I have been getting the following message a lot whenever I try to access my yahoo mailbox:

There was a problem accessing your mailbox.

This is most likely a temporary problem that should resolve itself within 10 minutes. We apologize for the inconvenience. Thank you.

This never happened before. It only started when Yahoo began their “premium” service, i.e., “Let’s see if we can browbeat our gullible users into forking over more money to us”. Are they hoping people will think “Hmmm, my ordinary Yahoo service is fucked up; maybe I should sign up for the premium service!”? Isn’t that like the Far Side cartoon where the window-glass company is throwing bricks with ads attached through people’s windows? Has the average IQ in the US dropped to such a degree that this kind of business policy actually makes sense? No, don’t answer that. It would be too depressing.

A community church near Houston, Texas, wants permission to use some of my photos for a brochure. I wonder which church it is. I spent a few of my childhood years in the area, and my parents’ tendency to switch churches every few months resulted in a familiarity with several churches and many different denominations. We could go to a Baptist church for a few months, and then suddenly switch to a Presbyterian, and then to a Methodist, or Anglican, Episcopal, or whatever. I would go from one Sunday School to another, never really getting to know any of the kids. It was a theme of my childhood, actually, since we moved around so much, just on a smaller time scale. Eventually I became conversant in many different kinds of church ceremonies, i.e., when to kneel, when to sing, when when I could get away with doodling on the program notes for lengthy periods of time during the sermon. I didn’t pay much attention to the sermons because if I had I would just have wanted to respond to the pastor’s claims, but I knew from confirmation class that discussion was frowned upon. We were God’s Flock, dammit. Sheep don’t discuss things. Shut up, TC. Nobody wants to hear your theories on why the Philistines might not have been so bad after all.

At the time I thought it was normal, but when I look back on it, I realize that all of that moving around from church to church was most likely the result of my parents’ inability to get along with normal people. This might explain a bit about my views on life or my distaste for people who are just too damn happy all the time. Discuss.

I got a couple of emails today, notwithstanding the 350+ articles of spam I get in each of my email accounts. Surely these spammers have lives. I’m certain people know who they are. If you know one, slap them for me, ok? If you are one, stay where you are; I’ll be right over with a hot poker and a VCD full of Andromeda episodes. You know, for torture.

One of the emails was from the Mirror Project, saying that my last submission has been posted. The other was from a reporter from ICRT who wants to do a feature interview with me. I’ve never done a radio interview before. It brings to mind scenes from movies like Grosse Point Blank and Almost Famous, though I doubt it could possibly be as interesting as all that.

Spring is here, of course, and I am thinking about making some more “Renegade Province” T-shirts. Does anyone have any suggestions for a new design, or should I use last year’s? Or maybe another theme altogether? I’ll definitely make larger shirts this time around, since cotton tends to shrink a bit more than I had expected. I think I’ll add the URL of this site to the design as well. Maybe I could even sell them at Oriented gatherings. There’s one next Thursday night, actually, over on one of the swankier sections of Anhe Rd.

The lights are on once again in our gigantic neighbor, the Taipei Financial Center, for the first time since the 3/31 earthquake. I guess they are going to restart construction again soon, but I think I’ll stay away from the thing anyway, just in case any more cranes come crashing down, feasibly ruining my entire lunch break.

The Vampire Song of the Day is one of the movements from Beethoven’s symphony #3, I’m not sure which movement. It goes daa-dee-daa-dee-da-da-da-da..you know the one. But as much as I like Beethoven, I’m getting a bit tired of hearing that theme over and over again. Whoever invented the loop function should be forced to hear the same song over and over for the rest of their lives. That is, if they’re still alive. If they’re dead, well…good.

In a week this website will be one year old. Last year about this time I had simply wanted an online space to show my photography, and this weblog was just an afterthough spurred on by my friend Moose’s site. And a year and over 30,000 hits later, my photography page is still by far the most popular page, even if this is largely due to my inability to successfully block being listed on google’s image search requests.

