Nice these late autumn days in Taipei. There was a spell of cooler weather earlier with some rain but warmer again currently. I suppose this is the equivalent of Indian summer. Aboriginal summer. Last gasp of warm weather before however we get into winter, ease or plunge I forget.

Yesterday was so nice that after lunch I started wandering and meandering on my bike, thinking of all the possibilities where I could go just casually riding before heading back to my own neighborhood. I didn't get far. With each pedal, the prospect of going further became more unattractive. I've done this before. I know Taipei and there's nothing new to discover by going on; nothing interesting, nothing fascinating, only familiar nothing. Dead to me city.

It's been years and years that I've been doing nothing, never venturing beyond about a two mile radius of my neighborhood. There's been infrequent reason to go beyond that. I know any changes I notice will be changes of the same things. In a similar vein, I can jump on the MRT to some random station to see how things are different in that area and I'll end up feeling how pointless that was.

I used to get on my faithful Giant road bike and go on "rides", so long ago in the past that I can reference them as something I used to do. I would get out of Taipei and ride in the surrounding townships, in the mountains, in what used to be Taipei County. All of those towns and cities are now districts with their same names in one consolidated entity called New North City, literally translated, or New Taipei City otherwise. I explored as much as I wanted to and as much as I want to. There's nowhere I haven't been or want to revisit.

And retreading old ground, supposedly and theoretically this would all be different if there were someone else in my life that I might enjoy doing . . . things. Finding something new somehow becomes fun when it's with someone whose company is enjoyable. Even going somewhere familiar with someone is enjoyable because it's about the company. Even going somewhere familiar with the same person because it's about us going there this time. How charming.

But no, I get bored. Boredom is how I got to where I am now. Even enjoyable company will eventually become boring to me, and that makes it pointless. It's pointless to continually find new enjoyable company who I know will eventually bore me. That pursuit, knowing its pointlessness, would become an attachment to enjoyable company. I dislike that kind of pointless more than I like enjoyable company. The kind of pointless into which you have to put energy. I'm fine with the pointlessness of my life in general because I don't have to put much energy into it.

I do remember when Taipei wasn't boring, when there was always somewhere new to go and discover, whether by street bike in Taipei proper, road bike further afield, or MRT or bus along whichever lines they went. Early on, some of it was done with classmates or that Korean chick, but most of it was on my own. Then there was that visit by Sadie in 2013 where it was that enjoyable company thing.

Now I look at google maps and I'm not even curious about anywhere. I just look for food places in and around a two mile radius. Hell, when I first got here there was no google maps, I bought a paper map at a bookstore to decide where to explore. That's indicative of the changes, but the changes are more than that. The world and society has changed and moved on to become a place that isn't mine anymore and doesn't interest me.

I haven't kept up with changes. Mind you, I still don't have a so-called "smart phone". I put that in quotation marks, but for most people that would be like saying I don't have "lights" at home. What do you mean you don't have lights at home? (I don't have lights at home). What do you do for light at home? (I just don't need lights at home). You just sit in the dark? (Computer and TV screens provide all the light I need). I do have lights, but transpose that to a phone.

What do you mean you don't have a smartphone? How do you live? How do you breathe? How do you exist? Are you even here? In a few decades, that may not be hyperbole. And "smartphone" is a word, it's not spell checked as an error. That's how much the world is passing me by. I may not even be a qualified English editor anymore.

I imagine a virus that is only transmitted through staring at smart phone screens and which is time activated and then kills the user. There would be a mass die-off of humanity. I would survive. Who else? You? Would I be the only adult surrounded waist-high in children. Not even, as I read an article about how most kids have phones now. Me and homeless people shall inherit the earth. I haven't seen any homeless people with smartphones. Yet.

I digress. Whoa, do I digress. Well, never mind. I was just going on about how the world and society has changed and transformed and I didn't even notice nor care. Come to think of it, I totally saw it coming, too. And still don't care. It's not judgment, just description.

current status

Alcohol: I haven't quit completely since August last year when I had that great, wonderous, earth-shaking revelation for the umpteenth time that alcohol wasn't going to kill me and it therefore served no purpose. I was drinking almost a bottle of liquor a day with some beer in the mix because beer make happy. I cut down to a bottle every three days or less plus beer still in the mix because beer. The plan was to eventually totally get off the sauce, but that didn't happen because alcoholism.

