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butterflies

Cheek, tongue. Tongue, cheek.
Say, can I have some of your Taiwanese food?
Yes I’ve been eating it, two or three weeks now, haven’t got sick once,
That should keep us both alive.

This green island has become a fantasy-world to me, my life here being decidedly surreal.

So tomorrow morning it is. Packing the bags tonight for the journey home. Sharaun really digs Taipei, and I couldn’t be happier. I was a little worried that maybe she wouldn’t like the food, but she jumped right in and ate duck stomach and sea snail right along with me. We had a great time doing some sightseeing and hanging out with the bar staff. She experienced nearly all my usual Taiwan experiences: KTV, binge-eating, betel nut trying, Taipei 101, life at the bar, royal hotel treatment, and hot-as-balls sauna weather. She took to the city instantly, and is in fact right now out with a new friend of hers getting a manicure. Incredible. I guess the only thing she didn’t really get to experience was the multiple-hooker trapeze orgies… but then again I don’t think that’s really her cup of tea. But hey, she did surprise me with the betel nut and duck stomach…

Travel travel travel. It’s all I do. I will step off a plane, enter the vagina that is your country or state as a proud, erect, conquering penis. I will repeatedly pound you for all you’re worth, and then limp flaccidly back to my plane where I will get just enough rejuvenating rest before being whisked off to my next distant triumph. I may notch my bedpost for you if you are memorable enough, but I wouldn’t get too excited if I were you. Now get out of my bed, and leave your number on the table… I might want to call you in a couple hours if I’m bored. Beat it. Oh, and Shanghai, Denver, Austin, and Taipei – you’re in the queue that way, so hop to them Kegels and be good and limber upon my touchdown. Ahh… that felt good to get out of my system.

If you know me, you know my penchant for “non-commercial” music. I’m not one for the latest Top 40 and often couldn’t ID a chartopper if they shared a cab with me. But, I like to think I’m not entirely closed-minded, and I do indulge in the occasional prefab pop nugget. Usually, I end up liking these songs because I hear them at a key moment – and in the moment they sound perfect. That’s the case with this radio-tune I really enjoy right now, “One Thing,” by some chick called Amerie. Sharaun tells me that the super-slick production is the work of some hotshot guy right now, makes sense… programming managers must have been tripping over themselves to get this into rotation. No telling if this link will still work even tomorrow, but you can listen to the entire track here. It’s just so summery-fun sounding to me, it kicks the music snob in the ass and makes him listen. The stuttery pounding background instrumentation and cloppy beat remind me of vintage Utah Saints or Dewdrops era Deee-Lite.

Well folks. I think that’s it. I’m giving myself a day off from posting tomorrow, unless I come up with something on the plane. But… even then we’ll be in the air for close to 24hrs, so there may not be an opportune time to publish. I think I’ll join the regular crew down in Henly’s Ball for one more night of Taiwan.

Radio silence, 24hrs.

Posted on

colloquially confusing

Think dumpling and soy sauce.
Sharaun made it safe to Taiwan… and she seems to have adjusted to the time zone with no effort at all. Slept through her fist night fine and was up and out last night after a small nap. We tackled one of the local pubs near the hotel with a couple buddies of mine who work at the hotel bar (somehow, my life in Taiwan revolves around being at bars, people who work at bars, just… bars…). We had some drinks, some food, and some good broken-English talking. I took her out to a semi-touristy dumpling place for lunch, and she seemed to dig on the grub… although she is sorely lacking in the chopstick kung-fu department. Her first dumpling slipped from her weak grip at about six inches off the table – splashing down into a plateful of vinegar and soy sauce, the impact sending liquid to all four corners of the table and her shirt. But you gotta admire the effort.

