White Lotus Tsunami Happy Ending Thai Massage

If the story arc of Season 3 had a shape, it would be a tsunaaaaami, and it would have a gentile southern lady’s accent, thanks to Parker Posey.

Hi. I’m Desiree Sanchez. “La Voz del GenX.” That’s what Dr. Nutmeg calls me, so I’d take that moniker with a grain of salt to scrub the eczema on my palms…it’s so itchy! I know my gut is telling me to cut wine, dairy, coffee, processed foods (and peanut butter?), but I only managed to cut dairy — oh except for that cream cheese on my toasted bagel. So good. Shit. Gluten’s gonna cause another flair up, plus I barely slept. My whole system felt out of whack, probably perimenopause again as a couple of huge zits on my chest keep appearing and disappearing every month. Last week was clear and lucid. This week is groggy, unmotivated, and tired. Oh, and a little bit sad. I’m missing friends more than ever after watching the finale of The fucking White Lotus. Yeah, the 3 Frenemies storyline struck me hard. Laurie’s final teary monologue. Whew. Sums up all the other characters’ monologues for me, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about the “shape of the narrative” cuz I’m a geek and I wanted to visualize writer Mike White’s story structure. I had a hunch that it was shaped like a tsunami because it’s such a huge metaphor and visual in Episodes 2 and 3. I started Googling “tsunami-shaped story arc” and found this amazing book Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative describing all the different ways a story’s plot can mimic nature. Simultaneously, I was reading all the Reddit commentary about #Waaaa, this season is sooooo sloooow, I’m too Westernized and Tik-Toked to pay attention to something for an hour, every week, when is something going to happen? Meanwhile, everyone from The View to The Cut to Vulture to Instagram stories to YouTube marketing videos — couldn’t stop talking about the 3 frenemies.

Woah, just look at that unintentional tsunami-shaped camera work!

If you know how to read film, and if you clicked above, you’ll see that I know film, I have a MASTER’S degree in it (haha), although as you can see I hardly knew how to work the settings of my Black Magic camera. Regardless, I’ve been super snobby about the Westerners complaining that this Season was too slow. Me over here? I literally learned how to watch sloooow Eastern European cinema in Prague over the course of four months. This slow burn SHITe is my jam. Plus, I visited Thailand in 2004, and hadn’t really thought about my time there in ages, so I was EXTRA obsessed.

Anyways, back to why this TV series has me feeling all perimenopausal this week.

In Episode 3, the 3 frenemies storyline took a back seat for me as the fabulously lethargic Victoria Ratliff (Parker Posey) has a dream about a tsunaaaaami crashing down on her as she stands in front of her columned mansion in North Carolina. Her husband appears, but he just stands there “and does nothing.” I swear to you, I had almost the same dream exactly one year ago in 2024. In fact, I posted about it on LinkedIn, and yes, I knew it was cringe to show my eccentric side on a platform designed for corporate proprieties, but I took the “plunge” and posted about the dream because it was so clearly related to the anxiety and huge transition I was about to experience as a new web developer in my hometown. So I thought. This is what I wrote last May:

Since I started my new job a month ago, my dreams have become a streaming platform of horror movies. I call it Nutflix (altho I just found out that’s a diff kind of platform 😂)!!🥁

One night I was swimming among sharks. Another night a tsunami was crashing down on me. The visuals are quite literal: 
I am scared. Overwhelmed. 
Afraid of f**king up, especially “at my age” cuz I’m supposed to be seasoned, professional, mature, poised, and role modeling for my sobrinas and hijastra.

I already knew from experience that the tsunami dream is one of the big ones in the collective unconscious so I waited to see if I could connect and sure enough, my new Latinas in Data comadre commented, “Its a good sign depending on the color of the water.” She also wrote that she had the tsunami dream, too. Given my uber anxious and unsettled state of mind, it wasn’t possible for me at the time to see the tsunami as a “good sign” and I didn’t remember the color of the water. I just knew that it was dark, and about to swallow me whole like “The Nothing” in the Neverending Story. And I’ve got a theory that writer Mike White’s tsunami-shaped tale is a larger allegory for us Westerners.

But first a word from our sponsor! Dr. Nutmeg created a game out of this meandering rant I just wrote. She used AI to create some data visualizations of The White Lotus tsunami narrative arc and wants you to create and share your own!

Dr. Nutmeg’s Data Viz Game

Hola, Femmebots! Welcome back to The “Latinas in Tech TV Show.” I’m Dr. Nutmeg, your hostess, and tonight’s episode is coming to your inbox LATE because sometimes Latinas be stereotypical... and as you can see, our guest patient Desiree has been overthinking the narrative shape of The White Lotus Season 3. TBH, I was like, “Why did you miss the Monday night deadline? Where is this going? Will anyone find this meandering stream of consciousness entertaining? Can we turn this into a working meeting, porfa?”

So I came up with a game for our audience of Femmebots using Infogram’s new built-in AI apps to create a data visualization of the story arcs presented in the book “Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative,” where story arcs can take the shape of nature:

• The radial or explosion — all the action revolves around a major event that has already occurred. Sounds like The White Lotus Season 3!

