pt. 1

So what was 2008 in a nutshell, aside from yet another waste of a year?

It started in New Jersey with my last trip to the U.S., four weeks spending time with family and brother's in-law's family. Watching parents get old, nieces and nephews starting their own journeys. Touching sentimental smarmy scenes, but what life's about, I guess.

After I got back to Taiwan, I moved from my Xindian apartment back to Taipei in March on a lead provided by my estranged cousin. The move was a good one in every way but one, but the main reason was because I was running away from a problem.

The problem was a total asswipe of a white guy, an intolerable, obnoxious, bellowing meathead of a Brit football fan hoodlum who moved in next door. I couldn't find any better way to deal with that problem than to run away. I can't change the outside world, so I have to change myself, my situation. I have to relocate. I have the luxury to up and move and run away from my problem; not deal with it.

I joined a band and we started rehearsing in January. We started gigging in March. It's a cover band and we play bars and get paid, so it's semi-professional. In July, the bass player bought a restaurant and since then we've played most weekends there, exclusively.

It's a humiliating joke of a cover band, and I have no rapport with the other members, and if it weren't for the pay, I would have quit a long time ago. Quitting is always in the cards, but actually playing during gigs is alright and softens the drive to quit.

I started work in April as a copy editor at a local English-language newspaper. Not a bad job, I liked it and I could do it. I'm not bragging when I say that when I was the lead copy editor, fewer mistakes made it to print. Not none, but fewer.

And since I stopped being the fulltime copy editor, I've been appalled by some of the mistakes they've allowed go to print. Aside from the smaller non-AP style mistakes, they've had misspellings in headlines, and on the historic election issue, they even got the day of the week wrong on the front page. I didn't work on that issue because I had already switched to part-time, and then soon after that, in the middle of November, I switched to only working on weekends and emergencies.

The reason? I was running away from a problem. The problem? The newspaper re-hired a previous copy editor that I found offensive and obnoxious with a poor work attitude, and instead of working out the problem, I ran away from it. I don't know why the editor-in-chief re-hired her, he had problems with her before, and continues to have problems with her.

Why I can't stand her, I can't say. I just can't stand being in the same room with her. Her big fat face is a caricature of a witch, complete with hideous mole. Her breasts sag disgustingly over roles of belly fat, et. al.

Why this bile? I'm generally not one to attack someone's physical appearance. If someone's physical appearance makes me react less than ideally, I switch on meditations of the like: what if this was someone I love; there are people out there who love this person and would be hurt by my venom, I don't want to hurt those people; these are just circumstances and anyone can be affected by them; am I so perfect that no one is offended by my personality? Hell no.

I think it's karmic, and this is a copout and it's running away from engaging and dealing with a problem. I think in other lifetimes we were of various sorts and degrees of enemies, and not the family love-hate kind. This is of the Nazi-Jewish kind, KKK-African American kind. Unbridled, unapologetic and relentless.

But even if the karma carried over, we are not who we were then, and if I understand that, I should try to neutralize the karma by engaging her. And since we are not who we were then, we can work it out without the luggage that burdened us before. I didn't. And I have no intention of doing so.

So if we by chance meet again in another lifetime, it'll be the same, maybe it'll be her ostracizing me. Maybe she'll have a gun to my head, maybe I'll have a noose around her neck. And this is part of what it means to be caught in the suffering of cyclic existence, because I'm not willing to fix something in me I know is broken.

I'll continue working there on weekends and playing in the band until I decide to move from Taipei, which I think is imminent.