Some of what I like being over here so much for is the fact that there are so many people interested in just talking to you to improve their English. I love being the “tutor” in a situation where someone is honestly asking a question about your native language. Lately, I’ve been chatting via MSN with a girl I know who lives outside Taipei – and she IM’d me an English question that I thought was kinda cool. Seems her English teacher and her were making plans over IM to go get some dinner and see a movie, and at one point she asked him if he would “buy dinner.” He replied that, yes, he would “buy dinner” if she would “get it.” The confusion came from the usage of “buy” and “get” when combined with dinner. She assumed he meant he’d pick up dinner and he assumed she’d do the same, and no one ended up bringing the cheeseburgers. So, she asked me – where did she go wrong? The intent was for her to actually bring the dinner, and that he would pay her back when she got there – but the sentence “I will buy it if you get it,” messed it all up. Really, that sentence is kinda confusing, and IMO could’ve been better worded as, “I will pay for the dinner if you bring it.”

Anyway, as I was trying to explain this to her, I was running through the scenario in my head with me in her place and another native-English speaker in his. That’s when I realized that this could potentially be a confusing situation to even a native speaker – and, when I also saw the chance to teach her a little unconventional English that I could see myself using in the same situation. If someone told me, “I will get dinner,” a possible response from me might be, “Pay-get or get-get?” Now, to someone learning English that may make no sense whatsoever, but I think most native speakers would get the idea that I’m trying to clarify the intended usage of the word “get.” I thought it was an interesting situational example of some unconventional phraseology. And while perhaps a bit unrefined or improper, I think the “pay-get or get-get” question is definitely valid English for today’s generation. And that’s the kind of English they seem to be most interested in, young-peoples’ speaking-English.

Written for yesterday, never posted:

I am a walking zombie. I’m beginning to think it’s not the timezone thing that beats me down, it’s my Taiwan sleep patterns. Back to the hotel for three of four hours sleep, up again for a meeting scheduled on US time, into the office, nap when you can. It’s less of a sleeping-waking pattern and more of a deprivation experiment, which I suppose could also account for my susceptibility to this bug that I’ve caught. That, and the fact that my swearing-off cigarettes lasted a whole two days before I was kidnapped, tied up, and forced to smoke a couple while drinking beer with the guys the other night. But I maintain folks, I maintain and I will continue to maintain.

Two weeks in Taiwan will do wonders for your Chinese. I daresay I can understand every 10th word spoken in about 80% of the sentences I hear (I’m pretty sure that having to qualify “every 10th word” with “about 80%” of the time means I actually understand less than every 10th word, but it’s the only way I could get at what I mean). In some instances, I can follow a conversation surprisingly well. The problem is, my ear can’t tell the difference between true Mandarin and the local Taiwanese dialect – so I’m sure there are times where I’m populating my mental cross-reference database with a mixture of words. If I were to speculate, I think living in Taiwan for 6mos might be enough to me to have a passing hold on the language. I really wish I could learn it, I think it would be so cool to say I speak Chinese. It would be even cooler if, when I say I can speak Chinese, I really can speak Chinese.

Although I disagree with it, Tiny Minx Tapes’ review of the new Nine Inch Nails album is flippin’ hilarious – check it out.

Peace out.

Posted on

good people are everywhere

I did a GIS for "big hands" and this came up, look at those dang hands!
Man. Nothing like a trip across the world to breathe some life back into these near-dead typing fingers. I’ve been working on a blog surplus this entire week, constantly shifting content from one entry to a buffered rough of the next day’s because they are too long. It’s good for me because it gives me some confidence in my writing again, and I guess it’s good for anyone (there are people, right?) who reads this because you have more junk to waste your time on.

Sharaun left the US this morning, and last night before she left she was IMing me at work every 10 seconds to ask a question about what she should bring. Yes, Sharaun, they have shampoo in Taiwan, and it’s not even made out of nuts or berries. And yes, they have shaving cream, the island is not overrun with unshorn sasquatches (sasquai?). Oh, and yes, they have irons here – I mean it’s true that, up until last year, they would simply make a weekly pilgrimage to the dragon’s cave and leave their clothes overnight so his fiery breath would smooth out all the wrinkles (which, incidentally, are caused by small evil clothes-wrinkling spirits and can be warded off with a concoction of mud, grass, and dung applied to the scrotum each evening). After this discussion had tailspun out of control, I decided to spice it up a bit:

Sharaun says:
I don’t need a bathing suit do I?
Double-D in Taiweezy says:
not unless you wanna swim.
Double-D in Taiweezy says:
oh, and bring a space suit if you wanna go into space.

