10:45 pm greencastle, july 20

only one date for the header/title, because the purpose of two before was for perspective--one time for greencastle-ites and one time for me. but now that i'm in the air and changing time zones left and right, there's only one useful point of reference, eh?

last day around...i got like five hours of sleep, if that. see, i stayed up until probably past three packing, organizing stuff, and generally...not sleeping. then i got up somewhere between eight and nine, trying to catch daisy before she left for work, then supposedly (uh oh, we know what that means...) meeting my mom and some friends for a final meal out at like 10:30. hah...so when i arrive upstairs at like nine or so, nobody answers the door, i let myself in, and everybody's still asleep. except for daisy. because she's out, presumably at the cram school already. augh! horrible! so, what the heck, i figure, grab my computer, and hang around upstairs until others wake up--namely, carl comes upstairs...hah. whatever. by tenish, everybody's awake, though, so it's all right. and probably just shortly after eleven, my mom calls to let me know she's made it around downstairs. meh.

...so lunch, then. remember that one restaurant i may have mentioned long ago, the one that seemed really nice, had some curry stuff, and at which i tried coconut ice cream in an actual coconut? yeah, that's the one. that's where we ate--a whole meal this time! well...almost. after all, i decided to teach again, right? but i wasn't too hungry and probably wouldn't have finished my seafood curry anyways. so...then when i get to the cram school, i finally get a chance to talk to daisy, and everything's hunky-dory. i get my pay (more later), i'll be teaching well enough, i brought the books that carl bought for her the day before, and it's okay for my mom to video record class and all. so...pretty much just that happens. class goes...well enough. of course, after class, after all the kids are gone, i actually take a look at how much money i got--and it's quite a bit more than i'd expected to make, so i'm really happy about that. the important part, though (really, i mean this), was the experience. it's not every summer, or even every high school kid, that finds him-/her-/itself with a chance to teach english in a foreign country, especially while meeting tons of new, cool people and making a good many friends. i really had a blast.

ken ting was, no doubt, very cool, and i'd have liked to spend more time there these past few days, but it's definitely a good thing that we made it back as soon as we did--just before the typhoon. see, there are these "bridges"...which happened to be swept "out" by this "typhoon." ah...two of the very bridges that we took getting from and to the airport, in that order. like...totally gone, large chunks were, and we saw photos/videos on the news and in newspapers of people getting lifted across in cranes. crazy...especially the amount of water--as much as 1.8 meters in some areas, and well over a meter right where we were in ken ting, if i'm not mistaken. crazy...

later, after a whole bunch of goodbyes, some filled with excruciatingly polite (and lengthy) exchanges, my mom and i gathered up all of my stuff--my bag, suitcase, and a plastic bag of other stuff that i would put into one of my mom's three trunks so's mine [...as he comes back to writing, having been asked to stop as the taipei to lax flight started to land, now writing at 4:19 am or so on the flight from l.a. to cleveland] and...took the mrt back to where she was staying. now, that is no easy task, what with all the people and extremely limited space. but it wasn't too bad; the stuff wasn't heavy so much as bulky, but we managed. from there, i took a nap, she packed more, and we spent a good while trying to figure out where our tickets were misplaced. uhh...that was almost a problem, but i actually (yeah, i know) wasn't worrying much about it, because either my mom had just packed them absent-mindedly or, if we couldn't find the tickets, we could always get new ones, since we have our passports and everything. well, the case was the former, so no worries, indeed.

hrm...nothing of interest later, probably. direct flight from taipei to los angeles, though, and that was pretty nice. i slept...maybe five minutes total, the movies were either really bad or boring, so i declined to watch them, i finished my book within the first few hours, and the bloody air conditioned dryness practically killed me. i spent more time in the bathroom trying to get one nostril to clear up and the other to stop feeling like it was burning with cold, all with success staying right on the ever receding horizon, far out of reach. *sigh*...it was probably worse than the a/c in buildings and whatnot in taipei, but at least it only lasted just over twelve hours. leg room wasn't a problem, though, because i had an aisle seat. woo!

and then...lax. which is, quite possibly, the single worst airport in which i've had business. so...when we arrived there, customs and whatnot were all fine enough, but as soon as we headed off in search of our connection...we were forced to exit. that is, there's no (available) way inside. so...we had to walk three terminals down, which took like ten minutes, carrying all of our carryons and dragging along our checked-in stuff--you know, all four checked in pieces, all four carry-ons, and a bag of duty-free gifts that my mom bought. *ugh*. but...it really wasn't too bad, for we got carts; it was just awkward and annoying. but then...inside...it did get bad. you know, not the fact that the line in which we were waiting was like thirty people long, but the part where they were letting approximately (and this is probably an overstatement) one party through each minute. AUUGH. it...took...*foreeeeeeever*. well...so then as i waited in that line, which turned out to be the one in which one is to stand *after* checking in both oneself and one's luggage, my mom headed over to get our tickets and everything. hah...so, like, minutes *after* our flight is supposed to have started boarding, they call anybody on the flight leaving at 11:30 (california time; our flight) to just skip the line and go. hah...so i drop off our carry-ons with some airport security guy taking care of another man in a wheelchair and weave my way through the unavigatable lines for ticketing. well, that failed, of course, so i just cut everybody and walked along in front of the counters, found my mom, told her what was up, finished checking in our luggage, and we finally headed up.

talked to this cool guy while waiting, though. he was...what...52? i think that's right. but...sixty or sixty two seems closer--his hair was all white and he looked pretty old, but then, it could just be genes. he lives in panama, though, and travels...*all* the time. used to do business all along the east coast, too, and we talked about boston for a bit. doesn't like the cold, though, so didn't really like that area. that's why he lives in panama, though, right? yeah. what's more, he grew up in gary, indiana. hah...it was pretty weird. but this guy was nice and definitely cool. it's especially nice to have some decent small talk in one's native language after a month devoid--often it's kind of pointless, but i welcomed it this time.

anyways, so we pretty much run to our gate to find that, contrary to our beliefs and all those screens that give updates on one's flights, ours is rather delayed...but only by some twenty minutes or something; they just started boarding really late, took off a little late, and i have no idea when we're arriving. it's supposed to be about four hours, and the movie (fever pitch, about some guy who's hxc obsessed with the red sox who falls in love, but his first passion gets in the way...blah, blah, blah, but i *had* to at least give a movie so centered around the sox a chance, and it was decent enough, if agonizingly cliche in the end) killed about twoish, so...we'll probably be landing shortly, and, unless anything amazing happens (you know, such as my batteries surviving after all this time [my mom was using it earlier, on the international flight, too] and through all these boots), here ends my "twjournal." fun? for me, yeah, sure, i guess, and it'll definitely be cool to read this in a few months, years, whatever. for you? hah...something to do, right? surely there're better, more lucid things to read on the internet--but then, there are definitely worse. so...maybe? i'll post the last of the pictures eventually, too. okay...cleveland to indianapolis shouldn't be long, and i should be back in town by noon.

lyngus@gmail.com

...or call me. ;D

12:18 pm greencastle, july 19; 01:18 am taipei, july 20

i need not say that i have mixed feelings about leaving, because that goes without saying; so i'll just pull some hypocrisy and say that.

got up at like noon today, of course. but i actually got up because i decided to do something today, rather than just sleep, or being woken up by a call. but then i spent a good while ripping some of my cd's while packing, both of which went pretty well. by the time i'd eaten, done morning stuff, and all of that, it was almost threeish, and so i headed upstairs. sat around talking for a bit...then succeeded in finding plans for the rest of the day. i was planning on calling derek or something if i couldn't find anything worthwhile otherwise (not that he isn't, just that it'd be kinda weird to call saying "uhh...so...i dunno if stuff is open or not, because of the typhoon, but i'm bored, so could i hang out at your place or with one of your friends or something, if everything is, in fact, still closed?" but...apparently everything's back open, and carl and his friends decided to go out this evening, and i tagged along.

...and, amazingly, they're all extremely similar to us. that is, between all of them, i could either reconstruct or find parallel versions of johnny b, mark, karen, petey, cam, and many other characteristics common among a bunch of my friends. all of them go to school in california, by the way; a few from usc, most from berkeley; but i think pretty much everybody was from one of the uc's. i'm not sure if any are anywhere else, but they are all californians by schooling. one of them, gina, was also a friend of another one of them, who speaks little chinese. she's a relatively fun person, but seems a little...well, maybe a bit...egad, i can't think of the word! like the "popular" kids back in middle school and everything, the ones who thought they had the most and best friends, somewhat elitist, too. ah, well; at least she wasn't that way too much, so i enjoyed conversation with her. she games, too, interestingly enough; and *all* of them (with the possible exception of gina; she left very shortly after dinner, for she only got to taiwan monday morning or something and is still fairly jetlag'd) love anime and manga. lesse...i'll do this chronologically, because it's easier that way.

dinner fell through the first two tries, because the first restaurant was closed and the second was fully booked until well after nine. that is, we were trying to get room for twelve. so...we ended up just having hot pot again. it was pretty good, and we all had *tons* of meat. literally. not. but...heaping plates of it, at least. that was after meeting pretty much at this little mall thing, which had a "mini" arcade ('bout the size of fun and games, if anybody from wellesley is reading...so actually a reasonably big place for the states), in which we messed around for maybe twenty minutes. played some foosball, among other things. fun fun. headed upstairs in the mall...bought a knicknack or two. those coin vending machines, you know? with necklaces, watches, candy, or random toys? yeah, they have them here, too, only more expensive, and with stuff about 400 times better. woo! oh, uhh...well, shooting the chronology thing again, before we (carl and i) even made it to the bus station, from whence we left, we swung by this bookstore for to buy a few more book for the cram school; i'll probably be teaching that storytelling class again tomorrow, too, for a bit more money and, most importantly, the experience.

anyways...after dinner, we walked around a bit, "guang jie"-ing--an action which i've tried to explain in the past, but which we actually tried translating today, which turned up with window shopping and "strolling the streets; lounging about the streets." but...so there are normal arcades here, right? and they have that basketball thing, right? where there's a hoop and a bunch of balls, and you have to hit like fifty shots in the first minute to keep going, when the hoop starts moving back and forth, right? well, they have places which are made specifically for that, having nothing else. uhh...yeah, okay, whatever. basketball is literally unbelievably big here. like, a cheap analogy would be if every football, basketball, or baseball fan in the states had pete's passion for ultimate. something like that, anyways. it's unreal--especially how good most of the people are. but...i suppose if one enjoys something so much and plays it so often, one must be good, eh? hopefully, anyways. so...i definitely fail at that, but i tried it a few times. oh, and, of course, in these specifically designed places, the machines are pretty nice--spotless black and silver/white; very aesthetically pleasing. chain-link hoops, too, and black basketballs (or, at least, grey, sometimes). NT$10 per play--*cheap*.

then...looking around a bunch. until, of course, we made it to one of those shaved ice places...which was amazing! that is, where in the states one would see an ice cream store or some store with slushes or whatever, in taiwan, there is shaved ice, upon which syrups and/or fresh fruits are served. well...this one was amazing. first, their ice had milk in it. so it was unbelievably tasty already. i wouldn't even have to ask for more, but, since it was offered, why take something so plain? but i didn't go out on a limb or anything, really; just mango. it was superlatively good, though. not to mention the fact that the store/restaurant itself was superlatively cool--one was allowed to draw on their walls! like, there were all kinds of names, short epithets about random people, a few url's, a variety of random scrawlings. not only that, but it was neat, too! some emoticons and whatnot, plus real drawings. but everything was nice and neat...the walls weren't all dirty or anything, and there wasn't any crazy scribbling or senseless nonsense. man...if marv's did that...

