sun setting light

Kaohsiung, Taiwan

4:27 p.m.

4:28 p.m.

4:37 p.m.

4:39 p.m.

Kaohsiung, Taiwan

Semester over, did a one-day retreat on Saturday, emailed my aunt that I was thinking of going to Kaohsiung on Sunday or Monday, got a reply from her telling me to come down on Sunday as soon as possible, because my cousin who's living in China was coming in that day with his Chinese girlfriend/potential wife.

Apparently, this was a big deal.

My uncle's apartment was crammed full of relatives craning and rubbernecking to meet and ogle the possible new addition to the family, although they will remain distant as I'm pretty sure my cousin is pretty settled on staying in China. Listening to him talk about China, it sounds like he was a mainlander for many lifetimes. It's deep within his habituated self and identity, fervent even.

Did you ever have a disagreement with someone and their stance is basically, "You know, if you would just see things from my point of view and ignore your own, you would understand."? That's what it's like talking to him about China.

I come from an international human rights background, and my criticisms are primarily against the government, but he keeps pushing for me to come to China and see what it's really like, thinking it will change my opinion.

But I have nothing against the Chinese people, and whatever I experience first-hand is not going to change my opinion about the human rights violations by the government. It's not going to make me realize that the Dalai Lama is, in fact, a separatist terrorist seeking to overthrow the government, and that the guy Yahoo! recently got thrown in jail deserved it.

And it's not going to make me start using Yahoo! again. Google isn't beyond reproach as I recall they were kow-towing and bending over backwards to censor Google usage for the Chinese people, but morally, Yahoo! are pygmies.

In his urgings to come to China, he said, "Just come and see what it's like, and don't talk to anyone about human rights or anyone involved in human rights." See? He's Chinese! In Taiwanese politics, people are divided between the blue and green camps. I'm green. My uncle's blue (for some bizarre reason not even my mother can figure out). My cousin's . . . red.

Regardless of this, he and I go way back, and our usual fruitless debates don't taint our relationship any or cause any hard feelings between us.

And I also found out that I'm past conscription age, so I just have to do a few things with my passport and I'm as good as sworn in as a citizen without having to do time in the military. I can stay here as long as I want, I don't need a work visa to work, and I don't need to be enrolled in school to stay here. I can take a leave of absence after the next term to do whatever. Basically it feels like my options have become much more wide open. What that means practically, if it's going to change anything about what I'm doing or how I feel, I have no idea. It might not even be true.

The one-day retreat was really a good experience. I hadn't done one in almost three years, and a whole day of sitting and other types of meditation was very grounding, taking me back to my Zen roots, my first spiritual language.

I've been meeting up with a woman in this meditation group for the past couple weeks for language and dharma exchange. There's no, like, chemistry between us to speak of, but in terms of practice, we're pretty par and speak very similar languages. We know what each other means, and that's pretty rare for me. Usually people don't get my meaning or I feel they're not listening to me, don't understand me, or they bore me.

Finally, I'm in Kaohsiung now and I'm feeling quite comfortable here. I feel like I've escaped from Taipei. My experience in Taipei is starting to rot. I'm very tempted to move here after this next semester. The key thing that might keep me in Taipei is if I get that drumming gig. Running through all my doubts about accepting it if offered, I realize I really shouldn't let that opportunity slip by.

Auditioned last night for a weekly paying gig on drums. I think I did alright, but fear of commitment keeps paralyzing me! Was it fun? It occurred to me just now that, yea, it was fun. I don't know what I'll do if I get the gig. They definitely sounded like I was in the running.

Things in my head keep proliferating, growing, getting confused, weeds growing and entangling. Several posts ago I felt all my life I was cutting through the over and undergrowth, getting rid of all the confusion only to find at my core, a steel, shiny, smooth sphere of negativity.

I got to class this morning alright, after what was easily my worst riding commute to date. I guess that's not saying much since riding to class is always smooth and more pleasant than taking the bus or getting stuck in traffic on or in a motorized vehicle. I was just trying something new and made a series of bad decisions that made the commute inconvenient, but I took that all in stride and still got to class earlier than anyone else.

But then during the first half of class, I noticed something in me progressively changing, deteriorating, collapsing, imploding. I don't know what. It's like my body was about to shut down, but I was aware of it happening.

