d u d e r n e t

Outstanding

Arguably the funniest show-biz couple out there, Amy Poehler and Will Arnett, lend their visages to Gap ads, which have apparently already started running back in the States.

Love the portrait... wish I could figure out who shot it.

The item in OK Magazine included this bit of hilarity from Poehler, discussing their holiday plans:

"We do what we always do — we rent a private jet and go up and then we call all our single friends and we say 'ha ha, how does it feel to be alone at Christmas?' and then we dump jet fuel into the ocean — but only where there are endangered species."

That's my kind of party. Ahem. Now I'll return to watching YouTube videos of Arnett on 30 Rock and the late, great Debbie Downer. Carry on.

Quite a packing conundrum

So, when I moved here, work paid for 250 pounds of boxed goodness (books, clothes, magazines, etc.) to be shipped from the U.S. It ran about $1,000 (via DHL), and involved a week's worth of hassle once it arrived on Thai soil, from clearing customs to paying duty to, finally, delivery.

Obviously, nobody is paying to ship all that stuff back. And now I've got decisions to make. I could employ an actual moving company, who would box everything up, fill out all the customs paperwork, ship it by air to California, then deliver it to mom's house and unpack everything. For $1,800.

At the other end of the financial spectrum, I could do some further purging, leave most of my books and many clothing items here, and take back just what fits in my two giant pieces of luggage.

The options in between are not much more desirable than those above. I could ship again with DHL (or with UPS; for some reason FedEx is way more expensive than either), but that would involve somehow buying and transporting boxes back to my condo, finding and filling out all sorts of paperwork, and crossing my fingers that everything would arrive in one piece. That'd run about $1,000, give or take. Using ThaiPost (the postal service) wouldn't cost much less and would take about three months, from what I've read.

So: Spend too much money with no hassle, spend a lot of money with plenty of hassle, or chuck what doesn't fit and pocket the savings?

As painful as it would/will be, I'm leaning towards the latter. What say you?

The value (and folly) of e-mail

Ponder this for a moment: You're in a completely different part of the world than you were yesterday. Every single person you held dear, from family to friends to coworkers to drinking buddies, resides thousands of miles away. What do you do, to maintain that lifeline? You e-mail.

Problem is, most of those people you hold dear get boatloads of e-mails every day. From other friends, from their own family, from readers, from other coworkers. So, yours gets buried in the Inbox, or shuffled off to another location. This isn't meant to be whiny, or surprised, or full of complaint. It just is.

And I'd be the same way. That's how friends fall out of touch, that's how when you move from one job to the next, and make promises like, "Oh, we won't lose touch. We'll e-mail all the time!" you deal with the upheaval. I am (or, was) the same way. You get a one-line e-mail from an out-of-town amigo, and think, "Well, this isn't too important, it's just one line!" Or you get a very lengthy e-mail from the same friend and think, "Phew, this is long! It's going to take me forever to write back!" and so it lingers.

But when you're in a place where phone calls cost lots of money (not to mention the double-digit time difference), and you can't just swing by somebody's desk to gossip, and you can't just text someone that you're at the bar down the street, e-mail means everything. I said to someone a month or so ago, "If e-mail didn't exist, I wouldn't have even considered moving here." What I didn't think about: It does, but it's so easy to ignore.

Some people get that, and I couldn't be more thankful for them. It's the others whose relationships I hope will be easier to rekindle once we reside in the same country again.

Also

Is it weird/obsessive that I feel the need to proofread my blog posts multiple times after publishing them?

(No, this is not an open invitation to point out all the errors that inevitably still creep through.)

Light, tunnel, etc.

I've got two weeks of work left here, and I can honestly say that I've never been so happy -- no, check that, thrilled -- to be walking away from a job. Now that it's down to a manageable 10 days, I feel like I can breathe a bit.

That isn't to say that this whole prospect of an unsure future isn't a little bit unsettling. Thoughts of the next six months or year keep me up some nights, but not in the same way that this job and this city were keeping me up the last couple months. More excitement than dread this time around.

Last night, I was reading Alexandra Robbins' book The Overachievers, about the pressure to overachieve in high school (and before) to do well in college (and beyond). I ordered it because I so enjoyed her book Conquering Your Quarterlife Crisis, which I read a few years back.

