I was late to a lunch date today. As I rode the subway into town, I thought about how this day would go if it were a couple of years down the road, and technology had kept up its current rate of development. My guess is my friends would look my position up on their GPS phones, see that I was still in Bitan, in my apartment, at noon. They’d see me leave, walk down the street, and then turn back to my apartment. My Twitter 2.0 service would flash “forgot my damn umbrella” and a real-time weather bureau layer would confirm that it was now pissing rain in my neighborhood. They’d watch me cross the bridge, just miss one train and wait for another, and then see me go one stop too far. T2.0 message: I’m tired of getting off at Taipei Main Station all the time. Then the little dot labeled “Poagao” on their screens, should they check it during their already-proceeding meal, would wander through some alleys in the vague direction of the restaurant, and (I’d like to think) they would make space for me at the table just before I walked in the door.

The rain in Bitan was incredible, I should add. I could see the heavy rain approaching and leaving, the white froth advancing in a line across the bridge at a good clip. My feet and legs were soaked, and it was a good test of my semi-waterproof shoes (verdict: kinda). To the north, the city was bathed in sunlight. The rain missed it completely.

But what I’m curious about is this: If everyone has access to our whereabouts, paths, even our hitherto-private musings typed into a wide-distribution services, will it make us more allowing for human nature? Before, we’d just come up with an excuse: “Traffic was bad” or “There was a sale on gold bullion” or “I was attacked by monkeys” or something that may or may not have happened. When it gets to the point where everyone can see what’s happening, and we all witness the chicanery that we all do and don’t tell anyone, will such shenanigans cease to be the social faux-pas that they currently are? Or will everyone just know, and not even bother mentioning them?

I guess we’re about to find out.

I was late to a lunch date today. As I rode the subway into town, I thought about how this day would go if it were a couple of years down the road, and technology had kept up its current rate of development. My guess is my friends would look my position up on their GPS phones, see that I was still in Bitan, in my apartment, at noon. They’d see me leave, walk down the street, and then turn back to my apartment. My Twitter 2.0 service would flash “forgot my damn umbrella” and a real-time weather bureau layer would confirm that it was now pissing rain in my neighborhood. They’d watch me cross the bridge, just miss one train and wait for another, and then see me go one stop too far. T2.0 message: I’m tired of getting off at Taipei Main Station all the time. Then the little dot labeled “Poagao” on their screens, should they check it during their already-proceeding meal, would wander through some alleys in the vague direction of the restaurant, and (I’d like to think) they would make space for me at the table just before I walked in the door.

The rain in Bitan was incredible, I should add. I could see the heavy rain approaching and leaving, the white froth advancing in a line across the bridge at a good clip. My feet and legs were soaked, and it was a good test of my semi-waterproof shoes (verdict: kinda). To the north, the city was bathed in sunlight. The rain missed it completely.

But what I’m curious about is this: If everyone has access to our whereabouts, paths, even our hitherto-private musings typed into a wide-distribution services, will it make us more allowing for human nature? Before, we’d just come up with an excuse: “Traffic was bad” or “There was a sale on gold bullion” or “I was attacked by monkeys” or something that may or may not have happened. When it gets to the point where everyone can see what’s happening, and we all witness the chicanery that we all do and don’t tell anyone, will such shenanigans cease to be the social faux-pas that they currently are? Or will everyone just know, and not even bother mentioning them?

I guess we’re about to find out.

Hot, muggy days. The cicadas are starting up with their one-note song, which will become the familiar cyclical chugging sound as the summer progresses. I got up around 8am and took a nice hike up the mountain to the Meizhicheng Community. I enjoy walking around there because it’s quiet; everyone’s off at work in the office, and it lets me relish the fact that I’m not. This afternoon we came close to having our first clockwork summer thunderstorm, but it didn’t quite happen.

Saturday night we played at the Animals Taiwan benefit held on a rooftop near Zhishan Station. It’s a nice neighborhood with older houses along the river that leads up to the palace museum. As I walked up the strange double staircase I noted signs asking me not to talk or make any other noise in the stairwell, as the neighbors were sensitive to noise. Not a good sign.

The roof was teeming with people, mostly foreigners, and several pavilions had been set up against the possibility of rain. The “restrooms” were a couple of bins behind the stairwell door. At one point our host, David, spotted an old Taiwanese fellow standing at the stairwell door, and hastily called on a local friend to reassure him that we weren’t going to cause any havoc.

