In which I fail to apologize...

Sorry for my silence the last two weeks, folks - it's been unavoidable. I'm preparing to leave for some field work at some refugee camps in Southern Thailand, and the planning thereof has taken all my time. It's also going to take me out of communications range for about three weeks - my phone will work intermittently, but I'll be neglecting this blog further. Once I get back I'll resurrest my earlier pay-per-blog contract.

See you in three weeks!

In which I dance for joy!

I'm going to New York! Yay!

In late June my university will be running a two-week advocacy project to lobby UN members and NGOs for long-term institutional and financial support. I've been chosen to join them, and it'll be nifty all around! More details to come, since I'm still under the weather and my bed beckons. But yay!

In which I crawl back into bed...

I've neglected my blog because I've been poisoned. Possibly it was the junk food and popcorn I ate while watching a movie yesterday. Or the khao soy and tom yam I had before the movie. Or the ladles of kim chi that followed the movie and preceded karaoke. Or the massive Thai meal that I indulged in after karaoke. Either way, I've been pretty much reduced to a sleepy, enfeebled mass of whininess.

Between the hospitalization exemption I offered when I started my pay-per-blog option, and the fact that my promised 30 days of consecutive blogging is up, I'm going to take this opportunity to go into a coma and neglect my blog for a short time. I'll renew the deal as soon as I'm no longer in a torpor.

In which I procrastinate for a good cause...

I know I owe you a post, but it's the last day of Songkram, and I'm not spending a big chunk of it typing. Instead I'm going out for lunch and then back into the fray.

In other news, I should find out about my New York trip within the next day, and I may yet go on another couple of international excursions before I wrap things up here in Thailand (probably Malaysia, Cambodia, and possibly Vietnam). There will also be another trip in May which will remain mysterious for now.

More to follow on Songkram, after I've gone out into the crazy.

In which I'm traumatized yet entertained...

The madness of Songkram continues. I would conservatively estimate that this massive water brawl involves a quarter of a million people at any one time, and stretches around the 6 or 7 kilometres of Chiang Mai's central moat. The moat, a rectangular canal 20 metres wide and god knows how deep, surrounds the core of the city. It's filled with a perplexing green fluid I hesitate to call water, which dyes clothes a sickly yellow. People fill their buckets from the moat and fling the odd contents on passersby, who retaliate with relentless streams from hoses and water guns. Pickup trucks whose beds typically host 8 or 10 bucket-wielding combatants and 2 massive garbage cans full of ice water circle the moat (at something less than walking speed), dispensing liquid fury at everyone within range. Riding around in such a vehicle of destruction was how I spent yesterday morning... and I think I'm going back out to do the same now. Toodles!

In which I briefly recount a day of trauma...

It's 5:15 PM, Friday afternoon. Since I've woken up I've had a plastic bucket shatter on contact with my forehead. My right foot was overrun by a pickup truck. My student group "accidentally" left me behind in the fray while they headed to a lake 20 kilometres away - and they took my wallet, keys, and phone with them, leaving me thoroughly stranded and defenseless while smiling nitwits dumped ice water on me. I'm sunburned and wrestling a touch of heatstroke.

OK, that's the bad stuff of Songkram, day 1. I'll tell you the good stuff after I've had a couple of hours of recuperative coma and maybe hit the streets again tonight.

In which civilization is collapsing...

I'm not exaggerating - I sincerely feel like I'm in a zombie movie. There are students pounding on the locked and barricaded door of my office, trying to terrorize me with squirt guns and vast buckets of a mysterious clear non-alcoholic liquid. The presence of pricey electronics has deterred them not at all. All pretense that they're preparing for their field work has been abandoned, and the compound has descended into a Hobbesian anarchy of flying ice water and piercing screams. Deranged cackles fill the air and the puppy is very confused. Confused and sleepy.

All this madness simply because we're on the eve of Songkram. The bloody holiday hasn't even started yet, and somehow I absorbed three buckets of water from roadside children merely on the ride back to the office from lunch at the nearby hole-in-the-wall. Daily I ride past what I infer is a brothel on my way home - yesterday the ladies made sure to drench my nether regions with a tub and hose as I bicycled by. This all par for the course, I'm told, and though Songkram doesn't officially start until tomorrow I'd bet my frontal lobe that Chiang Mai itself will be a roiling cauldron of sheer pandemonium by the time I leave work tonight. I am on the precipice of Ragnarok, and the savage hordes thronging at my door are legion.