...walked around for a while more, and came upon a manga store. as in...the barnes and noble of manga. unbelievable. of course, that means hentai, too...and gay pr0n...but that's okay. they had sheet music, too! and a whole bunch of random manga posters, keychains, accessories, etc....and anime, too, including a certain "appleseed," which looked astoundingly cool. like...some kind of cgi in addition to normal anime style. what's more...i think it's drawn or directed (or something, anyways) by the same people as bubblegum crisis! woo! one of the first animes in which i was interested. and, of course, any media that is at all related to paul oakenfold absolutely *has* to be cool, by default, which scored the appleseed soundtrack enough points for me to decide to do something about finding it some time, if not the anime itself. but...that'd be expensive, so i'll likely look into no more than the music.

shortly thereafter, we headed off to that illegal video game store. that is, it has a freaking huge collection of games, all of which are offered at a tiny fraction of the normal price burned. like...less than $20 for games that would normally cost $50. that, and the place was covered in posters from quality games--not just mainstream, but quality--two which are becoming practically mutually exclusive. i was impressed. there was also a tv set up with a game going, which was looking pretty fun. what's more, on top of all of that, the store seems to have some rough hours of 9:30 pm to 3:00 am or something...yeah, um...okay? i dunno, maybe cops are a lot less likely to come by around then. makes sense...but whatever. the whole place exuded an aura of elitist nerddom, though...it was a little disorientating. but the main reason we went there was so that carl could return a game that he got there a few days ago--ddr fever. it's extremely cool--even for non-ddr-fans, perhaps; well...at least a little--in that it has such songs as "gotta get through this," by daniel beddingfield, and "i believe in a thing called love," which you'll know. problem was that the music was approximately six seconds off from the arrows...so even if the beat was easy and the steps simple, it was confusing, what with the beat way off, but because the song was just being played, just similar enough to throw one off. tried it earlier in the day, and that's how i knew. tried it with the sound off, but ddr definitely isn't nearly as much fun that way. ah, well...

lesse...and that's about when we split, down to just five of us heading home on the same bus. it was cool; we were the only ones on the bus after just a couple of stops, so we could mess around and look weird with no worries. it was nice. oh, and before i forget, of course, because all of these others were in their various respective uc's or whatever, i was their junior by about two or three years. at least. uhh...it was pretty much fine until they actually asked me where i was, and i responded with indiana. what school? ah, yes, that...well, you know...and they were all really surprised; i'd actually been hoping they'd not ask, in the event of them treating me differently not only because i'm new and american, but because i'm like three years younger than them, but i think it worked out well enough. uhh...at least, conversation worked out the way i'd normally expect one to go among my friends and everything, nothing conspicuously avoided or whatever. hah...they really reminded me a whole bunch of my group of friends, and it was really cool, i say. very cool.

...and so when i got back, i was informed that daisy had come in search of me for reasons of payment, whereas i was asking after her concerning working a little bit more. well...she was asleep when i got back (just about midnight), so...i just hung out upstairs a bit, watched some more of that weird bread anime with barney, talked to his dad for a bit, and pretty much wrapped up my day. turns out that barney's dad does something that i totally wanted to do but from which was dissuaded: go climb around a mountain alone and hang out there for a few hours. well, actually, i'd like to stay the night in solitude, just relax for a while or whatever, but...i guess it's true that it may not be too safe, especially if i got lost or something. ah, well. maybe...something'll turn up. well, if i do go hike the appalachian mountains with mark next summer, there'll be all that to which to look forward. it'd be cool, no question.

ah, yes: the one thing that i wrote down on my hand today: some time earlier today, perhaps in the bookstore, perhaps shortly after dinner, but very likely another time altogether, i was just thinking about random stuff (well...a certain time, this is), and my thoughts strayed to the fact that i'll be leaving for home...it's tonight, now. huh. and the first thing that popped into my head..was wellesley. like, my old house (from outside), the drive/street (it was actually a terrace), the three paths into town that i took most often, the way to chris's house, the nearby neighborhood, all the way up to another good friend of mine, paul, through town, downtown, a few stores, wellesley college, and all the way to natick and framingham, the nearest actual shopping places with malls, strip malls, movie theatres, and that arcade, fun and games. all of this in no more than a second, and not at all strictly in that order. but...i thought it was really weird how, when i thought of "home," i thought about all of the places that i knew so well, frequented so often, and appreciated so little back where i did the vast majority of my growing up. thought about it a bit more and realized how...*much* that place is. just...everything, indescribably. i just wish my elementary school (preferably middle school, really) could somehow have a reunion some time; several days long, at least, and not necessarily soon, not even in a few years, but in maybe a decade or so. maybe more. like a high school reunion, which actually happens, because by then people have forethought and distribute future contact information, but...things don't work like that in middle school. well, i'll have my yearbook, and maybe in a dozen years or so, i'll stumble upon this again, or take a look at that old book of memories, and think about those great people. if i'm ambitious, i may even look a few of them up somehow, via internet, no doubt, or maybe local phonebook, email, whatever. it would certainly be an astronomically beautiful event, anyways, and it's a nice thought.

well...this'll be my last post for...maybe two or three days, whereupon the last post (not too likely plural) will grace this blog. until then, this very second-longest post, of some 29, draws itself to a close. 'night, i say, with about 5:30 remaining until i must first attempt to rise.

1:35 pm greencastle, july 18; 2:35 am taipei, july 19

i realized last night that the times of my posts seemed really, really off, by some hours or something, but that'd mean that my computer's clock is off. well, remembering this and checking it out today, yeah, it was two hours slow, some-magically-how. uhh...but i set it forward and it so it should be fine now.

anyways...practically nothing at all happened today because of the typhoon. well...it was really great walking outside, though; my mom called me at 12:30, waking me up, to tell me that we were going out to meet my uncle and one of his old friends, who is, apparently, now the general manager of china air or something like that. like, all of it. and his family, as it turned out; well, his wife and daughter, at least. we ate lunch this spicy hot pot place. but first, the weather. extremely windy and a light drizzle most of the time--but when i say "extremely windy," i mean that it's blowing down signs, blowing over cemented and weighted trees, and blowing away umbrellas. so, of course, it was incredibly cool to walk in it to the mrt station and whatnot. until i arrived there and saw the main doors closed...and began to worry. but there were signs posted, and i skimmed them, gathered the meaning, and headed to the side door, the handicapped one. worked.

...at lunch, it was pretty much the same as a normal spicy hot pot place, but they had a bunch of fruit and ice cream/popsicles from which to select afterwards. xiangwen, though, the guy's daughter...seems surprisingly cool. i didn't get to talk to her much or anything, but she had as many facial expressions (mostly made with her lips) as...say...reggie and tyler, but made them (appropriately) when doing random kinds of stuff that, say, betsy would do--straightening a row of chopsticks, stacking them up together, picking at things, all disregarding the other people around--but more off in her own world, like tracy, sometimes, not quite noticing when she's doing something really weird. that's my impression of her, anyways, so she seemed cool enough. meh.

and then...ah, yes. went shopping. i'm surprised at how...*gasp* fun clothes shopping can be. bought...a cool shirt that apparently comes in this weird little bag thing, a nice pair of pants, and two belts, all at the small cost of some $10 or so to me; my mom decided to be very generous and pay for everything but the shirt. what's more, between my uncle's, my mom's, and my purchases, we payed enough (like $80 or so) to get two of these free bag things. uhh...yay, i guess. free stuff is good!

then i spent this evening and much of the night upstairs again, hanging out with barney (who is, unfortunately, ill) and carl, gaming and messing with music--got two of my cd's that wouldn't before to rip, among other stuff. woohoo! i've been wanting to listen to tracks off of both of them for a good while now, so now i can. sweet.

leave at 7ish tomorrow, my time, which means i'll be back in greencastle...around early evening, maybe? roughly? very roughly, yes. uhh...end of short (-est, probably) post.

