Gecko123

There's also been a lot of tough guys who have ended up on a morgue slab. You're whipping the OP into this macho frenzy. The interloper is his wife's son, so will be in her life for the duration. Does the OP really want someone like this giving him the evil eye every time he sees you? Do you really want to be worrying about someone accidentally-on-purpose running you over with his pickup truck every time you go for a walk? Evicting him? Locking him out of the house? What do you imagine is going to happen? He's just going to slink off into the sunset, never to be seen again? No, he'll be back, probably with an even bigger chip on his shoulder and nursing a grudge for life. That's why I say no way the OP should take the lead on this. He'll eventually forgive his mother if there's any hard feelings. The OP? Revenge time.

One thing the OP may not be fully aware of is that in Thai rural culture, long since emancipated children are free to return to the parental homestead, and unless there is a really, really compelling reason to kick them out, nobody ever says a word. I have seen this happen many times, i.e., Somchai gets out of jail, loses his job, gets divorced. It sounds like his mother's house is all the more attractive for squatting because she is frequently absent, and a mentality that she has "another house" has set in. Don't know what to tell you about how to handle this situation, but absolutely do not get into a physical altercation with this guy. Possible drug use, Oedipal undercurrents you may not be fully aware of, retaliation by proxy, etc., are just a few of the reasons why. Let your wife take the lead on this, and try to negotiate a resolution.

This isn't meant to be homophobic, only meant to make the ex-wife feel better if she reads this... with all that lisping and his heavy accent, what I want to know is how on earth will they be able to understand one another over the roar of a big bike. Joking aside, she looks like a sweet person, and that they might just be compatible. Best of luck to them.

OP: By any chance, did your "insisting" include leaping over the counter, knocking over display cases, trying to smash the cash register open, taking hostages, or threatening to fire bomb the store? It just sounds a little bit like you you might be leaving out a few details about what role you perhaps played in the escalation.

Jealousy, revenge, and greed are often motives for murder. Whether the risks are higher in Thailand I'll leave others to judge for themselves. Just something people might want to consider.

Complain to store management.

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This suggests that immigration was immediately aware of his outstanding arrest warrant as soon as he contacted immigration. Only pointing this out because I don't think this level of data base coordination has always been the case. The American guy needs some lessons in body language etiquette when under arrest. His hand on his drink when charges are being explained to him as well as his hands in his pockets while being photographed do not convey respect, contrition, or an appreciation of the charges he is facing.

Good msg. Easy to disregard during late rainy season, but truth is precipitation levels this year are still below average.

For one thing, Biden hasn't meddled in Federal Reserve policy, pressuring the Fed to keep interest rates low for political gain like Trump endlessly did. The financial suppression of interest rates since 2008 bears a great deal of blame for the current situation. Artificially suppressed interest rates ripped off savers and created disincentives to save. They also forced capital to be misallocated into the stock and real estate markets. Purchases of single family and apartment buildings by investment companies are largely behind the housing affordability crisis in America. But I agree that the democrats have been equally guilty of fiscal recklessness. A big difference however is that Trump's fiscal recklessness largely benefited the rich and corporations, while Biden's big ticket spending has been done largely to address economic inequities (student debt forgiveness) and to invest in the future (Inflation Adjustment Act).

https://www.imidaily.com/datacenter/thai-elite-visa-statistics/

Usage as a noun considered offensive adj. Relating to or being a person whose gender identity does not conform to that typically associated with the sex to which they were assigned at birth. n. Offensive One who is transgender. Usage Note: Transgender is properly used as an adjective. Its use as a noun is offensive; phrases such as a transgender person or a person who is transgender are preferable. When referring to more than one person, the phrases transgender people or the transgender community can be used. · The term transsexual is older than transgender. Although the use of transsexual as a noun was once acceptable, nowadays, such use is usually considered offensive. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition copyright ©2022 by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved.