Fortunately, they're expecting me to emerge unarmed, and yet I have three empty plastic bottles, a good-size bowl, and an adjacent bathroom with a functioning faucet. I'm going out to play.

In which I'm grumpy...

CUSO has officially witheld permission for me to go to Burma and help my students with their fieldwork, on the grounds that the Burmese secret police might have been following our activities - and possibly this blog - and could be waiting for me with open handcuffs. Argh. I was really looking forward to that trip.

Maybe the adorable 7-week-old puppy that has adopted our school will cheer me up. More to follow.

In which a movie review sends me off on weird tangents...

I don't know why Sunshine opened here in Thailand before anywhere else on Earth, but I'm damn glad it did - and not merely because it affords me a rare opportunity to gloat. I'm one of the three people on Earth who liked The Beach, by the same team, so add the appropriate grains of salt hereafter.
Sunshine's admittedly implausible premise follows a desperate mission to jumpstart the dying sun with a vast fusion bomb, thawing the snowball Earth and rescuing the remnants of humanity. Try to suppress your disbelief at this central conceit, and you'll find a very rewarding film.

Sunshine isn't nearly perfect - its thoughtful pace might less charitably be called sluggish, and its latter third introduces a needless, jarringly incongruous horror element that threatens to drag the film into the witless realms inhabited by the grossly inferior Event Horizon and Supernova, or even the hideous, little-known Solar Crisis. The superficial similarities to these films may alienate some potential viewers, but this movie is stylistically far closer to director Danny Boyle's own 28 Days Later, with obvious inspirations from 2010 and (presumably, since I haven't seen it) Solaris. Substantively, it's much more like... ummm... nothing else I can recall.

I loved Sunshine because it gives a better sense of the naked, audacious vulnerability of space travel and the titanic energies at play out there in the universe than any other film I've ever seen. 2001 was a glorious film about the cosmically unfathomable, but Sunshine at its best is a movie to make one simply feel very small - an experience hard to find in even the best films. Space kills in this film, very quickly and plausibly, and the radiant indifference of the sun vaporizes unprotected matter in microseconds, imbuing space with an awesome and entirely fitting dread that I've never felt in another sci-fi movie. Cold vacuum and the unrelenting solar wind are more palpable and terrifying in this film than anything a slasher or zombie flick has ever thrown at us.

I was so enthralled by what I saw that I barely registered the acting, which I belatedly realize ranged from serviceable to excellent. The human story revolves convincingly around the psychological stresses of years spent in space, which is nicely underlined by a creative but not overly conspicuous score. But the setting offers visuals of unexpected ingenuity and power: the replicating sparks of nuclear fusion inside a fantastic bomb; the inferno roaring along the surface of a kilometres-wide solar shield; a brief but gorgeous journey into the core of the sun. Every one of these drove my heart into my throat. If you've ever enjoyed a space film, you'll find Sunshine a surprisingly moving experience.

Brief and extremely nerdy tangent here (which might offend a highly sensitive few): I wonder what it says about me that the concepts and cosmic settings like the ones in this film affect me far more than any religious story I've ever read. I had this thought towards the end of the movie, and spent the walk home pondering it. I concluded (probably not for the first time) that my key frustration with religion is that it shrinks the entire universe down to a human scale. I know this is the main attraction for many - religion thus infuses random events with a mostly benign agency, and provides a comforting . But in depicting the cosmos as a construct built mainly for our benefit, faith closes most religious minds to the vast wonders that are out there for anyone to see if only they're interested in looking.

In all seriousness, walking on water and turning it to wine are laughably feeble "miracles" next to the awesome forces at work every instant inside an exceedingly ordinary star like our own. Are we really supposed to be impressed by this? How can I get worked up over a story of one man rising from the dead 2000 years ago - even if it's true - when we can look out into the universe and see galaxies colliding with one another at this very moment? Nothing in horrors of the Biblical Apocalypse, even approaches the scale of the furious energy the sun releases in a microsecond. It's not just Christianity that cripples itself so. No religious tradition that I'm familiar, from the Judeo-Christian-Islamic-Bahai narrative to the entertaining inventiveness of Hindu mythology, even hints at the energies the universe flings about with routine abandon. Even less do any of these traditions help us to understand real miracles like the spectacular births of galaxies. Dig through every religious text on earth for something that sounds like the unimaginable beauty of a supernova or the mind-wrecking weirdness of a black hole - you won't find a thing. Great minds like Carl Sagan have worked to reconcile this incongruity not by shrinking the universe down to a human scale, but by trying to expand the concept of God to encompass the wonders we can now see. (Go read Contact. Now!) But far too few even try.

