Tuesday, February 1, 2022
6:11 a.m. Room 1102, Phannu House
Mae Sot, Thailand
I don’t know where it is coming from, but most mornings now, I hear quite loud Buddhist chanting. It is happening right now and will continue for some time. I’m not aware of a large temple nearby, but there must be one. I actually am not as familiar with my new neighborhood as I’d like. My life of late has been largely confined to my room at Phannu House as I try to catch up on my backlog of YouTube videos.
My YouTube life continues to be an odd one. I quite enjoy shooting the video. The way that I do it is quite similar to how I would normally record my life and thoughts in pictures or words. The drive to make the videos is not quite the same but it is related to the drive I’ve always had to turn my own life into a story by writing long journal entries or long letters. And so, it isn’t a struggle to shoot the video. I feel the urge to do it. I want to do it, and I enjoy the process. But then comes the editing of that video. And that is much more of a challenge. I enjoy it as well, but my enjoyment is not so great that I want to do it for eighteen hours a day and do nothing else for two or three weeks. And yet, to deal with the vast amount of video I shot on this trip, that is what is required.
I had an interesting chat online with “Stan”, a man from the UK (now living in Kuala Lumpur), related to this. Stan shoots a little bit of YouTube video, and I guess he wants to change his approach. He normally just shoots silent POV video as he walks around or rides his electric scooter around various neighborhoods, stores, and markets. He doesn’t speak or try to tell a story or talk about his life. He just passively shoots what is around him. But he has been watching my videos, and he wrote to me to tell me how much he admires my ability to speak into the camera naturally. And he wanted to know how I did it. He wanted advice on how he could do it. Did I have any tips or tricks to share?
I struggled a bit to answer him. I’ve actually gotten similar comments in the past somewhat frequently, and I struggled to process them as well. The thing is that I’m not aware in any way of speaking into the camera naturally. I didn’t know I was doing that. I wasn’t aware that this was anything special to be able to do. My friend Daryl in Kuala Lumpur, who also shoots YouTube videos, has often said the same thing. He wants to put himself in his videos more. But he says he has trouble doing that because he doesn’t know what to say. And he asks me how I can talk so long and about so many things. And I have no idea what to tell him. My problem isn’t thinking of things to say. In fact, I don’t have to think up or invent topics. I just talk. And I could talk forever if my energy levels didn’t eventually run out. All these people see what I’m doing as an ability, a skill, something special, and I just thought anybody could do it. What’s so hard about talking? I’ve got a thousand thoughts in my brain right now. I could keep writing right now and jump from topic to topic forever if I didn’t eventually just run out of energy. The same thing would happen if I happened to be running a GoPro.
I tried to answer Stan, the guy from Kuala Lumpur who asked me this question. I’m not sure if what I wrote made sense or was helpful. I started off saying pretty much the same thing I just wrote: that I don’t do anything special or even try to speak naturally. I don’t have any special tips or tricks or secrets. I told him that for me, speaking while the camera is running is like having coffee with a friend. When you’re sitting there chatting over coffee, the conversation just flows. You don’t stop and think about what to say next. You don’t have to force yourself to talk or come up with a strategy to be able to keep talking to your friend. You just talk. You just have a conversation. And it’s the same for me when the camera is running. One topic leads to the next.
But in talking to Stand and Daryl or other people, I’m forced to try and see it from their point of view. And I have to believe them when they say that being able to talk into a camera is a skill that they don’t have. I guess it’s the same with everything that a person can do naturally and instinctively. You don’t think of it as a skill. You can just do it, and so you don’t think it is anything special. But for other people, it is special. And I ended up looking at the subject from the outside and wondering what might feed into it. And one thing I came up with is my nearly lifelong habit of journaling and letter writing. I instinctively think in terms of stories. Whatever happened in my life yesterday is a story that I tell to someone today. And perhaps years of writing down the events of my life makes it easier to do the same out loud when I am holding a camera.
I ended up talking to Stan about that and I brought up things like the Moth podcast, where people just get up on stage and tell stories from their life. And I brought up certain performers, such as Spalding Gray and Mike Birbiglia, people who tell stories on stage in a humorous fashion. I wondered if listening to that podcast and watching Spalding Gray and Mike Birbiglia on YouTube would help Pete relax and see that it’s okay to just tell simple stories from his life. My idea was that inflated expectations might be the problem when it comes to Stan and Daryl. Perhaps they think that in order to talk, they have to say something really big and important. And so they get stiff and try to think of deep and important topics. And then they can never say anything. Maybe the trick is to realize that everything is interesting. You don’t have to talk about deep topics and tackle the meaning of life. You just have to tell the funny story of what happened to you when you went to the 7-Eleven. More observations and trivia than deep thoughts.
