Wednesday, March 2, 2022
9:23 a.m. Room 4, PLP Guest House
Mae Hong Son, Thailand
I’m now back in the small town of Mae Hong Son. Last I wrote, I was in Mae Sariang, and I was getting ready for the 163-kilometer scooter ride to get here. That ride went by without a hitch. The only issue was going outside the Mitaree 2 Hotel to find that my scooter had been boxed in by many other scooters. It appeared that the Mitaree 2 Hotel was quite popular with people doing the Mae Hong Son Loop by motorcycle, scooter, and tour van. The parking lot was jammed, and I had to do some heavy lifting and moving to clear a space for me to wheel my scooter out. I thought I was leaving quite late in the morning, but apparently not. None of these other people had started their day’s journey either. I was still on the road earlier than average, it seemed, even when I deliberately tried to sleep in and leave late.
I had a restful and comfortable night at the Mitaree. The accommodation was certainly a huge step up from the basic shack I slept in for three nights in the village. Having a bed, a table, and counters certainly makes packing much less difficult. All your stuff is at knee, waist, or shoulder height. In the shack, all my gear was arrayed on the floor, and packing up involved a lot of bending over, sitting down on the floor and then getting back up again. That is surprisingly exhausting when you aren’t used to it. I’ve noticed that time and again in my life. I’ve spent quite a bit of time in countries where the norm is to do all your living on the floor. Even South Korea was like that long ago when it was accepted practice to sleep and sit and eat and read and teach and study and work all on the floor. Even the heating system consisted of water pipes running underneath the floorboards, so to stay warm in winter you have to lie down on the floor. It’s tiring when you are more accustomed to sitting in chairs and sleeping in beds that are raised a couple of feet off the ground. I’ve often wondered if living on the floor made you better or worse. Perhaps that style of life is healthier and people there are in better shape and physically tougher. Or does it just make you lazier? Perhaps it is so much more work to get up off the floor and out of bed that you just don’t bother. Perhaps you simply lie there on the ground doing nothing for much longer because it’s too much work to get up.
The highway from Mae Sariang to Mae Hong Son is nice, but it isn’t on the same level as the rest of the highway to Pai and then to Chiang Dao or Chiang Mai. It has wide sweeping curves as opposed to tight ones. And the scenery isn’t as nice. But it is certainly fun to ride. Rather than really immerse myself in the experience, I put in some earphones and just listened to podcasts as I raced along. My goal was simply to get to Mae Hong Son. I’d already ridden down this highway multiple times, so I wasn’t in the mood to really explore the area.
I arrived relatively early in the day, and I rode straight to the PLP Guest House. I’d stayed at the PLP before, and I booked two nights in advance. It’s a nice place that offers good value in the low-budget range of rooms. The contrast with the shack in the village is striking. That shack, as I mentioned, cost 400 baht per night. And it consisted of pretty much nothing but four thin wooden walls, a fan, and a cold water hose in the bathroom. My room at the Mitaree cost 450 baht and came with everything, including a nice bed, air conditioning, a nice bathroom with glorious hot water, and free coffee and morning snacks. This room at the PLP costs 300 baht per night. And it’s a big room with two nice twin beds, some furniture, and a nice bathroom with hot water. I believe breakfast is also included in some fashion, though I’ve never had the breakfast here. There is no air conditioning, but the fan is big and modern, and its cord reaches the outlet. At the shack in the village, the cord for the fan couldn’t even reach the one available outlet. I thought that was very strange.
After all that talk about kettles and how I didn’t bring a kettle so my backpack could be lighter, I went out and bought yet another kettle. That makes a total of four kettles (or five if you include the kettle I bought in Myanmar and originally brought to Thailand and then threw away because it was too dangerous). I just enjoy my cups of instant coffee too much. I thought I could get away with using the kettles that hotels sometimes provide or go without my coffee at all or just go out to coffee shops in the morning. At the shack in the village, my room did come with a kind of kettle. It was one of those hot water heaters, not a kettle per se. And it did work. But it was a giant pain because it was designed to keep water hot, not necessarily boil it. And so it took a long, long time to heat up the water. It did this gradually. Plus, it was broken. You had to press down on the plunger on the top to force out the water. But every time you pressed down on it, the entire top of the heater would pop open and you’d lose the seal for the pressure to work.
