This morning I resorted to taking a taxi to work because I didn’t want to be too late and get yelled at again. Traffic was terrible as usual, and as we sat unmoving on the Jianguo Overpass a really nice Taiwanese song came on the radio. I listened for a while, then askd the cabbie what song it was.

“I dunno,” he said. He was one of those cabbies who don’t like to talk a lot, but I suppose an apparent foreigner speaking Taiwanese with him piqued his interest. “It’s the theme song of one of those soap operas, Ah-cheng, I think it’s called.”

“One of the Big Three 8 o’clock Soap Operas?” I asked, and he nodded. I haven’t been into those things for years now, especially since I no longer have a TV in my room, and the TV in our living room makes everyone look like badly animated aliens. I used to get really addicted to them, though, despite their invariably awful production quality (an exception to that was the Hong Kong-produced Outlaws of the Marsh, which was on a few years aqo. It’s also one of my favorite Chinese novels, so I’m biased). I should look into this one, though. No doubt it sucks, but I can at least look for the theme song.

When I got to work today (on time, I might add), I found that every cubicle had a small Christmas stocking pinned to one of its walls. Inside each was a stick of candy. When I opened up my inter-office email, there was a message from one of the IT guys. It read:

Look around you! There’s cute little red stockings everywhere, see them? Also there’s a piece of candy inside each one. In this cold Christmas season, we’ll give you not only a warm feeling, but also a chance to make your dreams come true!

Everyone can play Santa this year. Here’s how to play:

Do you have something to tell that special someone? Do you want to thank them? Is there something you would like to confess to them? Like your true feelings? Just write a note and include a small gift and put it into their cubicle stocking!

The funny thing about this is that I have a small crush on the IT guy who sent this email. Yeah, savor that irony.

Also, it’s not that cold out. Yet. There are reports that mainland China is sending us a strong cold front for Christmas (or ROC Constitution Day, as it’s officially known here), and it should arrive on Friday. Maybe this stocking will come in handy after all.

Thankfully, nothing was damaged or even knocked over in my room from the earthquake. Still, maybe I should consider arranging things so that they’re a bit more stable in case a bigger one hits, because eventually a bigger one will hit.

My motorcycle has been parked out in the rain at the office for two days now, since I don’t like to ride it in rain, especially the constant, cold downpour that has continued for the last couple of days. I’ll bet it thinks that I’m punishing it for gouging my ankle the other day. At least it will be clean, but I’m a bit worried about the effect of 13 years’ of rust on its frame. Hopefully it will last a bit longer, or at least not fail in anything resembling a catastrophic manner.

As if the recent cold, rainy weather and my resulting soggy shoes weren’t bad enough, there was an earthquake this morning.

It didn’t seem that strong at first. It started out with that slight tentative quiver that makes you wonder if maybe the seaweed tuna roll you had for breakfast wasn’t such a brilliant idea. Then it got stronger, and other people began to say the magic word: Earthquake! I’ve been through stronger ones, of course, most notably the 9/21 quake in 99, and even after that, but this one seemed to last a long time. People ran to the stairwells and stood against the support pillars in our office. I stayed at my desk (damn I’m heroic: “Brave Editor Finishes Editing Insipid Feminine Product Commerical Script Despite Being Smushed by Falling Drink Machine in Quake”), but I did take the precaution of putting on my shoes just in case I had to run for it. I was waiting for the power to go off; a sure sign that it’s a big quake in my book, but it stayed on, and eventually the quake died down. It was odd to see the buildings across the street swaying back and forth, but soon that stopped as well.

My concern now is that my room has been trashed again, since my building tends to sway rather aggresively in some quakes. It’s not a terribly big problem as long as nothing of import is broken, but….but….it’s the NOT KNOWING that’s TEARING ME APART!

Sorry. Perhaps I should go home now.

Frightening things are afoot. That much we all know, but it seems to me that the whole 9/11 thing has caused a lot of people to believe they are justified in just turning off their brains so that other can do their thinking for them. My good friend Clar, who is responsible for international student affairs at a large US university, described what is going on at her school. Here are some excerpts from what she told me:

“It’s so scary here right now. There have been leaks in the press that the government is compiling a list of all “suspected terrorist sympathizers”, and it includes a University Pres. who gave a speech urging “peaceful solutions, and to not give in to hate.”

“The most recent student (of several) to be picked up was taken from work, he was not allowed a phone call. for 4 days, he was in INS lockup (a wing of a state pen.) and his roommates, family, all thuoght he’d been mugged and killed. local police finally found him. INS didn’t notify them, either. he was just taken.”

