Story Archive - March 2009

Insomnia (03/29/2009)

Even the houses of my own dear readers must—though it be for just one day, one hour—be ruined and become houses where the stones are mortared with moonlight, windowed with starlight and furnished with the dusty wind. - Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

I show up at the front door and the house is completely dark. "Funny," I think to myself. I ring the doorbell expecting the lights to turn on. Nothing happens inside. I ring the doorbell again. Once more, nothing happens. I twiddle my thumbs for a moment, but then pull out my phone and call the house. I can hear the phone ring inside the house, but after a few rings that machine picks it up. I don't bother leaving a message, instead I pull up a chair on the porch and wait. Ten minutes go by and the sun sets as my bones start to get cold. I'm confused.

Getting bored I stand up and start walking around the house and peeking in the windows. It looks dark inside. It looks like no one is home. I return to the front door and on a whim I knock and the door swings open. At this point, any sensible person would be a little nervous, and sure I'm a little nervous, but I also have some strange and false sense of bravado about me. So I casually stroll in, "hello? Is anyone home?" I am answered by silence.

I flip the light switch and it barely turns on, like half the lights are burnt out and the rest have been replaced by ten-watt bulbs. It's dim and creepy, but I keep proceeding forward. "Hello?" I call out again. Then I see a flash of movement in the corner of my eye and spin to look. There is nothing there, but something brushes against my leg and I flip out and jump to the side. There is a cat, curling around me. "Hello there. Where is everyone?" She looks up at me. "Meow?" she asks. I assume she is wondering the same thing. I pick her up and she purrs and cuddles in my arms. It's strange. The cat doesn't usually like to be picked up, but she is clawing into me.

I hear from the stairs, "you found kitty..." in a quiet and passive voice. The daughter starts to come down the stairs. She's five or six by this point, small for her age, and wearing a Sunday dress.

"Are you cold?" I ask her. She shakes her head as she glides down the stairs. She reaches out and I move to pass her the cat, but the cat hisses and claws deeper into me and I can't get her down. "I'll hold on to her a little longer. Where are your parents?"

"My parents had to leave." She says it plainly and matter-of-factly, "give me kitty." I'm hesitant to hand over the cat for obvious reasons: clearly, the cat is not ready to be passed along. Then, though I made no motion, the cat is in her arms. The cat hisses, she giggles and faster than I can move she vanishes into the next room. I follow after.

She's in the middle of the room playing with her dolls. "Where is the cat?" I ask her. She doesn't respond, but I can hear her voice in my mind "kitty had to leave." She's playing with three dolls like they are a family with the two parents and one little girl. She waves her hand over the top of them, and through some slight of hand I cannot quite see, the parents are gone. "What happened?"

"My parents are gone. They had to leave." I'm down. I head for the front door as quickly as I can without running. Of course, it's locked. I didn't lock it, but it's locked of course. I struggle a bit with the lock and with the dead bolt. "Where are you going? My parents had to leave. Someone has to play with me." The bolt gives and I'm the street.

There's no quiet silence as I'm fleeing the house; it's a shrill ear piercing scream and I look back over my shoulder to see her standing in the doorway with anger emanating from her, "don't leave me! Someone has to play with me!"

Not looking forward I smack into a neighbor and we tumbled. "Are you okay?" the neighbor asks me.

"I'm scared to death. The little girl is creeping me out." He explodes into a dust cloud, swirls around me and past me, vortexes around the little girl and then fades into nothing.

That's the point I wake up. It would be nice if the story ended there, in that moment of fading terror, but I was hit by sleep paralysis. So there I was, terrified in bed and unable to move myself truly awake and staring at the clock projection on my ceiling, "4:17."

Swing Swing (03/27/2009)

Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful. - Don't Let's Start (TMBG)

So if I've played my cards right, you probably haven't noticed my avoidant personality disorder or social anxiety disorder. I mean, I'm not clinical with either of these, but I have enough symptoms that I wouldn't dismiss them out of hand. The internal monologue when struggling to get myself into an uncomfortable social situation is weird and frustrating because I've been through it time after time; it's easy to rationalize away the fear and hard to internalize that rationalization, slow my heartbeat and not forget to breathe.