A troup of Taiwanese girls did a dance routine to recorded music. I didn’t really pay that much attention, as I was chatting with Rowan about the movie. Then it was our turn to play. We did several songs and got the audience dancing. It was great, until the police showed up. Predictably, the neighbors had called them, though it wasn’t even 10pm yet. David rushed to find another interpreter to talk with the police, and the group of them stood by the door going back and forth. “This is so embarrassing,” I said to Brian Foden, who was standing next to me. “How can someone live here so long and still not speak the language?” I immediately regretted it, as I always do when I express such a sentiment in a crowd of people who are likely to take great umbrage at it. Mr. People Person, that’s me.

A deal was negotiated with the police to let us play until 11pm, so we started playing again. We got a couple of songs in before the boys in blue made another appearance, this time demanding that the whole party be shut down. The cops herded us off the roof, their walkie-talkies squelching out orders. I wanted to tell them to turn them down, as the neighbors didn’t like noise, but I refrained, as it wasn’t really my party. “We’re getting rid of the foreigners…they’re almost gone,” one of the cops said into his radio. Apparently the complaint had been against “those foreigners.” Hopefully next time they hold an event they’ll find a more suitable place.

I was exhausted from editing by the time David, Sandman and Conor showed up at my door at 4pm on Saturday. While it was good to have company, I wasn’t exactly sure how I was going to make it through a show that started at 10:30pm and lasted into the wee hours of the morning, as is our wont. Slim called and said he couldn’t make the pre-gig practice, and Thumper was in Kaohsiung, so we ran through a few of the horn pieces until we were more or less satisfied everyone remembered how they went.

After packing up and heading over to Athula’s for a rotti dinner, it began to sprinkle. I went to the local shop and picked up a new washtub, and Athula helped me poke a hole in the bottom with a piece of metal heated on his grill. In addition to the rotti, I also got a beef kebab and tossed all the gritty bits at one of the local dogs. David and I then caught a cab to Sappho while Sandman and Conor waited for Jojo to drive them.

Sappho is, simply put, 1977. Or rather, what I imagined that year and we drove past lounge bars with the word “DISCO” in lights above the door on rainy Houstonian nights. The crystal motif permeated the place, and all the surfaces were shiny with a distinct lack of right angles. Even the music was appropriate to the era. I tried and failed to capture the brown tones and funky barstools with my camera.

We threw our stuff in a side lounge and started setting up as the other Ramblers began showing up. Slim took a while tying Sandman’s gold bow tie, resulting in the picture above. We got two free drinks. My first was the worst rum and coke I’ve ever had. The second was the worst ginger ale and whiskey, but slightly better than the rum and coke. But they did the job. Plus the Panadol I took for the oncoming migraine I was feeling, or rather, seeing in the form of bright lights flashing across half my field of vision.

There was only a small crowd when we began playing, and only one of them had a suitable hairstyle. From what I understand the bands there usually only start after 11pm. Playing 20’s and 30’s music in a 70’s lounge bar was a little strange, a feeling enhanced by the fact that the sound was muddled and far away sounding. We couldn’t hear ourselves very well. The sound guy took our name literally, I’m thinking. The bass was muffled and faint most of the time, yet managing to emit loud booms now and then. The small crowd was growing, and everyone was trying to talk over us. It wasn’t a very good set.

The second set was much better, however. The sound guy figured out what he was doing, and the crowd got into the music, even dancing on the lighted octagonal floor tiles. We played for quite a while. It was about 2am when we stopped. I was still conscious, but my feet were dragging. Fortunately Sandman and Jojo gave me a ride back to Bitan so I wouldn’t have to deal with a cab ride.

After a long day of slogging through the refrigerated molasses that is our Internet connection, my week’s work is finally done. It’s started raining, and I’ve just opened the window. The wet smell wafts into my solitary office, which is lit only by one old table lamp nobody else wanted, where I’ve been working to renaissance tunes courtesy of the Harmonia archives. Since the alternative service fellows were discharged, it’s just been me in here. Only occasionally do other people come in, usually by mistake. I’m thinking of printing out a big arrow, with no explanation, to post on my door: Whatever you’re looking for, it’s not here.

I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been editing night and day. Every time I feel like posting something, I tell myself I should be editing instead. But here I can’t edit, so I thought I’d drop a line to let you know that I’m still around.

This weekend will feature more editing, but our band has a gig on Saturday night at Sappho, a lounge bar in a basement off Anhe Road. I’ve never been there before, but David, who has jammed there before, says it’s nice. I’ll post the gig poster, but Wordpress makes posting a picture really difficult. With Blogger, you click the picture button, browse up a photo, and click, it’s there, resized, clickable and wrapped nicely in text at the position of your choice. I’ve been looking for a Wordpress plug-in that does the same thing, but no such luck as yet. It’s the only thing I miss about Blogger so far.