My room at the Mitaree 2 did not come with a kettle. But I noticed that they had a hot water heater in the lobby. I checked with the woman at the desk, and she said that it was there for guests to use. So after I moved into my room and unpacked and showered, I prepared some coffee, and then I went out into the lobby to fill my cup with hot water. The woman at the desk jumped up and started to bring out a tray filled with coffee ingredients, and I had to talk to her and show her that I had my own coffee. This was very confusing and took a long time. And then I went to the kettle and pressed down on the plunger and filled my cup. Then I went back to my room and settled onto the bed to enjoy my coffee. And then I took my first sip, and it turned out that the water was room temperature. It wasn’t hot. I went back out into the lobby, and I found out that the hot water heater wasn’t plugged in. They plug it in for the morning breakfast rush. And then they unplug it for the rest of the day. I thought this was quite funny and fairly typical for my life in Thailand. The woman at the desk was very concerned about helping her foreign guest get his coffee. She had all the coffee ingredients and came rushing out from behind her desk to give them to me. But in all this activity, it never occurred to her to plug in the water heater or mention to me that I needed to do so.
So I plugged in the hot water heater, and I noted that the warming light came on at the front. Now I just needed to wait until it boiled the water and the light switched over to “hot”. I went back to my room to pour out my lukewarm coffee and prepare a new cup. I waited for what felt like a long time, but when I went back out to the lobby, the water was still “warming”. I went back to my room and waited for what felt like another very long time. But when I went back out, the water still hadn’t boiled. And each time I left my room, I had to get dressed to do so. I tend to lounge in just a pair of shorts. No shirt, of course. But every time I go out to the lobby, I have to put on clothes. AND I have to put on a mask. So it became more and more of an effort to make this cup of coffee. Finally, on my next trip out, the water was hot, and I could make my cup of coffee. But by then, the coffee mood was almost gone. It had taken so long and required so much effort to get this cup of coffee that I didn’t really enjoy it.
In the morning, I felt sure that I could go out to the lobby and the water heater would be plugged in and I probably could get an easier cup of coffee. But I wasn’t absolutely sure. And I didn’t want to risk it. And it just seemed like too much trouble to get started down that path. I’d have to get dressed and put on a mask and leave my room and walk down the long hallway in my bare feet (or put on my sandals) and go to the lobby to see if the water heater was plugged in. If not, I’d have to plug it in and then go back to my room and try to calculate how long it will take for the water to boil. And chances are it would be empty anyway, and I’d have to go back to my room and get some water to fill it up. It all just seemed like too much work, and I didn’t bother. I just packed up and, after extricating my scooter from the parking lot, I got on the road. No morning coffee.
I had a vague idea that my room at the PLP would have a kettle. I had a memory that my first room here had both a fridge and a kettle. And I thought I had reserved the same type of room. But when I arrived here, they showed me a different room. It is a room with twin beds instead of a large double or queen. And it has no fridge and no kettle. I actually prefer rooms with twin beds. I sleep in one and I spread out all my gear on the other. But I was disappointed to see that there was no fridge and no kettle.
This guest house does have its own restaurant. And I think I could go over there with my coffee cup to get some hot water. But this restaurant isn’t attached. It is on the other side of the street. And it is one of these typical Thai places where no one ever seems to be around. I could see myself going over there with my coffee cup and then being unable to get hot water. Or the water wouldn’t be hot enough. Or it would take a long time and a lot of effort.
So after I unpacked, I sat here for a few minutes debating. And then I mentally said, “Screw it. Let’s go buy a kettle.” I had arrived here quite early in the afternoon, and I wanted to settle into my room with a nice cup of coffee. I needed to get on my scooter to get gas anyway. I figured I might as well buy a kettle at the same time. A quick check of Google Maps showed me there was a giant home-style hardware store just outside of town. I rode there and after some hemming and hawing, I walked out with an interesting little device. They did have actual kettles. But these were quite large. They were 2-liter models that are meant to be plugged in in your kitchen and then left there on the counter. They are too large to reasonably carry around in a backpack. I do have the space for one, but they still seemed too big. I wanted a travel kettle.
