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Friday, June 29th, 2007
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1:23 am - C'est tellement simple, l'amour.
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I know where I am, a third of the way between here and there, a month down with two to go. I am between.
I know where I came from, Taiwan in red and gold, friends who truly love me and the coiled thread of new possibilities I have only just begun to pull. I miss them because they matter, because they touched me and helped push me onwards, upwards... if life is but a collection of moments, I could ask for no finer memories than Taiwan, no finer friends to share them with.
I know where I am going; I can see it, my other home at the far shore of the continent, like Gatsby's green light twinkling. The thread leads there, to a future I am finally beginning to shape, to stand on. I know, I know, I will have a good life, full and rich and happy. I know who I want to share it with, what it means, how it will be. I believe in me, at long last.
I'm not lost. I know where I come from, where I am, where I am going. But I'm not there yet. I am between.
I'm trapped, one third down and two thirds to go, trying to swim to the green light. I see my destination, and am fighting for it, fighting to stay above water. Lately the weight of this seems heavier, more daunting. People I miss are becoming insubstantial, ethereal... the ties that bind me to my path more uncertain. I have to draw on my own strength and trust in their innate goodness and their love of me, I know. Prevert says "love is so simple", and he's right. One day, I will be O.K. again. But in the mean...
I wish she'd call me. I wish he wrote back. I wish I had a car so I could visit them in Alaska. I wish she was closer. I wish I could buy him a beer. I wish I could hold her at night.
The sea is cold, and the green light is still so far away. I wish I wasn't swimming alone, but I guess this is how I prove worthy of them. I just have to trust and believe.
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| Saturday, December 9th, 2006
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6:36 pm - Election Season
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The city is silent, now, or at least more silent than it was. It seems even Taipei can be quiet by comparison. The trucks with their blaring Blade Runner-esque messages are gone, the empty firecackers littering the ground like so many dead leaves, tiny packets of exploded hopefulness and bravado. The campaign banners already coming down, hanging like broken window shades listing drunkenly from the Boo Radley house. Some of them won, many lost; the sights and sounds of them desperately vying for public affection already begin to fade in the march of time. Election season goes.
Time is on my mind a lot, lately. The first semester is almost over- when did it even begin? Am I really turning 24 in a week's time? I remember a conversation I had with my father recently- no, not recently, it was a year ago! No, Jesus, two years?- about how fast time goes. I remember him screwing up his face as he sat in the ridiculous overpaded leather chair of some tacky chain restaraunt. We were sharing Manly Man Time drinks over Christmas break- this was before I thought of Taiwan, of Mandarin, of many things long since dreamed and wanted and forgotten. He stirred his straw and confided in me, something he rarely does (he is a man, after all, raised to know that Men Don't Cry) that he was scared.
"I'm getting old. My dad is dead. I'm already halfway finished my life. It scares me so much to think of dying, it comes so fast!"
I will blink and it will all be over. I will be an old man, with my own life to look back on, my own experiences and memories. It will fly by like seasons in Taipei, election campaigns, semesters, birthdays. I wonder if I'll make the right decisions, look back fondly on the choices I made and the places I went, gaze upon fat and happy grandchildren of my own.
Dad's birthday is coming up. I should get him a present.
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| Monday, November 6th, 2006
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12:54 pm - Snowing At The Equator
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Today is some kind of Daoist holy day; the whole city smelled like smoke and incense. I don't know which one, sadly, just that all the shop owners were out burning ghost money and serving baibai treats to the shopping ghosts. Now, a shop owner here or there doing their baibais happens often enough that this wouldn't be anything big, but they were all doing it today, nearly every store burning money and opening juice boxes and Orion pies for the spirit world. Ximending was like a temple; big chains and small markets, they all had the same beat-up iron cans for the money and sagging card tables stocked with Vitali and dianxin and incense, the air heavy with wealthy smoke.
And ash. Smoke and ash.
I was idly browsing expensive dress shirts in a major chain store, and two large white flecks of ash floated by my shoulder, landing on the current pink-pinstripe item of interest. I brushed them off absentmindedly, barely registering the grey smear. The young guy in an expensive suit out front kept right on stuffing stacks of beige-and-red Dead Currency into the roaring bin, looking mostly bored and slightly reverent. More ash floated from the bin and in from other ones down the street, touching on four hundred dollar pants and between racks of silk ties, like November snow.
