Little things

Yesterday was kind of frustrating.  I wasn't in a good mood when I got up.  I was unhappy about the struggles I was having with myself getting into any of the nearby restaurants to order a meal -- the previous two nights had been a little discouraging on that front.  And I was feeling a little weird about the stuff I had written in this space the day before.  I was more direct and explicit about some things than I typically am, and I always feel a little uneasy after I "self-disclose" beyond my normal boundaries.  And especially with a blog, I'm putting stuff in writing, that could have an indefinite lifespan on the web, and I have no idea who might end up reading it nor do I get much feedback as to how anyone reacts.  It's a little unsettling for me, but I've decided that this is a space where I'm going to communicate some things that are important to me, independent of who's listening, and if makes me vulnerable somehow, so be it. 

So I was already feeling some angst, and then as I'm taking a shower yesterday morning, I hear the bar in the closet with all my shirts hanging from it come crashing down again.  This time, rather than the screws coming loose from the wood, a problem I could fix again, a piece of the metal broke off so that I need to actually replace the fixture.  I haven't tried to deal with that yet, so in the meantime the hangers are hanging from a shelf in the closet such that I can't fully close the closet doors, and I keep bumping into the open door whenever I'm going in or out of the room. 

Then, as I was reading the news online, my computer sort of froze up.  Not entirely, but all of a sudden, out of the blue, although maybe due to one particular webpage I was trying to open (the "We are change" link to the right), it just slowed way down to the point that it took 20 or 30 seconds for a command to take effect.  I ended up just shutting everything down and restarting, and the problem disappeared, but two annoying little events like that, on top of my grouchiness, wasn't getting the day off to a good start. To add to my frustration, earlier in the week I developed this little splotch of itchy rash on my right forearm, and it had been bothering me as I was waking up in the morning.  I had something similar between the fingers of my left hand a few times last year, and got some expensive cream from a dermatologist to use on that, so I've been using the cream for this too when it really starts to itch, and that seems to help for awhile.  The rash seems to be waning now, which is consistent with the previous episodes when it lasted for about a week.  The doctor said the stuff on my left hand wasn't a fungus or anything, and presumed it was just some kind of stress reaction.  Whatever it is, I don't like it.

So with an itchy rash, a broken closet bar, and my computer acting up to add to my early-morning consternation, it made me wonder whether this was some sort of "revenge" for "calling out" the bad guys in the previous day's blog entry.  I suppose that's an idea that might sound silly to most people, but I take seriously the possibility that the forces of darkness have it in their power to hassle people if/when they want to, so as to create more negative energy that has the effect of keeping us individually and collectively in a lower vibration and thereby hindering the raising of our vibration to the higher level we need to achieve for the next phase of our evolution.  Surely all these little things could just be random events, their timing together sheer coincidence, but it did occur to me that maybe I was under some kind of little energetic attack by the dark forces because I had chosen the day before to try to shine a little light on them.  Dark doesn't like the light, and I'm aware of other lightworkers out there -- more energetically sensitive than I am -- who are quite convinced that dark forces occasionally mess with them in an effort to impede their efforts to bring light to the planet.

I didn't dwell on this thought too much, but instead got ready to go into the office as Terence, the director of the research center, was taking all the staff to lunch and invited me along.  In addition to the administrative staff, we were joined by an NCKU professor who is involved in one of the Center's research projects (and who I think I met when I gave a talk here a number of years ago) as well as by a Dutch professor who is also doing some research at the Center and apparently has a longer tenure here than I do.  He just started his NCKU position this week, but I think he said he has been in Tainan, or at least Taiwan, for nine years now, and he and his wife are renting a house 30 minutes away that he said he will invite us all out to sometime for a barbecue.  

We had lunch at the same nice (and expensive, relative to all the other nearby options I've found) restaurant that Terence took me to my first day here, and I had a nice meal of salad and warm roll, a sea bass entre with a sauce that included mushrooms, peas, and an oyster in a half-shell, a little red wine to wash all that down with, and then dessert and coffee.  After lunch one of the staff members took me to the post office to get my ATM card for my bank account, then to the Chinese Language Institute for me to sign up for Mandarin classes, and finally to show me where the restaurant on campus is.  After spending a little more time in the office, I headed back to my room.

One of the primary routines in my life, that I tend to maintain to the extent that I can, is that I like to start my day with a cup of coffee and then have another cup in the late afternoon, to give me a little energy to continue to be productive throughout the evening.  On days that I don't have that second cup, I start dragging by 9 PM or so, making it hard to get any work done or even to do things like respond to emails.  With that cup, though, I tend to be good til 11 or 12 if I want to, and in normal life I often get more work done after 5 PM than before.  Awhile back I bought a little French press and some coffee so that I could make coffee in my room rather than having to go out to Starbucks or elsewhere two times a day to get a cup.

So I came back from the office ready to make myself a cup of coffee only to find that, between the morning and the night, a bunch of little ants had found their way into my room, onto my desk, in and around some of the food items I had stored on the shelves, and into the trashbag where I had been throwing garbage since I got here.  Not that I had stayed in a grumpy mood all day, but the funk hadn't entirely left me, so coming back to the room to find the ants immediately put me back into a high frustration state.  I spent the next hour trying to remove as many of them as possible, along with any items that presumably were attracting them there, the whole time just being annoyed at the whole situation, including having to face the fact that maybe it wasn't going to be viable for me to keep food in my room, which would/will end up being a non-trivial hassle.