That makes me question my mindfulness practice which believes quitting completely is not only possible, but even easy when mindfully applied. On the other hand, the reduced consumption (a schedule I've been on many times before in the name of cutting back) hasn't been making me feel like crap like the bottle a day did. There just hasn't been anything compelling to make me quit completely, but like my months at a monastery, now well over a decade ago, I theoretically could stop completely if I had to and not even think about it. Same as it ever was.

Sleep: Insomnia really went away with the reduced consumption of alcohol. Coincidence? The thing is that I've been on this reduced schedule of consumption before during years I've had insomnia, so they shouldn't be related. Psychological? I still always need music on to fall asleep with a timer set to shut off. Sleep is unsettled towards the end with multiple waking in the morning, but I turn on the music and reset the timer and that gets me back to sleep. If I don't turn on music, I don't fall asleep. Average 6 hours sleep with lights out between 1:30 and 2 a.m. and getting up in the 8 o'clock hour for morning sitting.

Exercise: It was full stop on even any thought of running and cycling since August last in the same realization as stopping drinking. Why am I doing this? So much effort and maintenance required, so much pain and risk of injury, so little satisfaction as performance declines. My bike is covered with dust and cobwebs, tyres flat. I don't even want to check how the last pair of running shoes I bought are doing.

Interesting how stopping exercise and stopping drinking are totally different things. Entropy working differently in either case. Or not. I'm kidding, entropy isn't at play at all (or is it?), but I'm realizing my jokes are too abstract, obtuse or just not funny. I realize now I should've been pointing out all along when I'm joking, which is even less funnier. Yes, that was a grammar joke. Yes, that was me pointing out that it was a grammar joke. Yes, it wasn't funny initially and even less funnier pointing it out. Oy vey.

Eating: Appetite has remained completely stable since August last. Faboo. Also alcohol related? Who knows? Maybe not. Maybe it was alcohol related at that time. Which still means it was. The Korean food obsession that started last November lasted until May or June when it relented. Literally Korean food almost every day. I still go for Korean when I think about it, but I no more have to think about where was the place I went least recently to decide where to go. Aigoo.

So what have I been doing? Reading and mindfulness practice has been the all-permeating focus. But mindfulness is more of a Zen thing and I've been playing and fiddling more with Vajrayana, so I should just say practice, mindfulness being a part of it. Pushing the teachings and my understanding the best I can without a guru. No great, mind-opening, satori-like breakthrough, but that's not a focus; not something I'm striving for. More slow immersion into my understanding with tangible, experiential moments of getting things. Applying whatever whenever, focusing on energies. Everything is energy. Energy equals emcee squared (on a total aside, to date there surprisingly has been no notable rock band that has named itself E=mc², but there was a white rapper who went under the name MC Squared).

K-pop girl group obsession and immersion has remained unabated. A lot of time spent watching YouTube videos. But with YouTube videos it's not just K-pop. I watch science lectures and documentaries. There's a "World Science Festival" channel where I watch videos on cosmology and astrophysics.

I watch a channel called "Asian Boss" which features vox pop videos in various Asian countries (at least once in the U.S.) asking people on the street about various topical topics. I think they edit videos for the most intelligent responses, which is refreshing and totally opposite of U.S. talk shows where they do the vox pop thing asking simple questions, but then air the most ridiculous, stupid-sounding people.

I also pay attention to a channel called "China Uncensored", which has sarcastic "news" videos about China-related topics, mostly pointing out China's hypocrisy and unfriendly or hostile relations with other countries. The sarcasm makes the outrage palatable. I like sarcasm, in case you haven't noticed. Wait! Was that sarcasm?! Was I being sarcastic talking about sarcasm?! Good grief. I'm having a crisis of (being) meta.

Back to the South Korea fetish, I follow a few South Korean YouTube vlogs. Apparently professional vloggers. They make money off of it. It's totally voyeuristic watching these people going through certain days they decide to video and narrate. I don't know how I feel about it. It's fascinating watching slices of these people's young women's lives, but it's not prurience. True, they are attractive but that's just the dressing, the bait, the aesthetic. It's the same with K-pop. I'm sure the boy groups are putting out just as good music as girl groups if it were just about the music, but for the pop genre, my aesthetic leans towards the girls. Same with golf, mind you. You couldn't pay me to watch men's golf, but I'll watch LPGA tournaments when sports channels choose to air them (NB: they won't if there's men's or motor sports or such boring bullshit to air).

