, I’m goth-white.

Now, I’ve been in Cambodia for almost two months now so many of you may have forgotten, but I am in fact a white person. Caucasian. Cracker. I actually know the rules of fucking croquet. I listen to the Decemberists. I don’t understand the appeal of Tyler Perry. In short: Soy Blanco.

The weirdest thing perhaps about Cambodian culture is how willing Khmer people are to display their fantasies. They dream of looking like pop-stars or American icons, but instead of suppressing that with gusto, they wear it on their neatly pressed sleeves. In a way, this is incredibly admirable. But it is the by-product of a culture with no history of individualism. I don’t want to pass a judgment (see, I even have white guilt) but their visual presentation makes Khmer people a little difficult to address. Try having a reasonable conversation with a woman that has pigtails, a school girl dress, pink socks and four years on you. It is very strange and completely unlikely to happen in the states unless you happen to be a Las Vegas conventioneer.

I bought a helmet with a mirrored-windscreen to wear on my moto because it keeps the police from pulling me over for being white (sometimes…) So when I’m driving I am faceless and raceless. Sometimes I keep the helmet on after I get off the bike—for the first five or so steps. No one seems to see me. Then I take it off and suddenly: “Sir you want dvd?”;”Tuk-tuk?”;”How you do today sir?” Sometimes I want to leave it on, but then I think: You are what you are. Which, in my case, is clearly white enough already.

I’ve been remiss in my posting (if remiss is a term applicable to self-centered blogging to an audience of, lets say, 8) and I apologize. The internet at my house went out for a few weeks and I wasn’t going to blog at the office, so I was left in the horrible predicament of being unable to tumbl anything at all. I thought I might disappear if I did’t update my every emotion online, but lo and behold, I’m still here.

Here has been pretty hectic. NYE turned into a bit of a shit-show. I was in work until late so I tried to catch up on drinking after arriving at a rather classy bar with fancy looking people, patron and dangle-your-feet-in-this-pool Miami Vice vibe. Not having anyone to kiss at midnight, I did the next best thing and full on tackled a buddy into one of the pools. So much for his phone. So all my coworkers jumped in and we had a dance party while appalled do-gooders looked on. Quite nice really. Then we did some rather less exciting bar-hoping and 2010 more or less started with a hangover—appropriate, I think, after the aughts.

Since New Years, it has been mostly work work work. But there have been a few exciting (for me) developments.

I bought a moto! She’s orange and white, jerky as shit in first and second, and, for the moment at least, the apple of my eye. I can now zip around the city saying “Ciao” to people who smile and nod a lot. I’m calling her the Creamcycle for now, but I think it sounds a little dirty, so I’ll probably change her name down the road so to spreak.  I feel like an adult again, not having to ask to go to this or that place; it is like getting my license all over again. The key difference, of course, is that I don’t have a license. But whatever. Sometimes you just shrug and say, “its Cambodia, what ya’ gonna do?”

On a more professional note, I’ve been asked to do a feature story for a fairly prominent architecture magazine back in the states that I’m very excited about for two reasons. The first reason is that I haven’t gotten to do a magazine feature before and the subject, Khmer Modernism, is interesting despite sounding completely ridiculous. The second reason is that I get paid very little and I like to eat food. I have some other nibbles from stateside mags so hopefully I’ll be doing some real freelancing soon, which would go a long way to making me feel justified in coming here.

All these happinesses aside, it was a long week and there is a certain pool with a certain lounge chair and a few certain bloody marys that I need to go see about.

I broke a 22 year streak.

Every Christmas morning, before last Friday slipped by, I’d woken up early, tottered into my sister’s room, rousted the parents and waited on the top of the stairs (typically while being bathed in spaniel saliva). Then coffee, stockings, presents, the tree, food and the disappointment of early-darkness, another year gone. This was the biggest holiday of the year; really the only true holiday of the year. In missing christmas this year, I broke a promise to both my mother and myself. Putting something on a pedestal doesn’t, it turns out, make it sacred.

Christmas in Cambodia is sweaty and long. It started, this year, at a club where bartenders wearing santa-hats provided VIP service for 3 bucks-a-head. The techno-christmas remix (see above) was accompanied by a sort of Led Zeppelin laser show. Everyone is dancing and the only thing I’m not self-conscious about is my breath. I’m one shot of whiskey and about 4 candy-canes deep.

The internet is out at my house, so Skype is off and I wake up to my ringtone (Bad Moon Rising) and my family chirping through speakerphone. They’ve just gotten back from church. I actually considered going to church myself, but having looked into it and discovered my options consist of Baptist and Mormon (no gaelo-irish churchagogues here) I decided against it. Boston is covered in snow and I miss it. I wish I was there listening to newspapers crumple in the fire rather than the asthmatic wheeze of my air-conditioner.

No matter. I head off to the Foreign Correspondents Club with three co-workers. We are the only actual, ya know, correspondents, but other than that “Christmas Brunch” is no misnomer. We eat brie coquettes, turkey, mashed potatoes and pudding as a gay-french couple do an unsuccessful impression of Marvin Gaye singing Cole Porter. The table nearest the drum set is occupied by a forty year old russian woman in what appears to be an old-fashioned wrestler’s outfit

A nap and a talk with Caroline later, I’m feeling much more genial. Triptophane is my drug of choice.