• The ripple — a story is slowly nudged along by each rippling small wave. Hmm. That sounds like The White Lotus Season 3, too!

• The cell structure — requires the reader to make the connections between people and events because the writer doesn’t make them. Is that also The White Lotus? Geez, what do I know. I’m just a silly mad scientist overusing an SEO phrase.

• The tsunaaaaaaami — described as a combination of the ripple and the cell structure — Oh! Ay! Now I’ve got a mad scientist theory brewing:

If The White Lotus Season 3 story arc had a shape, it would be a tsunaaaaami, and it would have a gentile southern lady’s accent, thanks to Parker Posey.

If you’ve watched Season 3 in its entirety, I wonder if you also see this tsunami shape of ripple, ripple, drip, drip, brew the drama slowly and quietly underneath the surface for six, one-hour-long episodes (to the chagrin of annoyed Reddit commentators) for two whole months. Writer Mike White strang us along with ripples of plot until BOOM! SPLASH! CRASH! Episode 7 finally magnetized all the characters and storylines into one, satisfying karmic scene that felt like a tragic Thai massage happy ending.

I know what all you Femmebots are saying in the audience: So what? Who cares about the shape of a story? What’s a tragic Thai massage happy ending? I thought this was a “Latinas in Tech TV show?” Entertain me, clown! Or at least educate me…

OK, OK, bueno, fiiiiiiine, I’ll get to the point:

1. IF you didn’t already know, storytelling is EVERYTHING when building new tech (or new anything). Whether it’s architecting the user journey of an app, selling the app to a user, or showing an audience of investors that YOU are the right person to build your app for a market you’ve defined, the story needs to be tight.
   
   And guess what? The shape of your story doesn’t have to be linear. It can meander or ripple or spiral — as long as you find a way to hook your audience. In the case of The White Lotus, the characters of Season 3 hook us week after week with slow-burn scenes that explore their relationship dynamics. Between episodes, our collective brains replay their dialogue in memes: “Saxon, honey, what’s with all the racket?” or “I just had a massage, you’re setting me back!”
   
   Reprogramming Femmebots here at The FACTory is similarly a non-linear process that starts and stops in ripples, according to time, energy, and resources, so the shape of our story here has been a spiral.

2. Infogram will generate a timeline (above) based on a text prompt like this: “Show the evolution of The White Lotus characters over the span of one week.” Of course, I added my own background graphic and moved all the ripples into a spiral shape, so if you feel inspired, create one and share it with other Femmebots!

3. Speaking of spirals, in Episode 2 of Model Ricans, we established the narrative structure as a spiral, “where a story twirls in circles until the main character has made a final decision.” What is the decision we are waiting for Desiree to make? To stop running. She is an unreliable narrator whose thoughts and memories are not linear. Her story seems to start in 1985 but jumps to 2019 in an effort to hook the reader quickly with the main question: How does a young, emotionally unbalanced Latina transform her less-than-supportive upbringing into success in the tech world?

The beginning is also the ending so I’m wondering if Desiree’s story ends in 1985 or 2019 or should the timeline copy Back to The Future?

Year after year, Desiree and her BFF Marga keep trying to build an app that will pay off Puerto Rico’s debt and set up the island for independence, so the spiral structure makes sense. But the ripple structure — which slowly nudges the narrative along in rippling small waves — personifies their “iterative process” for building new software. And the cell structure mystery around an emotional trauma that is holding Desiree back “requires the reader to make the connections between people and events because the writer doesn’t make them for us.”

Let’s go to the pink therapy room to make connections between the people and events of the two tsunami timelines that appear in her story:

• 2004 Desiree’s siblings are getting married and having babies, so she travels to Thailand (two months before the infamous tsunami crashed down on the country’s most beautiful and touristic beaches)

• 2024 Desiree starts rebuilding her app, and dreams about a tsunaaaaami crashing down on her

Dr. Nutmeg: Good evening, Desiree. Do you ever wonder what caused your tsunami dream last year or the tsunami in Thailand 21 years ago?

Desiree Sanchez: Where am I? Oh. It’s you again. What am I doing here? I thought I was watching Jeopardy with Mami.

Dr. Nutmeg: We’ll get to that later. For now, please allow me to switch your internal VR camera lens to these settings:

• surrealistic

• sci-fi feminist with a pHD in metaphysics

• End of first Mercury Retrograde 2025…

Now let’s spin backwards. The FACTory, otherwise known as the Blue Ball Time Machine in Downtown snOrlando, spins and spins until we are in a beautiful place called Krabi, not too far from Koh Samui, the location of The White Lotus. Oh, look! Just for our Femmebots audience, Desiree’s memories of Thailand in 2004 are downloading into The FACTory.

That first memory is quite telling:

18 Oct. 2004
Who I am: The perfect combination of my parents. I am not more my father than my mother or vice versa. Dad: Philosopher. Mom: Storyteller. Me: the writer of contemporary ideology.

Dr. Nutmeg: Writer of contemporary ideology? What the heck does that mean?

Desiree: I don’t know.