11:13 am greencastle, july 17; 12:13 am taipei, july 18

two days to departure, three to arrival...

hrm...this past day feels like two for some reason; not because it was especially long or packed or anything. maybe just because i traveled far. or, maybe because i just copied five pages of written text...which made for a decent post once typed. ah, well. whatever.

first things first: got to sleep in a bit. it was nice. would have slept in like an hour (at least) more if my mom hadn't deliberately misled me...but i guess it'll be okay. see, she woke me up at ten or so, yelling at me and telling me that we had to leave really soon to catch our noon (or so) flight back to taipei, most importantly, before the typhoon arrived. well, so i got up, showered and everything, and quickly packed, with her rushing me along the way. then, when i'd gathered all my stuff and completely prepared to go, i suggested we do so, and she said, oh, wait, uncle alex just went out to do a bit of shopping; he'll be back in just a bit. uhh...well, why don't we go down and wait or something? no, no, it's fine; i'll just go out and look for him quickly. you wait here. well...whatever, mom, just remember, we have to hurry. you know, i think that she's been rushing me so much all this time, she'll be quick out and back, coming shortly even if she doesn't find her brother, knowing that he may have arrived without her. well...so like five minutes after she leaves, my brother knocks on the door of our hotel room. ah...how convenient. now we're just waiting for my mom, who should be back very shortly.

the paragraph break represents the forty-some minutes that we waited, eventually doing so down in the lobby, where our ride had come to meet us, and putting all of our stuff into his car. they wonder if maybe she may have gone out to buy some stuff, not just look, but i say no, no way, of course not, she wouldn't do that when we're so rushed; she's smarter than that, she should know what she's doing. long time after she left, my uncle decided to go out in search of her. like ten minutes later...our ride, my grandfather-in-law (or whatever) headed out too...so i'm sitting here in the lobby, listening to franz ferdinand, green day, incubus, or something, worrying about how late we're going to be, how much we'll have to rush, and what'll happen if my mom got lost or something. and, of course, they all come back together; they hadn't wandered off far, any of them. unfortunately...they come back bearing a good few bags full of stuff. my mom had gone shopping. effing a. that's *not* what i'd expected of her. see if i ever trust her again when it comes to time at all--trying to be early, on time, or whatever. pssht...i'll just stop there. i was pretty upset by her irresponsibility and lies. she says that she hadn't planned on buying anything when she went out in search of my uncle, but i'm not sure if it was exactly as simple as that, and she definitely wasn't concerned at all about making the flight. in the face of an impending typhoon. later on, she seemed concerned enough to consider going back by train, but...i dunno. once again, i wasn't too happy. if i'd pulled a stunt like that, my consequences would be none too light.

and then, of course, every flight for taipei that we could make (like...ten, or so, between twoish, when we got there, and sixish) was fully booked. the first one that seemed like a possibility was at 7:35 or something, and even that was iffy, for most flights after even seven were being cancelled due to the winds and rain. *sigh*...stand-by lists.

fortunately, though, my uncle knows the general manager of taipei airlines or something, so he called him up, talked for a bit, and got the general manager or whoever from the local airport to come around and hook us up with some tickets on a 3:30 or so flight. that definitely, definitely worked out well. connections are a good thing. so we made it back to taipei easily enough, in the end. oh, had some more chocolate milk tea, too...and it was awesome. i'll probably be drinking more of the stuff if i can find it. woo!

mom says weather reports predict some 1340 mm of rainfall through this typhoon--or was it just monday? i can't remember. but...think about that. it's over a meter--well over, at that, and more than four feet. that...is kind of...a lot of water. a *whole* lot. impressive.

...then went upstairs and gamed for a while with carl and barney, talked for a while, whatever. set a whole bunch of new records for them in smash bros. with marth and a few other characters--17:03 or so for the target challenge. woo? iunno. uhh...helped them figure out a new game that's copied, so japanese only (fake games are huge here. that means availability and cheapness.). ah...watched part of some anime that they've just finished downloading (the entire season, to date, that is)...about bread. baking, that is. uhh...two words: solar hands. apparently...no, i don't really get it, so nevermind. just...it's about baking bread. and pretty funny. one just has to be a very quick skimmer in some parts, where they have the english subtitles scrolling quickly on the bottom of the screen and explanations of cultural or whatever references on the top, flying by at the same speed as the subtitles. pretty cool, though. pretty cool...

...typhoon's almost arrived, methinks; at least the outermost parts of it have definitely already reached us, as one can tell by the constant rain (relatively heavy, but not torrential) and significant wind. makes me happy. woo! it'll be better tomorrow, no doubt, but it does mean that i had to, and probably will have to, cancel meeting a few people, what with the dangerous winds blowing ads or whatever down and dangerous potential flooding. ah, well. it's a loss, but i'll get over it, and i'll probably be back in the future. one thing's for sure, though: i'll definitely hear from them more through this very computer. well...assuming it doesn't get zapped by this storm. hrm...i'll just wait a few more minutes with it on before unplugging it to be safe. 'kay.

10:09 am greencastle, july 15; 11:09 pm taipei, july 15

...and so here's the entry that i wrote for friday and saturday, when i was off in southern taiwan, rather than taipei--a name which derives it's former half (tai-) from the taiwan, and it's latter from the word for north. of course, anything not parenthetical but in brackets is a comment of mine from monday morning, taiepei time, at like two, when i'm actually typing all of this up.

(nostalgia is official [sic] a physical state of being, too, now.)

we took a plane, and then a car, to ping dong, on the southern end of taiwan yesterday. but first, in the morning, john, his mother, his friend, his sister, a friend of hers, his brother, and i went to the chiang kai-shek memorial building, together, too early in the monrning. that is, i stayed up until like 4:30 that morning, first talking to carl about random stuff, and then doing that whole...bloody..."slideshow" thing. actually, thought, it turned out i needed only to type up my notes and whatnot, bring the few pictures of class that i took together, and stick them all (magically) on a floppy for daisy (she preferred floppy to cd or email...*sigh*), so that ended up taking...altogether not too long. the hardest part was actually resizing the pictures right so that they would fit on the floppy. the text was only a few dozen kbs.

that memorial building, though...was definitely cool. i mean, it wasn't actually open in the morning, when we went, but there was definitely another 2005: world year of physics huge...thing with stuff with which to mess around. took pictures, and i'll show garner, maybe. ah...oh, and so we wandered around the vicinity, immediate, too, and there was a nice little pond thing with a bunch of trees, a few other buildings of minor interest, and...a huge, artificial slope like. see the picture(s). they're building a skiing/snowboarding slpe, ten stories tall, right there in the courtyard of all these big buildings. there'll be snow, of course, too. weird...

not much happened later friday, but the plane ride was notably interesting. see, we left from a small airport, so not only does one need buy tickets no more than minutes before departure, if they're available, but upon take-off, the overhead view of the mountains and general greenery, even in taipei, is beautiful. i was dead [*cough*] tired, as later that day and today, after like a week of too little sleep (yeah, yeah, i know, but i saw it coming way before i even left for [wrote that as "ofr" first time around] taiwan). it was great, though; some parts even looked like spines or something, where ranges or valleys, or somethihng, stood in rocky grey contrast to the luch greenery. taiwan's a tropical place, in case you're not sure, by the way.

but then...not much later that day. came back, met my mom's brother's in-laws (parents, brother, nephew, and neice), had dinner. lesse...now it's (the first) time to consult my notes. ah, yes. how could i forget? ah, okay, all the excitement of today (later--oh, the joy of anticipation!). rain! typhoon's coming to taiwan, so the weather's going to turn nasty in a few days. means it's already not too hot, sometimes, so we had a wonderful rainstorm yesterday, complete with very dark clouds in the distance, over the ocean, as we were being driven (by my uncle's father-in-law) over from the airport, with excellent lightning. wehn it struck, finally, i definitely went outside and stood on their porch to watch the storm for a while. it was great. there were times when i could see the wind, when it blew hard and so compressed the drops of rain together--it was like a sheet of white wiping over everything.

of course, some people got caught in the rain, some of whom were on bikes. they mostly tried to get to wherever they were going (*cough*) as quickly as possible, and i thought, wow, if i were already as soaked as they must be,i'd just take my time. one or two kids did. i thought, wow, good for (i just wrote "ofr" again...) them, it'd be pretty cool if they were to, iunno, yell or something--right before they did. winners, for real.

before i forget, i'd just like to point out the fact that my muscles (namely, forearms, thighs, and calves) have gotten sorer the days following that upon which i ran by several days...uh...uhfortunately. mebbe that'l do something about itself...hopefully. especially the soreness in my writing/disc/;right arm--it's something of a problem. [i just realized: i like my adverbs very much.]

anyways, anybody ever heard of "ragnarok?" my...cousin-in-law? uhh...my uncle's nephew-in-law, anyways; the guy plays the mmorpg...watches the show...reads the comic...and, presumably, plays the card game. i just thought that was weird...a bunch of these two days have had odd thoughts like that.

or me remembering that "hollaback girl" is, apparently, something of a big song here; it plays entirely too often, including the video.

then, today, i had to get up at like 5:30 or six in order to get on the way to ken ting (and eluanbi), the very southernmost tip of taiwan. well...ken ting has a national park, but we really just looked around before going to a beach there, where we spent maybe two hours. finally; no, not enough emotion. *finally*, finally, finally, threw my disc around a bit, though, admittedly, in very poor conditions. my uncle isn't the greatest frisbee-er, but he can throw and catch pretty well. the wind wasn't much of a problem, but that, somehow, it kept making me overthrow--m headwind, that is. the issue was the sand. okay, so i've put my feet on radiators before, bare, for minutes, and i can stand standing in pools of ice water, but this sand *burned*. i mean, i couldn't even run around in it for a minute; it was too bad. after trying to, and getting stuck in it many a time when my foot slipped out of a a flip-flop, or i simply threw one or both off to run for the disc (i only actually ran for hard catches), my feet ended up a little raw later. and red. even the water was warm--not just "not cool" or anything, but warm in the shallower areas. by about waist height it was normal, but...killer sun, i say. i'm even a little red about thes houlders today. so...swam very briefly a few times, but the waves (though very small, slowly picking up through the day and the coming of storms) and people mostly prevented any real swimming (for more than ten strokes of whatever), and an indecent number of motor boat-ers kept me from water where i couldn't breath while standing flat-footed-ly or swimming more than a stroke or two submerged. *sigh*...but apparently it was better than normal, people-wise, because of the imminent typhoon.

and then, lunch. pretty good. tried a few more things i've never had before, but just in the cooking, mostly. actually had shark fin soup, escargot, and some unique taiwanese veggie thing with dinner. but the tea that came with lunch...it was just tea-colored coffee. no, it probably didn't actually have that many chemicals (such as caffeine), but it tasted just like coffee. very peculiar. oh, also had some coconut milk stuff that was extremely tasty.

afterward, we headed over to eluanbi, wich [sic] is *the* southernmost piece of land on taiwan. took a whole bunch of pictures. tossed the good disc around a few more times. decided, when i threw it uphill and it stayed darn near parallel to the grouond, a foot above it for a few meters' ride that yes [sic], my backhand has evolved into something of an air-hopper. took a bunch more pictures. saw a lighthouse that was destroyed (and rebuilt) twice, some 100.4 m or so tall. bood stuff. then, went to a street vendor with coconuts (they're big on them [and they're really big] there), payed a bit of money, and had him promptly grab a huge one, lop off one part, put a straw in [ouch, sorry, definitely my bad; i'll call it a written typo], and hand it over [twice.].not too sweet, but very refreshing and tasty. he was just doing this and bottling it. fresh, pure coconut juice/milk looks just like water, too, so it looked like bottled water. cool.

there were a bunch of little stores there, and so we saw a whole bunch and bought a bit. saw some kid with a shirt on that appeared to say "chic." he turned a bit; "chick," is this? no way! oh, okay...wait, "chica?!" what a loooooser! i laughed.

also saw some very cool shell art things--that is, just sculpted or painted and whatnot--including mood rings. yes, i saw shell mood rings, and almost bought one for the extraordinary novelty of the thing, but decided aginst it. oh, and that stoore seems to have a website, too. they had it hand-painted on the bottom of their sign, and i plan on checking it out.

