I arrived a bit early at The Bones. It was still light out, so I walked around the neighborhood a bit. It’s located in the Minsheng Community, where I used to live in an apartment with an insane woman as my landlady. The insane landlady makes the Vampires look like Martha Stewart wannabes. I had recently screwed up my knee in a Wushu accident and was on crutches, and therefore unable to descend stairs, so I had friends bringing me food to eat. Insane Landlady didn’t like all of this company, and threw me out on the 2nd of the month, just after she got that month’s rent from me. I was out of a job due to my injury, couldn’t walk, and she threw me out. That night I called every friend I knew in North America and caught up with all of them over the course of several hours.

The neighborhood hasn’t changed much since then. The trees along Minsheng E. Road are a lot bigger, but that’s about it. The alleyways to the north are still dark and mysterious, mostly old residential buildings lining narrow streets. Very nice. Chen Shui-bian used to live in that area, I think.

At 7:30 I couldn’t put it off any longer, so I went inside the restaurant and was directed to a raised platform area at the back of the restaurant where a few people had gathered. I looked around and was surprised that that was the venue, just an empty back room with a few chairs along the walls. It felt strange, like being confined to a hallway. More people arrived, including some I knew, but I felt awkward the whole time. After taking a couple of pictures for possible entry to the Mirror Project, I decided to have dinner in the restaurant proper along with Berta and Maoman, who showed up fashionably late, and Cranky Laowai, who was even more fashionable in his lateness. It was fun, though. I’m not good at mingling in pools of fashionable people, but I do like sitting down with some friends and just chatting over food and drink. Later one Berta introduced me to Alex, who is from Panama. Alex claimed to be a poor student, but his suave dinner jacket, yellow waistcoat, gold ring and necklace as well as his well-oiled, slicked back hair indicated a more affluent, or at least more interesting background.

I should have gone directly to bed last night, but instead I got online and chatted a bit, mostly venting about my job. Work today wasn’t a thrill, either. I turned in my passport. Yes, I’ve decided that, since they’re going to charge me not to go to Bali, I might as well go, and just hope that I get there and back in one piece. One live, sentient piece would be even better. But sitting in the office, looking at the sunny pictures of the resort where we’re supposedly going to stay just made me ache to go, so I thought, fuck it. I’ll go. It’s not the best argument in the world, and probably wouldn’t hold up very well in court, but it works for me.

I met Tim, from the English Digest Magazine, after work today. We walked over to the studio and chatted on the way. Tim is from Toronto, although he was born in Taiwan. He’s rather shy, but funny. At the studio, which he had a bit of trouble finding as he doesn’t go there often, he put on a sample of the simple English-teaching program for me to hear. It sounded like the guy had just drunk a bottle of Lysol mixed with Coke. He was practically delirious. I told Tim I could never, ever, muster that kind of enthusiasm, but he said it was ok, I could just talk normally. It went pretty smoothly, actually. Afterwards Tim’s company treated me to dinner at Grandma Nitti’s, and I ran into Fish, whom I haven’t seen in a long time. Fish is headed back to Vancouver in a couple of months.

Mindcrime might be coming up tomorrow afternoon. I plan to spend the morning being horizontal. I rained all day today, which should help the drought situation, but it will probably be sunny tomorrow. What we really need is a good, Nari-like typhoon, hopefully without the casualties this time, though.

Why is it when an evil person is happy we use the word “glee”, but when normal people are happy we just say they’re “happy”? How come most people can’t be “gleeful”? Just what kinds of evil acts does one have to perform before one can express true, internationally recognized glee?

Sorry. I’ve been in a rather snarky mood for the last couple of days. I’m just tired of things in general, and my head hurts. My company won’t let us out of the Bali trip via the scary skies without coughing up NT$5,000 to pay for the giant Hallmark card to China Airlines saying “We’re so sorry that your company’s reputation is in the toilet. Get a clue soon!” So, it’s NT$10,000 to go, and NT$5,000 to not go. Added to this is the fact that Kymco is holding a promotional activity that very weekend where they let you take one of their new motorcycles for a spin around the island for a couple of days and tell them what you think of them. Damn, I would have like to do that, too, despite the fact that I can’t afford a new motorcycle now.

