back in the work vibe
I was hoping to make another food post today, but things didn't turn out that way.
Thursday turned out to be a "snow day", or whatever you call it when the government orders a shutdown because of a typhoon. I saw the message but assumed it only applied to government offices, so i walked to walk in the morning, due to the Youbike public bike system being offline. The city was fairly quiet, and by the time i got near the office and saw several other workers standing outside shuttered shopfronts looking confused, i was not optimistic. Headed up the elevator and it was pitch black inside. Guess everyone was off. Walking home, i got caught in those scattered but heavy showers that seems to happen on the edge of a typhoon. I got a little soggy, but the market stalls near my house were open so i picked up some goodies and enjoyed my free day off.
Well, not really a day off, because i logged on and of course there was a problem in production that i spent several hours fixing so as not to leave my European colleagues in the shit. A bit later my grandboss appeared online, who is currently in Europe, and he advised members of the team who were confused about whether they should work from home or take the government-mandated day off that they should work from home because we are white collar workers and are issued laptops for exactly this reason. We haven't had an HR person in the Taipei office since last year so i don't think anybody really knows what the law says, but quite frankly when everyone in the European offices not only gets paid twice as much as we do but also gets twice as much annual leave as we do, i am not going to bend over backwards to work from home when there's a once-in-a-blue-moon typhoon day. So i switched off around lunch time.
Of course, the typhoon didn't hit, didn't even really come close, but it was pretty windy and rainy for a couple days.
Friday night i got sucked into playing a computer game till 4 in the morning. It was mindless and it's not an especially moving or notable game, but i had fun. Then Saturday - after getting the groceries - i decided thanks to a comment on a different LiveJournal that i would try to watch one of the Star Treks that i remember from my teenage years.
I probably don't write about it much, but i am a big Star Trek fan. Like a lot of culturally British kids of my generation, i watched Doctor Who growing up. And, yes, i literally hid behind the couch so Daleks couldn't get me. Not while i was watching it on TV, but when i discovered the novels. (Books are scarier, after all.) After the divorce, one of the things mom did (deliberately or not) to help construct our new little family was start the Doctor Who Club. Every week, when Doctor Who was on, mom opened a family bag of potato chips, poured them into a bowl, and we all sat down to watch the Doctor and eat chips and dip. It was a little ritual, a secret thing we did that was just for us. And then Doctor Who got canceled. Whatever would we do?
Enter Star Trek: The Next Generation. And the Star Trek Club. Every week we watched Picard and the gang boldly go, and it was great. Of course we had watched bits and pieces of the original series on syndication over the years, but it's different when a show is airing in real time. It feels more special.
I don't remember when the formal Star Trek Club ended, i guess eventually we grew out of it, but all three of us - my mom, sister and me - still watched it every week. By the time i moved out of home i was watching Deep Space 9 and Voyager. I even caught a decent chunk of Enterprise, although that came out during an awkward period in my life when my mental health was a disaster, shows were hard to watch online, and i didn't always own or have free access to a television.
Thank god the internet got fast and now everybody can watch whatever show they like on a laptop, or even a phone.
Naturally, i was as thrilled as every Trekkie when a few years ago it was announced that Star Trek was coming back to TV. I watched plenty of other sci-fi since, of course. I watch pretty much everything that is set in the future and/or has space travel in it, even if it's terrible. And some of it is very, very good. Much better than Star Trek ever was. But Star Trek still holds a special place in my heart. Is it because i grew up a military brat and Star Trek focuses on a military-like organization? Is it because it shows a future i believe in - one in which most people are nice and not trying to kill each other? Is it simply because i like the idea of exploring strange new worlds? It's probably all of those things.
And then the new Star Treks happened, and they were... fine. It was great to see that universe on TV again, and every now and then there would be episodes i really enjoyed. But the modern trend toward telling serialized stories in relatively short seasons, plus the now-mandatory fan-fic/romance elements and writers trying so hard to try make a cultural impact or say something important... it leaves behind a lot of the simpler pleasure of what Star Trek once was to me - a comfortable hour each week where i could tune in to see principled, professional people clocking in to do their jobs competently, even as they found themselves in one fantastic situation after the next.
I never went back to watch the old Star Treks because i was scared that they wouldn't be as good as my memories. But Saturday i did just that. I picked Voyager - the Star Trek series that even while it was being aired was getting criticized for being too simplistic, for not following Deep Space 9 into the more ambitious, serialized route inspired by Babylon 5 (or, i suppose, British sci-fi like Doctor Who). Voyager is the story of a ship lost in space, decades away from home. Every episode they encounter an anomaly, or they get a tip about something that could get them home faster. Some adventure occurs. Then at the end of the episode they're no closer to home than they were before. If any traumatic events occurred, there is little-to-no acknowledgement of them in the next episode. There isn't a great deal of character growth, but that's not really the point. It's the police procedural of sci-fi shows.