I don’t know what I should do to celebrate the one-year mark. Any suggestions? I should do another edition of the News from the Renegade Province, I suppose. Three editions a year isn’t very good, I’m afraid. I would do a redesign if I had any faith at all in my design skillz, which I don’t. Besides, I like my design. The guys at Blog You! may think that my icons are too big and my design simplistic, but I like it, and it seems to work. I’m not the kind of guy who buys a new ride every year, anyway.

In other news, my friend Mindcrime indicated that he was returning to our fair island after a three-year-absence while he went off to pursue golden dot-com opportunities Cali. Hopefully this time he will choose a better place to live than Sanchung. That, I believe, was his biggest mistake the last time he was here.

And now? Off to Dean’s to watch some Futurama, Farscape and other Sci-fi delicacies only recently made available through illegal cable channels.

What a weekend. I got little of what I had originally planned to do done, but I managed to do quite a lot that I hadn’t planned at all. All I can do as I sit here in the wee hours of Monday morning is wonder at it all. I feel like I’ve changed the sheets on my life.

The weather on Saturday was perfect. It simply doesn’t get any better in Taipei than it was on Saturday. Fresh, clear, just the right temperature. I enjoyed it from my room as I fiddled around online and chatted with the bwg, but I couldn’t stand not being out in it, so I called up Kirk around 3 and we decided to go out to one of the teahouses in Maokong, which is out in in Mucha. We took the MRT to the Wanfang Community Station and then caught a cab up to the Maokong valley. For some reason, the cabbie dropped us off at the foot of the valley, so we walked up. And up, and up, until we found a suitable place, pitched rather precariously in a Swiss Family Robinson-style over the stream running down the middle of the valley. The waitress offered us some free cake and we sat out on the balcony over the stream and wondered aloud to each other what it would be like to live in such a place all year round. It was quite pleasant during the day, but after the sun set it got a bit chilly. We didn’t relish the thought of walking all the way back down, so we asked the owner if she could call us a cab.

“No problem,” she said. “I’ll just ask one of my girls to drive you down.” We were then taken on a harrowing dash back down the mountain in the dark by a surprisingly cheerful young lady who thought nothing of passing the other cars on blind curves at breathtaking speeds. We managed to reach the Zoo Station in one piece, though. They’ve built a mini-mall there, and so we wandered through, pausing of course to consider buying some Play-doh at the Toys-R-Us store, before taking the MRT back to the city.

Kirk wanted to go to the Taiwan Bear Club, so we wandered around looking for Tianjin Street for a while before finding the place, which is a traditional Taiwanese bar whose patrons are mostly heavy-set types with crew cuts, rugby shirts and backwards baseball caps. The host paid quite a bit of attention to Kirk, whose strong verbal skills were put to the test in deflecting the former’s advances. Both Kirk and I were hopelessly outclassed in the bear category, though, as we simply aren’t large enough. Ironically, the dance floor was so tiny that only a handful of largish men could dance at one time. You’d think they’d think of things like that when they design such a venue.

Sho called at around 1am or so and invited me over to his friends’ place near Youth Park for a midnight snack. I took a taxi over there, but somehow we ended up at my place. I won’t go into details, though. You’re just going to have to use your imagination. Let it suffice to say that things are moving along.

Sunday was spent mostly at home, and then at one of Sho’s friends’ birthday party over at the Youth Park apartment, which is on the first floor of one of the huge public housing units over there. Sho said he might move in to one of the rooms there, since one of them is moving out. The place was sparsely decorated, which was just as well as over 20 guys showed up. Sho was in the kitchen cooking Three-cup Chicken and seafood fried rice. We watched a pirated VCD version of Amelie and then played lude card games over dinner and cake. It was quite fun, but I was quite tired by 11, so I just went home and crashed. Too tired to think of a witty ending at the moment, so you’re going to have to think of one on your own.

