MONDAY, APRIL 27, 11:33 p.m. - Crunch time in the page design room at the China Post. Pages 1 and 2 and 15 and 16 are the last we work on with a midnight deadline we push, but rarely make. By 11:33, the pages in between would already have been sent to press. Anna in the foreground is super-sweet and speaks fair English and is an expert page designer. The guy standing in the back is a veteran no-nonsense local news writer and is overseeing work on the local pages (15 & 16). He's actually taking some slack off my job because his work will make sure the page comes to me in pretty good shape. Much appreciated. My copy editing station is on the other side of the window where we still use DOS computers!

I'm not sure what's different now. Several weeks back at work, and I think I can manage these 2-days-at-a-time, 4-day work weeks.

We still need to hire someone else, though. This job is partly an acquired skill, but some people never quite get it. Last year we had someone who defended misspelling "surprize" in a headline by saying it was the British spelling.

Currently, we have an intern as a reserve, and I've expressed that I don't think he's competent for the job and should only be called in for emergencies. Not careful enough, not fast enough, not detail-oriented enough.

The paper, The China Post, is changing with the new boss, and I'm feeling it's appropriate to demand more professionalism at the copy desk, and letting go people who aren't quite getting it – for me, people who I'm repeatedly cleaning up after, or who I can't rely on to catch any of my mistakes.

It really helps that the new boss speaks English, unlike my old boss, who could only read journalistic English and wasn't conversational (he could patch together a sentence or two for me, and with me patching a sentence or two of Chinese for him, we got along just fine).

It's a big difference, actually. I've also noticed a lot of new faces around the local news desk who apparently speak fluent English; something I attribute to the new boss.

The old hands are still there, and their English is competent, but not fluent, and sometimes we have to get them to do an interpretive dance to figure out their meaning, and then we have to re-write to make an article make sense.

Their saving grace, though, is that they are very intelligent and know how to write news. And I'm joking about the interpretive dance, usually when I bring up a question about something that didn't make sense, out of all the articles they've worked on, they know exactly which one I'm talking about, and can usually clarify it without even looking at what they wrote, i.e., what confused me.

And now that I think of it, the vast majority of the people pulling news from the foreign newswires now are also excellent in English. Only among the layout designers do we have a range of English skills from functionally non-existent (but sweet) to very good to functionally fluent.

When I started working there, none of the designers could be said to speak English. They studied compulsory English in school and paid enough attention to be familiar enough with the alphabet to do the layout design job, but they were a pain for us to work with.

Actually, my respect for my old boss has seriously plunged. He was touted for his dedication, but his management left much to be desired.

So I'm not sure what's different now. If the conditions were the same as they were last year, I wouldn't go back. My lifestyle, one with no active positive element in it, could not maintain those conditions.

Active positive elements means either a social network, or an activity that generates meaningful positive returns. Cycling is fun, but not meaningful. The band sucked ass. My social network consists of people who always say let's do something, but then nothing ever happens.

But the decreased days help. The possible lifestyle-supporting paycheck helps (I'll know for sure next month). Quitting the band helps. The new sitting helps. I think the new sitting really helps. It may have slipped in as the key factor for recent content.

It's making a big difference finally being able to grapple with the wandering thoughts and knowing the difference between a distracted mind and one that's at a still point. I probably had still points before, but that's all they were – a point before the swirl of thoughts swept my mind off again.

Now I'm finding how "big" that still point can be. It's a teeny step, but a big teeny step, and I do take it out into daily life with me. It feels new, but it's no doubt standing on the shoulders of my efforts to date, and it helps clearing out negative thoughts and negative responses.

It is about "being in the moment", which means being focusedly aware of oneself and one's surrounding, without discursive thought(s) running through one's mind. It's funny because "being in the moment" is one of the first things a novice hears in introductions to Zen. But what I was saying, "hey, yeah, right!" to 20 years ago is completely different from what it is now. Or it may be the same, just on a different cultivated level.

Now, at that still point, that "being in the moment", reality is vivid and clear. And this is just a dip in the water. I'm at a point where if I were traveling from New York to Taipei on foot for the past 20 years, I just reached the Pacific Ocean.

TUESDAY, APRIL 21, 2:43 p.m. - Home altar.