The girl scout uniform is a uniform most often associated with young and early teen girls. Some posters have tried to deflect away from this fact by pointing out that young women into their late teens can still be girl scouts, but everyone knows that this is a uniform primarily worn by 7th to 12th grade school girls. To pretend that wearing this uniform in a karaoke bar setting where sexual services are often transacted was not done for the purposes of giving the girls the allure of being underage and that that would not appeal to customers who harbored fantasies about having sex with underage school girls is nonsense. Your comment suggesting that only someone with a dirty mind would think such a thing is a transparent attempt at deflection. Going into a bar where all the girls are dressed up in girl scout uniforms is just good clean fun, and anyone who thinks that it might appeal to those with pedophile fantasies and predilections is a dirty old perv? R-i-i-g-h-t. Shure, pal. Anyone with a moral bone in their body should see that this was inappropriate and it's a poor reflection on this forum that, with only a few exceptions, so many seem to think this is A-OK. If people want to dismiss the disapproval voiced by the Thai and foreign on-line community as narrow-mindedness, my response would be that some of you need to be reminded that people are trying to raise families here, which is rarely easy. Imagine a school girl seeing a woman ducking into a karaoke bar wearing the same scout uniform she wore to school the day before. You don't think that degrades the uniform, and would be innocence corroding, the child asking her mother or classmates why grown women were wearing girl scout uniforms in a karaoke bar? You demanded to know who I was, as if to suggest, who gave me the right to get on a moral high horse? First of all, it's not a moral high horse. It's simple common decency and respect for community values. But to answer your question, I've taught in Thai schools and I've raised a Thai step daughter who participated in girl scout activities, and as a former teacher and step-parent, I found the use of the girl scout uniform in a karaoke bar setting to be very inappropriate and offensive.

People on this thread are acting like it's no different than a nurse uniform, a French maid uniform. They don't seem to understand that it's an elementary school girl's uniform.

Sexualizing the Girl Scout's uniform in a karaoke venue was done to provide customer's the opportunity to indulge pedophiliac fantasies. It also disrespects, sullies, and stigmatizes the uniform of an organization which aims to instill wholesome and moral values in young women. Morally indefensible, not to mention tacky, and in extremely bad taste.

Are you sure that burning passion in his eyes isn't sexual yearning? He may be afraid to make an overt pass at you out of fear it'll get back to his wife. One way to get to the bottom of this (no pun intended) would be to Invite him along on your next camping trip.

Nice try, tiger. I don't think I'm the only one who's suspicious that your 'Andy of Mayberry' portrait of bonding with your extended family isn't as rosy as you are trying to make it out to be. Untethered to reality and delusional is what I suspect. As I said in my earlier post, my observations about the general level of at-home elder care available and afforded to both Thais and foreigners and the general extent to which older foreign men bond with the extended families of their Thai wives is based on 20 years of observations, and I stand by these observations. You can make 'sorry for you' comments to your heart's content. I have never observed any older foreign men bonding with their extended Thai families to the point where they realistically can count on the extended family playing a significant role in the elder care for the foreigner. The obstacles to them playing such a role, which you ignored in your post, were clearly spelled out in my earlier post. You sound like you have been showering your extended Thai family with your generosity, and to a large degree given your wife financial incentives to stay in the relationship not just from your past and current generosity but by providing her with financial incentives through a potentially hefty inheritance when you kick the bucket. More power to you, and I'm happy that's working out for you, but allow me to share one more observation with you. In any negotiated agreement, both parties have to perform their part of the agreement. The question is WHEN does the other party have to perform their part of the agreement. If you have been showering the family with lavish gifts thinking that there is an implicit agreement that when you are elderly, and no longer able to take care of yourself, they will reciprocate this generosity by taking care of you, then you have already performed your side of the agreement and have to take it on faith that they will fulfill their side of the bargain at some point in the future, if necessary. It should also be noted that if you are holding out the promise that your wife will receive a generous inheritance upon your demise, she has a big incentive to assure you that you will be lovingly cared for in your dotage, even if her capacity or true volition to fulfill these responsibilities have not been fully thought through or aren't fully heart-felt. In a word: talk is cheap. You want to posture as 'Mr-super-confident-happy-as-a-pig-in-mud' on this thread, be my guest. My cautionary advice about the risks of going the home care route was to the OP and to others who might be considering this option. Feel free to ignore these considerations if you don't think they apply to you. If you discover after it's too late that they do, well, that'll be on you.