And, you guys, it's great. Yes, there are better and worse episodes. Some of it is cringeworthy. One thing that stands out for me as being very of its time is the indigenous character's New Age-y traditions. You can try to imagine it's a futuristic take on pan-Indianism, but more likely it's just a writer trying to include native-like elements into the story in a clumsy way. I can't really complain about it, though, when i've felt similar awkwardness in the new Treks when they tackle issues around gender or other topics closer to my own experience. It's tough to try to write an inclusive story that doesn't come across as preachy, or pandering, or contrived. So i give it a pass because... it's fine. Old Trek is still good. It's more or less exactly how i remember it. Comforting.
This morning i had to tear myself away from it because it was sunny out and i knew i'd feel sad tomorrow if i didn't go out and enjoy that for a bit. So i cycled out to Bali. It was really, really fucking hot out. Like heatstroke hot. I stopped a bunch of times for watermelon juice, winter melon tea, grass jelly, shaved ice...
I visited the Liao Tian Ding temple, which is a temple for a relatively recent folk hero of Taiwan. He was a young thief who was around during the Japanese colonial era who gained somewhat of a Robin Hood reputation for outwitting the authorities and donating some of his spoils to the poor. It doesn't sound like he was all that great of a person in real life, but after he was beaten to death by one of his accomplices he became a local legend, and now he is venerated at a temple on the site where he was buried. It's no small temple - three stories, with another mini-temple and a statue out back. I thought it was kind of neat to visit a place that celebrates someone who by all accounts was a criminal and - most surprisingly - only died about 100 years ago. Even in the modern world, we can still have new legends. Isn't that wild?
I turned around after the temple. Didn't even go the km or two further to paddle my feet in the sea. I was thrashed when i got home. It was too hot for a long ride. But after i rehydrated and cooled down, i felt satisfied. It was a good ride. All that remained to do was make dinner.
Saturday morning i found the magical bread shop which sells 饃 mó, a kind of heavy, Central Asian-style flatbread they use to make burger-like things in northwest China. I ate it a lot when i lived in Shenzhen because it was about the closest thing i could get to real bread there. Here in Taipei you can easily find baguettes, which are great, but this sort of dense bread is still quite rare. I ran across the shop by accident a couple months ago and then went back several times since but could never find it again. It's just a hole in the wall without any signs where (when it's open) there is a table with 饃 and various other 餅 flatbreads and 饅頭 plain steamed bun. When the shutters are closed, it just looks like a random shutter on the front of a random building.
Anyway, i got the mós, sliced them in two and gave them a quick toast in the pan, after frying up a few wheat gluten sausage-like things plus garlic, chili and bok choy. It was a fantastic meal that hit some kind of hotdog spot for me. Eat hotdog. Watch Star Trek. Good weekend.
Alas, tomorrow back to work. Ughhh.
Thursday turned out to be a "snow day", or whatever you call it when the government orders a shutdown because of a typhoon. I saw the message but assumed it only applied to government offices, so i walked to walk in the morning, due to the Youbike public bike system being offline. The city was fairly quiet, and by the time i got near the office and saw several other workers standing outside shuttered shopfronts looking confused, i was not optimistic. Headed up the elevator and it was pitch black inside. Guess everyone was off. Walking home, i got caught in those scattered but heavy showers that seems to happen on the edge of a typhoon. I got a little soggy, but the market stalls near my house were open so i picked up some goodies and enjoyed my free day off.
Well, not really a day off, because i logged on and of course there was a problem in production that i spent several hours fixing so as not to leave my European colleagues in the shit. A bit later my grandboss appeared online, who is currently in Europe, and he advised members of the team who were confused about whether they should work from home or take the government-mandated day off that they should work from home because we are white collar workers and are issued laptops for exactly this reason. We haven't had an HR person in the Taipei office since last year so i don't think anybody really knows what the law says, but quite frankly when everyone in the European offices not only gets paid twice as much as we do but also gets twice as much annual leave as we do, i am not going to bend over backwards to work from home when there's a once-in-a-blue-moon typhoon day. So i switched off around lunch time.
Of course, the typhoon didn't hit, didn't even really come close, but it was pretty windy and rainy for a couple days.
Friday night i got sucked into playing a computer game till 4 in the morning. It was mindless and it's not an especially moving or notable game, but i had fun. Then Saturday - after getting the groceries - i decided thanks to a comment on a different LiveJournal that i would try to watch one of the Star Treks that i remember from my teenage years.
I probably don't write about it much, but i am a big Star Trek fan. Like a lot of culturally British kids of my generation, i watched Doctor Who growing up. And, yes, i literally hid behind the couch so Daleks couldn't get me. Not while i was watching it on TV, but when i discovered the novels. (Books are scarier, after all.) After the divorce, one of the things mom did (deliberately or not) to help construct our new little family was start the Doctor Who Club. Every week, when Doctor Who was on, mom opened a family bag of potato chips, poured them into a bowl, and we all sat down to watch the Doctor and eat chips and dip. It was a little ritual, a secret thing we did that was just for us. And then Doctor Who got canceled. Whatever would we do?
Enter Star Trek: The Next Generation. And the Star Trek Club. Every week we watched Picard and the gang boldly go, and it was great. Of course we had watched bits and pieces of the original series on syndication over the years, but it's different when a show is airing in real time. It feels more special.
