Yesterday we were all called over the intercom system out to the lobby, where we were given smouldering incense sticks so that we could wave them at a table on which many snacks of questionable desirability had been piled, in an attempt to assuage any hungry ghosts that were loitering around. It’s Ghost Month, you see, and people get a little antsy knowing that the door to hell is just sitting there open, no screen or anything, letting any just about any vengeful spirit through…even, I’m afraid, those without shoes or shirts. Or heads. In any case, our office still reeks of incense, a smell that works equally well against both ghosts and comfortable breathing.

I rented and watched Chinatown on DVD last night. Made in 1974, this film is a good detective flick, made right before they started getting tacky. The music and atmosphere work well, although the story takes some pretty unbelievable twists. Faye Dunaway just manages to avoid making me cringe with her combination of bad acting and not acting. Jack Nicholson looks incredibly young, but he’s not the sexiest guy in this flick. My pal Mindcrime has noted the fact that I am almost universally attracted to relatively insignificant co-stars rather than the star of any given film, and he would nail me on this one. My pick for the sexiest guy in Chinatown would have to be Burt Young, who plays Curly. You might know him better from his later role as Paulie, Rocky’s brother in the Rocky series. In Chinatown, however, he’s still young enough to pull my strings.

It’s been raining more or less all day, which doesn’t look good for me riding my motorcycle to sword practice and then home tonight. Poor thing’s been sitting out in the open for the past few days, since I don’t like to ride in the rain. At this point I’m not too concerned that the rain will harm it; my only worry is that the rain will wash away the grime which is presumably all that’s holding it together.

When I got off of work last night I noticed that it was much darker outside than usual. It turned out that it was pouring rain, so I left my motorcycle at the office and jumped in a taxi to take over to Warner Village to meet Doug and Donovan. The news report on the radio in the cab was talking about the recent drought and how the Feitsui Reservoir was running dry, which was pretty funny to listen to in the middle of such a downpour. It took 45 minutes to cover a distance I could have covered on my bike in 10-15 minutes, such was the traffic. Someone had covered the roof of the taxi with autographs, although I didn’t see any names I recognized. Maybe they thought they were famous, or maybe it was a group of those flash-in-the-pan ‘stars’ the Taiwanese media is always on about, all distressingly average-cute-daughter-of-a-rich-influential-friend types without an modicum of talent.

Doug and Donovan were already at the restaurant, wading through the usual miserable service to try to get a table. Later on Dean got there, having spent his mandatory 45 minutes in a cab, and we finally sat down to eat.

I told them that I appreciated the offer to head up the magazine, but that I felt I couldn’t leave my current job just yet. They are convinced, however, that they have to launch yesterday in order to get the foreigner demographic and then latch onto their main audience of Chinese readers. They both seem like good guys, and we talked and drank until midnight. Maybe in the future I’ll get a chance to work with them, but I just can’t commit to the venture right now. Having made the decision, however, I do feel a lot better. I think. There’s always going to be could-have-been thoughts popping up, more and more so as life goes on. It’s unavoidable. I hope I’ve made the right choice.

Anyway, speaking of my lovely job, a couple of days ago my boss came by and said I should stop being so rude in my company-wide emails. What happens is, when I notice a mistake that everyone is making, I will send an email to everyone telling them to correct it. I try to be short and sweet in these emails, e.g. “A is incorrect. B, rather, is correct, ok?” Apparently someone, not a native English speaker, had complained about the ‘ok?’ part of my message. They felt it was “rude” and “totally uncalled for”.

Huh? I mean, I usually talk to foreigners in English and to Chinese in Chinese, so I don’t really know what kind of English Chinese people think of as rude, but when I asked my boss this question, she took some serious umbrage, saying “Don’t challenge me!” She said this in the same tone as Norfolk in A Man for All Seasons, when he says “Are you challenging me, Cromwell?”

Fortunately I don’t have many opportunities to communicate with people here. If I did, I might not have even lasted this long. I honestly did not know that “ok” was a four-letter word, though. I’ll just stop using it, ok? Oops.

