Basically, I'm trying to kick start my life. I tend towards entropy. If my life is allowed to run out of momentum and stop moving, it will. I will let it. Without some external push, I'll just stop moving and sink to the bottom.

So I'm at my parents' house, sinking to the bottom. My parents are no help, they're totally hands off, no questions asked. When they ask questions and find the answers too difficult, they just drop them. But now even they are getting pushed to extremes, and they've recently dropped hints and given some aid to get me moving.

Ordinarily, my life is none of their business, and any help, aid, suggestions, feedback, encouragement, hints. . . talking. . . is not welcome, but even I'm realizing how pathetic this is getting, and I allowed it. Some movement has been made to reinstate my Taiwanese passport, so that if I go there, I won't have to worry about my visa constantly expiring.

They filled out the passport application because it's all in Chinese. They don't even know what my highest degree of education is. I don't have a doctorate.

The next step is what I've been saying I'll do for the past three months – take an online course to get certification to teach English as a foreign language. This is all me, I need to do it, no outside encouragement, no one else involved. All I have to do is click the mouse a few times, but, man, entropy.

The momentum that I'm trying to pick up is for going to Taiwan and teaching English. Although it recently occurred to me to find out if there are bike messengers in Taipei. If so, that's what I want to do. Imagine that, at my age.

My cousin in Kaohsiung has gone radio silent. There have been long stretches that I haven't been able to write to her because of lack of inspiration, but my last message to her was asking if she knew anything about housing in Taipei. Pretty straight forward. No response. I don't think she's checking my messages, she has a dedicated gmail account just for my communications.

And leading up to this, she stopped responding to my messages. Her last few messages were all one-sided and made no mention of anything I wrote. In fact, she mostly wrote about Buddhism, but her tone was a little like her last foray into Buddhism, when she joined what turned out to be the Buddhist equivalent of a cult. Brainwashed and too easily impressed by "magical" aspects of Buddhism and attributing reality to them.

The magical aspects of Buddhism, fine, I have nothing to say about that. There's a wide range of Buddhists including ardent Zen skeptics to total crackpots, and I, myself, am at neither extreme. However, I don't think anyone should ever be impressed by any "magical" aspect of Buddhism, and any reality attributed to it must keep in mind that all reality is subjective.

I sent her something for her birthday, and her response to that was, "Thanks for the gift", then launching into the one-sided Buddhist thing.

I'm trying not to be upset at her until I know more, but when things aren't going well between us, when communication falls apart, we tend to repel each other, tethered together only by the nominal tie of blood which will still eventually bring us together again.