The Translation App is a Poet
A faulty deck of cards, a sore wrist, and an accidental proverb that might be the truest thing I’ve ever heard.
“Hasty behavior leads to misdemeanor…”
Forgotten from March 18, 2025
We’ve just spent a week doing absolutely nothing on the Thai island of Koh Yao Noi in Phang ur Nga Bay next to the Andaman Sea. Coffee, reading, massages, walks on the beach, cocktails, dinner. Repeat. That was our whole itinerary—and we earned it. Well, Jen earned it.
Jennifer is an international superstar when it comes to Pilates, and she travels the world teaching her techniques to other instructors. It started in Japan way back in 2008 or so and eventually grew to Korea, China, and Thailand and beyond. She’s taught in Europe and in Moscow once — I doubt we’ll be going there again anytime soon. As with any of our business successes, there is an element of skill (Jen) mixed with random accidents and happenstance, and our willingness to grab any opportunity and do our best to turn it into something. Our business motto is, “Hope for the best.” That’s the entirety of our business plan. And sometimes it really works.
These trips can be difficult to organize, but we’ve figured it out over the years and now everything runs like a fairly well-oiled machine. In the old days, either the grandparents would come and stay with the kids while we were gone, or Jen would sometimes go off by herself. With the nest empty and my ability to do the majority of my work from wherever, it’s now no problem for us to head out together for as long as we want.
Covid shut this part of our business down completely. We weren’t able to hold international courses from 2020 until Jen dipped her toes back into Japan and Thailand in 2024. We did some livestream events during that break, but for movement, there’s nothing like a live course. So this year we planned a big trip. Beijing, Nanjing, and Xiamen in China, and then a week of nothing on a beach, and then two more courses in Bangkok to finish things off. We’ll be gone for 7 weeks or so, all in.
Jen works like a dog on these trips. She teaches two courses in each city, eight hours per day for seven days straight. Then there’s a travel day to the next city, and then she starts it all over again the day after we get there. It is a grueling and brutal schedule for her. Add to that the difficulties of teaching students who don’t speak your language, and it can be draining and stressful. The key component of these courses (other than Jen) is the translator. And make no mistake, Jen doesn’t need an interpreter, she needs a translator. These courses are technical, and there are lots of anatomy and medical terms. You don’t want someone putting their own spin on what you’re saying in this case. It has to be precise. They need to say exactly what Jen’s saying. It isn’t an easy job, but Lost in Translation is not what you want in this situation. On the other hand, Jen freaking loves her work and the students can tell.
China was strange and great as it always is. The number of cameras and security guards per square foot is astonishing. The number of walls topped with barbed wire hiding upper-class apartment buildings is impressive. From the moment you get your photo taken when entering the country, you can feel pretty confident that your face is being tracked through every intersection and crosswalk by some AI overlord, no matter where you go. But honestly, none of this feels all that oppressive. We’re humans, and we’re adaptable to just about anything. You deal with what the situation calls for. I mean, look, if you’re in China, you don’t want to have loud conversations about Tiananmen Square, Tibet, Uyghurs, or Taiwan. You also don’t want to have quiet conversations about any of that on WeChat, which is monitored by the state. Everyone uses VPNs, but they’re technically illegal. And if you use one to access BBC, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, you may be asking for trouble. The point is - there is an entire massive population of people just like us living in this situation - and it’s possible within that to be happy and productive and creative. The friends we’ve made there are warm, fun, are building businesses, and they seem to be doing whatever they want to do. As long as your happiness, productivity, and creativity don’t cross a line. And that’s the problem. Knowing there’s a line automatically infringes on your happiness, productivity, and creativity. Unfortunately, I think we’re all going to be learning that lesson in a big way soon enough. Or perhaps we’re already there. (We’re already there.)
The studios Jen teaches at are never in tourist areas, so English is non-existent, almost as non-existent as our Chinese. I very much wish I were one of those people who could pick up languages easily. I always feel so dumb and so American when we travel. Assuming everyone in the world knows English is a pretty decent assumption since everyone in the world seems to have better education systems than ours, but it is also an absolutely rude assumption that I don’t like to make. We always learn three words, which are usually enough to get by anywhere in the world. Hello. Please. Thank you. We need to add “I’m sorry” to our lexicon. We’re also quite adept at pointing at things.