Nothing we see through a telescope precludes the possibility that it was all created by a supreme being - indeed, some of what we see suggests that may be exactly what happened. But it does make the "greatest stories ever told" look awfully small by comparison - and more than slightly patronizing. To my eyes, the world's religions all share one unforgivable fault - a pitiful poverty of imagination.

In which I regret my impulsiveness...

My attempt to fix/supercharge the lesser of my two hydrocannons was ill-advised, to understate grotesquely. I have done incalculable property damage so far in excess of the $10 value of the water gun that the entire venture seems a cruel self-parody. My apartment is a splish-splosh swamp, littered with the tragic remains of supermarket-bought dishes and cracked Chinese plastic. The gun itself, once merely broken, is now far too volatile to touch. It sits on the floor of my shower stall, hissing angrily at me and occasionaly belching great ugly gouts of water without asking permission.

I don't think I should be allowed to own a screwdriver.

In which I prepare for the worst...

One of the interesting quirks of Thai life is that there's no greater loss of face than that of losing your temper, particularly in public. Actually getting pissed off is a social shame on par with being dumped by your girlfriend while being pantsed on national television. No doubt this helps to maintain social cohesion in a densely populated country with a history of blah blah blah... The relevant aspect, really, is that this reservedness allows people to pull off acts of startling buffoonery - like hurling buckets of icewater at passing cyclists - without fear of getting slugged in (highly justified) retribution. In any other country on Earth, the life expectancy of such a miscreant would be measured in femtoseconds.

But if you can't beat em...

All this is a maddeningly loquacious way of saying that the buildup to Songkram continues apace. I got nuked again on the way home today by an unseen assailant in a passing SUV. For reasons unknown to me, work crews are constructing a fiberglass submarine in the parking lot of the mall next door, and the populace is arming itself with a Mississippian fervour. I thought it wise to do likewise, but what started out merely as prudent planning morphed into a fine opportunity to take my inner adolescent out for a rampage. I am now the proud owner of two lovely and even matching water cannons, each of approximately the same mass and atavistic ferocity of Tsar Bomba. Should I encounter God in my travels, God himself will be soaked.

In which I'm horrified beyond all comprehension...

My students and coworkers have begun to play Celine Dion songs, and it's not a welcome accompaniment to my daily efforts to facilitate change in Burma. It rather reminds me of the saccharine soft rock that's always the very worst part of visiting my dentist - yes, much much worse than the searing dental pain. Pain passes, wounds heals, and teeth are rebuilt, but a long day of Celine songs leaves a black mark on my soul that may as well have been burned in by an arc welder.

I think it's my cue to go home for the day.

In other news, prompted by a conversation with my friend Raf (who's currently in Darfur), I'm beginning to wonder neurotically where my next job's coming from. Something always comes up, but the UN's webwork of personal connections and patronage is a hard thing to break into. Once you're in, you're in, but getting one foot in the door is a daunting task. A few of my friends (like Raf and Natalie) have made that much-coveted transition to well-paid development work, so I know there's a way in... I just have to find it.

In which Songkram comes early...

Though Easter passes unnoticed here in Thailand, we have a four-day weekend of our own coming up: Songkram, the Thai New Year's festival. In Chiang Mai, girdled as the city is by a kilometres-long moat, Songkram takes the form of a massive four-day water fight. All civility and reserve are quickly jettisoned and the entire city transmogrifies into a vast arena of dueling buckets, hoses, water balloons and super soakers. It will be unphotographeable - you'll have to rely on my terrified first-person retellings. During Songkram, there's no stigma against soaking the defenseless or the unaware, and those in moving vehicles are considered particularly luscious targets. Songkram will begin next Friday, and the drenched buffoonery will continue through the following Sunday.