I guess I'm comfortable here, now. I have no home, anymore, but this will do just fine.
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| Wednesday, November 1st, 2006
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2:56 pm
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I just got this from my stepmom about my Dad:
"He's playing Grand Theft Auto.
I just watched him get his car stuck between a telephone pole and a signpost.
Then some guy came and grabbed him out of the car, so he just started jumping up and
down, and the guy let go of him.
Then he wound up driving down train tracks, then he almost rammed a cop car.
And the whole time, he kept repeatedly leaping out of his car for no reason. Of course
I was laughing so hard that I couldn't breathe.
The best part was that after all this, he looked at me and said, "I guess I'd better read
the instructions a little more.""
When I read this, I laughed so hard I started making funny noises.
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| Wednesday, October 25th, 2006
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8:50 am - Well, That's Interesting...
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Hong Kong University seems to have liked my abstract enough to invite me to come give a presentation at their Contemporary China Studies conference in January. The topic of my paper/lecture will be Chinese energy consumption patterns and their effect on the global oil market, both in economic and security terms.
Holy shit.
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| Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006
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10:35 pm
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There's no beauty in these things we do; they are merely the desperate acts temporal creatures, the ones who know they must die. The sunset graces that hill for five, six, seven minutes, and then it is gone, casting the lush jungle and ancestral shrines in the lengthening blue shadows of another night. And so it goes, forever, with no footprints to mark the passage of what came before.
We cannot transcend. It's sad, but also somewhat peaceful. Take life as it comes.
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| Friday, September 8th, 2006
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2:05 pm
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It's amazing how things build up, unnoted, until you're so far behind in the recounting that it seems impossible to clean out the Aegean stable of news. Best intentions rarely come to fruition, do they? I could have sworn I was going to use this journal to keep people informed...
At any rate, I've got a few hours to kill in Hong Kong (yes, I'm back there) before I can leave, so I'll try to bring everyone up to speed here and now. For starters, I'm back in Hong Kong to get my visitors visa (which you can't get in Taiwan itself, that being too sane), so that I can extend it long enough to apply for a residency visa, so that I can get my Alien Residency Certificate, so that I don't get deported. The visa system in Taiwan is positively demented, I assure you all.
I have a place in Taipei now, a nice efficiency-style studio with a bathroom, small kitchen, fridge, TV, DSL, air-con, all in a nice neighborhood a few MRT stops from my school. School starts the 15th, and classes themselves begin on the 25th, so lately I've been simultaneously relaxing from the insane whirlwind of studies and travel I endured on the mainland, and studying to brush up on my traditional characters in time for the placements test on the 15th.
Taipei is lovely, even moreso when you have other Chinese cities to compare it to. Shanghai is mean, Beijing is smelly (well, all Mainland cities are stinktastic compared to Taipei, but Beijing takes the shitcake), Xi'an is scruffy (though my favorite of the bunch still), and Qingdao is superficial. Taipei has lovely people, clean public spaces, history, art, and great cultural events going on all the time, from Mozart concerts to the upcoming Missy Eliot show. I forgot how much I missed this place, really.
Anyway, back to the beginning. Mary and I enjoyed Xi'an a lot, as did Alienor, who joined us a little later. Alie's first introduction to a Chinese night-market was to have her newly-purchased wallet full of money pick-pocketed from her. Fortunately for her, she 1) noticed it and went 'Hey!' and 2) I wore my running shoes that day. I chased the pickpocket down, and when he slowed, unawares, to check his loot, I caught up with him. Just as I was about to judo-kick him in the spine, he threw her wallet over his shoulder and hoofed it- end result, money recovered.
The rest of Xi'an was a little more prosaic than that, though certainly fun.
After we left Xi'an (pictures of the various famous Xi'an sights will be forthcoming, I promise) for Macau (if you can't book tickets to the inhospitable desert region of Xinjiang, a decadent, beautiful post-Portuguese-colonial resort island full of casinos is the next best bet!), we endured a 30-hour train ride next to kids who had a battery-operated top that played a tinny rendition of Happy Birthday for the entire trip. Over. And. Over. Mary eventually stole the zipcord that made it run, but their oblivious bastard grandfather bought the little shits a new one (they SOLD THEM ON THE TRAIN!) and we sat in Happy-Birthday-punctured misery until we got to Guangzhou. From Guangzhou, we caught the express train to HK; from HK, we hopped a ferry to Macau.