So finally I got the place cleaned up enough that I moved on to the task of making my coffee.  Now, a little more background here is in order.  Early on it became clear that I didn't really want to have to take a trip to Starbucks (or even other alternatives nearby) two times a day for coffee.  Not just the pricey coffee there, not just having to walk down and up four flights of stairs every time I leave the building, not the extra time it would take every day to make those two short trips, but because it just doesn't seem too much to ask to be able to make my own cup of coffee and drink it here in the solitude of my room!

So, after Yungnane had taken me to the RT Mart the first time to look for a mattress pad, I ended up walking back there a couple days later to get a few other items including the little French press I mentioned above.  (When Yungnane learned I had walked there, he said "Wow-- you are so strong!"  It's really not all that far, but I guess walking a few miles seems pretty unusual to him!)  With new French press in hand and a bag of ground coffee, I started making coffee in my room, either in the morning so as to skip the trip to Starbucks then, or later on in the day to avoid having to go out again.

Now, for hot water, I had two options.  Each floor in my building has a water dispenser, which I presume is also a filter that improves the quality of the water above regular tap water.  Each dispenser has three temperatures you can choose from -- cold, room temperature, or hot.  So I started using the hot water to make coffee, only to learn that the hot water in the dispenser on my floor wasn't really as hot as it indicated (96 degrees C, which should be almost boiling).  After letting the coffee steep in the French press for a few minutes, by the time I started drinking it it was already pretty lukewarm.  Not really satisfactory, or satisfying for that matter.  So I started going down to the kitchen to microwave the water to boiling temperature to make coffee with, but that meant going up and down four flights of stairs to make the coffee, which ran counter to one of the purposes of making my own.  Finally, I tried the hot water from a dispenser on the floor right below mine, where the fridge is that I've been using, and while not boiling hot either, it was better than the dispenser on my floor, so that was the option I'd been living with for awhile.

I decided that to solve the problem once and for all, I would go out and buy a little plug-in electric kettle that would heat water to boiling right there in my room!  I could take water from the dispenser on my floor, boil it, make my coffee, and not have to go up and down any stairs!  So I got Yungnane to take me back to the RT Mart one day to buy the kettle and a few other items, and was psyched that finally I would be able to make myself a cup of coffee to my liking.  I took the kettle out of the box, noticed that the cord had a 3-prong (grounding) plug, and looked around for an outlet to plug it into, only to realize that all the outlets in my room were for 2-prong plugs!  With one exception -- high up on the wall, above the bed, there is a 3-prong outlet made for the air conditioner to plug into.  I could plug the kettle into that, but then I would have to stand there and hold the kettle while the water heated up since the cord wasn't long enough for me to set it down anywhere while it was plugged in.  Not ideal.  In fact, not even worth considering.  Foregoing my perfect cup of homemade coffee longer still, I decided I needed to find either an extension cord or an adapter for the outlet.

So Wednesday I went out looking for a hardware store, or someplace that might sell one of those two items.  I headed out in a new direction, walked up and down a few streets, found a place where there's a little street market with people selling fruits and vegetables, which was good to know about, but after walking around for a couple miles I didn't find any store selling electrical stuff, so I came home and decided I'd have to ask the Center staff if they could help me find what I was looking for.  When I went into the office yesterday, for lunch and to get the other things done, I told them what I needed, and it turns out they had a whole set of adapters right there in their office.  So they let me have one and I took it home with me so that now, finally, I had everything I needed to make my coffee!

Dealing with the little ants delayed that a bit, but with that immediate problem addressed, I took the French press to the laundry room to clean it out before making a fresh cup.  I unscrewed the filter pieces from the little pole to wash the grounds out from between the parts, but in doing so the little screw holding the whole mechanism together fell into the sink and straight down the drain!  Argh!!!  I couldn't believe it!  I screamed, yelled, loudly, repeatedly!  Fortunately there is hardly anyone in my building, so no worried Taiwanese folks came running to see what had happened.  With open windows, I'm sure people outside could here my anguish, and I had the fleeting thought that it was good they couldn't understand what I was saying, but I'm sure most of those words are pretty universal by now!

So, I was foiled again.  The nice hot homemade cup of coffee would have to wait some more.  It was now about 7PM, I still wanted some coffee, so I walked over to the 7-11, which is right next to the Starbucks and sells a pretty good latte for only 50 NTD, less than two US dollars and a buck less than a grande coffee at Starbucks.  I took it home with me and sat down in front of my computer, and drank my latte while doing some emails online and killing more little ants that I swear spontaneously appear out of nowhere!

I've gotten better over the years at learning to just let go of my frustrations, to remember that it's all pretty trivial, doesn't really matter, things are what they are, no sense having a lot of negative emotion about any of it.  So as I drank my latte, and started letting go and just accepting what is, I opened the email I had received a little earlier from Dominique, the staff member at the Center who had picked me up at the train station when I arrived in Tainan and who had taken me to see the campus restaurant that afternoon.  She had taken one of the menus from the restaurant and translated all the items into English!  OMG, what a godsend, I mean, this is a real game changer!!  Not only will it allow me to order from the reasonably extensive menu at that restaurant, but it gives me something I can take with me to other restaurants and just point at the item I would like to order!  I went back there today and got myself a nice big plate of chili fried rice.  I plan to work my way through much of the rest of the menu during the rest of my time here!

So what had been a rather frustrating day came to a much better end.  As I hit the sack sometime after midnight, all the little things that had generated so much annoyance earlier had all but receded from my consciousness, and one simple little act of kindness had put me in a good place and feeling optimistic about waking up to a new day!