an update

Anyway, turns out that today I didn't go on Clinton-Quest. Instead, I applied for some universities (Mal-U/C & UVic). This year I decided 'screw UBC' because they didn't offer me money last time & my grades are the same. Another thing I realised while in Taiwan is that I don't really want to be a secondary school teacher in Canada, nor in Taiwan & I am pretty sure I equally don't want to in most other countries. So I applied for Malaspina's Faculty of Arts & UVic's Faculty of Humanities (indicating interest in Pacific & Asian Studies). I'm hoping to continue studying Japanese / Chinese & English or something related to linguistics or literature.

In other news, tomorrow I don't really feel like chasing Taiwan's president either, nor watching indie rock concerts in the rain (plus I don't know where they are). So I am probably going to meet up with Scott at the Chen residence for the watching of the 1st half of Smallville: Season 4. I hope it will be a nice peaceful day & I can rest some more. I haven't been too motivated to study Chinese at all today, nor was I yesterday. I think in class I will move to work on reading comprehension, perhaps if the lady can find easy articles or something, or perhaps selected passages from younger grades' textbooks. Sometimes I half-know what the "Three Principles of the People" text is about but I don't know enough to learn most of the definitions of new terms.

Rock on, y'all. And post comments... I know some of you are in Idaho, but last time I checked a very large portion of my readership is not in one of Carmella's jazz bands. Is it a content issue? More randomness needed, perhaps.

K out

your body crumbles

soulsick / your body crumbles
soulsick / rotting from the inside
soulsick / your spirit stumbles
soulsick / happiness denied

My morning today made the lyrics of soulsick get stuck forever in my mind... the rest of the song (well, the verses) suck, the prechorus isn't bad, but the chorus is where it's at. lol

Anyway, I got up this morning ready to go to choir. Well, almost. Had a shower, which was pretty mediocre & cold for most of it, then the hot didn't stay for much & it was lukewarm. The bus took forever to come (there was one when I got there but it wouldn't stop for me) and then we waited a good 3 light cycles at a rail crossing as trains crossed, stopped, and then reversed direction, accomplishing I am not sure what. When I got to the school, it turned out no-one was there. Called my music teacher, & she said there was no practise because it was the tests for people who failed too many of their exams & had to do them again. Damn failing, come on people. Supposed to be studious.

At this point I still intended on salvaging my day. When I stepped outside it of course the skies opened up Taiwan style, and it rained so hard the water was bouncing off the ground and running downhill in rivulets and streams... there was like mist over a foot high from the bouncing. So I got on the MRT and thought maybe I could go to Ximen and buy a CD. But then, just to spite me, my finger started bleeding for no reason. So I realised "this is one of those days when things get progressively worse until you just give up and go home." Thus I did.

Aside from a random injury that appeared on another finger, it was pretty good. Got to talk to lots of people on MSN, yay... and then went to a Rotary event in the evening. Said event was not bad, mostly consisted of eating. My stomach was unhappy... as I said, soulsick.

Anyway, tomorrow I am going to try & find Bill Clinton with a couple exchange student friends. Apparently he's in Taipei or coming or whatever. Rock on

Quote of the day

Ok, you guys, I present to you the quote of the day. I sent an email mentioning how if there were these two events at the same time in March, I would have to cancel the less important one (Rotary Trip) in March, because I had a very important national competition, in March.

"by the way, the trip is on 17th-22th April, not March"

Well then, that seems to be resolved. Taking care of business, but I keep involving my stuff in more stuff. Like, now I am learning idioms & poems every week, and memorizing the poems (so I can recite & write out poetry, but so far I only know a few). Today I picked up a big sheet of practise calligraphy paper for cheap. The next thing I am going to try my hand at is graphic novels, because apparently some people got into them last year, & they are all in Chinese. It didn't seem too difficult either, I'd just need to pick up some more vocabulary & whatnot. I am getting behind on grammar though. Whatever.

Things are looking up, random, and the likes all at the same time. By the way, the basketball game halftime show was in the States.

K out

le fin de semaine

Well let me say I actually had a pretty enjoyable weekend. If every week were to like this I might be forced to revise my general opinion of the fun-ness of life & mood. lol

Taking care of business: To answer the question you guessed, I am going on the choir trip. Turns out the events are pretty close to the same time & choir is 3 days in Yilan, somewhere I have never been... I will also get to hit Gaoxiong with the host family for two days later on. But I am not one to pass up once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to travel (it's not like I'm ever competing in a high school choir comp again, let alone a national final).

Last week's last few days were relatively uneventful. There were exams at school & I elected on Friday to go to Chinese class instead of the school's 'fake cheerleading' event. By "fake" cheerleading, I mean, it is just a competition to whose class/school can cheer loudest or best. There was no sport event of note though it may have marked the start of an unremarkable municipal event. Now, I'm all for "real" cheerleading--viz. throwing people about in the air--but I would decline to participate in an event involving such because I do not feel I have adequate strength to ensure the safety of the ladies going airborne.