Good one, right?

Last night I met some guy in the bar. He was from New York, and he spoke fluent, and excellent, Mandarin. I was impressed at the way he conversed with the bar staff. He was a large, Andre-the-Giant-ish looking man, with a goofy face and out-of-place looking black moustache that matched his curly and tousled black hair. He had a deep voice which I pegged as tobacco-induced. He was talking to Tracy and she was all smiles, but when she turned her back to him she screwed up her face in disgust as a signal to me that she wasn’t that pleased with Mr. New York-can-speak-Mandarin. Later on the topic turned, as if often does here for some reason, to that of “fun” in Taipei. Of course, being like 90% of the Westerners here, Mr. NYCSM treats this city as his own sexual playground. He actually said to me, without so much as a flinch or hint of hesitation, that he considers these Taiwanese women to be, “… nothing but shit, but great for a fuck.” Yeah.

If you know me, you know I can take just about anything with a smile… staying polite above all, while keeping my opinions to myself. I’m generally agreeable, and would rather listen to your crap and politely excuse myself in hopes of never seeing you again than invite drama and uncomfortable situations by openly disagreeing or challenging you. It’s much easier for me to write you off as a buffoon who I’ll never have the displeasure of meeting again than try and engage you with how my views differ from yours. But… all I could do in reaction to that was sit there stone-faced and say, “Damn, Mr. NYCSM. That’s a little rough.” He laughed. Having already noticed his wedding ring, shamelessly displayed, I got a bit confrontational (for me) and said, “So, you got a family back home in New York?” Mr. NYCSM replied, “Who knows. I’ve been trying to work up the nerve to call my wife and wish her a happy Mother’s Day.” Now, I guess that could mean a lot of things, but I took it to mean that he’s forsaken his family to the point where he doesn’t know if they’ll be there when he gets back, or perhaps their relationship is bad enough that saying they’re “waiting for him” is just an unknown.

Ten minutes of conversation and I hated this man. He’s been coming to Asia for twenty-five years and “… knows where to find trouble in every city you can think of.” I could almost see the slime oozing from his skin, smell the foul scent of rotten. The guy was so deplorable to me, I nearly left. But in the end, I held my own and stayed at the bar. Mr. NYCSM seemed extremely jealous of the way I seemed to be friends with the bar staff, and talked about going out with them later on during the week. I mean, here he is, he can speak Chinese, he can talk to them, he’s been coming here for a quarter-century, and this fat be-sideburned young whippersnapper is having better luck making friends with the staff than he is. It was my small victory over his disgustingness.

As he finished his last flute of champagne (no kidding), he stood up and walked over to me. “What are you doing tonight,” he asked. “Oh, tonight? I actually have plans with some friends.” “I hope they’re good plans,” he said, insinuating. “Yeah, yeah they are,” I replied. He went on, “I was thinking you and I could go find some trouble tonight.” “Sorry, can’t make it,” I said, trying to sound as uninterested as possible. “Later this week then,” he continued, “We’ll do something special; go halvsies.” “I’ll let you know,” I say, “What room are you in? I’ll try and give you a call,” anything to get him to just leave. Mr. NYCSM slips me his room number, and leaves me with a meaty handshake from his huge paw. As soon as he leaves, Tracy comes to me and says, “He is your friend?” “No,” I reply, “I hate him.” “Good,” she says, “He is very dirty.” And so, we agree.

Good people are everywhere I suppose, and so are bad people… it just helps to have an eye for the good ones. I couldn’t live like that… it’s just not me. I’m just a big pussy through and through.

Time’s up. See ya.

Posted on

the luxuries i’m afforded

Zoinks.
If someone ever tells you that the food in Taiwan is no good, I want you to punch them flat on the mouth for me, OK? Because, honestly folks, the food in Taiwan is freakin’ awesome. Take your hand, form it into a fist, pull back your arm, and clock ’em on the jaw while saying, “I strongly disagree with you.”

