jaunt part two, the stress and a hole
I left off my last entry describing my long weekend in Kaohsiung, a fun night out and a ride to the southern tree, ending in a rainstorm and bento.
The next morning i took a wander round the market, picked up some pineapple and a rice ball, chomped down my favorite southern brekky, then jumped on my bike to head up to Tainan. I plotted a route that would take me past a bunch of shuikus. Shuiku being one of the amw-language words that i use when i am talking to myself. It's the Chinese word for reservoir, 水庫 shuǐ kù, which literally means water store. It's fun to say because it's pronounced schway-koo, and thus when i go on bike rides i prefer to tell Lucy (my bike, no matter what bike i am riding) that we are off to seek schway-koos than try to utter an awkward French word that pulls my mouth into a sad, lemon-sucking pout.
I made it up to a nice little shuiku in the northern end of Kaohsiung, one that's probably crawling with visitors over the weekends but on Monday morning was completely deserted and exactly the kind of break i needed from the city and my job and all the rest of it. It had a little bike path going around it, up and down every hill, then over a rope bridge, tall bamboo leaning overhead, temples poking out from palm trees in the distance. Alas, as i turned toward Tainan proper i ended up on a large, loud freeway. I made a couple of attempts to get away from the main roads but kept getting sucked back onto them. The weather was extremely hot, the trucks were extremely loud, and i wasn't much feeling it.
Eventually i looked at the map, and looked at the weather report, and checked how much hotels were in Tainan - a city that's never much appealed to me in the first place - and decided to change direction and head to the bullet train station instead. Tainan is one of the few cities in Taiwan whose high speed rail is miles out of town, completely in the middle of nowhere, which is probably inconvenient for tourists but turned a laborious ride into a relaxing one for me. The last 15-20km i was cycling through rice paddies, down tiny one-lane farm roads with only the odd scooter zipping past. At one point i came up through a canal-way that went right through the middle of a factory, which seemed like it should've been private property, but the chap in the hard hat at the bridge seemed utterly unbothered when i rolled up and he waved me through.
The mix of rural and industrial landscape out on the edges of the cities is some of my favorite places to ride. When i cycle past large factories it puts me in awe of all the epic stuff humans build, it's a celebration of our civilization. I didn't get those feelings when i cycled through expansive residential districts in Canada and the US, and i think it's because those spaces are so unnecessary. Factories get bigger because it's not cost effective to make them smaller - they would be if they could be. Houses get bigger because the owners are greedy, grabbing land and monopolizing it for their own selfish pursuits. So massive factories and grain silos and rice paddies and aquaculture ponds make me proud of what our species has accomplished, whereas castles and mansions and houses with lawns and white picket fences tend to make me depressed.
Not that everything rural is something to be proud of either, mind you. I always wonder how many people who eat meat and dairy have traveled slowly through the parts of the country where their food comes from. Because dear lord, if you chose what you ate based on how it smelled, animals would surely be the very fucking bottom of every list. Even seafood isn't that bad when it's straight out of the ocean. But riding past the stench of chicken barns and hearing the screeching and screaming echo for miles around, it's amazing people still line up for 蛋餅 egg pancake every morning. Fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes - they just sit there quietly looking delicious, then you harvest them and they are delicious. The end.
Anyway, after the farms and a quick stop in a village for sweet tea, it was on to the outlet mall and office park nestled up next to the high speed rail. I folded up and bagged my bike, bought a ticket and zoomed on home.
All in all, it was a pretty successful trip. However i did notice that along the way my bike had suffered an injury. The rear rack has been thoroughly bent, probably due to being smashed around the high speed rail luggage nook as other passengers wrenched their suitcases around and over it, which doesn't affect its utility as a rack, but does mean that the bike no longer converts to "free standing" position when you flip the back wheel in. This was exactly the kind of thing i wanted to test on this trip, and i think it unfortunately confirms my fear that putting a folding bike in a soft bag and expecting it not to get destroyed in a battle royale with wheelie hard shell suitcases is wishful thinking. If it doesn't rain too much today, i will take it back to the shop and see if they can remove and mallet the rack back into shape.
