2.1.11

It will be my fifth in Siam when I leave for Bangkok tomorrow.

I remember the first time I visited the city.
This was in 1983 on my second vacation to the Philippines from my Oman days.
I was travelling alone and by whim, I decided to get off Bangkok on my way home. At the airport, I met an Englishman – Jonathan Barker – who was also travelling alone. By sheer boldness out of the exuberance of youth, I asked him if he liked to join me in order to save on hotel expenses. I wasn’t surprised when he agreed.

Jonathan was a shy man.
And I wasn’t.
So, most of the time, I was the one deciding where to go, what place to visit, where to eat, where to stay. We went to a disco, had a nice time in Patphong and for two nights had to come back to the hotel drunk.

I met him again when we returned to Oman.
Unfortunately, I was too naïve at the time to read many signals.
And therefore, we never got connected again.
I wonder where he is now.
And wondering whether he wonders about me, too.
Nah!



Watched “Hereafter” which starred Matt Damon who was directed by Clint Eastwood.
Not as bad as the reviews I have read.
Episodic three-in-one, and three merging into one in the end.
One tries to escape his gift of communicating with people in the hereafter.
One writes about her experience of the hereafter.
One obsesses about communicating with someone in the hereafter.
But it takes faith to believe in the hereafter.
I am not sure what it looks like
but I know I believe there is a hereafter.
When one completes a course, he graduates.
Graduation is not a commencement exercise for nothing.


REFLECTIONS
Leviticus 14-16

Leviticus 14:57
These are the regulations for infectious skin diseases and mildew.

If God is so concerned about the minutest details of skin diseases and mildew, surely there is something symbolical about this that we need to mind. And I am thinking decay. God must love the physical things he creates that he does not want them see decay?

Leviticus 15:16
When a man has an emission of semen, he must bathe his whole body with water, and he will be unclean till evening.

* Of “discharge”, “infected penis”, “tulo”, nocturnal emission and menstruation – you are unclean!!!

Leviticus 16:6, 10
The scapegoat – for atonement and to be sent out to the desert!