The language apps are amazing, but they don’t always work as expected. My favorite translation weirdness of the trip was when I accidentally called a young male waiter “sweetie,” which confused him a bit. It was a bit too obvious for my liking that he wasn’t into me. Then I got this message on WeChat from one of the translators about some snafu, “Oops. Sorry, Mr. Gianni - hasty behavior leads to misdemeanor…”
Hasty behavior leads to misdemeanor is my new favorite saying. It is something I’ve lived. So now I know how ancient Chinese proverbs are written. By the translator function inside WeChat.
While Jen teaches her courses, I spend the majority of the day editing video in the hotel room or a coffee shop. I brought four Pilates workshops to edit as well as some projects for a client in Asheville, and that has been plenty to keep me busy. On some trips, I go out and explore a little, but because of how many days in a row and how many cities we’re doing, the guilt of knowing how much harder Jen was working kept me at the computer all day, every day. I got a lot done. But not as much as Jen did.
At the end of these courses, it’s always the same. There is an immense outpouring of gratitude from the students to Jen, and there is an immediate and urgent invitation from the studio owner for her to come back. I’m very proud of Jennifer for being so awesome at what she does and I’m sincerely proud of the businesses we’ve built together. I’m impressed over and over again by what Jen does. It’s something I could never ever do, and I like knowing and hanging out with people who can do things I could never do. If I had a choice, I’d only know people who can do things I can’t.
I didn’t set out to be a partner in a Pilates empire. My problem is, I’ve tried and have been unable to make a living at anything I truly enjoy, and frankly, I’m just not very money-motivated. I mean, I like having some money lying around - but I’m not willing to do just anything for it. Leaving the film business was the worst financial move of my lifetime. I was shoveling money into our bank account like an engineer in a runaway coal train back then. But I just don’t have the patience for jobs like that. You know - jobs that demand your time and energy, where you have to answer to someone, and where someone up the chain receives most of the reward for your hard work. I’m not built for that. Neither is Jennifer. So when I quit the film business and we moved to Asheville, the decision was that since Jen likes what she does, I’d just find a way to help her do her stuff, and we’d figure out how to make enough money to live on. The studio, Jen’s teaching, our continuing education website, and my little video production company have somehow been enough to send two kids to college and keep us afloat. But I notice that our daughters have no interest whatsoever in being entrepreneurs - and I think that tells us that they’ve seen the ups and downs and the inability to budget when you don’t know what’s coming in and the stress of every single thing being your problem and they’re like, “um… nope.” I don’t blame them. But we’ll see what they say after working for a company for a few years! There’s a phrase that self-employed people love. “Work 80 to avoid 40.” It’s a favorite of mine, too. I’m fine working double to avoid working a nine-to-five and to avoid having a boss. Because another favorite phrase is, “You’re not the boss of me.” Just thinking about an imaginary boss makes me want to punch that imaginary boss in the face.
The point is, Jen deserved a week of doing nothing on a gorgeous island. I didn’t deserve it, but I certainly didn’t complain and did a whole bunch of nothing right beside her. I may have even done more nothing than she did. Jen’s reading a book called Four Thousand Weeks. It’s sort of a self help book which is a genre I loath, but she’s been reading me short quotes now and then which I enjoy the same way someone enjoys horoscopes— we love it when something seems relatable to us personally even when it’s relatable to everyone and therefore in no way special. But the book seems to be about what we’ve been obsessed with since we turned 50. It’s about time, how you use time, how much time we waste, and how important it is to not use all your time to get ahead in the useless ways that getting ahead has come to mean in our society. We’re pretty good at unplugging, but with the extra nudge these little quotes were giving us, we unplugged like a mofo. We woke up whenever, got some coffee, walked the beach, read by the pool, got a snack, read by the pool, got dinner and some drinks, played some cards, and repeated that every single day. We went on no excursions, we did no sightseeing, we didn’t go to James Bond Island, we didn’t go snorkeling, we didn’t climb the mountain, we didn’t go on a boat tour, and we didn’t feel bad about that at all. There’s a fear of missing out that kicks in when you’re in a place where there are things that everyone does when they go there. “Oh shit, are we not going to get that Instagram photo that a million people have already gotten?!” You feel that you should do all of the things that you’re supposed to do. We sometimes have that problem. Not this time.