I don't remember when the formal Star Trek Club ended, i guess eventually we grew out of it, but all three of us - my mom, sister and me - still watched it every week. By the time i moved out of home i was watching Deep Space 9 and Voyager. I even caught a decent chunk of Enterprise, although that came out during an awkward period in my life when my mental health was a disaster, shows were hard to watch online, and i didn't always own or have free access to a television.
Thank god the internet got fast and now everybody can watch whatever show they like on a laptop, or even a phone.
Naturally, i was as thrilled as every Trekkie when a few years ago it was announced that Star Trek was coming back to TV. I watched plenty of other sci-fi since, of course. I watch pretty much everything that is set in the future and/or has space travel in it, even if it's terrible. And some of it is very, very good. Much better than Star Trek ever was. But Star Trek still holds a special place in my heart. Is it because i grew up a military brat and Star Trek focuses on a military-like organization? Is it because it shows a future i believe in - one in which most people are nice and not trying to kill each other? Is it simply because i like the idea of exploring strange new worlds? It's probably all of those things.
And then the new Star Treks happened, and they were... fine. It was great to see that universe on TV again, and every now and then there would be episodes i really enjoyed. But the modern trend toward telling serialized stories in relatively short seasons, plus the now-mandatory fan-fic/romance elements and writers trying so hard to try make a cultural impact or say something important... it leaves behind a lot of the simpler pleasure of what Star Trek once was to me - a comfortable hour each week where i could tune in to see principled, professional people clocking in to do their jobs competently, even as they found themselves in one fantastic situation after the next.
I never went back to watch the old Star Treks because i was scared that they wouldn't be as good as my memories. But Saturday i did just that. I picked Voyager - the Star Trek series that even while it was being aired was getting criticized for being too simplistic, for not following Deep Space 9 into the more ambitious, serialized route inspired by Babylon 5 (or, i suppose, British sci-fi like Doctor Who). Voyager is the story of a ship lost in space, decades away from home. Every episode they encounter an anomaly, or they get a tip about something that could get them home faster. Some adventure occurs. Then at the end of the episode they're no closer to home than they were before. If any traumatic events occurred, there is little-to-no acknowledgement of them in the next episode. There isn't a great deal of character growth, but that's not really the point. It's the police procedural of sci-fi shows.
And, you guys, it's great. Yes, there are better and worse episodes. Some of it is cringeworthy. One thing that stands out for me as being very of its time is the indigenous character's New Age-y traditions. You can try to imagine it's a futuristic take on pan-Indianism, but more likely it's just a writer trying to include native-like elements into the story in a clumsy way. I can't really complain about it, though, when i've felt similar awkwardness in the new Treks when they tackle issues around gender or other topics closer to my own experience. It's tough to try to write an inclusive story that doesn't come across as preachy, or pandering, or contrived. So i give it a pass because... it's fine. Old Trek is still good. It's more or less exactly how i remember it. Comforting.
This morning i had to tear myself away from it because it was sunny out and i knew i'd feel sad tomorrow if i didn't go out and enjoy that for a bit. So i cycled out to Bali. It was really, really fucking hot out. Like heatstroke hot. I stopped a bunch of times for watermelon juice, winter melon tea, grass jelly, shaved ice...
I visited the Liao Tian Ding temple, which is a temple for a relatively recent folk hero of Taiwan. He was a young thief who was around during the Japanese colonial era who gained somewhat of a Robin Hood reputation for outwitting the authorities and donating some of his spoils to the poor. It doesn't sound like he was all that great of a person in real life, but after he was beaten to death by one of his accomplices he became a local legend, and now he is venerated at a temple on the site where he was buried. It's no small temple - three stories, with another mini-temple and a statue out back. I thought it was kind of neat to visit a place that celebrates someone who by all accounts was a criminal and - most surprisingly - only died about 100 years ago. Even in the modern world, we can still have new legends. Isn't that wild?
I turned around after the temple. Didn't even go the km or two further to paddle my feet in the sea. I was thrashed when i got home. It was too hot for a long ride. But after i rehydrated and cooled down, i felt satisfied. It was a good ride. All that remained to do was make dinner.
Saturday morning i found the magical bread shop which sells 饃 mó, a kind of heavy, Central Asian-style flatbread they use to make burger-like things in northwest China. I ate it a lot when i lived in Shenzhen because it was about the closest thing i could get to real bread there. Here in Taipei you can easily find baguettes, which are great, but this sort of dense bread is still quite rare. I ran across the shop by accident a couple months ago and then went back several times since but could never find it again. It's just a hole in the wall without any signs where (when it's open) there is a table with 饃 and various other 餅 flatbreads and 饅頭 plain steamed bun. When the shutters are closed, it just looks like a random shutter on the front of a random building.
Anyway, i got the mós, sliced them in two and gave them a quick toast in the pan, after frying up a few wheat gluten sausage-like things plus garlic, chili and bok choy. It was a fantastic meal that hit some kind of hotdog spot for me. Eat hotdog. Watch Star Trek. Good weekend.
Alas, tomorrow back to work. Ughhh.