on mental health and my pre-typhoon adventure
Work has been busy lately, but that's not why i haven't written. One of the ways i have been occupying my time and brain after work has been to play computer games. Instead of playing my usual style game, which is short, indie, story-heavy "walking sims" and narrative adventures, i have been playing big, long, often-tedious "AAA" (mainstream) games that suck up 60+ hours. It's more absorbing than watching a show because i actively need to be doing something to make the story progress, and i don't get distracted by random Wikipedia tangents or stupid internet arguments. I don't think it's sustainable to stuff my brain into computer games for every moment that i'm not working, but for now it's something that is helping me to readjust my mindset out of drinking, again.
Which isn't to say i have turned back into a teetotaller. But whereas before it was equivalent of a couple six-packs a week, sometimes more, now it's like a couple cans a week. I will say, though, the other day i remembered why i like drugs, including alcohol. Because they let you set your brain chemistry how you want it to be. It's easy to forget that i was once diagnosed with, treated for and hospitalized due to manic depression aka bipolar disorder. It's easy to forget because ever since i stopped marinating myself in helplessness and refocused my life around the things that i love and cut out (almost) all of the things that stress me out, i realized i didn't need meds any more, didn't need to keep going to a shrink, didn't need to center my whole identity around mental health.
But, of course, there is still something there. Sometimes my brain does charge off on its own shit and i do or say something really inappropriate for the circumstance because i started zipping into a hypomanic rush where the whole universe starts spinning around me and obviously i am the funniest and cleverest and bestest person so you all must listen to me stop. Because i deliberately have a personal life that features zero other people, the blast radius is limited, but sometimes the crazy leaks out at work and then - even if people ignore me, which in this case they thankfully did - it still has a fallout on my own mental health because then i start getting anxiety about what i said and then i start getting anxiety about the fact that if i have anxiety i might crash and depression really sucks and i can't afford it because shit is going down at work and i have stuff to do.
That running commentary on myself that ricochets inside my skull, making me do or say dumb things, or stress about things that didn't need to be stressed about, or starts talking me into a corner... Fuuuck! That is when drinking is great. Or doing whatever drug. Because you know exactly what you are going to get. You know where your headspace is going to be when you are coming up, you know where it's going to be when you are high, and what will happen when you come down. It gives a very clear map of your mental state for the next couple days, and that's exactly what people who are going bananas want. A predictable bananas-going.
So when you're clean and sober and cray-cray, you got two choices, you smash hard on cognitive behavioral therapy and offshoots like mindfulness and bla bla bla and your personal life becomes like a job. Or you get on the doctor-prescribed psychiatric meds, which is just replacing one drug with another, except now you have to "keep coming back" to some doctor who will check to make sure it's actually working the way it was supposed to. Just like being a junkie, it's exhausting.
Anyway. For now i am on my drug-free (ish) kick again, so let's see how it goes. Computer games help. They distract from the internal and potentially-damaging thoughts and keep me focused on a meaningless, harmless activity. Repeat until too tired to continue. Sleep. Wake up. Go to work. The end.
But it's summer, goddamnit, and i am missing some of the few primo sunny days here.
The typhoon got my ass in gear.
One thing that i am sure all of you who live in a hurricane/typhoon area are familiar with is how emergency services and the media will go nuts any time there is a storm that may or may not actually hit. Meanwhile local people do not give shit till the last minute. So this typhoon Mawar is big one na, probably it go north to Okinawa, we shall see, but they say on Sunday batten down the hatches. But even if typhoon just float by, we still get rained on, so instead of hatch-battening, i got some sun.
I decided to be safe and stay closer to the city, so i started by biking up to the 社子島 Shezidao peninsula that i wrote about a couple entries ago. It is close-ish to central Taipei, on a peninsula where the Keelung River and the Tamsui River meet. I know the local residents are resisting development in the area, which led me to believe that it was a small rural bubble in the city, but now that i biked round there, it's actually more like a warehouse and light industrial district. There is some smallhold farming there, but it's not a huge block like there is on the other side of the river outside the dyke. I guess it's less about rural people wanting to keep their heritage, and more just about poor people living in pre-fab units and jerry-rigged dwellings trying to keep out the inevitable encroachment of middle class condos and shopping malls.
