I'm glad I haven't run out of directions to randomly head off into on my bike to go exploring and shooting.

Today my idea was to head south lazy, just take Roosevelt Road and cross the Jingmei River, which actually I think takes me into the next city south of Taipei, Xindian. I'd figure out where to go once I got there, and if nothing looked interesting, then just backtrack and come straight back on Roosevelt Road.

I wasn't planning on going long, since I'm really not happy with my language progress and felt I needed to put even more hours into studying. I ended up going all the way down to the end of my map, all the way to Xindian MRT station, end of the line. So I've been to both ends of the Danshuei line. I actually thought that would happen much sooner. But it's a big city. And not easy to navigate.

The Xindian Station area, right near the Xindian River, is a similar idea to Danshui, but smaller and more relaxed, more family oriented and less youth oriented. I didn't start shooting until I got down there, because riding on the roads here: A) requires complete attention to not get run over, and B) they all start looking the same. And since I hit the Xindian River, I decided to head back north on the riverside bikeway.

I must say, with all the faults in the planning of these bikeways, not to mention the ongoing construction, the sheer extent of the bikeway system along all the major rivers is quite a marvel. If only they could tie them integrally into Taipei recreational life, they would have a major score. If they could do that, it would be more impressive than Golden Gate Park and Central Park combined.

At this point, access is still the major problem and so I think use of the bikeways and riverside parks is still kind of a niche attraction. A lot of people do use them, but they're a gem to be sought out, not an attraction that people magnetize towards. When I mentioned them in class once, my teacher commented that they must be something that only foreigners know about, because she didn't know about them. She was wrong, but to my point.

I mostly continued to shoot at 800, but for some shots with a lot of sky background, I bumped it back down to 400. I need to take more comparison shots like I did with the last roll. I'm writing this like I'm telling someone else, but it's really just a reminder to myself.

Pentax ZX-5n, Ilford XP2 Super

this is the only one shot at 800, the rest are at 400

the two above are raw scans (no contrast/brightness adjustments)

4:13 p.m.

4:24 p.m.

4:26 p.m. - the lady walking backwards with me wondering if she'd bump into me, just because I'm stupid like that. 

4:30 p.m.

4:57 p.m. - I hate when people dump-post multiple pictures of the same thing, but then I realized these are one subject, but very different photos doing different things, so okay.

4:59 -5:00 p.m

iTunes soundtrack:
1. The Funky Avocado (Michael Hedges)
2. Saving Grace (Throwing Muses)
3. Sweet Thing (live) (David Bowie)
4. Rapture (Blondie)
5. I Saw the Light (The The)
6. The Hover is Ajar (Shannon Wright)
7. I'll Buy (The Replacements)
8. Vigil (Fish)
9. Country Honk (The Rolling Stones)
10. Explain It To Me (Liz Phair)

小心

Xiao Xin from keauxgeigh.

April 30, 2006; 4:26 P.M. - Xindian River Recreation Area, Xindian, Taiwan (south of Taipei). I was shooting when this woman was walking backwards towards me. Old people here walk backwards for exercise for some reason. As she approached me, I wondered if she would clue into the possibility that she might bump into something, so I switched over to MPEG and got the last few seconds of her approach before the other person tells her to look out. I was kinda hoping to capture an impact, but it was not to be. (Oh my god, and I didn't even get out of her way in the end. What a jerk! -ed.)

iTunes soundtrack:
1. Cello Suite No. 3, V. Bourree (J.S. Bach)
2. Brothers Gonna Work It Out (Public Enemy)
3. Erica Kane (Urge Overkill)
4. Dance Hall (Modest Mouse)
5. Luna Luna (Spitz)
6. Symphony No. 4, IV. Allegro Ma Non Troppo (Beethoven)
7. Appels + Oranjes (Smashing Pumpkins)
8. Do What You Have to Do (Sarah McLachlan)
9. Stay Hungry (live) (Talking Heads)
10. Open (Peter Gabriel - "The Last Temptation of Christ")

One of my classmates dropped out because she decided to enter a law school program that starts in the middle of May. Last night was her last night here, and we all went out with her for dinner and then to a bar where our teacher joined us. Our super cute teacher. In the third hour of class, my mind sometimes shuts off to Chinese. You could say "你好嗎?" (How are you?) to me and I'd be like, "Strange noises are coming out of your mouth". What gets me through that hour is staring at teacher and appreciating the cuteness. I think this is fact, it's not like I'm hot for teacher. The Korean woman in class also agrees about this unwarranted cuteness. A lot of the cuteness is in her actions and gestures. Not to mention she's funny and quick-witted.