I feel that way a lot these days. Watching too much Discovery Channel, describing what happens when something bad happens and the body starts reacting and shutting down. I've been feeling my soul or my spirit doing that.

Final report is done, no big deal. Winter weather gloom and seasonal affective distortions seem to have set in and I'm battling it with chocolate. Dove dark.

Tomorrow I have an audition, which is tolerable. It's the most set up and formal affair of the music contacts I'm being bombarded with. Several weeks ago, in a flurry of trying to be more social (what was I thinking?), I contacted a bunch of people about doing music, and now it's all coming back to me when I'm in the leastest mood to deal with it.

But I'm trying to tell myself to slap out of it, I started it, go through with it. Respond to these people, make the connection, knowing that even if it came to anything, I just wouldn't care.

Negativity still creeping back in. It's been reaching a fevered pitch and I'm trying to beat it back down with these posts.

I need to send emails to people who helped me with the final report, thanking them. It's basically my cousin, my aunt (who I need to contact to tell her I'm coming to Kaohsiung on Sunday if I decide to do that), and a woman I met last week through a meditation group and with whom I did a language exchange. One day retreat on Saturday I still haven't decided on, but would be a good idea if I want to maintain this contact. She's one of the contact people for the group. Push to be positive, don't sink.

Bored now. Time to left turn this blog, see how long it lasts.

Back in the library at a library computer. I feel much better now having put food in my stomach, as well as a warm coffee-type drink. They call it coffee, but if it's from a tea bar, that means it's some kind of instant formula. Kinda yuck, kinda hits the spot every once in a while.

I have a final report tomorrow that I'm preparing. I'm so sick of classes, I'm so sick of reports, but at least I didn't have to come up with a topic for this one. And the content is largely determined by other people, too, since the assignment was to interview at least 3 people about one of the news articles we read this semester. I got 4 people and it's about the simpified character (non-)controversy regarding the Chinese written language.

So tomorrow is the final, in the afternoon I have to go practice drums for an audition on Thursday night, I also have some films I want to catch up on before they're out of the theater. Friday is the last day of class and then I have a week off. Saturday I'm still thinking of going to a one-day retreat with the Dharma Drum Mountain group, and on Sunday I'm thinking of going to Kaohsiung for the week off I have.

Maybe it's the Winter, but man did things get bleak fast. All the development, all the theory, all the cultivation, pushing myself towards positive thinking, so quickly dissolved away.

Now I walk down the street and I look at people's faces and they just fill me with overwhelming sadness. Why compassion? Why exist?

I'm faced with staring down the gaping maw of my existence, and this is my basic core. All my life, digging up, confronting, and dealing with issues was clearing away the wild growth, hoping to get to an answer, a doorway to lead somewhere, but instead is an impenetrable, cold negativity. This looks like the (dead) end of the road.

How do you go back? Why should I want to? The word is unbearable, and it's an unbearable where suicide doesn't exist, not by changing definitions, but the idea, the act, are no longer an option, because that's how bleak it is. If suicide could even be considered an escape, escape is no longer relevant.

It feels like all my life I've been clawing down through the dirt, the weeds, the muds, the trees, the woods, trying to get to the core of something.

I've eaten through it all Gotten through the shit Cleared away the brush

And now I find myself clinging to a nine-foot diameter stainless steel pinball. The core. My core.

Nothing new is going to happen
Nothing's coming down the line
Nothing's gonna change.
Just sitting on this shiny metal impenetrable ball.

This is just the way it is. Unbearable, and has been for quite a while now.

Dreams: What Is and What Should Never Be

I had Amina dreams two nights in a row. Very strange. I don't remember the first night's dream at all, just that it was an Amina dream. It may have just been a "the idea of her" type of dream. The second night's dream I made a note to remember just because of how strange it was to have two Amina dreams in a row. 

The situation was in New Jersey at my parents' house, and that sort of setting was much more like a Shiho situation. It was like in high school, but in the dream there was no thought of Shiho, it was clearly Amina. My feeling towards the object in the dream was that of Amina in college, whereas in high school, I tended to blow off Shiho's feelings towards me. 