...which about covers everything on *both* of my hands. yes, i do believe it does. had a respectable headache last night/yesterday; i've survived today. now, though, it's time to go to sleep in. woohoo! finally!

09:49 am greencastle, july 14; 10:49 taipei, july 14

hey, look, before i forget it, a translation of the conversation that just took place:
twin: what are you doing?
me: homework.
twin: why are you turning on your computer?
me: to do homework.
twin: why are you turning on your computer?
me: to do homework.
twin: what are you doing with your computer?
me: i'm doing homework.
twin: why do you have a homework?
me: so i can do my homework.
twin: what are you doing with that camera?
me: homework.
twin: where did you buy the camera?
me: it's not new. i already had it.
twin: where did you buy the camera?
me: it's not new. i already had it.
twin: what are you doing with the camera?
me: homework.
twin: where did you get the camera?
me: it's not new. i already had it.
twin: i have toothpaste.

...but so i got up at like seven today, like i said i (highly disturbingly) had to. well, it was fun, though, and probably worth it. went to the taipei zoo, and left like 20 minutes later than i'd meant to, but it took more than that much time less to get there, so it wasn't a problem. that is, i ended up arriving early anyways. and then...the zoo. bunch o pics. took my mom's camera, so i can upload them. also took a bunch of pictures for the cram school, and i'm going to work on that slideshow probably pretty much as soon as i'm done writing this entry. um...not a lot to say there, then, if i do upload the pictures; after all, you'll be able to see stuff and whatnot. only things of which i don't think i took pictures were the reptiles and amphibians, because they were mostly boring, and some of them weren't even apparent.

then class, at which i arrived like twenty minutes late because the people with whom i was at the zoo were the ones with time-telling devices, and when i told them that i had class at one and had to be back at like 12:30, they thought that i meant to leave at 12:30...which was a problem. well, not really, in the end, but, of course, i worried a whole bunch...

then this afternoon i met up with derek again. no, wait, it's the first time it's been planned. actually, though, other stuff came up with him, and he forgot, but ended up being able to come anyways, after picking up these two girls...you know, as dates for the two of us. ahh...yeah, whatever. fortunately, they didn't go along with it the way he was hoping they would--like americans. they played their asian roles and were all polite and everything, so methinks the two of them hit it off better with me than with derek--and, besides, their english wasn't amazing, so they resorted to a lot of chinese, and one of them wouldn't even speak english; just chinese with me or her friend. so...the four of us had dinner (the older girl paid, the one derek met first; the other girl was her friend. uhh...i'm the youngest of the four of us; derek and the friend [daisy] were both born in '87, and the other girl, whose name i didn't quite catch, was born two years before me.), and the oldest paid for derek, her friend, and me, but i successfully paid her back for my portion. i was happy about that; it's a good sign. but...iunno, derek kept hitting on them, even though he has a girlfriend back in the states, and even tried to hug them when they had to go, but...it was definitely dodged. hah.

anyways...we went to that arcade in ximen again, and derek AAA'd another song--but that was after the girls left. he did pretty well while they were around, but didn't want to try to hard, for fear of sweating unbecomingly. i tried this one game which is like ddr, only more like an eyetoy game, but it was very cool. vertical sensors, and one waves one's arms as if dancing, with five directions--forward, diagonally left and right, and straight to the left and right. i did pretty well, apparently got a "b" ranking, and derek, probably trying to show off, but failing, got a d. meh. (my song was harder, too, methinks.) oh, tried that "keyborad mania" or whatever it's called, the one that i saw on display in beijing earlier this year, and talked about in an earlier post. uhh...it's hard. it's like sightreading--no, wait, it is sightreading, but harder yet, because, rather than the notes, it just has the positions, and the keyboard is extremely small, so i can hit almost two full notes with one finger, if i were so inclined. can't even play the white notes from between the black ones; not enough room. totally wasn't worth my three or four coins. lesse...oh, but playing ddr later with derek definitely rekindled my interest in it, and i realized that it's like 20 times more fun with speed modifiers. *that's* the reason i stopped playing; it was so slow, many songs were boring. now i've got an answer. maybe i'll try to play again. but then, i don't have the game, or pads, or enough interest to save the money and buy either, so, then again, probably not. meh.

then we checked out an internet cafe, and i found this awesome new cs map by the name of "bloodstrike." it's like a mix between prospeedball's setup and mentality, but in an arena more like one of the iceworlds. no free guns, of course, though, and buy zones at spawn. so...i jump onto the lan server with a keyboard whose "ctrl" button takes a full two seconds to rise after depression, an "a" key which is almost as bad, and a slightly unresponsive shift key. oh, man...that was a huge problem at first. and it was a problem that the host of the server kicked it down about five rounds after i got there. and it was a problem that they kick under-eighteen out at ten. *sigh*...so i finished with a mere 9-2 kill-to-death ratio, roughly. well...maybe next time. it was cool, though.

talked some more ddr. so that guy, kevin...imagine max unlimited. now, make the speed 1.5. now, flip it, so the bar (apparently what the arrow things that one actually hits, not the scrolling ones) is at the bottom--oni mode, that is, when you get three AA's and unlock a fourth song at the arcades. now, rush through the song, put kevin by the screen, and look at the AAA on it. oh, man. okay, another time, take away oni mode and put it on stealth--where the arrows are invisble. wait, this deserves a paragraph of its own.

kevin beat max unlimited without seeing the arrows. and got an AAA.

then he did it backwards, also stealth.

i saw pictures.

yeah, that's right.

okay, enough...whatever. geekiness, gamer-/nerd-dom. but...tomorrow morning, i'm going out with john and friends--oh, man, i totally forgot to tell everybody how many people there were. well...john, his younger brother, his younger sister, three of his younger sister's classmates, john's friend, his friend's younger sister, john's mom, and, finally, me. ten, total, unless i made a mistake or was redundant or omissive; but i think i got that right. ate at good old...mickey d's. ah...it was pretty good. i decided to get something that i can't get in the states--i think it was a teriyaki beef and onion...thing sandwiched between two rice patties. it was pretty good. fries were less greasy and salty, which would be a good thing, but i don't really care for them anyways. oh, and apparently taiwanese mcdonalds' make some kind of shake thing, with ice cream and the soda of your choice. and, like, ice cream with mango (and probably other fruits, too). oh, right, then after that lunch, the ten of us went to an arcade briefly, where i schooled in foosball (despite really, really sticky...pieces, whatever you want to call the poles with the guys on them) and did well enough at air hockey.

hrm...what else? oh, got another way cool gift. hrm...if anna's reading this, skip the rest of this paragraph, will you? or just go ahead and spoil the surprise--i'm sure it's great, and i'm sure that it's pretty likely that you're reading this blog (at all) thoroughly enough to catch this. but...so they had these penguin-shaped flip flops at one of the taipei zoo gift stores, and they have beaks, color, and everything--including, that is, on the strap, the words, "C.I.A kinky foot prints" sic. they were too good to pass up. well...they may to go somebody else, but i think anna (garst, that is, to be sure) should enjoy them.

just thought i'd share that one. oh, talked to natalie hollies earlier today, too. like, one of the people from back in those good old latin poetry days (hah.). online, of course. she plays ddr, is a swimmer, and is really cool (for reasons besides those two qualifiers, of course). told her all abour derek and kevin...it was great. some time next year, we're having a latin poetry/swimmer get-together thing, with her, maddison (who was at about my level, maybe a little lower when it came to full comprehension, and, therefore, tests, but definitely more willing to bs lines that she didn't do, meaning that she took it a lot easier and slept a lot more than me...), and me. we'll play ddr. we'll remenisce over those old latin poetry times. we'll complain a lot, no doubt, by then, because the school year will have started...and we'll probably talk swimming. it'll be a blast of a ball.

ah, so, as i'd been saying a bit ago, the ten (or so) of us, john's crowd and i, are heading out again tomorrow, to the chiang kai-shek (or however it's spelled in english) memorial building for some fun. at...nine. gotta be back to my apartment at around noonish. heading out shortly thereafter for the nearest airport, where imma catch a flight to the south of taiwan--and there i'll stay until sunday afternoon, or so. then...i'll be doing something for dinner, but i'm not sure what yet; if all goes according to my mom's and ruining my plan, i'll be eating with my...grand-aunt, i suppose, kinda works. but...i still wanna go check out another night market with mindy, monday some time (not when i'm having class) i should be heading out with john again, and tuesday i should be hanging out with derek. wednesday, of course, i'm on my way back. my approximate plans for the remainder of the time. very approximate...

well, i'm off to see about takig care of stuff, so's i can get to sleep with enough time to catch a few winks before another dawn hits me. huh...yeah, whatever.

oh, yeah, so john's server, which i've been using, is too full for me to upload the next batch of pictures...so i'll just hold on to them.

11:08 am greencastle, july 13; 12:08 am taipei, july 14

...'nother short one, because i'm really tired and have a minor headache. and i have to be up really bloody early tomorrow. like, if i'm to be at the taipei zoo at 9, then i should leave at like 8, which means i'll have to be up...in like seven hours. oh, man.

