Hiccups. For about three months at the beginning of the year, I got hiccups three times a month for periods of over 30 hours. You can only know how much that sucks if you've gone through it. The first hiccup comes and you know it's gonna suck until the next day.
Although I did channel the hiccups and incorporated them into a meditation from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Something about "hi-ka" gasps regarding conciousness transference/control approaching the time of death.
Insomnia. That started at the end of May and lasted all Summer and then tapered away in October. I could only get a few hours of sleep every night and then I'd wake up and not be able to get back to sleep. It frayed my nerves and I went to work a zombie and even almost snapped at my uncle at one point. A few times since then I've had trouble sleeping and all of it came back with bouts of paranoid madness. Fortunately, those all have been one-offs. I think it has something to do with the air in my apartment.
The night job and insomnia did lead me to night riding, though, which I discovered is totally awesome in the Taipei area. No traffic, no pollution, no dehydrating, no sunburn – night riding was the bomb and definitely a good point of 2008, maybe the only one. It was such great pleasure exploring again, wandering, roaming, just going, getting a lay of the landscape (unfortunately the only lay), the roads. Couldn't see anything, no scenery, but you have to little give with the little take.
I must say I'm very pleased with my budget-priced Giant OCR2 road bike. It's taken me all over northern Taiwan. I put reflective strips on the forks and got a headlight for the night riding. It needs new wheels, though. They're more bald than I am, making downhills a hairy, scary deal, and glass is getting through the stock wheels more and more readily.
Anything else, 2008? Thanks for the Shiina Ringo! I've bought almost all of her CDs and DVDs available in Taiwan. I'd already downloaded most of it, but I just think if it's an artist I really want to support, I need to go and buy their CDs.
Hm, and weirdness. The October suicide of Korean actress Choi Jin-Sil. She was one of the most popular actresses in Korea. I didn't know who she was, never heard of her until a black and white, printed out newswire picture of her came across my desk at work. The picture struck me immediately for no reason, and I knew the caption I had to edit wasn't good news.
Instead of putting the printout in the edited captions box, I folded it up and took it home, and for the first time began a cycle of the Tibetan Book of the Dead: Liberation Through Hearing directly focused on a person, using her name, and trying to respect that she was Christian by altering the text to make Christian references.
I ran the recitation for the full 40 days as indicated in the instructions, even though I believe time is an artificial construct and either doesn't exist or exists differently in the death bardos, and even though really I have no idea what I was doing. I just felt an intimate closeness to her, like an older sister, someone I loved and missed not even having known her. She was someone I lost personally and want to find in the future.
I don't know how that works, but I'm open to the possibility. Like the way I think my estranged cousin Audrey may have found a way, in a way we couldn't possibly understand or articulate, to be born in the same family as me. We're karmically drifting apart and maybe have been through lifetimes, and as much contention as there is between us now, being cousins is actually the perfect relationship where awareness of each other is maintained, as well as whatever status quo until some detente can be reached.
Oddly, this thing with Choi Jin-Sil may have been my most significant relationship in 2008. She didn't reach her 40th birthday.
That said, I'm declaring friendships with Madoka, Sadie and Hyun Ae dead. Nobuko emailed a one-off late in the year and nothing since, but I cut-off from her once before, now she has immunity and she can come and go from my life as she pleases, no problem, I'm totally open to her. Actually, come to think of it, that goes for Madoka, too.
As for 2009, I guess I should smarten up and look forward to another empty year, with meaningless communications and collisions, with no affirmatively positive elements, no successful suicide unless I can help it, but lord knows we'll keep trying, and a probable departure from Taipei.
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| 12:17 a.m. - New Year's with the band's people. Ricoh Caplio R4. |