When I head into work—oh yes, I work on both Christmas and New Years—the secretary passes me a post office slip. A half an hour later I’m bribing (I think) a woman at the Post Office to give me my package. Everything about her is rumpled and careless except her immaculate nails—I could be at the DMV.

The box, which I open at my desk, is full of goodies. New York Magazines, amarettos in a Zabar’s bag, photos, predominantly of Toby, and little knick-knacks like a rooster that changes color to predict the weather. The rooster is bright blue. He will remain bright blue at least until June. I’ve received an air-mail stocking so I’m full of bonhomie. I pass out jelly fruits.

I drift through work easily, even pause to watch my parents open a few presents over Skype, which does work at the office. We eat dinner in a barang restaurant surrounded by nightclubs and NGO workers in too-tight polo-shirts that seem to have emerged from a nearby Frat house (Sigma Mau Mau?) down the street.

When I go home, I eat cheese cracker from my package in bed and look at the pictures: my puppy rolling on an indian wool blanket; my sister in one of her endless grey sweatshirts; Ani, George and Caroline smiling while propping up an angry-looking Lisa. This is the only way I can go home this Christmas. It isn’t enough—not by a long shot—but its something alright. So I fall asleep happy.

A view from the Cardamom foothills (in about seven pixels).

Today I woke up feeling terribly colonial. I thought to myself: “Self, short of subjugating an entire people, what can you do to revel in this feeling of Western entitledness?”

“Aha,” I responded, “you can go to Raffles.”

Raffles, for those unitiated sorts whose homes aren’t guarded by men in gold-spiked pith helmets, is a gracious old hotel that has been one of the ex-pat centers in Phnom Penh since the French arrived in the mid-(whenever). As I walked up the pea-stone driveway and into this air condition valhalla, I felt—as all New Englanders do when approaching something dripping in affluence— an English accent rise in my throat.

Unfortunately, prices in Raffles do not reflect prices in Cambodia as a whole. Raffles sits, economically speaking, about a block from the Musee D’Orsay. I could only afford a small coffee and a pastry, which I ate by the pool in the company of the least bashful person in Kampuchea. Where Khmers go swimming in their jeans to avoid making a spectacle of themselves, this woman, whose body brought to mind the venus of willendorf after maybe three months of pilates, wore what can only be described accurately as a G-string. When she walked, her cheeks gave a little golf clap over the straining nylon.

In and of itself, this sight would have probably repulsed me, but the spectacle was made worthwhile by the four or five gardeners furtively doing anything in their power to get an eyeful. We are all voyeurs when we wander into other people’s world.

Anyway, the coffee was fabulous and I’m certain I will be back soon. Raffles has the bar, and I mean THE BAR—a giant room full of wicker chairs, sculpted elephants, pool tables and handles of Bombay sapphire. Heaven, essentially. I vowed to return as I stumbled back out in the 100 degree heat and waved for a moto, whose wheels shot gravel into my shins.

One of the burned out mansions in Kep. Unfortunately, no is allowed to buy them or fix them up so the only people for whom they have non-aesthetic value are squatters. Not a bad spot to squat.

Last weekend, on my first non-jet lagged Saturday in Cambodia, I drove with a group of coworkers down to Kep, a sea-side resort along the south coast. We stayed in lovely barebones bungalows with 80s pop-icon posters on the walls and views out over the South China Sea. Most of Saturday was spent on Rabbit Island, a former penal colony of the coast that has the only white sand beach in the area. A little sun, a little seal; pretty fabulous stuff.

We ate fresh caught crab for dinner. I struggled with that. After years in Maine, I’m a lobster expert. You know how soldiers can take apart their rifles and then put them back together while blindfolded? I can do that with a lobster (though, the parallel somewhat breaks down at the putting back together stage). Crabs—and I should have seen this coming—are a whole different animal. I was given about a pound and a half of crab, but I still went hungry after slicing up my fingers with the shell. Still, if not being able to get at crab meat is the biggest problem of the day, you’ve had a damn fine day.

We ate across from some of the fine old mansion that line the coastal boulevard. Kep was once the Kampuchean Riviera, a veritable Newport, RI without the lockjaw. The Khmer Rouge, not being party people, burned everything down. Most of the mansions are now cement shells. They remain quite beautiful in a faded-glories sort of way—the way you’d still take Elizabeth Taylor home because she used to be Elizabeth Taylor and you can always squint.

On the way back to Phnom Penh our van had to swerve around an elephant that a rice farmer was riding down the highway. I can’t say exactly why, but this excited the hell out of me. I always watched Star Wars for the creatures; seeing an elephant will never get old.