...but while i have this connection, i should do something with it. class today...went well enough. at the end, i got to take a few pictures of the class (people) and the room itself, for that powerpoint thing i'm supposed to make for...friday. a draft, anyways. (and i almost spelled that "draught.") ah...later, ran in the da'an park, like i said i'd meant to a while ago. i decided to follow through with a sort of theory or whatever that i came up with a while ago; that every time i think, "wow, i would totally do that...but only if there were somebody here with whom to do it, or somebody to see it, or somebody to back me..." well, so that was the basis of a few things that i've done, such as trying to take pictures of weird things (when i had the chance, and when i didn't think i'd get in trouble...so, like, once), buying random stuff that looks cool but i don't know about, mainly food, playing games that look funny (only kinda "ha-ha"), etc. uhh...and, now, running in that park, also because i know that i'd've regretted it later if i hadn't. methinks it was actually a good run, though. not only was the scenery decent--even saw some people playing soccer. and, of course, a bunch of basket-ballers. made me really, really, REALLY want to play ultimate again; or, at least, throw a disc around for a bit. well...maybe i'll do something about that. and so about thirty minutes into my run, i realized that my pace had slowed to pretty much what my race pace was at the end of my first season, maybe the beginning of my second season, and i agreed with myself that i'd do better this year, this final year. probably. at least, i'll try harder. at that point, too, i sat down and did a good few crunches--like 150 or something, can't remember exactly how many. i've discovered that doing them on one's side helps reduce unfortunate love handles. uhh...woo!

of course, the twins came along, but so did the nanny and her husband, so they just watched them play for the eighty or so minutes that i ran, cooled down, walked around, and whatever. it was pretty cool. pretty flowers and things there, too, including two people making out on top of this one hill...which was pretty awkward, seeing as they were taking up the whole sidewalk, and i was still going at a pretty darn good pace, so i came up to them quickly and, not looking up, as usual, almost bumped into them. hah...whatever. i just laughed shortly after i left them. actually, i've been doing that a lot; just laughing at myself when i do stupid stuff or see others doing something weird. stumbled twice in the same spot on the same flight of stairs--if not the same stair, then with error of no greater than two steps--two days in a row, and i laughed out loud. ah, well.

and...later today went out and saw the "fantastic four," because i heard it was decent fluff. and it was. only one major glaring problem that i couldn't handle; at the end (spoilers, of course, but it shouldn't matter), when the torch is burning von doom, at "supernova temperature," as per the "world's greatest scientist," a temperature which, a fraction of which, anyways, earlier melted titanium, it was contained so as not to destroy buildings, people, or the earth by the invisible girl, who could bend her mind around and...contain it. somehow. even though she could barely hold back some beams of electricity earlier. and, of course, there's no need to prevent the flames from going down (after all, they just melted a bit of asphalt on top) or out from above...say...five meters. well...once again, another summer action flick to pass the time. worth the $10 i payed for a drink, popcorn, *and* the movie, though. well...at least, more worthwhile here than whatever i'd've payed back home.

good thing i'm about done here, too, because my batteries are pretty much drained--computer, mental, and physical. *sigh*...not enough time to recharge, though. i'll go do what i can.

12:02 pm greencastle, july 12; 01:02 am taipei, july 12

forgot a few things yesterday. first, some more stuff from espirit: well, besides a few incredibly expensive shirts and whatnot (you know, like, $40 t-shirts that weren't special in any way--no pre-fading, no frayed edges; nothing), there were two things that i was very tempted to buy. first, a pair of pants. well, they had a bunch of pretty decent pants, but none that i would really want, had they been even as cheap as $20. but ther was one amazing pair...know that red bow tie that i have? yeah, they were probably just a little lighter than that, but they felt like girl pants--really tight. also really long, too; the only length they had on display was of length 32. meh.

...and the other close call was actually a series of them, but all the same thing: jackets. espirit has some amazingly cool jackets, but between all their red and khaki zip-up hoodies, their pinstriped casuals, and some way cool denim and khaki...iunno...messing around jackets, not a single type cost within how much money i had--indeed, i'm not sure if i could have bought more than one of the cheapest two or three jackets they offered, and that's with the 50% drop. ah, well. maybe some day when i'm obscenely rich, i'll remember this, or come across it again, or something, and think, "wow, wouldn't it be so nice of me to go out and buy one of those jackets for some little kid or something, hoping that, just maybe, he has thoughts similar to mine?" but, of course, i won't have gotten rich by doing stuff like that, in all liklihood--but then, in a bout of yet more reality, i'll probably not be rich enough to toss hundreds of dollars around for merely pretty cool casual jackets. meh.

just realized that i ended both of those paragraphs with "meh." reminds me of how, talking to derek online earlier today, i managed to start two consecutive messages with "hey," punctuated just so. well...at least it's not much of a problem for me. yet.

lesse...oh, yesterday also went into a shoe store with my uncle--he wanted to buy some new sandals. wow...so i saw these black dress shoes made of crocodile skin. which cost more than $800, getting close to $900. thought i miscalculated. dropped a zero and divided by three, long division, in my head, just to be sure. then again. yup...those shoes definitely cost probably about as much as i've spent on my ps2 and all associated stuff. that's a little upsetting--that they advertise it, proving that somebody, somewhere, must have bought it. aw, geez...

today, though, class went very well. the two girls again, conversation. well...it went well, despite my original plan dying--or, at least, finding itself very ill. so, ah...after i copied over the video of target stuff onto my computer, there were like 240 or so mbs free. that was a huge problem. but...i didn't realize that until i realized how much the video was lagging. actually, it didn't start being bad for the first three or four minutes--just lagging for a second here and there, stuff that can be expected of any pc. after bit longer, though, it decided to jump around by fives of seconds...and that was a problem. so i definitely just went through the rest kinda quickly, pointing out noteworthy (hopefully, to them) things. afterwards, class was spent talking about shopping stuff; it actually had direction this time. good stuff. however, i forgot to tell them to bring pictures about which to talk next time...well, maybe they'll show up for class on thursday, the poetry one (the two, ann an minnie, are in both classes). mebbe i'll remember then.

okay, now i'm tired, and i may go running tomorrow morning. may. it depends on a few things, not the least of which is how tired i am. but then, the conversation class tomorrow--with ted--is cancelled, so i may be able to go in the afternoon. hrm...there's some potential there, especially because i have to hang back and wait for my mom to bring her camera, so's i can take pictures of class to turn into some kind of powerpoint-esque slideshow for daisy, the owner of the cram school. it's kinda complicated and vague at the same time...but no matter. oh, and the "esque" is because i don't have powerpoint on my computer (i'm too cool), but i do have corel presentations, which can save slideshows as .exe's--definitely an indispensible (and amazingly cool) feature. did that last time i came and gave those presentations. worked very well. was happy with it. works well, actually. leaving out subjects. putting periods at the end of awful fragments. i don't recommend it; only for those very confident of their ability to sufficiently mangle the english language such that their meanings are only manifest to a select few whose lines of thought are similar. woo. sleep...

10:08 am greencastle, july 11; 11:08 pm taipei, july 11

...so, in case you missed it, danshui was a blast. lesse...of course, i skipped a lot in that last (really short) post. i'll try to patch in some of those holes now.

besides the mrt and walking, and besides taking the boat to get from danshui to bali and back, we also biked for about one and a quarter hours. see, on the bali side of the...uhh...i guess it's a river, but it leads right to the ocean and is already salty...there were a few places where one could rent bicycles to go around, alongside the river thing, the bay, look at the pretty scenery. well, we did just that, after renting two bikes for an hour. hah...so about 40 minutes on our way out, we come to a crossroads (oh, of course, after being passed a good many times by people that wanted to go faster than us [for we were taking it slowly to enjoy the view] and, interestingly enough, a good few people in actual serious cycling gear), where it appeared that one way would take us somewhere in towards civilization and the other way would lead us into a huge loop across another bridge (that is, us having already crossed one at this point) back to bali, passing by danshui--and, of course, we could turn back. well, so as not to retrace the same path, we decided to go for the loop. first, of course, we asked some people how long it would be, to see if we would have time. uhh...unfortunately, those twenty or however many kilometers sounded...just a little far for twenty minutes, so we just went back. of course, that didn't stop us from being late, but we didn't have to pay much extra. the people were kinda nice.

hrm...oh, played that chinese drum game, which is easier than it looks--or, at least, than i'd expected it to be. it really is just as simple as beating the drum on time...which about concludes that part of the story. but we did try a few other games, too, such as this one in which, for NT$10, or a little over 32 cents, one may try to find differences between two pictures--five per pair of pictures. as long as one doesn't fail within the time limit, one may proceed on. well, we did pretty well the first time, got through at least three rounds, but the second time was a little different...first off, rather than pictures of statues or scenery or whatever, it started with a picture of some woman in nothing more than a thong and a see-through shawl thing, not quite covering her; both lace. and it was unbelievably hard, not to mention awkward, if for no other reason than the fact that to any onlookers, there would just be some american guy (weird hair) and an asian girl (weird, spikedish hair) staring intently on a barely (and debatably) dressed lady. uhh...yeah...oh, and i discovered that i suck a lot more at those basketball games than i remember i used to. i mean...my first try, i didn't even break the 50 point mark (most baskets counting for one point, some for two, and really nice ones three; i think the computer judged on whether or not you used the backboard and whether or not you hit the rim), but i did better the second time around. sixty seconds per round, that is. *sigh*...ah, well. that's why i play ultimate, not basketball.

hrm...took some pictures--which reminds me, mindy took some with her cell phone, too, and i'll have to ask her for those. really great sunset, too. many pictures of that, but a bunch of them were just me hoping to catch a good angle and not being able to see well at the time. i'll see how they turned out when i get back home, where i have the *right* connecting cable.

oh, among the things that i bought, there was a bunch of candy, another gift or two, and more of that weird drink in the funny bottle that tastes like bubblegum and is kept sealed by a marble. unopened this time, and with the opening mechanism thing. i'll see about brionging that back. woo!

