Sunday, September 26, 2021
7:15 a.m. Green Guest House
Mae Sot, Thailand
I have a funny story from the other day. After a morning walk around Mae Sot, I got back to my guest house, changed into my usual comfortable shorts, made a cup of coffee, sat down on the bed and began editing a video on my phone, as I often do. As with everything, I only have one pair of shorts. I always wear this pair of shorts and nothing else when I’m hanging out in my room. They’re quite old, worse for wear, and should be replaced. But I never wear them in public, so it doesn’t matter. They’re just my hanging-out-in-my-hotel-rooms shorts that I’ve had for years. In fact, I’ve had these same shorts since I left Taiwan many years ago and for many years before that.
Anyway, I’m lying here on the bed, head resting against two pillows, busy tapping away on my smartphone screen with my stylus, when I feel something really strange against my inner thigh. I jumped a mile high. It was such a strange feeling. And I look, and there’s nothing there. Nothing at all. I concluded that maybe my skin just twitched or something. It was weird.
So I went back to my little video project. Quite a bit of time passed, and then I felt something again! I jumped again. This time I jumped right out of bed. I figured there had to be something crawling around on my body. But I couldn’t see anything. I took off my shorts and looked everywhere. I turned them inside out and searched every pocket and every inch of fabric. There was nothing in my shorts. I took the sheet off the bed and flapped it wildly to shake out any poisonous creature that might be hiding in there. Nothing.
I was feeling weird about all this, but since I wasn’t able to find anything, I just put the shorts back on and lay back down on the bed. I felt nothing for a long time, and eventually I forgot about the incident. And then I felt it again, stronger than ever! It wasn’t like a cockroach on my skin. I know what that feels like. It wasn’t like a beetle crawling between leg hairs and tickling me. This was like something big and strong.
I’d had enough of the mystery at this point, and I whipped off the bed sheet again and shook it strongly. I searched the whole bed. Nothing. I took off my shorts and searched them. I flapped them hard. Nothing fell out. What was going on????
And then I went over my shorts carefully inch-by-inch, feeling with my fingers. And this time, I felt a large lump. I couldn’t see anything, but I could feel something. Whatever it was, it was inside the bottom hem. I looked around, and I saw that the thread holding the hem closed had come loose at one point, and there was an opening into the hem, essentially into the interior of my shorts, between the layers of fabric. And I assumed that one of the big centipedes had come inside my room and then found this opening and worked its way into the inside of the material of my shorts.
But how to get this creature out? I had no idea. It’s not like I could force it to back up and go back to the opening and crawl out the way it came in. I eventually decided I had no choice but to cut open my shorts. I got out a pair of scissors, and I cut through the hem at the front of this creature to give it an exit. And what came out? A rather large gecko.
How such a big lizard managed to cram itself into that space in my shorts, I couldn’t tell you. But now it all made sense, particularly the sensation of something big moving against my skin. This was definitely a new experience for me. I’ve woken up with a gecko sitting on my face and on my head in the past. But I’ve never had a gecko actually inside the hem of my shorts before.
This gecko adventure happened a couple of days ago. And that leaves yesterday to account for. Not much happened yesterday. As always, I had rough plans to take a quick scooter trip to Sukhothai. Will I ever make it to Sukhothai? The thing is that I have to be in Mae Sot on October 1st to return to immigration. And if I left on Sunday morning (right now, in fact), I would have enough days to make an interesting journey to Sukhothai and make it back. So I spent yesterday morning preparing for that. I cleaned the bathroom and my room. I took out the garbage and cleared out my fridge. And then I went out to find an ATM to get some money for the trip. And that’s when things started to fall apart. I’ve had good luck with the Bangkok Bank, so I went there first. Unfortunately, all the Bangkok Bank ATMs were down for servicing. I couldn’t use them. So I went to the Siam Bank. And their ATM ate my card. It accepted my card and I punched in all the appropriate numbers to withdraw some money. But then I got a kind of error message, and the ATM just froze. Nothing happened. I waited and waited and waited, but nothing happened. I thought maybe it was waiting for me to hit a confirmation button, so I hit the Enter button. But nothing happened. I started to worry that my debit card was gone forever. In the end, I had no other option but to try to cancel the transaction. And to my relief, that worked. I hit cancel, and the transaction was cancelled, and the ATM ejected my card. I then went to a third bank, and the ATM accepted my card and didn’t freeze. But I got an error message saying that this ATM only issued 100-baht notes, and it was unable to issue the 10,000 baht I was asking for. That would consist of one hundred 100-baht notes, and it could only issue thirty actual bank notes at a time. So that ATM was a dead end as well.
