Bangkok

I have not hollered at y’all in awhile. Aside from now having an extremely pristine colon I have been doing extraordinarily ordinary things. I’m holed up in Bangkok pretending my hotel room is my apartment and that I have an everyday life here that consists of taking long baths, watching way too many bad movies, riding a stationary bike in the gym,
sitting around in the Jacuzzi, cutting up and eating mangos and papayas with my Swiss Army knife, letting the maid in to make my bed and vacuum while I eat muesli in front of the TV, and wandering the aisles of supermarkets calculating how much it will cost me to make avocado, lox, and cheese sandwiches for a week versus ordering room service stir-frys. Ohhhh, it sounds kind of luxurious when I put it like that. I got lucky with this hotel; it has a half off thing going. I scored a clean and decent sized room for $15 a night. It’s expensive compared to what I’ve paid for most rooms on this trip, but a great deal for Bangkok. With AC, cable TV, my own mini fridge, and a couch, I’m feeling quite cozy.
Thailand is an easy place to travel. No one gives you a second glance. Gone are the days of constant stares, pointing, gathering crowds, and the endless flow of sexual harassment. What a relief. Bangkok is very cosmopolitan, and there’s plenty of stuff here to help expats feel at home. I took myself out to a movie in English the other night, the first I’ve seen in a theater since Harry Potter in Hong Kong, last July. Before the film they played a little piece about the King of Thailand, during which everyone had to stand silently and respectfully. When I was on my way home something similar came on the TVs in the metro station. Everyone froze in the position they were in and stood motionless until it finished. I was mulling over the possibility of just ignoring it and continuing on, but the thought of being arrested and having my Jacuzzi taken away was enough to stop me in my tracks.
In my off time from the Jacuzzi I take walks around Bangkok in the steamy heat. This city is spilling over the top with gigantic malls. Huge, clean, air-conditioned, meccas packed to the brim with every, and any sparkly consumerist desire you could possibly imagine. Being that temperatures have been in the 100s, I’m obligated to stop in and participate in the air conditioning. Malls are bizarre alternate, windowless, dimensions, with no view into the actual outside world. You’re surrounded by a simulacra of what your life could be like if you were a cartoon character with cash exploding out of your pockets. After about an hour inside the vortex of a mall I lose all sense of myself and start thinking crazy thoughts. While looking at bedazzled coin purses, six-inch platform stilettos, and hair scrunchies with charm bracelets attached I start thinking things like Oooh, I could look cute in that… I could rock the look with some tight jeans and maybe a small dog… and the next thing I know I’m Paris Hilton. Malls are like Vegas. They pump something into the air that puts your brain in a headlock. I’ve decided that rather than shopping it’s more productive for me to hang around the mall coffee shops in a gas mask and find a rich man under mall mind control who wants to buy me stuff. Sadly all the men seem to already have attractive and stylish women, sans gas masks, attached to their arms. ~Sigh~ I guess it’s back to this traveling the world plan.
I’m in a bit of a Traveling-the-World-Slump. I’m finding it difficult to get interested in my camera and planning what to see next. When I arrive places I’ve started to feel like I’ve already seen some variation of them a few times before and often it doesn’t feel worth the effort in getting there to see it. The feeling of excitement you get when you’ve planned a small trip to get away from your daily life and go to a completely different place isn’t there, stuff starts to blend together, people, places, sights, meals, days… My mind is fuzzy, my thoughts feel thick and clumsy, rambling and lacking any kind of a coherent through line. No job anchor, no friend anchors, no people or place anchors. I feel a bit socially retarded. It’s both weird and intriguing.
While I don’t mind being socially retarded, I would like to get re-excited about the upcoming year of traveling. I think in order to do that I need to somehow break free from the steely grip of the tourism machine. I’m not really sure how to do that. I’ve been fantasizing about getting my own set of wheels and doing more camping than room renting, something that feels less like a page out of lonely planet, but I think that could be complicated, so I’ll need a good long nap and a few bubble baths before I can pull the logistics together, and maybe some sparkly scrunchies and a giant handbag with a puppy in it.