Anyway, it reminded me that I so identified with the latter concept that I e-mailed the author shortly after reading it. So I got up, fired up the computer and, sure enough, there was the e-mail from me to her, and her response, right there in the trusty Gmail archives. I was struck by how I was feeling that I should make this uncertain step a few years ago, and how a lot of the emotions I was feeling then about life and work (and the fact that those two things were synonymous) are the same ones that drove me in the last month or so to make the move out of here.

Selected bits of her note to me, that ring more true now, even, than then:

"If the most important thing in life is to be happy, and you need to make changes in your life to get there, then that's not throwing anything away at all. Forget about the past. That's done - you accomplished what you had hoped to. If you're not satisfied anymore, move on and start over, plugging away in a new direction, even if it means you have to start from scratch, if it's that important to you."

It is. She continues:

"I mean, you're 24. If you were 44 with kids to support and a mortgage to pay, then maybe this would require more analysis regarding your finances. But you don't have those ties. So if you can't take risks now, when are you going to take them? If you were to have everything in your life 'secure' at age 24, then what the heck are you going to do/strive for/learn over the next 50 years?"

And even though I'm, uh, not 24 any more, the point still rings true. If not now, when? Somehow, it's reassuring to me -- almost an endorsement of my plan -- that I've been thinking this same thing for the last three or four years.

Memorialize this

Drawback about this job: You get screwed out of holidays.

Today, for instance, is King Chulalongkorn Memorial Day.

It is a Tuesday, for the record. The office was full and bustling yesterday, which was Monday.

Today, the taxi rolls into the parking lot, and the only car is that of my boss. The office is deserted, lights are off, save for the magazine's little corner on the third floor.

So, as Americans working in Thailand, we work on the Thai holidays. That's fine. Thing is, we also work on American holidays. A couple months ago, we worked through Labor Day as our colleagues back home savored their long weekend celebrating that last weekend by the pool. Or the beach. Or whatever.

Just saying.

An exciting day in music

Two items of note today from across the pond (or, if you're where I am, across the... er... continent), especially if you're a fan of late-90s-era BritRock:

Oasis releases its first digital-only single, "Lord Don't Slow Me Down," for £0.99. I think it's outstanding, and I don't even really identify as an Oasis fan.

The Verve releases its first 14 minutes in the studio since 1997, for free via NME. I wouldn't call it terribly inspired, but it's nevertheless interesting to hear what studio time is like with the freshly-reunited Richard Ashcroft & Co.

Meanwhile, my list of concerts for the London trip is steadily growing, and has now, I believe, topped out: Arcade Fire, Pinback, the Weakerthans, the Hives, Babyshambles.

'God bless America and her gays'

Video from the Onion news network

Anchor: "How many soldiers' lives is the life of one gay man worth?"

Gen. McBrayer: "Seven."

Back from the beach

Before I drag myself from the couch to the (oh, sweet, heavenly, wonderful) bed, here's a handful of pictures from this weekend's trip to Koh Chang, about four hours south of Bangkok. It was an exhausting four days of work meetings (and two long and cramped car rides), but the hotel was gorgeous (though set up more for couples than co-workers) and the views even more so.

Call off the travel agents ...

... The Thailand Experiment is coming to an end.

Bangkok's not for me, and neither is this job, and both of those things have become painfully clear the last couple of weeks. So, my last day here will be in the middle of next month, and I'll be back in the States by December 1, give or take a few days (depending on how long I extend my London stopover on the way -- yes, I'm taking the long way back).

Before I left, my dear friend Amy told me to think of this as "a year abroad." Turns out, it's more like a quarter.

What am I going to do? I couldn't tell you. I do know I'm not going to work (at least in the traditional sense) for a while. I'm moving back home, to my mom's house in the beautiful Sierra foothills, and will take it easy and work on a few projects I've put off for years. And most importantly, I'll have the entire holiday season to share with family, which hasn't happened in a decade. It only took a miserable trip around the world to make that happen. Ah, well.

So, come December or January, if any of my Bay Area buddies find themselves driving up to Tahoe and want some company (or just a spot of coffee on the way), you'll know who to call.