My computer’s clock tells me it’s 4:10pm, but my body can tell it’s lying. Jumping fourteen hours into the future is not easily accomplished without some sort of physical punishment. I’m slowly beginning to realize that I don’t love travel, like I’ve previously claimed. I love being new places, but generally don’t enjoy the journey if it’s primarily flying airlines that somehow seem to miraculously cram more people into a plane at the expense of the tall man’s leg-room. I swear, those planes are getting more and more like those circus cars that somehow house a hundred clowns in a space that should fit four. Though I oft lament my consistent inability to sleep in sardine-cramped quarters, it’s certainly worth the discomfort to get where I’m going. Like so many things in life, the more you suffer through it, the greater the reward. Also, I’m feeling very dramatic this morning, so I hope you’re feeling comfortable with hyperbole.
I have five hours to kill while I wait for a few more Pioneers people to arrive at the airport so we can vanpool to the coast. I’m tired out from sleeping about four hours in the last 36, which seems to be step one in my usual adjustment to a drastically-new timezone. Step one: sleep less than two hours during sixteen to seventeen hours of flying. Step one can also include any sleep I may get in the airport waiting for my next connection, hence my total of four hours of sleep. Step two: crash. When I get where I’m going, I lay down for an indeterminate number of hours for some of the hardest sleep I get in any given year. When I visited my sister Daylan in Kenya, we drove home from the airport, I laid down in her bed and was immediately out into a rock-like dreamless sleep for the next eight hours. Today I don’t want to sleep THAT much because I’ll continue sleeping from mid-day to pre-dusk morning for the duration of my trip, and that would be a big waste of time, now wouldn’t it? I’m pretty good at adjusting when I fly West. Coming back home seems to take longer to adjust.
I’m really not sure why I’m telling you guys this, aside from the fact that I have time to kill and haven’t written something truly wordy in months, if not more than a year. I suppose writing this is better than continuing to wander the part of the airport outside the gates where there really is nothing to do. In case you didn’t already know, I’m a bit of an idiot. I come all the way to Thailand, and decided to camp out in a Starbucks, which is a bit more of a lateral step than a step up from aimless wandering. Writing really is one of my true releases, where I can get my thoughts, as scattered as they may be, out onto the page. I don’t much care whether anyone reads it. Kind of a public diary, I suppose. A place where the multitude of fragments of ideas in my mind find a place to get together and figure out how they all fit together. Or don’t fit together. Like how strange it seems that I’m listening to Allison Krauss and Union Station play for all to hear in Thailand of all places.
I tend to get down on American culture for the way it idolizes beauty and consumerism. The more places I visit, the more I realize America is far from alone in that idolization. I’m struck again at the enormous ads in the Tokyo and Bangkok airports, touting beauty products that cost and make a fortune worldwide by plastering larger than life women and men who have been airbrushed into oblivion (anyone remember that Arrested Development where Gob had to check albino on his mother’s fake drivers license because he “airbrushed her into oblivion?”) to make all of us want what they have. I know this is hardly a new area of discussion, but I was struck by it early this morning. There’s something about those European ads that instantly make me feel inferior. Pretty amazing that print media can draw out such a strong reaction.
It’s hard not to judge people in the Bangkok airport. Especially since I know a little about the shady things that can go on between Westerners and Thai women. Every time I see a white guy walking hand in hand with a young human stick-figure of a Thai woman, I instantly jump to a conclusion. I think that sort of judgmental attitude is a result of working on a short documentary with my good buddy Fritz. He shot a bunch of footage in Cambodia, and we put together a doc about a teenaged girl who was tricked into sex-slavery. The story has a happy ending as she is ultimately rescued from that world and given a new chance at life through a handful of amazing Godly people. Editing and composing the music for that project was an amazing and eye-opening experience. Non-profit Transitions Global uses it in their materials. I can show you the film sometime if you’re interested.
I had a realization at about 2:00 this morning. The video gear I brought with me on this trip is worth a lot of money. A lot. I think the quality you get from good gear is easily worth its cost, but sometimes it makes you wonder. I expect in the next couple days to be shouldering my spendy cam out in public and have someone ask for money. I’ll probably say I don’t have any money or just ignore them. And even if I don’t have the money and I’m not lying, I’m still carrying around a piece of equipment that could be worth more than a years salary for any number of locals here. It’s a bizarre and uncomfortable dichotomy that so often the people telling the stories could be eliminating the very stories they’re telling just by investing in those people. I suppose that would probably be a short-lived solution to a much greater problem, one that could certainly benefit from a bit of exposure. But still, it makes you think.
This is my first trip in the last year and a half that I’ve taken without Mandi by my side. The one benefit I get from this (lack of) arrangement is that I have more time to take my time with footage because I don’t have to think about how I’m wasting her time by stopping every ten seconds to shoot. Ultimately, however, I already miss her a lot. I don’t have anybody to be grumpy (or occasionally deliriously giddy) around from lack of sleep. I don’t have a hand to hold out in public. I don’t have that voice of reason with me at all times, the one that snaps me out of a funk or makes me laugh really hard. In part, I have too much time to cogitate on such things while I wait for the other members of my vanpool, and when things pick up a bit the pangs of longing will subside to a dull ache. But right now, while I have time to just BE for the first time in a long long while, my only wish is that she were here with me. Next time she will be. That will be a good day.
So thanks for sharing in my ramblings. I’ve not had verbal (not verbal, though, as it’s written) diarrhea in a good long while. Perhaps free time is Dayn’s perfect verbal stool softener. Gross. I’m so sorry for that last statement, though apparently not sorry enough to delete it. Next time I probably won’t have so much to say, though who really knows?
Daynold out.
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