Alive and Not Asleep

It's 5AM. My eyes and forehead want sleep, but my body is awake and my mind is restless.

I've been on a long insomniac internet trek. It began around 1AM with routine facebook, gmail, and news checking, the sort that often precedes going to bed, but this time it transitioned smoothly into researching the Dallas metro system, and from there into checking Google Earth. Google Earth led me, predictably, to Taiwan. I wanted to see if there was any progress shown on the construction work beside the main metro station in Taipei. (On another internet wandering, I had learned that the construction sites I noticed while living there in 2007-2008 were going to be two relatively tall buildings with quite a bit underneath them, further extending the already extensive underground portion of the metro station area.)
Google Earth had apparently not updated its satellite pictures of Taiwan in quite some time, and did not even show the sites as they had been 3 years ago. I found a german site with an article about the construction, which linked to a skyscraper website with an old forum topic from about the time I was living there. Another quick search, however, revealed a recent one where someone had posted pictures. The deep holes are covered up, and vertical work is likely to begin soon, probably by the next time I manage to get to Taipei. In checking to see if anyone had posted new Taiwan-overlays for Google Earth, I came across an announcement that street-view was now available for parts of Taiwan. I went to check this out, and was rather moved to find that vast sections of Taipei are now viewable in detail from the streets. The exact alley on which I lived was not photographed, but the streets surrounding it were, and I could see all my favorite places on Yong Kong Street. I followed the photo links from Taipei over to Keelung, and found that it had been street-viewed too. I don't know how many employees Google has, but someone put in a lot of driving time... I wouldn't be surprised if Google wants to expand Google Earth into a complete visual representation of most of the Earth. They have already progressed quite far towards that goal... Using Keelung's street-view I went up onto a mountain to see if I could recreate the view of the city as I saw it when I was there on top of a mountain, but could not find the place where I had been previously. I went to look up the wikipedia article for Keelung to see if I could get my bearings, but found nothing pertaining to the statue I was looking for. I did notice that Keelung had been settled by a particular tribe before the Chinese arrived, and a few followed links led me to a map of Taiwan's indigenous tribal peoples. I noticed the Amis tribe, having met a few Taiwanese who were of Amis descent, and from their article went to search for their music on YouTube. I found the music of a famous singer named Difang, who apparently had a performance found and used by Enigma in a very famous song without crediting him. I remembered that I had heard his music in the home of a missionary in Taichung, and quickly found the original song (without drum and synth tracks) on iTunes. Definitely worth 99 cents for that one. I listened to it a few times, wondering if the song had words or simply melodic phonetic sounds, and went to look for a Cantonese language lesson video on YouTube, to check the pronunciation on a phrase I had learned from a friend at the Chinese church I go to. I did not find that phrase, but heard many others, and read an interesting article contrasting Mandarin and Cantonese and comparing their difficulty levels. (Cantonese was judged to be the more difficult of the two languages by several linguistic metrics) I then looked for a Hakka language video, as I have a few Hakka friends as well and would be interested in learning at least a few common phrases. I found what I was looking for, but will probably just have one of my friends teach me, as a later search on Wikipedia revealed that the Taiwanese variant of Hakka is not the same as the Guangdong variety, which I think is what the video was using. Reading about the Hakka people led to reading about the Mien people, -I just met a Mien lady this past weekend- who were heavily influenced by Hakka Chinese language and culture at some point in their collective pasts, and about how America used their help in Vietnam during the "Secret War" in Laos.
Now many of them live in Sacramento, apparently... Noticing that it was now after 4AM, I checked facebook and my email once again, and then checked a few webcomics that had updated after midnight. I listened again to the song by Difang, and felt very alive, as I often do when staying up this late.
For some reason the background noise of my mind dies down at these hours, and I become aware of my life, this life that we all experience in common, moment by moment. Now in the quiet hours when latest night shifts towards earliest morning, I write this short account of one night's doings, and ponder life as it passes. Small wonder I have trouble sleeping...
A mental prompting led me to check the syllabus for my World Missions Class this semester. As it turns out, I do indeed have an assignment due tomorrow, a one page essay on the World Evangelism Conference. That will be written quickly enough, the difficulty will be keeping it to anything as short as a page. Yet the thought of assignments due suggests that getting at least some sleep tonight is recommended. 3 hours of sleep is better than no sleep, perhaps.

And so this little rumination ends here. Perhaps someone will find this amusing. If not, at least my insomnia has manifested itself into written form. That should be useful later somehow.

Rest comes in many forms... sometimes sleep is not one of them.
-Joseph