"We Have Some Catching Up To Do..."

So much has happened over the last five days that contemplating how to write about it leaves me breathless with anxiety. The weekend's events seem retrospectively less glamourous after the momentous adventures of the top of the week, but some highlights lend themselves to description (I'm sorry I couldn't render all of this in cxl480 because I don't have a 560iMachineBox-Pro 8* but I'm dealing with 4.67 pendisc from the mid 2000s and it's like "Back to the Stone Age!"  If you can't follow my jargon you're probably not my friend on facebook/gmail/blogger/twitter/twatter/blotter/blitter/blatter anyway so whatever.)

On Saturday, my sister and I explored the Khao San Road district of Bangkok in the late afternoon and early evening. Khao San Road is known as a haven for young hipsters from around the world and if the T-shirts on offer in some of the stalls were any indication, such a reputation appears entirely accurate. I saw an Imperial Stormtrooper holding an umbrella on a t-shirt in once such stall. Mere minutes later I saw some paleface wearing the shirt and deduced that he had just bought ironic Star Wars memorabilia in the heart of the Jade Empire of Southeast Asia.

Perhaps my years living "Check Your Privilege" atmosphere of UC Berkeley has fatally buttressed my carefully nursed white self-hatred. But Bill Hicks' line about the "whiny white pieces of shit" inhabiting the cast of "Thirtysomething" came into my head over and over again despite the fact that most of the travelers moving about Khao San Road are probably just perfectly agreeable Norwegians, Germans, Canadians, Americans just like me.

Tangential to my own insecurities are some observations about race in Thailand. Based on media representations I have caught on billboards, street advertisements, and the haunting telescreens that dominate Bangkok's Sky Train transit system, it appears that the more Chinese a Thai looks, the better. That is, light is right in Thailand just as in the U.S. or Brazil or seemingly anywhere in the world. I have begun to understand Southeast Asia interpolates the paler East Asia with the darker South Asia.

An exhilarating nighttime Tuk Tuk ride through Bangkok's metropolitan archipelago carried my sister and I to the Ratchethewi neighborhood we had read was the chosen destination of "young Thais in the know." Experiencing a district teeming with the budding cognoscenti that attend Bangkok's universities imbued me with a frightening vision of a future increasingly overtaken by neon regalia and the features of an endless, infinite shopping mall.