In which I land on another continent...

And now I'm officially in New York for a couple of weeks. I think I managed to thump my jetlag into cowering submission quickly, simply by refusing to sleep until the appointed hour. I spent yesterday wandering around midtown Manhattan, eating hideously unhealthy New York food and trying not to doze off in the middle of intersections. But despite my sleepiness, I can't escape the obvious conclusion that New York is my kind of town - crowded, kinetic, and entirely loopy in all sorts of interesting ways. I've never been here before, and now I've got some time to explore (and look for work here). I'll be spending most of this time at the UN, but if anybody reading this is in town and wants to meet up, drop me a line in the comments. More to follow...

P.S. I've been sufficiently busy with prep for New York and the concurrent disintegration of my work situation in Chiang Mai that I almost forgot it's my birthday tomorrow - joy!

In which I'm so very sleepy...

I'm in Taipei at the moment, about to head out to LA and then New York, so my blog silence is likely to continue for a couple of weeks yet. I'll do what I can, though.

In other news, wish me luck - I need to find a whole buncha cash for my University.

In which I continue, unavoidably, to procrastinate...

My work and my preparations for my trip to New York continue to consume my waking hours, and this blog is unlikely to be back in full swing until the first week of July.

In lieu of a proper post, I offer instead this brief, not terribly deep, but still quite interesting article about junk science and misconceptions in Rachel Carson's landmark environmental tract "Silent Spring". Thought-provoking reading for politicians/enviros.

In which I offer a short news flash...

The military government here in Thailand is about to rule this afternoon on whether the top political parties, including the one dethroned in last year's coup, will be permitted to run in the elections promised for December 2007. Anticipating a disbarment (which rather defeats the label democracy, doesn't it?) and ensuing civil unrest from those party's supporters, the whole country is rather on edge today.

The police forces are boasting loudly about how "effectively" they'll clamp down on any disorder, and the military has mobilized 13,000 soldiers and MPs to prevent the mass migration of ousted Prime Minister Thaksin's rural supporters into the cities for the next few days. Many schools have closed in case of street violence, we volunteers been warned away from politically sensitive areas of Bangkok (not a difficulty for me, being 800 km away in Chiang Mai), and we've been given explicit instructions to stay the hell away from any protests.

I don't really know what to make of it. There are signs that the potential for violence has been blown out of proportion by a jittery military, but only time will tell. I'll follow with more news as it happens.

In which I catch my breath...

Well, I'm finally back in Chiang Mai after nearly a month of constant motion. Getting up at 5 AM every day to move on to the next town is not my kind of vacation, but it was enlightening and gave me some new side projects to work on. (Anybody know a good place to find funding for an AIDS orphanage? I need about $40,000.) I saw bits of pretty landscape in my wanderings, but mainly I enjoyed talking to various folks in some startlingly difficult situations. I was variously mistaken (unintentionally) for a doctor, a missionary, a soldier, and an Australian. I ate things I would prefer never to eat again (Betel leaves are most unpleasant). I got very sick (by my rather fragile standards, not theirs) on three occasions, and even talked politics with far more people than I expected to. I caught wind of an unfortunate amount of raw sewage but also walked through beautifully terraced rice paddies and saw some manmade landmarks on par with the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower.

I'll post more details when time permits, but in the meantime here's a photo of three Karen children, lifelong residents of the Mae La Oon refugee camp, a cheerful but unthinkably crowded patch of otherwise unusable land in east central Thailand. This is the first photo of processed from about 1100 that I've taken in the last three weeks.

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.