I couldn’t find a travel kettle, but they also sold a miniature cooking pot. This is similar to the pot that I already have in Mae Sot. It can boil water. But because it is shaped like an actual cooking pot and has a sealed bottom and even a lid, you can also use it to cook. This one is a pleasant lime green. I believe it is made by a Thai company called Benka. It has a curved non-stick interior, a lid with a little steam hole, and a switch on the front that goes from Off to 300-Watt to 600-Watt and it is listed as a 1.2-liter pot. It’s actually bigger than I need. It’s a cooking pot, after all, not a mini-kettle or travel kettle. But it is significantly smaller than my original cooking pot and much smaller (though not really lighter) than the kettles they sold at this store. Being a cooking pot, it is short and squat and round. The kettles were tall and more bulky and had very large handles protruding from them. The kettles also used very heavy-duty, large electrical cords and plugs. This cooking pot has a normal household cord and kettle. The advantage to a kettle is that it boils water faster and it has an automatic turn-off switch. You can turn it on and forget about it. The kettle will switch off once the water is brought to a boil. This cooking pot brings water to a boil more slowly, and then it will just keep boiling it forever. And if you forget about it, it will boil dry and then destroy itself. So you have to monitor it. I’ve learned since yesterday that at the 600-watt setting, this Benka boils water more than fast enough. It’s actually surprisingly fast. So the kettles really aren’t a big advantage in that regard. And with this Benka, I can do a bit of cooking. I can’t really cook a full pasta meal. It isn’t big enough for that. But it is the perfect size for soup, for instant noodles, for boiling eggs, and for anything like that. It is quite versatile.
On the one hand, it was silly to buy this kettle. I’d agonized over this in Mae Sot and made a huge deal out of leaving my current cooking pot behind to save on weight and bulk in my backpack. And I’d already purchased two kettles on recent trips and then left one behind and gave the other one to Steve. I had no business buying a third one. However, I love this little Benka already. My coffee yesterday afternoon was practically the highlight of that day. And I had another cup of coffee in the early evening. And I’m currently enjoying my second cup of coffee of the morning. And it was so convenient and easy. I didn’t even have to get dressed or leave my room. I can see my squat, lime green Benka across the room sitting on a little shelf, and it pleases me immensely.
It’s funny and a bit silly how often I’ve done things like this in my life. I will go back and forth between doing what feels natural and forcing myself to do something else. Most of the time, it involves some kind of misguided effort to lighten my backpack and make my life less complicated. So I will go through my gear and throw away, give away, or leave behind all kinds of things. And then I’m happy to have a smaller or lighter or less complicated backpack of gear. But almost inevitably, once I’m back on the road, I start to miss those items, and I buy them all back. Every time. For this trip, I also left behind my precious light bulb. It’s not like a lightbulb is heavy or takes up a lot of space. However, it does complicate your life. It’s delicate, and you have to pack it carefully so it doesn’t break in transit. And when you arrive in your new room, there is the time and effort involved in unscrewing the lightbulb and putting yours in. And then you have to remember to unscrew it and take it with you when you leave. And you have to time this process right, because you can’t unscrew it when it’s hot. You have to turn the light off and wait for it to cool down. And then it can be too dark to see clearly. It complicates things. So I left it behind for this trip.
And already, I regret it. My shack in the village had just one light, and it was such a dim light that the shack was dark and gloomy. I really wanted to switch it out with a bright 100-watt bulb, but I didn’t have one. And here at the PLP, the bathroom is very dark and gloomy. It has just one very small bulb, and as is always the case, it is one of those energy-saving bulbs that barely sheds any light. You might as well have a candle in there. If I had my 100-watt light bulb with me, it would be much cheerier in there. By the time I leave Mae Hong Son, I will almost certainly have purchased a new light bulb. I just won’t be able to help it.
Over the years, I’ve done the same thing with sleeping sheets, mosquito nets, and a dozen other items. I will leave them behind and then instantly regret doing so and just buy replacements.
My pants are falling apart again. These are my last and only pair of pants, and they split apart at the left and right knees on the last day or so before leaving Mae Sot: exactly the same as the other pair of pants that I tried and failed to have repaired. I couldn’t be bothered to buy new pants, so I just made some simple repairs and hoped to nurse them through the next month. However, after sewing up the tears, the pants just tore apart right beside where I had sewn them shut. I knew that would happen, but I just thought it would take longer. I then sewed up this second tear. And the very next day, the knees tore open in a third spot right beside the two sewn sections. My entire knee now just sticks through the pants when I sit down. The thing is that when you sew up a long tear, you actually use up some of the material, and the tension over the knees actually increases with each repair. And then it simply tears more easily. I’ve now stopped trying to sew up the tears. Now I just put in some stitches at the bottom and top of the tears to try to keep the tear from spreading up or down too fast and too far. Unless I stumble across some convenient pants, I will be walking around in fashionable pants with giant tears over my knees for the next two or three weeks.