Macau is lovely beyond words, a perfect combination of Southern Chinese temple-loving, rice-eating, barter-arguing fun, and Portuguese colonial architecture and placidity. We went to beaches, a casino (I won a lot and then lost it all, whee!), shopped at outlet malls (one pair of chocolate brown corduroys to rule them all, and in my wardrobe bind them) and generally unwound a bit. After that we went to Hong Kong again, where I fucked up the day of our flight, and Alienor saved us from sleeping in the airport by springing for a five-star hotel near the terminal ("OK, people! That's it! I need room service!").
So. Now I'm in Taipei (or will be, once they GIVE ME BACK MY PASSPORT SO I CAN GO HOME ARRRGH), cooling my heels until the 25th. And that, as they say, is that.
Love ya'll.
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| Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006
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12:30 pm - And Now, The Long Overdue Update
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This just in: it is absolutely fucking impossible to sail up the Yangtze, short of buying a $850 U.S. ticket off a crazy German riverboat captain.
I left Qingdao on the 25th, having 'graduated' from a program I never really quite got into the swing of, though everyone and their mother insisted my spoken Chinese is coming along excellently. From Qingdao, I went to Shanghai, where I was to meet Mary on the evening of the 28th, leaving me a few short days for proper goodbyes owed to people who have become incredibly close to me over the last two months. Shanghai itself is hardly a city to say much of anything in beyond "do you have a shirt that matches these pants?"; I love to shop as much as the next guy, and saw an excellent museum or three, but overall I felt like I'd been dropped into a giant mall with expensive... everything.
The expensiveness of this place was further magnified when Mary arrived sans baggage, and the useless chucklefucks at United proceeded to jerk us around for three days about the whereabouts of all her worldly posessions; rarely answering the phone number they gave us, being bored, reticent sources of half-information when they did bother to pick up, and constantly insisting that her bags would arrive "this evening", a magical time which never seemed to arrive. After three days, they asked me to provide them a fax number so they could "fax me some forms". Since I was at a fucking hotel, this proved a bit difficult, though I eventually got the front desk to agree to let it through for the low low price of six RMB a page, or roughly five year's salary for the average taro farmer. I then asked what this form was, you know, for, since he had yet to explain that, and was told that at this point the bag seemed to be irretrievably lost, and that this was the next step in their long search process. In two months, she will be paid nine dollars a pound for her missing bag- huzzah!
Only later did Mary notice that they had labled her missing backpack as a children's stroller on the initial claim form. United Airlines is a fucking sack of flaming donkey turds, and I hope Google tells everyone so.
There being no boats up the Yangtze from Shanghai (and oh, how deluded I was to think there might be one from somewhere else!), we proceeded by train to Nanjing, which the Chinese call one of "the three furnances of China". Apt description, let me tell you as my face melts off in this net cafe. Mary's runny eyes manifested as full blown pink-eye on the train ride over, so as soon as we checked into our hotel we headed to the hospital, where she was seen, processed, diagnosed, proscribed, and given medication in twenty minutes and for all of $7 U.S. dollars. Communism may suck and all, but damned if it doesn't pull off an upset from time to time.
We slept the night in a dorm-y double room next to a hilarious construction site (pictures to follow from Xi'an, now that I have a week there to kill...) and got up this morning fresh and slightly less crusty to go get ferry tickets, whereupon we were told that sailing up the Yangtze is slightly less common than swimming to Macau, but that there JUST HAPPENED to be this ONE BOAT that only comes by EVERY 18 DAYS, WOAH! I talked to the captain of this majestic pleasure liner, and he told me that his was the only boat sailing this infrequent yadda yadda see above, and that it would cost me 850.
Me: "850 kuai isn't bad."
Him: "No, zeez eez American dollarz."
Me: ".......do you know how to get to the train station from here?"
