Bedtime Revenge

Friends,

The above picture is from a temple up on Maokong, which is amusing because the name Maokong/貓空 literally means cat hole (as you can see on Wikipedia, there’s some dispute as to whether the 貓 refers to civets or is a homophone for potholes, but for our purposes it’s definitely cats). Maokong is our top pick of places to go for visitors to Taipei, so we end up there frequently, and I never mind. Among Taipei people it’s famous for its tea, but given you can get the same tea in the city, the main draw for me is the gondola ride up. It’s incredible — you have a beautiful view of the city’s skyline while also being able to see how quickly city gives way to greenery. If you time your visit right and go up during daylight then back down around sunset, it’s really breathtaking.

The temples and ice cream are nice too. And, I guess, so are the cats.

Our latest trip to Maokong was to accompany my international student mentee, who had never been. I was hesitant to sign up as a mentor at my university. After all, I only work there part-time, I don’t know the systems very well, and if they want advice about things my perspective is very limited. But it’s been really great! I’m hoping to take on more mentees next year. The department that runs it, the Office of International Affairs, is incredibly student-centric. I interact with a large number of int’l students and they all have good things to say about it. In fact, this semester I had an assignment where students could introduce or review any organization, restaurant, or physical space on campus and multiple of them chose to write glowing pieces about the OIA.

Today is the final day of the semester, and I have to say, one thing I’ve begun to appreciate about working in academia is that everyone is falling apart at the same time. In other situations–friends, family, non-academic coworkers, etc.–you have to do a lot of guessing as to other people’s emotional states. But in the world of education, twice a year you know everyone is barely hanging on, one laptop malfunction away from a breakdown. It’s a good reminder to be gentler with everyone.

I have been luxuriating in procrastination lately, and for me procrastination looks like this: When I have a lot I need to do, I suddenly find other things I need to do as well to avoid doing the things I need to do the most. This is especially true at the end of the semester, and even more especially this end of the semester. I need to be grading. I need to be preparing to travel to the US. I need to be putting together our fifteen thousand documents to apply for permanent Taiwanese residency (which doesn’t mean we’ll permanently reside in Taiwan, just means I am no longer beholden to a work permit, mostly).

In this situation, when I am required to do Something Important I Do Not Want To Do, I’m clearly not allowed to spend too much time playing video games. However, I am allowed to do other, more productive things. And so I find them! I make the 45 minute walk home from the last week of class because I need the exercise and it might be the last time the weather is good enough. I read more than usual. I send birthday cards to friends I haven’t sent birthday cards to in years. Or ever. I cook more (relatedly, I baked so much bread while working on my theses). I installed Linux Mint on my laptop because I hate Windows 11 and am slowly become more and more unhealthily fixated on my immeasurably small impact on the world vis-à-vis what companies I support and products I use. (If you want to join me on this, I have lots of suggestions, but I am currently trying to find good plastic-free floss and deodorant alternatives, so hit me with those recs. Yes, that was another “procrastinating for a good cause” rabbit hole.) I am trying to find someone to replace the seals around our doors, which is language-barrier central. I’ve already made a list of things I need to do post-travel before the school year resumes in the fall.

Which is to say that I’m very productive when I need to be. Just not in the direction I need to be. But the grades will get done.

There’s a common Mandarin phrase that went viral a few years ago: 報復性熬夜, literally “staying up late for revenge,” meaning people procrastinate on their sleeping to make up for not having enough free time during the day. I’m not sure I would willingly decide to sleep less, but the reality is, it happens.