It's the lives that interest me, the living life that they are doing which I'm not. The relating with other people, the moving through their cities/lives/world, neither of which I'm doing. They are reminders of what I'm not doing, what I may have used to have done when I was younger but don't even want anymore. And there is that tension between feeling I want to be a part of something and the reality that I totally don't.

Branching out of those videos, just recently I did a brief spate of watching videos of people showing their apartments in Seoul (still the Korean fetish). Again, it's just the look at and fascination of the lives going on. All those people doing something. Is there anyone doing the worthless nothingness I'm doing?

There's a class of apartments in Seoul that I don't think we have in Taiwan called goshiwon, which are tiny, basic apartments originally meant for students cramming for national exams. Mostly foreigners and students on a budget use them now, but they remind me of my ideal when I first moved to Taiwan. I wanted to live a simple hermit-like existence, and a goshiwon would've fit the ideal perfectly.

Now I look at my apartment and all the stuff I've accumulated and this is luxury compared to tiny goshiwons. This is my karma. I haven't torn myself and my ego down enough to deserve living in a goshiwon. I probably couldn't survive a goshiwon. I'd be like, "I gotta get out of this situation", and I could because I could afford it. I live in an apartment where I had the luxury of being an insomniac and baby it. Luxury of all my perceived problems without the added stresses of the perceived inconveniences of a goshiwon.

What made me think I could be a monk? I didn't deserve it. I haven't karmically earned it. My karma is still such "bad" enough that I tend towards comfort and luxury. In another life, I could easily become the hungry ghost my mother is in this life. That's the harsh possibility. Wow, that escalated quickly.

Last and least, since last December when cable TV went down for two months (I don't know if it's related; could be), I've been spending at least two hours a day with a bass in hand, plugged into my Korg PX5D and connected to iTunes and working on ear training along with K-pop songs. Why? I don't know. I'm not trying to do anything, it's not about making music or practicing bass or being a musician or anything. It may be closure to my discarded "musician" identity. I recognize now that I was never good enough to be a musician. I'm not talented, I never learned music nor got to know it, and I certainly never practiced near enough to be a musician. And if not any sort of "formal" musician, it behooves me to admit that despite my love of music and trying to make it, I was also not passionate enough to be any sort of musician.

Maybe it's an afterglow goodbye gesture towards musicianship. Ear training is one of those things I never got and never practiced as a skill. I'm just trying to see if I can improve my ear training, and that's it. It's not going to make me a musician, it's not going to make me know music. It's just training to listen to notes and develop a sense of what intervals sound like, where to go for the next note. I daresay it hasn't been a totally hopeless endeavor. It has been evidence that if I had started ear training early enough, in my teens, I could've been OK at it. I have good sessions where my fingers find the right notes without even thinking, and bad days where I feel hopelessly tone deaf and flounder about the fretboard hitting notes only after the second or third guess.

K-pop is particularly good for this because the songs are written by professional musicians applying theory, meaning there is a structure to the progressions, unlike rock which a lot is by feel and if theory is followed it's just happenstance. The theory-following structure makes a lot of K-pop predictable (they love their circle of fifths), which is good for ear training, but the writers are interesting enough to put in lots of twists and surprises to challenge ear training.

Ah, it all comes back to me. Another YouTube channel I pay attention to is ReacttotheK, a group of classical music students who react to K-pop. I generally avoid reaction videos as pointless and varying degrees of stupid, but it was interesting listening to people who know music, who pronounce "timbre" correctly, who know the difference between a piano, horns and an elbow, and had something intelligent to say about the songs.

Hearing them use music terms I recognize but have forgotten reminded me how lacking my music education has been, including ear training. That's what inspired me when cable TV went dark to at least try to do some ear training as a last gasp of musicianhood. I can grasp ear training, whereas I couldn't get music theory even if Kim Jong Un threatened to nuke Seoul unless I mastered music theory. I would pretend to try to do it and stall as long as I could to buy time for Seoul to be evacuated.

And bam, I found the gateway video that hooked me: