China Airlines is as uncomfortable as I remember it; there’s just something about the seats that have me trying to bend metal by the end of the flight. Nice selection of media, however, including the 30 Rock 3rd season premiere (with Chinese subtitles) and enough movies to put together a a summer science-fiction marathon: Moon, which I liked a lot, seeing as how I actually had to put on the headset to follow—which certainly wasn’t the case with Transformers 2. I had to again for Will Ferrel’s Land of the Lost because I couldn’t believe what I was seeing had been released as a major motion picture. What a shame that they revisited this show without the awesome end theme.
Taipei’s TV lineup doesn’t seem to have changed much; in under a week I’ve seen every Bruce Lee movie and more than my share of Jackie Chan and Tony Leungs—had the time, being laid up with what we first feared was the H1N1, but turned out to be more akin to stomach flu or Traveler’s diarrhea. (I suspect the sushi my in-laws always insist on treating us with.) My experience with the health care here is, nevertheless, one for Michael Moore’s films: seeing a doctor and a bag full o’ drugs cost half my insurance co-pay back home.
Dreams, had a bunch, thanks to the mild fever. In one, Ron and his whore planned to drive me to the ocean and throw me in, so I broke his neck from the back seat without so much as an emotional farewell. The same night my then ex-wife, our child, another woman and I were registering at some Taiwanese agency, and the only word I understood from her responses was the state of her new relationship: “lesbian” …still, our breakup apparently was amicable. Then there was the Star Trek movie which had me feeling was worth a revisit, where original cast featured alongside Next Generation, Deanna Troi traveled the corridors in a floating seat and Kirk showed heroic vigor by placing a vital dumbbell-shaped part on his thick head of hair and running off to engineering to save the day with it.
The apartment 老婆 arranged for us reminds me of Blade Runner, except all the flying cars have descended onto the damp streets as scooters. From our eighth floor window I can hear all the noise from below, where shops repeat recordings through megaphones so distorted that even she can’t make them out, and I have to resist the urge to smash. One that played all night sounded like 發燒 (fāshāo), but instead of mocking my temperature, it’s 肉粽 in Taiwanese (バッチャン, because I’m not learning Pe̍h-ōe-jī just for the sake of this post).
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