I arrived at the Taipei Language Institute, a.k.a TLI, a little after 7:30 last night, but I couldn’t find Berta anywhere. I walked around the hallways and peeked into various classrooms that were mostly filled with rows of students chanting various Beijing-accented Mandarin sounds. Eventually I asked the woman behind the counter where the Taiwanese class was, and she took me to a small room in the back of an office where two men sat, one older and one younger. There was no sign of Berta, but they were obviously expecting her to show up at any moment. The younger of the two turned out to be Japanese, and the older one the teacher, of course. He wore glasses and was prone to making odd, birdlike motions with his hands as he wrote on the archaic chalkboard. Both his Mandarin and Taiwanese were flawless.

Berta arrived after a few more minutes of awkwardness, and we began to go through the textbook. I got the idea that the teacher had not expected to have more than two students, and he made a little speech about how it would be difficult to teach so many students with such disparate backgrounds. The Japanese fellow had formally studied Taiwanese a few years ago, Berta learned from her parents when she was growing up in the US, and I learned all the Taiwanese I know on the streets or in the army. I couldn’t decide whether he was being cautious or subtle about indicating that I wasn’t welcome. I have a week to decide, however, before the next class, whether I want to pursue it further. It would be good, but then again I do at least already have enough Taiwanese to use it to learn more on my own; I just need to get off my ass and do it. The only thing the class would provide would be motivation and structure.

In the middle of the class, Sho called. I went outside to answer, embarrassed that I had accidentally left my phone on, especially since I rant about such things quite a bit. We arranged to meet at the West Gate District MRT stop after I got out of class.

The rest of the lesson went well. The teacher had made it clear that he was instructing the other two and that I was just visiting, so I tried to limit my participation to answering his direct questions. I could definitely learn from it if I am just willing to spend the time and money.

After sending Berta running across the platform at the West Gate Station to catch the train out to Banqiao, I took the escalator up and found Sho waiting for me in the square that used to be the traffic circle. We walked through the pedestrian areas to a drink place and dined on friend chicken and spicey dofu. After a while we were joined by A-wen, one of Sho’s friends, whom I’d met at Funky that night as well. We chatted until the shop closed and kicked us out. I took some pictures of all of us before jumping into a cab home, since Sho said he had to deal with issues related to his grandfather’s funeral ceremony later that night. He did say we should get together today, though.

I put up a new picture on my photography page, and just for the hell of it, here’s a one of Sho.

The Vampire nearest me at the office tends to play one or two songs from one CD, set to loop, all day long. Today is Annoying Pseudo-reggae Song Day. I’ve noticed that many Taiwanese people see TV, movies and music more as background distractions than actual entertainment, so this doesn’t seem to annoy anyone at the office. Except me, of course.

Last night I went to the Great Eastern Tavern to meet up with Dean, Carl, Graham and some other people. In contrast to its name the establishment is really just one tiny room on Changchun Rd. It was empty when I arrived at 7, but began to fill up after 10 or so. More and more people came in, including a group of four really annoying business types who began to dance on the bar to bad cover music.

Carl and Dean and I stayed until around 1 am. Carl, in between glasses of whiskey and expressions of desire to live in Paris, was asking me “the hard questions” about my book, most of which I couldn’t answer. This doesn’t bode well for my finding a publisher, I suppose, but I’m still going to try. I just need to stop fiddling with it and learn to abandon it, as they say. I also need to begin a new creative endeavor, either another book, short story, film or even art.

After I got home I saw that someone had left a message on my phone. I thought it might be the DIY people, but it wasn’t. It was Sho. He had had an argument with his family. We talked a bit and he said we should get in touch today. I’ve called him twice this afternoon, but his phone is off. So I might go down to TLI and sit in on a Taiwanese class with Berta Liao. She’s spoken well of it to me and wanted to know if I would be interested in joining it, so I said I would take check it out.