I also offered up the comparison with simply speaking to a friend over coffee. And I noted how one of the tricks to becoming comfortable when public speaking on stage is to focus on one person in the audience and speak directly to that person, again as if speaking directly to a friend over a cup of coffee. I didn’t go this far, but I wonder now if a good mental trick might be to imagine that the camera is not a camera at all but a smartphone, and your friend is on the line. And then as Stan is wandering around the streets of Kuala Lumpur with his GoPro, he could just start talking as if he was having a phone conversation with a friend.
I think I said a whole bunch of other stuff. But there was one perspective that I didn’t mention. I just didn’t think of it at the time. But it occurred to me later, and this perspective is something that I’ve thought about a lot. And it might be the most important one of all, at least where my habits are concerned. And that is that turning your life into a story can remove fear and sadness and loneliness and regret and other extreme negative emotions. It helps you understand that in the end, nothing matters. Whatever bad thing is happening to you, turning it into a story whether in a letter or a journal entry (or maybe even a real piece of fiction) can take away its teeth. It can take away its power to hurt you.
Just take my scooter trip to the north as an example. I felt confident it wouldn’t happen, but it’s possible that I could have had an accident. At any point, one of the tires on my scooter could have blown out, and I could have crashed and broken two legs and smashed my jaw and ended up in the hospital for months. And from my personal point of view, that would have been a terrible tragedy and just the thought of it can be terrifying. I’m here completely by myself. I have no home. I have no money. I have no insurance. Talk about disaster. What would I do? But if it did happen, I’d just write about the experience as it was happening to me. And by writing down the story, it becomes less frightening. It removes the teeth from the situation. It puts it into perspective.
I’ve often thought about stuff like that. And at a deep level, I think that drive is what has kept me writing a journal so much. I think about people who suffer a great tragedy. Something happens that completely changes their life. And they end up writing a book about it. They document their experience. I think many people experience this urge to write a book about dealing with a tragedy. And it is a way to pull the teeth from that experience, to make it less scary, to see it as a story. I’ve always seen the power of writing to be able to do that. It makes things less personal in a way. You can see the humor and the interesting nature in things by stepping outside of yourself.
And in a weird way, the habit of keeping a journal makes you behave better, perhaps more courageously. It is like you are writing the movie script of your own life. I know that tomorrow morning, I will be writing about what I did today. And how do I want that script to read? If this somewhat disturbed giant husky at this hotel suddenly turned on me and attacked me and started mauling my arms and legs and face, how do I want my story of how I reacted to play out? Do I want to write that I started screaming and panicking and crying and falling apart? Or do I want my movie script to read that I stayed calm and fought off the dog and then, with no drama, walked over to the hospital to get stitched up? Even as the dog was biting me, I’d probably already be thinking about writing down the story.
That makes me think of that time in the Philippines after the typhoon when I tripped and fell and smashed my camera and cut open my jaw. I would never argue that I’m any kind of tough guy. I know myself too well to ever argue that. But it’s true that right after it happened, I simply sat up on the rocks, looked at my destroyed camera, felt the blood running down my chin and neck, and thought, “Well, that just happened.” There was no cursing and swearing and getting upset that I’d broken my precious camera. At a very deep level, I knew that all the swearing and getting upset wouldn’t make the slightest difference. Nothing I could do at that point would prevent my camera from being smashed and my jaw from bleeding. It was done. All I could do was get up and move on with my day: pick up the pieces of my broken camera, go find somebody with bandaids. And after just sitting there for a while looking out over the ocean, that’s what I did. I think I laughed at the silliness of the whole situation, and then I got up. And I was already looking forward to waking up the next morning and writing down the story. I was already thinking about that with pleasure.
And I have plenty of examples from my life of people reacting in the opposite way. My father got very upset when things went wrong. He’d get angry and smash things or throw things. In fact, he’d make it worse. He might be trying to fix something, and he’d get so frustrated that he’d pick up whatever it was and smash it to the ground or take a hammer to it. And that might be satisfying, but it certainly didn’t help. All it did was make the thing MORE difficult to fix. It’s now more broken or even completely destroyed.
And to bring this thought back around, I think keeping a journal and writing letters helps with keeping that kind of balanced perspective when things go wrong. You can take a terrible situation and see the funny side or the fascinating side. You make it less personal by turning it into a story.
I have no idea why I’m talking about this so much. But I’m wondering now if it is because of my current situation. If I hadn’t gone off on this tangent, I’d probably have written stories about my room here at the Phannu. I don’t have any other stories to tell because I haven’t been doing very much. And this room has some negative aspects to it. And there are two ways to talk about these negative aspects. I can be upset about it and complain about it and see it as making my life worse. Or I can step outside of myself and write down the story, and in so doing, it isn’t so personal anymore. It becomes something funny or even interesting.