But it was in New Jersey and my family situation was completely different from what the reality was. I got along with my family, and they were familiar with my friends and even hospitable. They knew Amina was a close friend. 

It was a Sunday afternoon, around noonish. Oh, actually the dream transitioned into an Amina dream. It started off just living in New Jersey with family, and it was a nice family situation, I didn't hate them at all. 

In the dream, I was out of it for some reason, maybe even delerious, and also departing from reality, my family knew and cared. They were telling me to get some rest. I may just have been suffering from fatigue and lack of sleep, which is probably attributable to my current reality.

So I lay down to sleep, and then the dream transitioned to the noon-ish hour and Amina had arrived to call on me. My mother called to me to take some medicine, maybe just aspirin and asked if I could go out and get something she needed, and that a friend, Amina, was downstairs waiting. 

Since Amina was a close friend and my family knew her, I didn't need to rush to go down and meet her. There were some other people who were supposed to come a little later, and in that regard it was very much like an actual Shiho situation, where a rehearsal might have been scheduled and Shiho would come early to hang out beforehand. 

There was an exchange in the interim between me and one of my brothers about one of the neighbors having a party and concern about street parking, even though in reality, street parking is never an issue where my parents live. 

So I got ready and went down to greet Amina, but actually in the dream, I don't remember ever actually seeing Amina. When I got downstairs, it turned out she had a little brother named Howard that we all knew and called 'Howie", but he looked like an East Asian kid, so I guess that's weird since Amina is Pakistani. Shiho didn't have a younger brother.

When I got downstairs, the front door was open and two birds flew in, and there was some commotion about getting the birds out, since they weren't supposed to be indoors, and once they got used to being inside, you can never get rid of them. I'm sure there's some symbolism in there.

But we chased the birds out and that's when the dream ended. Something about the front lawn and how it used to have more trees, rows of trees, but in reality there were never many trees on the front lawn.

The last post was a drunken post, mostly because I had been at a bar, and when at a bar, people drink.

I look at the half empty bottle of vodka in my room, realizing I had just bought this bottle on Friday, even before the last bottle was finished, and think: you're not an alcoholic if there's no one around to notice you're an alcoholic.

So if I die of liver disease, and then people find out how much I drank, at that time then I'll be an alcoholic. Go me.

Talking about dying is no longer dramatics. It's just sinking in deeper that it's the natural course of things. Being dramatic about death is not going to stave it off, it's not going to make living life any more bearable. When the idea of death sinks in as a philosophical reality, even depression becomes petty.

Not S.A.D. distortions, those have an actual cause, and I can link that depression with the weather and realize it's temporary, dependent, cause and effect, impermanent, and will change with the weather. But general melancholic depression and angst withers away as petty with a better grasp on death. Just death. Not *death*.

I have to give part two of an oral report on the Tibetan Book of the Dead in class tomorrow, which might explain the drinking and the death, since I hate public speaking. It's very basic since I'm giving the report in a language that after a year and a half of studying, I'm no where near conversational.

Last time I gave a watered-down history of the Tibetan Book of the Dead in broad strokes. Tomorrow I'll say something about the death betweens, the part about positive and negative aspects, and how basically the book is really an explanation about what we're trying to do in life to attain liberation.

These are short reports, 5-10 minutes. My past report topics have included: lomography, Burma and its evil military junta, slideshow of a Burmese refugee camp, shakuhachi, next year's U.S. Presidential election and the possibility of either a woman or black man winning following the disaster of Bush, the Gnostic Gospels and the role of women in the early Christian movement, the possible future options of the relationship between Taiwan and China, the legality of the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the Star-Spangled Banner.

The time stamp is right, it's 1:35 in the morning. My alarm clock has been set for 5:00 in the morning for quite a while. Not necessarily because of the monastery, more because of morning classes, some because of the new bike which had me going on morning rides as much as possible. I try to get to sleep by the 10:00 hour to get a needed 7 hours of sleep.

Tonight I went to an Irish bar on Dunhua near Nanjing East Road, a good 40 minute ride from Hsindian, to see a band that is looking for a new drummer. I answered their ad, I went to see them, I chatted with them, and on one hand it would be a great gig to land, on the other hand what the hell am I doing?