In any case, do you know what this means? This means, if I can find someone to fill in for me, I can go play in Oz for a month! What do you say, Australia? You ready for a stroppy dag like me, goin’ walkabout and thrashing at mozzies in the bush? As Shauna would say, Ooh, er…

I’ve been on a slow, miserable burn today. Everything seems to bother me, and nothing interests me. Annoying music, people clipping their nails in nearby cubicles, people bumping into me in the hallway … I had lunch with Dean and Brian in the MRT concourse under the train station…of course on the way I passed the place where I didn’t get the job I’d wanted, the job I need, where I would have started working next Monday, making more money for half the time. The recent news about my college professor isn’t helping, either.

But, as they say, this too shall pass. I’m going to meet the ‘D’ section of my address book, Dean, Doug and Donovan, tonight after work down at the Ruby Tuesdays at Warner Village. I’m going to tell them my decision on their magazine offer.

The Taipei International Finance Center is apparently back on track to become the world’s tallest building, after the Song-shan airport changed it’s rules in order to keep planes from sideswiping the structure. At 101 stories, it will certainly stick out on the city’s skyline when it’s done. Here’s a picture of the construction as it appears from Warner Village, and here’s what it looks like from my window, miles away. Our tallest building right now is the Mitsukoshi building, which towers above everything else in this 12-story town, is less than half the height of the new building. Chiropractors here must be rubbing their hands together in gleeful anticipation of the strained necks they’ll be called on to treat.

The other day I ran across a place called “McSnack”, on Fuhsing N. Road near the corner of Minchuan E. Road. It was a McDonald’s, but one trying really hard to be as unlike McDonald’s as possible. It was spotless inside. There were potted plants and a glass counter with desserts on display. The staff all wore their black berets backwards. Smetana’s Ma Vlast (at last!) was playing over the store speakers. I choose a bagel burger over the english muffin. It tasted ok, but afterwards my stomach sent me an urgent message. You think you can fool me, it said, but you can’t. I know you just ate McDonald’s food. And now you’re going to pay.

A friend of mine who went to my college emailed me late last night. I was just about to go to bed when I got the message. He told me that one of our professors, the one professor who had the biggest impact on the direction of my life and who often went out of his way to help me, doesn’t expect to live more than a few more days. He was in his 60’s when I was in college, so he should be in his 70’s now, and he’s been battling cancer for about a year, my friend said, although I hadn’t heard of it before. It’s a real shock, and I’ve been walking around in a vague mist of sorrow since.

One day back when I was still in high school in Winter Park, Florida, he wrote a letter to me, all the way from Taiwan. The postmark was one I’d never seen before, the blue-and-red airmail envelope seemed strange. A Chinese postage stamp with characters I was just beginning to learn. I like to think that it all started with that letter, with his descriptions of his neighborhood and the little dou-jiang stand where he ate breakfast every day, even though in my heart I know that it started much earlier, in ways too subtle to recount.

This morning I wrote a letter to him, a letter that is on its way across the pacific ocean in a similar route as that first letter so long ago. I don’t know if he’ll get it or not, but I had to write it and try to thank him for all that he’s done for me. I don’t think I could trust myself on the phone, but I hope he gets the letter.

Oooh, I’m tired. I stayed up until 3 a.m. last night working on a project and was woken up by the red glow of a particularly garish sunrise this morning. I had to come in early today to hand in the report anyway. As for my weekend, I worked on my book pretty much all of Saturday and most of Sunday, in spite of weather perfectly suited to exploring a new beach somewhere. All in all I wrote over 6,000 words this weekend, to make a total of 10,000 words over the past two weekends and a grand total of over 50,000 words. If I can keep this up I hope to be finished with the first draft of my book within a month. Then I can begin working on editing it into something worth publishing and, hopefully, even reading.

I arranged to meet Carl at Eslite on Sunday afternoon so we could go over a project I was working on for a tech company, but Carl was late (when isn’t he late? I don’t think he’s ever not been late, actually. He must run on indian time too), so I walked up and down the forest median of Dunhua S. Road, admiring the sunlight through the trees. Sooner or later the city will be out hacking most of the limbs off of all the trees in the city, since vegetation grows back so quickly here.

Carl arrived eventually and after we went down to the shops so that Carl could buy a rather expensive lamp, we arranged to meet Dean at an Italian restaurant nearby. We were walking over when I suddenly noticed a giant transparent animal of some sort, clinging to a water tower. The wind was causing it to move back and forth against the tower, making it look for all the world as if it were actually humping the structure.

