My Waterloo Sunset....

Although it rained cats and dogs because of the burgeoning typhoon, I was not annoyed at all. How could I complain? I mean, after all, I was definitely not a greedy person and got a day off on Monday would be completely enough. Therefore, with my satisfaction, I stuffed myself into a comfortable fluffly sofa with my rose tea and tried to find something interesting to learn from BBC News website and enjoyed the unearned day.

With such a versatile website, I always wished I had 48 hours a day to read everything. Before I could find any method or person to make my dream come true, I recently choose to focus on "The Flatmates" which provided educational and entertaining conversations that not only irrigated me with more advanced vocabulary, phrases and idioms but sometimes also reminded me of an exotic and memorable journey.

The memory came powerfully toward me just like the overwhelming wind and rain outside when I saw the idioms--It's daylight robbery. I smiled. I thought it would only appear in Chinese, but it was not the reason that I laughed. It was because I used to say it almost everyday when I was in the UK.

I remembered vividly that it was a sunny cloudless Sunday morning, I invited a friend to join in my first adventure in London to Spitalfield Market. She recommended fervently I tried a quite famous stall of hamburgers. A hot, juicy and with high calorie hamburger that was much more than I could expect in my first adventure in London. How great that was, especially after eating cold sandwiches for almost three days in Leeds, York and Manchester. That was definitely one of my dream food at that time. I was pretty quiet on our way to the market because my mouth was full of expectation.

I saw the queue before I got closer to the stall. It was absolutely a good sign--a long queue. I loved a long queue because it often suggested that the food was good, well, at least in my country. Although it was quite cruel I was only allowed to feel the hamburger until it was my turn to order, I still waited patiently. But the closer I got to the till, the more mysteries I had.

Why everything on the grill all heavily burned? Was it really the food that I was going to pay for? Or were they just some accidental imperfections that would not be sold to customers? It cost about 3 quid a hamburger so did that mean they burned the food in a completely tasty way?Well, like I said, I was definitely not a greedy person. The hamburger was good because at least it was totally hot and with high calorie.

That was the first time I said it's a daylight robbery in London. Besides food, there were lots of things I found they were insanely expensive compared to my country, such as flats, the tube, trains, toilets and so on. After watching my friend eating a 2 quid small ice cream without any guilt, I started wondering maybe it was a reward for working from 5PM to 3AM as a waitress in a fancy restaurant.

Luckily, I was not the only person to feel it was quite expensive to live in such a beautiful country and I could still find myself numerous and amazing enjoyments without costing any penny. All the free and wonderful memories might be in a certain way to explain why I yearned for going back to the UK again so much.

Listening to Waterloo Sunset by the Kinks from my IPod Nano, I spent my last night in London at the patio of Royal Festival Hall and tried to compose my own Waterloo Sunset. With a little sip of my homesick tea and a big bite of my unwilling-to-leave cake, I started to write a postcard to my family to tell them how much I gained from the journey and how grateful I was to have their support. I told them I was very proud of myself that I had done another special thing in my life and there was only one thing I felt regretful that was no matter how hard I tried to keep everything in my diary and took as many pictures as possible. There would still be no way to share all the marvelous experience I had with them.

Well, obviously, my mum was quite moved by my postcard. Although it was completely not my main purpose to send them a postcard like that, my mum still decided that after ten years from our last family overseas travel, we all went to Japan for a vacation after ten days I went back to Taiwan.

Pessimistic Optimist Doctrine

Sign the attached non-disclosure agreement before you read this post.


The following content will reveal a discovery which takes me 26 years to verify. After my countless experiments and expensive clinical trials, I now announce formally the doctrine-- Pessimistic Optimist.

Without any hesitation, my friends will all definitely agree that I am one of the most energetic and enthusiastic people they have ever met. I will also consider myself as an advocate of optimism. One of my mottos is "Everything will be better after I get some sleep". I thought God will be pleased and satisfied with how optimistic I am. But, on the contrary, I felt punished when I was optimistic and confident. The more optimistic and confident I was, the more I suffered. I also found out if I pretended to be pessimistic, humble and understated inside my heart, everything would work smoothly without facing any difficulties that I expected.

Take the presentation I gave the day before yesterday for example, my supervisor assigned a legal issue for me to research as my first job to start my internship and asked me to give a presentation to all colleagues in my division after 2 weeks. Although I had already been here for 2 weeks, I still had not know everyone or been known by everyone yet. This was not only the first time that I could let all my colleagues and supervisors realize how professional I could be even though I was merely an intern, but also a perfect chance to make them consider me as their potential employee in the future.

There were my evident footprints in books, articles and court decisions which were related to the issue. After I plowed all the documents, I was still very anxious about the presentation. With scarce confidence, I entered the vast conference room. But, since I started to give my presentation, my doctrine was proved again. All my colleagues said they couldn't feel my tenseness but calm instead.

I know you can't wait to retort me that it was because I was well prepared. Then, how do you explain my presentation in my Internet and Law class last semester? True to form, I did all the research I could and even made an extremely fascinating slideshow about it. Couldn't stop giggling because I thought I would have all the spotlight on me due to give such an excellent presentation. However, somehow everything just got out of hand and I came under fire after the presentation. It ended up in a totally disaster and I was in a huge blow. If you think that it was because I didn't work hard enough, then you would definitely hear my outcry now.

After 26 years' experiments and clinical trials, this doctrine has already deeply embedded in my mind. Therefore, according to this doctrine, in order to share my exciting news with you without being punished by God at the same time, let's keep our voice as down as possible and pretend to be the humblest and most modest people for the moment.