I don’t know how many people around the world are aware of this, but there is a certain habit among Chinese men (and other Asian cultures) to clear their throat in the morning. Somehow they grow up believing that they have to retch and retch and retch in the bathroom every morning and go through this awful, horrible, nasty loud process of clearing out gunk from their throats and spitting. It goes on for a long time and it sounds gut-wrenchingly awful. It’s just the nastiest thing. And my neighbor, the son of the family that owns the Phannu, does this every morning. He’s so loud in the morning in the bathroom. He bangs and crashes and does all kinds of crazy things in there, and then he clears his throat with this horrible retching noise that goes on forever. And he does this every morning. My instinct is to go bang on his door and ask him, “What are you doing in there?? And why? And please, for the love of all that is holy, can you stop????!!! It’s disgusting.”
I think it bothers me so much because I don’t see any logic in it. Hundreds of millions of people all around the world, including me, happily go about their days and their lives without ever needing to do this. So why does this guy? What’s the point? A related issue is spitting. I remember the spitting from South Korea. All the men spit on the streets all the time, especially in the morning, and this spitting goes along with all this throat clearing. And the sound is so nasty. And it’s everywhere.
But instead of letting this behavior and the sounds actually get to me, I write about it. I’d write an email to my friends when I was in South Korea and tell them all about the insane things going on around me. I’d turn it all into a story and write it all down. And by doing that, it didn’t bother me nearly as much. It would end up not bothering me at all. I’d just note it as an amusing aspect of the life going on around me.
And recently, I got a new neighbor on the other side of me here at Phannu House. I haven’t met this person yet. I think it’s a foreign woman. But what I do know about her is that she smokes. And smoking is another problem for me. She sits outside her room on a bench and smokes there frequently. And the smoke comes right into my room. I’m absurdly sensitive to cigarette smoke for some reason. The smallest amount of it makes my eyes and throat burn. I hate it. I really hate it. Yet, whenever a smoker asks me if I mind if they smoke, I always say I don’t mind. Of course, I’m lying. I hate cigarette smoke. It really gets to me physically. But I always pretend it doesn’t bother me at all. And when I find myself with a smoking neighbor, I generally write about it and turn it into a funny story.
I even adopt, from time to time, the WWHFD trick. This is something I invented to help myself overcome my reluctance regarding certain tasks. This is usually to do with some kind of public situation where I have to go into a bank and deal with a problem or call my bank in Canada (which I dread). Or go into a hospital. Or a clothing store. Or any of a dozen places where I dislike going intensely. This is related to tasks that I really, truly, don’t want to face. And I realize I’m being a baby about it. I tell myself to just grow up. Be a man. Be an adult. And my trick for accomplishing this is WWHFD, which stands for “What would Harrison Ford do?” And in my brain, I imagine that Harrison Ford would have no trouble with this task. He would simply be a man and do it. He’d do it with confidence. And I adopt the Harrison Ford persona, and I picture how this scene would play out in a movie if a character played by Harrison Ford was doing it. And then I would simply treat the situation as a scene from a movie and I’d just deal with it with confidence. Quit being a baby about it.
I had one other adventure related to this room that occurs to me right now. I wrote the other day that I got some cleaning supplies for my room. And that’s because paying by the month means that I have to clean the room myself. And that’s fine, of course. Even if I was paying by the day, I wouldn’t let them clean the room anyway. I’d still do it myself. But I’ve been slowly tackling the bathroom. The bathroom wasn’t disgusting when I moved in. It was even somewhat clean by low-budget hotel standards. But I sometimes find myself in the mood to really get a place in order and sparkling. And even though the hotel staff had clearly been cleaning the bathroom floor and sink regularly, they hadn’t really been that concerned about anything above that level or any of the fixtures. The bathroom doors here tend to grow thick layers of gunk or even mold, particularly toward the bottom. And this door was no exception. The walls will get dirty. The top of everything gets neglected and will accumulate years of dirt. And the two windows in there were a complete horror. And it was the windows that I really wanted to deal with.
One of the things I did at the Green Guest House in the days leading up to my departure was clean the bathroom windows. The problem I faced was that during the endless rainy season, a large colony of garden snails had taken up residence on the outside of my windows. These were big snails, and they lived on the outside of the screens between the screens and the outer cement walls. And something I learned about snails is that they poop like crazy. I’ve never seen so much poop. They put all my pooping geckos to shame. And it wasn’t possible to clean this poop. The screens can’t be removed and there is no access to the outside of these windows. With the never ending rain and the inability to do anything about it, I just left the snail colony alone and the poop piles they created built up and up and up. The majority of it fell to the bottom and created piles there. But much of it also stuck to the screen. It was everywhere.
