Workmen downstairs are using that ubiquitous red, white and blue striped plastic material to place a circus tent-like wrapping over the front of our building and the Bridge To Nowhere for our annual company party tomorrow night. Saving a lot of money by holding it right here, no doubt. This is the party where everyone in our department is supposed to dress up like doctors and nurses. I plan on wearing what I usually wear, since usually doctors dress like everyone else. If they say “But you’re supposed to be dressed as a doctor,” I’ll just say “I am! You didn’t specify ‘doctors in the operating room’, did you? Ha!”

I know, it’s not getting into the spirit of things, but I’ve always had a hard time getting myself into the mob mentality. I think I was born with it but the doctor (how ironic!) noticed it and cut if off, sort of like Shauna’s sixth finger. Anyway, when I get pissed off I like to think I’m my own little, one-man mob. (How many times have I heard myself utter the words “Don’t make me a little mob; you wouldn’t like me when I’m a little mob” in dark alleys?)

I find working here at the new office is rather nice, actually. The air conditioning system gurgles loudly over my head, drowning out the desktop radios of the morons who insist on broadcasting ICRT to the whole office, a large part of the IT department accidently locked themselves into the pool room by closing the glass doors and not being able to open them again, and I have placed one of my motorcycle’s old rear-view mirrors, which seperated from the rest of the bike the last time I bounced it and myself across the surface of the Renai traffic circle, next to my monitor so that I can look over and see Four-animal Mountain out the window. There are Star Trek-like sliding doors. The absence of Whiny Woman alone is cause enough to break out in song.

I like it here so much that I made a page for it. It’s not much, but I thought I might as well. Granted, it’s not going to win me any awards, but I figure that the fewer people read this site, the more people I can make fun of. Plus I’m less likely to be beset by a raging mob of irate readers.

And deep-down, that’s what it’s all really about, isn’t it?

…and the weather saga continues: Cold, rainy, and generally disgusting. It makes me so glad that I’m out of the army. Not being able to come in out of the cold and wet, not being able to dress properly for it, etc., were cause for a lot more bitching from Corporal Poagao than you hear from the current Civilian Poagao. If you can imagine.

I was taking advantage of one of the many breaks afforded to me by my constantly crashing computer this morning when I discovered that we have an actual boxing ring on the 10th floor, looking quite out of place among the desks and coffeemakers. Just when I think I’ve found the most bizarre thing about our new offices, I find something even stranger. I even got pictures of the boxing ring and the giant chessboard (which is being used for meetings and art/craft projects). And you thought I was making all of it up.

What is particularly funny is that people are just beginning to wonder if it was the best idea to locate the punching bags right next to the glass doors. One of my female co-workers was using the punching bag and found to her dismay that the laws of physics not only apply to her but seemed to have a bit of a vendetta, as the bag came back and hit her on the side of the head with rather more force than Newton had led her to believe would result from her paltry blows. I had to make a quick exit to prevent my mirth at the situation from being broadcast around the office, and when I had finished laughing in the stairway I returned to find everyone standing around looking at the bag as if considering whether they should have it put down.

Lunch at Ameroni’s was nice. Saw Steve for the first time since he returned from his trip, as well as Graham, Dean and Gavin. We always eat at the same table for some reason, and the coffee is always slow, likely for another reason, although none of us know exactly what it could be. There are never more than a handful of tables full, but the staff seems to be comprised of people the management took pity on and rescued from the School for People with Particularly Short Attention Spans.

The Taipei Financial Center, which was originally supposed to be the tallest building in the world upon its completion at 101 stories, then cut down to 76 stories due to worries about airplanes hitting it, and then supposedly given the go-ahead for 20 more floors, is located a block away from the new office. It’s already the tallest structure in the city, higher than the Mitsukoshi Building, which is about 46 stories. It’s especially striking at night, when showers of sparks are often visible cascading out of the massive structure.