Are you ready?!

Ok, my exciting news is I got more "Yeses" now. Besides, Queen's University Belfast, I also have Aberystwyth University, Brunel University, University of Stirling and Nottingham Trent University.
Shh! I have told you to keep your voice down.

If global warming is Al Gore's inconvenient truth, then mine will surely be pretending to be a diffident pessimist when I am not. Please feel free to contact me if you find my doctrine is terribly wrong, I will absolutely be happy to hear that. But, before that, let me remind you again, you have already signed an non-disclosure agreement.

What can a notebook tell?

In an internal meeting early this morning, all employees of my division were required to attend. As an intern in Technology Transfer and Service Center at Industrial Technology Research Institute,this is my first time to join in a formal meeting here. I was prepared, well, actually I didn't have to prepare for anything for this time since I just started my internship last week. With my curiosity and excitement, I got there on time.

After finding myself a understated seat and glancing round the conference room, I suddenly noticed something funny and embarrassing. Why was I the only person with a red and slim notebook which has a cat on the cover showing its queer attitude to ask for kisses while others all carry a fat and big "brick"?

When I was a girl, I used to wish that one day I'll become a successful lawyer wearing a fitted ARMANI black business suit and black patent leather heels. I thought that was very cool to be a pretty and professional business woman and help people with my legal advice at the same time. But among my limited working experience, it is sometimes annoying that there are always some dress codes to obey and they will even give you a professional yellow pad that have their name printed on it and force you to take notes with it. I know that a law firm needs to be attractive to their clients and it is always true that splendid appearances win a better impression. But after getting clients inside the firm, then? Anyway, the meeting was quite boring and after seeing a colleague's amusing drawings of my boss wearing a green hat in her brick, I am more convinced that it's the thing on our neck that matters, not our fancy business suits or our professional notebooks. Besides, I thought this is our client's or the market's choice to decide whether they want to hire a stupid but wearing luxury suits and heels lawyer or an intelligent but just neatly dressed lawyer.

So, dear boss, can I wear my mini skirt next Monday?

A makeover that we all need

"Time for a judicial makeover?" This is a report I read from Law in Action of BBC News today.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/law_in_action/7495199.stm)

Despite the dissenting opinions, Carole Malone of the News of the World says that judges in the U.K. are not only largely out of touch but also belong to a pass-the-port culture of a long time ago. David Rigg, the managing director of the communications consultancy Project Associates, even suggests judges engage with the media with care. Well, this is definitely not just a UK story. Judges in Taiwan are also facing the same scenario for quite a long time, too. There is even an old and bad joke about it!

Before the joke, there is something needed to explain first. If we literally translate the Chinese slang of “blow job” into English, it will be close to “play the trumpet.”

One day, while a judge tried to devote all his attention to a sexual-harassment trial, he had his patience to ask the pale and still panic victim to describe all the facts. The victim sobbed out her story. She said, “He just kept grabbing my butt and asking me if I could play the trumpet for him, even after I said No firmly” With a long deliberation, the judge finally said, “It seems that the trumpet is the most crucial evidence but why I don’t see it among all the evidence? You need to submit it to the court!

Well, the joke just reveals that judges in Taiwan are also considered to be out of touch, however, this is a very old joke and I have confidence that most of judges are not living in the ivory tower anymore. But why do the public still consider that judges are those people who will ask them why not enjoy meat while they don’t even have any rice to eat?

Is it because their decisions are always too dense, too ambiguous or too ideal for the public to understand? I have to admit that even after 8 years legal training, sometimes I still want to ask those judges. “Do you speak Chinese?” or “Are you sure you are writing in Chinese?” As a result, it’s not hard to imagine there will sure be a certain distance between our judiciary and the public.

Another reason I think it’s because of the bloody media. The media in Taiwan is always interested in those decisions that seem to against our common knowledge when we skip the reasoning and only skim over the conclusion. Somehow the bloody media in Taiwan tries to mislead the public and convince them that our judiciary can be controlled by a certain political party or a certain person. But, is it all the media that should be blamed? Well, despite having a bloody media here, I always believe people should still have their own will to make their own decision. They can turn off the TV at least!

Should judges try to defend their own decisions outside of the court? I am not so sure if we can expect judges remain neutral after having some interviews with the media? Maybe the judges in the U.K. can, but can we? If everything can’t be explained or understood in a court decision then what kind of decision is that? But how can we do nothing but let the media in Taiwan keep disguise the correct information to the public? So, is it time for a makeover? I’ll definitely say yes. But maybe not just only for our judiciary and our media, most important for our people!!

My first post, again!

I used to have a blog and I thought that it was a brilliant idea to share what happened to us in our own blog. After all, we are in the 21th century now and we should evolve ourselves to show our respects to Darwinism by using modern technology. For that reason, without any hesitation, I just said whatever I wanted to say in my blog until I comprehended that there were no ways to know who actually read my articles. My boyfriend's ex-girlfriend read it! The tarty girl that I gossiped about read it! Of course, I completely understood that open to the public was one of the main ideas of using a blog. But without any invitations, how come they still find a blog from an understated and unknown person like me?

After facing this incredible discovery, I couldn't get rid of the idea that there was someone peeking at my life! Since then, I surrendered my constitutional right and stopped feeding my blog. Some people used to told me that I should not care about what other people think because it was MY blog that they were reading! Now I start to write again and this time I think I will be more like a law school student and try to defend my infrangible right!