Okay, I guess there were a couple of excursions. Jen is a big fan of Thai massage (and any other type of massage or spa treatment you can think of), so there were a few days when she went off to do that. I took this as my cue to grab the scooter and explore the island a little.
There’s nothing I like better than to go get lost in a strange place on any sort of two-wheeled transportation. I ended up on a rough little trail that I should not have been on, passing through old dilapidated rubber plantations, passing little huts, and then the trail narrowed and became almost impassible, and I was in the middle of the jungle and pretty much lost. And I thought to myself, “I am in a super weird spot at this moment in time, and I feel absolutely safe.” And what I think I meant was - “I am a white male who was born in America and I feel absolutely safe anywhere I’ve ever been and I always have and likely always will.” If I didn’t have so many women in my life, I wouldn’t have even given it a second thought. But I do. And my daughters have told me stories about certain gas stations they won’t go to, or grocery stores where they don’t feel safe, and my reaction is always— “What the hell are you talking about?” There’s a term for being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes, being able to understand that their experience may be completely different from yours, and having empathy for what they go through even when you don’t quite understand it. One term for this is being woke. From what I hear, that’s illegal now. Which reminds me, I’m working on a little art project where I’m finding sitcom equivalents to the current administration cabinet. If you have anything to add - let me know in the comments.
On my scooter ride, I’d found two secret beaches down some little dirt trails. Our first big trip together was to Thailand back in 1999 or so. On that trip, we’d rented some little motorcycles, and when we were in Phuket, we’d seen a little sandy trail off the side of the road. We went down it, which Jen immediately (correctly) flagged as a mistake. We got stuck a few times, but once you invest like that in something like that, it’s foolhardy and unforgivable to turn around. At the end of the trail was an amazing lean-to bar that served beer and cocktails, and some simple food. It was obvious that this little paradise was stocked solely by boat, and all of the other ten or so patrons had arrived by boat as well. There is something special about finding a place like this by accident. We spent many hours there, and it was the highlight of our entire trip. We’ll never forget it. In that spirit, I wanted to show Jen the secret beaches I’d found. She agreed and hopped on the back of the scooter, and off we went. The trail was rougher and tougher to manage two up, but we made it. We walked around for a few minutes, and admittedly, it didn’t have the magic of the original secret beach. So we headed back, and on the way down a steep hill, I screwed the pooch and we had a bit of a mishap. Meaning, I crashed the scooter. Jen reached out to brace herself and banged her wrist on the speedometer, and she banged it pretty hard. My first thought was, “This isn’t going to bode well for Jen wanting to do the Tuk Tuk race.” My second thought was, “Babe, I’m so sorry! Are you okay?!” Just being honest. We all think about ourselves first, don’t even try to lie about it. Jen is a very good sport, but she didn’t want to see my second secret beach find. I don’t blame her. Hasty behavior leads to misdemeanor.
So we went back to the hotel, cleaned up a bit, and went to our favorite eating and drinking joint a few blocks away. They had a little wooden boat with little twinkle lights sitting up on a bank above the ocean that you could hang out in, and for some reason, that had become our little spot. The bartender was nice and the food was great. We played some cards while sipping mango mojitos like we’d done several times before.
Suddenly, I realized that something was wrong with our game of Rummy. The deck didn’t feel quite right when I was shuffling. The cards I needed were just not showing up and hadn’t been. I counted the cards and, for the first time, we realized that we were playing with a 33-card deck. We laughed and kept playing. You take what you’re given and you do the best you can with it. We are absolutely comfortable not playing with a full deck. So much so that we hardly notice. That’s our default.
Great writing.
My takeaway would be "Love conquers all"
Could’ve done without that picture of Kosher Heydrich or Dollar Store Goebbels, whatever perjorative term fits him these days.
Great essay!