It's friggin' cold in Taipei. I don't know if these are record lows for Taipei, but it's in the low 60s inside, and in a country where central heating is unheard of and space heaters are the only non-cost-effective solution, there's little respite.

It's conditions like this that make me think I spent lifetimes as a reptile, something cold-blooded that doesn't retain heat well. In these conditions, nothing would please me more than finding a spot of sunlight and laying out just to keep warm. I have no fear or aversion to snakes or lizards, not that necessarily means anything.

Just for fun, I like thinking about past lives by looking at what we are now, in this life. Maybe a lot of what we are may be impressions from past lives experiences. But there's no set formula for it. For instance, I really like cats and I think my attraction to that species was having been one before. However, there may be people who were cats in past lives and hated that existence and hate cats as humans. Tuna still makes me swoon.

My brother loathes cockroaches more than anything else. They freak him out as much as spiders used to me. It's very visceral. If his repulsion was from having been a cockroach in past lifetimes, it's not that he was disgusted by being a cockroach at the time, but an impression of it carried over, and his processing of it now, or as a human he has the capacity to process it now, makes him react with disgust.

I've mentioned my thing about spiders before, and I played with the idea that I had lifetimes as insects, many of which ended in spider webs. Imagining myself as a fly, and then imagining a spider, one the size relative to a fly, and being caught in a web and watching that spider come at me – I can see how that fear impression might be carried over lifetimes.

I've spent years getting over my fear of spiders, and I think I've been successful, but there are situations where I still have the same initial fear reaction.

I had a girlfriend who thought elephants were the cutest things. The guitarist of the band I'm in was not only a dog in previous lives, but it was very recent and direct that he attained a human form. I certainly don't mean this in a demeaning way, it's just an observation, but he is in many ways a dog in a man's body. Yea, yea, I know, that can be said about most men, but this guy is . . . shameless. Thankfully, he hasn't humped my leg recently.

Oh, and seafood, I think I've been seafood before. Seafood for most part repulses me, although I can actually eat it if it's socially expected (read: forced) of me. It's not that it isn't to my tastes, but eating it makes me feel cannibalistic for some reason.