In the Future: Turns out there was a Rotary event opening a centennial park on Sunday, at which Ma Ying-Jiu (mayor of Taipei) was in attendance, but of course I wasn't invited to that. I'll get back to what I actually did that day in a moment. On Wednesday we are supposedly, according to the schedule, going to said park for some activity; however, we've been told that we're practising the dance class again. The purpose of this is to prepare for yet another event on Thursday (as well as yet again on the tour, another thing I'm glad to miss)... did I mention my choir is performing at a Rotary event Thursday as well? I will laugh very, very hard if it's not the same event. But if (as likely) it is, I'll need to do some clothes-changing. On Friday I have another event going on, but I'll get to that later.

Saturday, I got up pretty early to go to choir practise. This was pretty good, though right near the end I ran out of voice, probably because fewer people than normal came, & the tenors were sucking. I thought I could make them all hear how to do it at least halfways right, but I do not have Brianna-calibre loudness of course. Returning home I talked to Scott online for a while & discovered he was to go to an event at the Taipei Sheraton hotel. Since a Rotarian invited him, there was naturally no address & he was having trouble finding it. I busted out a Chinese google search & then enlisted the help of my host little brother to navigate unnecessary flash-animated menus to find it. But we convinced ourselves he couldn't find it by himself, so I was to accompany him, and though he didn't "invite" me, he "didn't have any objections if I came along," and was sure, "I could probably just show up & get dinner out of the deal." And I did.

What Scott's club has that mine doesn't is young people, or at least the college & young-adult tagalongs of adult rotarians. Whom we met. There were a good 6 or 7 girls right in my favourite 18-25 college demographic & we met lots of cool guys too. Youth socializing & networking--this is my kind of Rotary activity. Also on Friday, Ivonne told/invited me to perform at an event on Sunday evening.

[ok on the halftime show of basketball game my host family is watching, there is a country band playing... but like a countrified rock type song, with a rap break in the middle, and a pimped out midget with a pink tophat & cane just chilling on stage & lots of girls in bikinis & cowboy hats dancing nearby... in fact the genre is very hard to classify]

On to Sunday, where in the day I didn't do much of anything. I found the place (an 'overseas youth hostel' where there had been events before) and Kenta & I performed no problem. He played an original piece on his traditional instrument, which I thought was fucking awesome, but he disagreed. I've always held a soft-spot for extremely good original compositions though. For my act I talked a little in Chinese (of course with Japanese introduction) which was then translated into Japanese. Considering the Taiwan-Japan relations theme, I cut the Canadian folk songs from my program, performing the love theme from "Princess Mononoke" (with corrected romaji lyrics I wrote from memory corrected by Kenta, but sung from memory) & a Chinese classical piece set to music. As always, speeches improvised on the spot.

Afterwards, we got to what I've been wanted to do all year, which is talk to Japanese girls, again from 18-29... I had some trouble telling who was Japanese vs. who was Taiwanese, as everyone could speak Japanese at the event (with the exception of me, darn Rotary... *fistshake*) & it was interesting. Scored a nice invite to Kenta's club and another to a goodbye party on Friday evening. Yes!!

Today I went to school. We finally did pushups again in army class, but the newly negotiated calligraphy lessons are still forthcoming. Some music/army collaboration is making a "schoolwide patriotism competition" for 1st years. You have to sing the school song, and then march in formation & sing another song. I don't know if I'm doing it or not, we've got something going on for music though, which involved picking songs. Chinese was ok, got our essays back. I had a little bit of red, which is not bad considering I never get people to check stuff (unless I am writing in English of course), I think I may get to learn some things about sentence order/structuring by making corrections. More Chinese lessons coming up tomorrow, yay.

Rock on, y'all. [1 hr] K out

...to spit in Sightblinder's eye...

//Till shade is gone, till water is gone,
into the Shadow with teeth bared,
screaming defiance with the last breath,
to spit in Sightblinder's eye on the last Day.//

Some of you may recognize the above quote, but the incompleteness of the title of this post suggests the latter part of the line: 'on the last day.' And I'm not talking about any apocalyptic or religious sense of the word, merely in the sense that there will indeed be a last day, and there wasn't before. In other words, I have a confirmed flight date and should be departing Taiwan & returning to Canada on July 15th of this year.

It's weird to know that I have less than 5 months remaining here. Though I am looking forward to seeing you again, long-suffering Canadian / other overseas readers, I already dread in my head parting from this country. Needless to say, on the other hand, there are electric jam sessions with at least one individual that are long overdue.

Personally, the thing irking me most right now is needing to say I have been here six months, instead of 5 months. I'm not ready for that, though once again I have busted off a plateau & am improving. I still don't have skills to my satisfaction; the level I am going for is functional literacy (i.e. newspaper w/ the help of a dictionary) & the ability to continue through self study. This means I need to get better so I can learn to read an idiom book. As it is I need people to explain them to me (in Chinese of course) & give examples of proper usage.

One problem I might run into is that right now it looks like the 5-day Taiwan tour overlaps the choir competition; however, I am still confirming this. If so, I am going to have to cancel one & you can guess which that will be. In fact, though it should be obvious, I indeed invite you to guess--you even have a 50/50 chance. This new semester of school is looking better, I have shifted things around a bit. I cannot believe how the time flies though.

