Chapter 13

So the three-day final exam session started today, which means no classes to teach, but a lot of time sitting around watching the students do exams or self-study. I brought my Kindle, and started reading a book called Homo Deus, by some Israeli author with a weird name I can’t be bothered to spend two seconds looking up. I had enjoyed her book Sapiens, a vulgarized, nuanced and compelling account of the history of our species and how the cognitive, agricultural, scientific and technological revolutions might have made us more advanced, but it could also be argued made us more miserable as well. In the sequel, the focus is on trans-humanism, the possibility of a post-biological world, and the pursuit of immortality. So far, a pretty good read.

I was in charge of the grade 12 chemistry exam, so I distributed the papers and spent some time running from classroom to classroom, answering questions and clarifying ambiguities coming from the small print and the poor quality of the printer. Two students cheated, or rather were caught cheating (god knows how many didn’t). Plagiarism and cheating and poor academic integrity in general is a big problem in China. One student was already on the verge of getting expelled, as we learned in the meeting yesterday, that incident must be the final strike and I doubt we’ll see him again.

The album Hating Life by Swedish band Grave played in my earbuds on my commute home. Grave are absolute death metal legends and their debut Into The Grave is my favorite album of the genre. Hating Life is not nearly as good, the molasses guitar sound has cleaned up a bit while still being dirty and crushing, the singer has adopted a shouted approach that doesn’t fit with the music as well as the low growls of the classic first two albums, and there’s a bit of an experimentation towards groove and alternative metal that quite a few bands were trying out in the mid-nineties, but has aged quite poorly with the subsequent rise and downfall of nü-metal.  

I ate a grilled cheese sandwich and a tomato sandwich for lunch. The girlfriend had bought some weird bread with sweet red beans embedded inside that taste almost like chocolate, but I made my sandwiches anyway. Bad call. Should have just gone back downstairs to get some normal white bread at the corner store.

I watched some YouTube videos while I ate my weird savoury-sweet sandwiches. The Amazing Atheist talked about the value of incrementalism and the necessity for left-wing progressives to make compromises to function within the political system. That seems to be a common debate, between intransigence/sticking to one’s values and diplomacy/making a united front, and one that lost the Democratic Party the 2016 election in my opinion. I also watched a video about the early days of the UFC and how the sport was kept underground by adversarial politicians, bad marketing, and ultimately competition from Japan, before getting revived and becoming the multi-billion-dollar business it is nowadays. That stuff fascinates me, I have been a fan of MMA since 2002, when the sport was barely coming out of the so-called Dark Ages, and it grew tremendously under my eyes.

As I walked the dog for his daily midday outing, I couldn’t help but think about a bizarre news story about a Quebec couple who went out past the 8 PM curfew with the wife holding her husband with a leash, not because of some deviant sado-maso fetish, but because apparently walking a dog is part of the lockdown exemptions. The smartasses got fined a few thousand dollars. Still, it’s a bit ridiculous, you should be able to go take a walk if you stay in deserted places, even during the strict quarantine I was subjected to last spring I’d go walk or ride my longboard once in a while.

I listened to Creedence Clearwater Revival on the way back to school. Sometimes a little dose of classic rock is the only thing that can satiate my thirst.

I was babysitting a class of eleventh-graders while they were studying, and they were chatting loudly. I fished out my mp3 player to drown out the noise, and put on the album Here In After by Immolation. A lot of death metal sounds brutish and cavemanish (and fucking awesome, don’t get me wrong) but Immolation gives the impression of being way more intellectual, without the nerdy wankery of a lot of bands classified into technical or progressive death metal. I like them quite a lot.

I invigilated a full 90-minute English reading & writing exam, then I was seriously ready to go home. Doing nothing is exhausting. I cracked open a Black Yang beer and munched on some Japanese rice cakes while writing the story of my day thus far, while listening to two great underground bands: Dömesticrust (Indonesia, crust punk) and Shallow North Dakota (Canada, sludge). Then I took a nap for an hour or so, and went to play soccer. There’s a bunch of expats in town who play every Wednesday, I go when I’m free. Mostly British and South African guys, but a few from other nationalities too.

If it looks like my social life, aside from my girlfriend, is mostly if not totally made up of fellow foreign residents, and that my interactions with the Chinese who make up 99.99% of the population of the city are either transactional or professional, well it’s not an unfair assumption. That’s something I’ll address at some point.

The indoor soccer building is about 25 minutes away by bicycle, a very pleasant ride, half of it on bike paths going through a park by a canal. On the way there and back I listened to a podcast by Ryan Long, a comedian who’s got some pretty damn funny skits on YouTube, my favorite being the one with the woke guy and the white supremacist finding out how much they have in common. We played for two hours, it was good fun. Then I got home, took a shower, drank a beer and ate a can of sardines while watching a Japanese wrestling match.