Poagao's Journal

Absolutely Not Your Monkey

Oct 08 2003

We had a little banquet for our Tai-chi teacher on…

We had a little banquet for our Tai-chi teacher on Saturday after Tuishou practice. It was at the ritzy Howard Plaza restaurant underneath the opera hall at the CKS Memorial. Since we’re coming up on Double Ten Day, a lot of groups were practicing their shows in the square. The biggest of these groups was the Taijimen, or Tai-chi Gate society. They were dressed in white, waving flags, sounding horns and marching around in formation. Tai-chi Gate is almost quasi-military in its organization. Just joining requires a huge amount of money, probably around NT$60,000 or more, and the group has quite a large political influence, though little to do with actual Tai-chi.

During the lunch we were talking about the Tai-chi Gate people, and one of our number said “We should keep our voices down, they might hear us talking about them.”

“Yes, they outnumber us,” I said. It was a joke, meant to recall something out of a Hong Kong gangster flick, but everyone nodded seriously. I guess you don’t mess with the Tai-chi Gate gang.

I was in a questionable mood when I got home last night. I had copied the final Lady X version onto DVDs at Milifilm, and onto tape. The tape image was almost unwatchable due to a strange jumping shudder phenomenon, and the files on the DVDs, which I gave to Mindcrime so he can do the DVD version, caused his Powerbook to physically attack him. When I tried to import the .avi file into the Canopus Raptor editing software, it would only import nine minutes and twenty-six seconds. I opened of Vegas 4. Same thing. I could open up the whole thing in Premiere, but Premiere and my camera are not on speaking terms. I tried to get online by my adsl decided it was a good time to stop working as well.

It was just about then that I spotted a movement in the roach trap next to my computer. A baby gecko had gotten himself stuck in the thing. I spread roach traps throughout my new apartment, expecting to fill them quickly, since I’m so close to the mountains, etc., and this is what I find? Baby Geckos? Having grown up in Florida, Geckos are welcome in my house, much more welcome than roaches. I was definitely sending the wrong message to the Gecko community with all of those roach traps.

The video failures, the trapped gecko, and strange computer behavior combined with having just consumed several glasses of Coke at Dean’s that night pushed me over the edge, and I just stormed around my apartment for several minutes muttering profanities. Well, shouting them, actually. Consider it a free lesson in English-language cursing for the entire neighborhood. Then I got a knife and pried the gecko off the trap, mangling one of its feet in the process, but it couldn’t be helped. I set it free on the balcony next to a dead roach in case it was hungry, but it vanished, so I guess it wasn’t too bad off. Today I was half an hour late to work, but I managed to work out the videotape problems by copying straight from my camera to VCR at Tall Paul’s office, and hopefully burning the DVD-ROMs with Macs will solve the DVD problems.

posted by Poagao at 7:15 am  

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