At least that's the official schedule. As I enjoyed a pleasant open-air tuk-tuk ride across the river to a friend's confirmation party, a random shorts-wearing farang appeared from nowhere took sociopathic aim at me with a water cannon the size of a bazooka. One impeccably precise burst left me drenched as I passed by, unarmed and anyways too stunned to retaliate. Thankfully, I had to stop and pick up new shirts en route anyway (yay for having a personal tailor!). It may seem obnoxious and malicious (and maybe it is) - but it's just the way of Thailand during Songkram. Whether you're ready and willing or tremulous and fleeing, you're going to get soaked. If this happened today, I dread what next weekend holds... and I'm buying an arsenal of my own first thing tomorrow morning. May as well go down fighting.

In which I wish all a Happy Easter...

Thailand being a Buddhist country (and the largest religious minority being Muslim) nobody much notices Easter over here. This is a great frustration to my students, most of whom are Christian, since they didn't get the day off yesterday for Good Friday... but I've gotten an Easter visitor! My friend Elisa from grad school is in town with her parents, and I'll be joining them for Easter brunch tomorrow - joy!

In other news, my internet was completely and profoundly broken all morning - hence the delay on my post. My apologies.

In which I offer another post of interest to few...

There's a surprisingly gripping blogalogue you'll find here, in which Catholic pundit Andrew Sullivan and committed atheist Sam Harris have been arguing civilly and passionately for months about the existence of g(G?)od. Fascinating if it's your thing.

You may have presumed that this post is an excuse for me to put off the last of my Laosblogging for the day, and you'd be right. But now I've wrapped up my non-violence class and will be getting back to such joyful frivolities as soon as I've repaid my massive accumulated sleep debt. See you in a day or three.

In which I'm beginning to get annoyed...

As Corinne noted in her comment on the last post, other bits of gross nationalism are popping up all over Thailand at the moment. An exceedingly stupid 57-year-old Swiss man has been sentenced to ten years in prison for insulting the king. Outraged over restricted alcohol sales on the King's birthday last December, the drunken fool spray-painted over four posters of the monarch in full view of security cameras, and was promptly arrested. Thailand's draconian lese-majeste laws, enshrined in the bleeping Constitution, forbid any criticism, however benign, of the King. The King himself doesn't seem to want such insulation, but they're part and parcel of Thai nationalism - which, by the way, is really starting to get on my nerves.

Bottom line: if you're not Thai, you'll just never get it - or so we're told. Hence, foreigners are socially proscribed from criticizing the government for handing down a 10-year sentence for petty vandalism, or when all of Youtube is blocked because someone showed a video of feet touching a picture of the King. I grasp that these acts are monumentally disrespectful and show a disgraceful contempt for the standards of a society that has kindly welcomed we foreigners. But there's something far more vile about a decade's incarceration for a crime that robbed and injured no one. The government should have deported that asinine fool and been done with it.

As usual, I reserved my real frustration for the foreigners who defend the government's actions on the grounds of cultural sensitivity and the like. I've talked to more than a few of these folks, and they're driving me batty. There's cultural tolerance, which I'm all for, but defending such a foul move goes far beyond that. These people have let cultural relativity erode their core personal principles, and that's pretty reprehensible.

Myself, I'm disgusted. I really enjoy life in Thailand - it's not a difficult place to carve out a pleasant existence. But it's not a free country here, in some very important ways. I'll surely be glad to see the last of ugly Thai nationalism when my term here is up.

In which dark clouds continue to gather...

Today I encountered a day-old Bangkok Post which informed me that the leader of last year's military coup, General Sonthi, is considering becoming Deputy Prime Minister in order to help keep the government on track. This, despite his insistence that the government would be run by civilians. Last week he fired all military officials who were considered to be loyal to the ousted Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, and replaced them with Sonthi devotees. Last month the main pro-Thaksin TV station was shut down, ostensibly for non-payment of licence fees, and replaced with a more coup-friendly broadcaster. And I've read, increasingly, that "unnamed figures" high within the military bureaucracy are pressing the "civilian" government to use its expanding powers to crack down on the feeble pro-democracy protests that spring up from time to time in Bangkok.

Nearly seven months ago, when the coup happened, we were told that by now Thailand would be putting the finishing touches on its renovated democracy and preparing for shiny new elections. But there's not a whole lot in the above paragraph that sounds like the actions of a military government in the process of giving up its power - despite all promises to the contrary. I'm going to park myself in front of a stack of newspapers and see if I can make sense of all this. In the meantime, I promise that when I leave in August and the military government is still firmly clenched to the reins, I'm going to have a romping great round of I Told You So. I will start, with no small amount of dripping contempt, with the half-dozen Western aid workers who've schmuckishly told me that they actually cheered the coup. Idiots.

