Only a great deal of conspiring...

could have brought this about.

Sometimes I get these days where things conspire against me, to stop me from doing what I want to do. Most days work is very, very slow. I might translate an article or two, and then sit and knit all the live long day. Today I came with the plan of tackling my British student visa application (and I truly mean tackling, in a violent, agonized, frustrating, molar extracting, kind of sense. At some other time, if I have recovered from the intellectual and emotional trauma of the process, I will blog about it). However, as soon as I got to work I've been absolutely inundated with work. Nothing interesting either - just routine, routine, and a whole lot of waste of words. If someone was going to write an article just to fill space in a newspaper, I'd really like them to be at least good at writing. No such luck. I implore you - if you are a political commentator in Taiwan - just STOP, for god's sake. Hold your pen for a couple of days, and wait until you've actually got something to say. Then, when you've written it, read it through, and cut absolutely everything that is unnecessary out of it. When you have an article about 1/3 of the length of your original, go ahead and publish.

My year in Taiwan is about to come to an end and my stint at Taipei Times will leave me with very mixed feelings. In a way it was interesting, and it taught me a lot of things (but then again, the things I don't know could fill a truck, so learning something new is not hard). In another way I've found it to be the most frustrating experience - not only the fact that it's an office job, but the fact that so much of what I do is processing pointless, poorly argued, essentially illogical tripe. Repetitive, uninteresting, and without the slightest shred of intellectual challenge. Not having an ounce of respect for my employer is probably not going to help that either.

Liberty Times: several days ago the headline news (yes, front page headline) was about a German volunteer in Taiwan. He's tall and blond, and works with disabled children. The article spent itself in the journalistic equivalent of simpering and eye-batting. I ask you - did nothing else more important in the world happen that day? truly nothing more important than a tall white guy volunteering in Taiwan?

Case and point.

On the plus side the job is relatively cushy, the pay is fine by me, and the people I work with are very, very nice.

But I'll still be glad to be moving on come July.