Tonight is the Oriented Happy Romp House Happy Hour, to be held at a place called “The Bones” or something similarly myterious. To be honest I’ve been feeling more and more disillusioned with the whole oriented thing, which seems to be turning in on itself. But there’s going to be cheap ribs, so I’m there. Plus there’s going to be a whole restaurant full of people to be snarky with. How could I turn that down?

I don’t usually mention the Onion, as its reporting is of such consistently high quality, but the piece about Sharon and Arafat’s Sexual Tensions had me rolling the aisles, causing surprisingly little consternation among my co-workers, most of whom are used to my antics by now. The article got me and my good mate Womble talking about our favorite middle-eastern leaders, and I suggested that I wouldn’t mind dating the present King of Morocco. “But he’s married,” Womble said. “And straight.”

“Maybe not,” I replied, sending him this article.

“Well, he’s still married,” said Womble. I think maybe Womble’s more of a King-of-Jordan kind of guy.

My, my, my. How far Hotmail has come. How far down, that is. Remember back in the day, when Hotmail was a useful email tool where you could check your email from anywhere, quickly, simply? Then other online email services came around, and spam became a problem, and while the other services took steps to deal with it, Hotmail just bent right over and said “Take me”. Why? Who knows? Perhaps they were promised large amounts of money by the spammers. Perhaps they made a pact with the aliens. In any case, they’re useless now. The service Microsoft paid US$3 million for all those years ago has become worthless garbage. My old hotmail account from 1997 was spammed over even at the highest “anti-spam” setting, so I opened another, which was overrun within about a month, and I used up my auto-blocking of 250 entire domains in a couple of weeks. There’s no use trying to open another. It’s history. Nice going, Bill. I know an entire IT department that would be perfect for you. I called them up yesterday to ask when our Internet connection would be fixed. “What’s wrong with it?” the IT guy asked.

“Oh, nothing. It’s just been cutting off every few minutes for the last three weeks for every single computer in the building,” I volunteered. “You might have heard about it.”

“No, we haven’t heard anything about that.” Sarcasm, of course, went right over his head. “What websites are you visiting when it does that?”

“All of them.”

“Are you sure? You might be visiting some strange websites…”

“Oh, forget it. Go back to your blocks.”

Today just sucked, job-wise. I was filled with loathing for my place of employment and anything else that kept me indoors, stuck in an office all day today. And the motorcycle downstairs is gone. Apparently they were doing research on what people thought of it and how much they would pay for it. Unfortunately, the people didn’t think to let people ride the thing, just look at it. For all I know, it’s crap to ride.

After work I rode up through the upscale neighborhoods to the southeast of us, to the edges of the mountains, parked my bike and just walked around listening to the cicadas and barking dogs. It was nice, but a little spooky; hardly anyone was around. Living up there would be nice, but I’ve been wondering how it would be to live by oneself in one of those places. Maybe it’s a little less lonely in the city. Perhaps the noise of cars downstairs is the one thing keeping me sane.

My roomate, the guy at the English Digest place, left me a list of questions for the interview, with instructions on how to write my answers so that beginning students could understand me. That’s a bit much, I think. I’ll do the interview, but they’re going to have to simplify it themselves, I think. Either that or pay me to do their job for them. I could certainly use the extra money. I’m supposed to meet with the head guy there, a Canadian, on Friday after work.

I caused a bit of a panic today by sending out a company-wide email with a link to this website, which calculates the odds of a particular flight going down. If you play around a bit with it, you’ll find that, while flying from Taipei to Indonesia on Cathay Pacific nets you a 1 in 1,267,323 chance of not surviving, and 1 in 1,837,138 of the same on Singapore Airlines, if you fly on China Airlines it’s a much more worrisome 1 in 183,761 chance of not making it to your destination alive. When I got back from lunch today the head of our PR department asked me if I had sold all of my China Airlines stock. I said I figured my co-workers were on a need-to-know standing, and they need to know, especially since all of our company trip destinations, with the exception of one, are on China Airlines. This is in spite of the fact that that particular airlines is conspicuously missing from our parent group’s list of airlines we can use.