Has to be said that there didn't seem to be all that much going on in the area, although it was Sunday and right at the sleepiest, hottest part of the day. As you can see from the photo, the bike path on top of the dyke is super new and nice, so you'd expect cyclists to be doing a loop, but i was one of the few who made it out to the head, where - very rarely for Taiwan - there was a guy with a cooler selling homemade lemonade, winter melon tea and other cold drinks. The lemonade was delicious. The 黑糖檸檬 black sugar lemon drink they have here is more like sweet brown water with a splash of lemon rather than the tart yellow stuff they have overseas. Very pleasant. Does not hurt teeth.
I decided to take my bike down to the boat launch where a few guys were fishing and had a quick paddle in the water, seeing as i wasn't going to make it to the sea.
Then i figured i could extend my trip instead of going home, so crossed the river and took another bike path through the wetlands toward 關渡宮 Guandu Temple. On that side of the river there were some larger paddies. I saw one with some cute paddie art, featuring little star-shaped bunnies holding hands.
One day i should go out of my way to photograph all the kawaii stuff in Taiwan. Like, the electric boxes that are converted into lego men, or the mascots by the side of the road welcoming you into the neighborhood. Although there is creepy stuff too like the scarecrow robots in front of construction sites waving flags to warn drivers, or the animatronic demons that you occasionally find in temples that didn't update their decor since the 70s. Real Big Trouble In Little China shit.
But today i looped around a bit and dropped my bike at a nearby train station, then headed up into the hills. There are some formal hiking trails around that part of town, but as usual i ended up following my OpenStreetMap which led me to all kinds of random back routes, clearly just showing the path one GPS-toting hiker or jogger picked, but missing the dozens of other informal trails that criss-cross the route. I started up one winding path into a thicket of bamboo that was creaking and cracking like something out of a horror movie. Bamboo makes the wildest noises when it's just left to grow untended. I turned back when i saw a ramshackle hut that might have been an old tea house, or a 亭 tíng, or a squatter who probably wouldn't care to have a dumb foreigner walk past their house.
Eventually i found my way through people's back yards and Chinese graveyards to a signposted trail, and climbed up to... another graveyard. But there was something important up there, because i encountered a group of hikers who were all taking selfies on the 三角點 "three corner point", which confused the hell out of me because it didn't seem like three corners of anything. Not Taipei City, not New Taipei City. Later on i looked up what 三角點 meant, and it means triangulation point. I.e. those round metal survey markers that tend to be stuck on a small concrete block on literally every fucking hill you climb, especially in Taiwan and Hong Kong/China. Who takes photo of that? I'm not sure if the group thought i was weird for asking them which were the three things that joined here, or if they are actually the weird ones for getting so excited about a spot that had no view, and was by far not the tallest peak in the area.
Anyway, i left them behind and walked up some rather weird paths along a road, past a still-active golf course, to an abandoned driving range (that people were still using), and then back into what appeared to be another signposted path. Which i promptly left because i wanted to get to an actual 山頂 mountaintop. The worst part is, i got very close to it, then i asked some other people who came down where the 山頂 was and they said "oh it's the other way", so i believed them (despite my map), and now i expect they were talking about the big momma mountain of like 900m that it was way too late in the day for me to climb with my dwindling water supply and goddamn flip-flops.
That's right, flip-flops. I 爬山 in flip-flop like Taiwan rén!
Actually the real Taiwan rén don't seem to say 爬山 (literally "climbing mountain") for hiking. I see some sign like 登山, which in China means "serious" mountain climbing, like with ropes and equipment and shit, not walking up a near-endless flight of stairs carved into the edge of steep hill. Could be local usage, but i don't know.
I mean... this kind of shit, this is what shits me about Taiwan. I can speak the language, albeit using more China mainland terms and pronunciation than Taiwan local terms and pronunciation. I can ask directions, i can let people know what i want to do, but they never parlay this into a conversation with me. Chinese people are like Americans. They kick off invasive conversations, even if you didn't want to have a conversation. I have to say i miss that a bit because i am coming up to a year in Taiwan now, and i feel like an ignorant expat, which i never did in China. Despite my best efforts, i am stuck in a foreigner bubble. No Taiwanese people want to talk to me about anything.