My advice to the OP is to keep repatriation or assisted living options as stand-by options. I have seen the care elderly people receive in rural Thailand (both Thais and foreigners) and generally speaking it's not a pretty picture. Bed confinement, a TV at the foot of the bed, a wheel chair if they're lucky. On many occasions the home confinement is so complete, it is only after their death and the funeral announcement that you discover they lived in the house. Forget about recreational activities, mental stimulation, being read to, physical therapy, social stimulation, etc. The standard for elder care in rural Thailand is very, very rudimentary. Change the bedding occasionally, variations of rice porridge for food, change the bedpan, pickup bed for trips to hospital. That's about it. Very sketchy emergency services. Others have mentioned how unwieldy it is for most Thais, especially women, to maneuver even an average build male foreigner. If you're real big, you'll probably need 5-6 grown men to get you into a vehicle, or up off the floor. I have heard that 'no, I could never put you in a retirement home, I want to take care of you forever' sentiment before from Thai wives. Most of the time, putting the spouse in a retirement home isn't financially feasible, so the retirement home option isn't even one that's contemplated. That's where this attitude is coming from, not necessarily from a spirit of wifely devotion. When your wife says this, it's a safe bet that she is contemplating a bed-ridden existence, which is most often the norm. She probably doesn't have a clue about all of the stimulative and extra care which might be available. For example, she's not going to be familiar with dietary supplements advances in medications, physical therapy, pain management, therapeutics, etc. which might make your life easier. In my opinion, the idea that Thais have some 'elder care gene' which makes them ideal care givers for elderly foreigners is wild nonsense. Maybe, just maybe, two hundred years ago this reverence for the elderly still held true. But with urbanization and the deterioration of the farm nuclear family which has been ongoing for at least 75 years, that reverence for elders is a thing of the past. And even if by some miracle you were fortunate to be in a home environment where it was still relatively in tact, I can only say that I find the idea that an elderly foreigner's extended Thai family would be on ever-ready stand-by to pitch in on elder care duties to be absolutely laughable. Almost everyone who is able-bodied works full time, has their own family, or works away from home for long stretches. Brother-in-law Lek or nephew Sen is going to be getting up in the middle of the night to walk you to the bathroom because you let him use your motorcycle or loaned him a few thousand baht 10 years ago? I don't think so. And what happens if the wife gets sick or dies before you? She's obviously going to be a much higher priority for her blood relatives and kids than you. That's why I say repatriation (for the Western level of care) or nursing home care in Thailand would probably be your best bet. At-home care can be done, but, especially once you no longer are able to have input into its quality, entails a great deal of risk regarding the quality of care you'll receive.

This is very true, and it's only human nature. People invest a lot of time and energy learning a language, and it's frustrating when validation of those efforts is not forthcoming. A couple of posters keep saying that the only reason some Thais don't understand non-native Thai is because the foreigner's Thai is deficient. That is no doubt true in some cases, but is by no means true in every case. Even highly proficient speakers encounter Thais who have a mental block when it comes to comprehending non-native speakers. The reason the non-native speaker can say with confidence that it isn't their Thai which is problematic is because they have had countless successful verbal interactions with Thais in the past. In my opinion, posters who are saying that the root cause can only be because the foreigner's Thai is deficient, are unwittingly revealing that their own Thai is insufficient to have made this observation independently on their own.