April 28, 7:47 p.m. - hot pot

9:00 p.m. - Kathy reading farewell cards

Soon after getting to the bar, before teacher arrived, I was regretting being there and pondering my exit. This social situation couldn't be good, and could only get worse. Remarkably, after teacher arrived and several pitchers of beer, it got better. I didn't zone off into my own world wondering what I was doing there, and rapport was decent with teacher – surprising since if you divided the class into good students and poor students, I would firmly plant my abilities on the poor side. I'm fine with classwork, homework, and tests, but I can't hold my own in the simplest conversation. Simple sentences and phrases and clauses, I can do. As soon as sentences get a little bit complex, syntax goes out the door and is replaced with goo.

April 29, 12:28 a.m.

1:26 a.m.

This is all backdrop though. I ended the evening/morning with giving our departing classmate my mindfulness bell which I've had since my first visit to Deer Park. She had expressed interest in mindfulness practice after I told her I had spent time at Deer Park, and she has read some of Thich Nhat Hanh's books. Some of our discussions also indicated that she might be pre-disposed to benefiting from the practice, otherwise I wouldn't have done this. I gave her the briefest and most general of transmissions regarding the bell, bits of philosophy and psychology and our role in our relationships, just for the purpose of giving her something physical in her reality so that if she ever arrives at a point where she might find some use in the practice, she will have a reminder of what to look into.

So this morning I found myself without a bell. I must admit, with all the ceremony and respect that surrounds the role of the bell, I think we really use it just cos it's fun making noise. It's fun hitting things. After the rain stopped this afternoon, probably for the first time in almost a week (oy lordy, that's a totally different story), I felt confident enough about the look of the sky to head out on my bike to the Longshan Temple area with my camera to find a new bell.

On my last roll of film, I took some shots pushing the XP2 Super to 800, and the results were quite good. The lowlight shots at 800 were better than the lowlight shots at 400, even though the camera indicated it could handle them at 400. So on this roll, I'm going to try shooting the whole thing at 800, even the bright shots, and see what comes out. After buying a satisfactory replacement bell, bigger than the one I had and not much more in cost, I shot around the Longshan Temple area, peeking into alleyways off the main roads. It's a cliche, but that's where the more interesting subject matter is, if not the more interesting views.

The infamous Huaxi Night Market, aka "Snake Alley", during the day

What am I doing? Where am I going? These are the important questions to hold in my mind, because if I'm just floating along in life's current, it's not what I call my life.

I say to people that what I'm currently doing is just floating, seeing where my path takes me because I don't know what direction I want to set my life into. That's different.

It's different to float through life being mindful and aware of being in the current and watching where it's taking you, from being proactive and making affirmative decisions in life, but doing it mindlessly and being an actor of circumstance.

So what am I doing? Where am I going? Who am I meeting who really means something, who is making a difference in my life, and in whose life am I making a difference? Or are these people no more significant than images on a movie screen? I get meaning out of them, but I'm irrelevant to them.

Who are you when you look me in the eye?

iTunes soundtrack:
1. Shoot Him (The Sugarcubes)
2. Walking in Your Food Stamps (The Police)
3. Sweet Song (Blur)
4. Johnsburg, Illinois (live) (Tom Waits)
5. Dead End Street (The Kinks)
6. Flute Concerto in G Major (Vivaldi)
7. Complete Control (The Clash)
8. Thank You (Dreams Come True)
9. Trailer Trash (Modest Mouse)
10. Duppy Conqueror (The Wailers)

I woke up near noon today because I went out last night, meeting up with a cousin of my sister-in-law's cousin (on the other side). The weird part of it is that cousin in the middle was an acquaintance of mine from San Francisco who I met completely independently of any family matter. She worked for NAATA and we had a mutual filmmaker friend.

Last night was a mistake. From now on, a ground rule is to never randomly meet up with someone who hasn't been briefed that I'm a little on the off-beat side, that I don't want in life what most other people want in life, certainly not someone who went to business school. I once roomed with a business school graduate, and there is a "type" there, and it's not mine. They are my very definition of an ordinary life, ordinary aspirations, constantly suffering from always desiring, always acquiring, always needing more, always focusing on the next future score. And they look down on me because they find my interests and aspirations incomprehensible (that's not really fair about my roommate, who didn't look down on me and was plenty fun to hang out with once we got to know each other). Although that same character "type" also got us into a nightclub without paying the cover charge because she's outward enough to have known the guy at the door.