Anyway, back on the topic of 爬山 pá shān... Middle class Taiwanese seem to be overly defensive when it comes to the flip-flop thing, which i joked about at work a few days ago. I guess it is a kind of hick stereotype here, the guy in flip-flops, riding a scooter, chewing betel nut. People don't seem to like to be associated with that image of rural/southern Taiwan. So on the trails you will mostly see urban 有錢人 in the latest and greatest brand name hiking gear, poles, boots, the works. Never mind most of hiking trail is just stairs.
So it was a really nice surprise when i reached one section that my map was telling me to go down, but i had popped out in a mountaintop village and there was a big, unleashed dog standing in the middle of the road. I was debating going all the way back and taking a different fork, and along comes my guy in ragged yellow T-shirt and flip-flops looking local as can be. I asked him if it was possible to get down because my map said yes, and he told me to just nut up and walk past the dog, which i did, and followed him down an unmarked staircase in between people's houses, which eventually led back to a trail going into the jungle, where the bugs had started up their deafening late afternoon screech.
I thought the dude was a village local, but perhaps he was a hiker too, because he bounded down the trail ahead of me, and i eventually caught up to him (briefly) where he had breaked to do fucking chin-ups on a branch overhanging the trail.
I gotta say, something i did see a bit of in 社子島 and again got a hint of right there was a kind of Chinese man that does things to me. I'm not really into men, and more than that i'm not into sex or relationships at all any more, but every now and then i see something appealing, and this is one of those things. It's the glistening bare chest of an older Chinese man who seems to have worked in the sun every day of his life. There's something really attractive about it to me, and it's something you rarely see in Taiwan (or at least Taipei) due to the tendency for everyone to cover themselves from head to toe the moment a single ray of sun comes out. It's almost subversive to have a tan here. Now i should also put the brakes on the stereotype for a second: anyone who has spent longer than 5 minutes in East Asia should know that the men here are not universally fit, slim and hairless. There are plenty of overweight bear types. In fact i'd say a lot more of those than hard-bod kung-fu masters. But when i do see a unicorn, i'll take it for the gift it is. It's nice to see attractive people when you're on an adventure. Like seeing a pretty flower in bloom or a sunset.
Anywho, i made it back to civilization, and spent the last little bit of the descent following a creek. At the bottom i found a Youbike station and jumped on the last bike there, cut back across the bridge to 社子島, got back on the river side of the dyke, then followed the greenway home, passing significantly more people on the way back than the way out. People who avoided the peak heat and went for a late afternoon/evening ride, i suppose. But me, i love to go during the hottest and quietest time of day. The air is still thick and heavy, and i guess soon the typhoon is going to dump half the Pacific on our heads. Oh well. I had a good day.
Which isn't to say i have turned back into a teetotaller. But whereas before it was equivalent of a couple six-packs a week, sometimes more, now it's like a couple cans a week. I will say, though, the other day i remembered why i like drugs, including alcohol. Because they let you set your brain chemistry how you want it to be. It's easy to forget that i was once diagnosed with, treated for and hospitalized due to manic depression aka bipolar disorder. It's easy to forget because ever since i stopped marinating myself in helplessness and refocused my life around the things that i love and cut out (almost) all of the things that stress me out, i realized i didn't need meds any more, didn't need to keep going to a shrink, didn't need to center my whole identity around mental health.
But, of course, there is still something there. Sometimes my brain does charge off on its own shit and i do or say something really inappropriate for the circumstance because i started zipping into a hypomanic rush where the whole universe starts spinning around me and obviously i am the funniest and cleverest and bestest person so you all must listen to me stop. Because i deliberately have a personal life that features zero other people, the blast radius is limited, but sometimes the crazy leaks out at work and then - even if people ignore me, which in this case they thankfully did - it still has a fallout on my own mental health because then i start getting anxiety about what i said and then i start getting anxiety about the fact that if i have anxiety i might crash and depression really sucks and i can't afford it because shit is going down at work and i have stuff to do.
That running commentary on myself that ricochets inside my skull, making me do or say dumb things, or stress about things that didn't need to be stressed about, or starts talking me into a corner... Fuuuck! That is when drinking is great. Or doing whatever drug. Because you know exactly what you are going to get. You know where your headspace is going to be when you are coming up, you know where it's going to be when you are high, and what will happen when you come down. It gives a very clear map of your mental state for the next couple days, and that's exactly what people who are going bananas want. A predictable bananas-going.
