Babbling Brooks! Purple Prose! Watch out, it’s time again for….Poagao Walks Around!

The sun came out just after I finished the last entry, so I decided to ride down to the nearest grocery store to pick up some food. Unfortunately, this included inadvertently stabbing my right leg with the kickstart, necessitating about five minutes of strained cursing and oily smoke pouring out of the exhaust pipe before I was on my merry yet slightly bloody way.

After I put everything away I decided to explore the little valley that runs to the northeast of my temporary quarters. It used to shelter a small road besides a small stream, but they’re in the midst of developing it into something altogether messier, with concrete barriers and artificial channels. The road ends at a no-trespassing sign in front of a wild chicken ranch, but you can take a nice hiking path into the hills from there. The trail passes through several small ravines and the ruins of old traditional houses, causing me to suspect the area was a village in the past. It’s quite an isolated spot even today, though; it must have been really out there back then. The trail passes by a small marsh/lake with clean water and colorful birds flying around. The setting sun caused me to turn back, though the trail went on in a much rougher incarnation beyond the lake. I took the road back at a much slower pace as I was trying to stay far enough behind and thus out of earshot of an old man with a loud radio in his pocket.

Took a trip to Costco today with Maoman. I’d never been to the Xizhi Costco, but they’re more or less the same worldwide.. Costco would be a brilliant idea if I were rich. This trip was nice because I filled up on the samples offered on virtually every aisle, and I got to watch Maoman castigate an employee for picking up spilt blueberries off the floor and putting them back on the shelf to sell to unsuspecting customers.

Last night I went over to Maoman’s place again, since it’s so close, and we watched a couple of episodes of Six Feet Under, a show I like better each time I watch it. I still shouldn’t have my own TV, though. I waste enough time as it is doing things like blogging. One of the characters, Keith, spoke a line that just hit me: “When someone sees you as you really are and wants to be with you, that’s powerful.” So many little gems, so well-written throughout. I really want to see more of this show, sloth-like tendencies be damned. I’ve also been watching the re-packaged Lonely Planet show, now called Globe Trekker. Ian Wright is a god.

Should be getting paid soon, and although this does not signify the end of my financial issues, it is a welcome trip out of the red. I’ve found that it is quite cheap to cook, if not the healthiest diet in the world. Having a real kitchen is helpful too. The better the weather is the more I like living out here, but commuting is still a pain. If I were to live out of the city I’d have to be within walking distance of an MRT line, and that’s that.

Just saw the “finalists” for the WTC project in New York City. Holy Crap Ideas, Batman! One of them looks like an erector set and the other looks like the project was completed by Mrs. Miller’s Fourth-grade class under threat of cancelling summer vacation. And I hope I don’t offend any fourth-graders out there when I say that. I’ve seen a lot of prospective ideas for this space, and some of them were even pretty good, but it seems they inverted the list by accident and came up with the top two Worst Ideas. And I thought I was good at making bad decisions.

I’ve been thinking about phrases like “I knew them from their blog” or “I met them online”. The more I think about it, the more I think it’s impossible. Knowing someone from their blog is like watching “Final Fantasy” and thinking you know what real people look like. It’s not quite there, a blog is only what said person wants to show the world, and misses the rest, all the nuances, all the psychoses, wrinkles and all. Granted, I’ve met people online and gone on to meet them in real life to find them very nice, but in each case I was suprised at how different they were than I had imagined. In most cases this is a good thing, but it has the potential to be a pretty bad thing as well. It’s part chaos theory, part common sense, but nothing can ever be what you expect. Usually it’s more, sometimes it’s less, but it’s always different. Sounds obvious, I know, but it’s also something I’m still in the process of learning. When I was growing up I thought that nature was deliberately making reality to be exactly the opposite of my expectations, and while this may have resulted in the abandonment of certain religious convictions, it also convinced me to try to stop expecting things altogether, or at least to stop putting any stock in my expectations.

Blah. I’d quit while I was still ahead with this babbling but I fear I’m too late.

I called my adopted family in Hsinchu to wish everyone a Happy Goat Year, but only the Filipina nurse was home, so I called my little brother instead. He and his wife are working on their third kid; my gan-ma must be thrilled. I should go down for a visit sometime. It’s been ages since I’ve been down there, or anywhere else for that matter.

Things have been pretty slow lately, needless to say. While the period of time during Chinese New Year’s gets more and more active and bustling each year, it’s still a general slump in the general scheme of things. It’s just as well, I suppose. I’ve been spending the majority of my time up here in the mountains, watching TV and DVDs, spending time online of course. I watched the entire British Queer as Folk series, which was good, better than the copycat US version, which I also liked. Of course it’s full of stereotypical characters, but it’s not just stereotypes; there’s a lot of accurate stuff in there as well, and being drama, it can’t very well be representative otherwise it would be an hour’s worth of two chaps sitting at home having dinner.

I’m feeling back in limbo lately, in the in-between of things, up in the air. You’d think I’d get used to that feeling by now, but I think I dealt with this kind of situation better when I was younger. No, that’s not entirely true; I’m more resigned to it now than I used to be, and yet somehow that makes it worse. It says more about me than the situation, and not in a good way, either. But life is like that; you just slog through and hope you’re doing ok.

It’s cold again, of course, supposed to get down to 7 or 8 degrees Celsius tomorrow. Most people go back to work in the next couple of days. I’ve got another week and a half up here, and until the 27th to move if I want to avoid next month’s rent. Things are moving on, so I’d better do so as well.

I just got back from Maoman’s place, where he fed me some delicious mashed potatoes and sauce for dinner. Afterwards, we settled down to watch some Red Dwarf, but Maoman got bored and went over to fiddle with his computer, so I switched the TV back to cable and saw a picture of something flying through the sky and NASA captions on it. Oh, I thought, they’re replaying the Challenger disaster tape. But when I looked closer, I saw that the logo said Columbia, not Challenger. Oh, no, I thought, not again.

I can’t say it seems like yesterday because I was a junior in high school that frosty Florida morning when I had to scrape the ice off my ’77 Datsun before coaxing the engine to life and driving to school for an Algebra test in Mrs. Wright’s class that was interrupted for an announcement that the shuttle had exploded. Of course we all knew something was wrong as we could all see the oddly forked trail of smoke on the horizon out the windows for an hour or two afterwards. I spent my lunch hour writing a hasty report for Mrs. Bell’s history class comparing and contrasting the Challenger disaster to that of the Hindenberg. Needless to say, I got a poor grade as well as Mrs. Bell’s undying antipathy for that stunt.

All of these thoughts came rushing into my head along with a great sorrow for the crew when I saw the TV screen. It’s happened again. At least we know what’s happened –the shuttle broke apart upon re-entry– but not why or how yet. I hope this accident, if accident it was, doesn’t again cripple the space industry as the last one did. The shuttle fleet is over two decades old, and I’m actually surprised we’re still using them, but the pace of space-related technology development has been agonizingly slow ever since the Apollo program was discontinued. My father worked on the shuttle program in the late 70′s; I remember him trying to tell me about re-entry strategies with models even though I was only 8 or 9 years old. He lives with my mother in his hometown of Ardmore, Oklahoma now; I wonder if he heard the booms.