My uncle came up to Taipei this evening. He invited me out to dinner without telling me it was to a wedding banquet for the son of one of his old classmates. I had no business being there. Uncomfortable would be the perfect word to describe it, except I, out of principle, don't get uncomfortable. Awkward, yes, I do awkward, and it was awkward, but any number of situations with my uncle are made awkward by him.

I don't have enough exposure to family, nuclear or extended, to have a high tolerance to it. And my tolerance for this family is running thin. I don't think I'll be going to Kaohsiung again anytime soon. I'm certainly not planning on it.

Audrey called to mediate between me and my uncle getting to my place, because for some reason he wanted to see where I lived. Maybe an edict from my mother to check out where I'm living. The pattern of Audrey's behavior remains the same, and she was sweet, but I only feel it as manipulation now. I don't care. I just didn't care.

I need a category for blog entries called "negativity". The overcast weather didn't help today. I rode south today, crossing the Jingmei River into Hsindian to go to the Carrefour there to look for a coffee scoop. I'm at a total loss to understand why a simple coffee measure is so hard to find in Taipei.

Sitting there at that wedding banquet, surrounded by people I didn't know and couldn't understand. I observed the lives. The lives. Tables and tables of lives that I had nothing to do with, but here they all were for this person's wedding banquet.

I was at a table with a bunch of old people – old being in their 60s or 70s. Young people working and serving. Young people will someday be old people. These young people would someday be old people. Moved down the conveyor belt of life and time.

I thought about my brother and his wife and their wedding. They now have a kid. It's incredible thinking about the lives of these kids, the mystery of what they can become.

I never want to be a part of this. I don't want to be the young person serving other people because it's a job and I have my whole life ahead of me. In fact I've done that, working for a catering company in San Francisco. I don't want to be the person getting married having my life shown in a slideshow at my wedding. What kind of slideshow could capture my life? What kind of horror slideshow? I don't want to be having kids and having my priorities re-worked, realizing this little life is now the most important thing in the world. I don't want a job, I don't want to be supporting someone. I don't want to be someone's father, inviting my non-existent old friends to my child's wedding. I don't want to be alive.

What's so great about this human form? Our human lives endowed with liberty and opportunity to forward ourselves on the path towards liberation. I believe that. But I look at our human form and I see metabolizing machines. We crudely fuel our bodies with food, munch, munch, and we metabolize material to energy, and we expel our waste.

Waste. A good word on which to end this entry.