Dr. Nutmeg: OK. I’ll Google it. “Ideology: A system of ideas and ideals, especially one which forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.” Ah yes — you were subconsciously aware that you are the Voice of Your Generation.

Desiree: Gross. Whatever. All I remember is spending two debaucherous — but educational — weeks in Thailand with my BFF Marga.

Dr. Nutmeg: Do you remember what you did in Phuket during a full moon party?

Desiree: No. Yes. I mean…it wasn’t as bad as those Ratliff bros in The White Lotus.

Dr. Nutmeg: According to your memory files, you buried your guilt in the sand. After you left, it rumbled and bumbled for two months until it boiled up from the depths of the ocean and crashed down all over the resorts and tourists on December 26, 2004.

Desiree: Are you saying my hedonistic debaucherous behavior caused the tsunami?

Dr. Nutmeg: I didn’t say that. You did. But here’s the mic. Femmebots, let’s allow Desiree to tell the story of her experiences with tsunamis in 2004 and 2024, in her own words, since this is, after all, her very own Reality TV Show…

Is this mic on? OK.

All I know is that 2004 was the year my family of Model Ricans started getting hitched left and right, having babies, and becoming real adult Latin people who are stereotyped as Very Family Oriented People. When I tried to do the same with my Nicaruense boyfriend (remember, the Frozen Ego Waffles one), he said we should see other people, so I flew to Thailand from Miami to visit Marga, who would totally help me manage the emotions I felt from not achieving the conventional Model Rican Dream: marriage, house, babies.

“I want to do everything I would never, ever do at home,” I told Marga when I arrived in Bangkok. Her Colgate smile was all I needed to know that I would indeed be a satisfied customer.

She had been living in a penthouse with her husband in Chiang Mai for a year, and invited me to visit her, so she knew all the places to go and how to ride on a moped to get there.

“We’ll go to a brothel and get massages, they’re the best,” she said, as I tried not to catch flies in my mouth. “But I’m getting ahead of myself — first we’ll get a regular Thai massage, with clothes, just so you can get the feel of the way people do things here. You’re going to love it compared to Miami, I just know it.”

Marga was right.

I loved the story of the Thai massage. Girl meets Boy. Boy falls in love with Girl. Boy loses girl. Girl and Boy get back together. Sounds like the story of Chelsea and Rick in The White Lotus. Sounds like me and Sky Bowman in 1989, except we never get back together and I keep repeating that same story over and over. The rocking back and forth of the old Thai woman’s palms on specific acupuncture points awakened me to the vibe of the Eastern hemisphere. Something inside me was shifting, but I didn’t know what.

After that Marga and I tried DMT. This was before the movie Enter the Void showed us what a DMT trip looks and feels like. I don’t remember if I felt anything. “I’m already in a different country, I kinda feel like it’s a big enough head trip,” I said to Marga, so after that we went to a brothel where Dong and Lyn didn’t seem too happy that we were female. In this place, only men patronized them for their “talents.” But I reassured them. “No happy ending.” I just wanted to ask them questions and find out what their lives were like. It was a much different approach to seeking truth than Sam Rockwell’s character. He thought he wanted to become an Asian girl. What did I want to become?

Uh. I don’t know. More than a basic Latina from Floridian suburbia?

I certainly didn’t think I was acting out Mami & Papi issues or running away from my feelings toward palm trees, endless sunny days, and beautiful people who are also escaping the core traumas of childhood. Miami and Cancun have their Latin-flavored, Catholic versions of hedonism that leaves one feeling guilty. Thailand is a place founded on a completely different type of philosophy and spiritual tradition. As a Westerner, you can immediately feel that the vibe is different, less inhibited, less ashamed, more logical about the cause and effect of our “good” or “bad” behavior. Instead of going to hell when we die, Buddhists maintain an understanding that “hell” can be the experience of suffering right here, on earth. How you manage that experience will determine your karma.

In Buddhism, karma refers to the principle of cause and effect, where intentional actions (thought, word, and deed) lead to future consequences, shaping an individual's experience in this life and potentially future lives.

As for me, I took it all back home with me and decorated my condo like I was going to live in a Thai state of mind for the rest of my life…which I’ve done on and off because it’s not the easiest thing to do in a place like Florida, which is tropical and hedonistic like Thailand, but VERY Christian and Catholic and Republican and ashamed.

Is what’s happening now the real reason I dreamt of a tsunami last April?

And was Mike White using the character of Victoria Ratliffe to warn us that our entire world is getting hit, present time, with a financial and political tsunami from which we may never recover? It’s a slow-burn tsunami, hitting different places and people, kinda like COVID did in 2020. You hear about it infecting other people here and there, but “you just sit there, doing nothing” until the tsunami crashes down on you personally.

Example 1: A teacher in Idaho has to take down a poster that says, “Everyone is Welcome Here” because it’s an “opinion.”

Example 2: Hearing abruptly ends after lawmaker (intentionally) misgenders congresswoman

Example 3: Paying voters for their support.

I’m also hearing stories left and right from friends in DC to LA to SF about how the federal funding cuts are affecting them.

Has the tsunami crashed down on your region of the U.S. yet?