We were discussing just how bizarre this seemed when Carl shouted “Oh, you cannot not take a picture of that!” Following his gaze, I saw a newly opened shop on a nearby corner. It appeared to be selling 70’s-style jackets and accessories, but the name of the shop struck me as a just bit off-color. It was called “Mother Fucker”. I don’t know exactly what that symbol in the middle is supposed to mean, but it doesn’t look too wholesome either.

Since we were on a roll as far as bizarre sights went, we decided to go take a picture of the “latter half” of a zebra which serves as a decidedly un-pedestrian pedestrian crossing light at the corner of Dunhua N. Road and Civic Boulevard. The really odd thing is that the other half of the zebra is nowhere in the vicinity. That’s really no way to treat a zebra.

Doug said he would be in Taipei some time this week, but I still haven’t been able to come to a decision on his offer. I don’t want to make the same kind of lateral move I made when I left the news, which was simply so bad I wasn’t very picky about where I went, just as long as it wasn’t the news. Such decisions tend to result in a long series of unsuitable jobs. I have to be reasonably sure that I’ll be happier at the magazine than I would be here, but so far I have no evidence of this one way or the other. If they would only delay the magazine’s debut for a few months, so that I could join full time after Chinese New Year’s, I would do it, since I wouldn’t be throwing away my new year’s bonus or annual leave. As it is, though, I’m still not quite convinced that it is worth giving all of that up. This is, of course, the way large companies get their people to work at unpleasant jobs. Carrot-and-stick? Or Fish-in-a-barrel?

Rather than devoting my precious weekend to the usual selfish pursuits, I have put together a short tour of my room. I figure this is the only way anyone is going to see it, and since my turtles are acting very nervously today (they’re in a washbasin at the foot of the bookshelves, in case you’re curious), possibly heralding an impending earthquake, I figured I would at least capture the scene of so much debauchery (most of it solitary) for the sake of posterity. Note that I did not bother to alter it in any way from its original state; this is more or less what I come home to every day. Try not to be too jealous.

Yes, today is Chinese Valentine’s Day, but I haven’t really been out to enjoy it. Don’t see how I could, actually. Why isn’t there a Singles Day, you ask? Because every day is Singles Day! We’re single 24-7-365, baby!

Tomorrow is Chinese Valentine’s Day, I realized as I sat in the park downstairs drinking my mint tea after lunch. Some construction workers lazing around the park during their break were razzing one of their number as he argued with his girlfriend on a cellphone about their plans for tomorrow. While I’m usually perfectly satisfied with the single, almost monk-like lifestyle I lead, around Valentine’s Day, which Taiwanese celebrate twice, once for the Western version and once for the Chinese version, I get a little irked about still being single, without a single serious long-term relationship in…well, ever, really. I know this is mostly a result of me not really trying, and I still cringe at the contents of most love songs and mushy so-called ‘chick flicks’, but yes, even I get lonely at times. That would explain the bitterness, cynicism and fits of depression and occasional rage, at least.

The honest answer, though, would be that there aren’t that many people out there who are able to put up with me, and of those I don’t even know if there are any I could put up with. I’ve always believed in Yuan Fen, loosely translated as “Fate” or “Destiny” or “A Long Piece of Red Industrial-strength Cable That Ties Certain Individuals Together Throughout the Ages in Their Various Reincarnations”, but as the years pass I am beginning to have my doubts. Unfortunately, there is no standard procedure to follow when one has one’s doubts. They’re just sort of there, at least until someone does something to dispel them. Mine are still around, gathering dust in the corner, but I really don’t have room for them, rent being what it is these days. I really should have a garage sale and get rid of them (I also have way too many old video games).

Anyone want some used doubts? Any excessively self-assured Christians, third-world dictators, smug businesspeople or on-the-edge activists out there in need of a little balance and perspective? Anyone?

This guy seems to think that changing the lettering on Taiwan/ROC passports would automatically grant UN entry to Taiwan, and all of the countries in the world would graciously open their doors to Taiwanese of all walks of life. I hate to break it to him that we would remain just as unrecognized with “Taiwan” passports as we are with “ROC” passports. As for customs people not being able to tell the difference, uh, isn’t it their job to know these things? Do they mistake South Koreans for North Koreans? Do they mix USA up with Saudi Arabia? I think they need to learn their jobs, rather than us changing our passports to larger print so they can understand it. Ah, well, it’s just some American guy in Nevada…he just happened to say something the Taipei Times agreed with, which is basically their precondition for publishing Letters to the Editor, so his credibility isn’t exactly stellar anyway.

