Saturday, April 30, 2022
4:08 p.m. Room 1102, Phannu House
Mae Sot, Thailand
This is a rare time when I’ve fired up my laptop in the afternoon instead of in the evening. And that’s largely because I had a small project to work on when I first woke up. A friend of mine works as a freelance translator in Taiwan. She translates English novels to Chinese, and from time to time, she sends a few questions my way when she isn’t familiar with certain English expressions, particularly when those have to do with slang or contain cultural references. Being from Canada, I’d be more familiar with things like that. I really enjoy answering her questions. It’s interesting to try to see the English sentences and vocabulary and cultural references through her eyes and help her understand what they mean and how best to translate them.
This time, she is working on a kind of police procedural and murder-mystery thriller novel written by a well-known Australian author. In the past, I might even read the entire book so as to better understand her questions. This time, I didn’t have time to do that, and I simply referred to the pages in the book that contain the phrases she is trying to translate. She sent me a set of questions yesterday, and then a second set in the evening. My idea was to wake up in the morning when I was as fresh as possible and tackle the second set of questions right away. There were a couple of items in her first set of questions that even I didn’t understand. There was a reference to a hairstyle called a “moonie”, for example. She didn’t know what that was. And I’m afraid that I didn’t know either. I tried to find out, but I couldn’t find information about this online either. I have no idea what a moonie looks like, and I couldn’t help her with that.
The second set of questions were actually much easier than the first, and I wasn’t having any difficulty phrasing my answers. Unfortunately, I appear to be much less skilled (even now) when it comes to working on this MacBook and navigating the complexities of Microsoft OneDrive. My friend sent me her questions as Microsoft Word files attached to an email. And when I clicked on them, they were opened automatically in a web browser Window, and they were saved to my OneDrive account. At least that is what happened with the first set of questions. I didn’t do any of this deliberately, I should say. I get confused about how OneDrive works sometimes. And in this case, I just tried to open the file on my computer, and then it saved it to OneDrive and opened it in a web browser automatically. I didn’t choose to do it at all. And when I started working on the second set of questions this morning, I was just going along on the assumption that the same thing was happening. But then at one point, I went back to my email inbox to double check something, and when I tried to go back to my document, the browser window had been closed. And everything I had written was gone! I had answered nearly every question in her list. I think there were just two left. But all my work had vanished. Apparently, when I opened this attached Word file, it opened it right inside my email inbox somehow. In fact, this browser-based Word file replaced my email page. And when I went back to my inbox, the Word file closed, and nothing I had written was saved. When I opened it again, it was just the original file with just her questions and none of my answers. I looked everywhere to find a copy of this file that had been saved to OneDrive. But it simply wasn’t there. I spent some time looking around and I tried everything I could think of, but I eventually had to conclude that the file simply didn’t exist, and I would have to start over.
Luckily, redoing the whole file wasn’t a large task. All I needed to do was type out and then edit and proofread my answers a second time. I didn’t need to redo any research or reread any sections of the book. All the knowledge was already in my head. Therefore, doing all this the second time was quite a bit faster than when I did it the first time. Even so, it was quite frustrating to lose all that work AND not understand how I had lost it. I still don’t understand what happened. When I wrote my answers to the second set of questions for the second time, I made sure to do so in a file that I KNOW was saved to my computer. I didn’t dare trust Microsoft’s OneDrive to do it for me. Right now, in fact, my online life is a bit of a mess. I have documents spread out between Microsoft OneDrive and Google Drive, and I never quite know which document is where or exactly how it got there. I have a foot in both worlds, and I don’t know how to separate them and use just one of them.
After I finished answering the translation questions, I replied to a few comments on my latest YouTube video. I was a little bit on edge about that. I posted two videos as Premieres last night. And I was not happy with either video. The first video was the last video in my Sukhothai Series. And the second video was the first video in the Loop Series. I wasn’t even going to post the Sukhothai video as a premiere originally, simply because it wasn’t that important. In the video, I just have a bowl of videos and drop by a camera store. Nothing very interesting or important happens. I was going to post it and make it public, but I thought there was no point in making it a Premiere. A Premiere really isn’t a big deal. It’s just a video with a chat window. Yet, because of the word Premiere, it still feels like this treatment should be reserved for only the most important videos. But I decided that I would use it as a kind of prelude to the main Premiere, which was my first video from the Loop Series.
But I was quite uncomfortable while the Loop Series video played as well. Perhaps it was just my mood, but it seemed like a terrible video. It felt super slow and super boring, and I was kind of embarrassed as it played. I kept thinking that anyone watching it must be bored out of their minds and must be wondering why I would bother making such a long and slow and boring video. And I also felt that it was confusing. I had deliberately not recorded any video of that scooter trip as a scooter trip. I didn’t want to make videos about my planning and preparations and packing. Nor did I want to make any videos about actually riding the scooter from Mae Sot to my first destination. My idea was to skip all that and just make interesting videos about interesting places. So, the video opens with me already inside my bungalow at Ban Tha Song Yang.
And when I watched the video myself before the Premiere and listened to me talk, I thought the video was okay. I was engaged by what I was saying and by the story I told. And then I was engaged by the actual climb up to the top of the hill and the visit to the riverside. I thought the video was okay. In fact, I had such confidence in the video that I included a long, nearly silent sequence of just my feet and legs as I walked back down the trail. I don’t know what possessed me to do that, but I remember editing the video and thinking that I could include a kind of musical sequence of me walking down the trail while holding the GoPro at an unusual angle to capture just my feet. And then at the last minute, I decided to NOT include any music. I really liked the sound of my feet going over rocks and crunching leaves. And rather than worry about how much of this video sequence to include, I just threw it all in. I included most of it. And when I watched it myself during the editing process, I thought it was fine.
