My Life as Adoga

I am enjoying another East Coast Driving Holiday with Joe. Yesterday we drove from Hualien to Taitung between the mountain ranges. Today we will drive the Coastal road until reaching highway 30 that goes West through the mountains and meets up again with the valley highway back to Hualien. Tomorrow morning we have an early morning train back to Taipei. The scenery is beautiful, but the highway has been re-designed so that the emergency lanes are now motorcycle lanes, and stopping to take photos is discouraged. And though Joe promised not to gripe when I want to stop or explore someplace, he still managed to slip in a passive aggressive complaint: "I don't like to take too many photos, myself," or "The way back to the highway is if you turn right here." That's OK. If I was allowed to explore as much as I liked, we'd be heading West instead of South, and end up on the West Coast! But I do miss being in the mountains. This trip has forced me to accept

With that ever-present goal of achieving productivity over the summer break, I spent some time this afternoon on the HSR to Kaohsiung composing an essay I want to send to the Taipei Times. Joe further encouraged me to organize a forum of important business leaders to speak about the relationship between reading fiction and success in business & life.  But where to begin. Joe says I should start with David's wife, whose boss is a major public advocate for the arts. This sounds very doable. How to begin?

Waiting for my students to have their turn at the student club awards ceremony. I have so much other important work to do, but I am growing tired. 

One of the curses of university life here seems to be that you can never just focus on your teaching more research. There always has to be some sort of contest or competition  which requires tons of paperwork, or there's a report to be written and documentation to be gathered. Careers seem to be built upon publication, called "research." True success in this requires time, lots of time, for reading. But even basic responsibility of class preparation makes it difficult or impossible to find enough time to read as much as you need for a truly successful research endeavor. Those who succeed seem to do so on the backs of their teaching assistants. I wonder who suffers in this case. The teaching assistants who are forced into so much extra work, or the students who must do without an experienced and highly motivated professor?