Before I go any further, sometimes you just have to share a song. This is one of those songs. I can think of at least three short films set to this amazingly trippy number. That fast crossfading on the b-b-b-bah course… oh man.

I’m pretty sure I crashed the hotel’s wireless router for my floor on Saturday night. I was simultaneously trying to download the latest O.C. and “preview” some new music – and the link just went down. It was acting flaky for about an hour after that, and I couldn’t get a solid connection again until Sunday morning. This is the first time I’ve brought my normal “bandwidth habits” on the road with me, so to speak. I usually just hold off on my downloading while away – but this trip was long, and Ben suggested I just bring GrabIt! with me and be able to enjoy new tunes as if I were at home. I thought it was a brilliant idea. I then also went one step further and started BTing some US TV shows… so I’m confident I’ll be giving the hotel a nice consistent bandwidth spike for these 11 days.

One of my worst I’m-in-Taiwan fears has come true – I’ve come down with a cold while here. Now, it’s nothing horrendous, more of the annoying head-clod type. But it’s enough give me reason to sleep for all but 6 hours of my Saturday. I don’t think, as I did earlier, that this is just a reaction to my cigarette binge; I rather think that this bug was waiting in the wings… being suppressed by my normally indomitable immune system, which it caught weakened and sleeping after the cigarettes. So I walked over to the local drugstore (I found one that sells Western medicine) and picked up some Panadol. Now, my Latin’s a little rusty, but I know that pana means “all” or maybe “every,” and I think dol means “pain” or maybe “sickness.” So, using my SAT root-word reasoning skills, I decided this was the medicine for me. Turns out I was right, there’s an insert in the package that has some English – and the pills are an all-cure cold/flu type thing with some vitamin C to boot. I started taking them, maybe that’s what made me so sleepy yesterday. I’m hoping they can knock this thing out over the weekend (of which there remains only today, but I’m still optimistic).

I’ll tell you something about me, I like to whistle. You can ask me wife, I whistle all the time. Whereas most people sing along to songs while they drive, I whistle along. Apparently, Chinese legend says that whistling after midnight (or maybe just at night, I could have misunderstood) is perceived to be “calling ghosts.” So, every time one of my local buddies catches me whistling happily after the sun’s gone down – they shush me and say, “ghosts!” I just thought that was cool, so I’d mention it… it doesn’t really round out a paragraph well, but what can I do?

Another cool thing that’s happened to me on this trip? OK: somehow, I befriended the night-shift housekeeping manager at the hotel. He’s a round man in this mid-thirties, and looks consistently beat down. Whenever I see him, he’s always dressed for work, which, being cleaning, means a scrubby tucked-in t-shirt, grungy pants, and some thick-soled work shoes. His hair is always damp from sweat and disheveled, and he has always, and I mean always, got a fat mushy mouthful of chewed up betel nut, his teeth and tongue stained dark red. He often stops by the bar after a couple hours on shift, always chewing betel nut, and orders two tall mugs of orange juice while he enjoys a cigarette.

One night, I was sitting at the bar as he made his usual appearance, and he started talking to Tracy and she introduced me to him. The bar staff call him, and all the other maintenance workers, A-Pe, a word in Chinese which means eldest uncle on your father’s side, but they use it without the actual blood-relation (I think we all have an “uncle” or “aunt” that’s really just a parents’ friend, right?) Anyway, he pulled out his little bag of betel nut to refresh the spent wad, and jokingly offered me one. Tracy then mentioned to him, in Taiwanese, that I had in fact tried betel nut on one of my visits here. This made A-Pe perk up in disbelief, and then he really pushed the betel nut on me, I suppose thinking, “I’ll see if this white boy is what he says he is.” So, reluctantly, and because I was the center of attention, I took the nut, asked for a cup to spit in, bit off the nut’s “cap” and spit it into the cup, and tossed the whole leaf-wrapped thing into my mouth with a loud crunch.

A-Pe was dumbfounded. He stared at me in disbelief, red-tainted mouth hanging open. He spoke to Tracy, “He’s like a professional!” Tracy translated, because A-Pe speaks not a word of English, but I laughed out loud as I mashed up the green thing. Now, I’m convinced that, after trying it multiple times, betel nut does absolutely nothing. Yes, it’s true that minutes after biting into it you feel a wave of heat wash over your body, but from my experience it only lasts less than a minute. I have felt none of it’s “keep you awake” properties that the locals tout. Regardless, this simple act of sharing A-Pe’s betel nut has made us fast friends. Now every night A-Pe offers me betel nut. I’ve only taken him up once more after that first time, mostly because I felt bad for always turning him down – but he knows I’ve been feeling sick. He offers me cigarettes, which I’ve also been turning down, and he asks me questions through Tracy. He’s a very, very, nice man… and I have the feeling that a story on his life would be ultimate interesting. He’s very jovial, always smiling and laughing, and very physical, always putting his arm around you or slapping you on the back. I’ve come to really enjoy “talking” to him. His favorite questions for me seem to center around how many Taiwan beers it takes to get me drunk – he has this theory that he can out-drink me.

One night, A-Pe walked with me downstairs as I went to meet someone in the lobby, both of us chewing betel nut from the bag in his pocket. At one point, he turned and pointed to me, saying “you,” then pointing to himself and saying nothing, then pointing to the bar where we’d just come from and saying “Tracy,” then raising an imaginary bottle to his mouth and tilting his head back to gulp down the imaginary beer within it. I got the meaning immediately: A-Pe wanted to take me drinking (and of course bring along Tracy so that we could converse). I gladly accepted, in my terrible Chinese, with “hen hao, mei wenti,” or “very good, no problem.” So, sometime this week, when A-Pe’s got a night off, I’m going to have a drinking contest with him. Don’t think for one moment that I don’t realize the awesome bloggable opportunity this presents. A drinking contest with a working-class Taiwanese man that I can’t communicate with? I plan to take pictures and turn it into a small novella.

It’s opportunities like that which make me realize how lucky I am to have a job that enables me to experience this kind of things. How beautifully unusual, and worthy of fond memories, is a chance like that? Maybe some would feel otherwise, but just being able to have such an otherworldly experience makes me glad to be here. I guess my college debt is good for something.

After watching the last two O.C.s I downloaded, I’m realizing that that dang show is nearly ahead of me. I mean, in the last one, they not only played the new Cribs, but they played a track off the Of Montreal album that I got not four days ago. I so want a job soundtracking that show.

Is this as big a deal as it sounds to me? Guess some folks think so.

Good… afternoon… or some shit… I can’t figure this time zone thing out for the life of me.

Posted on

three our fathers

I call shenanigans.
I don’t know how I didn’t manage to post on Wednesday, I’ve been writing more than enough for a post-a-day – I’m just royally confused by the timezone thing and set Thursday’s entry up to post that day instead of Wednesday. Whatever.

This morning I woke up feeling incrementally crappier than the past couple post-cigarette-binge days (for a weakling like me, five smokes constitutes a “binge”). My throat was sore and I had so much crap in my head and chest. So, before I hopped a cab into work I stopped in the 7-11 to look for some cold medicine. I was hoping for some Theraflu or Cold-Eze – but it seems they don’t really sell medicines in the convenience stores here. I didn’t even see Tylenol or Rolaids or anything with active ingredients. I did, however, see this:

Smoke all you want, you can just bean-jelly yourself back to health.

It may be hard to see in that small picture, but it’s a yellow box with a lot of Chinese writing. What caught my eye, however, were the little pictures in the bottom-right. The first one shows a man who has his hands up to his face, like he’s tired or maybe even holding his sore throat. The second one actually shows a cigarette. Now, to me, this looked like a Chinese miracle cure for cigarette-sickness. On the bottom of the box they show two little pill capsules containing what looks like a brown powder. The price, 75NT, and the thought of being able to write about the stuff, made me buy it. So, when I got to work, I asked my Mandarin-speaking buddies what I had just bought. They said, “If you are working all day and tired, or weak from smoking, you take this for health.” Bingo! It really is the Chinese miracle cure for cigarettes! I asked if they could tell exactly what the stuff in the pills was, to which they replied, “bean jelly.” Great. The miracle cure for cigarettes is bean jelly. The Taiwanese people love them some beans. So, I think I wasted 75NT on some powdered bean junk that won’t make me feel a lick better. I popped one anyway though, y’know, just in case.

