Autobobots wage their battle to destroy the evil forces of...the Decepticons!

In Taiwan there's two kinds of pirated merchandise. The kind the fell off the back of a truck, but at least it's got the right paint scheme. And the kind made of grade G plastic on a factory mold made by shamelessly reverse-engineering an official product. The kind of crap that catches your eye for a second with a recognizable shape, until you realize you're looking at a yellow and green Optimus Prime, called a "Transformable."

When I saw this I sang, "Transformables! ...Not what you'd expeeect!"
Which I still find funny.
Also I've been watching the Transformers - Animated series on Veoh. It's an American children's cartoon, so, awful, but I've been enjoying it. The pilot was three episodes long and Starscream ran around starscreaming it up, so that was fun for a nostalgic kick. A few episodes later the Dinobots got a chace to poke their heads out of retirement, and that was fun too. Grimlock makes me laugh. I'm looking forward to seeing what the show does with Megatron.

I worked the first day of a month of subbing for Mr. M today, and I feel less confident now than I did before I went. My wife says I did well, but I didn't feel like I did. I taught four classes today, and almost every time I said anything at all, they stared at me blankly. I kept running up against the end of the reading material with nothing planned to do when they were done, because I hadn't expected them to finish so quickly, and I would have been pleased and impressed if the problem had been that the work was beneath them. Unfortunately it was very clear that the students had little to no concept of what they were reading.

There was a thing about a narrator sharing a toad with his friend, and I had to explain what a toad was, and then what sharing was, and it is very difficult to explain abstract concepts like sharing and Circque du Soleil, and why the Beatles-themed circus show is called "LOVE" in allcaps.

So we read this thing and it says, "The Cirque du Soleil is a different kind of circus!" And I'm like, "Okay so do you know what a circus is?" and they're like, "No."
And I just sort of go...uh...fuck. But actually no, I think that might have been my best class today.

Anyway, I feel like I just blundered, badly, through a day of teaching and they're going to notice that I only have one work outfit, and when I ask the boss if she has anything permanent for me, she's going to want me to go away.
I don't think this is very realistic, but that's how I was feeing until this morning when I decided, "I can totally do this," and then I did it, and I'm thinking about doing it for a week, and then I think about doing that all over again three more time, and I think "I can't do this." But I'll probably be fine again tomorrow.

I feel like I'm actually getting worse at driving the scooter. I think I'm the only one who gets worse at doing things with practice. That reminds me of a Metalocalypse quote.
"I am slowly learnink hows to unplays the guitars."

I keep falling asleep and I really should go to bed because I have work tomorrow and I didn't get enough sleep last night. Two in a row sounds like a bad plan.

This house is near the top of a mountain. That means that no matter how pleasant it is in town, after a half-hour drive, we arrive at our chilly mountain home. Our house, as has been mentioned, has no insulgoddamnlation, and NO heating whatsoever! We have one surly cheap plastic space heater. It's basically a toaster someone pumped up on steroids and then cut in half. It's two heating coils mounted into a chintzy plastic frame with faulty wiring. It's a peach.
But it does manage to keep hypothermia at bay.
Okay I don't think we'd get hypothermia.
Oh, also, one of the two staircases which lead between the 1st floor (kitchen, shower) and the 3rd (bedrooms) likes to have condensation on the walls and cieling, which drips down and makes the stairs kind of slippery. Sometimes also, the kitchen floor is slimey, as is the upstairs bathroom. The shower room is perpetually nasty, and one of two refrigerators does not work at all, nor has it for some time, as I understand it, yet it is FULL of ROTTING food. Sometimes while we're cooking, we'll be washed over with the unmistakable aroma of Dumpster.

