I have been thinking a lot about that kind of wisdom, courage and serenity recently and how one can go about trying to acquire them. I have been trying to keep an eye out for situations that really call for it. Two recent ones have involved the American Army (Pacific Command) and a rooster respectively. This is going to be about the rooster.
For several nights now I have been a tormented soul. This has partly to do with the fact my work (I am doing a 4-5 week surgery rotation at the Children's Surgical Centre in Phnom Penh, about which I will write more later) leaves very little time and energy for all the other things I want to do. But mainly it has to do with a rooster.
There is a rooster (or something that sounds a lot like a rooster) in my neighbourhood. One of the following things seems to have happened to it: either (1) it has brain damage causing its circadian rhythm to malfunction severely, (2) someone is doing one of those sick experiments where you put an animal in a box (don't get excited T this is not a Schroedinger rooster) and leave it there for days to see what happens to its endogenous rhythms and sense of time without cues from sunlight, OR (3, I didn't think of this originally, one my roommates suggested it) it could be tied up under a street light.
I have not had a good night's sleep for four nights and it's starting to show. Last night was a little bit better because I used ear-plugs but then I couldn't fall sleep for a while because of the eerie silence, and shortly after I did fall sleep one of the ear plugs fell out and ... It (the rooster) gets going increasingly earlier each night (supporting the black box theory). Last night it began at around midnight for about 20 minutes and then it abruptly stopped. I was overcome with joy thinking it had died (I liked to imagine it was annoyed to death). It had not.
What made my burden of suffering even more difficult to bear was the fact that none of my roommates seemed to hear it, which makes some sense given the direction the sound is coming from and the positions of our rooms, but still, it would be much better if I could commiserate.
I will not make a list of the things I planned to do to the beast if I ever got my hands on it. I think it might reveal more about the depth of the darkness within me that you might be prepared to deal with through a travel update and for those of you who know me well enough it would all be redundant anyway. To my credit the darkest thoughts emerge in that not-fully awake state of sleep deprivation when most of my "higher" faculties are in fact sleep, leaving only the deepest, crudest and most compelling layers of instinct and motivation.
Last night thanks to the ear-plugs I managed to get some sleep and this morning, to my delight, my misery found company: James whose room is on the same side of the house as mine had heard the beast as well. He suggested a hunting party. I didn't need to have my arm twisted.
I have always wanted to kill my own food. The closest I came was being in Timmins. We didn't actually go hunting, or even plan to, but at least I was in a place where some people, some times, did that sort of thing and I could feel that my fantasies were a little closer to reality there than elsewhere. With the hunting party, I could kill two birds with one stone so to speak. As we were beginning to discuss who to invite and what we would need, Mitch (who lives on the opposite, soundproofed side of the house and is vegetarian, related his own rooster experience, and told that us that if we gave it a name and some respect we might get used to it in about a year as he had with his own distant nemesis). So James offered the name "Number 43 With Black Bean Sauce."
~
I am petty sure that despite all the plans for the hunting party, the untimely crowing of Number 43 With Black Bean Sauce is one of those things I cannot change. Which means that I have to accept it and live with it, and do so serenely. I have no idea how to do that yet.
Good night & peaceful sleep!