As for the Irish guy’s comments on Taiwan…uh, yeah. We’ll learn from Ireland. That’ll work, because it’s exactly the same situation, except for the fact that it’s completely different. I, for one, hope that Taiwan can end up better off than Ireland, or at least with less violence.

I was incredibly busy yesterday…well, considering my normal workload, anyway. After work I went out for some good fish and chips at Mr. Fish in an alley behind the Sogo department store with Steve, Dean, Gavin and Edward. Afterwards we went to the Q Bar, where Carl joined us, and then the rest of the 70’s Airport Love Palace, i.e. Catherine, Dave and Eoghain. It turned into a real party, but as usually happens with me, the more people arrived, the more isolated I felt. Anything over 3 or 4 people is out of my depth, socially speaking. Steve felt it unfair that I refer to him as sarcastic when Carl is not similarly described, but I feel that Carl goes beyond sarcastic and is one only a handful of people in the world that would be aptly referred to as ‘droll’.

Doug said he and Donovan would be up again this weekend to discuss the magazine, so I have to stay in Taipei again. I would really like to spend a weekend somewhere else on the island, perhaps Kaohsiung, which I haven’t visited in years, or even one of the east-coast cities, while it’s still summer. I, like Ernie and Daniel, need to get out of Dodge for a while. I think the beginning of Autumn often has that effect on people. Steve mentioned last night, “How many people, when they’re on their deathbeds, say ‘How I wish I’d spent more time at work!'”?

Whiny Woman became particularly incensed at someone this morning, and our proverbial cup o’ whinage has since runneth over. Someone dared do something without her permission, it seems. It’s ok, because when I am tired of listening to her I can just play some Power Station. No, not that Power Station, but these two aboriginal guys here who have incredible voices and cool songs, although lately they have been selling out to the more popular and rather mushy love song style. Their song Mingtian de mingtian de mingtian (the translation of which, “Tomorrow Never Dies” boldly taunts several major copyright laws), always reminds me of bowling alley jukeboxes, because that’s where I first heard it, back when I was a cameraman for TVBS and we were filming a bowling tournament. Mindcrime actually met Power Station in person once at G’day Cafe, which is run by a group of very nice aboriginal people. He described the band as being quite short. Of course, Mindcrime is several inches taller than I am, so that pretty much describes well over 80% of this city.

Speaking of G’day Cafe, I had lunch there this afternoon. At a table near the wall was a foreign couple, a blond girl and a nondescript guy. I couldn’t hear a word the guy said, but the woman’s voice overpowered every single conversation in the room. At first I thought they were talking international business, but I soon realized they were discussing film festivals. I was interested despite myself, but I couldn’t very well go over and say “Hi, I haven’t made a single film since film school a couple of years ago. Pander to me!” I guess I could have, but, unlike my wallet exploding, I actually had a choice in this matter, so I opted to stay put, reading my book and eavesdropping on the woman’s half of the conversation, which was dominated by name dropping and pseudo-technical jargon, with very little real information. Maybe I’ll run into her at some point in the future, especially if my shock fluid leaks all over my disc brake again.

First I have to make another film, though, and before that I have to finish my book. Knowing exactly how I was going to keep my stomach full in the few months would be nice, too.

Amazon is in the baby business now. When will this online ordering madness end? Although I searched the site quite thoroughly, I still haven’t been able to find out exactly where one clicks to order a baby. However they do seem to offer free shipping of babies. Wouldn’t the whole sea mail delivery process be kind of rough on infants?

The Muppets sing the 12 Days of Christmas with John Denver. The reason I searched for and downloaded this (this is really dating myself) was because it conjures up a pleasant memory of a late 70’s Christmas season when I was about 8 or 9, sitting with my brother and sister in the commodious back seat of our 1969 Buick Electra 225 at night on our way back to our home in Seabrook after a Saturday in downtown Houston, and this was on the radio. My siblings and I were all really into the muppets at the time, and the rendition really cracked all of us up. My sister was also a John Denver fan, although my parents tried to forbid her from listening to his music due to their suspicion that his “Rocky Mountain High” was chemically induced.