Today in culture class, we made shuijiao (水餃) which I was somehow able to eat without vomiting. I shall explore this phenomenon further as apparently the fried ones actually taste good. Talked with Scott at Starbucks for a few hours waiting for Chinese class (without buying anything at the time--stealing atmosphere!) though we'd both bought coffees earlier in the morning.

I know I don't normally drink coffee & nor does Scott. But due to the sudden hot snap, there are loud, buzzing insects inside. It's also freakin' hot, but the insects kept flying by my head and breaking my peace of mind. So I slept for about a third of the time I was in bed & Scott looked even more haggard (but that's probably because he needs to shave all the time and I don't).

After class we went back to Nanshijiao & talked some more, mostly about his RP world & the mechanics thereof, and the history thereof. He wrote a book about just the world, no statistics or numbers in it all all (the system he made up w/ his friends doesn't use numbers or writing stuff down anyway) so it can be adapted to any system. It continues to be very interesting, though I have only read part... right now my home on computer time is partly devoted to studying Chinese. and blogging :p

Anyway, enjoy yourselves, and please comment if you feel the need. Rock on, K out [20 minutes]

Year of the... Rooster

Or "le coq" as it is called in French, to my great amusement. Just had Chinese New Year recently, which means people have been setting of freaking loud firecrackers at random intervals... this did not help me sleep last night, at all. I just thought I'd share one last picture from the third day of the choir trip. I'm going back to Hualian with my host family to visit elderly relatives. This is what a sunrise looks like on the other side of the international date line:

So speaking of going back to Hualian, this will involve again being in the boonies with no internet. It also involves leaving at 4:00 AM. So I am going to go pack up and prepare now. On the homework front, I have about 700/1500 words done on essays (that's one complete & 1 in progress of the three) so I will be doing more work in the next few days. Tea is good. K out

tsop

I saw this on Megs' livejournal. As always, instances of "journal" have been changed to "blog." Try it, if you'd like:

Reply with your name and I will write something about you.

I will then tell what song[s] remind me of you.

Next, I will tell you who you remind me of, celebrity/animated or otherwise.

Last, I will try to name a single word that best describes you.

Put this in your blog

Anyway, on Friday a lot of stuff happened. In fact, I put in a 21-hour day, while still managing to maintain sleep of about 9 hours a night... Thursday evening I found myself at Scott's again hanging out with him & Luke (made Luke watch Rejected). Friday morning everybody had to meet at some side entrance to City Hall & we then proceeded to enjoy the suckiness that is being in a large group organized by Taiwanese people.

Got to see all the exchangees & at various points talk to outbounds, w00t. We all went to the 89th floor of 101, which is a wussy three hundred something metres up, but you can still see the bridge north of Danshui on a clear day. It was not a clear day.

Later on we roamed around the mall part at the bottom of 101... I went to the big bookstore with Ivonne & we talked a bit. Subsequently all returned to the basement of City Hall for lunch. Samantha, Nastasha, Katie, & I were situated at the important table with some random Rotarians, apparently because the mayor would be there later; we were expected both to not make trouble and be able to speak some Chinese. There was a call for entertainment so a couple people including myself went up (on the promise of prizes) and hit up the crowd. Eventually the Mayor did indeed come.

We were supposed to ask him questions, so I asked him whether he wanted to be the President in the future (all presidents of taiwan since the jiang rule ended have served as mayor of taipei before their election, just as a trend, not a rule) but he dodged my answer like a true politician. Later we 'discovered' Taipei by being inside this little museum, instead of free to roam the city on our vacation. The movie was nice, because it was so badly done it was clearly propoganda, so it wasn't like insidious or anything. The Japanese lady was there, which always makes my day.

After everything wrapped up, Scott went home to pack, Claire went off to cram school (paid for by Rotary... *chinstroke*) and other people either went off places or headed off in a big group to hang out. I went with 4 girls to a coffee shop where we had a long, interesting conversation. About 3 hours long.

After I got home, I had dinner and then started packing... and packed more, and more. I have a lot of stuff, incl. too many clothes. I really want to send a box of stuff back, to make room. Somewhere in there I wrapped some presents to Amy & Joe, and needless to say finished very late. Still got my sleep in though.

Yesterday I moved host families. It's far away from everythiny now. Also, carrying several trips of quite heavy bags up 5 flights of stairs was not exactly fun (though I suppose it counts as exercise. In the evening we went to some sort of New Year's event at the company that supplies lunch boxes to my new host father's schol. The karaoke was bad, for the most part, although food was o.k. Major plus: my bedroom has a piano in it. w00t w00t w00t ...

I spread the writing of this post over more than 6 hours. Most of it was spent enjoying the silliness of ubersite.com--certainly over-the-top but not suitable for everyone. lol

K out

get this:

I won't be talking about the stuff I've done recently, because I am moving house soon so I might need to do some summarizing later. Now is for packing.