“I should not have expected that we would have learned anything from the past…… I’m waiting for the interrment camps to start up. At first, I

thought that I’d be out of a job since it looked like they were gonna ban internaitonals, now it is clear that I’m going to be made a tool of the witch

hunt. The INS came to my office and requisitoned lists of students from “certain countries”.

“The U.S. Patriot Act has **REPEALED** the Buckley AMendment (protecting student records), and it has NO TIME LIMIT. It doesn’t say that these freedoms are suspended “for the duration of the war”, it’s forever. And nobody complained. anyone who questioned it was slammed in the media. They’ve loosened the rules protecting the privacy of phone calls. I don’t know about e-mail and snail mail. they are setting up military tribunals.”

“If it’s an analogy that helps, the things that our students were picked up for – they were paperwork errors and minor violations. the kind of things that before the U.S. Patriot Act was passed were settled by filling out a form, paying a $120 fee to the INS and waiting 6 months for a response from the regional office. Now they’re being picked up and put in jail. The student I told you about had let his grades slip and was on academic probation. that means he was not enrolled for a semester. the normal procedure is to file a form called an I-539 and attach proof that he got back in school the following semester, pay a $120 fee and get a letter to put in his file saying that he’s back in INS good graces. Instead, he was jailed, and released on $3,000 bond. He’s hired an attourney, and he’ll have to go before an INS court this spring.”

“It’s like being a taxpayer, and all the previous years you’ve filed, if you make a calculation error, the IRS sends you a letter telling you to fix your

return, with a grace period in which to do it, and then one year, the exact same error lands you in jail, with no warning. scary.”

As I said, frightening stuff.

Today didn’t start out on a terribly good note. It was raining when I woke up inside my mosquito netting; I had smushed about a dozen mosquitoes last night, and a dozen more were waiting when I emerged from the protective white web. I took a few minutes to hunt them down and kill them, and now there are little splashes of blood, my blood, thank you very much, all over my walls and ceiling.

The rain seemed to have stopped by the time I headed out, so I got on my motorcycle and managed to miss the kickstart, instead gouging my ankle. The metal rod went straight through my jeans and sock and managed to draw blood.

“Aaaaaw, FUCK!” I said, arousing absolutely no attention as I am often heard saying this kind of thing. I had to re-park my bike and go back upstairs to bandage my ankle, then come back down and head to work. I drove slowly today as I had already seen too much of my own blood and I wasn’t too anxious to see any more.

I arrived at the office at the same time as Terrence, one of my co-workers. I walked to my desk and piddled around on the computer to take my mind off of the pain in my ankle for a while before my phone rang. It was my boss, warning me about being late.

“Huh? I got here before 9:40, I’m sure,” I said, but she wasn’t having any of it. Apparently the Big Boss had wanted me to do something for her at 9:50 this morning and I wasn’t there.

“In light of the fact that everyone’s salaries are already frozen, we are conducting performance reviews. Your extravagance is exceeding the boundries of my patience,” she said. Meaning what? I have no idea. Is the fact that our salaries are frozen even though we haven’t been adversely affected by the Global Economic Boogeyman supposed to be some kind of incentive for me to get here on time?

I didn’t want to argue, so I said ok, I’ll try to do better. After hanging up I went to Terrence to confirm when we had arrived. “About 9:35,” he told me. On time. Something tells me I need to get serious about finding another, hopefully better job. Me and the rest of the people on my links page.

The noise last night turned out to be coming from an aborigine concert rather than Ramadan-related festivities, I found when I went down to have a look. There was a good-sized crowd at the theater in the park, and Power Station was there along with several performers I didn’t recognize. Midway through the concert it began to rain, though, and they lost a good half of their audience, which was a shame. Most of the songs were good, with the exception of their “We Are the World”-esque rendition of “Aborigines Will Always Be Aborigines”. I decided to go back and watch The Godfather: Part 2.

I haven’t been able to find Tim Tams at any other Watson’s besides the one near our office, so I went back there to stock up. I mentioned the Tim-Tam Gap to the girl at the counter, and she said “Yeah, we’ve been having trouble keeping them in stock since we first started selling them about a month ago.” See? SEE? I mentioned the concept of peanut-butter Tim Tams to Simon, but all he said was “Eurgh! No.” Oh, well. Just a thought.

Another wasted Saturday…ah, but it felt good to just stretch out on my bed and know that nothing was on my schedule for the entire day. So I doodled in my sketchbook, caught up on some reading, configured my webcam to broadcast The Poagao Channel (Channel 285680 on Earthcam TV) whenever I feel the need to become the object of visual voyeurism in addition to the literary voyeurism I usually subject myself to in this journal. I also watched The Godfather DVD I bought recently. The good stuff, ’twas.