But then came last night as the video played as a Premiere, and I was conscious of other people watching it. Meanwhile, my attention was centered mainly on the chat window as I chatted with people. I only saw the video out of the corner of my eye and only heard myself speaking with part of my brain. And at that time, the video seemed supremely awful. For one thing, it was confusing. It had no establishing shots at all. Where was I? Why was I in this room? Why was I just sitting on the floor and talking and talking and talking into the camera? It was so confusing. Meanwhile, I was shooting with the Panasonic G85 for the first time in months, and I had no idea what I was doing. The camera was going in and out of focus all the time. The field of view was really tight on my face. The exposure was dark. And it was jumpy and jittery because I hadn’t turned on full stabilization. Plus, it sounded awful because I wasn’t even using my normal microphone. I was using the internal mics on the camera, and every time the fan went by, it blew air into the mic and drowned out the sound. It was truly awful, and I was mentally screaming at myself in the video to shut up and just show something interesting. Get on with the video. Quit talking.
And then the video suddenly jumped ahead to the next morning. And this was confusing also because at the time when I was there, I decided to just restart the entire video. I thought the opening sequence in the bungalow was so boring and confusing that I wasn’t even going to use it. I was going to delete it all and forget it ever happened. And so, the next morning, I started a fresh video as if the previous day hadn’t even happened, and I repeated a lot of the things I said in the first video. But later on when I edited the video, I decided to actually include some of the earlier stuff from the previous day, and then it got completely mixed up as I repeated some things but not others. Now it felt even more confusing. Where was I? Was this in the evening? In the morning? Was this taking place on the same day? A different day? It wasn’t clear at all. The whole video was a mess.
And then I set off on my scooter to climb the hill I had picked out, and on the way, I talked about Ken Abroad’s video and about some other topics. And then I had no idea how to find the trail to the top of the hill, so I ended up riding all around the hill on my scooter with no clear idea of where I was going or why I was recording this on video. And while this video was playing during the Premiere, I was mentally screaming at myself in the video to just quit babbling. And I pictured people watching the video thinking, “Where is Doug going?” “Why is he just going around in circles on his scooter?” “What is he talking about?”
And then I started climbing up the trail, and I had no idea what I was doing with the Panasonic G85 camera. It was out of focus the entire time. It was waving around all over the place. It was too tight on my face. The exposure was way off. I couldn’t hold it steady because it was too heavy, and it was really shaky because I hadn’t turned on full stabilization. Meanwhile, I was breathing heavily because I was trying to climb up a very steep trail while holding a heavy camera and while talking the entire time. And I was breathing in and out like I was running a marathon with sixty pounds on my back. I sounded like a locomotive roaring into the microphone.
And there is nothing visually interesting in the video for a very long time. It’s just my sweaty face and the tight trail around me with the trees and leaves. Eventually, there is a little bit of scenery as I get high enough to show the village below and the river and the mountains in Myanmar. But it is very little too late, and the next thing in the video, I’m at the simple chedi at the top and talking endlessly about that while showing nothing clearly. I was mentally still screaming at myself in the video to get on with it and move faster. Do something. Show something interesting.
Eventually, I moved around to the front of the chedi, and finally there was a little bit of interesting video of the wide scenery shots of the village and the river and mountains. But it was far too little and far too late. And the next thing I knew, I was staring at what felt like eight hours of just my feet. And I started to wonder what kind of insanity possessed me to think it was a good idea to include eight hours of just silent video of my sandaled feet going down a trail. I guess when I edited the video, I thought it was fascinating. I thought it was artistic or atmospheric or something. But during the Premiere last night, watching it on my laptop was one of the most painful experiences of my life. I just cringed throughout.
I was hoping that the sequence down by the river would salvage the video a bit. I had memories of that video sequence being quite beautiful and even interesting with all the boats buzzing around. But by this point, I was so bored by my own video that all I saw was just how long this section of the video dragged on and on and on and on. What was I talking about all this time? I have no idea. I just started praying for this video to be over. It felt like an hour and ten minutes of the most excruciatingly boring video ever created by the human race. That is how it felt to me. I was desperate for this video Premiere to end. And I started to dread the rest of the videos in the Loop Series. If this first video was this long and boring, how bad were the other videos going to be?
And the crowning pain came from the knowledge of just how long and hard I had worked on this video and the other videos in the Loop Series. I know how many hours went into editing and uploading these videos. It was so much work – work that went on for days and weeks. And THIS was the result? THIS was the best I could do? I was not feeling good about my YouTube efforts last night. That is for sure. And that mood carried over to this morning. And that’s partially why I was eager to ignore YouTube and dive instead into helping my friend with her translation project. I wanted to do something else and pretend for the moment that YouTube didn’t exist and that that Premiere with eight hours of nothing but feet had never happened. It probably wasn’t quite as bad as it seemed to me. But it certainly wasn’t good.
My reluctance to engage with YouTube continued throughout today. I did fight it off for a little while. In fact, I started shooting a new video. My plan was to go to the fancy Chimney restaurant for lunch, and I was going to feature the place in a video. I even shot the opening here at Phannu House and I shot a sequence in which I looked at the Google Maps listing and looked at the photographs of their dishes. And then I shot some video as I walked to Chimney. I’d gotten all my cameras prepared, and I had the G85 in my hand and the GoPro on my chest harness. But when I got to Chimney, I just turned around and left. I just couldn’t go inside with my cameras. I wasn’t in the mood. I didn’t feel like I had anything to say. Plus, it was incredibly hot and uncomfortable, and the restaurant looked crowded. Everything just felt wrong, and I decided to abandon the whole thing.
And the rest of the day has been spent on a variety of YouTube-related projects.