hrm...and nothing more worth mention until today. after a relatively uneventful poetry class session (just review of limericks, what we did last thursday, becase two of the five kids that showed up today missed the explanation; as a result, too, i had to stay an extra hour, gratis, helping them or whatever. meh, not a lot i can do, least of all complain.), i made my way to...yes, sogo! woo! no, but just to meet my uncle today. we didn't actually buy anything there. actually, i got there like half an hour before he did, so i wandered around for a while and considered buying a few things, but didn't any yet. may later; just gift ideas. then i wandered about a few nearby blocks, window shopping, and found a espirit store with a bunch of really cool stuff--namely, almost all of it marked down to %50, making a good portion of it an actually (get this) reasonable price! yes, i know, it's amazing! know what else? i found a really cool bag there! woo! for like NT$1680, about half over what all the other ones were that were almost as (imho) nice, but then, the price was halved! so it only cost NT$840! yeah, i definitely knew i was going to buy it. that is, until my uncle said that he'd get it for me, as a gift, if only because he had so few chances to do stuff with me. i was like, wow, no way, it's just something that i've been looking for, but he insisted. so now i have my pretty new espirit messenger bag, and i'm pretty happy. oh, yeah, and i'm pretty happy that my dad sends news that word is in about cross country camp! woo! of course, this comes with mixed feelings--that is, camp is august first through third, or something, but i recall that camp tended to be, what, just the weekend before school starts, right? if so, that's definitely bad, because i want at least a few more weeks of summer...aw, man. i really hope there's at least one more. and i hope that everybody cool who wants to can come to camp--namely, graduated seniors and people new to cross. hah...i know that i, for one, have exactly as many forms that i need in as i do sureties about cross country ultimate--excluding the fact that, unless either my father or i got it wrong, there was a certain sentence about an "_ultimate_ season" this year...(_*_ signifying underlines, of course, because i can't remember the html and don't have a connection right now; i'll change that if i get one and remember) which would mean that a good few of us stay on the team, and, so long as schimpf always gives us our *entire* frisbee friday, that i, for one, have decided that i shall actually try the full season and do as well as i can. i mean, it's my last season, anyways, and i'll have ultimate to keep the fun in the sport, right? besides...i realized earlier today, while thinking about this and resolving to practice hard if ultimate goes through, one of the reasons i actually do like running: it's indescribably easier to run, thinking about nothing else, barely even concentrating on keeping my pace, having to worry about nothing other than making it all the way to the finish, the end, or whever i'm planning to go, than it is to sit around and let the burdens and cares of school, college, and life in general weigh me down. oh, and if schimpf finally lets us listen to music while we run this season, i'll definitely get a much smaller, readily portable mp3 player to strap to my arm or whatever while i run--after all, if i actually try, then i'll likely not be running along with anybody with whom i can keep interesting conversation. we'll see how this all works out. of course, one of the things that falls into place in the back of my head and crowds all my thoughts a little bit more, all the time, is stuff like this--where i plan everything out, make all these easy forked paths for any sequence of events, and don't realize that there's something significant missing in the first...bracket or whatever, and so it all falls apart immediately. wasted time and effort...which is why i don't often go for optimism, and clear-cut black-and-white situations don't ever work out right.

...and so i straightened up some stuff on my mp3 player, cleaned up a few things there and on my computer, and have decided that i'll go to sleep relatively early tonight after reading some more barker. it's surprisingly good, i tell ya'. not zelazny-amazing, but it's good. oh, and stranded at the drive-in remind me of the pixies, only much higher fidelity and making more, better music. aside from "where is my mind?" of course; that song's incredible. finally started a playlist of nostalgic music today, something i've been meaning to do for a long time; everything in it reminds me distinctly of something, and it's impossible for me to listen to the song without remeniscing at least briefly. that song's on there, of course, along with many others. it's only (roughly) 36 kinda strong right now ("kinda" because maybe a dozen of the songs are tentative, and i'm not sure if the association came up unconsciously or otherwise, and one song i have in my head but of which i've failed to get a copy), but about a third of them...incredible. of *course* (*of course*, of course, of course) american pie is on there. and, with that...

01:18 pm greencastle, july 10; 02:18 am taipei, july 11

...so i find myself getting busier and busier yet, so i'm pretty happy about that. not so much by the number of things that i'm doing each day, how many activities i have planned or whatever, but moreso the quality of the time that i'm spending doing stuff. went to danshui again with a girl, mindy, today. she's one of the students to whom i gave that speech...uhh...like two and a half years or so ago. one and a half? something like that. one of those high schoolers. well...she was a third-year student last semester, and so now that it's over with, and she's taken the jcee, the college entrance exam, she'll be in a university in a few months. she's tomboyish, also kinda bleached her hair, waxes it up in a really cool fashion, and wants to be an english teacher in the future.

but, so, ah, danshui...was really fun. lesse...walked around from like 11:30 to 6 or so, after and before, respectively, an hour-long mrt ride. lesse...saw a whole lot of shops, ate a bunch of stuff--such as this "chou dou fu," or "stinky tofu," with some spicy sauce on it, which was pretty good, fried (whole) squid, which was *really* good, some kind of tofu with noodles in it, kinda sweet and spicy, which was all right, thousand year egg, some kind of bird egg cooked with fish--really good--and a bunch of other things. oh, a cone of ice cream like thirty cm tall--you know, because it was really hot out and i didn't want to get something that would melt too quickly and drip all over me, such as a medium or large--like 75 cm. watermelon juice (unfortunately watered down). some kind of indescribable sweet drink, pretty good. bunches of other stuffs.

...but, because i had to be there at 11ish and i figured it'd take a while to get there, i had to get up at like 9:30 for a quick shower before going. and that was after going to sleep at like three. so i'm really tired, have class tomorrow, and think i'll go get on that sleep. oh, but cross country camp news arrived today. hopefully everybody interested got the info...but this isn't the toime (is how i typo'd it, which reminds me that i've been listening to a lot of "stranded at the drive-in" and "the decemberists" in the past...day, and i'm liking them both a whole lot.) or place to talk about that. maybe later. maybe in a different blog...so many from which to choose, right? yeah, whatever...

10:49 am greencastle, july 9; 11:49 pm taipei, july 9

so a good few things happened today. it all started around 11 this morning. wait, make that like 10:50, approximately when i was dressing after my shower, and suddenly a (surprisingly large) drop of blood fell onto my hand. wait...it feels like my nose is really runny. aw, dag. stupid nose...well, so after i cleaned that up and got my nose to stop bleeding, i realized that it'd already dripped onto the ground and my foot a few times...and that was pretty upsetting and nasty.

...but on to the actual important stuff. so lunch, (well...i suppose that, now, it's) yesterday. went out with carl, barney, the twins, daisy, her sister, sally, a friend of sally's, and sally's and daisy's father (nine of us) in this pretty cool tea room thing, which was something of a hybrid restaurant, too, but most of their food was actual eastern food with little more asian twist than rice. decent desserts, though; i had some strawberry, cherry, and banana chocolate tart, which was a little too rich, but otherwise pretty good. some kind of mushroom and shrimp stuff over rice for my main meal, though. afterwards...carl, barney, and i took the twins around and to sogo again. carl and i talked at length about skateboarding and other stuff...he's really cool. uhh...oh, so that restaurant was on the lowest floor of a shopping mall, and we walked through it to get up, out, and into the mrt station. then, we entered the mrt station thinking that we could head back, but the twins really, really wanted to go do something, and that's why we ended up going to sogo. hey, funny story, it costs like NT$20 to enter a station and exit the same one...so like 66 cents, but still...between the three of us (under 115 cm free), they made two free us dollars. pssht...

and then we spent like an hour in front of barbies.

well, they looked at some other things, too, but the longest time was in front of some barbies. and it was very boring.

...and just as we were leaving sogo and had entered the mrt station again, my uncle alex called to see if i could meet him at...sogo. of course. well, i told him i had to drop stuff off where i was staying (kinda true, i was the one not holding an infant, so i was the one carrying some left-over cake) first anyways, so...yeh.

so at like 3:30ish or so (very rough; give it a thirty minute margin of error) we met in front of sogo, at the main entrance, where there's this huge weird clock thing, and, today, a performance and people talking about some "khlein" store or something; more designer clothes, i assume, newly opening. some decent dancers, actually, though. decent, but only marginally. then we went and got some drinks over which we could talk for a bit and figure out some movie stuff. oh, right, i forgot to talk about that here; i've already told much of this story to at least three other...well, at at least three other places. so when he first called, it was like, "hey, so, i'm in town, and your mom and i agreed that you and i are going out for food and to watch a movie saturday. kthnxbye." so...i kinda had to cancel whatever potential hanging out was happening with derek (yes, a name!), but it was interesting. oh, had some kind of berry yogurt slush (approximate translation) thing and it was really good. ah...figured out where a movie theatre would be, figured out the time of the movie (war of the worlds; yeah, yeah, i know...), and headed off. made it in time, no worries....movie theatre on seventh floor of huge mall complex. very cool. i need no articles.

oh, hey, you know what else is funny? the way "hollaback girl" was playing when i walked into the theatre...and the way i threw my arms up in exasperation and got a few weird looks. auugh! auuuuuugh!! and i've realized that i've seen that *one* preview for "stealth" at least four times for every movie that i've seen in the past, say, four months. i kid you not, it is *everywhere,* and that's a problem. it plays at every movie and on all the tv's around anywhere, and this is extremely bothering. ah, well...not a lot i can do about that.

then dinner in sogo--chinese food, not especially noteworthy, but it was one of the better meals i've had here. uhh...looked around at more stuff there. i think i'll buy a new messenger bag while i'm around...my present one is coming apart a bit, one of the corners, so...yeh. but almost all of them are around NT$1000, or about $35. *sigh*...we'll see. maybe if i find one that i really like. oh, saw some $60 oakley flip flops. they look comfortable, but not even $40 comfortable...pssht.

hold up. i just realized that i probably never fully explained sogo, what this massive thing is. well, imagine a department store. now, blend it with a shopping mall, so that it has all the stores and whatnot of a mall, including the little vendors of drinks and small snacks everywhere, but tear down the walls between stores and package them up mostly into displays characteristic of a u.s. department store. alright, you've the general idea. now, make it twelve stories tall, with two basement floors. there you go! that's that specific "pacific sogo" or whatever the outlet is called. it's...pretty dang cool, and i definitely wish i could bring a bunch of you along to mess around there; it'd be like target times eight--an approximation, but quasi-realistic. man...so much stuff! well...they wouldn't be quite that lenient with us taking stuff all around the store, but we could definitely point and mess around right there and everything to our little black hearts' content. *sigh.* maybe some time, when we're all like 30 and want to have a good old reunion, it'll be in taipei. but, then again, maybe archer will finally come to his senses. but, once again, maybe i'll actually be optimistic. hah. haha.

ah...which about covers it. real plans tomorrow. real plans next thursday. real plans all next weekend. real plans...what...tuesday? wednesday? tentative plans wheneverelse i have time. yeah! but...it's been way too long since i've played ultimate. the sogo nike place had some of those really cheap discs, and i almost wanted to ask the store guy if he'd back up a bit so i could try it out. it was cheap, too--like $8, i think, but i can't remember for sure. wellp...i should probably go to sleep, seeing as i've got to be somewhere rather far in about...less than eight hours. uh oh...

10:49 am greencastle, july 9; 11:49 pm taipei, july 9

so a good few things happened today. it all started around 11 this morning. wait, make that like 10:50, approximately when i was dressing after my shower, and suddenly a (surprisingly large) drop of blood fell onto my hand. wait...it feels like my nose is really runny. aw, dag. stupid nose...well, so after i cleaned that up and got my nose to stop bleeding, i realized that it'd already dripped onto the ground and my foot a few times...and that was pretty upsetting and nasty.

