From Wikipedia:
Sloth (Latin, tristitia or acedia("without care")) refers to a peculiar jumble of notions, dating from antiquity and including mental, spiritual, pathological, and physical states. It may be defined as absence of interest or habitual disinclination to exertion.
Mentally, acedia, has a number of distinctive components of which the most important is affectlessness, a lack of any feeling about self or other, a mind-state that gives rise to boredom, rancor, apathy, and a passive inert or sluggish mentation, Physically, acedia is fundamentally associated with a cessation of motion and an indifference to work; it finds expression in laziness, idleness, and indolence.
Sloth has also been defined as a failure to do things that one should do. By this definition, evil exists when "good" people fail to act.
Thavorn's mamma and live-in BF both exhibit high levels of sloth (IMHO). Yesterday Lot had the day off work so spent the whole day alternating between watching television and sleeping. It is not that there is a shortage of work to do. Both Mamma and Lot find work fascinating ... they can watch it all day .. they seem fascinated by it!
Today, Thavorn and I have been cleaning and washing now for over 2 hours. I asked Thavorn why her mamma does not hire a cleaning lady once a week for 300 baht to clean and Thavorn stated that by the end of the week there is no one in the village willing to clean up such a mess. Seems like most of the village is slothful. Mamma is simply a pig, making a mess all around her wooden platform where she sits and eats all day long, except to get on the motorbike and go visit a friend to gossip. I do believe everyone has a redeeming feature but I have yet to discover it in Thavorn's mamma.
Thais find farangs fascinating, they can watch them all day. For example, they are probably all gossiping about the farang who runs around the lake every morning. You certainly do not see Thais exercising except in hi-so gyms in Bangkok and perhaps some body builders in the park. But, then again, there are quite a few runners in the park in Bangkok. Maybe 50 people out of the 10 million that live in Bangkok. When I lived in Malaysia I found Malaysians to be even worse. I would guess they blame it on the temperature.
Walking around Bangkok is always a chore as Thais walk so slowly, twice as slow as a farang. They also tend to be oblivious to the foot traffic around them. They certainly would never hold a door open for anyone. Just not in their culture.
Rereading my post, it sounds like I am becoming disenchanted with Thais and Thai culture but that is not the case. I am simply making observations of what I experience and sharing those observations. Thais are simply different than farangs and that leads many farangs to become upset at the differences. It is simply the way of Thai. I am also certain, it are these differences that explain democracy's failures to date.
A perfect example of the differences is the use of the word farang to describe all caucasian foreigners. In Canada we would ascertain a person's nationality and then refer to them as German, Italian, etc. In Thailand, that is simply too much work and I also doubt if the school system does a good job teaching them about the countries of the world and how they differ from each other. Very few Thais hold passports. One wonders why?
TTYL
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