Flight back from NY

I believe Ang Lee took the same flight as me, but i'm not 100% sure it was him. I only briefly saw a person that looked like him and his small entourage of people being escorted by China Airlines staff past the mass of people anxiously waiting in line to be stuffed into the economy section.

Side note: Why are people always in such a rush to get in the airplane? First of all, the last time I checked everyone has assigned seating. Secondly, it's an 18 hour flight. . . or 18 hour 10 minute flight for those lucky people that got on line early. . . way to go! 10 free minutes!

I thought I lucked out when I checked in, I got the last window seat available. After I get to my seat this chubby 10 or 11 year old kid wearing a straw cowboy hat, black t-shirt, shorts, and orange crocs shoes sits next to me. His parents nowhere to be found. Great!

He had the worst case of ADD imaginable. I'm not kidding, he couldn't sit still for 2 seconds.
I had to tell him twice to stop bumping his elbow into me and stop shaking the seat. While we were waiting to takeoff he was simultaneously watching the safety video, looking out the window, and flipping through the airline magazine. He'd look at the TV for one second then out the window for one second then back to TV then to magazine then to window then to TV etc etc etc. . . And when I say flipping through the magazine I mean strictly flipping through the magazine, he didn't even look at most of the pages before he flipped to the next page.

At this point, I'm thinking, this is going to be a long flight. That's when he looked around for a second and then put his hand down his pants and scratched/grabbed/molested his private parts. That's not the worst of it, right afterwards he'd pick his nose with the same hand and bite his nails.

That was it. . . GAME OVER. I'm out. I'm not sitting with this kid for 18 hours.

This kid had absolutely no clue on what socially acceptable behavior is. What kind of parents don't teach their children how to behave in public? Then I thought probably the same kind that lets their 10 year old boy go on international flights alone with no adult supervision.

He played the testicle tug game two or three more times before the fasten seat belt light finally went out and I jumped to first empty seat I could find.

Then I started thinking, maybe this kid is really clever and he did this on purpose so he could get both seats all to himself.

Nope, when I looked back from my new seat a few minutes later the ADD kid was still ADD kid. The guy sitting directly in front of ADD kid had a really annoyed look on his face. Everytime the ADD kid moved or got up from his seat he'd shake the seat in front. So basically every 30 seconds. Good luck trying to sleep. . . hahahaha sucker, I got the last empty seat!

The rest of the 18 hour flight was uneventful, watched some crappy movies, food was pretty bad as usual, but the time passed by surprisingly quickly.

Was nice coming back to Taipei.

Inspirational Story

I saw this on Digg earlier today, usually i don't post stuff like this but I thought this was really interesting. . .

Some guy named Jamie Livingston decided to take one polaroid picture a day, everyday, to document his life. He did it for 18 years straight from March 31, 1979 to October 27, 1997. . . he died of cancer the next day on October 28, 1997.

Some of his friends decided to make a website where all 6000+ of his pictures can be viewed. Unfortunately it's down due to too much traffic.

Here's a link to a few of the polaroids (a little bit slow to load):
http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/15131
Mostly same pictures minus a few. but much faster loading:
http://www.experienceproject.com/uw.php?e=224637
Here's a link to more background info:
http://onlytheblogknowsbrooklyn.typepad.com/only_the_blog_knows_brook/2008/05/mental-floss-di.html

I've decided to try the same project as Livingston, take one picture a day everyday for as long as possible. . . hopefully skipping the getting cancer and dying part of the project.

Today's pic:

LOL, don't expect much. . . my life is not particularly photogenic, especially on weekdays.

Update 24-Dec-2008:
Results from my own attempt at this project.

Suicide at 師大 (ShiDa)

I found out this morning that someone committed suicide yesterday at ShiDa. A young girl jumped off the top of the building where I go to class. . . about a 10 story fall. I overslept yesterday so I completely missed the whole thing. My classmate actually heard the sound of the impact and another classmate was able to get a closeup view of the rescue effort. . . well, more like cleanup effort.

When my friend told me what happened, I was thinking to myself this doesn't make any sense to me. This happened at 8AM. . . why kill yourself so early? What's the rush? Why not get a few more hours of sleep and then jump off the building. That's the great thing about buildings, they don't go anywhere! And I think the weather was beautiful yesterday. . . It's always raining in Taipei, why kill yourself on a beautiful day? Suicidal people are weird.