This morning I was awoken at about 7am by someone shouting/singing in arabic nearby. I poked my head out the window to find Hsinsheng South Road filled with hundreds of people milling around. Then I realized that today was the day muslims can start eating again after fasting for Ramadan, and there was a huge celebration at the mosque next door. Various chants, which I assume went something like “Nothing like fasting to build an appetite” were traded between the crowds and the person on the loudspeaker. By 9am it had pretty much died down, and the sun came out.

I did get some writing done, but eventually I decided I had to take some advantage of the nice weather, particularly since it’s all that much rarer in December, so I bought some sandwiches and walked down to the NTU campus to eat and read. The nice thing about NTU campus people is that they are so assured of their English ability that a foreign-looking person tends to be beneath their notice, which is nice.

After lunch I walked across Roosevelt Rd, aiming for the river. I passed a few empty apartment buildings and wondered why they were empty until I noticed the high-voltage power lines running behind them. I can’t imagine living with that threatening hum 24 hours a day, either.

I kept walking towards the river, passing the amusingly named Drinking Water Museum, recalling the good old days back when there was actually potable drinking water in Taiwan. Further on down the road I passed a series of amusing murals depicting the various stages of a standard military obstacle course in a sort of anime-esque style painted clumsily on the wall underneath an elevated highway. The sounds of young men’s voices came from behind the wall, and I stopped to take some pictures.

I was just snapping the last of the murals when one of the men, wearing the blue jumpsuit of an MP, came over and told me I couldn’t take pictures of the murals. “What? Are there military secrets to found in these awful….uh, awfully cute paintings?” I asked him. He was about half a foot taller than me and looked quite stern, but sorry, I’ve served with MPs before and he didn’t scare me. I was finished taking pictures anyway, so I just said “Ok, fine,” and walked away. Just for your reference, here are the “top-secret” murals the MPs were so concerned about keeping me from photographing:

1. Start! This is the beginning of the obstacle course, if you hadn’t noticed.

2. Barbed wire. Here’s a hint: go underneath it.

3. What looks like log-rolling is really crossing over either shark- or small-mountain-infested water using gray logs. Secret: Grow extra arms. Shhh!

4. Pole-climbing. The trick to this is to hide behind the pole so the enemy won’t see you.

5. Jumping over a log while running from a comically-depicted pursuing tank. I’d probably go around the log, but that’s just me. I’m not quite sure how not having a mouth or nose is supposed to help here.

After I finished wandering around down by the always-depressing riverside park, Kirk called and said he wanted to go shopping for videogames, so we arranged to meet at T-zone. While I was waiting I watched the traffic and noticed two large-capacity imported bikes dodging through traffic. The problem with larger capacity motorcycles here is that everyone in Taiwan is used to having these little scooters they just drive flat-out all the time. People drive as fast as they can go, and that is going to have to change. Unfortunately, most of the people who are, at least initially, be able to afford the larger bikes are going to be rich young people, who tend to be the absolute worst drivers there are, probably due to a combination of belief that they are young and cannot die couple with a belief that they are rich and cannot get caught. Another problem is that police here are used to passing out tickets for such things are making a right turn on red rather than for dangerous driving or speeding.

All of this is either going to have to change, or traffic is going to get very bloody very fast. In the case of the latter, I might just shelve my plan to buy a new motorcycle and do what Kirk does; take the MRT and buses everywhere I go, unless it’s out in the country somewhere.

When Kirk arrived, he showed me a reindeer antlers headband he bought for NT$100. It lit up and played “Jingle Bells” when he put it on. I told him it was the tackiest thing I’d seen all day, but I have to admit it did cheer me up.

It seems that the Ramadan festivities are still going on downstairs this evening in the form of music and other events. I like it.

I think the police must read this account. The reason I think this is that last night on my way home from work, one of them, apparently just to taunt me for considering a career in their illustrious profession, pulled me over and shook me down for over NT$600, which is, I know from experience, roughly the amount needed to keep a cabbie with a crowbar from seriously fucking you up after denting his fender with your head. Actually, I think the fact that I made an illegal turn also had something to do with the cop pulling me over, unless the other two people he pulled over had also recently confessed in their online journals to once being interested in the wonderful world of bribes/law-enforcement.

After the officer wrote me the ticket, I asked him how much it was going to cost me. “I don’t know. I think these are over NT$1,000 or something,” he said absently, waving me off. I spoke to the police in Chinese because I don’t believe in the old “Oh, I’m a foreigner and therefore beyond the reach your petty third-world authority” spiel. I could do it, but I also know that it pisses them off. If he sees that I am not Chinese and waves me through, that’s his business, but I am not going to put on a whole song and dance act just to get out of paying a NT$600 ticket. I was stewing about it, sure, but I was also more angry at myself for not noticing the guy standing there early enough to avoid a ticket than I was at the cop himself.