But enough bitching, I feel confident that we'll be able to move soon to a reasonable apartment. This will be a happy thing. Life will also be more livable when we get someone to show us where we can buy high-quality organic meat and produce. I miss cheese. The only decent pizza places we've found wouldn't last a day in Portland, let alone New York, and they were overpriced. We found a Mexican place which was delicious, but underfilling and also overpriced.
A burrito, as in...a burrito. What you, as a Portlander (if you are one) must surely think of as..."a burrito" was roughly equivalent to $9 US. The burritos at this place were very tasty, but also very small. The 300 元 burrito was almost the size of anything you'd get from virtually any taqueria on America's western coast. But that is far too much to pay.

Ahem. But enough bitching, I said....

Here's something that happened to me:
I gave myself food poisoning like a moron by eating some fried rice that had sat out all night. I tried to cook the death out of it first. "But I failed. Miserably!" (Police Chief Brian Irons, RE2)
First I felt fine. Then some hours later I felt like Satan had made a summer-home in my bowels. Some more hours later I was weeping and vomiting into the toilet, cutting an exceptionally pathetic figure of pantslessness...it probably would have been funny if it weren't also horrifying.
Puking my guts out and screaming my abdominal pain into that Lovecraftian abyss of a toilet, I suddenly found myself making words!
Having hit the absolute bottom of self-esteem and comfort, while at the same time feeling unconditionally beloved by my wife, who held me while my organs staged their violent coup, I found myself screaming things like, "I hate you Dad!" and "You're evil!" and "I have emotions!"

So...that was interesting. I mean I've known for a very long time that I'm angry at my father. But I realized then that I hadn't allowed myself to actually experience the full ferocity of my anger. I could talk about why, but something that became a reoccurring theme that night was that the more I rationalize, the less I feel. It's a way I've been using to cut myself off from my emotions, and that coldness makes me feel dead.
All the slime and spite and evil selfish hatred for the world that my dad pretends he doesn't feel he poured into me and in my guts it became a virulent toxin, poisoning me for most of my life. If not all of it. It took an ocean of distance and some time, and someone that makes me feel safe, loved, and known, but finally my body rejected the darkness and shoved it out.
The combination of totally unchained, top-of-my-lungs screaming and pure bile may have scarred my throat a little, and my voice sounds deeper, or at least drier to me now.

It was my wife who asked me the question which caused me to realize that the reason I'm so upset is that I loved my father, and still do. That's exactly why I hate him so god damn much. He and others are why I have a baseline fear of men in general. I realized that I thought of all men as sleazy misogynist pricks (television in the '90s did not help), and I was terrified that people might see me that way, or worse, that I might be one and delude myself into being unaware of it (like my father). My father is why I'm afraid that people will hate me if I'm attracted to a woman. Because I always hated it when he displayed his attraction, because he's fucking skeez.
I'm constantly nervous that (most) men are going to start competing with me over whatever. I don't want to fucking compete with you, you troglodyte, leave me alone! I don't want to have to be better than you or worse than you or whatever. I just want to mind my own fucking business.
My dad couldn't observe anything I did without judging it against his own tastes. If I was watching a cartoon it was stupid, if I was listening to some music it was derivative, if I was playing a video-game, the music was stupid, the voice acting was stupid, and the characters probably looked stupid, or moved wrong. If I was playing a racing game, he was unimpressed if anywhere was off-limits, like the bay, or inside buildings or whatever. If I was playing a game based on New York or San Fransisco, his two favorite cities, and I showed it to him, that street isn't next to that street, what's that supposed to be, and wow it sure is small.
If I ever did anything exciting, it was usually met with a story about how he had done something similar but far more impressive in his youth. I honestly believe that he does not think he ever intended to put me down. But he's a vile evil subtle fucker and I don't care.
It may sound like I'm overreacting, because I'm not actually talking about the really insidious shit, because it's so subtle and manipulative, that it would take a fucking book just to set up the contexts and situations in which he oozed his hatred into my subconscious. Fuck! And my conscious mind, while I'm at it! Sometimes he wasn't subtle at all, like whenever he was in a bad mood for WHATEVER reason I usually didn't get to know (because to talk about his emotions would be to admit that he was less than 100% super cool chill-out dude all the time)(though in retrospect I think it was around the time he was having marital difficulties with his...third? Wife.) he would just endlessly push all my buttons until I ran out of patience and screamed at him, which gave him what he wanted, which is to act like he's so rational because he's not screaming, and I must have some kind of bizarre problem to just randomly flip out like that.

