Justifiably bitter

On January 3rd, 6,000 baht was taken from my suitcase while it was going through baggage check at the airport.

On March 6th my ipod was stolen from off of my desk in my office.

Today my iPod was stolen off of my desk while I was grading papers no more than 9 feet away the entire time. I think back on it and maybe the thief struck while I was going to the bathroom for a few minutes. More than likely they did it while I was distracted in a 2 hour window from 1-3pm. All day I was trying to ignore the students constantly filtering in and out of the foreign language office. There must have been at least 500 mathayom 4 and 5 students coming and going, milling around the office today returning their textbooks and checking their final grades.

As my desk is a mere 3 feet away from the textbook stack, I found the constant buzzing of noisy 15/16 year olds brushing up against my desk, squeezing through the narrow passageways between desks all afternoon to be distracting. Plugging my headphones in would have been the logical answer, and in hindsight the solution. I've been trying not to plug my headphones in as it can be seen as disrespectful to the other teachers in the room, giving them the impression that I am going out of my way to avoid dialogue with them. Especially since today was the last day of the school year, and I am one of the only teachers in the office, I thought I'd set my ipod aside, and talk with my coworkers. "Why not right?" I thought. "I won't have to do this chit chat water cooler crap for another 2 months!"

Biggest mistake of my life. Setting my ipod aside and letting myself get distracted by my coworkers allowed for any one of the 500 kids to swipe it off my desk and disappear for 2 months. Its the perfect crime. I give the kid credit though. As bad as he or she is at studying or paying attention in my class, they chose the most expensive and the most personally valuable item to steal from me, and on the best day of the year to do so. The only day of the year that is followed by 2 months to disappear like a fart in the wind (shawshank). This coward did his homework, no pun intended.

If anyone reading this can burn music mp3's to a CD or DVD and send it to me, you'd be doing me a huge favor. That iPod was my life. I spent years collecting the 15,000 songs and 700 or so photos on that hard drive. I had rare DMB performances, Weezer's b-sides collection, thoughtfully crafted playlists, and photo albums saved to the hard drive. I'll be traveling for the next two months and this would have been the ideal time to use my ipod. Not to mention I finally got a good sound system for my room, and now no music to play on them. This act of cowardice really leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. Pirating music is wrong indeed, but taking 120 gigs of someone's life away is so much more personal. I try to remind myself that it only takes one person to shit on the salad. This shouldn't e what I take away from Thailand but right now its all i can think about. I've been told that Thailand is a country of friendly buddhists, but this is the second time I've been stolen from in 3 months. I don't know if its because I'm a foreigner to their land, and it was a personal steal, I'm not going there. But I will say that in the 20 years I've lived in the States I've never had my car broken into nor has my family's home ever been robbed. Twice I've been stolen from in 4 months in Thailand.

You can bet next term I'm going to accost any Thai kid with headphones in their ears that walk in my general direction smirking at me. I'll try to put this behind me and make the best of a bad situation, but this act couldn't get more personal for me. Its my sanity that I go home to after a hard day. I am imagining a thai kid erasing 100 gigs of my life and throwing on 50 Cent, linkin park, and lots of Korean pop. Or worse yet stealing it and realizing they don't have a connector cord. shudder.