The weather continues to be gloomy and mistily oppressive. I hope this lifts soon. It’s really getting me down.

I just got a call from a woman from the Taiwan Television Network. They want to remake my room. It seems that they’ve got this program called “DIY King” where they go around remaking the homes of various people, and after they saw the TVBS Weekly story, they got the bright idea that I was an Interesting Person and thus a suitable candidate for their show, which I’ve never actually seen.

I laughed at the poor woman’s offer, if only out of pure incredulity. “What could I possibly have to do with the world of Do-it-yourself Interior Design?” I asked between chuckles. She wasn’t able to say exactly what it was about me that invited people to wonder what my room looks like, although the TVBS reporter did also ask to see it. Maybe they assume that my abode is as bizarre as my usual attire. I warned her that my room is rather small and noisy, and probably not worth fixing up, but she replied “Well, maybe we can do something about the noise.”

She was optimistic, I’ll give her that. The fact is, however, that I’m living on a major thoroughfare, Xinsheng South Road to be exact, and while the view is nice, the road noise is considerable and the balcony is tiny. It’s a one-man balcony, in fact. Still, if my landlord has no objections, I don’t suppose I do, either. They’re welcome to try. I still don’t quite see the point, though. Maybe I should move somewhere with more potential.

In other news (or lack thereof, I suppose): Sho isn’t answering his phone, hasn’t called, hasn’t responded to my text messages. I suppose I should stop trying to contact him. I made an effort; it didn’t work. It’s discouraging, but there’s also not much I can do about it. I plan to go drown my romantic failure-induced sorrow tonight after work at the Great Eastern Tavern on Changchun Rd. along with a few friends from the newspaper. Newspaper friends are especially good for that, somehow. There’s a certain rakish, yellowed air to old newspaper friends, a sense of having been through the same shit, I guess. Sort of like old army buddies, but more, I dunno, semi-literary or ostensibly worldly.

The Mirror Project put up another one of my photos. It’s a neat idea, the Mirror Project. Photography that includes the photographer, adding a whole new dimension to the picture, sort of like reading stories in their original handwritten form.

I’m having a conversation on ICQ at the moment. I can’t decide whether it is with a really clever AI program or a really stupid woman. Judge for yourself:

AI or woman: (3:28 PM) HI

Poagao: (3:29 PM) hi

AI or woman: (3:30 PM) WHAT R U DOING¡S

Poagao: (3:31 PM) working

AI or woman: (3:31 PM) WHAT IS YOUR JOB¡S

Poagao: (3:31 PM) I’m an editor.

AI or woman: (3:33 PM) O¡C ¡C ¡C ¡C

AI or woman: (3:34 PM) YOU R FREE NOW¡S

Poagao: (3:34 PM) Well, as I said before, I’m at work.

AI or woman: (3:36 PM) WHY YOU CAN PLAY ICQ WENT YOU WORK¡S

Poagao: (3:36 PM) Why not?

AI or woman: (3:37 PM) Are you curious¡S

Poagao: (3:38 PM) Should I be? About what?

AI or woman: (3:41 PM) ARE U BORING IN YOUR WORK

Poagao: (3:41 PM) I hope not..but I suspect I am.

AI or woman: (3:44 PM) I ALSO BORING¡T

Poagao: (3:45 PM) How honest of you to say that.

AI or woman: (3:46 PM) I DO NO WHAT I WANT TO DO¡S

Poagao: (3:46 PM) I can only guess what that means.

AI or woman: (3:46 PM) REALY

Poagao: (3:47 PM) Ok, ya got me. I have no idea what you want to do. Unlock your CAPS key, perhaps?

AI or woman: (3:50 PM) WHY

Poagao: (3:50 PM) Oh, I dunno. Just a hunch.

It’s not often I get to partake of such enlightening conversation. No, really.

