Looking down at Zhouzi Park No. 2 through the glass windows of the Zhouzi Car Park, I marvelled at a view that was very different from the one I had from sitting on a bench of the park.

This bird's eye view was a result of serendipity after I climbed up eight floors of stairs inside the public parking facility.

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Two brothers coming back from a beach where they just saved two women from drowning found that the elder brother's wife had passed away and his young daughter crying, asking where her father had been.

It was the context set for the movie, Quiet Chaos, which was "nominated for an unprecedented 18 David di Donatello awards (the Italian equivalent of The Oscars) and a number one hit in Italy."

The story followed was all sorts of meetings that the father had while staying outside his daughter's school. We saw parents coming to pick up their children; the father's colleagues coming to discuss the company's upcoming merger; the late wife's sister coming to seek personal consolation; and the younger brother coming to see how the father and the daughter were holding up after their loved one departed.

The movie gave the audience a fresh perspective of the process of mourning, healing and recovering. Gradually, we saw the sorrow hidden under the father's calm countenance was overcome by a somewhat chaotic current created by people around him. Most importantly, it was the strong connection between father and daughter that kept him moving forward.

Quiet Chaos is my first movie from the 2009 Taipei Golden Horse Film Festival. My previous Nanni Moretti film was April back in 2004.

Read also:

• Movie poster and quote from PNAN
• Review at Movie Jungle
  

How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman is such a peculiar novel that I picked up to read for several times and abandoned also for several times until I had run out of Booker-Prize-winning novels and left with no choice but finishing it.

The novel has nothing similar to anything I have read before. Written in Scottish dialect, its phrases seem strange and informal. The jumpy narrative, accompanied by glaring invective and defective logic, require extra efforts to comprehend. This is not the best English-learning material I would recommend, but the technique employed in this novel creates an unforgettable atmosphere that makes it worth reading and the prize.

The thing is he was going naywhere, naywhere. So he needed to clear the brains, to think; think, he needed to fucking think. It was just a new problem. He had to cope with it, that's all. that was all it was. Every day was a fucking problem. And this was a new yin. So ye thought it out and then ye coped. That was what a problem was, a thing ye thought out and then coped with, and ye pushed ahead; green fields round every corner, sunshine and blue skies, streets lined with apple trees and kids playing in the grass, the good auld authorities and the headman up there in his wee central office, good auld god with the white beard and the white robe, sitting there watching ye from above, the gentle wee smile, leading the children on. That was fair enough. It was just the now. It was this minute here. That was all; once ye got through it ye were past it.

Page 37, How Late It Was, How Late

Read also:

• How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman
  A Lesson in Scottish

An amusing instance of hardware redundancy materialized in a meeting room, where we were walking through some SIT test cases. The lamp of the projector at the bottom went out and we switched the video cable to the projector on the top, completing a switchover sequence.

I am sitting in a restaurant called Bread First at Neihu. I thought it was just a bakery, but it turned out to be more then just a bakery. It serves also Chinese dishes during lunch time, and offers free Wi-Fi connection--that's how I am writing this post using just installed BlogPress Blogger Edition.

The smell of good bread baking like the sound of my life.

- Bread First

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Among a few advantages of Evania living in Taipei is that it is about one hour way to her brother's family at Taoyuan County. Her nephew would be happy to see his aunt in a regular basis and work on children's poems in Hakka like the following.

My first niece was born at 6:01 AM, on September 6th, 2009. She was 51 cm in height and 3280 gram in weight. Her mother, my first sister, spent about seven hours in labor before giving birth to the first baby girl of our next generation. It was a dream came true for my sister because she always wanted to have a daughter. My youngest sister, a mother of two sons, also wanted her second child to be a daughter but the probability was not working out too well. I used to comfort my sister by suggesting that she could still raise her son like a daughter. It was of course not a serious suggestion, but I later realized that, from a gender equality point of view, the thought of raising a daughter to be a daughter or a son to be a son was nothing but an influence of gender stereotypes. A better suggestion should be raising your sons or daughters to be human beings who would explore, develop and realize their potentials.

We asked a local Sakura Kitchen Life store to renovate our 30-year-old kitchen. The configuration of the sink, stove and range hood remained the same except that they were upgraded to the latest models. And with a new addition to the kitchen staff: a dish dryer.

In a counterclockwise, the photos on the left showed the transformation of our kitchen.

The granite counter tops were not mounted until the day after the cabinets were installed. It was because my sister's boyfriend's brother owns a company selling granite counter tops and he was kind enough to offer us a price that we could not refuse. So one thing led to another, our contract with Sakura included a term that separated the granite counter tops to a vendor of our own choice. It was probably not difficult to imagine that this actually made things much more complicated with all the coordination and potential incompatibilities between two vendors.

Now the kitchen had been done and it's time for a postmortem.

Mostly, I wonder if the granite counter tops are worth its money and our extra efforts. The bottom line is that even though we have got a good price, they are still more expansive because they are of a more luxurious type. I guess it's not a question of whether we could afford it, but a question of whether we need it.

Too often, we confuse what we want with what we need.

Google launches Street View in Taiwan, but initially covers only great Taipei area. The streets I am living are not yet included in the initial launch, but hopefully, one of the five specially designed picture-taking cars from Google Taiwan will find them soon. The view below is the closest I can get. The lane to the right leads to my parents' place. The lane to the left leads to where Evania and I live.

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The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai just moved from the unread list to the read list of my Booker-winning novels.

Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself. (page 3)

The "she" in the quoted paragraph above refers to Sai whose losses including her parents who died in Russia, her grandfather who lived in limbo between the past colonizing power and now independent home country, and Gyan whom she fell in love with but grown apart because an insurgency of local people had transformed into a fight between two lovers.

Could fulfillment ever be felt as deeply as loss? Rationally, I decided that if you still believe in love, you pursuit to fulfill it. You could divide it into small achievable steps, but never dawdle on your way. The key to feel something deeply was not deciding which things--you could feel deeply about anything. The feeling could only be as deep as the time you spent feeling.