Neeranam does have a point, even if his post came across as unappreciative of the young man's efforts to practice his English. The gas station attendant's English was barely beyond rudimentary and the Tik Tok's Thai appeared to be upper intermediate if not advanced. There's sort of an unwritten rule that you defer to whichever language both people have the highest proficiency in. There are some Thais who barrel ahead in broken English or spend long moments trying to recall vocabulary blithely ignoring evidence that your command of Thai is vastly superior to their English. Worse still, are Thais who instantaneously try to bully you and act dismissively about your Thai and coerce you into speaking English with them by simply refusing to acknowledge your Thai skills or make any effort to comprehend your Thai. Foreigners who speak Thai well are aware of this dynamic. They are confident about their Thai language skills because they have had countless successful interactions with Thais in Thai. They know when a person is simply refusing to speak Thai with them, versus having a genuine difficulty comprehending non-native Thai. As annoying as this can sometimes be, as Neeraman said, I do agree that foreigners should be reasonably tolerant of this behavior, especially around young people who are just trying to develop their English skills.

Out in the countryside, where the population density of foreigners is generally quite low, most of the time you're judged as an individual. People don't seem to harbor many preconceptions about people based on nationality, or for that matter, race. It has been my observation that when Thais do develop prejudices based on nationality or race in many cases these biases have been picked up through interaction with white foreigners who have indoctrinated Thais into their racial ideology. Maybe not always, but in many, many cases this is true, whether spread over the dinner table, by foreign bar or entertainment venue owners, or perhaps even by exposure to foreign media. A prime example of this indoctrination is the painstaking explanations you hear on this forum about how the word farang should be reserved exclusively for white people, which implicitly raises all sorts of questions about why this is so important to the person expressing this view, and what nomenclature should then be used for anyone who doesn't neatly fit into a Caucasian pigeon hole. I occasionally am asked about my nationality. When I say American, the response seems to be fairly neutral, neither two thumbs up or two thumbs down. In the past, the reaction was more favorable than it is nowadays. When people ask about my nationality I think it's usually because they are curious about why I speak Thai as well as I do. I can't recall any Thais having strong opinions about specific nationalities, but I am sure in more heavily touristed areas, such attitudes do develop. During the dark days of "good guys in, bad guys out" I did notice that policemen seemed to inquire about my nationality more often than usual, and I did suspect that they might be profiling based on nationality. But now that things have settled down, it's been several years since I've had a cop ask about my nationality.

Shouldn't primary, if not sole, focus be on managing the diabetes rather than engaging in DIY management of symptoms?

Most of the time it's done out of necessity, not to shirk parenting responsibilities. Rural parents are often forced to migrate to urban centers in search of work and the best (and often only) child care option available is to have the children remain in the village and be cared for by the grandparents or other close relatives. The reason this was not so 100 years ago is because with less mechanization, farming activities were more labor intensive and the whole family unit's labor was needed to operate the farm. With the introduction of labor saving farm equipment, demand for farm labor dropped forcing migration to urban centers. This is the root cause of why the nuclear family in rural Thailand is under stress, which is also a problem in virtually every other developing country. Another reason why this problem is intensifying is because 2 or 3 generations ago, chances are the grandparents or other family members charged with caring for the children had been raised in traditional two-parent households. But because this process has been going on for many decades, nowadays, chances are that the grandparent or other family member charged with raising the kid were themselves raised in a household where the birth parents were frequently absent. So there's a generational erosion of family values and ability to pass on parenting skills.

And more importantly, regardless of the etymologic origin if the word farang, it is commonly used as a colloquial shorthand for Westerners, irrespective of their racial background. The ignorant and vile claim that this word is a racial slur has been tirelessly propagated by a tiny handful of forum members, and it is without question the single most damaging piece of cultural misinformation spread on this forum.

After giving this some additional thought.... the wife having been raised by grandparents is a somewhat special circumstance vis-a-vis their expectations regarding sin sod. If the grandparents really did step in and raise the wife on behalf of her real parents (for whatever reason), and they invested a lot in their grand daughter's welfare (nutrition, education, moral training, etc.), they may genuinely feel like they got stiffed on the sin sod, especially if that sacrifice impaired their ability to set money aside for their retirement. Some of the other family members may also feel that they indirectly sacrificed on behalf of the wife because the grand parent's resources were monopolized by the the wife. Also, being older, the grandparent's might be more 'old school' regarding sin sod expectations than today's generations. The possibility that not paying any sin sod may be the root of these tensions may benefit from review.