Dean’s uncle mailed him the latest Enterprise episodes on tape. *salivates*

When I got back home tonight I turned on my computer and for some strange reason it works now. I didn’t do a thing to it. Perhaps it was just in a bad mood. Or maybe elves came and fixed it. I have no idea, but either way I think I’d better start watching my back.

In any case, the photos I took today are up now. Enjoy.

I was afraid that I wouldn’t make it to work in time for the office-opening ceremony this morning. All of the cabs were taken; it took me 15 minutes of standing in the freezing rain to finally catch one. When I got to the new office, I could hear the drumbeat of the lion dance, so I followed a few other latecomers down to the basement and then up the stairwell to join the back of the crowd inside the lobby rather than show up through the front door.

The lobby was filled with incense smoke from the joss sticks everyone had. Slogans were thrown around and speeches made, as the smoke irritated my eyes. I was glad when we were told to go out into the rain again to watch the finale of the lion dance, which was being performed by four guys and one kid. The kid had his own little lion costume and was incredibly cute. The other lions were two-man costumes, front and back, and they did the customary acrobatics and after our Big Boss fed them red envelopes for breakfast. Everyone was huddled under the Bridge To Nowhere to get out of the rain.

After the performance and some fireworks, the lion dancers began to pack up their equipment and load it into their little blue truck. It was still raining, and the little kid, perhaps 5 or 6 years old, stood watching the older men work.

“Aren’t you going to help them load the equipment?” one of my co-workers, a woman about my age, asked the kid. She was bending over and staring at him.

“Ah, come on, give the kid a break. He’s been dancing in the cold rain for the last half an hour, after all,” I said, and the woman stood up straight and said (altogether now):

“Wah, your Chinese is so good!” (thanks, you can sit down again). The kid was completely forgotten in light of the astonishing revelation that The Foreigner Can Speak, so after the woman left I took some pictures of him on my digital camera and showed them to him. “That’s you! Look at you!” I said. He was delighted. I wondered how long it would be before he, too, is taught to react to non-Chinese like the woman did.

Eventually we were allowed back in the lobby, which, although still unfinished, was filled with tasty treats. The lion dancers didn’t get any, however, which I found rather petty. Unfortunately they had already left by the time I made my way inside. The first three floors of the building are still unfinished. I found my computer on my new desk, all set up, but one of the moving people apparently stole my telephone, so I had to get another. I feel like someone stole my cubicle walls, but hopefully I’ll get used to it. At least I have my old chair and plenty of space for books and stuff. The pool table and punching bags are right in front of me, and a wonderful view of Four-animal Mountain right behind me. The basketball court and ping-pong table are just downstairs, and the pub is on the next floor up. I think I’ll wait until the weather clears before I visit the rooftop gardens, though.

It seems louder here, probably because there are more hard surfaces and fewer sound-absorbing partitions. The bathroom on this floor is really strange, with bowls for sinks and a window in one of the toilets so the people in the building next door can watch as you do your business (I’m kidding; there’s blinds on the window). There’s also a shower.

Steve is in town, on a visit from Tainan, where he’s staying with his in-laws. I foresee expensive taxi rides in the near future. But that’s ok. I’ll buy lottery tickets just in case I don’t have enough cash. You never know when a few million extra dollars could come in handy.

My feet are wet after slogging through the streets all day. In case you hadn’t noticed, I am not a big fan of Taipei’s wet winters. In fact, were it possible, I would like to hunt down and kill Taipei’s wet winters, but I suppose they do make the summers seem much nicer.

My computer at home is acting estranged, like it’s never seen me before. It won’t even start for me anymore. I dunno, should I go straight to a divorce or should I try counciling first? Or maybe just finding the wininet.dll file and copying it back into my windows directory would help. Regardless, it’s being a pain. I haven’t been able to do any work on my book this weekend at all, and time is getting short. The weather is stuck in the “suck” position as well, so it’s not like I can go outside. I’m using Dean’s computer to write this.