Looking back, I think he must have been aggravating me in order to create someone who was acting the way he felt so that he could project his rage onto me, making an externalized sort of mascot for his own anger, which he could then easily dismiss as a force outside himself, all the more easily dismissed because I was like, seven. Or eight. Or five, or thirteen or fifteen or twelve or seventeen or twenty-two. Younger than him, anyway. He's always had a big thing about years equaling experience, and therefore wisdom. What an asshole. Anyway, that's just what I think were his motivations. It doesn't really matter, because the result is that I was miserable and rarely had the freedom to feel emotions which were genuinely mine. I mean my anger at him for being a prick to me for the sole purpose of being a prick to me, that was mine, but as soon as I expressed it he would dismiss it and shut me down, because that's what he was trying to do with his own anger.

God, where was I? Oh yeah, so I got food poisoning and puked, and puked, and when there wasn't anything left in my stomache, all this childhood shit flew out of my throat instead. When it was all out I felt amazing. Weaker'n shit, but really blissfully happy. It took me about a day to recover enough to move around the house, but when I did I discovered that I was no longer afraid of the dark. I wasn't like, phobic before or anything, but walking into a totally dark or very dim room would often start a slow panic which could only be alleviated by light. I find this is no longer the case (unless I have reason to believe that I may walk through spider-webs, which isn't all that common). I'm not certain why, but the sensation is that there is no longer anything in the shadows not to see. A day after, I began rationalizing my cathartic experience, and I started to feel the sense of freedom I'd attained labor as the cold, greasy chains snaked their way back into place. At the time, I felt something come in the door (I was alone downstairs in the kitchen, which is near the door we use as our primary entrance) and near the kitchen. I realized instantly that it was the thing in the dark, it was my fear, returning, and I made a decision feel instead of rationalizing. I faced the fear thing, the shadow, and forced it back out the door.

We've heard that this place is mildly haunted, but this was absolutely an internal thing, a part of me manifesting itself in my imagination. The anthropomorphization of my fear. It was handy to have something to tell to fuck off. Except that wasn't really what made it leave again, it was that I admitted it was there, allowed myself to feel it without being ashamed of myself for being afraid of the dark (not calling myself immature), it was like shining a light into a dark corner.

I've also been able to write more freely since the catharsis, and I feel the love I already felt for my friends more...I'm not sure how to describe it. More definitely? Intricately, purely?
"That was quite the cocktail." (Solid Snake, MGS)

I don't know, but it's something, and I want to hang on to it for as long as I can. Forever being the goal.

Uhhhhh...that's all. I guess? Yeah. For now, anyway.

