It's been ten days since I've arrived and according to Dad, I've only three more days until my suprachiasmatic nucleus decides to pick up the vibe of these haunts so I can have a proper night's sleep. I suppose that may mark a kind of rite of passage on the long and fateful road to taiwanese immersion. To celebrate, I thought I'd share with you a few comic and surreal things about my experience so far.

Gretchen, whom you all probably know, has a fear of scuba-divers so pronounced that she will not swim if she sees any nearby. I've always been a little bit perplexed by this phobia, but this perplexity was often overrided by the ensuing self-congratulatory dialogue I would have with myself concerning my lack of irrational fears. Self-congratulatory dialogues no longer - upon arriving here, I found I was thorougly afraid of all the people in their funny gas-mask things they wear. The pollution here is not bad, but most people here are very health conscious and do not want to risk exposure to exhaust from adjacent scooters in the open air. Yes, yes, it's all very understandable, until you actually look at these people and realize you can't read their facial expressions or hear what they are saying. Most people don't say anything when they put their masks on, they just become these quiet, withdrawn, vaguely threatening presences all around you while you're just trying to get a snack at the local food stand.

I was troubled by this for a time, but eventually I just decided to let it go and assimilate as I could. My friend recently bought me a face mask and now I quite like it, but I still try not to look at myself in the mirror if I can help it.

A few other random little things: it is the garbage trucks, not the ice cream trucks, that play music on the streets and it's strictly western classical music.

The most popular tea in Taiwan is called Boba Naicha, which means mama's breast milk tea. Apparently the consistency of the black tapioca pearls explains the name.... This is really going to be my most freudian post (as you'll see below) I promise.

The kind of mindless way of greeting someone in Taiwan is chibao le meiyou? It is the "what's up?" equivalent but it literally means have you eaten/are you full? This always trips me up, because I know it's not meant to be meaningful but it just seems like such a specific question, that person must be interested. But it is often perfect strangers who ask me this, so I begin to wonder if they want to go to eat with me and I end up like a stammering fool, or one of those people who tells you their life story when you ask them "how's it goin'?"

Finally, a vaguely serendipitous thing happened to me today while I was secret santa shopping for my friends from our apartment/dormitory this afternoon. As some of you may know, I was, for a while after taking a class called "Darwin, Einstein and Freud," farely fascinated with psychoanalysis. One of my favorite bits of psychoanalysis was Salvador Dali's paranoiac-critical method. This "method" developed by Dali involved taking seemingly mundane situations, images, objects and animating them with the force of your own subjective interpretation. Thus, Dali, perceiving two coffee mugs next to a coffee pot, came to envision the image as a depiction of mother-son cannabilism though the connection is vague and "poetic" as he calls it. His most famous example of the method is in his book The Tragic Myth of Angelus, which is a whole book he wrote about a single impressionist painting called "Angelus" by Jean-Francois Millet which features a farming couple bent in prayer at dusk after a long day's work. Dali took the stillness of the painting to be a "static tension," the manifest content of the woman's subtle dominance over the man. The pitchfork stuck in the ground is taken to be an indicator of violence and the wheelbarrow of sexual brutality. I'm often attracted to inexcusably pedantic writing, and this book is no exception, so imagine my surprise when I went to a poster store looking for presents and in among vanities of Japanese pop stars I find, low and behold, our "Angelus" quietly, or perhaps passive-aggressively, tucked away! You can bet I bought two copies straight off, one for myself and one as a present to I don't know who yet.

As you might be able to guess, "Angelus" is the painting at the top next to yours truly.