I still take opportunities to push myself on these things under the hope that the more I push myself the more I get desensitized. For example, I no longer have any problem hailing a taxi or ordering a drink from a bartender. These activities once required me to go through a routine of steady breathing and mental preparation, but are now no harder than saying hi to a good friend. On a particular comfortable night, I might even buy you a drink.

While recently in Japan, the greatest anxiety was caused from going to lunch, which I had to do by myself every day. Everyone will tell you, "every restaurant has displays out front and so it's easy to order." The problem here is that just because you identify the food out front does not mean they have an English menu, so unless you are willing to stand up and walk back out front with the server so you can point at the item, this can be a problem. I also discovered the ability of taking a snap with my iPhone and just showing the photo to the waiter. Still, either of these activities makes me feel like an idiot and feeling like an idiot is the bane of social anxiety. Sure, I could have asked my brother to identify restaurants with English menus or I could have survived off packaged boxes from the convenience store, but it's all about pushing myself. I didn't starve.

On an upcoming Friday I have been asked to go swing dancing with someone and I can think of fewer greater opportunities to feel like an idiot. I took six weeks of swing dancing in high school, but the last time I went swing dancing was in college and I felt silly. My personal favorite moment was when some sketchy dude twice our age came and started watching me and my date, commenting for improvement and than asked if he could cut in to demonstrate. I realize that he might have been a genuinely sweet person trying to offer friendly advice, but I punched him out, as was the thing to do at the time. It was very awkward.

Anyway, I'm going dancing of course, because she asked me to. And of course, I'll be terrified by it. And of course, I'll get over it. And of course, I'll remember it as a lot of fun. The pain fades faster than the glory, so they say.

City Streets with Melville (03/16/2009)

七転び八起き - Old Proverb

This was my second trip to Japan. I went to Japan once before half a decade ago and had a wonderful touristy trip through Tokyo and Kyoto (with a brief zip through Nara). This time around was a long and peaceful week in Kanazawa with a brief weekend down in Osaka.

The very first thing I did when arriving town was okonomiyaki and nomihodai. Now I've got to be honest with you, nomihodai is the best and worse thing that happened that week. The idea is simple: pay a small fee (maybe ¥1,200 ($12)) and you get all-you-can drink beer for an hour. Usually, if you drink three beers, you come out ahead. But if you're aiming for cost-effectiveness and you're competitive you may end up having six to ten. Like we did. Constantly.

I showed up in Japan without any Japanese money. This method worked just fine for me in Taiwan so why not a repeat? Kanazawa was not a big enough town to have an international bank, so the first weekend I went to the ATM machines at the train stop to discover that none of them would take my ATM card. None of them! Only one even bothered to ask for my PIN, but it wouldn't allow me to enter my entire PIN and would kick out the card with an authorization failure. Yes, I am a paranoid person with a more-than-4-digit PIN.

The first weekend we headed down to a larger town of Osaka and executed Operation Citibank which involved pulling out my daily maximum from Citibank two days in a row and hoping it would be enough to last me the rest of the week. We saw the castle and headed to the very top of the Umeda Sky Tower. In theory Umeda was impressive, but having just been in Taipei 101 the week before, it seemed a little underwhelming.

Back in Kanazawa, the week was meant to be a relaxing peaceful one and the weekdays, while my brother was off teaching his classes, were just that. The weekdays were filled with long walks around the city, wandering the streets and just thinking through life and times. I had my GPS and I had my iPhone with data working in Japan, and I was amazed at how enabling those two devices were in letting me just go crazy. I could just set out in any random direction and walk for a few hours and then finally think, "I need to get home," spin up the GPS and start walking back. On my random walks I saw many trees covered with ropes to fight back the snow, powerful Disney kamis guarding temples, and foosball table big enough to play with a full size soccer ball.