Road Trip Morality

"Nobody gets mad at a dog for eating a rabbit."
"Rabbits don't build civilizations," said Scott, "Keep your hands on the wheel when you talk, man, you make me nervous."
"Seriously," added Natalie from behind them.
"No, but termites do," Jack answered.
"Termites don't build civilizations, they make colonies," said Scott.
"Well to a termite it's the same thing."
"You're anthropomorphizing the termites."
"You're anthropomorphizing the anteater," said Jack with his hands on the wheel.
"What?" asked Scott, "How?"
"Well you're saying it's okay for the anteater to eat termites because the termites don't build civilizations. But neither do anteaters, so why is it on higher moral ground?"
"It's not on higher moral ground, it just...anteaters just eat termites, it's instinct."
"It's instinct for termites to build colonies," Jack said. He waited.
"Right," prompted Scott, "And that's not anthropomorphizing the anteater, by the way."
"Well, whatever," Jack waved the point aside, "How can you say it's not instinct for humans to build civilizations?"
Scott paused, "...Okay."
Jack went on, "So if civilization is instinct, then termite colonies are just a small version of that."
"You're saying insect colonies are a scaled down version of human civilization because it's arguably instinctual on both counts."
"Yeah."
"Okay."
"And if you validify one animal's-"
"Validate."
"Thank you, if you validate one animal's way of living, then you have to validate the other one's."
"Which means the same set of moral standards applies to humans, if we accept that humans are animals, as defined by functioning on instinct, yes?"
"Uh. Yeah."
"So, again; You say that by legitimizing one animal's perspective, you necessarily legitimize the other's, due to their mutual dissimilarity to the human species."
"Right. Termites don't want to be eaten."
"And anteaters don't want to starve."
"Right."
"However," said Scott, "if your logic works one way, it also works the other. If you've proven that it's okay for anteaters to eat termites, you've also stated that anteaters destroy civilizations."
"Well, but you just unmade your own point, because if it works backwards, then it already works forwards."
"Ooh!" Scott convulsed with the impact of his defeat, "Fuck. That's true."
"So I still say it's fine," Jack concluded, and his hands came to triumphant rest on the steering wheel.
"You guys are arguing about the morality of killing people," said Natalie, breaking her silence.
"Yeah." Scott and Jack agreed.
"But...he kills people," said Natalie, gesturing to Scott. Jack and Scott looked puzzled at each other for a moment, then back at Natalie. Scott twisting round in his seat to look over his shoulder, Jack in the rear-view mirror above.
"Well," Natalie went on, "It's just kind of moot."
Scott tilted his head.
"Like. You kill people. He has to, that's not going to stop. You're arguing the morality of something that's not going to change, whatever you decide is right or not."
Scott made a mock-serious face. "We're not arguing. We're conversing."
"The debate is fun, irregardless," Jack added.
Scott turned to Jack, "Irregardless isn't a word."
"It actually is," said Natalie, "It's in the dictionary."
"What?" Scott demanded.
Natalie explained, "It's defined as a variation of 'regardless' that arose from frequent mispronunciation."
Jack frowned contemplatively. "So it's only a word because a bunch of people were wrong? That's stupid, I don't want to use it."
"That's the evolution of language," said Natalie, "That's pretty much how it's worked for every other word in history."
"Normally I'd agree with you," said Scott, sinking lower into the passenger seat to get a better view of the night sky, "But 'irregardless' just sounds dumb. It's an ugly word."
Natalie looked out at the trees whipping past.
"Yeah."
The following silence was only long for Natalie.
"It's creepy when you guys talk about...what Scott...does."
Scott turned in his seat to look Natalie sincerely in the eye. Jack spoke without looking in the mirror. "I don't think it should be creepy. I mean it's not creepy when a dog eats a rabbit--"
"Don't--" Scott tried to interrupt Jack, his eyes closed in frustration.
"It is if you're a rabbit!"
Scott looked at the seat next to Natalie. Natalie looked out her window. Jack drove.
"Right," said Scott. He faced forward and sank again in the passenger seat. After another pause, Jack and Natalie both apologized at once.
"I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable," said Jack.
"No," said Natalie, "I shouldn't lie to myself. I have to come to terms with the fact that he..."
"I don't know," said Scott, "Maybe you're right. It's obviously not natural. And it's pretty fucked up! Maybe you guys should be afraid of me."
Jack dismissed the thought with a gesture, "Well I'm not."
Natalie kept looking out the window.

Bee.

This was in our livingroom. I RAIDed it so hard we had to leave the window open with a fan on for three days for it to air out.

Click the image to view the full-size photograph for detail.

I placed the lighter there for scale, it's a normal disposable lighter like you'd get at any convenience store checkout. If you have a lighter handy, I'd like you to look at it for a moment, and look back at this picture.