After I got home, Kirk, Victor and I went out for hot pot at the new three-story, neon-emblazoned “Ke Ke Ya” Hot-pot Palace on Heping E. Rd. and Tai-shun St. The hot-pot materials were on the second floor, while we were seated on the third floor. The pot itself was too small, however, and the food wasn’t terribly appetizing. This didn’t phase Kirk, who piled plate after plate on the table until Victor and I were taking bets on just when he would explode.

I had been crabby after getting the ticket, but after a couple of hours of the piss-taking that usually occurs when we three get together, I was feeling much better. We discussed the various aspects of pet ownership, got an honest of Windows XP (nice, but not necessary) from Victor, who works at a computer shop, and Kirk and I corrected each others grammatical mistakes. All good fun; the kind of interaction with the outside world I need more of, especially after a day in this big white Fridgaire of an office.

After I went home I watched Enemy at the Gates on DVD. Clumsy but inventive cinematography and repetative music didn’t do nearly as much damage to the interesting story as the tacked-on romantic interest. Had potential, though. Bit of a shame it didn’t realize it. Actually pronouncing their own names correctly might have helped as well.

This morning I woke up to find the thermometer on my air conditioner reading a comfy 8 degrees celsius, although the weather report said it was 12 outside. Still cold enough for my big red jacket, though. When I got into the office I found waiting for me a very nice email from a reader in the Chicago area, so nice that I will not divulge too much about Friday, since he is looking forward to it and doesn’t want me to spoil the surprise.

I will mention one thing, though. Since I had to go to the post office in order to pay my traffic ticket, I stopped of at the G’Day Cafe for lunch, since it is nearby. There I ran into my friend Graham, who has taken over the lease of the 70’s Airport Love Palace, and a co-worker of his named Dan. Both of them were quite impressed by my chicken sandwich. G’Day always has good chicken, and the Taiwanese aboriginals who run it are really nice people. They especially like my aborigine hats and are in general the only ones who aren’t laboring under the rather heavy illusion that my hats are all of middle-eastern/arabic origin.

That’s all I’m going to say about Friday for now. Wouldn’t want to spoil it.

Traffic last night after work was incredibly congested, even for Taipei. I just hit that one point where the entire city is gridlocked, apparently, right after everyone has just gotten off of work, and for some reason roughly half of the cars on the road are double- or tripled-parked.

I arrived at Cafe Odeon at a little after 6:30 to find Cranky Laowai, of Oriented fame, browsing the considerable selection of imported beers. Then I got a call from Dean, who was in a taxi. Dean had told me how to get there, and now he wanted to know how to get there himself. Not long after that he and Brian, his co-worker from the ROC Department of Propaganda, where Cranky Laowai works as well, had me surrounded at a table in the back and taunted me by intimating that our beef lasagna was, in fact, fresh out of a Chef Boy-ar-dee can.

Richard, another News alum, showed up, and we walked over to Peso, whose staff is surely used to my presence by now as well as my preference for cheese nachos and Bailey’s Irish Cream. No sooner had we settled at a table in the loft than they began playing a horrid, Taiwanese-shopping-mall version of non-stop Christmas tunes. I was chosen to go inform the staff the impropriety of this musical choice, but my entreaties were apparently ignored, so I went to the empty DJ booth and turned the cacophony down. The staff then got a clue as to my intentions and put on some more appropriate music.

Soon enough we were joined by Graham, another News escapee, and then who should show up but another Oriented frequenter, codename: Alien, along with two of her friends. I think that the girls must have been doing some drinking of ther own before they got there, or else their brews were inordinately potent. Or maybe alcoholic fumes tend to gather at the top of the building where we were sitting, hastening the process of getting drunk. I don’t know. Whatever it was, it worked. I wasn’t drunk enough to get into the real spirit of things, i.e. being able to actually appreciate the atrociously bad jokes that only too much drink can produce, but just drunk enough to think that the guys who worked there were kind of cute. I didn’t, however, feel like a repeat of last Saturday morning, especially since I had to be at work this morning.

Alien wants Dean and I to play Kirk and Spock respectively in a Star Trek episode she is thinking of producing some time next year. You laugh, but it could happen! You never know!

At some point after midnight the lights came up and the music stopped. We could see cops entering downstairs, checking everyone’s ID’s. They progressed up until they were on the level just below ours. Graham and Dean have both just recently been legalized and were eager to show off their newfound status to the police, but they never got the chance. The police didn’t even bother coming up to check us and just started tallying up their quota sheets, getting ready to move on to their next bar.

We all agreed that this was preposterous. We wanted to be carded, dammit! It wasn’t long before we realized just how lame our indignation was, though, so we just slunk away dejectedly in the abject knowlege that we’d all have to be at work in a few hours. Graham and I approached the police about being carded, plaintively holding out our respective ID card to be checked, but the police just looked at us sadly and shook their heads. Sorry, son, we can’t help you.

Actually, a few years back during one of my periods of sporadic unemployment, some of my friends said I should apply to the police academy here. After all, they said, who would suspect a foreigner of working for the Taiwanese police force! It was genius! The only flaw to such a brilliant plan was that I didn’t particularly relish the idea of being shot at. What a silly youth I was. My loss, I guess.

Now it’s sunny outside, and the green shoulders of Yangming Shan are just visible through the haze up Longjiang St, which runs down behind our building. I walked up it during my lunch break to the local Watson’s to get some Tums when, what should I find on sale inside but Tim Tams! All flavors! Almost by reflex, my hand shot out and grabbed a box of “Chewy Caramel”. Surely this was new; there’s no way they were on sale here before I went to Australia and learned about them there? Now I just need some milk to suck through them.

On my way back from lunch I passed a Yamaha RZR similar to mine, and I found that it had even more kilometers on its odemeter than mine does. Over 20,000 more, in fact. Perhaps that is why it never moves. I’ll be lucky if I can wrench another 20,000 kilometers out of my motorcycle.

We’ve arranged to meet at Cafe Odeon, near Shi-da, tonight at 6:30. Hopefully there will be food there, but if not there’s plenty of restaurants around there. And I’m already pretty full from the Tim Tams anyway.

Yesterday afternoon the older of the two delivery guys who serve our office went around handing out purple bags to everyone. “What’s this?” I asked him when he dropped one on my desk.

“Gifts,” he answered in his usual curt fashion.

“From whom? What for?” I asked, opening up the bag to find four cans of dried, shredded chicken. On the package, a cartoon chicken, presumably pre-shredding/drying, managed to gave the thumbs-gesture in spite of the fact that it had no thumbs.

“It’s from the boss,” the delivery guy said. This makes me uneasy, because in this time when everyone is gleefully broadcasting to anyone who will listen that “The Economy is Bad”, why would anyone equip an entire office with cans of shredded chicken? The only answer I can think of is that they’re trying to soften a coming blow, such as reduced or even cancelled New Year’s bonuses. They’ve already frozen our salaries in spite of sustained profits, all of the doom-and-gloom remains in the realm of “predictions”. The reason I know this is that I see all of the budget reports. We’re not making any less money than we always have, but all of the money from recent “cost-cutting” has got to be going somewhere. I’ll be damned if they take our New Year’s bonuses away, as those are supposed to make up for our pitiful salaries.

I was so intent on seeing Doctor Zhivago yesterday that I went and rented the obviously-pirated copy to watch the parts that wouldn’t play on the real DVD, just so I could follow the story. The real DVD looks wonderful, but the sound was a bit iffy and of course there were three or four chapters that I couldn’t watch because they caused my computer to crash. Overall a beautiful, if rather emotionally empty movie. They should have let a Russian director do it. It might have lacked the scale and scope of David Lean’s direction, but it would have been able to delve into the depths of the characters like only a Russian telling a Russian story can.

The ride in to work today was depressing. It is the kind of day, grey, cloudy, slightly moist even though the rain can’t break through the pollution, that lends itself to brooding on the past as a pleasurable alternative to dealing with the present. A bunch of friends from my days in the newspaper business are planning to get together for dinner and drinks tonight, but so far nobody knows where or when. I suppose that will be decided over the course of the day via chat programs and cell phones.

Last night I saw my first WTO-related ad, at the gas station on the corner of Xinsheng and Heping. It was a picture of the supremely gaudy and questionably-named Dink scooter, and underneath was written “Pre-WTO 150cc/Post-WTO 250cc”. Although I’m glad to see them opening up to larger bikes, this development has the potential to really screw things up here, traffic-wise. They’re going to have to strictly implement a whole new set of rules to keep things from getting out of hand. Of course most people, the office people, aren’t going to be interested in larger bikes, but a significant amount of other people will be. I’d guess that rich punks and wannabe gangsters, as always, will be the biggest problem, since they know that the police won’t bother them. It might just be the perfect time to move out to the country, find a cheap little place in Muzha, Danshui, Beitou or thereabouts and start using public transportation more.