Since leaving San Francisco, I've been telling myself not to just be doing what I was doing in San Francisco in another place. When I was thinking of relocating to Taiwan, I mentioned to Nobuko maybe I should try landing a paying gig when I'm here.

But what am I doing? Would this make me happy? It's a much easier answer now: no!

The first hour I watched them, I thought it was something I could do, something I could get into. The second hour, I was just getting queasy, asking myself is this what I want to do?

What do I want to do?

I want to die. I don't really like the idea of suicide if you want to end your life, but I'm all for it if the purpose of it is to die, and if it's me. But that's a rhetorical answer to what was a rhetorical question.

If I'm not willing to join a band, or at least try out for one, what am I doing practicing once or twice a week? Rhetorical.

What am I doing with my life? I need to answer that now. If I don't have an answer, I should just go with my ambition to die. At this point, I feel like I have more value to the people around me in dying than in living. In my living, they just take it for granted. They take my shit life for granted. Why the hell am I living a shit life just to have it taken for granted? Why would anyone want a shit life granted to them. Rhetorical.

Where is connection? Where is home? And when was the last time I emailed Nobuko? For someone on my short list of people I really love, that's just . . . oh, par for the course.

 

The Most Distant Course 最遙遠的距離 (2007, Taiwan) 

Not bad, not great. It definitely has its moments. My biggest problem was that many scenes were self-indulgent and went on too long. Also, the character introductions in the beginning were sloppy. It's a small thing, but the audience shouldn't be made to endeavor sorting out which characters are important and which aren't. So this is not a spoiler, but for ease of viewing: the important characters are the soundman, the kinky therapist, and the depressed office worker girl. Not important: the film crew, the prostitute, the boyfriend (maybe boss, maybe just co-worker), the patient. They are presented like they may be main characters. 

The film is quiet, slow and meditative, almost mournful. It's about loneliness and connection in regard to an individual's relationship with an "other"; the distance and intimacy of sound and how it connects, but also requires distance to travel. In all these cases, the connection is distant or broken, and the result is a lonely striving and search. 

The basic plot is about the soundman who is depressed because he gets fired and broke up with his girlfriend, and decides to finish a sound project that they were planning to do involving going around Taiwan recording its sounds. He makes recordings and sends them to his girlfriend not knowing she has already moved out, and the tapes are received by the new occupant who listens to the recordings. She becomes intrigued by the recordings and sets off to find the places of the recordings. Hilarity ensues. Or not. 

I thought it was definitely worth watching. It's a bit too long, and the execution of the concept was sloppy and could've been more poignant, but like I said it has its moments. I'd recommend this to people with an interest in Taiwan, Asian cinema, independent and foreign film, and people way into their own heads. I give it a fresh rating: 7/10 tomatoes.

I can't tell you how well that "Don't be an asshole" mantra has been working. And with some twists!

Somewhere in my twisted logic, I'd thunk that the beneficiary of me telling myself not to be an asshole would be other people. They don't get my bad vibes or nasty looks or worse. Truth is nary a soul could care less what I'm thinking or how I'm behaving.

But it turns out the primary beneficiary of "Don't be an asshole" is me! It just feels like I'm being kinder to myself when I stop myself thinking that way. It helps me be nicer, and in turn, calmer. Variations have cropped up including "Don't think like an asshole" and "Don't look like an asshole". What a great use for the word "asshole".

It's even helpful when the other person is "in the wrong". I don't know if anyone else thinks this way, it may be a throwback from law school where somebody is always at fault, and it's never yourself. But sometimes they really are being rude or clueless or whatever and it makes me critical if not angry, and then "Don't be an asshole" shuts it down nicely.

And it should be shut down. I don't want to care if people are rude or clueless or whatever. People do what they do. I've gotten to the point that if I were to see myself I'd probably think I was rude and clueless and whatever. So it's better this way.

Great. Once again my great personal endeavor only puts me in the range of what is considered "standard". Story of my life.

Like studying this stupid language. If I was putting this much effort into studying physics or marketing or law, in the end I'd have some insight or expertise into the subject. But studying a language, you never become an expert, you never have insight. You're surrounded by a whole country of people who speak it naturally as breathing, and will always be more natural at it than you.

I really think I'm getting somewhere.