THAT WAS FLYING AROUND OUR HOUSE. I came upstairs, walked through the doorway and dodged something huge and black flying at my face. After getting clear to the other side of the room, I got my back to a wall, and looked back into the room. For a moment I saw nothing, and it sounded like there was a helicopter flying by the mountain. Then I saw it flying around. It flew heavily, sluggishly. It didn't seem able to change directions quickly, and elevation appeared laborious. Still, it could fly forward with some speed, and I was wary of its position until we decided what to do about it, which was, of course, to murder it quickly. While we were deliberating, it sounded as though someone were mowing their lawn nearby. It was this thing.

At first it was recuperating on the ceiling, which is pretty high in this room, so I couldn't really reach it with the RAID until Mark knocked it down with a broom, at which point I pressed the button at point blank range and just held it down until the creature stopped moving. Which took awhile. Like ten seconds or something. Slow, mississippi-counting seconds.
I actually stopped before it did, because it was drenched in deadly neurotoxin and wallowing in a puddle of it. I had a facemask on, by the way, 'cause fuck that.
It struggled for a few more long seconds, then finally slowed down, settled, and then STOOD UP, STRETCHED ITS WINGS, and then fell over and curled into the dead-insect position seen in the photo.

Chinese New Year is coming up, which means the next two weeks will be partytime for Taipei apparently. So we went shopping to prepare for a few days of everything being closed.

我的 太太 recently rediscovered our Lonely Planet: Taiwan book, and she and I have decided we need to go to a hotspring. Like soon. Like now.

I'll be subbing or M when he leaves for Europe for February, and after that I hope to implore the boss there for a permanent position if she has one available. Failing that, M may find someplace else to work, sticking the boss at Hart with me whether she likes it or not, but that's all about money and that's boring.

The gift collection for our homies is quite nice by now. I'm looking forward to sending it all. I hope everyone likes their weird crap we got them.

The other day I brought the puppies some food because I want them to grow up all adorable and genki like the adult dogs who bounce around us in circles whenever we leave the house, instead of all scared and skittish like the other ones who flee when we so much as look at them.

OKAY. THIS COUNTRY REFUSES TO ACKNOWLEDGE VINEGAR. We cannot find a fucking pickle in any grocery store we've been to. We find things that claim to be pickles, oh yes! But pickles THEY ARE NOT. They may, perhaps, be "pickled" in the technical definition. But they are SWEET to the taste! Sweet! A pickle is not a candy bar, it is not something children clamor for on All Hallow's Eve. It is a fucking vinegar-and-garlic flavor party and I want a goddamn invitation. I AM ON THE GUEST LIST. Also no pizza.

We got some olives though. They're not like...Mediteranean gourmet blow-your-face-off stuffed with feta and garlic, but they are vingary and they taste good.

HAHAHAHAHAHA

HA HA HA HA HA HAHAHAHAHA

HAPPY X-MOS EVERYONE

The only reason I remembered that today was Christmas Eve/Christmas was because my wife was writing in her planner and asked what was today's date.

I love being free from that bullshit!

It's 5:27 AM

I think the frogs are singing in response to the rainspout, which has been dripping at a steady rhythm onto something loud below it for the last five hours, at least.

It didn't wake me up. I've just been up all night perusing tealit.com for affordable motorcycles and private English tutoring jobs.
The tutoring job market is vast but each individual opportunity is a small number of hours per week. To make decent money at it, I'm going to have to find multiple pupils per week, which means I think I might need a scheduling book. Fortunately there's a bookstore near where S and M work that sells stacks of crap like that, adorned with whatever variation of adorable as suits your fancy.

The dogs are competing with the frogs now. They started howling, but they couldn't keep it together and it degraded into barking. The dogs are louder of course, but after about a minute they get tired and the frogs resume their contemplative chorus.

Notes

I'm going to try to remember some things I've been meaning to record here. I should keep a notebook handy or something.

