Poagao's Journal

Absolutely Not Your Monkey

Feb 20 2003

Room for Rant, Part XXXVIII I stayed up until 2…

Room for Rant, Part XXXVIII

I stayed up until 2 a.m. last night combing through almost 300 entries on a Chinese rental website and writing down a sheetful of possibilies. Then I slept for a few hours, until 5:30, when I got up again and took the first MRT train to the West Gate Station to check out the morning audio environment there. At first it seemed fine except for the sound of buses roaring past on Hengyang Road. But then I spotted a group of elderly women carrying a suspicious object. Sure enough, it was a boombox. They set it up in front of the Chungshan Hall and began doing the dance.

Oh, well. I walked over to a nearby stall and had a large breakfast of egg-cake, turnip paste and bean milk. A group of women from Hong Kong sat next to me. Although my Cantonese is very limited, I could make out that they felt that the bean milk was better here than in Hong Kong. I tried to imagine myself back in Hong Kong while listening to their conversation (it does seem like more and more Cantonese can be heard on the streets of this city lately), but it’s impossible because there’s no harbor. To me, no matter where you are in Hong Kong, there’s always the idea if not the sight and/or smell of the harbor lurking around every corner. Taipei has a severe shortage of good harbors in my opinion.

I spent the rest of the day going down my sheet of possibilites and eliminating them one by one. Every single one was crap. Krep. Krrrrrrrrep! I must have walked several miles by the time I was through. All of the possibilities are just about as exhausted as I am, unless I want to live in Shilin or beyond. I inspected the area around Hou Shan Pi MRT and found it barren and industrial with pockets of niceness around the park. I met my friend James on Hsinsheng S. Road at lunch, and he showed me his wonderful $25k/month apartment on Renai across from his museum (he’s the curator there). Hsinsheng S. Road is all messed up due to the construction of the second stage of the MRT system, so there were a couple of cheap places there. Unfortunately, they all involved living with several other people.

Before I came back home I stopped back at the West Gate Station, and sure enough, a group of older women, another group I’m pretty sure, was doing impressionist dancing to Buddha’s Top Hit “Nanwuahmitofo”. That tears it; tomorrow I’m going to call the landlord and cancel. As much as it would have been nice to live in that area, I’m moving to get away from noise, not get it at a cheaper rate (at the moment, 1:30 a.m., they’re raising giant signs with cranes and affixing them to various structures outside my building). James said I would eventually find something if I just keep at it, and he’s probably right. I had set the 27th as my deadline, but it doesn’t really matter. There are other, more important things to think (and rant) about.

Dean, Mark, Tall Paul, Rowan, Alien and I met up to discuss film projects, but we didn’t get much discussion done. We did end up spending a lot of money, though, so I guess that’s something. It seems everyone is plagued with doubt over their various projects, and nobody’s doing anything at the moment, which is a shame. We all need to get cracking in that respect, me most of all. Tall Paul’s getting ready to begin production of his next film, and I need to go over the locations with him so we can set up all the shots. It will be a good opportunity to use my new camera and get more used to it as well.

In other news, I’ve updated the links page by culling some sites that weren’t being updated, and adding some new ones I’ve found out about recently. I’ve also changed the sight and sound files. The sight is, of course, me at breakfast this morning, and believe me when I say that I am usually a sight at breakfast. The sound is Wu Bai’s “Rushing”, a twangy, westerny song sung in Taiwanese to let you know that it is not, in fact, the theme for a new brand of canned coffee.

posted by Poagao at 3:18 pm  

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