It all comes down to money, of course. If the mucky-mucks can save a few NT$ by putting employees’ lives at risk, they won’t hesitate to do so. They’d be glad to hear that many of my friends have said I should take my chances just to see Bali, which is reported to be a pretty wonderful place. We’ll see. I should invite said friends along for the ride, if just for the chance for one of us to turn to the other, be it as we exit the plane in Bali or at 35,000 feet, and say “See? I told you so.”

If it turns out that a PLA missile hit the plane, rather than it just being the result of CAL’s usual incompetence, I might reconsider. Otherwise, I might just tool around the ol’ renegade province by myself for the duration on my motorcycle.

Speaking of motorcycles, a few days ago I was loitering around the balcony on our floor when I noticed a guy downstairs unloading a large, black motorcyle from his little blue truck. He wheeled it into the lobby and covered it with a sheet. Today they took off the sheet and Lo! it’s actually Kymco‘s answer to the impending arrival of larger bikes following Taiwan’s entry into the WTO. It’s a 250cc V-twin, nice and heavy. I doubt it’s very fast, but it looks nice and solid. I’d probably buy one, perhaps used, as long as it rode ok. I wonder if they’d notice if I took it for a little spin around the island- uh, I mean, block. Oddly enough, the larger bikes don’t appear on the website, nor has there been any advertising or promotion to speak of. It makes me wonder if perhaps the authorities concerned are not planning to change any of the existing regulations, under pressure from the gangsters who run the motorcycle industry, the same gangsters who were behind the original legislation banning any tiring competition for the last 20 years. They’re probably hoping that no-one will notice that they didn’t comply with WTO regulations. Sometimes it feels like the Taiwan Strait doesn’t even exist.

I met Dean at the Ruby Tuesday bar, where he was slurping down part of his new Vodka Diet (Slogan: “A Steak in Every Bottle!”) while we waited for Graham to show up. How could I expose myself to the potential wrath of the manager, you ask? Well, simply put, Planet Hollywood was closed, so there wasn’t much of a choice. Graham did show up eventually after a day of frolicking among the hills and dales of Yangmingshan, and we settled down for a second viewing of Episode II. Unfortunately we missed the beginning, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. I have come to the conclusion that Jango Fett is the coolest character in that movie, even cooler than Mace Windu. Jango is a cool name, too. I can see why they named that jazz guitarist after him.

The sun shone through my blue curtains this morning, waking me up and causing the turtles to scramble about in their basin. No surprise, actually, due to our ongoing drought. I called up Maoman, waking him just to make myself feel better just like the bastard I am, and we arranged to meet up at United Mix for brunch at 2. Of course, I was the first one there, but soon enough Sandy and his wife showed up, followed by Maoman, Vanessa and Baldur the Dog, all perched Taiwanese-fashion on Maoman’s ample scooter. We all sat out on the balcony since the weather was so pleasant. There was another foreigner with his wife and kid there. The child, a girl of about 3 or 4, couldn’t decide whether to be delighted or terrified about Baldur the Dog, and she expressed her angst by screaming at the top of her pretty little lungs. “Leave! Now!” I suggested diplomatically, but Maoman et al knew the guy and waited politely until he left on his own. This is why I want a cat. Not a child. Not a dog, but a cat, preferably one that pretty much takes care of itself. Perhaps one of those robot cats, as soon as they can purr realistically and fetch me some Bailey’s from the store.

After the screaming child’s departure things were quite pleasant. I even took this picture, which, due to the fact that you can see the reflection of me holding up the camera in the upper left, could theoretically be submitted to the Mirror Project. They would take it, of course, as they accept everything, but I should show some restraint, after all. Maoman is talking to Kimmy, while Vanessa poses in shades.

After brunch Maoman and Vanessa had to go home and clean up their apartment to prepare for the former’s first meeting with the latter’s parents, so I left my motorcycle parked at the restaurant and hitched a ride with Sandy and Jojo to have a look at their place in Xindian. For a mere pittance, Sandy and Co. have managed to rent an entire house in Bitan. It’s amazing. It’s an older house, and smells strongly of 1953 when you walk in, warm and charming in a black-and-white TV series way. They have two stories and several rooms all to themselves, with a magnificent rooftop view of Taipei. It’s ideal, or would be if it weren’t surrounded by huge apartment blocks that block out the sun on three sides.