So I didn't get out until late today. My plan was to head straight north to Songshan Airport and watch/shoot airplanes taking off/landing, and I left it open how I would return home from there. I ended up finding my way to the Key Lime River, a tributary of the Danshuei, and also part of the bikeway system, and rode along that. My complaints about the riverside bikeways are maintained along the Key Lime River (Keelung River, actually). Access for bikes(!) is pathetic. Once you figure out how to get there, they're great, but I really think they had to go out of their way to make it so difficult to get to them.

The Key Lime River winds its way eastward then south, and the exit access I managed to miraculously find put me somewhat north of Taipei 101. But on the way home, I found the Raohe tourist night market, just setting up shop to open. Just because it's a "tourist" night market, doesn't mean it's not the real thing, and this one was pretty damn good. PDG=friggin' awesome shaved ice. It was the first thing I ate today, piled high with fruit and condensed milk. Proving myself the anti-foodie that I am, it didn't occur to me to take a picture of it until it was TOO LATE, yo'm sayin'? Oh well, next time.

Pentax ZX-5n, Ilford XP2 Super.

Bus stop right outside my apartment. Da'an Park is across the street to the right and the footbridge can be seen through the trees on the left.

Woman on a phone blocking the sidewalk. Of course I had to match the obnoxious by shooting a picture of her. Well, I didn't have to. I know now it's better for my own mind to just let people be.

Who doesn't love watching planes take off at the airport?

Shot from Dazhi Bridge

Dragon boat on the Keelung River

Tonight, I declined hanging out with classmates.

I don't mean to be callous, or judgmental, or anti-social. I don't mean to suggest that they're not worth hanging out with. They are totally worth hanging out with. I just want to be doing something that means something to me. And hanging out with them just didn't feel like it.

Last week, I hung out with them out of craving. Out of impulse. Out of desire for contact. But then all this week, in class, I didn't feel there was a connection. I didn't feel that there was any meaning to it. I didn't feel like going through more of that.

I was in a really bad mood by the end of class today. I felt like I was going no where with taking these classes, that I'm wasting my time, that my practice has really fallen apart, and I, as are we all, am still going to die and I'm wondering what it will mean to me. No "big picture" ideal, just what will it mean to me.

Part of the reason my practice has fallen apart is that I don't feel I have time to sit for 45-60 minutes after waking up, so morning sitting has been cut down to 20-35 minutes. Evening sitting has all but gone because I'm so tired by then I end up drifting off or outright falling asleep. This is not what I signed up for.

Mindfulness during the day has been taking an extra effort to maintain, but I can't say I'm disappointed in that. That was to be expected.

After getting home today, I set my timer for 60 minutes, sat for as long as I could, then read out of the Tibetan Book of the Dead for a section with the timer still running, then resumed sitting until the timer went off. I think that's how I will do evening sessions from now on.

I didn't hang out with classmates, but I responded to a call to go out with a relative of my brother's wife's family. My sister-in-law's family has been totally invaluable to me, so I didn't want to blow her off, but. . . it ended up being a total joke.

I am simply not to meet up with anyone new without a clear understanding that I am not a participant in this thing called life in the manner in which they understand it. Without that understanding, all random social engagements are to be avoided. Hanging out with classmates will be alright. I just needed to avoid it tonight.

iTunes soundtrack:
1. Full Disclosure (Fugazi)
2. Bea (Throwing Muses)
3. Mi Amigo (Skip Holiday)
4. Check It Out Ch'all (Paris)
5. Sensation (The Who)
6. Jeckyll & Hyde (And Ted And Alice) (Bela Fleck & the Flecktones)
7. Furry (100 Watt Smile)
8. It's So Hard (live) (John Lennon)
9. After the Ball/Million Miles (Wings)
10. Dragon #2 (Helium)

I've been socializing too much with classmates. I don't know how it happened, but last week it just exploded and I hung out with someone or the other after class almost every day. I need to try and not be negative about it, though. It happened. For whatever it was worth. Today I let myself get sucked into going up to Tienmu with two other classmates to visit another classmate who was going to cook for us. I think I primarily let myself get sucked into it because of the possibility that our super cute teacher was going to join us. Oy vey, what the hell?