On a side note, I've decided to take a break from school. Work has been really hectic recently and there's no sign of it letting up anytime soon. Plus I'll be in NY for two weeks in June. My plan is to get myself to learn the class material on my own and try to start reading newspapers. We'll see how that goes. . .

So, unfortunately, no more stories from school for at least the next few months.

Snoopy Sno-cone Machine

Does anyone remember this thing? I was browsing through a blog that I frequent once in awhile, when I saw some hello kitty drink holder. I'm not sure why but it instantly brought up memories of the Snoopy Sno-cone machine my sister and I had when we were little. I vaguely remember the sno-cone ice that came out of it could be made just as easily with a plastic bag and a hammer, and the flavoring liquid it came with was just red sugar water. . . but I think we had a pretty good time with it or else I wouldn't remember it twenty plus years later.

Crappy weather

I should really be studying Chinese but I'm so far behind that I don't feel like starting because even if I catch up this week, I'll just fall behind again when work gets really busy.
















It rains a lot in Taipei. I should be used to it by now, but I'm not.

The forecast is usually wrong though. I don't even know why I look at it. I think maybe the guy that does the forecast is in a bad mood today and wants everyone else to be in a bad mood. We'll see. . .

Turns out I'm married. . .

I got a call this past tuesday from an unknown number. Normally I just ignore them but just so happens that I was expecting a call from a friend of a friend visiting Taipei, so I picked up.

The reception at the beginning wasn't so great, so I wasn't sure I knew what the lady on the other end was saying. . . but she sounded like she knew me so out of politeness I pretended I knew her. I'm sure everyone has had that experience before. Where you meet someone or get a call and you have no idea who that person is but you keep on talking like you know them, hoping the other person will drop a clue and in your mind you'll go "Oooooh yeah!!!!".

Except this time, the "Ooooh yeah!!!!" never came. I eventually had to ask her who she was. . .

She said she's my 老婆 (wife)!

Okay. . . ... . . . ... . . . ... . . . ... . . . ... . . . ...

Then I asked her how she knew me, and she said we met at some bar or club two years ago and I gave her my number. Which is highly unlikely since two years ago was when I just moved to Taiwan, I didn't know anyone and I just started phone service. I think I would remember giving out my number.

So from that point on I started, as politely as possible, to end the call. She started asking why I was so "cold" to her and I just kept on insisting I had to go. Eventually I just hung up.

I'm sure everyone is asking why I didn't just hang up immediately. . . the problem of that is that this person knows my cell phone number. If I piss her off, she can call my randomly in the middle of the night and wake me up. And I NEED my sleep.

I added her as "Wtf" in my cell phone contact list. So if she called again I would know to ignore her.

Phone rang again on Wednesday night and I immediately ignored it when I saw "Wtf" on the screen.

I'm thinking this kind of call is some sort of scheme where they trick people into going into shady places and then they stab them and cut out their organs to sell on ebay. If in the next few weeks, there's no new posts here and you find a human liver being auctioned by a seller from Taiwan on ebay. . . don't buy it! And call the police.

Anyways, she didn't call yesterday, so I'm hoping that's the end of it.

Strange Contest in Class Today

Learned the chinese word 憋 (bie1) in class today. It means suppress or hold back. The usage example the teacher gave for this word was 憋氣 (bie1 qi4). Which means hold your breath. So out of the blue the teacher said everyone hold their breaths and she's gonna time it. See who can hold their breath the longest. The first person gave up after 30 seconds. . . PATHETIC! i wanted to laugh at her for having the lung capacity of a chain smoking 6 year old with pneumonia. . . but then i realized that laughing means i'd need to let a little bit of air out of my lungs which might still contain a small amount of unused oxygen, which might make me need to breath sooner. So I didn't laugh.

After almost two minutes of holding my breath. . .

I passed out. I think an hour has passed, I'm here typing this on my PDA in the emergency room. The doctor told me there's probably no brain damage but I should check back in a few days.



Just kidding about the passing out, emergency room, and brain damage part. I was the last one to start breathing. So I guess I won this impromptu breath-holding contest. But I feel kind of stupid because my face got red and i started sweating a little. I'm normally not competitive at all 99% of the time, but sometimes, for seemingly completely random stuff I'm ultra competitive. I feel like I just have to win.