I am unbearably tired, to the point of having a little dull ache somewhere behind my eyes – my mind’s way of telling me to get some rest I guess. I don’t know about other guys, but for some reason when I’m in one of these hopelessly sleepy states, where my eyes are heavy and I’m barely able to focus, I tend to get an erection. Yeah, you heard me – I get my plump on when I’m nodding off. This is particularly unfortunate if I happen to be having a hard time staying awake during a customer meeting – and it’s doubly bad if I’m dozing in the time before I have to get up and speak. It’s like a flashback to the middle-school days of uninvited boners during class and being asked to come do something on the chalkboard (I never actually experienced that, but if TV sitcoms are accurate depictions of pubescent teenage life I’m probably the only one). Once again, though, the internet has come to my rescue by making me feel less a freak than I initially thought. Doing some research, I found this: “A man’s penis becomes erect (“hard”) in response to… deep relaxation….” Well I’ll be damned, I’m normal

I often experience changing emotions when traveling, especially when I’m away from Sharaun for extended periods of time. There’s always that initial excitement from traveling and being somewhere different, with different things to do and see. And while I’ve always got a general “awareness” that I’m away from my wife, I sometimes feel it more acutely at random times while away. Like today, riding in a warm van to one of the customer visits, I just started feeling guilty for being away. Guilty for going out and doing things without her, and guilty for going out and doing those things with girls that aren’t her. That’s the crux of it really… spending time with the girls that I’ve befriended over here. If I do a little role reversal, and imagine her away on business in some foreign country and going out with some guyfriend I’d never met, I think it would indeed get under my skin. Not that there’s a lack of trust, and not that there’s a reason for there to be one, but love and jealousy are funny things. I don’t know quite where I’m going with this. I think I maybe just wanted to put down in writing my realization that one’s consideration for one’s significant other’s feelings should increase proportionally to one’s removal from that significant other’s presence. If you’re far away and free to do what you will, imagination is all that’s left for the one you left behind…

Wow. I did a really poor job trying to say what I was trying to say. But that’s OK, because I’m done with confessional and feel no better for it; I’ll just be glad when my wife gets here.

I’m telling you right now, you will hate this new album that I love. You really will. Oh man, I can just imagine everyone who hears this going, “Dude, what the hell is this?” But I gotta tell you, I really like it. I’ve enjoyed A Silver Mt. Zion’s records before… they put a unique twist on the standard style of music I for some reason call “post apocalyptic.” I really, really, don’t know where that term came from – maybe Ben, maybe Pitchfork, but it fits well for the kind of music. Anyway, this is discord and minimalism at it’s greatest, simply wonderful. Evil sounding at times, and just creepy at others… but also with a softer side. The songs are all just a bit uncomfortably too long, but in a good way. I can’t explain it, but it’s got a grating quality that makes it fun to listen to. Shut up. I know what I’m talking about. Shut up.

Off to enjoy my 1st weekend in Taiwan. Because I’m a day ahead of you. Jealous?

Posted on

ni yo yan ma?

Bu hao.
Again, an entry that spans a couple of days and makes no excuses for non-linearity. It’s Thursday now in Taipei, and it’s oppressively hot and humid. I must admit though, I’ve been faring better than usual considering the heat. I think I’ve developed some kind of mental kung-fu that protects me from the heat. I still loathe going outdoors, but when I do go outside, and even if I’m walking around the city, I use my mind-control to keep my usually open-floodgate style sweating to a minimum.