And then it started to rain heavily. I checked the forecast, and it was calling for more heavy rains for Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday. I took all of this as a sign from the universe that I was not meant to be scootering to Sukhothai this week. And I abandoned my plans for going there this week. I guess I will just hang out in Mae Sot this week until my Friday trip to immigration. I just checked the forecast right now, and, not surprisingly, it is calling for a 100% chance of rain for today. And it is raining heavily outside as I type.
Interestingly, starting on Wednesday, there is a major shift in the weather forecast. Perhaps we are approaching a change. For many, many months, the verbal description of the weather forecast has never changed. It always has read the same: Thundery Showers. That’s all I’ve seen for as long as I can remember. But on Wednesday of this week, it changes to the magical sounding Sunny Intervals. The forecast for Thursday and Friday also reads Sunny Intervals. On Saturday, we return to Thundery Showers. But after that, there are more calls for Sunny Intervals. There is even a day in there on which they are predicting Sunny Intervals with a Gentle Breeze. My gosh. Could the rainy season finally be ending? I’ve never had to endure a rainy season like this before in my life. Combined with the pandemic, this rainy season has created a gloom unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. I’ll be very glad to see it end.
The rest of yesterday was spent working on some insanely long and detailed technology videos. For a YouTube video, they are really stupid. And I’m fully aware of that. But I think I’m going to finish them and post them anyway. And I’m planning to finally create my new Gear & Technology channel. Maybe I’ll post these videos to that channel. And then if someone wants to ridicule me for making such a ridiculously long tech video, at least it will be on an actual tech channel.
The first video is about unboxing and reviewing the Media Mod for my GoPro Hero 9. A typical unboxing video on YouTube should be about ten minutes long. Mine is forty-three minutes long. It’s more like a journal entry than an actual video. I treat the unboxing like a personal experience, and then I go over the Media Mod in excruciating detail with all my thoughts.
And then, believe it or not, I made a second video about the Media Mod. I guess I didn’t cover all the points I wanted to make in the first video. In fact, my intention with this second video was to make a short and punchy video. But when I shot that video, I was in a great mood. I had just woken up and I was full of energy, and I ended up talking about the Media Mod for an hour and a half. It was more of a rant, actually, and kind of a thesis on poor design.
The third video is an unboxing of my new camera, the DJI Pocket 2. That one is currently sitting at one hour and four minutes in length. But it is also not a traditional unboxing. It is more of a personal Doug-style odyssey.
On top of those three videos, I have three more hour-long videos in which I compare two Android-based video-editing apps. I made those videos months ago, but I never dared post them to my normal YouTube channel. They were so tech-heavy and so weird that they didn’t really belong on my regular YouTube channel. I kept intending to make my Gear & Technology channel and post them there. But I just never got around to doing it. And this comparison between these two apps is so insanely detailed and specific that I was reluctant to post them anywhere.
I’m having a lot of fun with my new camera. During the two hours that I was waiting for a friend out in a parking lot one day, I actually got out the DJI Pocket 2 and did an in-depth series of audio tests. I was testing all the various microphone options to see which I liked better. I had no intention of making a YouTube video about it. It was just for my own benefit to do all those tests. But now I’m thinking that I will recreate that experience and make an actual video about the DJI Pocket 2’s audio options. And I’ll make a bunch more about all the things I learn about the DJI Pocket 2. I thought maybe I could make a dedicated series of such videos and call the series “Learning Curve.” The idea would be to document my learning curve as I learn new things about the camera.
I always tend to approach social media in that way. The more normal and standard approach would be to make an official tutorial video. People make videos in which they teach other people how to use this or that camera. But my tendency and my preference is to approach everything more from a journal-keeping or story-telling point of view. Instead of making a tutorial video about using a microphone with the DJI Pocket 2, I’d rather make it more informal and more personal and just talk about my own experiences as I try out different microphone options. That’s why my videos end up being so long.