So here we are in a net cafe, killing time until our last-minute train trip to Xi'an, only a week ahead of schedule from when we're supposed to meet Ali; hard seat no less, the cheapest and most unpleasant way to travel. We arrive in Xi'an at 5am, no hotel bookings to our name, Mary wearing the same two dresses for the last five days, frazzled and pink-eyed and sans plans.
Believe it or not, I'm having fun. Weighing on me more than all the problems and trials and tribulations is the people I miss dearly, who I wish were here to experience a thunderstorm in Nanjing, or the Shanghai Bund at night, or a long crappy trainride to Xi'an when the Gameboy is out of batteries and there's no English-language books for a hundred miles. I love you guys and wish you were with me.
Hope you guys are also living in interesting times.
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| Wednesday, July 5th, 2006
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9:44 am
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Finally some photo sets for ya'll. They're both on Facebook, so for those of you who aren't college kids like me, let me know if you can still see 'em or not.
First one is a black and white set I took of an art gallery in Beijing that's in a former industrial factory that they didn't so much convert as empty (mostly) and fill with artwork. It was really cool, and I felt the B&W captured it better than the color (the color set captured more of the beauty in some ways, but without the ambient noise in that space I felt going for the simplicity of the lines and spaces was better, blah blah blah).
Second photo set is of a mountain I climbed last weekend, called Taishan. It's next to the birthplace of Confucius, and on top is the imperial shrine in his honor (as well as vast, vast fields of pot). Whee.
http://bard.facebook.com/photos.php?id=33500373
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| Wednesday, June 28th, 2006
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12:52 pm - Final Destination
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I think Mary and I (with Alienore tagging along) have finalized some tentative plans for the summer. Since Chinese geography is a mystery to most people, I highly encourage you to whip out a map and read along, since it's just that cool.
From Shanghai, Mary and I will leave by boat up the Yangtse, through the Three Gorges (while there still ARE Gorges, what with the dam filling up and all), all the way up to Chongqing. From Chongqing we'll take a commuter train or sleeper bus up to Xi'an, scope out the Terra-Cotta Army, and pick up Miss Frenchie (who arrives as tastefully late as ever). From Xi'an, we'll get a train up through Gansu Province, which is the old silk road pass through the northwestern mountains, up up up all the way to Xinjiang, the giant desert province in the northwest, where Turkic Muslim people who are in no way Chinese have been crammed into the rest of the country like their Tibetan neighbors to the south. There we will ride camels, eat mutton, and stare at the desert, while people in funny hats who speak surprisingly good English and little to no Mandarin do funny dances for us.
Or not, who knows, things keep changing...
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| Thursday, June 22nd, 2006
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12:16 pm
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Qingdao is not what I expected. It's almost always swathed in a thick morass of fog, casting the whole city in a grey light during the day and diffusing the omnipresent urban China neon lighting into an artificial aurora borealis by night. Even in this relatively tourist-ridden city, people still gawk and point at me; on those few occasions I actually get to engage in meaningful conversation, the amount of ignorance and misconception these people bear for everyone and anyone outside their little bubble is truly astounding. The young generation especially seems utterly devoid of global, or even domestic, political knowledge, and get profoundly upset when confronted with the notion that maybe Taiwan isn't actually currently in factual function a happy unified part of the mainland, or that Chinese citizens have to get permits to go to Hong Kong, or any one of a dozen not-even-controversial ideas that strike one as trivial.
The state television is creepily one-sided in a ham-fisted way that seems so blatantly transparent, until you realize the extent of the internet and print-media censorship here, and how little access people have to outside news (especially when they get all bent out of shape talking to foreigners who might inform them better). The people, for their part, simply go on shopping at luxury stores in blissful ignorance, spewing money left and right on the stupidest of pretenses- unless, of course, they're poor, in which case they're probably protesting their polluted farmland and kleptocratic local government way off in the middle of nowhere (not that anyone would know, since local television only runs documenatries on how much Edgar Snow hated Chiang Kai-shek, and other matters of vital national interest).