I don’t know why, but since coming to Taiwan this time I’ve been indulging in a cigarette or two each night. Sometimes this happens to me: I set the precedent one evening by breaking down a borrowing a smoke. Then, once people know I’m willing – they just won’t stop offering. I’ve got to stop though, because I am just not made for smoking. I mean, it kills me. This morning I woke up with a dreadfully sore throat, and that kicked-in-the-chest feeling. I don’t think it’s the smoking itself, rather the havoc it wreaks on my sinuses. My sinuses are all allergy’d up anyway, and smoking just makes things much worse. I wake up all stuffed up and horking up gobs of brown goo… almost like a headcold, but completely brought about by the Marlboro man. I tried to make a stand last night, because I had already been feeling the cumulative effects of the past few days – but some Taiwanese cab driver insisted I pony up and take a fag. After that, he was passing out the betel nut and it was a regular working-class party in the taxi. Come to think of it, that guy was fun. But no, I’m done, you heard it from the source – no more cigarettes.

Every time I come to Taipei, I test the limits of what I dare to eat. I don’t necessarily mean what actually comprises the meal, rather where the meal comes from. On this trip, I decided to finally throw caution to the wind and have some food from the street-vendors. The night markets are full of stainless-steel carts on wheels, behind which sweaty, unclean-looking men wearing A-frame t-shirts and smoking cigarettes that dangle dangerously long columns of ash as they stir their boiling pots or tend to hot skillets. The fare is varied: some kind of “tendon” soup, so-called “stinky” tofu, various parts of ducks, squids on sticks, sugared tomatoes with prawn-centers on a stick, you get the picture. Not all of it is unappealing though, I just like the shock value of mentioning only the oddball local stuff. Anyway, I’ve dined at a couple carts so far during this trip. I had duck wing, I had some kind of dessert made from shaved ice, gelatinous milk, and tapioca, and I returned to a donut vendor that Eric intro’d me to last time I was in town. I guess it’s a pretty “safe” list, but the point is that I haven’t gotten sick yet. There were a couple guys in the office today who opted to walk to McDonalds rather than join the rest of us folks for dumplings at the place down the road. Tsk tsk, where’s your sense of adventure?

The past couple days I’ve been catching myself trying to imagine this city from Sharaun’s point of view. Watching the scooters swoop in and out of traffic like a reckless swarm of insects; noticing the familiar sights like 7-11, Circle-K, and Hooters; feeling alone because no one understands you and likewise you can’t understand them. I’ve been desensitized to it, but it’ll all be new for her. I don’t know why I’m so excited about being able to see that, to watch her reaction to things. I guess it’s partly because I feel like the all-knowing old hand at Taipei. Even tho I’m as green as any other American who’s been to the city a few times and thinks they get it. I actually can’t wait until she gets here, so much to show her.

I’m in the office now, got here around 8:30am. The 4am meeting bit went over much easier than I thought it would, it doesn’t seem to have wrecked my sleeping – and I think I’m just about adjusted to the new timezone. I still want to sleep during the day, but that’s on par with my normal level of lazy so I’m not too concerned. Somehow, I forgot to bring some headphones for the laptop, so I can’t listen to any of the new stuff I’ve downloaded. Instead, I’m sitting here listening to tunes off my phone. Which is fine, really, but I think I’ll pick up a pair of headphones at the computer market. I have a hard time getting motivated to do day-to-day work when I’m here. I think it has something to do with being out of my element. Not sitting at my desk with my monitor and such. Working off the laptop screen with no external mouse and keyboard, I dunno. Just that feeling of not quite being where I usually am. I have to get totally absorbed in what I’m doing to be productive, which is sometimes hard to do.

Last night, as I tried to go back to sleep around 5am, I suddenly and randomly got an idea for what I want to do as my centerpiece prop this Halloween. For the last year I’d been thinking that I’d work on the witch again, making her actually fly around the yard this year – but I still see a lot of work in that one. The idea that came to me is relatively simple, which is good considering the success of the complicated witch implementation originally planned for last year, but I think the effect will be cool. I want to build a life-size coffin out of wood, stained to look nice and real, which will be propped up somewhere along the path to the front door. The lid will be able to open slightly, opening to show an eerie light and fog rolling out. While open, an arm will reach out toward the visitors, and then retreat back into the coffin, which will then close again. I think it’ll be pretty easy: some wood, a couple windshield wiper motors, an el-cheapo fog machine from Wal Mart, some lights and the prop for the arm.