My original idea was just to leave this all there for my landlords to deal with when I moved out. But I couldn’t really do that. So one day, I decided to tackle the problem. And clearing out this colony of snails and the poop turned into a task that was spread out over days. I had to develop entirely new techniques and approaches to the cleaning. And when I moved into this room at Phannu House, I saw that the bathroom windows here were exactly the same. The screens themselves were black with accumulated dirt. They were so nasty. They probably hadn’t been cleaned in ten years, maybe not even since the day the hotel was built. Large snails were all over the outside of the screens, and large poop piles had built up at the bottom. I couldn’t live with the windows remaining like that, and with my newfound knowledge of how to clean up snail poop, I set about dealing with it.
It was much easier this time because I could remove the screens. The screens at the Green Guest House had been fixed in place permanently. But these screens at Phannu House were held in place by clips that could be turned and then released. So I was able to remove the screens entirely, and that made the cleaning process a hundred times easier. But it was still a challenge, and it came with surprises. Nasty ones. It turned out that all the snails that were on these screens were dead. They had died long ago. And when I pulled out the screens, all these snail shells fell off and crashed to the floor and onto the bathroom sink and counter and faucets and exploded in a shower of dead snail shells and powdery dried flesh.
And the only way to clean out all the dirt and poop was to spray it with the bathroom shower hose and let it all run down the walls of the bathroom on the inside. There was just no other way to do it. I had had to do the same thing at the Green Guest House. All the accumulated dirt and poop of years came pouring into the inside of the bathroom, down the walls, onto the counter, into the sink, onto the faucets and the mirror, everywhere. And then I had to clean all of that up as well.
The final problem was that this particular bathroom doesn’t have a drain sitting on the floor near the shower, as these bathrooms in Asia usually do. Whoever built this place had done something different. And this drain actually went out the wall to the side, sideways. And to make this work, they had to sink the drain down so that half of it was above the floor and half below. The result is that all the gunk that I was hoping would just drain away with the water, collected in the bottom half of this drain and plugged it up. And this drain was located in a far corner underneath the main bathroom counter. And I had to get down on my hands and knees and get back there and dig down into the bottom half of this drain with my fingers to try and remove all this gunk so that the water could drain away. It was nasty.
It’s a bad design for the bathroom drain overall. The shower is on the wall on the far side of the bathroom. But the drain is in the corner on the other end beside the counter and door. And that means that any water from the shower area has to flow across the entire bathroom floor to reach the drain by the door. So everything is soaking wet all the time. And the builders had done a poor job in terms of sloping the floor towards the drain. Water tends to pool in various places around the floor. It’s all a big mess.
I’m not quite done with the bathroom. I still have two walls to clean. But it is so much nicer now than it was. I’ve always found it interesting how people can get used to things. I guess once you mentally get adjusted to the fact that your bathroom windows are black and filled with snail poop, you just accept it and live with it. It’s normal. But then when someone like me comes along and cleans it up, and suddenly the windows are gleaming and bright and clean, then you can see the difference. And you wonder how you could have lived for so long with how it was before.
I find that is why you need to be careful with leaving things lying around. If you come into your house and toss some kind of empty box onto the floor near the front door and leave it there for a day or two, you might mentally adjust to that being normal. And that box will end up staying there for years. You just don’t notice it anymore. Places like Phannu House are very much like that. I’m a newcomer, and I see everything with fresh eyes, and I see piles of junk everywhere. And I wonder how they can possibly live like this. The bench beside my retching neighbor’s door is filled with garbage and junk probably going back a decade. It looks awful and disgusting to me. But he has learned to see it as normal. He just piles junk onto that bench and doesn’t even see it anymore. And all over the grounds of the Phannu, there are shattered flower pots and junk and old building and repair supplies and actual garbage. It’s everywhere. But no one here even notices it anymore. But I see it. And bathrooms can suffer from that tendency. I always notice that the shower hose in these bathrooms will be black and green with accumulated dirt and mold. And that’s with the staff here cleaning the bathroom regularly between guests. And then I clean the hose and it emerges pure and white. And you can see such a stark contrast. But the people here just got accustomed to it being black and green.
I guess the living conditions of the dogs fall into the same category. I see them as neglected if not actually abused. But the people that live here just see it as the way things are. It makes me think that decluttering is a good habit. It forces a new perspective on you, and you might see even your own house in a new light with a fresh perspective. Maybe that’s why regular habits like spring cleaning are important. You might not even notice how dirty your environment has become until you get up on a ladder and start cleaning everything from the top down.