Some resort in Pennsylvania

The flight from Taipei to New Jersey was grueling. 16 hours of flying, but full travel time was 24 hours, including time getting to the airport and waiting in between flights. And it was Groundhog Day upon reaching LAX since I arrived around the same time I was at Taoyuan airport the night before (both were Monday night), waiting for a flight that took off at roughly the same time.

A mere 24 hours after arrival, the dreaded Thanksgiving weekend trip commenced with a drive into the mountains. A drive that should have taken a little over 2 hours, but snowfall made it a treacherous 5 hour ordeal which could have been worse without my constant brow-beating my mother to slow the fuck down.

And unfortunately the increasing snow through the day delayed the arrival of my brothers and I was stuck alone with the parents until they arrived today on Thanksgiving. Fortunately the resort fed us well and amply.

A little over a year ago I could barely eat at all, and since then I've been OK although I had to be careful because the slightest over-eating would send me into an unpleasant, uneasy feeling food coma. Actually that happened right before I got on the plane, making the flight even more unpleasant.

Now here at this resort I'm stuffing myself three times a day and snacking in between. My intestines feel like I'm making sausage. It's a one time thing, so I'm allowing it. And who knows whether it might change something in my gut for the better. Maybe all food issues will disappear.

Insomnia has persisted since leaving Taiwan. I may have gotten a couple hours sleep on the 11 hour trans-Pacific flight, but none from LA to Newark, and since then sleep at night has been touch and go with no settling into sleep. Which may explain the absence of food comas, since they may be masked by insomnia-induced fatigue.

Well, that was another boring post.

I don't know if I've mentioned anything about this, but I leave tomorrow for New Jersey for two weeks. If I haven't mentioned anything about it, it's because I've been dreading it; trying to block it out of my mind, hoping it will go away.

I really, really, really, really wish I wasn't going on this trip.

The only reason I agreed to go was I was trying to be a "good son". Parents mentioned it's their "50th anniversary", and they want to do something together as a family so I agreed.

"Something together" turns out to be Thanksgiving weekend at some resort in the Poconos.

Only later did I question "50th anniversary"? Any anniversary?! We're not the type of family that pays attention to anniversaries. Even without the kids, I've never heard of my parents celebrating any anniversary. The fact that they even got married is a total mystery. They've never talked about it or mentioned it, but as a family that doesn't talk about anything except the most superficial and meaningless things, of course they never would.

And this "something together as family"? All we've ever done together "as family" has been narrowly defined. If we all happen to be in the area, meaning me coming from wherever I'm living at a given time, the most we've ever done is gather at someone's house having ordered out a feast of Chinese food.

A resort? Everyone confined in this limited space for the entire Thanksgiving weekend? Quelle horreur. The focus will have to be my brothers' kids, my nephews and nieces. Me and my brothers can talk, but add in the parents and there is nothing to talk about. We aren't the talking type of family.

The last time we "did something as family" that wasn't a meal of take-out Chinese food was when I was in high school and my parents dragged us on a vacation in Europe. It was miserable. I was threatening to run away in England to get away from them permanently. It was a war zone in my teens.

So one reason I'm keeping this visit to a minimum of two weeks is because of the ridiculousness of this proposition. Also because it's winter. Also because I won't have a car. Also because parents are retired.

Since the last time I visited three and a half years ago, the situation has changed so that visits have near zero appeal. I'm just going to hunker down and try to disappear. Whatever imaginings the parents have of me being there is diametrically opposed to anything I am.

I don't know what the parents think they can pull off, but whatever they imagine for their lives now that they're retired, if it includes me, they're sadly mistaken. We're not that kind of family. If they want things to be a certain way now, they should have thought about that a long time ago to make it possible.

But the way they raised us was incommunicado. There was no communication, they didn't cultivate "doing things together". As such, I think it's ridiculous that they can hope for it now, and I'm not willing to go along with it.

They mention family reunions every year now. No. They contemplate it because they're retired and have the time for it. It's in their convenience. They never did any work to cultivate any family feelings. And as much as they've provided, they've never sacrificed anything for their children. The money they provided, they were making for themselves as well. The money they spent was a mandatory part of their world view where siring progeny was expected.

Xizhi-Wanli Rd. (汐萬路 2,018 ft.):

北3 Danshui->Beitou (1,121ft. climb):

Rte. 109->深坑->full bikeways home:

I now have my own personal MRT station! I allow so-called "members of the public" to use it, but I consider it my own. This new "Songshan" MRT line opened on Saturday and runs along Nanjing East Road, which is a major boulevard that I use as the reference point to tell people where I live. It's a three minute walk to the station.