We have a pretty fun class. We've got some running jokes that get done to death in class, but all in the name of practicing new grammar. I'm associated with coffee and my bike. The fellow we visited today is associated to death with cooking and his cat. And there's another older chap who is associated with drinking beer and his Taiwanese girlfriend, but no one really likes him because he's British and smells bad and has worse social skills than me. Well, no one dislikes him for being British. He lost me at smelling bad.

Actually, with only 3 out of 8 personality gags, that's not very good. I'm sure the teacher could do better in associating each of us with something characteristic that can be done to death in class.

Tienmu shots, April 16. Pentax ZX-5n, Ilford XP2 Super (the 2nd and last two were shot at ISO 800).

iTunes soundtrack:
1. The Happiest Days of Our Lives (Pink Floyd)
2. Another Brick in the Wall, Pt. II (Pink Floyd)
3. I Love to Cry at Weddings ("Sweet Charity")
4. Sit On My Hands (Frente)
5. Faith (Kristin Hersh)
6. Sabbath Prayer ("Fiddler On the Roof")
7. It Don't Matter to Me (Phil Collins)
8. Never Can Say Goodbye (The Jackson 5)
9. Promenade (U2)
10. Force Ten (Rush)

The Dharma of Mix Tapes:
I had a mix CD playlist in my iTunes that was going to waste, so I bought a spindle of CD-Rs, and I’ve been liberally burning copies and giving them out to almost complete strangers. It's a mix of stuff I mostly came across in 2005.

So far I’ve given it to all my classmates and my teacher, to the person who invited me to a qi gong practice center, and to the people in my building. And I’m not done yet – I’ve been counting people in the U.S. to whom to send it, depending on postal rates. I even burned a copy for my landlady’s 12 year old son, minus the Black-Eyed Peas track.

I don’t do a lot of “good” in the world. I’m not as giving as I could be, I don’t do volunteer work I could be doing, I don’t do charity that I could do. What I do is make mix CDs.

One classmate already told me she really likes it, which made me fall in love with her even more. Which means nothing, mind you, as I’m probably old enough to be her father (that is, if her mother was my hot (in a librarian kind of way) 11th grade English teacher).

But the way some people's faces light up when they receive a mix CD always surprises me. It's just a CD of music, and they look so happy. How did that happen? Of course I know some people won't like the CD, and no one will like every track on the CD in quite the same way I do. Some people won't follow the instruction that if they don't like it, to pass it on to someone else.

Giving it to my landlady’s 12 year old son made me pause. That kid is pretty interesting and has musical potential and interest and a supportive mom. When I was 12 years old, music had already been changing my life in a big way. I thought, “wow, what if this kid finds something on this CD that he really likes?”

I’m not blowing my own horn, but if someone gave me a mix CD when I was 12 with even a single track that changed my life, I would remember that track and that person to this day, even though I would have no idea what happened to him or her, what a loser he became or when or why he killed himself.

It's a nice small act to give and even when these CDs are collecting dust in the bottom of someone's drawer, it's a little piece of me that I sincerely put on a piece of plastic and put out there. Why not go make a mix CD for someone? Go!

1. New Killer Star (David Bowie)
2. Mushaboom (Feist)
3. Sambita (Kinky)
4. Suspended From Class (Camera Obscura)
5. Katun no Sadame (Ichiko Hashimoto – “Rahxephon” O.S.T.)
6. My Humps (The Black-Eyed Peas) Honey (Cindi Wang)
7. Do Somethin’ (Britney Spears)
8. Waupu Odabala (Taiwanese/Pacific Islander aboriginal)
9. The Way Back (Whysall Lane)
10. King Without a Crown (live) (Matisyahu)
11. Wake Up (Sahara Hotnights)
12. Leaning Against the Wall (Evil Tordivel Upbeat Remake) (Kings of Convenience)
13. Blue Flow (Heart of Air – “Haibane Renmei” O.S.T.)
14. Cassiopeia (Joanna Newsom)
15. Paths of Victory (Cat Power)
16. You’re In a Bad Way (Saint Etienne)
17. Soul Meets Body (Death Cab for Cutie)
18. Ue o Muite Arukou (Sukiyaki) (Sunday Girls)
19. A Man/Me/Then Jim (Rilo Kiley)
20. Goodnight Moon (Shivaree)

6:38 - 8:37 p.m., Shida main library

10:03 p.m. - classmates, Hyun Ae and two from Japan.