Some days ago there was a very small gecko in the kitchen when we came home. It was cute and extraordinarily lethargic so I brought it up into the warmth of our room and gave it a very shallow saucer of water (because the space heater dries out our room really bad). Over the next half hour it became much more energetic, and wanted nothing more than to get away from me, binocular and immense as I am. So I put it and its water dish next to the window, figuring it could probably find its way outside through a crack or something.

MOS Burger serves a variety of "rice burgers" which does not mean that the meat has been replaced with some clever rice substitute. It means that the bun has been replaced with rice. Not rice-bread, or some kind of rice-starch cleverness. Just rice. Formed into a bun shape.
It wasn't...bad? But I'm not ordering it again.
MOS Burger lacks a spicy chicken sandwich, and this is not something I can tolerate for very long.

I bought a helmet today. I'll let it speak for itself when I upload some pictures of it later, via webcam.

Speaking of pictures, I was hoping to purchase someone's used camera for 900NT, but they haven't emailed me back, so maybe that's not happening. Not spending that money is nice, but I'm disappointed. I would enjoy playing with a nice film camera again.

I'm still looking for a scooter, although I'm now also looking for a motorcycle, because I keep seeing these neat-looking old bikes around. Mark told me most of them are so old, they probably have about the same horsepower or less than a modern scooter. The next day I woke up realizing that when he'd told me that, it just made me like them more.
Something about outmoded machinery appeals to me, I find it almost "cute".

I keep hearing some kind of bird outside that sounds like an old modem connecting. Some jungle creature is sitting on a mossy bough late at night, illuminated in the dark by a glowing screen. There's a hot beverage sitting next to the monitor. The animal browses lazily. It's probably checking its e-mail, but there's nothing interesting in it.

I'm always saying that the present time is the barely remembered past upon which the fictional foundations of cyberpunk dystopias are built. Like, if you pick up Neuromancer, and then look outside your window, you can see that we are living inside the fictional world of the book, except it'll be another twenty years before the story about those characters starts. Maybe not even. It could go in ten. Seven years minimum, because it takes time to build space stations, and then more time for them to fall into disrepair.
It's weird to think that Case and Molly are children, right now. Johnny Mnemonic is eight years old, no idea what's waiting for him when he grows up. Not that anyone does, but you know. Or maybe that's the point, I don't know. Whatever. I don't understand literary movements.
Though I realized why cyberpunk has fallen out of fashion in recent years. Why it's been replaced by steam-fantasy and dieselpunk. I realized it today on the bus.

The buses here have two flatscreens mounted inside, one at the front, and another closer to the back. They show nothing but advertisements, and they even have a little volume. The reason I don't find this irritating might have something to do with being immune to the ad thanks to the language barrier. But it's also because they amuse me.
They frequently start playing a new ad before the previous one has finished, interrupting it completely. Over half of the ads are obviously flash animations, even displaying "click here to start" and "replay?" buttons that you can't click because it's not interactive, and they're poorly animated. Today, the rear monitor was failing badly and it made me smile.
The picture would distort and bend sideways, like every other horizontal line of the image was moving in opposite directions. Then the vertical hold would slip and the image would ride up a couple times. The picture would black out entirely for a second and then barely reconnect through a haze of visual noise. All while mockingly echoed by the front monitor which was having no problems at all.
When I got off the bus I paid for my fare by passing my wallet near a brightly colored logo on a white plastic machine by the door as I disembarked.
And I thought, I just lived a proto-cyberpunk moment. I mean my whole life is currently that, wireless internet on a laptop in a rundown dojo up a mountain on the outskirts of Taipei. But specifically with the public transportation/flickering flatscreen ad/casual RFID transaction.

Anyway, that's why I think the cyberpunk genre no longer holds as broad a sway as it used to; it's no longer relevant as fiction because it's no longer fiction. That might be oversimplifying, but I'm sure everyone gets what I'm trying to say.

I 've been looking for some images of the kind of motorcycle I'm interested in on the side here, but I just found this instead.