So when you're clean and sober and cray-cray, you got two choices, you smash hard on cognitive behavioral therapy and offshoots like mindfulness and bla bla bla and your personal life becomes like a job. Or you get on the doctor-prescribed psychiatric meds, which is just replacing one drug with another, except now you have to "keep coming back" to some doctor who will check to make sure it's actually working the way it was supposed to. Just like being a junkie, it's exhausting.
Anyway. For now i am on my drug-free (ish) kick again, so let's see how it goes. Computer games help. They distract from the internal and potentially-damaging thoughts and keep me focused on a meaningless, harmless activity. Repeat until too tired to continue. Sleep. Wake up. Go to work. The end.
But it's summer, goddamnit, and i am missing some of the few primo sunny days here.
The typhoon got my ass in gear.
One thing that i am sure all of you who live in a hurricane/typhoon area are familiar with is how emergency services and the media will go nuts any time there is a storm that may or may not actually hit. Meanwhile local people do not give shit till the last minute. So this typhoon Mawar is big one na, probably it go north to Okinawa, we shall see, but they say on Sunday batten down the hatches. But even if typhoon just float by, we still get rained on, so instead of hatch-battening, i got some sun.
I decided to be safe and stay closer to the city, so i started by biking up to the 社子島 Shezidao peninsula that i wrote about a couple entries ago. It is close-ish to central Taipei, on a peninsula where the Keelung River and the Tamsui River meet. I know the local residents are resisting development in the area, which led me to believe that it was a small rural bubble in the city, but now that i biked round there, it's actually more like a warehouse and light industrial district. There is some smallhold farming there, but it's not a huge block like there is on the other side of the river outside the dyke. I guess it's less about rural people wanting to keep their heritage, and more just about poor people living in pre-fab units and jerry-rigged dwellings trying to keep out the inevitable encroachment of middle class condos and shopping malls.
Has to be said that there didn't seem to be all that much going on in the area, although it was Sunday and right at the sleepiest, hottest part of the day. As you can see from the photo, the bike path on top of the dyke is super new and nice, so you'd expect cyclists to be doing a loop, but i was one of the few who made it out to the head, where - very rarely for Taiwan - there was a guy with a cooler selling homemade lemonade, winter melon tea and other cold drinks. The lemonade was delicious. The 黑糖檸檬 black sugar lemon drink they have here is more like sweet brown water with a splash of lemon rather than the tart yellow stuff they have overseas. Very pleasant. Does not hurt teeth.
I decided to take my bike down to the boat launch where a few guys were fishing and had a quick paddle in the water, seeing as i wasn't going to make it to the sea.
Then i figured i could extend my trip instead of going home, so crossed the river and took another bike path through the wetlands toward 關渡宮 Guandu Temple. On that side of the river there were some larger paddies. I saw one with some cute paddie art, featuring little star-shaped bunnies holding hands.
One day i should go out of my way to photograph all the kawaii stuff in Taiwan. Like, the electric boxes that are converted into lego men, or the mascots by the side of the road welcoming you into the neighborhood. Although there is creepy stuff too like the scarecrow robots in front of construction sites waving flags to warn drivers, or the animatronic demons that you occasionally find in temples that didn't update their decor since the 70s. Real Big Trouble In Little China shit.
But today i looped around a bit and dropped my bike at a nearby train station, then headed up into the hills. There are some formal hiking trails around that part of town, but as usual i ended up following my OpenStreetMap which led me to all kinds of random back routes, clearly just showing the path one GPS-toting hiker or jogger picked, but missing the dozens of other informal trails that criss-cross the route. I started up one winding path into a thicket of bamboo that was creaking and cracking like something out of a horror movie. Bamboo makes the wildest noises when it's just left to grow untended. I turned back when i saw a ramshackle hut that might have been an old tea house, or a 亭 tíng, or a squatter who probably wouldn't care to have a dumb foreigner walk past their house.
Eventually i found my way through people's back yards and Chinese graveyards to a signposted trail, and climbed up to... another graveyard. But there was something important up there, because i encountered a group of hikers who were all taking selfies on the 三角點 "three corner point", which confused the hell out of me because it didn't seem like three corners of anything. Not Taipei City, not New Taipei City. Later on i looked up what 三角點 meant, and it means triangulation point. I.e. those round metal survey markers that tend to be stuck on a small concrete block on literally every fucking hill you climb, especially in Taiwan and Hong Kong/China. Who takes photo of that? I'm not sure if the group thought i was weird for asking them which were the three things that joined here, or if they are actually the weird ones for getting so excited about a spot that had no view, and was by far not the tallest peak in the area.