We went out and walked around to see if we could find some of those red stickers Taiwanese use to advertise rooms for rent. On our way out we passed a sick dog lying on its side next to a box. It looked like it was near death. Sandy explained that nobody could get a vet that was of any use to do anything about it. I felt terrible seeing the poor thing. Every breath was obviously a pain, but it tried to lift its head and wag its tail when Sandy rubbed its head. Jojo is going to try and find another vet tomorrow, one who can do something to help the poor thing, either to treat whatever is wrong with it or end its suffering. Most likely the latter, I’m afraid. The China Airlines crash had already cast a bit of a pall over my day, and seeing the sick dog didn’t help my mood any. I am sure that they will do what they can for the dog. I don’t know who can save China Airlines, though. it has such an abysmal safety record I’m surprised anyone is still willing to use it. But the fact is, most Taiwanese people put more value on a cheap price than they do on safety. Witness the traffic here, the fake plastic helmets people give their kids, if the kids get helmets at all when they’re riding on their parents’ scooters, and the building columns with empty salad oil cans in the supporting walls. China Airlines has survived this long because of the Taiwanese mentality. That sounds arrogant, but it’s true. It never would have lasted this long otherwise. It will continue to operate in the same fashion, though. In a few weeks people will have forgotten the crash, just as they have all of the previous ones, and cheap prices will once again reign supreme. I love Taiwan, but this attitude is something I think we should do our best to eradicate. Actually I believe that our company trip next month to Bali is on China Airlines. I will see if I can switch to Cathay or Singapore. If not, I might cancel the trip altogether.

Back to today. We found some of the ads on a neighborhood wall and followed them up. A couple of them were for outrageously priced rooms in fancy large apartment buildings, but one was for an entire house, complete with porch and yard, located deep within a labyrinthian traditional Chinese neighborhood, for a reasonable price. I liked the house and would have considered living there if it hadn’t been right next to the freeway and thus a bit too noisy for my tastes. I can afford to wait, however. Finding a place for me is apparently Jojo’s new hobby. She’s done it for other people in the past. I suspect, however, that the Sandcastle represents extraordinary luck rather than the norm for the Xindian rental situation. In any case, spending time in the area felt like a day in the country. The air seems fresher out there, even if the place is overrun by mouth-breathing tourists from the city every weekend.

Dean, Graham, and possibly Boogie will be joining me tomorrow night after work for a second viewing of Episode II. I feel that enough time has passed that I can see it again without it being overly fresh in my mind (things in my mind don’t tend to stay fresh for long). On the other hand, I think Monday also involves going to work or something like that. And the sight of this construction equipment suddenly appearing directly downstairs from my room, accompanied by loud thumps that shake the building, does not bode well, either. Then again, I do have a couple more mirror project photos up. A mixed bag, in any case.

Getting up this morning felt absolutely horrid. I stumbled downstairs and into Mr. Wu’s blue Saab 9-3 at 8am, and we picked up breakfast and another passenger before heading out to Taoyuan. On the way Mr. Wu talked on his cell phone, trying along with his companion to get instructions to the studios as I sat in the back seat scalding my mouth with hot dou-jiang and egg-cakes doused in soy sauce.

The studios, Mr. Wu boasted, were the second largest in Asia, after some place in mainland China, but they didn’t seem that large to me. They consisted simply of a series of gray warehouses between a ridge and the road. Some of the other people to be filmed showed up and chatted with each other, but I was too tired, so I fell asleep on the couch in the make-up room while everyone else fawned over some bigshot who apparently had a hard time dressing himself as he was wearing about 27 different colors, none of which went together. He seemed exceedingly happy about everything, sort of like the bad guy in the third Huang Feihong movie, “Yao Tian-ba” or whatever his name was.

