Stuff I do

I have been more active recently, actually than I have been in a long time, doing several things that I have done on and off during the years that I found interesting, but they faded away over the years. Well, for whatever reason, in Taiwan, with my situation, I am able to do these things and it is good. I feel like I can activate myself as a person again. First of all, I don't really watch TV much. Partly because I can't, I only get 7 channels in English, mostly movies, so once you have seen a movie, how many times are you gonna watch it? We also get CNN, but that gets depressing after a while, and ESPN which is in Chinese and tends to cover a lot of sports I don't care about. We also get the Discovery channel and animal planet which are pretty cool. So anyways the choices are limited, and whereas at home I would just come home and watch TV, here that is not so much an option. I have a bunch of cool DVD's including family guy and simpsons, but I try to ration those because I don't know when I will ever get new ones.

So anyway, the point I am trying to make is that I am now active and doing things that I want to do. For example, learning Chinese. Here is my Chinese teacher: She is very active and fun. Unfortunately I only meet her for two hrs a week. But I also have a lang. exchange, but that is also only 2 hrs / week. I need like full time Chinese 20hrs/week. But I will just have to study more on my own. Vocab, pronounciation, and tones are murder. Forget about grammar. But I have picked up many things from osmosis just being here, and my students have taught me many things unwittingly, because their English is so bad that they are always talking Chinese, and I have to learn some survivial classroom Enlgish or I will be eaten alive.

Also I bought a new guitar for around $100, which in the US would be a POS but here it is OK.
My guitar teacher:
He is pretty cool. His English is not great, but he has ESP (English for Special Purposes) and his
English music related vocab is pretty good. Also he is a great guitarist, a good teacher, and a cool
guy.

I have also joined a new environmental group that just started (pictured here) which is trying to do something proactive to help clean up the environment here. Apparently it has gotten better recently, and it is not as bad as China, but it's still pretty bad. We are doing a beach cleanup, and thought about starting a petition, but it can't just be local, Taiwan is very top down and it has to go to Taipei. Anyways we are brainstorming and we are trying to contact other local groups that we can team up with. The air quality is really bad here. Depending where you are in the city, you just can't breathe without a mask. It makes me choke.

Also (and I don't have a picture) I have been going to Meditiation nights at the Yoga center every Wed., and I have met some cool people there, and the Monk in charge is really cool. He is from Texas but left America 21 yrs ago and never went back. He has been doing meditation for 33 yrs. It is really mellow and calm, not severe like Zen. He plays a bit of guitar and there is some chanting. It is very relaxing.

Also I go to the gym (again sorry no picture) and it has weights, treadmill, elliptical, and a swimming pool/spa/jacuzzi. Very nice. I even sometims go running on the track at the high school across the street which you can see in this pic from the roof of my building. I would love to hang out up there, but it just got colder, and there is a TV satellite there, so all those beams aren't good for your brain.

Doing all these things and working 40 hrs/week, I have been very busy (and also a bit of travelling), but I feel very positive and happy, more so than I have in a long time. It is like waking up again after a long sleep. Having recently seen (again) Lord of the Rings (all 3 extended version) and Star Wars 3, which are both Sci-fi stories that I love it made me think about things. If I really believe this, then I must act. You know the point of those stories is that there is good and bad in the universe, and once you wake up and the veil is lifted and you see what's really going on and take the blinders off (most people choose to wear blinders, like the people in the Matrix they are sleeping but living in a bubble world, they just go to work, go home watch TV, talk about the weather, and the health of people in the family, and maybe sports and politics, but that's it) so if you know, if you KNOW, then you can only choose to ignore it for so long. I have been ignoring it for a long time, and this is what has made me depressed from time to time over the last 10 yrs. Knowing and ignoring is worse than not knowing (this is why ignorance is bliss). And I have wanted to take action and be pro-active, but it is hard for me to motivate on my own, I need stimulus, or the right environment. In the US this is out West, Europe is cool too, but for some reason Taiwan brings it all together for me.