April 12, 6:12 p.m. - classmates

Riding east from my apartment on Heping East Rd. all the way down (directional and altitude, turns south and goes down a big hill) to Muzha. Pentax ZX-5n, Ilford XP2 Super).

Southeast on Heping East Rd. along the elevated MRT brown line

tunnel before heading south and down a hill (whee!)

I killed a mosquito yesterday. It was a calculated and efficient mid-air killing. It didn’t have a chance. It didn’t know what hit it. It has been on my mind since then, not because of guilt, just turning the act and the concept over and over in my mind.

One of the mindfulness trainings I accepted at Deer Park was not to take life. Other traditions call it a precept or a vow, and if I saw it that way, I would have violated it, failed. In the tradition of Deer Park, it’s a training. It’s good to not take life, but it’s even better to understand why not take life, any life, even if it means taking a life, breaking the precept, to learn it.

In this training, killing the mosquito was still a big deal. It was a life. Here it was, just in this lifetime, a culmination of a life process, existing, metabolizing, functional. In an instant, in one swift act of god-like arrogance, I unilaterally chose to remove this life. Not to be overly dramatic, I realize that the majority consensus of the world would find no fault in swatting a mosquito. After all, no one would fault Noah if he had swatted those two mosquitoes.

Maybe no one cared about this mosquito in the way we cherish our loved ones, but cherishing our loved ones can be seen as an artificial construct. The effort going into creating a life, whether mosquito or human, and the value of that effort can be seen as the same. Who is to say that it wasn’t a precious life? How many precious human and animal lives have been taken throughout history in a manner no different than swatting a mosquito?

I also considered my killing of this mosquito as a relationship. My relationship with this mosquito. What was my role in killing it? I was the killer, it was the kill-ee. What was its role in being killed by me? From its point of view, it wasn’t a thought, there were no ideas involved. It was bzz-bzz-bzz *thwack*, and that’s all, she wrote.

As a student of the ideas in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, I have to consider what I possibly set in motion in that context. I sent it through another cycle of death and re-birth. Karma kicks in. Ordinarily, a mosquito is killed, you have your karma and it has its karma, both go on your merry way.

In this case, I have my karma, it has its karma, but now they are intertwined because of how much thought I’m putting into it, because of mindfulness. To me, it’s death wasn’t worthless. If I let it live, that would have been good, but no further thought would have gone into it, a different kind of worth but not as focused, and eventually it would have died anyway.

In meditation, I consider the life that was the mosquito. I consider our lives as energy, and I imagine generating positive energy towards this life I took and sent again through the bardo states. I don’t know the karma it’s living out, as far as I imagine it has been a mosquito or an insect since that sort of life form evolved on this planet, with no dharma affecting it to change its karma. Until now, perhaps. Just perhaps.

Walking down a street today, I saw a woman limping with some leg defect. I felt fortunate to have this human life with good health and good circumstances. I felt and generated compassion towards her. Then I sarcastically thought, “where was this great compassion towards that mosquito?”

Indeed.

April 5, riding north on the riverside bikeways to the Keelung River (Pentax ZX-5n, Ilford XP2 Super film).

Danshui River

I went to Xinyi District, passing Taipei 101, to Elephant Mountain, a popular hiking range accessible from urban Taipei. Apparently it's a range called the Four Beasts with four distinct peaks named for four animals. I don't see them, I just see one range of mountains. There's also tiger, and I think monkey is one of them but I forget the fourth. Cockroach? Would be appropriate for Taiwan, but not exactly the Chinese (culture) thing to include in that group. (elephant, lion, leopard, tiger; none of which are indigenous to Taiwan -ed.)

It's a good, modest, medium hike for urbanites. Many would find it challenging but not impossible, more fit folks would say it's easy but could make up for it by going farther into the range and call it fun.

Pentax ZX-5n, Ilford XP2 Super:

Taipei 101 from south of Xinyi Rd.

just starting the hike up Elephant Mt.

unknown makeshift structure. made me wonder what life was like in poorer days when squatting was likely a reality for some.

lookout/rest station. the guy was stretching, a more fit folk, and considerately hoping to stay out of my frame. so I had to include him.

raw scan. unidentified temple.

actually there are a bunch of temples up there

3:48 p.m. - a typical tourist shot from Elephant Mt.

3:57 p.m.

4:30 p.m. - I would only be guessing at what type of temples these are. Fair to just say "local", possibly Taoist.

4:36 p.m. - friendly local

5:09 p.m. - back on the ground