Because last weekend i decided to do a Bali loop instead. Work was hectic so i just wanted to get out for a ride and not work on the weekend. I did, however, contact my landlord and complain about my mattress.
This house - like most places i have lived in over the past 6-7 years - came with a bed. But i think it's the first place i've ever lived whose mattress was made from springs. Or maybe previous places also had mattresses made from springs, i don't really pay any attention. All i know is the only times in my life i have ever bought a mattress, it was either a futon or camping mat or a rolled-up foam thing. So i don't really understand all this spring business. Seems like a really over-complicated way to construct a bed.
Which is why i didn't really register that the mattress had broken a year or so back. I think what happened is that these spring mattresses are made up of lots of little springs, and sometimes one or two springs can break, and that doesn't seem any different to the usual level of discomfort, but it starts a chain reaction which weakens the other ones, perhaps? Who fucking knows. All i know is that spring mattresses are super uncomfortable if you use your bed - as i do - for literally everything. I sit on my bed with my legs over the side like a stool. I sit cross-legged in the middle of my bed like a magic carpet. I curl up in a tiny ball like a fetus. I splooge out like a fly on the windscreen. But mostly i lie on my stomach, propped up on my elbows watching TV, browsing the internet, playing computer games, eating dinner, doing work, just living my life. And it was right under my elbows where the first springs broke.
Because i am one of those people who when i am inconvenienced in my personal life i just suffer and get on with it, i lived with the broken springs, even as the hole in my bed turned from some annoying divets with spiky metal edges that dug uncomfortably into my sides into a yawning pit, 6 inches lower than the rest of the mattress. Not that the rest of the so-called mattress provided much support anyway. The whole damn bed was squishy from the start. Every earthquake left me wobbling around like a blancmange. And we get a shit-ton of earthquakes here. It fucking sucked. But i just put up with it, because eh, whatever. People sleep on cardboard in the rain, so what do i have to complain about?
To be honest, sleeping on cardboard would be a lot more comfortable than sleeping on a mattress with springs.
Anywho, long story short, on the advice of a friend who was appalled at my situation when she found out how i'd been living, i told my landlord, and literally the same day she took me to a mattress shop (never been to one before) where i was told to lie down on different trial mattresses (never did that before) and pick one. To the bemusement of my landlord and the disappointment of the salesman, i picked the one that happened to be the cheapest and the hardest, but it left me baffled at the kinds of people who apparently want to spend more money for mattresses that sink underneath you. Totally impractical, you can't do anything! How can you type a 1500-word LJ entry when the platform you're trying to lean on collapses like a fucking soufflé wherever you lean? Ridiculous.
I have to say, the last few days have been some of the best sleeps i've had since moving here, although i still have some anxiety that these rock-hard springs are going to fuck me anyway someday. I guess you can't even buy mattresses without springs in Taiwan? Who knows. Weird.
This year the government changed around the 中秋節 Mid Autumn Festival holiday so that they didn't shuffle around working days to create a long weekend, we just got Tuesday off, which at first i was disappointed about, but then i remembered trying to travel anywhere on a long weekend sucks, so i embraced the random mid-week holiday. There was a small techno party happening in the basement of a New York pizzeria over on the student/hipster side of town, so i went there instead. And it was actually pretty good.
The first two (local) DJs played Detroit-y techno mixed with long, dubby hi-NRG instrumentals, which seems to be a mildly popular revival genre in Taipei at the moment. It's kind of great hearing sweaty, druggy Giorgio Moroder/Patrick Cowley/Bobby Orlando type stuff in the 21st century, remnants of a long-gone gay scene. But then the headlining DJ came on, a dude out of the Tel Aviv gay scene who moved to Berlin and played the Berghain once upon a time, and decided to switch the mood to the most generic, paint-by-numbers, vocal-hook tech-house you ever heard. He did eventually mix it up to include some disco and hi-NRG and even a freestyle surprise, but it didn't really capture me like the first two did. Still, it was kind of hilarious to be dancing in the basement of a pizza parlor, with space for maybe 25-30 people at best, surrounded by cushions and a strobe light and a disco ball and freakin pomelos (the traditional fruit of Mid Autumn Festival), which one joker started juggling on the dancefloor. Good times, even though not a single person spoke to me, in typical Taipei style. Such a different vibe from the laid back Kaohsiung crew.
