I have always been interested in joining a think tank (on a part-time basis though, as I don’t think that’s the career path for me.)

But I also have this concern about not wanting to be involved in anything too politically motivated though. Of course, social/economic issues are deeply intertwined with politics and there’ll always be more or less connection, but I certainly do not want anything with obviously political agenda. And those are not very common in Thailand, or so it seems.

Anyway, I received this link in the email today: http://www.buildingbetterfuture.org/

And on the scale of 0 (completely apolitical) to 10 (completely political), I guess this one would be at around 99. . .

Yesterday, when I walked into the canteen (well, canteen-ish type of restaurant… ร้านข้าวแกงข้างๆบริษัท, if you know what I mean), I was quite impressed with the sight of every single table completely black & white. Unfortunately, I was determined to quickly finish my lunch in order to go on to quickly finishing up my Friday afternoon work, so I forgot to whip out my camera and take a shot.

So, today and tomorrow will likely continue to be very monotonously black & white. I had never lived anywhere long enough to witness anything else like this, so I may not be able to compare. However, I just happen to feel that the color of the clothings here can be so expressive of an ideas/standpoint.

While I don’t mind wearing B&W for these 3 days (primarily because I do believe it’s a respectful way to mourn for a nationally important person, and also because my wardrobe is primarily black anyway (remember the 14 black jackets (of varying design and sizes) that I used to have??))

However, it really, really, REALLY bugs me when some colors now just have to have political implications behind them.

Heck, I mean, I don’t even think about this in the morning when I pick out my clothes, but I hate hate it when people ask (even jokingly) about why I choose to wear a certain color on a certain day.

Don’t they get it? the thing is, I didn’t choose to wear something because of some meaning behind it. It was probably just on top of the laundry pile or something. >.<

So, I guess a lot of people have a tendency to fudge around the figures in the stories that they tell, and I find it very funny when I hear the same stories twice with different numbers in it.

For example, right after my aunt took my cousins for a trip to Australia many years ago, she came back to tell us that the kids missed Thai food so much that they had to order Thai omelet (ไข่เจียว) that cost 400 Baht after the conversion. (Well, of course, having been in the US for 6 years, I was definitely not surprised by the price tag.)

A few months later, when she retold this story to other family members (with me in the vicinity), the price of that said omelet suddenly went up to 600B. So, I just couldn’t help commenting to her that with the Thai Baht’s value increasing (against USD) on a daily basis (during that time), Australian dollars must’ve been skyrocketing to account for this difference in just a few months!!!!

—-

Last night, I had the TV on in the background as I was browsing around the net, and it happened to be tuned to this certain cable TV channel which was covering a certain live event with a certain someone’s speech (which, by the way, I neither endorse nor agree with, but that’s not the point of the story I’m trying to tell.) Anyway, somewhere in the rhetoric speech, a figure of 500 million baht* came up.

But of course, when my grandma recounted this story to my mom the next morning, the figure somehow became 5,000 million baht. A 10 times increase overnight!

*laughs* That must’ve been some kind of crazy hyperinflation to make the value of 500MB equal 5,000MB overnight! d:

* But of course, in light of what we know about people’s tendency to exaggerate, I don’t even think that 500MB was really all there in the first place… d :

I love this from phdcomics.com

*laughs*

Okay, I may not be the most political person around, but I do enjoy things like this from time to time. d :