...but on to the actual important stuff. so lunch, (well...i suppose that, now, it's) yesterday. went out with carl, barney, the twins, daisy, her sister, sally, a friend of sally's, and sally's and daisy's father (nine of us) in this pretty cool tea room thing, which was something of a hybrid restaurant, too, but most of their food was actual eastern food with little more asian twist than rice. decent desserts, though; i had some strawberry, cherry, and banana chocolate tart, which was a little too rich, but otherwise pretty good. some kind of mushroom and shrimp stuff over rice for my main meal, though. afterwards...carl, barney, and i took the twins around and to sogo again. carl and i talked at length about skateboarding and other stuff...he's really cool. uhh...oh, so that restaurant was on the lowest floor of a shopping mall, and we walked through it to get up, out, and into the mrt station. then, we entered the mrt station thinking that we could head back, but the twins really, really wanted to go do something, and that's why we ended up going to sogo. hey, funny story, it costs like NT$20 to enter a station and exit the same one...so like 66 cents, but still...between the three of us (under 115 cm free), they made two free us dollars. pssht...

and then we spent like an hour in front of barbies.

well, they looked at some other things, too, but the longest time was in front of some barbies. and it was very boring.

...and just as we were leaving sogo and had entered the mrt station again, my uncle alex called to see if i could meet him at...sogo. of course. well, i told him i had to drop stuff off where i was staying (kinda true, i was the one not holding an infant, so i was the one carrying some left-over cake) first anyways, so...yeh.

so at like 3:30ish or so (very rough; give it a thirty minute margin of error) we met in front of sogo, at the main entrance, where there's this huge weird clock thing, and, today, a performance and people talking about some "khlein" store or something; more designer clothes, i assume, newly opening. some decent dancers, actually, though. decent, but only marginally. then we went and got some drinks over which we could talk for a bit and figure out some movie stuff. oh, right, i forgot to talk about that here; i've already told much of this story to at least three other...well, at at least three other places. so when he first called, it was like, "hey, so, i'm in town, and your mom and i agreed that you and i are going out for food and to watch a movie saturday. kthnxbye." so...i kinda had to cancel whatever potential hanging out was happening with derek (yes, a name!), but it was interesting. oh, had some kind of berry yogurt slush (approximate translation) thing and it was really good. ah...figured out where a movie theatre would be, figured out the time of the movie (war of the worlds; yeah, yeah, i know...), and headed off. made it in time, no worries....movie theatre on seventh floor of huge mall complex. very cool. i need no articles.

oh, hey, you know what else is funny? the way "hollaback girl" was playing when i walked into the theatre...and the way i threw my arms up in exasperation and got a few weird looks. auugh! auuuuuugh!! and i've realized that i've seen that *one* preview for "stealth" at least four times for every movie that i've seen in the past, say, four months. i kid you not, it is *everywhere,* and that's a problem. it plays at every movie and on all the tv's around anywhere, and this is extremely bothering. ah, well...not a lot i can do about that.

then dinner in sogo--chinese food, not especially noteworthy, but it was one of the better meals i've had here. uhh...looked around at more stuff there. i think i'll buy a new messenger bag while i'm around...my present one is coming apart a bit, one of the corners, so...yeh. but almost all of them are around NT$1000, or about $35. *sigh*...we'll see. maybe if i find one that i really like. oh, saw some $60 oakley flip flops. they look comfortable, but not even $40 comfortable...pssht.

hold up. i just realized that i probably never fully explained sogo, what this massive thing is. well, imagine a department store. now, blend it with a shopping mall, so that it has all the stores and whatnot of a mall, including the little vendors of drinks and small snacks everywhere, but tear down the walls between stores and package them up mostly into displays characteristic of a u.s. department store. alright, you've the general idea. now, make it twelve stories tall, with two basement floors. there you go! that's that specific "pacific sogo" or whatever the outlet is called. it's...pretty dang cool, and i definitely wish i could bring a bunch of you along to mess around there; it'd be like target times eight--an approximation, but quasi-realistic. man...so much stuff! well...they wouldn't be quite that lenient with us taking stuff all around the store, but we could definitely point and mess around right there and everything to our little black hearts' content. *sigh.* maybe some time, when we're all like 30 and want to have a good old reunion, it'll be in taipei. but, then again, maybe archer will finally come to his senses. but, once again, maybe i'll actually be optimistic. hah. haha.

ah...which about covers it. real plans tomorrow. real plans next thursday. real plans all next weekend. real plans...what...tuesday? wednesday? tentative plans wheneverelse i have time. yeah! but...it's been way too long since i've played ultimate. the sogo nike place had some of those really cheap discs, and i almost wanted to ask the store guy if he'd back up a bit so i could try it out. it was cheap, too--like $8, i think, but i can't remember for sure. wellp...i should probably go to sleep, seeing as i've got to be somewhere rather far in about...less than eight hours. uh oh...

11:42 am greencastle, july 8; 12:42 am taipei, july 9

so today was a whole lot cooler than i was expecting it to be when i last posted, but that doesn't mean this'll be a very long post. you'll yet behold. see, first i slept in. until about 9:30. and by 9:30, i mean 12:30. well...went to sleep late, so it worked out. ah...then i went upstairs and talked to carl for a long time--barney fell asleep while we were up there; guess he was really tired or...something. well...that was cool. see, having been living in the states for a good few years, carl's english is really, really good, and so i could talk full-speed and pretty much full-mannerism/catch phrase/whatever--at least, all the ones that i'd use around other people that don't wouldn't get two thirds of them. it was cool. talked about random stuff; school, computers, and, oddly enough, cars and driving. well...then i proposed we head to an arcade. huh...around this time, barney was back up. well, they thought, yeah, that'd be a bunch of fun...but there aren't any half decent arcades around here. just one or two that they knew.

well, i got us to try anyways, and wow, did they misjudge it. that, or the ones that they used to frequent were unbelievable. see, when chen-shui bian (or however one spells his name in english) was in power, he basically killed all the arcades, saying they were a bad influence or gambling was happening or whatever. this one is one of the few that came back. hah...huge, i say. huge! all kinds of games i've never seen (well, a few) among a dozen or so sequels to games i remember playing just a few years ago. none of them unexpected, but still. and a few new takes on old styles--a crossbow time crisis-like game, more of those chinese drum games like drumstyle, that game that's beatmania/ddr only with a keyboard that i saw being previewed when i was in china, and countless others. and, of course, ddr itself. well...needless to say, i really sucked today, not having played in months and, more importantly, used to pads like mark's, much, much larger than the arcade ones. but carl was really good, probably a little better than i used to be, and barney was about where i am, but he actually knows what songs he can do.

vastly importantly, though, i met another american while i was there. not just any american, one from ohio. and not just any guy from ohio, but a ddr fan from ohio. but that's an exceedingly drastic understatement. it's saying that jeff's a fan of computers, anna garst's a fan of shopping, and tracy's a fan of swimming. well...so when i played, he was sitting there, waiting for a turn. then barney, carl, and i, after i failed, went off and played some time crisis. we came back and he was playing; no, wait, *winning.* like...AA while looking around at stuff. approximately two greats on some eight foot like 200 bpm song--1.5 speed modifier. on his extra song, meaning that he'd just gotten three AA's. oh, man. so later we were talking, and he did stuff like...show me pictures of AAA's he's gotten. and...pull out a sheet of the steps for max 300 that he'd memorized before. uhh...wow. *all of them.* says that he can AAA almost every song on the arcade version of extreme, which has most of the songs from every single ddr. i mean, that's getting bloody perfects for every step, not even a single great. he has gotten AAA's on all extreme video game songs. extraordinary. he's pretty amazing on double, too. lesse...try max 300 A. *right before my very eyes.* double. that means both pads. you know, when there are eighth note runs back and forth across every arrow. and jumps with crazy stuff like left on the left pad and down on the right, only a quarter note between other things. and...lesse...was this one of the songs that he played on 2x speed? yeah, probably. he's good at that. know what else? he knows the world champ of ddr--this guy, megamanx, whose name is kevin. who can definitely easily (relatively) AAA virtually any song--i'm not sure if that's actual, too. man...man! i mean, i was standing there, talking to him, with him sometimes even looking over at me, glancing around, and *AA'ing songs.* auuugh! he's, like, indescribably good. anybody remember jsb? found those videos of him a long time ago? yeah, this guy's met jsb. when he's been playing, he's better than jsb. now, though, he's really out of practice--he's been in taiwan for a while, not playing *too* much, and the whole week before he came, he--you can practically put this in quotes--literally woke up every day, got on xbox live, and went back to sleep later. literally never left the house. halo 2. guy's unbelievable, but since i've met him, and seen him play, i believe him. oh, but kevin? yeah, aaroninjapan.com has a video of him AAA'ing max 300, and, if you look carefully, you should be able to see this guy in the background. says he and kevin have a bunch of other friends who are just as crazy (another understatement) at ddr as them, but kevin is, of course, the best. they go around to tournaments and stuff to win. it's crazy! but, once, my friend actually beat kevin--on doubles, once. kevin got like 5 greats, but this guy only got two or three. i mean...wow. they measure and describe how well they did by the number of greats that they get--you know, like, "i did pretty well, but didn't quite make it; just three." says that if you really want to get good, you have to realize that "great" just isn't good enough; if you get a great, you must see that you've done something wrong. figure out what it is and turn it into a perfect. i just though...no, way. this guy spends way too much time. but...very cool.

so i think we're going to try to hang out again or something tomorrow; means i've got plans pretty much all day. sleep until ten or 10:3ish, lunch with the people with whom i'm staying at 11:30ish, until about two, shortly after which imma try to meet up with this guy, and then i'm meeting my mom's brother, alex, in the evening some time vaguely after six. apparently, my mom told him to take me out to watch a movie...uhh...okay, whatever. i'd been hoping to some time, so i guess it'll work. i think i'll talk to my new friend and see if he wants to come along, but we'll see. oh, hey, know what's funny? it was so loud and i was so busy thinking about how incredible this guy was at ddr, i didn't quite catch his name; maybe dan, mayble kyle, but i really can't remember...and that's pretty embarrassing. huh...we exchanged emails and aim id's, and i gave him mine first, writing my name on the top of the page, but he didn't quite pick it up, and so i just have these two intarweb contacts. well...mebbe he'll have his name in his aim profile or up with his email. hopefully. whatever. he's pretty cool, though, and really modest, never bragging or anything. at least, i didn't feel like it was bragging, and i suppose that's mostly what counts. hah...crazy, crazy, crazy.