And that was my mid-Autumn. Got home around 4am, slept, ate a pomelo for late breakfast, and started playing Star Trek: Resurgence, which is the best Star Trek story since the 90s. I cannot express to non-Trekkies how much of a thrill it is to just walk around a spaceship with a tricorder scanning stuff and finding anomalies and trying to convince feuding aliens that peace is the best option. It's a love letter to everyone who grew up with TNG.
Side note: i have not paid much attention to AOC and "the squad" because i don't follow American politics near as much as i used to back in the Clinton/Bush years when i still dreamed of moving to the country, but during the DNC i saw Ocasio-Cortez on Colbert mention watching Star Trek: Voyager with her dad when she was a kid, and how seeing Janeway be a strong captain made her feel like women could do anything, and that story right there is exactly why it's so important to have shows like Star Trek TNG and Voyager. That is: shows which champion diversity and diplomacy and not being a fucking asshole. Sci-fi should inspire the next generation of leaders, it should give them trust in governance and hope for a better future. It doesn't all need to be the umpteenth iteration of "science is evil, society is collapsing, humankind is doomed, nothing left to do but stockpile guns and rampage across the wastelands like the savages we are". Sorry, no, most of us are better than that.
So here are my scattered thoughts. I wanted to write more, better, closer to the time, but i was too tired. And the next week or two are going to be even worse. It's that time of year when we have the corporate meetup, and this time it's not in Switzerland or Macedonia, it's in Taiwan. So from tomorrow - Sunday - we will be welcoming colleagues to our hot, wet, earthquake-shattered and typhoon-swept tropical isle. Not only will there be lots of presentations and workshops and lightning talks and maybe a hackathon, we also have to be hosts, and travel out to the east coast for teambuilding next weekend... It's going to be a lot. Wish me luck. As if i wasn't exhausted enough already.
At least my bed doesn't have a giant hole in it any more.
The next morning i took a wander round the market, picked up some pineapple and a rice ball, chomped down my favorite southern brekky, then jumped on my bike to head up to Tainan. I plotted a route that would take me past a bunch of shuikus. Shuiku being one of the amw-language words that i use when i am talking to myself. It's the Chinese word for reservoir, 水庫 shuǐ kù, which literally means water store. It's fun to say because it's pronounced schway-koo, and thus when i go on bike rides i prefer to tell Lucy (my bike, no matter what bike i am riding) that we are off to seek schway-koos than try to utter an awkward French word that pulls my mouth into a sad, lemon-sucking pout.
I made it up to a nice little shuiku in the northern end of Kaohsiung, one that's probably crawling with visitors over the weekends but on Monday morning was completely deserted and exactly the kind of break i needed from the city and my job and all the rest of it. It had a little bike path going around it, up and down every hill, then over a rope bridge, tall bamboo leaning overhead, temples poking out from palm trees in the distance. Alas, as i turned toward Tainan proper i ended up on a large, loud freeway. I made a couple of attempts to get away from the main roads but kept getting sucked back onto them. The weather was extremely hot, the trucks were extremely loud, and i wasn't much feeling it.
Eventually i looked at the map, and looked at the weather report, and checked how much hotels were in Tainan - a city that's never much appealed to me in the first place - and decided to change direction and head to the bullet train station instead. Tainan is one of the few cities in Taiwan whose high speed rail is miles out of town, completely in the middle of nowhere, which is probably inconvenient for tourists but turned a laborious ride into a relaxing one for me. The last 15-20km i was cycling through rice paddies, down tiny one-lane farm roads with only the odd scooter zipping past. At one point i came up through a canal-way that went right through the middle of a factory, which seemed like it should've been private property, but the chap in the hard hat at the bridge seemed utterly unbothered when i rolled up and he waved me through.