I got a decent amount of rest before it was my turn to be led to the small booth they had set up in the warehouse for filming. I sat down, got made up and tested for sound, and then the interviewer asked me several routine questions about Tai-chi, which styles, how long, what I thought about it, etc. It was over very quickly, and I hitched a ride back to Taipei with a dentist and his family. I regaled them with tales of the orthodontic terrorist acts commited upon me as a child, and they dumped me in front of my apartment building at 12 o’clock sharp.

Mindcrime was supposed to be coming up, but I wanted to take another look at the room I was interested in up the road, so I called ahead before walking up to see it in the daytime. It was still nice, but seemed a bit dirtier in the daylight somehow. The landlords were there this time, and we chatted a bit. I tried to get them to come down on the price, but they wouldn’t budge. They also wanted three months’ rent, a total of NT$45,000, were dubious about me having a cat (“they stink, you know,” they told me), but said I could have my residency there. They seemed fairly nice, honest people. I told them I would think about it and departed. I had just about made up my mind to move in at that point, but when I got downstairs, I noticed a bunch of workmen getting ready to tear out the trees lining the road there. I asked one of them what was going on and he said that they were going to be putting in a new MRT line down the road. This means, of course, that after they begin construction at the end of this year, that that road will be fucked up for a good five or six years. Large yellow machines, dust, noise….I don’t think so. Not for NT15,000 a month, anyway. Looks like I’m back to square one.

Just then Mindcrime called and said he had fallen asleep and wouldn’t be coming up after all, so I called up Maoman and invited myself over to his neck of the woods. I wanted to see his palatial residence for myself. He lives just a few minutes’ walk from the Wanlung MRT station, in a large rooftop apartment, with his girlfriend Vanessa, two cats and a golden lab puppy. It’s quite a nice setup. I hope I can find a place like that somewhere near the mountains like that. We walked around the neighborhood and up the side of the mountain where a large landslide had taken place a while ago. They were building a series of drainage waterways that looked like a miniature version of the Panama Canal up the mountainside. We stopped at a small, makeshift temple and asked the old woman about apartments in the area. She said she’d keep an eye out, and even did some fortune-telling for me. It was good to practice my Taiwanese with her, but she kept trying to get Vanessa to translate. It seemed to make the old woman happy, so I just let her translate, even if I understood most of what the fortune-teller was saying.

The mosquitoes were coming out and it was getting dark, so we went back and then took a cab over to a nice Thai restaurant on Dingzhou St called, appropriately enough, “Nice Thai Restaurant”. The food was good but the service a bit strange. They kept trying to rush us, which was a little irritating. Perhaps they have had bad experiences before with foreigners coming in and refusing to leave for weeks at a time, camping out with tents and demanding cute little desserts featuring coconut shavings at odd hours.

Maoman and Vanessa were heading out for a gathering at 99 later, but 99 is just not my scene, so I decided to come back home and get some rest. Mindcrime might still be coming up tomorrow, brunch could theoretically be had, and who knows what other facinating things will happen? I sure as hell don’t.

I went to Tui-shou (pushing hands) practice last night. The school is located not far from where I study sword, and my sword teacher’s son lives there. The floors as well as all of the walls are covered in green mats, and you take off your shoes before you go in. The students were mostly men, with the exception of a couple of women. I recognized a couple of guys from sword class. Everyone was wearing T-shirts, and I had a long-sleeved shirt on since it was cool and misty outside, so I ducked over to the nearest convenience store to buy a tank top to wear really quick before class.

Class started just after I got back. Everyone paired off and began sort of wrestling with each other. The objective is to get the other guy off balance enough to push him over. It’s quite complicated, and hard to learn except through practice. I soon learned what the mats on the walls were for; some of the more experienced guys could shoot their opponents across the room as if they’d been shot out of a cannon, slamming them into the opposite wall. It was amazing, and great fun. Every guy I wrestled with had a different style, and some were easier than others, or perhaps they were just going easy on me as I was a newcomer. My previous martial arts experience seemed to help, though. It’s really a matter of attitude and philosophy, a way of thinking about the physical world that allows development in that art. I’ve decided I want to continue in that direction, so I plan to go every Thursday, although I am going to have to miss it next week because of the Oriented Truce Hour, when everyone lays down their weapons and has drinks together.