Classes are too much, too fast, and my mind is a sieve with oversized holes that retains only the simplest things, things which then often get lost later on as more information is brute-forced through. Today's vocab unit contains "burned to death"; yesterday's had "theatre buff". You could ask me what madman thinks these kernels of wisdom are worth learning in second-year Chinese, but I'd have no coherent answer for you. That said, my spoken Chinese is coming along nicely, and in my rare moment of self-confidence, I can admit that I speak as well as anyone in my grade. My written Chinese is still crap, and I need to study harder, if that's even possible with 8 am classes and omnipresent exhaustion the order of the day. Paired with mandatory 'extracurricular' classes, it becomes readily apparent that whoever planned this program is a robot who has never spoken to a college student in their lives.
Remnants of Communism are everywhere here, from the march music they play each hour to signal the end of class (in place of some weird capitalist-roader noise, like a bell), to the plaques in museums proudly praising "Deng Xiaoping Thought" for making their atrociously bad curation possible. They're just echoes, though, playing hollow on a people who can now take their Hummers to the McDonald's drive-thru on their way to buy Rolex watches and bottles of overpriced Chivas Regal. A mass of newly affluent, globally ignorant and politically unempowered middle class people shuffle around this great land, becoming as consumptive and nationalistic as we are, but in some undefinable way worse, as though they intend to beat us by outdoing us on all our worst qualities.
I miss Taiwan.
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| Sunday, June 11th, 2006
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10:34 pm
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| Thursday, June 8th, 2006
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11:02 pm
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This long-overdue update was written about a week ago, while I was still in Beijing. No words can describe how slow Chinese internet uploading is, making the photos a huge pain in the ass time investment to upload, which combined with my ridiculously busy schedule makes this whole 'keeping people updated' thing nigh impossible. Hopefully I'll have time for more uploading this weekend.
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Now that I finally have some time, here's my first Beijing update... most of these photos have been done a million times before and none really capture the unique bizzare shit I've seen that you can't just find on a postcard, but if I didn't upload this stuff everyone would be very disappointed in me. So nyah.
This is an iPod vending machine in San Fransisco Airport. Retch in revulsion like I did, it's a lot of fun!
The flight was long and uneventful, though the scenery was beautiful at times:
I mean, it's an airplane ride. Hell, I've even taken longer, 'nuff said.
Stepping out of the airport and into Beijing is... a lot of sensory input at once. The whole city is in a kind of intense upheaval, and reading about it just doesn't do the whole thing justice. Cranes are everywhere, straddling the still-smoking ruins of whole neighborhoods as they throw up New Shiny in time for the Olympics. The air quality in Beijing explains much of why people smoke; at least cigarettes have a filter on the end.
After a little sleep, we were shepherded up the Great Wall, which is pretty, well, Great (the photos below do it more justice than I do). The walk up is as torturous as they say, and the wall itself is no small thing, which is why there were donkeys on the way up (which I assume were used by the people selling Coke and cigs in the defense towers). The merchants at the foot are some of the pushiest people in the universe, and set a pattern of screaming grabby capitalism (HALLO! HALLO! LOOKIE LOOKIE! YOU BUY!) that would come to represent much of Beijing to me by the end of our stay (which is to say, I hated a lot of the place).
(I'm posing like a Japanese tourist. Ha ha.)
After the Wall, we went to a traditional Chinese opera performance, which most of us slept through (not the best planning on the part of our teachers, but hey). It was all very beautiful and I didn't understand a fucking word of it.
On the second day, we went to the Summer Palace, which was amazing. The marble boat (look it up if you don't know what it is, I can't get to wikipedia from China- Dowager Empress Cixi's marble boat at the Summer Palace in Beijing) is everything I imagined the symbolic icon of the death of an entire dynasty would look like (whatever that means!) and the grounds were a good mixture of well-kept and ancient. The amount of reconstruction going on in the historical sites as the city prepares for the Olympics borders on the ridiculous, but there was still plenty to gawk at.
After the Summer Palace, we went to the Fragrant Hills, another part of the Forbidden City area (the middle of Beijing, basically) that the Emperors frequented for their whatnots. This particular area is a beautiful Buddhist garden-park and series of temples, the central one being on a hill that overlooks the whole city. Sun Yatsen was entombed there for a time before he was moved to his final resting place, and there's a huge shrine in his honor there. This part was so beautiful I want to upload more pictures, so I'll save that for next time. I'll get to Part 2 later, uploading the photos is a huge pain in the ass.
