Objects of Comfort and Uncertainty

Friends,

I am sorry the above photograph is not better. It is not every day you come across an alpaca outside a train station, and I was woefully unprepared. I saw it, smiled, and kept walking. Then I realized I should get a photo, turned back around, snapped this one, felt self-conscious, and quickly moved on. Street photography! Plus I was catching a train. I am not sure how many of the pictured people are in the alpaca’s entourage versus which are adoring fans hoping for an autograph or photo.

I am also not sure how many alpacas Taipei is home to, because one of the responses to me posting this photo was that it must not be Michael the Alpaca because Michael lives in a totally different part of town from where this photo was taken and probably has a hard time with transportation. But maybe it was Michael, on a really long walk. I do not know Michael so I cannot comment on these matters. I wish Michael lived on my patio, though not without warning because he’d probably eat our bonsai. Normally my patio is devoid of animals but tonight it was the setting of two cats talking to each other for half an hour. I shooed them away but they returned. I’m not sure if they were flirting or fighting. They were very loud but practicing good social distance (at least three cat lengths away at all time).

Patio and pets. We are waffling on both. As previously reported, we have been looking for a slightly larger apartment slightly further away from the middle of the city, but we’ve also largely talked ourselves out of it because our fear of the unknowns (neighbor noise, landlord annoyance, unknown unknowns) is greater than our desire for more space. We are mostly content, which is a big discouraging force when it comes to change. And the dog, we want a dog so much, but I am scared of the confined life it would lead, of international travel with a dog, of international travel without the dog. So, waffling.

Clearly we should make “friendly quiet dog-owning neighbor” our top feature sought in a new apartment. Two cats, one stone.

It has chilled in Taipei (Editor’s Note: chilled in this case refers to dropping below 70F for a few minutes one day.) and so we have gotten out the winter wardrobe. Said small apartment’s winter wardrobe space is a suitcase stored above our normal wardrobe. I love this moment because I get to pull out two of my favorite articles of clothing. The first is a nondescript gray light sweater from The Gap. It is a little stretched out, but is comfortable and fits well which is astonishing because I received it as a gift for my 16th or 17th birthday. The second piece of clothing I received when I stole it out of my father’s closet when I was somewhere around 20 years old. It’s a long sleeve t-shirt that features, like an oddly large-needs-an-oral-history-explaining-this-phenomenon portion of late ‘80s/early ’90s adult fashion, ducks (I’ve just learned from Wikipedia that duck-centric fashion might be a southern US thing). It’s also full of holes chewed into it by Jethro, our pet rabbit who is no longer with us. It is significantly stretched out and too large and is my favorite lounging around the house shirt. Holy.

If you use the common advice measure for how to decide if you should keep something you’re thinking of getting rid of — seal it in a box with the date on it or turn the hangar it hangs on the wrong direction and see if it’s still sealed or turned a year later — then I should get rid of so many things we left in the US. If, on the other hand, I follow the Marie Kondo mantra of deciding based on whether it sparks joy, then, yes, the thought of those things being close brings me joy. So too does living a life where having those things on hand is not currently practical. Ah, but what about the future? Marie Kondo needs to be more nuanced in her advice and offer solutions to many more situations. Or maybe she already has: I have not really partaken of the source material, so I’m working with about two minutes of YouTube clips and a few dozen social media references here. (As well as faded memories of the last time I mentioned Marie Kondo , which was way back in pre-Taiwan times, early 2019, when I was wrestling with the idea of no longer buying books. I ended up not getting past the first five minutes of her show, and I since then I’ve bought very few books besides those I gift and those by friends.)

We framed five pieces of art this week and they are so gorgeous and I’m so happy we did, but the truth is that they will now probably sit in a stack under a chair because we will avoid committing to putting holes in the wall to hang them by saying we might move soon, which in turn has the potential to become part of a self-fulfilling prophecy. I guess if my writing in this newsletter over the last couple of years has a thesis about living abroad, it’s that it’s such a potentially amazing experience and has brought me gobs of happiness, but that its big downside is it’s also inherently more uncertain, and that’s difficult to deal with some days.

The other big downside being Taipei summer, of course. But we made it through another one of those alive. (Mostly.)

(Observations, brought on by the previous segment: 1) I believe learning Mandarin and being here has made me tend more and more towards longer sentences. Mandarin uses periods almost like English uses paragraph breaks. 2) I am worried I am becoming increasingly unable to write or speak at length without mentioning the weather. Am I aging?)

Further reading:

• Three albums, all imperfect but all with a few phenomenal tracks, were released this past month. Of course there was Midnights by Taylor Swift. I’m of the opinion “Anti-Hero” is the worst song on the album, but the rest is good stuff. I’m still on team Folklore as her peak, though. Then there was 鐵擊/Iron Punch’s The Mirror and Me — check out “慢慢” ( Spotify link ). Finally, Su Lee released her first full album, Messy Sexy . I really like the final track, “Sonder.”
• Taiwanese sculptor Han Hsu-Tung/韓旭東 ’s “pixelated” wooden sculptures are breathtaking.
• For my western KY readers, I wish I could go visit WKU’s Kentucky Museum’s exhibit on Jonesville . Go in my stead, will you?
• ​It’s standardized test season, which means my one-on-one classes are filled with last minute scrambles to master vocabulary that may, but probably won’t, show up on those tests. I love/hate teaching vocab: hate because quickly learning vocab is pointless, love because etymology is endlessly fascinating. I came across this post from three years ago about “ Fantastic False Cognates ” and just love it. My favorites are emoji/emoticon, island/isle, and much/mucho, but there’s so many good ones.
• So happy Kiese Laymon was awarded a MacArthur . Very well deserved.
• I’m very sad about what’s happened to Great British Bake-Off over the years, but Prue is definitely not one of the reasons why. Loved this conversation between her and Helen Rosner .
• This series of photos of bureaucrats by Dutch photographer Jan Banning is just so full of things to see.
• Sarah Jeong and Sergio Olmos on the unmarked vans abducting protestors in Portland in 2020 that were terrifyingly briefly in the news is a must-read. I’d completely forgotten about them, which is… I don’t have an adjective.
• Peter Schjeldal’s essay, “The Art of Dying,” is the closest thing to a perfect piece of writing I read in the last month.
• I was unaware of the spectacle of Polly Klaas’s murder and its relationship to the “tough on crime movement,” but became aware while reading about her sisters’ efforts to counter mass incarceration .
• There are a million takes on Musk Twitter. This one is the best . I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such a collective anticipation of schadenfreude.
• Finally, Japan. Halloween. You know the drill .

I will say, even though I’ve lost some material comforts, I’ve absolutely gained in another area of happiness: weak ties. What are weak ties? I feel like I should make some joke about middle managers’ wardrobes here, but that’s beneath us, or so I will pretend. Actually, I had no idea what weak ties were until this article about their role in our happiness . The writing style of the article is, frankly, a crime against composition, but the content resonated a lot.

Go out of your way to say hi to a few weak ties today.

-g