I just spent an ungodly amount of time sitting in this awful metal folding chair (it has a pillow) looking for what the hell kind of motorcycle I keep seeing in town. I learned from a forum for expatriates in Taiwan that apparently some waiguoren think the locals associate certain motorcycles with Taiwanese farmers, a.k.a. hicks. Therefore if you, as a waiguoren, ride a motorcycle instead of a scooter, Taiwanese people will associate you with rubber boots and bad teeth.
This sounds to me like perpetuating stereotypes out of the white-guilt fear that someone from an alien culture might frown at you. If I were a local, I'd ride whatever the fuck I wanted, based on what appealed to me. Avoiding certain behaviors just because some simpleton might cast a sideways glance is... it's stupid! People will think whatever the fuck they think, and the only way people will learn not to be closed-minded is to drag their expectations into the light, kicking and screaming, and show them the light.

AND I'd like to note here that I haven't seen anyone who was really that judgmental. It's part of the culture here, different body language, different manners, different customs. People bitch and complain and tell you you're doing it wrong here. It doesn't mean shit, they're just making conversation. I really doubt if I ride a farmer motorcycle to work, that anyone at all would look at what I was riding as opposed to the waiguoren riding it.
Maybe, maybe someone might bring it up in a desperate attempt at making conversation, but to the point of actually disapproving? They'd have to give a shit first!

I hate it when stupid, gaijin, waiguoren, cracker-ass whities treat other people with any more or less respect than they would give to someone of their own phenotype.

Okay now I'm ranting. It's 8:50AM here. I can tell I'm tired when I cease grouping paragraphs loosely by topic, and also when my brain silently says to no one, "Dude we should totally get high."
Like...what? I don't even get high. And who am I talking to? It's not like I said it out loud, but it was obviously a comment aimed at a second party, and furthermore one which expects a response, but there's no one to respond, since it was only said silently inside my brain.

Oh good, it seemd like a mountain wind blew that stupid bee away. I kept thinking there was a mosquito buzzing in my ear, but it turned out there was a really persistent bee trying to get in my window like, over and over. God damn. I really should sleep.
Oh yeah, Mark found a near-dead Gecko in my room today, but it wasn't the same one. He gave it some water, like I did, but he said that made it move less. But I think that's just because it was cold water. It's probably fine now. Or dead. Which is like fine, but less...less somehow. I just fell asleep at the keyboard. I'm going to go crawl into bed.

Oh, by the way, here's an amusing bit of Chinese for those with a ...series of tubes...just ffell aslee again. Anyway:
The infamous "do not want" is
buyao
I think...? Good night. Morning. HA HA I'M IN THE FUTURE.

I keep remembering things and then forgetting them.

I know there's more I want to write down here, but I keep forgetting what it is.

The top floor is very cold. We've spent the last few days cruising commercial districts looking for an affordable suit for me to wear to work, because I think it would look super classy. Wode taitai got me a Snorlax pin that I think will look nice on the lapel.

Last night we missed the last old people bus up the mountain, and so all three of us piled onto Mark's scooter. That was...exciting is a word. I thought we might topple off the road into the jungle below several times. The night road was quite dark. So, spooky.

The cold up here is a problem. The two things which most drastically affect my wife's condition are food and cold. But the cold keeps us trapped in the one heatable room in the dojo, preventing us from foraging forth for MOS Burgers or other delicious sustenance. I'd call it a vicious cycle, but it's not a cycle, it's just one awful thing sort of reinforcing a second, also awful thing.

I think if I had my own scooter, it would open up my teaching opportunities to a broader geographical range.

Tonight we are imposing a family-wide hammertime. The family being M, S, and myself. Hammertime being nodistractionstimetogetcreativeupinthis tiems naow.

I do not believe S's recovery can begin in earnest until we have a warm, comforting place to retire to after the day's activities. This is the highestmost priority for me, because the cold gets inside, it penetrates defenses completely and chills her core rather than her skin. She needs a deep warmth, all-encompassing and persistent.