Finally, I see PF is hip to the Ponys. Good call PF, good call.

Until tomorrow, smoke-free.

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broken sidewalks and exposed pipes

The dinosaur that is the US cellphone martketplace.
Some thoughts on Taiwan:

I like visiting this city. I like the people, the food, the atmosphere and the culture. And yes, I’ve said all that before. I don’t, however, know if I could live here. When I make the mental shift and start thinking about this place as a primary residence rather than a temporary place, little things start popping out in my mind. The city is packed; packed with people, with scooters, with buildings… on and on. All of this stuff crammed into once place is kind of depressing to me. Some of the little things would also depress me I think. The fact that people wear masks over their mouth to protect them from the air pollution. The thin layer of grit and dirt that seems to coat things. I know, most of the things I’m complaining about are just “big city” characteristics. Taipei isn’t really all that dirty, it’s just that my uppity whitebread “planned community” back in California pays a lot more attention to public works. I’m not used to broken sidewalks or exposed pipes, I’m used to having things nice and neat with the ugly guts considerately hidden away from public eyes. These aren’t big deals, mind you, just small little things that, overall, I think tend to bring me down over time. This could be due more to the fact that I’m a “country boy” at heart, and given a choice would live outside city walls every time.

One thing that I do like about Taiwan is the way these people embrace their technology. If something is cool and people will use it, they build or implement it and sell it in the open market. The whole invention-to-market seems much less restrictive than US. All the cellphones have every possible feature enabled, are completely unlocked to any one service provider, and you can buy SIM cards everywhere. It’s much more intuitive, and it just works. If there’s a demand for some computer gadget of questionable legality, for instance something that could be used to circumvent copyright law, producers don’t blink while rushing said gadget to market for the public to decide. From my perspective, this willingness to meet consumers’ needs acts to speed up the whole iterative process of technology advancement. Not being hindered by overly restrictive terms and conditions or attempts to cash in on current offerings by holding back new and useful items or services really lets the people judge what’s good and what they will ultimately decide to pay for. This way, things that people actually perceive they want or need are naturally promoted over technology or services that people just plain don’t give a crap about. Sure, maybe this model does give some more “working room” to those rogue users who plan to do illegal things with good and services, but I think the added usability and convenience it gives to your honest customer base is worth it.

I’ll give you an example, when I bought my new Nokia phone in the US, it’s locked to the Cingular network, and is feature-limited. No authorized Cingular stores sell any accessories for the phone, despite the fact it’s been out in the states for quite some time now. You can’t get cases, covers, headphones, etc. In Taiwan, the same Nokia phone can be bought at any of the millions of cellphone outlets, with no contract, completely unlocked, and with all the features originally built-in by Nokia turned on by default. Not only that, but there are any number of places, from streetside cart-vendors at the night market to more “official” feeling cellular retail outlets, where you can get all kinds of cool accessories for it. Your choices aren’t limited to Nokia or Cingular branded expensive accessories, there are a myriad of Taiwan-made accessories which in many cases are not only cheaper but more fashionable or practical. I wish the US would start to handle technology like this, because when you compare the producer-consumer models, Taiwan is rabid for new stuff. In the states, I think we are less excited about new technology because it’s often poorly supported, marketed, and overly restricted in the interest of the big corporate players. I think some Taiwan-style decentralization would be good for the US. I think people would eat up the idea of being able walk into any 7-11 and pick up a new SIM card for their mobile phone without signing a two year contract.

And that’s it for now. I got up at 4am to call into an important meeting in the states, and I wanted wrap up this entry before going back to bed. I was able to download some of the US TV shows I’m missing while in Taiweezy, so I can keep up with what’s going on with Ryan and Marissa (I know, I’m pathetic, but I still think it’s cool that I can have an HDTV rip of a US show hours after it’s broadcast). Also, I’m able to keep up with the latest in pirated MP3 goodness as well – so I’m not as entertainment-removed as I usually am (I made the right preparations since I knew this would be a longer trip). OK OK, I’m outta here. Back to sleep for a few hours before it’s into the office.