Meeting a monk

Well, he is actually an ex-buddhist monk, but still. I had a new engineer come to my work to help out with a project, I had never met him before and I was feeling a little sad, because I love my previous engineer. He is young and seemed very nice even if he did have orange spots in his hair. So we chatted about the work we were going to do and at the appointed time we started. As we walked into the computer room I noticed his tattoo. It was a sitting buddha, the one where he has one hand touching the ground, it had a frame around it and six dots under it and was on his left forearm. And me, being me I had to ask about it.

So, I learned that while in college he got bored and wrote a monastery in Thailand saying he wanted to be a monk. Well, they pointed him to the Thai monastary in northern California and off he went to spend a year and get ordained as a Thai Buddhist monk. His family came from Kansas to participate and then off to Thailand for further study. He spent two years as a monk, until he got a little bored staring at walls all day and chanting, then he met a girl and left the monk life for love. He spent the next year teaching english in north eastern Thailand.

We talked about how lovely the Thai people are and how hot it can get there. We talked about a few other things and I decided I like him and he could stay.

I spent some time wondering at what it took to for a farm kid from Kansas to decide to become a Thai Buddhist monk. Did he even know any other buddhists?

I admire people that find something and go for it.

Of course, the first words out of my mouth (no not a swear word, thankfully) were that I wanted to kill all my users, when I found out the ex-monk stuff, I thought well that first comment is probably not going to do much for my karma. At the end of our conversation he told me that the woman he left the monastary for was now a Buddhist nun. Talk about karma.