flutter by: pre-departure social life: not a story

I lived through my lunchtime talk Wednesday, in case you’re wondering, although not coherently, rather in very abstract bits and pieces; there was some chatting afterwards and later that night a professor I know at the Sinica sent me a long critical commentary about my incoherence which I can’t make head or tail of. I can’t even make sense of the ways in which people can’t make sense of me. What am I doing in academia? Feeling a little like a monkey (the shit-throwing kind).

Then yesterday evening was a farewell dinner with bits and pieces of the Urban Development Department. The department head ripped a namecard off a little bag with a bottle of liquour that someone had given him and presented me with it along with a nice speech about how much I had helped the department and was always welcome back. In true Taiwanese fashion later that evening I took the bottle and presented it to Jennifer, with a little speech much to the same effect but backwards. The chief engineer, a sweet, quiet woman who was actually my very first contact in the department way back when gave me a crystal block with a 3D laser outline of the old city gates and walls which I feel like I ought to find tacky but which I actually think is really cool. Somehow the martial arts novels of Jin Yong came up—a contemporary writer so famous that even I have heard of him—and this morning when I went to the department for the last time to collect all the data on my computer there, my section head presented me with four volumes of Jin Yong, for me to read on the plane. Hospitality gone wild, this place.

The original plan last night was to go singing after the dinner, but everyone sagged out and I ended up walking home with My Former Object and the sixty-five year old deputy head of the department. I was so disappointed—why is it that it’s exactly when you don’t make plans that they end up coming through?—that I hopped down to Jennifer’s later in the evening for a little chat, which turned into a big chat, which turned into a phone call from a couple of friends at a dance club nearby, which turned into a little dance outing. I think the last time I’ve been out so late so regularly was freshman year of college, and that was not dancing, that was eating four a.m. eggs in the diner below my dorm.

This afternoon was a lovely lunch followed by a lovely coffee with the girl known here as Alex and two people I’m too tired to make up pseudonyms for and besides you’re going to see all their pictures in a second anyway—Most Beloved Tony (I’m not sure how this name came about, but it’s what I call him; he calls me Most Beloved Anya or Taiwanya; anyway he is most beloved) and SF, who first got me into Chinese language msn chatting. Alex is the one who was organizing the documentary film festival into which I for some reason sank my life last week. We stopped by the office so I could pick up my pay for the work I’d done for them—it turns out I was being paid, around $650 US. I’m thinking maybe I’ll put it toward a little video camera that I’d eventually like to get. As you can see, between the blahg and the pictures and the video camera desire, I’m on a little bit of a documentation kick. I also finally got to watch Alex’s short documentary, which showed pieces of eight or nine of the twelve first dates she went on last year when she went to the US. She found the people through an online dating site. I have a particular feeling for this little film because it's through one of the people she met on the site that I know her.

And now, well, if you can believe it, I am post-nap, pre-outing and, as you can tell, am just writing this to say hello. Especially to you people in Massachusetts. I can’t say that I wish I were there, exactly; it’s more that I wish you were here.