Back to work, back to reality, as the song goes. I had to get the entire day’s work done before 2:30 today because they were shutting down the server so that we could have an office-wide party for any and everyone who wanted to come and eat finger foods whilst milling around the boxing ring. I went downstairs and watched the lion dancers hired for the event, which is, by the way, to celebrate the completion of our new lobby and meeting rooms. The dancers didn’t draw a terribly large crowd, unfortunately. Mayor Ma did stop by, however. He was going to come over and talk to me until I greeted him in Chinese, thus no doubt spoiling his English-speaking opportunity. Maybe I should have called him “Mr. President” just to see his reaction. Oh, well. there’s always next time.

I was wandering about aimlessly, scooping up pastries and the fruits I could identify, when the reporter from TVBS Weekly called. It seems that the article on me was published last Saturday, and he just remembered to let me know. He said he had sent a copy over along with my photographs, so I went down to the new lobby to pick it up. The reception girl had already read it, apparently, as well as some of my co-workers. I sat down in one of the lobby’s beanbag chairs and thumbed through the magazine, which, in accordance with local law, features a skimpily dressed yet surprisingly nondescript woman on the cover. When I came to my article, I had to laugh out loud, garnering more than a few stares from the other celebrators in the lobby. I couldn’t help myself. The pictures and article layout were so over-the-top, but I can understand why they did it; it’s just their style. I sat and read the article, which, aside from a few minor flaws such as misquotes and getting my place of birth wrong, was pretty good. The photos included army pictures as well as ones the camera guy took of me at sword practice, me looking pensive in front of the New York, New York Statue of Liberty replica, me rolling my eyes in the MRT station…the most obvious thing I learned from it is that I’ve put on more than a few pounds since I got out of the army. I hate to break it to you, but it ain’t exactly all muscle, either. I blame the Tim Tams.

In any case, I have no more excuses; I have to start (e)mailing western publishers and agents with my queries now. I might as well just dive right in and see what I can come up with.

Sho had said that he was going to call today so that we could get together for dinner, but he never did. I called his number but nobody answered all day. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.

So far my 4-day weekend is turning out ok. I rode over to Sanchung yesterday morning and went with Harry to the government offices there to transfer my residency to that forsaken place, and then we went to the Guanghua Market to hang out and look at CD holders. After our mutual friend Yong-gen finished up closing the gym where he works, we went up to the hot springs, where we soaked and chatted under the stars until the wee hours of the morning. It’s tomb-sweeping day here so most of the population is down south and there weren’t many people there. The streets this weekend are rather bereft of foreigners as well due to Spring Scream down in Kending. It was so late by the time we finished I decided to sleep over at Harry’s.

This afternoon Harry and I met Kirk and Victor at a new Southeast Asian restaurant on Xinyi and Dunhua Rds. It wasn’t bad, and it’s always fun to have several of my friends get together and discuss my various shortcomings as well as a few of my more prominent neuroses. The weather, previously hot and sunny, got all gray and gloomy after that, so I’ve just been sitting around salivating over the JLAPE issues of DC Comics. I’ve already had two days off, and it’s still Friday. Nice. Our apartment is now completely inhabited by males, following the departure of our only remaining female tennant a few days ago. I wonder if this means we can all start lounging around in our underwear and leaving pizza boxes out for weeks. I haven’t met our new tennant yet. All I know if that he works for one of those English-teaching radio programs. I can imagine our conversations already:

Me: “Hey, what’s up?”

Radio Guy: “Hello. I would like to make a withdrawal. Can you help me?”

Me: “Huh?”

Radio Guy: “This is a book.”

Me: “Yo, I think ya got the wrong lesson there.”

Radio Guy: “Excuse me, officer. My wallet has been stolen.”

Me: (thumbs through script) “Oh, I see; you’re on Chapter 27: Driving Your Roomates Insane.”