Anyway, i left them behind and walked up some rather weird paths along a road, past a still-active golf course, to an abandoned driving range (that people were still using), and then back into what appeared to be another signposted path. Which i promptly left because i wanted to get to an actual 山頂 mountaintop. The worst part is, i got very close to it, then i asked some other people who came down where the 山頂 was and they said "oh it's the other way", so i believed them (despite my map), and now i expect they were talking about the big momma mountain of like 900m that it was way too late in the day for me to climb with my dwindling water supply and goddamn flip-flops.
That's right, flip-flops. I 爬山 in flip-flop like Taiwan rén!
Actually the real Taiwan rén don't seem to say 爬山 (literally "climbing mountain") for hiking. I see some sign like 登山, which in China means "serious" mountain climbing, like with ropes and equipment and shit, not walking up a near-endless flight of stairs carved into the edge of steep hill. Could be local usage, but i don't know.
I mean... this kind of shit, this is what shits me about Taiwan. I can speak the language, albeit using more China mainland terms and pronunciation than Taiwan local terms and pronunciation. I can ask directions, i can let people know what i want to do, but they never parlay this into a conversation with me. Chinese people are like Americans. They kick off invasive conversations, even if you didn't want to have a conversation. I have to say i miss that a bit because i am coming up to a year in Taiwan now, and i feel like an ignorant expat, which i never did in China. Despite my best efforts, i am stuck in a foreigner bubble. No Taiwanese people want to talk to me about anything.
Anyway, back on the topic of 爬山 pá shān... Middle class Taiwanese seem to be overly defensive when it comes to the flip-flop thing, which i joked about at work a few days ago. I guess it is a kind of hick stereotype here, the guy in flip-flops, riding a scooter, chewing betel nut. People don't seem to like to be associated with that image of rural/southern Taiwan. So on the trails you will mostly see urban 有錢人 in the latest and greatest brand name hiking gear, poles, boots, the works. Never mind most of hiking trail is just stairs.
So it was a really nice surprise when i reached one section that my map was telling me to go down, but i had popped out in a mountaintop village and there was a big, unleashed dog standing in the middle of the road. I was debating going all the way back and taking a different fork, and along comes my guy in ragged yellow T-shirt and flip-flops looking local as can be. I asked him if it was possible to get down because my map said yes, and he told me to just nut up and walk past the dog, which i did, and followed him down an unmarked staircase in between people's houses, which eventually led back to a trail going into the jungle, where the bugs had started up their deafening late afternoon screech.
I thought the dude was a village local, but perhaps he was a hiker too, because he bounded down the trail ahead of me, and i eventually caught up to him (briefly) where he had breaked to do fucking chin-ups on a branch overhanging the trail.
I gotta say, something i did see a bit of in 社子島 and again got a hint of right there was a kind of Chinese man that does things to me. I'm not really into men, and more than that i'm not into sex or relationships at all any more, but every now and then i see something appealing, and this is one of those things. It's the glistening bare chest of an older Chinese man who seems to have worked in the sun every day of his life. There's something really attractive about it to me, and it's something you rarely see in Taiwan (or at least Taipei) due to the tendency for everyone to cover themselves from head to toe the moment a single ray of sun comes out. It's almost subversive to have a tan here. Now i should also put the brakes on the stereotype for a second: anyone who has spent longer than 5 minutes in East Asia should know that the men here are not universally fit, slim and hairless. There are plenty of overweight bear types. In fact i'd say a lot more of those than hard-bod kung-fu masters. But when i do see a unicorn, i'll take it for the gift it is. It's nice to see attractive people when you're on an adventure. Like seeing a pretty flower in bloom or a sunset.
Anywho, i made it back to civilization, and spent the last little bit of the descent following a creek. At the bottom i found a Youbike station and jumped on the last bike there, cut back across the bridge to 社子島, got back on the river side of the dyke, then followed the greenway home, passing significantly more people on the way back than the way out. People who avoided the peak heat and went for a late afternoon/evening ride, i suppose. But me, i love to go during the hottest and quietest time of day. The air is still thick and heavy, and i guess soon the typhoon is going to dump half the Pacific on our heads. Oh well. I had a good day.