oh, so carl and i had a pretty good conversation on the way back before sushi tonight. i can't remember how it started, but politics happened! most fortunately, he's not a bush supporter and knows a bit about general politics, so he could join in my relatively (to, say, a blog entry) short rant, bashing, and flipping out (including throwing my arms emphatically into the air). i was glad he wasn't just another foreigner with rose-colored glasses. i'd've been pretty upset in that case. but all turned out for the better, thankfully.

then sushi was pretty good. i didn't eat a lot; guess i just wasn't hungry. hah...ended up not doing much in the arcade, so i've a whole bunch of coins left over. well, no matter, i'll definitely be visiting again. hrm...nothing really noteworthy there, but i was really thirsty and ended up drinking a whole bunch of tea. hah, funny story, i starting writing "eating" instead of "drinking" just there, surely at least partly because one may say that one eats tea rather than drinks it. meh. had some eel, aside from the standard calamari and various many fishes. make that many various fishes...yeah, i think i'll go to sleep soon. too much excitment in one day; too much talking as fast as i can, eager to blabber at full speed and with full use of my active vocabulary. i'm pretty sure i even mouthed "in the face!" and a few other ones today, but none were verbalized, for the sake of (once again) my integrity in the eyes of others. the illusion of relative normalcy.

oh, but so all the while that i've been writing this surprisingly long post (you know, i really did so little i didn't expect it to be this long; guess it's all that stuff about which i could talk today, and i'm even leaving stuff out, like carl's obsession with HID headlights that he wants for his 2004 accord, which he also loves, or the fact that the ddr guy played football--which reminds me, also, that carl at least tried a whole bunch of sports, such as rugby, soccer, swimming (mom signed him up for some meet when he was a little kid and decided that he'd have the best chance of doing well if he participated in *every* event...), cross country (had fun and seems to have been on a team very similar to ours), played ultimate, etc...)...here, lemme start that sentence over again, so's you remember where we were and don't have to waste some energy flicking your eyes back up to find the start of the...well, actually, i suppose that since this'll actually be in paragraphs, rather than the way i'm writing it right now--one obscenely massive chunk of text occasionally punctuated by the codes for closing and starting new paragraphs--it'll be pretty easy for you to catch those first few words again--most certainly faster than it's taken for you to read up to here. hah. okay, i'll move on now. (sorry.) ...and so as i've been typing this entire post/entry, i've been listening to some of my new music. wow, though...it's great stuff. one band, "stranded at the drive-in," had me puzzling over them for a really long time, trying to figure out whether it was a mistake wherever i read it and it was just supposed to be "at the drive-in," or whatever, especially when i couldn't find any other mention of them online, i.e. amazon or a web page of their own. no matter, they're definitely not the same, but they're definitely awesome. slint? yeah, they're a lot like mogwai, but i like them more; it's ambient, but their songs (or those that i've listened to; lots of music here, and my listening time is precious) all seem really familiar, plus the lyrics are well worked in. and...ah, there was also six organs of admittance. uhh...suffice to say, good stuff, but i've been listening to so much random, eclectic, really good stuff, i can't briefly recall how good--that is, in what way they're good, not the degree. (upon further reflection, they're also quasi-ambient, but up-tempo and generally indescribably [and wordlessly] quality-full enough to be listened to with one's attention partly on just enjoying the music, not solely concentrating on something else. makes for really good soundtrack music, too, methinks, and so i'll probably be listening to a lot of that while mrt'ing or wwhatever. sweet.) oh, and, of course, i finally got around to the decemberists, to my joy, both at how good they are, and, more importantly, the fact that they weren't overhyped. woohoo! good day, good day. (saying it twice makes it all the more so.) oh, and, of course, i finished changing *all* of my wma's (namely, almost every cd i'd ripped onto my mp3 player) to mp3. yes! theoretically, the quality would be a bit better, but, of course, quality can't go up...but at least i feel better about them now. oh, and filled in a bunch of the idv3_2 tag info for albums that needed it. so today felt both productive and extremely fun, not to mention mentally revitalizing. yes! big score! and, with that, i'm off to read a bit of "the great and secret show," by clive barker, which is shaping out to be much more than it'd seemed at first. i can barely stand it. just barely.

(oh, and then shortly after i finish this post and shut down and everything, i decide that i'm way too out of shape, and so do like 250 crunches and 30 push-ups. uhh...if i keep it up, maybe i'll be able to notice a difference. well, at least i'm not sore this next morning, just a little tight.)

02:28 am greencastle, july 7; 03:28 pm taipei, july 7

...now, to write a quick one before i attempt to find somebody with whom to go do something. well, then. yesterday i didn't do much; got up, went to class, did some stuff, came back, talked to carl and barney for a while, gamed a bunch, and slept. wait, more than that happened.

yesterday morning, just after i got up, i got online (miraculously), and, even more astoundingly yet, there were a bunch of people online! you know, like, the kind to whom i talk! i had no more than an hour, though, before i had to leave for class, so i didn't get to chat for a terribly long time, but it was definitely very cool. finished going back through vgcats and decided that it's pretty much the equivalent of penny arcade. amazing. and...that was about it for then.

...until class. well, see, wednesdays are when i'll be teaching two classes--the storytelling class and the conversation class. storytelling is only an hour, and next week i'll be reading a story from this reasonably sized packet of transparent stories that can be projected onto a white board. after i read each slide, i ask a question of the students to ensure that they mostly understand it. huh...not that, you know, more than one or two of them do, but if i prompt them just right, they give the right answer and i can pretty much feel okay praising them, which i do regardless. or try to, anyways. the pages also have chinese on them, so i think i'll go over that, too, so that it's easier to translate hard words and whatnot. the conversation class...ooh, boy, is it fun with just one other kid in the class. yesterday, it was just ted and me...for two hours. well, we had some other guy sitting in to watch us--another one that looked like mebbe a college freshman or sophomore, but is actually just my age, also going into his junior year of high school--but all he did was occasionally comment to ted in chinese, thinking that i didn't understand, where really i was just trying to get ted to speak in english. meh. uhh...he left after a while, but i spoke to him a bit, and it turns out that he'll be teaching at the same cram school in two years, after he graduates, for the summer. or something. i dunno...but i had to keep coming up with all kinds of questions, as simple as i could possibly make them, after totally scrapping my original idea--modeling and having the kids ask questions. hrm...what did *i* get out of it? well, this sentence of ted's: "I like computer games because the airplane can eat cookies and water." now, disregard, first, the fact that i typed "airplain" the first time, and, second, realize that i'm not making fun of him, i'm merely posting the vague similarities between his logic and that young friend of petey's who wrote that story about the eskimo living in the pineapple. or whatever. interesting, no?...but i ended up spending most of the time just asking him questions about a stay that he had in japan, apparently, a bit ago--less than a year, but i have no idea when. he liked it, though.

...but moving on, later that day, my phone crashed. uhh...it's a motorola. i'm not sure why, but i just got a call, it vibrated a bit, then started to ring, i opened it up, looked at the number, hit answer, and watched as the colors turned grayscale, then static-y stuff took over, the audio changed pitch, turned into just a solid note, and it died. well...after a few seconds, i thought, "wow, that was really weird. uhh...i think i'll write down that this happened--i'll definitely have to tell people about it." then i turned it off and back on, and it worked well enough. once again, really weird. no problems since. i guess i'll just keep on...not killing it, then.

...and later on barney, carl, and i talked for a bit, failed to get another computer's wireless card to respond, and gamed. nothing important. but today...i found like half a gb of music. good music, i've heard, but much of it i haven't yet. and a bunch of new, nice indexes. i'm pretty happy about that. also went searching for software and came upon a whole slew of shareware file encoders/decoders and rippers (you know, to change wave files to mp3, or mp3 to ogg, or whatever, and to rip to formates besides wma or wav), and i found one pretty cool freeware to mp3 ripper, so i checked that off my list, but none of the decoders would let me queue more than five files to convert at a time. this really, really upset me. it took forever, but i finally got one for which two sites had dead links but google could turn up for me. finally...so now i'm changing all those bloody wma's on my mp3 player to mp3. at 7x real time. well...at least i have the memory to spare.

uhh...class today. it was alright. limericks; the little kids totally didn't understand. but...by the end, with a whole lot of prompting, they could kinda work out their own single lines. kinda. they didn't seem to be able to grasp the concept of rhyming through lines, only single words, and the rhyme scheme as a whole was way over them. yeh...nothing else remarkable. oh, right, and my mom'll be in hong kong by now, so i'm on my own (with these other people) in taipei.

few days ago i decided that my mucuous membranes hold a grudge against me for something. see, my eyes alwasy feel really dry and occasionally itchily so, and my nose is always stuffy, runny, or just plane uncomfortable. bled twice yesterday, once each nostril, once while i was lying in bed, and once on a bus. that was kind of awkward. got a couple weird looks holding a bloody hankerchief (of my mom's, no less), squeezing my nose, and tilting my head back. ugh. at least it stopped before i had to get off the bus. huh...it itches almost all the time, too. and if i rub it? it gets irritated and itches more. then it starts to run a bunch and smells strange. this bothers me. much.

uhh...gamed more again, today. was pretty fun. tons of smash bros. just a handful of losses. even went one on one with barney at the end at beat him five kills to one, marth against link, if that means anything to you. no items, final destination. meh. and this, with me having been used only marth all these other times we've played.

uhh...oh, yeah, so...uhh...nope, i've forgotten. well, day off tomorrow. and saturday. and sunday. if only everybody were so lucky...but really, i think that if i were ever able to choose on what days i work, realistically, friday, saturday, and sunday would probably be the most favorable for me to relax. no question. of course, it'd be awesome to get payed while never showing up for work at all, but i think a four day work week is relatively reasonable. well...probably not until i'm at least 40 or something, but i can hope and dream, right? what? oh...okay. well, worth a shot. (where? yeah, that's right.)

hrm...so i suppose i'll queue a bunch of stuff to translate wma to mp3 and leave it overnight. hopefully it won't overheat or anything. meh. it'll probably be fine. tomorrow...what'll i do? besides sleep in, that is. hrm. mebbe go shopping or something, mebbe see about a movie. iunno. i'm sure i'll let you know.

(and oh, man, i just realized that i started this post about eleven hours before i came back to finish it. which means that it spans across almost twelve hours! sweet!)