Patches of different decades are quilted across the city. The central market is from the deco days. Office buildings off the main road into the city are icy clean and airconditioned with freshly built machines shipped over from Japan. Four blocks near the water sit in the 1970s. On the far bank, it could be the eighteen hundreds.The overall effect of this chronological pastiche is that the city seems far more modern than New York or San Francisco. The buildings, having spent most of their beautiful years abandoned for communist camps, are now content to be old, eccentric and looked after.

At night there are only a few lit streets. The Christmas lights have been strung up carelessly and Angkor Beer signs sepia tint the old white men who use young khmer bar girls as crutches. Around 2 or 3, when the bars begin to close, the backpackers, sexpats and bar girls return to their (or each other’s) respective cocoons. The only people left are the middle aged khmer men who crowd together under blue fluorescent light in corner cafes where they play dominoes or cards and wave their hands at each other.

The city feels safe at night. Like water, lawlessness seeks its own level. There is a befuddling yet fully realized social contract that binds everyone. The prostitutes speak sweetly to the beggars and the tuk-tuk drivers sleep soundly on the seats of their motorbikes.

Here is the lakeside mid-city. This will be filled up and developed soon, but for now it is the light that hooker, dealers and backpackers buzz around at night.

My ride didn’t show up at the airport so I entered Phnom Penh proper in a taxi driven a man whose insistence that he knew the location of my office seemed to run contrary to all evidence. We circled blocks of heavy looking french mansions surrounded by high stucco walls and pink flowering trees, getting out occasionally to consult with moto-taxi drivers. The cab driver wanted to discuss life in California; his family had moved to Fresno, leaving him behind.

The city is lovely—full of wide boulevards that call to mind a sort of dusty post-apocalyptic Barcelona.  We did finally reach the office and my ebullient new boss showed me to my new home, a squat whitewashed fortress of a house abutting the stately homes of several police-generals whose walls are decorated in an intricately woven fabric of vines and barbed wire.

My room is plain but functional: white tile floor, white walls and a pinkish bathroom. I have a small balcony from which I could leap easily onto the neighbor’s roof and steal his golden spirit house.

I more or less blacked out on my new bed for a few hours. When I woke up around 8, I rushed out to a concert at the Foreign Correspondents Club where my new co-workers had invited me to join them. The decks of the club were filled with tanned ex-pats and hipster tourist sipping watered down mojitos and feigning interest in the work of a pair of DJs. When the featured band, Ratatat, took the stage it became clear that their music was going to suck.

The band consisted of two interchangeable dudes with spanish moss beards, long hair and seventh grade understandings of the guitar. They played repetitive chords and banged their heads while a clip show of the movie Predator played against the wall behind them. I slipped up to the roof to look out on the molasses spill that is the Tonle Sap and nearly fell asleep with my nosed lodged in an Angkor beer.

We left mid-concert and the night became a blur. I tried to seem well-adjusted-if-not-likeable while barely managing to keep my eyes open. I know there was more beer, marijuana smoke and game involving a recently dismembered pig’s head being passed around. Some details, such as why this was happening, now allude me.

I took a tuk-tuk (a small living room pulled by motorcycle) home around one. The streets were illuminated by the Angkor beer signs and moto lights as I passed under the independence memorial, an intricate red stone tower poking out of Sihanouk Boulevard like a lit match.

Bed. AC. Ahhhhhhh.

Long days, in my experience, start early.  School, travel, surgery and work all have one thing in common: an alarm. I got up yesterday around 5, took a shower, grabbed a glass of orange juice and gave my Toby-dog one last hug; I was on the plane by 7:15 and in Chicago by 10.

The flight from Chicago to LAX was delayed by broken video screens and toilets. The pain of delay was eased by the presence of one George Wyhinny, who managed to make the flight, in true George style, by the narrowest of margins. The long layover in LA allowed me to take the nickel-stop tour. George and Lisa took me to the Hollywood Walk of Fame and a variety of other places I could live without.

I’d rather not live without Lisa and George, but I rather doubt they’ll be visiting me in la Cambodge. Lisa had memorized the landmine fatality stastics. George is maybe a few months and a hundred prayers short of fame.

There is certainly a lot to be said for saying “Fuck it” and hitting the road, but there is probably just as much to be said for staying put—for friends and routine. It is hard not to wonder if some sort of contentment is the casualty of my stir-craziness—one of those heisenberg things.

On the plane, I met a young woman, younger than me, who was headed to see her baby-daddy, a marine who will be heading to Afghanistan as part of the 30,000 strong cavalcade-of-hope-surge-apalooza. I didn’t know what to say to the girl. I was genuinely shocked to meet someone so directly involved and directly affected by a subject that gets tossed around my living room like another chew toy. 

The realization that I don’t live in America The Country so much as I live in a small exotic sliver of the States is fairly reassuring as I wing my way to Phnom Penh. I have to think I can handle a sliver, maybe even a slice, of Cambodia.

Here’s hoping anyway.

Some packing music courtesy of Dengue Fever.

Here is my contribution to the December issue of WIRED. Getting a Front of the Book piece into a Conde Nast magazine is a little like getting kissed on the cheek by a supermodel. You wouldn’t give it up for the world, but it is more of a reminder of what you can’t have than what you can.