explainer: I have needed a better format to talk about my travels and wanderings and suddenly had the idea to write some of my updates as letters, since all of my family and I are not all in the same place at the same time right now. I am always missing some of them, and I am always wanting to tell them things. maybe this will help me with that.
dear family,
I’m here in Thailand and most of you are in Australia and various other places. I miss you all a LOT. When I think about it too much, it’s too heavy and I start to tear up, like right now. I hope you know that every experience I have is immediately filtered into a list of things I want to tell you about.
Y’all know that I visited Vietnam recently (you saw the pictures and read my real-time group chat messages), but there are some details I will share more about since I didn’t have time to express all of it at the time. You know how I am, I take days and weeks to think through something for long enough to understand enough about it that I feel like I can share it with others.
I think in my next letter I will be able to talk more about what it was like to visit Vietnam and what I feel like I am keeping with me from that experience. I recorded a series of voice notes about it and I’ll use those to help me organize my thoughts later.
in the tropics
I keep forgetting that I’m staying in the tropics. The weather is tropical. The humidity and expected rainfall and the insects and reptiles and birds and plants, all tropical. Every time I go outside and am like, “wow it’s really fucking humid out here,” I have a delayed face-palm moment. I guess you can take the dragon out of Michigan but you can’t easily take Michigan out of the dragon, because my pasty-white cold-weather body is still gauging atmospheric weather data against all the decades of Michigan summer humidity and heat. Which is to say: it does not compare.
The humidity here feels like, to me, if you’ve gone into a bathroom where someone else was already running a very hot shower and the air was full of hot steam humidity. It feels like you could almost swallow it, it’s so thick sometimes. And any smells at all that are in the air are very apparent because they hang in the water droplets and you can almost taste them. Which is a little gross, especially because there is enough air pollution that the air often smells bad.
Sometimes I look out the window in the late afternoon and I see the pattern of clouds across the silvery sky and I think to myself, being here feels like being in a place where the sun is always a few hours away from setting, but it never really does. It does get dark — when the sun does set, it gets dark really quickly — but at two in the morning, there are birds that start singing. I don’t know why they’re up at 2am, but if I haven’t fallen asleep by then, it’s pretty difficult to get to sleep until they stop talking. Maybe it’s partly the light pollution; I’m sure that away from the city lights, it’s probably pitch black outside in the early morning hours. But here in Bangkok, even in the suburban areas away from the heart of the city, it’s light enough to read a book all night long. Even though my curtains are drawn, my bedroom is never fully dark. I’ve grown accustomed to it now and I don’t need my eye mask all the time to sleep, but for five or six weeks it was difficult to manage.
Yesterday Bee and I went to do banking and grocery errands, and discovered that one of the vine-y plants in the yard has shot out a single vine that is probably about seven or eight feet long now, growing directly toward the house, crawling across the tiled area where you’d park a car if you had one. (Thank goodness I don’t need to try and drive here, I would never get anywhere I was going because I’m not good at driving directly into traffic in the way most people do here.) The plants grow so quickly during this rainy season that it’s extremely apparent that plants are living things. It might be relatively slow motion, but that vine went from nothing to almost touching the wall of the house within a day or so.
Back to the humidity — even walking in the mall where there is air conditioning everywhere, if I walk too fast (which I tend to do without consciously realizing it), I end up sweating down the backs of my legs. The first time it happened, I was standing in line at the store to get a Thailand SIM card, and I was new enough to the environment that I could not figure out at first why there was a trickle of water sliding in a ticklish way down the back of my calf. My best advice: wear loose pants or shorts, bring your water and drink it, take breaks, and don’t do large bursts of activity in the middle of the day when it’s hottest. Even if you’re inside an air conditioned building. Additional advice: wear cotton or linen or maybe silk, because if the fabric covering your body isn’t breathable you’re going to feel sick a lot sooner.
how I’m occupying my time: Thai BLs, kpop, and language learning
I am still watching Asian dramas, and my current watchlists are almost entirely Thai BLs. There are some really good ones that were recommended to me by Ash, and I’ve also been working my way through dozens that I am finding as I comb through tags on Instagram and YouTube, and following links on MyDramaList and the extremely helpful World of BL website. I recently finished, among others: Not Me and The Eclipse, both of which tenderized me emotionally. Both of those dramas are in a small handful of things I’ve watched that give me the feeling of witnessing a great and terrible truth: something that I have also experienced, something that I crave, something that is deeply true, something that is heartbreaking, something that is worth sacrificing for. I don’t know how to describe this using one or two words. I just know how it makes me feel.
If anyone thinks Thai BLs are only fluff, just wait for the gut punch when you finally watch one that hits you directly in the place your heart already aches.
this month’s kpop is almost Too Much but that won’t stop me
When I’m not working on logistics for the family, I’m listening to my monthly playlist, which this month is top-heavy with new music from ENHYPHEN (DESIRE: UNLEASH), Stray Kids (Hollow), and ATEEZ (GOLDEN HOUR: Part.3). If you’re a Spotify person, you can follow those links to the albums there, and in the sidebar here on my website you’ll see my current On Repeat playlist which right now is going to include a lot of this new music.
catch me learning Welsh, Mandarin, and Thai all at the same time (I mean, I’m trying to)
I recently stopped using Duolingo after over 600 days of continuous practice. I started out learning Cymraeg (Welsh), and shifted to Mandarin about a year ago, but I realized that I do not have even the slightest bit of conversational literacy in either language, which I think is because of the way that Duolingo approaches learning. Which is to say, I am not learning anything much.
I started using the Hanly app to help me learn the hanzi (Chinese characters) because I couldn’t understand them at all in Duolingo, and after about a month I already understood a few fundamentals so well that I was able to read some characters based only on my memory; which was one more reason to drop Duolingo, because something that takes an average of 30-40 intensive learning minutes a day but doesn’t result in practical understanding is not worth keeping.
There are other reasons I decided not to use Duolingo going forward, including their disappointing decision to stop developing the Welsh language course and discontinuing working alongside the National Centre for Learning Welsh. I don’t like their use of AI in the context of language learning, especially since so much of how we understand and use language is contextual and subjective, which AI can’t replicate.
in conclusion, I have lunch to eat and chores to do
By the time I’ve finished editing a photo and posting this, it’ll be past lunch time, but right now I need to eat and help with chores. Even when the world is topsy-turvy or literally burning, I still have the privilege of having food that I can eat for lunch, and we still need to keep the cat fluff cleaned up, so off I go.
xox,
Nix
epilogue:
I’m watching Feud, which is a currently-airing Chinese historical drama (high fantasy), starring Joseph Zeng and Bai Lu. This is the end credits song, 对你说 (Say to You), sung by Joseph Zeng. It’s so delicate and heartbreaking.
featured image is a photo I took of Ash cat in our sunny catio yesterday afternoon
