Poagao's Journal

Absolutely Not Your Monkey

May 31 2001

I have a good job. The people there treat me very …

I have a good job. The people there treat me very well, no one bosses me around, I can determine my own lunch time and be liberal about when I come in in the mornings. I have a permanent connection to the Internet and I can read if I don’t have anything else to do. The benefits are good and it is stable, easy work that I can do well.

I have, however, come to loathe my job in recent days. I know it’s irrational. I have seen far worse jobs, pictures of workers hauling mud out of huge pits, etc. I have been unemployed and poor before, anxious to do anything, anything at all…so I should know better. Intellectually, I know that I have a good job, one that pays the bills and lets me live in an ok fashion…I can’t figure out what about the job is making me so miserable. Perhaps it is because I am not doing anything, really, I am not calling on any creative forces, nor am I asked to develop myself in any fashion. Perhaps it is another part of my life that I am deeply dissatisfied with. Perhaps the past few days have just been bad days. Or perhaps I need to take the plunge and just do what I want to be doing…

But I have a sense about these things. I can sense the very stirrings of a beginning of the end. Part frustration on my part, reflected in my actions, part others’ attitude toward me, I can feel things “slipping” in a way I have experienced all too many times in the past. I will, of course, try to hang on for a while more. In any case, I have to take off at least two weeks before September 25th, possibly even four weeks, a whole month around that time. Where should I go? I could go to Australia, except it would be winter there. How is Australia in the winter? Could I rent a motorcycle and drive up the west coast from Perth? I could also go to Europe, visit Mia and Graham in London, maybe see Matt in Spain, see France and Germany…I don’t know. Or I could go to Canada with Dean. Or I could go get my Ultralight license in the Philippines, except I would like to do that with a group of friends rather than by myself. Or go see Mindcrime in St.Louis, if indeed he is still there at that time. Does anyone have any suggestions?

I have an idea for a “Battle-brella”. You see, Taiwan’s sidewalks are both narrow and crowded, and when it rains, which it often does, everyone carries umbrellas, and these umbrellas are used as weapons against the people walking in the opposite direction. If I had a “battle-brella”, I could walk in confidence that the reinforced frame and hidden blades of my umbrella would instantly and uncompromisingly emerge victorious from any confrontation with a competing, garden-variety umbrella.

The Taipei skyline visible from my balcony over Ta-an park has become quite attractive lately as more and more buildings are being lit up. The weather is nice and cool today, slightly cloudy and a very pleasant change from the constant mugginess of the last week or so.

I’ve started to really read other people’s blogs, and it is strange how, whereas when you met someone, it was usually their physical appearance and mannerisms that you saw first. The famous first impression people are always talking about. But now, I get to read their thoughts, descriptions of their daily lives, moods, etc., all before I meet them IRL, if ever. I suppose that this kind of understanding of a person is as equally lopsided as only knowing their physical presence without getting to know how they think. Both are important factors in actually knowing someone. Yet I still wonder what this kind of shift will do to our accepted social infrastructure. There must be hundreds of thousands of blogs out there by now…we really need some way to sift through them all, so people can find the kind of stuff they’re looking for without resorting to chance. But I suppose that is much like people meet IRL, by chance.

posted by Poagao at 1:23 pm  

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