After practice I walked through the neighborhood around Minsheng and Xinzhong St where I used to live so long ago, over through eerily empty public housing blocks, past Asiaworld to the Nanjing E. Road MRT station, and home. My knees ached from all of the exertion. When I checked my email I found a response to a guy who had a room to rent, so I drove up Xinsheng S. Road to take a look.

It was cool, reasonably large and bright and not overly noisey. I was disappointed to find that it was actually on a major road as opposed to in a quiet alley, so you could hear the traffic downstairs, and the rent is at the upper limit of my financial capabilities, but it has a nice big semi-private balcony and comes halfway furnished. I have to meet the actual landlords, though, and see if 1)they’ll come down on the price, 2) whether I can have my residency there, and 3) if they allow cats. I plan to take a tour of Xindian this Sunday with Maoman and Sandman to see what’s up down there, and then I’ll make a decision early next week as to whether or not this place is a go or not. I dunno, should one spend over a quarter of their salary on rent? Is that too much? I’ve done it before, but perhaps that’s not a hard-and-fast rule.

I was so excited at the prospect of moving that I had a hard time sleeping last night. I’ve been feeling nervous and distracted all day today. Is this love? Or just the badly warmed-up frozen dinner I had last night before bed? Probably the latter, as I’ve been feeling a bit off all day today. In any case, I’ve been at my present location for almost two and a half years, so it’s probably time for a move.

Along with the Xindian Tour and Mindcrime’s upcoming visit, I’m also being picked up at 8am tomorrow and being whisked off to an undisclosed location in Taoyuan to be interrogated on camera about Tai-chi-related matters. No rest for the itises, but there it is.

It’s cloudy and drizzly today. Hopefully some of the rain will end up in the reservoirs. I’m not buying the TSU’s claim that the drought was “invented” by Mayor Ma for political purposes, by the way. Every time the TSU does something it merely serves to damage their own credibility. Lee Teng-hui did great things for Taiwan, but I’m afraid he’s just losing it in his old age. Just about all of the propositions the TSU has brought up have just been ridiculous.

As I took the elevator to lunch today, I asked the Office Vampire (song of the day: ICRT, which is pretty much all annoying, all the time these days) who happened to be in there with me why she was wearing sunglasses on a cloudy day. She took a bit of umbrage at this cheeky remark, so I added, “Well, uh, how can you see?”

“Why are you asking? What do you mean?” she said, glaring at me. That was all I could get out of her, so I didn’t bother inquiring as to her painful-looking pointy black shoes. She looked like she could use them in interestingly lethal ways.

At lunch I visited the Aurora computer store to confirm that Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outkast (apparently one of the Jedi abilities is Force Rapping) will be available here within a week or two. They already have the posters up. I can’t wait. Command ‘n Conquer: Renegade is becoming a bit annoying. The best games, the previous Jedi Knights, Half-life, Unreal, etc., have palpable atmosphere that you can wrap yourself up in. I’m especially looking forward to Outcast, since there’s a usable lightsaber involved.

At lunch there was a gaggle of Taiwanese professionals at the next table. Their conversation turned to Americans in general, as conversations tend to do when Taiwanese people are near me or any other foreign-looking person. I realized that all of their remarks about how strange and inscrutable foreigners were was strikingly similar to conversations foreigners here tend to have concerning Chinese people. I suppose this shouldn’t be a surprise. The main difference is the slightly reverential tone Chinese people reserve for conversations about westerners, unless they’re talking about how western men treat Chinese women. Then things just get ugly, no matter which side you’re on.

Fortunately, most of the foreigners I know and like tend to be a bit more open-minded about such things. I suppose those most insulated from a society tend to make the most sweeping generalizations about it. The closer you get to things, the more you realize that there really isn’t any one truth, only a range of biases various groups accept as truth.