The rain’s really coming down now. I can barely hear the sound of rush-hour traffic and imagine the hum of wet neon signs through it. I wish I’d worn my rain shoes and brought along a decent-sized umbrella instead of the origamic wisp currently residing in my backpack. These are the annual Plum Rains, so I can’t say I wasn’t fairly warned. Indeed, the cloud of flying termites swarming around the city the past couple of nights was a dead giveaway.

Dean’s back in the Renegade Province to help with post production. He’ll be meeting up with us at the Beer Factory later on, after paying homage to his beloved JB’s. He seems happy to be back; I know I always am when I return from abroad.

Expect wet feet tonight.

I was mentioning to Mark the other day how I needed large chunks of time to edit the film or exercise, and couldn’t just do little bits at a time, he set me on to Paul Graham’s essay on procrastination. I’d been meaning to read it for a while, and the other night, in lieu of doing something else, I decided to see what he had to say.

It turned out to be an interesting little article. Basically, Graham is saying that, given the fact that you could be doing any one of a hundred different things, you’re going to procrastinate no matter what you do; the only question is how. Are you putting off working on big things in order to do little things, or the reverse? But life can’t be that simple, can it?

Sure, it’s a good thing to keep in mind. I doubt anyone would put “looked up 17 different 80’s cartoon characters online” in an article about me (though they might). I have the choice to make sure what I’m doing is approaching a larger goal that is important to me rather than making sure my apartment’s clean or that all my laundry’s done.

Of course, we’re not all Vulcans and must work through our emotions; working on one thing straight through could adversely affect the outcome of a project, so allowances must be made according to our mental states. But all in all it’s a good idea to keep at the back of our minds, i.e., are we doing big things or just running errands? Is this website an errand? No, I see it as a valuable outlet and communication tool. Making sure every little bit of it is compliant and neat on the page, however, is kind of an errand, in that there are more important things in my life right now to be working on. Many errands, like jobs, for instance, are means to let us work on the larger efforts, unless you’re lucky enough to have a job that is a Big Thing.

In the same fashion, many small things that may seem like errands can actually be little bits of big things. Looking up a strange character I see on a sign is a small thing, but it’s part of a larger learning process, working towards a bigger goal. Doing Tai-chi forms. Taking pictures. Even just walking around to clear my head. Perhaps our subconsciouses can identify the big things in our lives better than our conscious thoughts can.

But making sure all my Flickr tags and sets are Just So? Arguing in the political forums of Forumosa.com? Comparing camera video quality of Youtube clips? Complete wastes of time.

I have bigger things to do.

New links!

Poagao’s Journal (here): poagao.org/pjournal

潑猴的日記： poagao.org/chinese

Monkey Learns to Push: poagao.org/taiji

The film production journal, Running with Swords: poagao.com/blog

It’s been a long, exhausting process, and it’s by no means finished, but thanks to Mark’s generous donation of his time and effort over the past week, we’ve managed to force this site, kicking and screaming, into the realm of Wordpress. Mark and I spent a couple of late nights wondering how to convert six years’ worth of posts and other ephemera, and it ended up involving ditching doteasy, upgrading my other hosting service, a nearly fruitless search for Blogger-to-Wordpress converters, converting all my blogs to Blogspot, then to Wordpress.com blogs and then to Wordpress.org blogs on my domain. I designed a new splash page with simpler links, but it’s still aligning to the top of the page whereas it should be in the middle. I also took the opportunity to make new banners for the Chinese and Tuishou blogs. The sidebars of all the blogs, however, are still pileups of bad links and leftovers. The film blog still hasn’t been converted, as that’s on poagao.com. I accidentally mislabeled a link yesterday in the WP admin section, effectively breaking this blog until Mark told me over gmail chat how to fix it. I knew it would be a difficult process, but neither of us could imagine what a pain it would turn out to be. I know nothing about coding and have relied on Dreamweaver for my web design efforts up to this point, something which Mark finds rather shocking. All I have to do to make him shudder with apprehension is mention the word “tables”.

So here I am in ur Wordpress, postin’ blogs. It feels a bit alien and cold after six years of the Blogger interface, but it does seem to offer more usability. Hopefully over the next couple of weeks, with Mark’s help, I’ll be able to clean up the mess and get everything working properly again. For those of you who link directly to this page, the new URL should be http://www.poagao.org/pjournal