It has been five years since my last posting in this forum. I don't normally write and post anything that my friends can find in Google search and read about. This trip is unique and this incarceration is voluntary in some way. I am writing a short journal entry each day in isolation. It is probably worth writing and sharing, and thus the restart of my blogpost.
I am in Taipei, Taiwan right now and I am in a quarantine hotel. The purpose of the quarantine is to isolate me and see if any Covid-19 viruses will manifest themselves in this period. I do feel like I am a human Petri Dish during this pandemic.
Click for Part 1/3 here.
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Day 5 - Wednesday, January 26, 2022
The international news was mostly on the imminent Russian invasion of Ukraine and the volatile US stock markets in the last few days. The brinkmanship between NATO and Russia is truly unnerving. I don't know whether the imminent, when escalated to that level, invasion of China to Taiwan will trigger similar responses around the world. The NASDAQ is already in the correction phase from its recent high. The wide swing between the initial big sell-off and the last-hour recovery during the trading day is truly remarkable. Certainly there are still people trying to get in to this already overvalued equity market. There is probably too much cash floating that needs a place to invest.
I continued my French reading today, that is, the book "Le Petit Prince" by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It was not an easy book to read at my level, but I was about 80 percent complete. I had three chapters left in my first French book. I liked this book very much as there was much to appreciate and ponder through the observations and conversations between this alien little prince and the aviator author whose plane crashed in the Sahara desert. Why French again after almost 20 years hiatus? It is my wishful thinking that Michael and I would visit and drive around France in July this summer. Given the way the omicron variant virus ravages the world now, this planning is very shaky to the least.
Day 6 - Thursday, January 27, 2022
Ah, what a surprise last night! I woke up to the sound of water dripping. It was not a dream. The water dripped from the ceiling near the bathroom. I called the front desktop and they delivered a couple of towers. I was told that help from the maintenance crew would be early in the morning. I told them to inform my upstairs room people to make sure that the source could be stopped just in case. I suspected that the accumulation of water and steam in the shower stall could be the culprit. It gradually stopped and fortunately I was able to continue my sleep.
The maintenance crew came in the morning, but need to open up more places to find the problems as obvious places appear to be dry. The management team agrees to move me to another room so that the maintenance crew can do their exploratory fix. In the meantime, the bedding and sheets are all replaced. Crossing my fingers that there would be no more leaks tonight.
Day 7 - Friday, January 28, 2022
I did my second antigen self-test today. It was great to be in the negative. I was also moved to room 1109, which was next door and that made my "moving" fairly straightforward. The room is not bad and certainly I don't want to witness water leakage again.
I did the usual routines: Pokémon game refresh, Chinese culture and economy update in Youtube channels, machine learning lecture, and something new today, the Chinese water calligraphy on reusable cloth worksheets.
Chinese calligraphy was sort of a requirement in my middle and high school education when I grew up. But few people took it seriously as long as the assignments were turned in and counted. When I visited a friend in Taipei a few years back, I was inspired by his calligraphy work and I decided then to pick up this pursuit. Chinese calligraphy helped me to concentrate and focus. I enjoyed my own progress as well as improved artistic appreciation.
I had the habit of understanding what I was writing about from those few famous templates. That forced me to read historical backgrounds and some classical literature pursuits. That was intellectually satisfying.
The pandemic changed things. I learned to read more online in current events, history, culture, geography, and travel. And I also started regular swimming almost on a daily basis. Nevertheless, I reached a serious plateau on calligraphy. I found excellent Youtube channels on learning Chinese calligraphy. Somehow I was convinced that I would not progress much further and I should spend more time on language and culture learning for my planned road trips in Europe and Japan with my son Michael. I stopped ink brush practices a year ago. I needed to have a realistic and fulfilling exit strategy for my remaining time on earth :-).
Water calligraphy was an inspiration to me when I saw it. It uses water, no ink, on reusable worksheets and it is environment friendly. Some worksheets come with preprinted traces and one can really practice. It is not as realistic as the real ink, but for my level and for my purpose, this is a good compromise. Here you can see my practice results while some parts are drying.
Day 8 - Saturday, January 29, 2022
Today is my halfway milestone. I will be out of quarantine next week this time. I look forward to taking a walk in the park and checking out my favorite breakfast place.
I continued on my machine learning and neural networks online lecture and he was a good teacher as he knew where to pause and drill down in details to build up a good intuitive framework. I enjoyed this very much.
I spent some time combing through Pokémon storage space and enhancing my battling portfolio. The Pokémon game and games in general can be useful to learn life skills. This is a collector's game. In a simulated environment, you manage your resources and goals. This requires cognitive skill, good planning, multi-attribute evaluation, tradeoff, and optimization. There are some social aspects also, and you have other players as your friends whom you trade goodies with, battle together or battle against each other. Just like everything else, one should not be addicted to the game and forget to live a balanced life with all things considered.
Day 9 - Sunday, January 30, 2022
I bought the water calligraphy work booklet shown here around this time last year from a street vendor in Taipei. It was a welcome change to practice against this real calligraphy piece instead of practicing the basic strokes on a big worksheet. That happened to be the famous "Heart Sutra" totaling 260 words in Chinese.
The Heart Sutra is one of the most important sutras in Mahayana Buddhism. I could not help but to learn and understand the essence and importance of the sutra and its history. It is definitely a Zen piece with its cryptic teachings full of apparent contradiction and mysticism. There is an English translation by the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh. The translation is beautiful, but radical. There is also an excellent exegesis for the sutra to rationalize his translation. The links are shown in the reference section.
Incidentally, from the BBC World Service news, Thich Nhat Hanh passed away a week ago on January 22 at the age of 95 in Vietnam. That's my quarantine Day 1.
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References:
- The Gay Genius - Biography of Su Tungpo 蘇東坡, by Lin Yutang
- Le Petit Prince - French version, English translation, by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- The Heart Sutra 心經 - dated since 661 CE, the famous 色即是空，空即是色 This Body itself is Emptiness and Emptiness itself is This Body
- Thich Nhat Hanh's English translation of The Heart Sutra
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