In other sword-related news, the school where I study Tai-chi Sword wants me to partake in a promotional film they’re making in Taoyuan this Saturday morning. To tell the truth, I’m not really too eager to do this, but I suppose it might be interesting, as long as they provide transportation out there and back. I have the feeling they’re going to want me to actually do some forms for the camera, although I’ve told them I don’t want to. I’ll give my opinions, but that’s it. I will bring my sword, though, if only to brandish it. I don’t often get to brandish things. You can’t exactly brandish a camera, a book, a can of fruit juice, or anything else I’m likely to carry around with me. “Watch out, he’s got a Snapple!” just doesn’t have the same effect on people.

After work I was just getting on my motorcycle to go home when Dean called. He wanted to see Episode II again. “It’s too soon,” I told him. “I need time.” I started home and had stopped off at a park to enjoy the fine weather when he called again. “At least let’s go out for a drink.” We agreed to meet up at Q Bar later.

I hadn’t been to Q Bar in a while. It hasn’t changed. Former News drones Richard and Graham showed up eventually, and Dean embarked on a long series of Screwdrivers while we talked of plans for an online animation series, among other things. At around 11pm I decided to leave and almost forgot to pay the bill. As I did, my old friend Randall, who runs the place, said something to me from the bar. It was loud and I didn’t catch what he said. I went over and asked him to repeat himself. He nodded at my companions and said I should be careful not to “hang around with foreign devils too much”, or my Chinese will deteriorate. Randall’s a funny guy. He keeps his head shaved these days. He just got his US green card but has no definite plans to move to the states.

As we were talking at the bar, I heard someone say “Are you Poagao?” I turned around to find a Chinese guy with glasses and a lit cigarette staring at me. I told him I was, half wondering if I had unwittingly this guy on my website somewhere. I do a lot of things unwittingly. It’s a Daoist thing, and as I always say, “Dao” is my middle name. Literally.

“I’ve seen your website,” he said.

“Really? How’d you find it?” I asked.

“Oh, just looking around,” he said. He must have seen quite a bit of it if he could recognize me in a dark bar. Still, I was impressed. It’s not often this happens to me.

I’ve been feeling a bit tired and depressed today.This might have something to do with the fact that I’m becoming a bit tired of my job again, but I also suspect that my itises have not been completely eradicated, and perhaps I need something stronger than the Liquid Brown Mixture. This is all quite annoying.

I purchased Microsoft’s Flight Simulator 2002 the other day. I have been playing with the WWII editions where you fly around and shoot at other planes, but I just enjoyed the flying and looking around part, so I got the just-flying-and-looking edition, aka Flight Simulator. I loaded it up and promptly set flights around cities I am familiar with. Houston, Orlando, New York, Hong Kong, and, of course, Taipei.

I was disappointed in every one, especially Taipei, which I know better than any other place on Earth. I know that you can download extra details for each city, and I might even do it if I can find them for free, but in each case the cities were not at all like their real-life counterparts. I took off from Houston, couldn’t find the Astrodome or the amusement park just across the highway that I remember from my youth. I flew down to the bay and couldn’t find any sign of development along the sandy embankment. When I flew north of Orlando and tried to find the towns of Winter Park and Maitand where I went to high school, I was confronted with empty farmland. Taipei was composed of a few anonymous buildings, with no sign of the Grand Hotel, the Mitsukoshi, or even CKS hall (which I think is actually included in the Taipei special version for $29.95 or something), and Hong Kong consisted of a handful of soulless skyscrapers on the island facing a flat expanse of emptiness that is completely unlike Kowloon. It was like going back in time and discovering a pine tree farm where the mall was supposed to be.

New York City, however, was relatively complete, and although you’re supposedly allowed to choose the date of your flight, none of them include the World Trade Center towers. I even chose to fly south down Manhattan island on the morning of September 11, 2001 in a Boeing 777, imagining that perhaps they had done something special, but they hadn’t, unless the program sends a cookie to the FBI whenever someone does that. I suppose I’ll have to wait a few more years until we can see every little detail in these simulation games.

One thing the program did let me do was take off at CKS airport and fly directly to Shanghai. Or it would have if I could figure out how to find Shanghai via dead reckoning. In any case no virtual mainland Chinese jets came up and escorted me down to a little virtual airport in Fujian, where little virtual town officials welcomed my gift of a brand-new virtual jetliner. Maybe in a few more years you’ll be able to do that, Moore’s Law permitting.