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Boy, was the last part of that ever prescient. There are more photos now (Qingdao is... weird and beautiful?), but as I said above I may actually be able to swing this by later this weekend.
Hugs and kisses and whatnot,
-Ian
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| Saturday, May 27th, 2006
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7:40 pm - Beijing, Land Of A Million Mao Watches
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I honestly don't have enough time now to get into the full majestic insanity that is Beijing; as an example of the pressing craziness of our itinerary, the very morning after we landed, we were hauled up to the Great Wall (which is a long climb), then subjected to Peking Opera. Today was the Forbidden City and the Fragrant Hills, and tomorrow is Tienamen and some other stuff. I'm literally sneaking away from the group tonight to actually, you know, see Beijing before we leave.
When I get all my pictures uploaded and have a day to write a proper post, I'll write down all my thoughts and experiences, but for know know that I love you all and am having the experience of a lifetime. Yesterday I stood on the broken edge of the Great Wall, in the middle of a fogbank, staring down at the craggy remnants of a dynasty's hubris as they disappeared into the whiteness. Today I ate what was literally the tastiest thing I've ever had in my entire life- slices of cold camel meat. Tomorrow I'll probably stand in front of a tank holding my groceries, who knows.
Now, I'm off to a night market. Whee.
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| Sunday, May 14th, 2006
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7:54 pm - More Punny Titles
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Recent paper titles to add to the list they will no doubt read to me when they finally bring me up on charges at The Hague:
"Clear And Peasant Danger", on how the CCP staged a comeback during the Japanese invasion period.
"Maoist Mass Mobilization In The Modern Military Milieu", which while not a pun, will certainly wound eyeballs from fifty paces.
I leave for Beijing in ten days; I have yet to pack up my stuff, other than move it out of my dorm room. My Chinese final and my last 20-page paper are due on Tuesday. I haven't moderated (Bard's very formal declaration of major, which involves papers and a board of professors), which is Very Bad. There are dozens more small things, too many to list, like the snowflakes that make up an avalanche.
I'd ask you to pray for me, but we all know that God personally thinks I'm a douchebag and has it out for me, so let's not call any more attention to my lowly existence than is explicitly necessary, mmm?
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| Tuesday, April 11th, 2006
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12:00 am
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It all goes so fast... am I really about to finish my Sophmore year? Maybe it's just because I'm way too old to be at college (the fact that I'm going to graduate as an undergrad at 25 is just plain embaressing), but life's pace seems to be constantly accelerating. A while back, when I was visiting home, I went out for drinks with my father. We talked about our lives and everything, and then he said something that really shocked me, something to the effect of "My own mortality is occuring to me, and it's scaring the shit out of me. I've already lived more than half my life." My father is very healthy, pretty active, lives a happy life, and looks way younger than his years, and yet he knows it's all going to end- the half-life mark has passed, its time for those isotopes to wind down. Lately I've been realizing that one day I'm going to go to bed and wake up and be 52, telling my son how quick it all passes.
Five weeks until I leave this shitheap* and head to Qingdao for two months, then to Shanghai and Points South, through Vietnam and Laos and into Thailand. From Bangkok, time dependant, I might hit Myanmar, though either way I'll leave Bangkok and head to Taipei to find an apartment. Then I stay there for a year, perched on the blazing neon edge of the world, gazing off into the mists of the waterfall where the mermaids swim... that cascades into nothing... and finally out into space where There Be Dragons.
Dragons, man.
*this shitheap is much nicer in Spring, but still filled with the same obnoxious douchebag hipsters.
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| Monday, April 3rd, 2006
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4:24 am - Futility
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I just spent three hours explaining to someone how it is they consistently hurt me. I was calm, rational, I cited everything, gave examples and put it in a wider context... I wasn't confrontational. I think I did the best I possibly could, since it was a last-ditch effort. It totally failed.
They ignored everything I said, even as I said it. They would do exactly what I said was hurting me, immediately after I said so, and I don't even know if it was on purpose. They blamed everything on a tiny insignificant part of the discussion (the little example of said behavior that sparked the whole thing, even though it was insignificant AND I READILY SAID SO), which they turned into a ridiculous straw man throughout. They basically behaved as if I wasn't worth the effort to read, let alone apply said reading to their understanding of me. They came defeated, and never once bothered to look up.