As for pop culture, I’ve dived into the fourth season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. I can see what’s good about the show. And I’m enjoying the new episodes. Yet, I’m not enjoying them as much as I did the first couple of seasons. Those seasons had a real drive to the storyline. For this fourth season, things have settled into more of a sitcom pattern. The story isn’t driving forward so much as just meandering around their current living situation. The third season ended on a strong cliffhanger – a real setback for our hero Mrs. Maisel. And I was so curious to see how she would fight through it. But instead of that happening, she just kind of settled into her old life with her parents and her ex-husband and other characters just hanging about and having their own little adventures. It just doesn’t have the same force and forward momentum and change as the earlier seasons. I guess that is to be expected. But it is disappointing.
And I can’t stop thinking about the movie Encanto. I guess it bugs me that I see so many problems in the story and the plot. And no one else seems to notice them or think that they matter. People just rave about it and talk about how they cried throughout the whole movie and thought it was so amazing and so beautiful. It makes me want to sit down and write a long critique of the movie or even record a video in which I tear it to shreds. When I was riding my scooter for hours yesterday, in between listening to podcasts, I just kept thinking about what was wrong with Encanto and how I would fix it. My biggest problems, of course, have to do with logic. Things just don’t make any sense.
I’ll give just one example. The main characters in the movie are all part of the same family and they all have superpowers. And the matriarch of this family, the abuela, never stops talking about how as a family, they must use their powers (what they call their gifts), to help the community around them. And a big part of the story is that the abuela doesn’t like one of her granddaughters, because this granddaughter never got a superpower. So she is unable to help the villagers. This granddaughter, Mirabel, is the hero of the story. She’s the main character, and why she doesn’t have a superpower and the fact that this disappoints her abuela drives the story.
But this makes no sense at all. For one thing, the abuela doesn’t have a superpower either. Only her children and grandchildren do. So the abuela is exactly like Mirabel. She and Mirabel both lack superpowers. So why would she dislike Mirabel so much? She is the same as Mirabel.
Plus, most of the superpowers can’t help anyone. One character has super hearing. She can hear anything no matter how far away. And they show many times that she can listen in on any conversation in the village. They never show this character helping anyone with her super hearing. How could she? And, in fact, in real life, the villagers would be very suspicious of her. She can hear everything that everyone says and does in the entire village. There can be no privacy or secrecy or intimacy of any kind. The villagers would soon resent her and not want her around. They’d probably try to kick her out of the village. Who wants someone around that can listen in on all their conversations and most intimate or embarrassing moments? They’d soon come to fear her.
Another character is a shape-shifter. He can magically transform into anyone and look and sound exactly like them. He never uses this power to help anyone. Again, how could he? Unless he was fighting some kind of super villain or invading army, this power is of no use. In a normal farming village, this power has no utility. In fact, just like super-hearing, it is a very threatening power. No one in the village could ever be sure that they are talking to or interacting with who they think they are. This character can impersonate anyone, male or female. So you can never be sure who anyone is, ever. This character could do anything he wanted and no one would ever know. Of course, this is a Disney movie, and this character never does anything bad. He doesn’t transform into all the men of the village and then have sex with all their wives. He doesn’t transform into the local banker and take all their money. He doesn’t turn into one person and then commit murder or go on a crime spree and have that person be blamed for it. But he could. He has the power and ability to do all that and more. And even in a Disney movie, you’d think regular people would see the problems of having a powerful shapeshifter living among them. How can you live your life when you never know who anyone is? But more to the point, as a shapeshifter, he never helps anyone. It’s not an ability that can be of any use to help the community. Yet, the abuela (and the movie itself) is supposed to be all about helping people.
Another character’s superpower is being perfect in every way and being able to create flowers out of nothing. She’s super beautiful and super graceful and perfect and can make flowers. But that’s it. But how does this help the villagers? It doesn’t. Apparently, she makes flowers for them when they want to have a party and celebrate something. And that’s nice. But it’s hardly really helping anyone.
Another character’s superpower is to control the weather. And you’d think this could help a farming village immensely. She could help them grow crops with just the right amount of rain and sunshine. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t do anything, in fact. All she does is create little rainstorms over her own head. When she is upset, it rains right on top of her own head. But that’s all she does. How does this help the villagers?