The mix of rural and industrial landscape out on the edges of the cities is some of my favorite places to ride. When i cycle past large factories it puts me in awe of all the epic stuff humans build, it's a celebration of our civilization. I didn't get those feelings when i cycled through expansive residential districts in Canada and the US, and i think it's because those spaces are so unnecessary. Factories get bigger because it's not cost effective to make them smaller - they would be if they could be. Houses get bigger because the owners are greedy, grabbing land and monopolizing it for their own selfish pursuits. So massive factories and grain silos and rice paddies and aquaculture ponds make me proud of what our species has accomplished, whereas castles and mansions and houses with lawns and white picket fences tend to make me depressed.
Not that everything rural is something to be proud of either, mind you. I always wonder how many people who eat meat and dairy have traveled slowly through the parts of the country where their food comes from. Because dear lord, if you chose what you ate based on how it smelled, animals would surely be the very fucking bottom of every list. Even seafood isn't that bad when it's straight out of the ocean. But riding past the stench of chicken barns and hearing the screeching and screaming echo for miles around, it's amazing people still line up for 蛋餅 egg pancake every morning. Fruits, vegetables, grains, legumes - they just sit there quietly looking delicious, then you harvest them and they are delicious. The end.
Anyway, after the farms and a quick stop in a village for sweet tea, it was on to the outlet mall and office park nestled up next to the high speed rail. I folded up and bagged my bike, bought a ticket and zoomed on home.
All in all, it was a pretty successful trip. However i did notice that along the way my bike had suffered an injury. The rear rack has been thoroughly bent, probably due to being smashed around the high speed rail luggage nook as other passengers wrenched their suitcases around and over it, which doesn't affect its utility as a rack, but does mean that the bike no longer converts to "free standing" position when you flip the back wheel in. This was exactly the kind of thing i wanted to test on this trip, and i think it unfortunately confirms my fear that putting a folding bike in a soft bag and expecting it not to get destroyed in a battle royale with wheelie hard shell suitcases is wishful thinking. If it doesn't rain too much today, i will take it back to the shop and see if they can remove and mallet the rack back into shape.
Because last weekend i decided to do a Bali loop instead. Work was hectic so i just wanted to get out for a ride and not work on the weekend. I did, however, contact my landlord and complain about my mattress.
This house - like most places i have lived in over the past 6-7 years - came with a bed. But i think it's the first place i've ever lived whose mattress was made from springs. Or maybe previous places also had mattresses made from springs, i don't really pay any attention. All i know is the only times in my life i have ever bought a mattress, it was either a futon or camping mat or a rolled-up foam thing. So i don't really understand all this spring business. Seems like a really over-complicated way to construct a bed.
Which is why i didn't really register that the mattress had broken a year or so back. I think what happened is that these spring mattresses are made up of lots of little springs, and sometimes one or two springs can break, and that doesn't seem any different to the usual level of discomfort, but it starts a chain reaction which weakens the other ones, perhaps? Who fucking knows. All i know is that spring mattresses are super uncomfortable if you use your bed - as i do - for literally everything. I sit on my bed with my legs over the side like a stool. I sit cross-legged in the middle of my bed like a magic carpet. I curl up in a tiny ball like a fetus. I splooge out like a fly on the windscreen. But mostly i lie on my stomach, propped up on my elbows watching TV, browsing the internet, playing computer games, eating dinner, doing work, just living my life. And it was right under my elbows where the first springs broke.
Because i am one of those people who when i am inconvenienced in my personal life i just suffer and get on with it, i lived with the broken springs, even as the hole in my bed turned from some annoying divets with spiky metal edges that dug uncomfortably into my sides into a yawning pit, 6 inches lower than the rest of the mattress. Not that the rest of the so-called mattress provided much support anyway. The whole damn bed was squishy from the start. Every earthquake left me wobbling around like a blancmange. And we get a shit-ton of earthquakes here. It fucking sucked. But i just put up with it, because eh, whatever. People sleep on cardboard in the rain, so what do i have to complain about?
To be honest, sleeping on cardboard would be a lot more comfortable than sleeping on a mattress with springs.