Anyhow, back to LOTR and Star Wars,the thing is if you know what's going on, you can only sit on the fence for so long, and then you have to choose sides. Well, although sometimes the dark side seems tempting (you can just wreck shit and be evil and get what you want) in the end it is emtpy and hollow and destroys your soul. And the thing is you want to feel good right? Well getting some things you want makes you feel good temporarily, but feeling good all the time inside is way better long term. So being good is really the only choice. And these movies make it very clear. I mean do you want to be the evil emporer? Do you want to become corrupted like Anakin? Do you want to sell your soul to the devil like the witch king? All these people thought they would gain power but they lost their soul, their humanity, their dignity, and ultimately were defeated. But even before defeat they had become this ugly horrible twisted creature (like gollum). So obviuosly the darkness rots you from the inside, whereas Luke, Obi-Wan, Gandalf, Frodo, Sam, Aragorn and so on are who you want to be. You want to shine your light. There is a great quote about this in "Coach Carter" with Samuel L. Jackson that I just saw that kinda sums this all up:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond imagination. It is our light more than our darkness which scares us. We ask ourselves – who are we to be brilliant, beautiful, talented, and fabulous. But honestly, who are you to not be so?

You are a child of God, small games do not work in this world. For those around us to feel peace, it is not a good example to make ourselves small. We were born to express the glory of god that lives in us. It is not in some of us, it is in all of us. While we allow our light to shine, we unconsciously give permission for others to do the same. When we liberate ourselves from our own fears, simply our presence may liberate others.’

- Marianne Williamson in Return to Love: Reflections on a Course in Miracles

This of course, sounds rather Christian, but it could also be Buddhist. I personally would cut out the bits about God, unless you can understand that God is also the "Chi" (or Mohammed or Vishnu or Jahweh or whatever you want to call it, but not just Jesus). That is how I choose to see it. But there definitely is an energy and a power in the Universe, I just don't think it is an old white guy with a beard and a thunderbolt in his hand sitting on a cloud. If so and he created us all in a grand experiment 5,000 yrs ago and is always watching is, he is a sick sadistic bastard. He lets people be raped, tortured, and slaughtered for his own amusement. So no, it is not a conscious being, but an unconscious force that created the universe, and the Universe is finite and it is shrinking (according to Einstein), the big bang started it and now inevitably (I love this word) it is slowing down and going back. Yin/yang there is always a balance. Unfortunately human action has drastically sped up this course of events. Naturally we would all die in millions of years when the sun explodes. But we should have these millions of years to frolic in our happy little world. However we do not, in 20 yrs London and Shanghai will be under water if we haven't nuked ourselves first. The Mayans, Nostradamus, the Egyptians, and the Bible Code all say there will be cataclysimic change in the year 2012. However this does not have to be bad. The true good Jedi, the buddhist monks will fight to protect us (and they say they have foreseen this is in a vision and will win the final victory, but of couse this is all just speculation). It may be a comet, aliens, war, or gloabl warming, but something is gonna happen around Christmas in the year 2012. I just really hope (and I know this is naive, but without hope all is lost) that it can be positive change. That the aliens are good. Or that people figure out how to live in harmony with nature. But it will take a major shock to the sytem to get us on the right track. Right now we are headed for hell in a handbasket, in large part because, we the American people allowed Bush to steal the election from Gore in 2000. We should have marched on Washington like they do in Latin America. But of course the worlds problems are greater tha just America. If Iran gets a nuke, if N. Korea gets a missile to carry their nuke, dirty bombs, terrorists, republicans, etc. etc.

So the thing is, you, me, we, we all gotta do something, because regardless of 2012 I could get hit by a bus tomorrow (knock on wood). Life hangs by a string. We thought we won a political victory, but now a Dem. Sen. is sick and the evil bastard Cheney might take over again. It all hangs by a thread.

So doing these things, and I am going to add Tai Chi is my Jedi training to try to make myself stronger, because when the fight comes, you have to be ready, and if you want to be effective, you have to be strong. Ideally, in 2-3 yrs, when i have some money and my Chinese is better, I will drop out, and go study under a monk for 3 or 6 months or however long I can take it. I know it will be very hard. But I have always wanted to do that. It is the only true path. I can't ever really fully drop out of society because I love my xbox, ipod, internet, and so on too much, but I just know I feel better if I do what's right.

"It's not how you look, it's how you feel. It's not where you're born, it's where you belong, it's not how weak, but what will make you strong."
U2- Summer rain