The last weekend in the city I didn't sleep. We went out for a Saint Patrick's day pre-party that involved a lot of Guinness.

A Week in Taiwan (03/05/2009)

If you asked me to sum up the sensual experience of India, I would say it is the sounds. You are never left to quiet, the country always wants to speak to you. Here in Taipei, the city has to be summed up by its smells. Your olfactory never rests and never needs to. Like so many cities out there in the world (and so different from my California life) these cities were put together before cars ruled the world and so the city is designed for the walker.

I was car-free my entire trip, and aside from one excursion, never even bothered getting into one. It was all about walking to the metro, walking to the bus stop and just plain walking. As we walked from point to point the streets were filled with hole-in-the wall food stops. Every two or three places we passed seemed to be just a little noodle house, or bun stand or some such deliciousness. But there is no food at home, because there is no refrigerator at home, because there doesn't need to be, because there is food everywhere. You can smell it as you walk down the street and the beef bowl, or the buns or the stinky tofu tempt your senses. Is it any different then the hotdog and pretzel and such vendors on the streets of New York? Maybe yes. Maybe no. One of my favorites was a bun a described as an "Egg McMuffin" to the horror of my hosts.

The week was a whirlwind from start to finish, but in a good way. There were down times, quick silent moments for reading and naps, but mostly it was out and about seeing things I may never get a chance to see again. When I get a quiet moment I'll put together the full itinerary for posterity sake, but for now a few highlights.

On the first full day we took some moments to wander through Da'an park and see the skate rinks, and trees and squirrels. We had lunch plans nearby, but with a little time before we needed to be there I decided to give the Geocache app on my phone a whirl and sure enough there was a cache right there in the park! A few minutes later we had uncovered the cache and pulled it out full of goodies. I flipped through the log book to see notes in Chinese, English, French, Japanese and more. I signed the book and hit it back.

On the second day we spent the morning at the National Palace Museum. We walked A LOT. I think we made about seven hundred full rounds of the museum totalying around six thousand miles. My feet hurt! This was just the beginning of things. Full of artifacts, the ones that make me smile the most are the one from over four thousand years ago. What I find fascinating is that on these very ancient objects there is writing; there is writing that the average reader can still somewhat read today. Show me a book of English from thousands of years ago and ask me to read it. HA! I could do no such thing.

The third day had trip up to Yeliu geopark, which is just a nice park with bizarre rock formations that are caused by the ocean eroding things in crazy ways. Generally eroding away the lower section, but leaving a mushroom head on the top. The most famous rock formations there are the tofu and the Queen's Head. You are no allowed to touch the Queen's Head, but through the magic of forced perspective I have stolen a kiss. Did I mention there was walking?

The fourth day, oh the fourth day! Lots of stuff happened, but let's just post one for the end of the night at the Luxy Nightclub. I did enjoy that the bar was full of men drinking Smirnoff Ice, to which I have been told is a clear sign it was a gay bar. I think not, but who knows? Dancing in the techno room we were getting ready to head out when a techno remix of Sweet Dreams came on, and I was reminded many high school nights at the Amazon. Pictures of me dancing with my lovely hosts.

So there I was on my final day in Taiwan. We were trying not to waste it way, trying to figure out what to do. The whole week my host had been trying to convince me to go to see the matchmaker god at the city temple who boasted a very high success rate. Honestly it didn't interest me. I'm not a big fan of either: (a) participating in silly rituals that are meaningless or (b) participating in religious rituals that some people feel strongly about, but I don't believe in. I figured the matchmaker god was going to be one of those two. So we went to the city temple so I could see the gods and smile at them, but I did not burn incense or offer up any god money to them.

At the end we went and sat near the river and just gabbed about life and the times. I'm trying to think through some tough things in life these days and it was nice to have a good friend listen and give advice. As pointed out by the my fortune on the first day, "you worry too much about doing the things you know are the right things to do. Stop worrying and be happy and zen knowing you are making the right choice."