Here in Taiwan, we have a new president! Behold his very airbrushed official portrait on Wikipedia. Our presidential inauguration was a beautiful celebration, then it was quickly followed by a 100,000+ person demonstration known as the Bluebird Movement against plans by the two opposition parties in the legislature to work together to make the legislature stronger and the president weaker. Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu summarize both the inauguration and the protests better than I could, but I want to emphasize what I think was the coolest part: the organization of the protesters. I’m told the bulk of the organizing was done on Threads, but it was really cool to watch the Economic Democracy Union’s Instagram page, where they shared so much practical info. For example, in Taiwan printing/copying is commonly done at 7-Eleven. You take a USB key, or, more commonly, upload the file and get a QR code to scan. The protesters put together a bunch of signs on a single QR code, so that people could print their signs out on the way to the protest at any convenience store they passed. Additionally, on the night they had 100k+ people, when it was time to disperse they announced a dispersion schedule spread over one hour, prioritizing allowing those with disabilities, the elderly, and those with children to leave first and asking others to wait to leave. Finally, after the protests were over, they had a thread of lost-and-found posts, complete with dozens of umbrellas. I know there’s legitimate criticism of social media as potentially deflating the desire for direct action by making people feel like they’ve accomplished something through a post or a profile picture change, but this movement seemed to be very much boosted by its online presence. It was really great to see.

A lot more photos of the protests at New Bloom, here, here, and here.

Further reading:

• There is nothing I can say about the ongoing genocide of Palestinian people that has not been said by far smarter people than me, but I can share some of their words. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor on the student protests: “The singling out of students may make it appear as though they are extreme and out of touch with the public when, in fact, they are giving expression to widely held sentiment.” And, USC valedictorian Asna Tabassum’s cancelled speech.
• Related: Anne Helen Petersen on student resilience post-Covid lines up with my point of view: “Here is a micro-generation that, if we’re to listen to the commentariat, is detached and anti-social thanks to smartphones and disillusioned by coming of age in the middle of multiple economic, social, political, and viral disruptions. By that logic, these students should be removed from the world to the point of nihilism. But what we’re seeing in these protests is the near opposite. It’s not nihilism. It’s activism.”
• If you haven’t listened to Nobel Prize-winning Filipino journalist Maria Ressa’s Harvard commencement speech, you should change that. Video here.
• I do not understand the people who are in charge of waiting room or restaurant televisions who choose to bombard us with the news (or, worse, the massage place I used to go to that would leave on *gasp* TLC). If I was in charge of this situation, I would play an unending loop of Foo the Flowerhorn videos. He recently blessed us with 3 solid hours of high definition shrimp eating cabbage. What more could you want?
• There’s a new meta study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology that shows a positive link between reading fiction and cognitive development, controlled for variables and comparing with similar activities. This might not surprise many readers of this newsletter, but I wanted to save it for some parents I talk to.
• Min Chao has a wonderful “A-Z” complete with some great photos about April’s earthquakes in Taiwan.
• This is an oldie, but I recently found out that actor Charles Grodin wrote an incredible memoir essay about his tryst with Miss Piggy. I cannot prepare you for it, nor do I want to. The Great Muppet Caper was a staple of my childhood.
• Two recommendations: The anime Delicious in Dungeon on Netflix is such a warm little send-up of fantasy game/DnD tropes. In quite a different direction, but also sourced from Japan, the novel The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yōko Ogawa is a nearly perfect 180 pages. I love love love the quiet thoughtful short novel, and this one is an ideal example.
• Finally, I gave my second guest lecture at NCCU last week. You can read the summary of the talk here. These two talks took way more time to prepare than I expected — they were adjacent to lessons I’ve taught, but not directly overlapping, so I had to dig up a lot of new stuff. Hopefully I get invited to do something similar next year so I can reuse that work.

My university has this giant wide-laned road down the middle of campus, Royal Palm Boulevard, that’s lined with palm trees and ends at the main library and is so incredibly picturesque. Lately you can find students in graduate cap and gowns taking pictures in the middle of the road, which is really safe, because the university only allows limited traffic on campus so it’s mostly just delivery trucks, the shuttle bus, and a legion of students on bikes. The road also has a speed monitor sign on the side, presumably to get the vehicles to slow down, but what is hilarious to watch is that it has the opposite effect on bikes. When students notice the sign, it’s not unusual to see them speed up, to meet the challenge, to see how fast they can get the radar to measure their bike.

I hope there’s something on your metaphorical road that makes you want to race your metaphorical bike in the not-too-distant future.

Be well, friends,

-g