Anywho, long story short, on the advice of a friend who was appalled at my situation when she found out how i'd been living, i told my landlord, and literally the same day she took me to a mattress shop (never been to one before) where i was told to lie down on different trial mattresses (never did that before) and pick one. To the bemusement of my landlord and the disappointment of the salesman, i picked the one that happened to be the cheapest and the hardest, but it left me baffled at the kinds of people who apparently want to spend more money for mattresses that sink underneath you. Totally impractical, you can't do anything! How can you type a 1500-word LJ entry when the platform you're trying to lean on collapses like a fucking soufflé wherever you lean? Ridiculous.
I have to say, the last few days have been some of the best sleeps i've had since moving here, although i still have some anxiety that these rock-hard springs are going to fuck me anyway someday. I guess you can't even buy mattresses without springs in Taiwan? Who knows. Weird.
This year the government changed around the 中秋節 Mid Autumn Festival holiday so that they didn't shuffle around working days to create a long weekend, we just got Tuesday off, which at first i was disappointed about, but then i remembered trying to travel anywhere on a long weekend sucks, so i embraced the random mid-week holiday. There was a small techno party happening in the basement of a New York pizzeria over on the student/hipster side of town, so i went there instead. And it was actually pretty good.
The first two (local) DJs played Detroit-y techno mixed with long, dubby hi-NRG instrumentals, which seems to be a mildly popular revival genre in Taipei at the moment. It's kind of great hearing sweaty, druggy Giorgio Moroder/Patrick Cowley/Bobby Orlando type stuff in the 21st century, remnants of a long-gone gay scene. But then the headlining DJ came on, a dude out of the Tel Aviv gay scene who moved to Berlin and played the Berghain once upon a time, and decided to switch the mood to the most generic, paint-by-numbers, vocal-hook tech-house you ever heard. He did eventually mix it up to include some disco and hi-NRG and even a freestyle surprise, but it didn't really capture me like the first two did. Still, it was kind of hilarious to be dancing in the basement of a pizza parlor, with space for maybe 25-30 people at best, surrounded by cushions and a strobe light and a disco ball and freakin pomelos (the traditional fruit of Mid Autumn Festival), which one joker started juggling on the dancefloor. Good times, even though not a single person spoke to me, in typical Taipei style. Such a different vibe from the laid back Kaohsiung crew.
And that was my mid-Autumn. Got home around 4am, slept, ate a pomelo for late breakfast, and started playing Star Trek: Resurgence, which is the best Star Trek story since the 90s. I cannot express to non-Trekkies how much of a thrill it is to just walk around a spaceship with a tricorder scanning stuff and finding anomalies and trying to convince feuding aliens that peace is the best option. It's a love letter to everyone who grew up with TNG.
Side note: i have not paid much attention to AOC and "the squad" because i don't follow American politics near as much as i used to back in the Clinton/Bush years when i still dreamed of moving to the country, but during the DNC i saw Ocasio-Cortez on Colbert mention watching Star Trek: Voyager with her dad when she was a kid, and how seeing Janeway be a strong captain made her feel like women could do anything, and that story right there is exactly why it's so important to have shows like Star Trek TNG and Voyager. That is: shows which champion diversity and diplomacy and not being a fucking asshole. Sci-fi should inspire the next generation of leaders, it should give them trust in governance and hope for a better future. It doesn't all need to be the umpteenth iteration of "science is evil, society is collapsing, humankind is doomed, nothing left to do but stockpile guns and rampage across the wastelands like the savages we are". Sorry, no, most of us are better than that.
So here are my scattered thoughts. I wanted to write more, better, closer to the time, but i was too tired. And the next week or two are going to be even worse. It's that time of year when we have the corporate meetup, and this time it's not in Switzerland or Macedonia, it's in Taiwan. So from tomorrow - Sunday - we will be welcoming colleagues to our hot, wet, earthquake-shattered and typhoon-swept tropical isle. Not only will there be lots of presentations and workshops and lightning talks and maybe a hackathon, we also have to be hosts, and travel out to the east coast for teambuilding next weekend... It's going to be a lot. Wish me luck. As if i wasn't exhausted enough already.
At least my bed doesn't have a giant hole in it any more.