I want so desperately for them to just TRY and understand, but I think it will never happen. I want for them to come and tell me that they realize how wrong they were, because it's what I've always done when I was wrong, and I can't bridge the gap for us both this time... but I know it won't happen, and it's selfish to want. I am trapped between two impossibilites, life without the only person who I've ever really cared about, and letting said person walk all over me (and themselves... that's the really imporant part, they seem to have no self-respect).
Every other time, I've tried, but I'm faced with the stunning realization that this time, I've actually tried too hard already- I already did and said everything I could. There's nothing else to be done, the ball is entirely in their court- and they long since left the court.
What do I do?
What CAN I do?
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| Sunday, April 2nd, 2006
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9:57 pm - Let The Amphetamines Flow
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I spent more or less my entire spring break doing jack diddly by way of academic productivity, much to my relief. I filed my application for the Taiwanese government's foreign language scholarship, did laundry, spring cleaned my room, spent a lot of time reconnecting with Mary doing goofy noodly friend stuff, and generally let my brain unwind. And by the latter, I mean I played a fuckload of Oblivion and worked on the Hunter campaign I'm running, which has proved to be a ton of fun to do. I probably should have studied some Chinese, but I was waaay too wound up and really needed the break.
The downside is that I have a fiction tutorial I need to get cracking on. I have tonight to produce about 20 pages at least of material for the book I started LAST semester, based in part on my experiences in Taiwan over the summer, and some other stuff (yadda yadda does anyone care?). The last time I was feeling uninspired, I spent the whole night going through rjhudson's journal and remembering shit I'd forgotten, all those tastes and smells and impressions that fade with time and distance, but this time I have a topic already in mind (binglang xiaojie, basically) and I am finally feeling motivated enough to take it on.
Time to make myself some tea and get cracking. Makes me wish I had some Adderall, but Kraftwerk and excellent Japanese hiphop will have to do instead.
P.S.- rj, if you read this, I owe you a beer when I get back to Taiwan.
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| Wednesday, March 1st, 2006
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10:46 pm - What I've Been So Busy With
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Mary keeps making fun of my paper titles, and I guess reading over them she's right...
"To Be Candide" on Candide.
"Rue Brittania: The Imperial Idea in Romantic Poetry" is fairly self-explanatory.
"A Sadistic Topic" for the Marquis.
"The Providence of Space" on America's geographical isolation as it pertains to Special Providence.
"A Violation of Rousseau's Treatise" on how much I hate Rousseau.
"A Locke On Machiavellian Politics", Lock and Machiavelli contrasted.
"Prospero: Magical Machiavellian Mastermind" for Machiavelli vs. The Tempest.
"Rousseau's General Willingness" ...you just need to read the fucker to get that one. Trust me, its not that funny anyway.
And drumroll...
"Polis Academy", on Plato. OW.
The reason this came up was that I just called my paper on the end of the Qind dynasty (specifically on Tsou Jung's anti-Manchu nationalism, but whatever) "Every Manchu For Himself".
Ow.
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1:47 pm
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The other night I had to think up a reason why I hadn't been updating this journal, for someone whose own journal is amazing and who thought my writing was great and yadda yadda. I couldn't really give him a straight answer as to why I've sunk below the waves, other than laziness.
And since laziness is definitely my greatest flaw, let's call this a stab at self-improvement.
I'm in a strange place at the moment... I feel as though I've moved on in some, if not dramatic fashion, then at least fundamental way... I've outgrown this school, these dorms, this life, and am just killing time until the Next Phase. I've finally got a goal in mind, now, and its nice.
With a little luck, next September I'll be back in Taipei.
That, of course, sounds a lot cooler than what it really is, which is: studying Chinese at NTU, or Shi Fan Da Xue, in their intensive chinese language program. Before that, I'll be spending mid-May to late July in Qingdong, on the mainland, in an intensive Chinese program my school runs on the cheap. From there? Who knows, I'll have six weeks to kill, wandering around China and maybe southeast Asia, sucking up as much Mandarin as possible before I head to Taipei and really get started.
So obviously, upstate New York has lost its appeal to me for the time being. Still, its nice to have a destination in mind.
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