Our office should be ready for us to begin work tomorrow morning. There was nothing for me to do on Friday, so I walked around the area after lunch and then waited in a Lotto line for several hours. I was muttering curses against the people who were going up to people in the front of the line and asking them to buy tickets for them. Of course, when I got to the head of the line, shortly before the stand closed, a couple of my co-workers came up and asked me to buy tickets for them. So I had to put on a show of being really annoyed with them for having the gall to ask the people behind me to wait that much longer to buy tickets. I know, I’m such a hypocrite. At least I’m not in denial. And no, I didn’t win the lottery. I’d be writing to you from an Internet Pub somewhere in London if I had.

I’m glad that some of my favorite sites, like Shauna, Blog You! and Davezilla have been nominated for this year’s Bloggies, but I just can’t force myself to take these award things very seriously. I suppose I would find it within my heart to do so if anyone had nominated me, but I do enjoy the freedom of not having to worry about what my readers think of me, since there’s only a handful of you, and I think I could take you.

Friday night Dean, Carl and I went out to the “Ren-jian” restaurant on Dunhua S. Road. After the meal we started drinking wine and actually exhausted the restaurant’s supply of Merlot during the next several hours. I don’t remember much of the conversation except that Carl thinks me rather reptillian, and Dean doesn’t like hats in restaurants. Or I could have dreamed that. I do know that we left the restaurant and walked down the sidewalk singing everything from Gilbert and Sullivan to Rodgers and Hammerstein. Unfortunately I was so drunk I couldn’t dredge up many of the words to “Your Majesty” from The King and I.

Saturday night Graham had a housewarming party at the 70’s Airport Love Palace, which is looking quite spiffy, with actual fish in the fishtanks and new wallpaper covering up the mold leftover from the most recent floods. I remarked to Carl that we had the unique opportunity to give the entire staff of the Taipei Times food poisoning. “Don’t you love the things TC says?” was Carl’s reply.

This morning consisted of brunch at Jake’s. Star Trek tonight, and lots of money for taxis. I was getting withdrawal symptoms from not being able to get online, which is actually really pathetic. Yesterday, I actually watched a videotape out of sheer desperation. A videotape!

Dean is signaling his desire to return to the world of PC gaming by ironing Evil Cat, so I’ll have to stop now. That cat could use a good ironing, actually.

Lotto-mania has been sweeping Taiwan in recent days. The government-sponsored lottery has accrued an amazing amount of money. Some call it a tax on the poor, but I prefer to see it as a tax on people who are bad at math. I can’t remember who said that first, but it’s true. I know, since I have always been terrible at math, and thus I followed all of the other low-SAT-math-section-scoring lemmings down to the local lotto seller and bought two tickets for NT$100. I choose one set of numbers based on the scientifically redoubtable “ages that were good for me” theory, and had the computer select the numbers for the other ticket.

And guess what? I didn’t come close to winning even the NT$200 consolation prize. And the real tragedy is that I will probably try again, just setting myself up for cruel disappointment every time and sending myself into a spiral of depression to rival the time I opened up the publisher’s clearning house letter to find that I hadn’t, in fact, won 10 million dollars.

I have a theory that for most people, no matter what they happen to be doing, their level of wealth at a certain time is fixed. It doesn’t matter if you’re working at a job or choosing lottery ticket numbers. Poor people tend to stay poor and rich people tend to get richer. So my ability to pick a winning lottery ticket is next to nothing, while Mr. Benz-driving Gangster/CEO will have a lot better chance than I do at winning large prizes. It’s in the stars, as they say.