In which I attempt to plan travels...

One of the lesser qualities of a life on the road is the lack of certainty. When each job lasts a year or so, and itchy feet set in after six months on the ground, it's awfully hard to know where one's paycheck is coming from a few months into the future. The end result is that perhaps a third of any given year is spent sending out various job applications - though thankfully not outright unemployed.

At least I feel like I'm climbing the ladder a bit. I've just applied for a spot with the World Food Programme in Rome - a hypercompetitive position I'm unlikely to be interviewed for, but it's not so farfetched that it's not worth a shot. Jeepers, I'd love to live in Europe for a little while and stop struggling with craptacular internet access. If I got anywhere with it, I'll probably find out in the next few weeks, but it wouldn't start until September.

Other travel plans abound. I've applied to join an expenses-paid advocacy trip to New York to lobby UN members to assist my grad school. That one I'm very optimistic about, rating my odds at about 70%. Cross your fingers for me, and I'll find out on the 16th.

Meanwhile, I'm attempting to weasel my way into Burma for a little fieldwork. My bosses think it's a great plan and thoroughly safe, but my neurotic paymasters with the Canadian government are rather less sure. They've denied my initial request for travel authorization, but I whined and appealed and I'll learn more this week. Wish me luck again.

In other news, my Nonviolent Social Change class isn't going entirely as planned. I had my students act out a meticulously planned roleplay of an Alabama lunch-counter sit-in during the 1960s. Instead of learning key lessons about nonviolent assembly, they cheerfully thumped the tar out of each other with water bottles for twenty minutes. Oy. Can't I teach a class about violent social change? Seems more in line with my expertise...

In which I complain and plead for clemency...

Posts are likely to be both brief and unexciting for the next couple of days, folks. I've stumbled into a busy week. I'm teaching a class on Nonviolent Social Change all day, every day, which is a bit odd for me, given that my expertise tends to be in the *other* kind of social change. At least my students and I have found common ground - neither they nor I are wholly convinced that Burma's problem can be solved without some judicious application of brute force. But we'll see if we all change our minds after watching Gandhi tomorrow.

So you'll get your daily posts, but the brutally time-consuming work of Laos-blogging, accompanied by cropping and tuning photos, will have to wait until Friday afternoon or so.

In which I whine...

The hot season held off longer than expected here in northern Thailand. Normally it hits by March, immobilizing this chunk of the country entirely. Thankfully, probably due to the aforementioned suffocating haze, we got a welcome reprieve through most of March, and the weather was merely brutal.

Now the hot months have fallen on us like a hammer. The temperatures routinely crack 40 degrees in the afternoons. Movement of any variety is sheer suicide between about 10 AM and 4 PM - at all other times it's still quite foolish. My decision to commute under my own power no longer looks so sage as it did in fall.

All of this explains why Friday's brief and lovely rainstorm was so welcome. The sky darkened and cooled, the wind picked up, and the skies eventually opened for a blissful half-hour, pouring torrential rain down on us. It's tough for a Vancouverite to go without rain for six months. All the male students cowered indoors, but the teachers (myself included) and several of our female students converged upon the two-inch-deep lake that appeared on the former site of our soccer field. We quickly discovered that it's impossible to kick a floating soccer ball - the mightiest strike only creates an epic splash as linear motion converts into angular and the ball is left spinning madly on the surface of the water.

So badminton became the new lake sport, and we six or so batted the birdie back and forth until the clouds abruptly dissolved and the sun reappeared. When the rain died shortly thereafter, one of my students stamped her feet in annoyance, looked at me with an indignant pout and demanded "Teacher! More rain!". I didn't have the heart to tell her that I don't control the weather - and I like to keep the fear of god in my students - so I shrugged noncommitally and wandered, soaked and slightly filthy and supremely entertained, back to my desk.

P.S. My pay-per-post policy has come back to bite me. I owe Christian $10 for missing Friday - but it ain't retroactive, since you're out of luck for Wednesday. This policy exists to keep me blogging and to keep people reading, so the castigation must come more quickly to be valid. And to Sunshine - sorry, my blog is on Pacific time, so I think I managed my Saturday post.