I’m Working… I Swear

Before I go to bed today I wanted to take an opportunity to actually use this thing like I meant to. Today was the first day I actually got some sleep and had some energy to do the ridiculous amount of site seeing and walking that Lili/my Dad require. First stop today was a pretty cool museum that focused on all the artifacts from past Chinese dynasties dating all the way back to 5000 BCE or something ridiculous.

It’s crazy how much of it is focused on making religious images. Learned a lot more about traditional Chinese Buddhism and how different it is from what I originally thought. I spent a lot of time asking Lili questions about pretty much everything. She told me the story of how she found out who here “guardian angel” was. I guess its this red faced warrior type guy who was known for his loyalty and courage.

I could talk to Lili for hours, she’s like my asian mom. After the museum we took a bit of a long car ride down to some Spanish/Danish/English fort that had been established, taken over, abandoned, several times in its history. It was pretty cool looking. To be honest I’m not much into museums and tourist kind of stuff but I’m not going to complain while we’re doing it.

Actually my favorite part of the day turned out to be walking down to this basically outdoor carnival/shopping mall. Lili had a term for it but it was misleading and I forgot it. Anyways there’s tons of people there, some cool food to try, and games to play. I won Babe’s little kid some sort of toy gun thing by shooting some balloons with a pellet gun, super easy when you’ve fired an actual gun before.

I also got to try some awesome/horrible food. Lets see… mango shaved ice (really g0od), random horrible candies, some kind of chinese corn dog, some watermelon smoothie juice thing, and one i had to try just to try, grilled octopus on a stick (not as bad as it sounds).

Uneventful car ride home, Lili wanted to point out to me what she described as slutty girls that sold some kind of stuff you chew on and spit out blood colored juice, she called it “beetlejuice”. But, sadly, most of them were very clothed and not as slutty as she had hoped they would be. Oh well.

Today is my birthday, I think, in Taiwan anyway. Anyways, we had another weird breakfast and then met up with the CA girls to take the metro to some random river so we could check out the dragon boat festival. It was basically like a fair thing with all kinds of weird food and some random boat race things going on. Pretty mellow, I did my usual of eating a bunch of things with questionable ingredients.

The girls negotiated us an extra half hour at the place we had lunch at because “look at him, so handsome”. Gay. Took the metro over to some tall important building, hung out. Went and checked out this pretty cool area of town that basically consisted of 100’s of electronics stores selling everything you could think of. It was like a giant Fry’s electronics except each store was in business for itself, it was tight. I bought a micro SD card and a blue tooth headset to hassle Charles via Skype more effectively.

The highlight of the day was actually taking the metro to a Buddhist/Toaist temple. I was actually kind of interested in it since I just finished writing that paper for Maggie that I did shitty on. That and finishing “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins on the plane ride to Taiwan. Anyways, I was asking all sorts of questions so they basically offered to show me how they “worship”. Tons of superstition involved, we got a bunch of incense and we were supposed to pray to each of the 7 god/idol type dealies. Each one represented a different thing and could help you out with different aspects of life. They accidentally made me pray to the one that would bring me a child, wish I could undo that one. The procedure was basically, tell the golden statue who you are, where you’re from, and what you want help with. It kind of got me thinking about how the whole religion/prayer process helps the individual in the most obvious way. Spending time thinking about issues you’re going through and asking for help from a higher being is essentially a way of focusing on your issues and getting through them. We all know (or should (jut kidding)) that nobody is really listening, but that thought process helps us psychologically by just focusing and giving thought to the issues we are going through. Our subconscious helps us resolve the issue, or maybe God does, whichever one you choose to believe is cool with me.

I had a good conversation with Lili today about how difficult it was for her to setup her team of people. She basically manages groups in two different cultures, Taiwanese (more western) and China (not… western). She was talking about how she has to let them be who they are, but also intervene before things get out of control. For example the Taiwanese group talks a lot, jokes a lot, kind of like people in the US. Chinese on the other hand will work till they die but they won’t really think about what they’re doing. Managing these people requires two completely different strategies.

I was kind of telling her about the issues I had with trying to manage both my buddy in India and my guy in Irvine and how completely different it was working with each of them. I’m looking forward to getting to India and learning more about the culture because I really think that’s a crucial part of working with other cultures successfully.

Man this is boring. Can’t believe you read this far.

During a meeting today my dad gave a little speech about his ideas on business. He said a business should be profitable enough that it allows you to enjoy your life. He added that there’s no reason to build your business so large that it devours all of your time. Money is a good thing, but having the time to do what you want to do in life is priceless. I guess this is where I got the tagline for this site from.

Its amazing how much a couple sentences can explain so much about a man. I’ve spent so much time with him and yet, had so much trouble understanding what he wants out of life. I could never figure out why he never fired so many of the worthless people at our office. Today, I realized that to him, it was more important to keep the family together, no matter how frustrating it was at times, than to get rid of them and make more money. I always thought that the biggest advantage that my dad had in business was that he was so rational and could make decisions that were good for the organization without worrying about peoples’ feelings. I’m learning that’s not what business is really about.

Its funny, I remember feeling just as idealistic as my father was today, but lately I guess I’ve put that aside to try to be successful. I really need to be careful that I don’t fall into a lifestyle of pursuing money, I should be pursuing my own freedom instead. Today was a good reminder of that.

On a lighter note: The girls from the sales office took me and my dad to a birthday dinner. Holy crap these people can eat, I think it took about 4 hours, all eating, there must have been 12 courses. The last hour was dedicated to taking photos of me that they could send to their little sisters… yeah creepy. I don’t know if I’ve told people this before but if you ever want your self esteem raised just go spend some time in China.  Pretty much every other conversation is about how good looking they think you are. Kind of annoying.

Ok so as sad as it is, I seem to be obsessed with fast cars. Its a weakness. This is sixth gear in Sachin’s STi. I’m the only one in the car so don’t get mad at me for endangering anyone elses life but my own. You’ll notice the speedometer only goes to 160 but it stops there pretty early in the video.

Your Car is Slow from Andrew Lang on Vimeo.