My theory was tested and did pretty well at today’s office raffle. They might as well have named it the “Everyone But Poagao Wins Big” activity. As I walked down to the finance department where the drawings were being held, I saw people walking out with DVD players, home stereo systems, digital cameras, large flat-screen TVs, the Hope Diamond, etc. Naturally, these people were mostly upper management types. I picked a random number (#4, not the luckiest of numbers in Chinese culture), and was rewarded with a Starbuck’s coffee mug. Oh, the joy and rapture. Even Whiny Woman won a refridgerator, and she’s been whining about it all day. “This looks like the refridgerator from a hotel room!” she’s been crying. “What’s next, glass ceilings?” She was so distressed that she called herself and asked if she was in. I’m not kidding. God knows what she would have done if she had gotten the coffee mug. Now she’s trying tell the refridgerator for way more than any kitchen appliance that is not gold-plated and equipped with its own shuttle launchpad is worth.

For lunch I went to the G’day Cafe one last time before we move. I’ll miss their chicken frajitas and the sunny aborigines who make it. One of those language exchange things was going on at the table next to me. It was the typical array of young Taiwanese women crowded around a foreign guy who looked to be in his mid thirties. Luckily I had brought a book to distract me from the mixture of giggling and bad pronunciation. Since more people look at my photos than anything else on this website, I should have taken my camera with me to capture it on film, but I’m sure I’ll see it again soon.

I don’t even know what the hell we are supposed to do tomorrow. Our system is being shut down tonight and even our crappy computers won’t work. We’re supposed to spend the whole day packing, but for me that will take about five minutes, and I might as well do that before I leave today. Hopefully they’ll let us leave when they realize that they’re only tempting us to get drunk and let out our frustration by popping all of the packing material bubbles.

So, I won a coffee mug. And I didn’t win the lottery. Some day this is turning out to be.

It’s 6:20 p.m. and I am still sitting here at the office, waiting for people to send me “last-minute” work. I’ve got a headache from staring at the computer all day. Usually I wake up with perfect vision, but by the time I go home my eyes are so stressed everything is slightly fuzzy. My job isn’t exactly a boon to my eyesight, which I just spend a substantial amount of money in an attempt to correct. Tomorrow is the office prizeWe also just got a letter from the Big Boss concerning which kinds of currency we are allowed to throw into the well located in the rooftop garden of the new office. And my right ear is really hot, for some strange reason. I dabbed some “Green Oil” on it but now it’s sort of hot and cool at the same time. And Whiny Woman‘s cell phone now has a pirate-themed ring tone. She comes in at around 1 or 2 in the afternoons these days and leaves about the same time I do.

That about sums up my day, which could be filed in the “Bizarre, but not in a good way” section.

Okay, I have to admit that I wasn’t exactly a model audience member myself when I went to see The Fellowship of the Ring. During the scene at the Council of Elrond, when Elrond says “You have a choice..,” I had to add, in my best agent imitation, “…Mr. Anderson.”

Fortunately the only one who got it was Dean, who contained himself admirably.

So, the Fellowship of the Ring: The movie began very awkwardly and stayed that way for quite a long time. The camerawork was not as good as I had expected. Granted, the scenes being portrayed were beautiful, but they were by no means beautifully portrayed. The music was mediocre and altogether uninspiring. I would have thought more of an early music, i.e. rennaisance pieces, would have been more appropriate than the generic Hollywood score they used.

As for the pace of the film, I know it is a difficult task to cram so much content into such a short time, but I really felt like I was on a whirlwind package tour of Middle Earth. The shot of the One Ring being cut off Sauron’s finger was replayed several times too many, and there were also too many unneeded flashbacks. The entire movie lacked subtlety to a degree that almost felt like a slap in the face, and I don’t mean that in a good way.

Rivendell was entirely too frilly. Indeed, the entire elven race seemed emasculated to a degree not even hinted at in the books. All of the laticework and lack of dignity in the architecture had me cringing in the theater. There was no sense of space. That the Council of Elrond was held on a porch, of all places, seemed an outrage. What happened to the big meeting hall?

