Chapter 10

I woke up at 9:30, when Minigo poked me with his triangle face. The girlfriend was already in the living room, and I could hear her babbling in Chinese, talking about Greek paintings or something. She’s an art teacher in another high school than the one I work at, and she also supplements her income with one-on-one online lessons on Sunday mornings.

I stayed in bed a bit longer, reading my Kindle, but the dog wanted to play, he brought me his stuffed dice so I’d throw it across the room, then he’d go fetch it and interrupt my reading again. Still less annoying than a human child. I think about my childlessness at times, just last week the girlfriend asked me how I feel, and whether I would regret not having kids. I’m on the fence, on one hand I feel like fatherhhood would be the ultimate life experience and bring a sense of purpose into my drifting life, but I also see it as an enormous sacrifice and though I do like children, I get annoyed with them quickly. Also I’m not very optimistic regarding where the world is going and how it’s changing, and at the personal level, I’m far from being in an ideal position to settle down for real, being an expatriate in a country that can deport me on a whim at any time and what not. For sure it’s not something to take lightly, there are too many unwanted bastard children running around this planet as it is.

The girlfriend is pretty adamant she doesn’t want any, and it seems like her parents have accepted that decision, albeit a bit reluctantly perhaps. I for one have that weight off my shoulders, my brother has two kids of his own, which removes my responsibility of spawning grandchildren.

For whatever reason, my old beat-up PlayStation 3 can’t connect to the living room TV, so it’s plugged in the smaller TV in our bedroom. I fired up GTA V and played for an hour or so. I finished the game a long time ago, but the possibilities in that sandbox world are nearly endless, so I like to just drive around and do stupid shit.

I finally emerged from bed, stretched, and hit the punching bag for three five-minute rounds, doing pushups and pullups in between. Just enough to break a nice sweat. Then I took a cold shower. I’ve been taking cold showers for six months or so now, apparently there are health benefits and I sure damn hope so. It’s not that bad honestly, even when it’s cold in the bathroom, in fact it makes the transition out of the shower a little easier than if I just took a steamy shower and had to go, naked and wet, into the frosty air.

The vaporwave playlist finished, and I put on an album by Inglourious Bastardz, an underground French hip-hop supergroup. It is titled 2012, obviously after the year it came out, and is a succession of quality lyrical rap tracks by prolific and talented MCs.

I got in the kitchen, cracked open a Goose Island beer, and got to work. I chopped all the fixings to make a marinara sauce and put it on simmer, made a fried rice with a bunch of leftovers, and also made a dip by putting fried bell pepper, eggplant, garlic, almonds and cashew nuts in the food processor. I forgot how it’s called, it’s a recipe from somewhere around the Mediterranean Sea, usually it’s made with walnuts but I improvised and used the nuts I had lying around. I put it in the fridge, as it’s a bit better if you let the flavors know each other a bit before eating.

I ate my fried rice while watching Botchamania, a compilation of funny bloopers and clumsy moments that happened in various wrestling shows. The next few hours were lazily spent reading blogs and dicking around online, then we went out to walk the dog.

“Where do you want to cross the canal? The big bridge or Adai bridge?”

Adai is the name of our old dog, who died a bit more than a year ago. I used to walk her over that bridge, hence why we started using that name to differentiate it from the others.

“Let’s go to the big bridge, there’s a bakery there, I want to buy some bread. Hey, speaking of which, let’s go eat Sichuanese food this week!”

I cocked my head. “Speaking of which? How’s that related?”

“You said Adai bridge, Minigo doesn’t have a bridge or a street named after him yet. That got me thinking about haochi street, the one with all the restaurants, now I want to eat mapo doufu!”

“But you can’t just say “speaking of which” if the logical progression is not that obvious!”

“It made sense in my head!”

“OK, we’ll go later this week, but not now, we have too much food we need to finish”

“What if we get a job in Dubai, and they don’t have Sichuan restaurants? We’re just going to eat curry for three years? Or if we go to Europe, we’ll eat only cold bread, cold ham, cold hummus, cold deeboodaboodeeboo, everything they eat is cold”

Deeboodaboodeeboo is her impersonation of how Italian or Spanish or any of those foreign languages sound to her, not that different from Westerners who say ching-chang-chong. The girlfriend truly says the darndest things, and entertains me a lot. We’ve been together for more than four years now, to the point that most of our communication is made up of inside jokes, non-sequiturs, and half-Chinese, half-English slang words that nobody else can understand.

We got home and gave the dog a shower, as he was starting to be seriously stinky. Then we got some drinks, a white Russian for her, a wheat beer from Lithuania for me, and watched a YouTube video about the Appalachian Trail. It’s been a goal of mine to hike the whole thing, all 2090 miles of it, one day, and I’m trying to convince her to come along. She likes hiking, but isn’t sure she’s willing to commit to a 5- or 6-month cross-country hike, especially not one as tough as the AT. The video, put together by a popular (well, popular for that tiny niche) hiking YouTuber, a blonde girl with a redneck accent who goes by Homemade Wanderlust, did a good job at showing the highs and the lows that thru-hikers experience on such a journey.

I watched more Rizin fights from that endless eight-hour card. Korean tiny fireball “Hamderlei” won the super atomweight belt in a razor-close fight, 21-year-old kickboxing phenom Nasukawa Tenshin destroyed his opponent with flashy lightning attacks, and an Angolan guy named Manel Kape got a second-round TKO victory for the bantamweight championship. Since then, he signed with the UFC, he should be a pretty interesting addition to their 125-pound division.

Dinner was quite the feast: hummus, nutty eggplant and pepper paste, tortilla bread, carrots, buttered asparagus, and pieces of marinated pork that we rolled into sheets of lettuce. We watched a 2011 movie called The Way, about the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage. The movie was retarded and not a single dialogue was believable, but the views of that famous hiking path was what we came for, as that’s another trail we want to do, before the AT.