Another character’s superpower is the ability to predict the future. You’d think that could be very helpful, and he would help the villagers avoid all kinds of tragedy. But according to the events of the movie, he never does any of those things. He just goes around predicting that someone will get fat, someone else will go bald, and someone’s goldfish will die. He never predicts anything good. He never predicts something bad and then helps that person avoid that disaster. He doesn’t do anything to help anyone.
To me, this is a major flaw in the movie’s internal logic. If the whole premise of the movie is that this family’s destiny is to use their powers to help people, shouldn’t they have useful powers? Shouldn’t the writers have stopped for a moment in the writer’s room and tried to come up with super powers that were actually useful? A pretty standard super power is the ability to fly. And if a character had this ability, they could search for children that got lost or rescue people that are trapped on a mountain or at sea. At least you could argue that this was helping the community. And even if the super powers aren’t specifically designed to be helpful, shouldn’t the characters at least try to use their powers for good? Shouldn’t the writers have come up with a scene or two that shows the characters actually doing something to help someone?
Two of the characters do have useful powers. One is super strong. And she works very hard in the village with construction projects, fixing houses, moving houses, and even redirecting rivers. She also gets the best song of the movie: Surface Pressure.
And one character is a magical healer. And the movie does show her healing people. Yet, healing is an extremely problematic power to have. I’ve seen this explored in many books, movies, and TV shows. At first it seems like a great power. You can help people and heal them from any injury or disease. But in this case, you could argue that the healer in Encanto is being extremely selfish. She has this power to heal anyone. Yet, she only heals people in her family and in her village. And that’s it. Meanwhile, everyone knows that there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people all around the country and the world that are suffering, and she could try to heal them. But she doesn’t. She just stays in this one remote village and helps her husband when he is stung by bees. And she helps her daughter when she gets a little cut on her hand. She helps a villager when he breaks his arm. But if you have the power to heal anyone, surely it would occur to you that someone in the next village could use some help. Why not go visit that village and see if you can help someone? Why not go to the nearest big city? Why not go anywhere? It’s very selfish to use your power only for your own family and friends and neighbors in one small, remote village.
In any event, someone in the outside world would surely hear of this woman with the magical healing powers. And in no time, people from all over the world would descend on this village to be healed. The place would be overwhelmed. People would come and beg her for help or would offer her riches to heal them. And if she refused, they would kidnap her and take her to another country or city to force her to heal the king or some rich man or someone’s children. If you think back over history or fiction, healers performing miracles rarely come to a good end. As I was writing this, I remembered a related scene in Jonathan Livingston Seagull. If I remember right, there was a moment when the enlightened Jonathan touched a seagull with his wing and seemed to bring him back to life. And the seagull community instantly began to fear him as some kind of sorcerer or demon and they attacked him and drove him out of the community.
In an interesting twist, the healer in Encanto performs her healing through food. She will make a special food designed to heal the particular injury or disease. And when the person eats the food, they are cured. And it doesn’t take much thought to see that this is pretty much what witches have done throughout history: they whip up a magic potion in a cauldron. And witches rarely come to a good end, either. They always come under suspicion or come into conflict with the local church and end up feared and then killed or driven out of the community. As I said, it’s a troublesome power to have. It’s too great a power. In order to include it in a story, you have to put limits on it for it to make sense. Imagine if you are a magical healer and you embrace your destiny to help everyone you can, you would soon go insane. You could never take a break. There are just too many people suffering from injury or disease. You could never stop for a meal or even a cup of coffee. You’d feel too guilty. You would feel guilty going to sleep at night. All the time you are sleeping, there would be a lineup of tens of thousands of people waiting to be healed. Every second that you are NOT healing means that someone is suffering. You couldn’t possibly live that way for long. It would tear you apart, and if you ever tried to stop healing, other people would tear you to pieces. The only way for this power to work in a story is to put limits on it. But they don’t do that in Encanto, and it’s treated as just another party trick, like super hearing, shapeshifting, and the ability to make flowers.
That is just scraping the surface of the things that are wrong with the story in Encanto. I could go on with a dozen more big things. I guess it kind of bugs me that a movie could be this big and this expensive with so many hundreds of extremely talented people involved in making it, and still have such a flawed story. And then pretty much no one in the general viewing audience notices the problems or cares about them.