I've never been so close to a major rapid transit system (i.e., not buses). In Noe Valley I was pretty close to a light rail line, but San Francisco's light rail was part of the MUNI bus system. It wasn't BART.

The closest I lived to a BART station was in Daly City, about a 10 minute walk, but BART was not a very versatile rapid transit system. It was basically a commuter system from Bay Area suburbs to downtown San Francisco. It had a single set of tracks that ran through San Francisco and every train on all lines stopped at each of those stations.

This new Songshan line of Taipei's MRT system has transfers to multiple lines which opens up convenient possibilities to quickly get to a lot more places than BART could ever boast. It will be seen if this is a life-changing thing in terms of daily life. Especially on rain days when I can't go out on bike. On the other hand, it's still public transportation; still a drag.

Another big deal about having an MRT line open so close is that the value of my apartment probably just skyrocketed. This means that I owe my cousin Audrey that much more for setting me up here since this is her uncle's property and she's the one who got me in here at a discounted price six years ago.

The night before last was another eight hour dead sleep. I'm not sure what that means having two nights like that in a row. Fatigue from all the poor sleep and that climb up to Yangmingshan? I don't know. Fatigue usually doesn't affect insomnia, but maybe I was SOOO fatigued that . . .

Maybe. Because I wanted to go the gym yesterday, but realized I was just too tired and that it would be a bad idea. It wasn't a matter of not wanting to get out and using that as an excuse to not go. I actually wanted to go and realized I was too tired. I even ended up taking a nap which I rarely do in the afternoon, so that all attests to being smart taking a rest day.

This morning I was back to back-end insomnia but with a twist. And it was a marginal back-end insomnia because I think I got almost five hours sleep before waking up. Five hours is enough rest to not consider it insomnia, even if I would like to sleep a few more hours. The twist was in the dreams. During the slides into light sleep that occur during back-end insomnia I do sometimes dream, I've mentioned before.

The first dream just naturally happened, a lot of random elements, no real plot. A tourist bus at a stop, lots of people. Then a distraction in a café and then realizing that I was late to rejoin the group, but my shoes were missing and I had to find them first. All the people were gone except for one little kid who was running back to the bus, also late, and I yelled to him, "Matthew! Tell them I'm right behind you". But running all over the site, I couldn't find my shoes. I was barefoot, anxious, I was making people wait for me, I was alone, there was no sign of my shoes. It sucked. I didn't like the feeling. 

I stopped and thought, "Forget it, I'm not doing this. I'm pushing out". I didn't think I was sleeping and dreaming, but there was an element of recognition that I could get out. On some level I must have been aware that it was a dream and I was forcing myself to wake up, but I didn't actually think I was lucid dreaming. But I pushed "up", upward towards consciousness, I suppose. I went up through several layers, even doubting if this was going to work, wondering how would I know what was waking reality and not another dream? But I finally visualized what I should see if I was awake and saw my room and the environs and then I opened my eyes and there I was.

And then I was frustrated with myself because I was having insomnia, I had fallen asleep since I was dreaming, and in the dream I forced myself awake. That was a groggy thought, though, since I know that kind of sleep is very light and I would've waken up anyway.

But that's not even the twist! The twist is at least two times afterwards I was able to push myself back down into a dream. I wasn't pushing myself into sleep but into a dream state. In an insomniac haze, I thought of trying it, visualized the sinking down out of wakefulness and it worked! 

The first one was very fragile and I knew it was tenuous and tried to move as little as possible while stuff happened around me. The dream started in a room and I could see out a window and saw some Asian faces, but then the scene was a collegiate-feeling urban courtyard and I couldn't tell if people were hostile or not.

A later dream I forced myself down into was more stable and I was aware that I was dreaming. In fact, I was so aware of it that there was a part with a woman I knew in California and I thought, "I'm dreaming, I can totally grab her boobs" and did and she had no problem with it. My, my, my, what the hell is my subconscious doing for realz? Just goes to show no matter how old a guy is, there's a libidinous 16-year old boy in there somewhere.

There was also a part where I was on a bus and one person there knew I was dreaming and another who didn't. I was looking out the window to try to get a reference to where it was so I could look it up later and see if it was a place I'd been before. Except I was having trouble reading, and what I could read I couldn't retain a memory of. The person who didn't know I was dreaming asked me what I was doing and I told him and he helped read out a place name, and I did retain that name even after waking up, but thinking I could remember it, left it at that and . . . have since forgotten it. Of course.

A lot of random, chaotic dream elements not worth mentioning, aside from knowing I was a dreamer and investigating the dream world. One thing I noticed was the feeling of each dream scene as being enclosed. Like being on that bus, but the bus wasn't traveling. It was moving but it wasn't leaving that town.