And the whole Liv Tyler thing: I could hear waves of yawns sweeping through the audience when Arwen appeared in the wilderness, just managing to drown out the mushy, earthy sound of Tolkien rolling in his grave. It must be a hard thing to ignore the marketing people if even Peter Jackson gives in to their insistance on a solid love interest. I had thought that, being from New Zealand, he would be less easily swayed. Oh, well.

Around the time the company came to Moria, the pace seemed to click, but the movie lost it again in the addled mess that was Lothlorien, which was apparently filmed in a tiny stage set or a cave. I was half expecting to see Osama bin Laden at some point. (So that’s where he’s been hiding!)

With the appearance of the awesome fighting Uruk-hai things picked up again, although the character of their supposed creator Saruman was rather over the top. By the time the credits rolled the movie had almost managed to redeem itself, yet even at three hours it felt rushed and clipped.

I left the theater not quite knowing what to think. This movie makes me wonder if it is indeed possible to bring the Lord of the Rings to the screen at all. Jackson certainly gave it a good shot, and I will certainly be waiting to see what he does with The Two Towers and The Return of the King, but the first part, my favorite of the three books, does not lead me to believe that they will be much better.

Of course, the audience didn’t help my viewing experience very much either. A Taiwanese girl sitting behind me spent the entire movie either giggling hysterically at totally innappropriate places or clicking her tongue whenever anything remotely bad happened. At the end she started going on about how terrible the ending was. “Nothing was resolved!” she whined. I would have really liked to provide some resolution for her, preferably with a gunny sack and some twine, but alas, we live in a more civilized age these days, so I will have to be content with the old banana/tailpipe recipe.

I suppose a portion of my antipathy towards the movie may stem from the whole “sour grapes” thing. I’m no Peter Jackson, but when I was younger my brain hatched various pipe dreams about someday directing a real LOTR movie. As unlikely as that particular fantasy ever seemed, the visual confirmation of its death presented to me on the movie screen last night, even though I’ve long since given up on such an aspiration, still managed to clip a few threads within my personal knot of psychoses.

The weather in Taipei remains cold and dismal, and work seems to drag on and on. I was told to appreciate my job today by someone making substantially more than I do for roughly the same or less actual work. What do you say to that kind of assertion? I suppose he is right, though. I should stop complaining so much if I’m not actually willing to do something about it.

And now they’re playing “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” over the intercom. I won’t complain. I won’t complain.

Urrgh.

Predictably, yesterday was spent cleaning my room and going through old army photographs. Last night I donated my collection of computer games to Dean’s Gaming Addiction, earning from him the illustrious title of “Enabler”. I don’t think his girlfriend is too happy with me right now.

Today is the latest in a long series of gray, misty dark days in Taipei. This is Taipei at its worst, when there’s no incentive to look at anything because nothing is worth looking at. No mountains visible in the distance, no sky or even interesting clouds. Just cold, dim greyness and row upon row of ugly tiled buildings stretching into the gloom. And the weather reports say it’s only going to get colder.

Fortunately this is one of those city that improves vastly at night, when it unfurls all of its neon-induced splendor. I just reserved four tickets to see The Fellowship of the Ring this evening at Warner Village. Dean, his girlfriend Kay, his co-worker Brian and I are going to meet there for dinner before the movie. It will be the first movie I’ve seen in a long time, and the first I will have seen with zapped eyes. My vision isn’t quite stable yet, and I shouldn’t spend so much time looking at this tiny computer screen, but hopefully the big screen will be a more comfortable experience.

We got some good news in the form of notification that we get Friday off for “packing”. One of my co-workers warned me against having too much stuff because “there won’t be anywhere to put it.” Apparently everyone is going to be scrunched into a much smaller space. Just another kind of downsizing, I’ll wager. No wonder they’re giving us a seesaw. I wonder if there’s a punching bag, too. Hey, maybe that’s what the’re doing with Whiny Woman!

Well, one can hope.