I know, not much of an entry for three days’ time. To make up for this gross insult to my readers, I submit for your entertainment two pictures of actual establishments near where I live. First there is the Church of French Horn Music. Hey, I like french horn music just much as the next guy, but somehow I think these people are carrying their appreciation for this backward instrument a bit too far.

The second is a nice, upscale restaurant called I Swear. I’m curious. Is it ok to swear at I Swear? Can I cuss out the waiter for taking too long with my Bit o’ Trendy Chicken with Tad of Random Vegetable? Sure, I’d pay a bit more for that. Who wouldn’t? If it’s popular enough they could open up a branch called “I Bitchslap”.

Last night as I was walking back from renting some DVDs at a neighborhood shop, I passed by a series of cars seriously damaged by the collapse of the brick wall they were parked next to. There were several people standing there watching as workmen erected a temporary metal fence where the wall had been, completely ignoring the large blocks of concrete lying on, and in some cases in, the parked cars.

One of the people, a middle-aged woman, came up to me as I stared at the well-kempt yard and swimming pool of the house within. “Do you know the person who lives here?” she asked. I said no, that I just lived nearby. It turned out that the people were the owners of the smashed cars, and they wanted to demand compensation from the owner of the house whose wall had collapsed. The owner doesn’t live there, apparently, and the entire house is rented out. One of the residents is French, apparently, so the unfortunate car owners thought I might know something of the whereabouts of the owner.

“Don’t you have insurance?” I asked, but the woman shook her head.

“It wouldn’t do any good if I did, because it wouldn’t be earthquake insurance.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s car insurance,” she replied, her expression adding “…you idiot.” I took the hint and walked on.

Back home I watched one of the DVDs I rented, Cast Away, with Tom Hanks. I believe it is the most moving story of the relationship between a man and a piece of sports equipment I have ever seen. Yes, I realize that it was a lot more meaningful than that, but since Zemekis didn’t do such a great job of conveying that meaning, I feel I have the right to trivialize his intentions. I’m just that evil.

Workmen have been repairing the cracks and broken lights in our office today. The AC still isn’t working, and it’s rather hot in here. We’ve got all of the windows open, though, so there’s some breeze, at least. I took off my shoes and put on some flipflops, unfortunately before recalling that little shards of glass from Office Turtle’s bowl were spread all over the place and consequently getting some glass splinters in my sole.

The Taipei Financial Center, just next door to us, is now officially spooky. Although the building came through the quake just fine, the incidents with the cranes falling off the top of it has caused all of the construction to be halted and traffic banned from surrounding roads. At night it is completely dark and silent rather than full of sparks and flashes of light from welders and other construction-related activities. Now it’s just a gigantic black slab looming over the entire area, the two remaining cranes stuck in the positions they held when the quake struck.

In other news, President Chen is calling for English to be made an official language of Taiwan, along with Taiwanese, Hakka, several Aboriginal languages, Esperanto and Corporatespeak. This sounds like an April Fool’s Day story, but it’s apparently real. It’s also sad, in that it shows how little self-esteem Taiwan has when the president can come out and make such a ludicrous proposal. What would most Britons think if Tony Blair came to Parliament and said “You know, we ought to make Chinese an official language in the UK. So many people speak it, after all. It’s the language of commerce!” All Chen is doing here is reinforcing Taiwan’s international reputation as an island full of people who have no respect for themselves or their culture, a reputation already solidified by rampant pollution and environmental chaos.

There’s a woman in our office, I may have mentioned her before, but since she wasn’t quite as annoying as Whiny Woman, I never really picked on her here. With Her Whininess gone and the flashbacks fading, this one, whom I call Ally McNoying, has come into the limelight of my limited attention. She has an extremely loud voice and inserts needless and often incorrect English words into her Mandarin, but only when she sees that I’m nearby. When I leave, she talks louder, even though I’m never part of her conversation. This is because talking with me is beneath her, while talking for me seems to be a priority. It’s strange. I would call her Ally McPsycho, but I’m still waiting on the lab results.