Another part involved being in a house with a bunch of people (there was a woman with a moustache and a penis, or maybe just a naked man, I didn't linger) and I couldn't find my way out of the house. I could see where the exits were, but couldn't navigate myself there. It felt like there were definite borders to each dreamscape that people might not notice if they were just dreaming.

The night before last was a full insomnia night: inability to maintain sleep on the front-end, unsettled fading in and out on the back-end. It was less than a week since the previous bout of full insomnia. That's not debilitating. 

Since weather permitted yesterday, I decided to go on my planned ride up Yangmingshan, the highest climb in the Taipei area which I haven't done in probably 4 or 5 years. The climb was fine. It's a challenging climb so I didn't mind going down to the granny gears at times. I don't think I ever went down to the lowest gear which means I was never anywhere near tapping out.

I gather Yangmingshan isn't actually a mountain as I thought at first. It may not even refer to a range. It is the name of the national park that contains Taipei's highest peak(s). The highest peak is called Seven Stars Mountain (七星山 Qixingshan). The main road that climbs up to that peak offers two alternatives. One road circles around the peak and heads back through Yangmingshan to Taipei proper. That's the route I usually think of when going up there.

The other road heads north out of Yangmingshan and descends to the north coast area and Danshui. That's the one I did yesterday and I think it actually reaches a higher altitude than the one that circles the Seven Stars peak, but I'll have to do that ride to confirm it's highest altitude. Doing that route meant traveling farther than if I had looped back into Taipei directly, and the ride exceeded 40 miles. So hopefully I expended enough energy to improve sleep, despite my type of insomnia having nothing to do with fatigue or tiredness.

And I did sleep solidly last night. A dead sleep until the end. Today was rain so I went to the gym, but energy levels were low and I attribute that to the combination of insomnia and exertion of yesterday's ride. Nothing unexpected.

After the Yangmingshan climb and the 40-mile+ route, I did reward myself on the way home by stopping off at what may be considered a Western-style deli, called 1bite2go in Shilin, with a corned beef sandwich. Absolute heaven.

Yangde->Yangmingshan->101甲 (2,753 ft.):

Xiadongshi 下東勢 Rd.->Chinese Cultural U. (1,312 ft.):

I tried this route up to Yangmingshan that was completely new to me, not using Yangde Rd, which is the main road up. I know there are numerous roads that go up from Beitou District, but they are mountain routes and very confusing unless you're a local and use them regularly. I plotted this route using Google maps street view and it seemed pretty defined. And fucking hella steep actually doing it! That's the reason Yangde is the main road to Yangmingshan, it's longer, but not as hard.

I had all but forgotten how wretched full insomnia is. Recently my sleep has been consistently unsettled on the back-end, but never enough to call it insomnia. Then the night before last night I had a remarkable full night sleep; solid eight hours, no waking, no dreaming. Rather than being refreshing, I think I was a bit dull and dead the whole day. That's not unusual.

Then similarly out of the blue, last night was full insomnia. I played three full mix CDs, which is 4 hours, and though I started sliding into sleep during the third CD, I was never totally out. Some songs I don't remember at all, so I must have gone below the threshold of sleep, but never for long. Most of the time, even when I was on the fringe of sleep, I could hear the song playing, even if I wasn't conscious enough to identify the song until I came up enough.

After four hours, it was 7 a.m. and at that point I stopped turning music on and for the next three or four hours it was like the usual unsettled back-end sleep; constant waking up and fading out. That kind of unsettled sleep after three or four hours of regular sleep doesn't qualify as insomnia. On the back-end of insomnia qualifies it as full insomnia. If I managed to fall completely asleep at 7 a.m., then it would've been a night of front-end insomnia.

Even being disconcerted by the full insomnia, the weather was nice as forecast and I decided to go on a planned bike ride. Cumulatively insomnia has its effect, but just one night is nothing. And going into winter I want to take advantage of any nice days as there will be weeks on end of no riding soon enough.

Having been able to climb hills recently, I decided to make a foray up the Yangmingshan National Park range (which includes the highest peak in the Taipei area, Qixing (Seven Stars), although I didn't do that today). It's the first time going up there with GPS so part of the reason is to make sense of the mess of roads and bike routes up there. It's a well-settled mountain, hardly backroads.

I went up from the only southeast access road off Zhishan. That way is pretty steep with lots of switchbacks. The highest point I reached was decent at below 1,700ft., but doing more of the mountain range goes considerably higher. Getting close to 1,700ft. on some Taipei area climbs is success, but in Yangmingshan, it's just passing through.

Yangmingshan from Zhishan Rd. exploratory foray: