Chapter 14

I had a full morning of invigilation, and also helped out with handing in and collecting the eleventh-grade chemistry exam. And as it turned out, the students in the class I was assigned to were not doing the economics paper, so I just sat in the room and read Homo Deus on my Kindle while they were studying or sleeping.

On the way to school and back I kept listening to Ryan Long’s musings on his Boyscast, he was mostly making fun of neurotic feminist bloggers who write condescending advice columns in the Huffington Post but are about the last people on Earth who you should be listening to, as their lives are complete trainwrecks. Me like that guy. He says funnies.

I got home and saw that either I didn’t close the kitchen sliding door properly, or the dog managed to pry it open with his ugly triangle face, and he ransacked the bottom shelf. He ripped to shreds the cardboard slip cover of a sardine can but didn’t manage to open it, and knocked down a few packages of noodles. I shouted my disapproval and threw him in jail (the bathroom). These days we’re working on a positive and negative reinforcement method, if he’s been behaving well during our absence we praise him and give him “candy” (a handful of stinky desiccated snacks that he loves) but if he’s been causing a mess he gets punished. I’m no psychologist, but I imagine he’ll eventually understand, even with his extremely limited intellect. He already seems to know if he’s been misbehaving, looking at me with sad eyes and an apologetic posture, as opposed to the energetic tail-wagging when he’s been a good boy.

I ate leftover pasta while watching YouTube. An attractive blonde woman who was running for the Georgia Senate is accused of sorts of unsavoury shit by her weaselly-looking Democrat opponent, after a picture emerged of one of her supporters who took a selfie with her on the campaign trail, a roughneck with ties to the KKK, neo-nazis and other backwards losers. Bad optics indeed. Still, anyone but a complete moron would know that this doesn’t prove shit, and that politicians are always getting their picture taken with strangers who can’t be vetted. Some might say “Well, if actual racist scumbags support you, you should be taking a step back and looking at your position on some issues uh?” and it’s not a completely unfair thing to bring up. Still, it comes to no surprise that a far-right-winger, in the bipartisan context, would support the candidate closer to his position on the compass, no matter how far towards the center she can be. If there was an American Nazi Party Candidate who ran on a “Let’s kick all the [redacted] out of Geowjah! 1488!” platform, that bald-headed chucklefuck would have been among the 170 or so to cast his ballot this way, but since unfortunately for him nazis are out of mainstream politics, he just went “Meh, at least blondie isn’t a globalist commie”.

I was tired as balls from going to bed late the previous night, so I took a nap and then got back to work. I had a two-hour babysitting session with eleventh-graders, at first they were quiet, in fact most were sleeping, then they got deafeningly loud. I listened to Fuck The Facts on my earbuds but could barely drown out the noise, perhaps I should get noise-cancelling headphones.

At the end of the semester they ask us to write comments on the students’ performance. I’m always effusive, even with Attitude Class. Unless a student has handed in almost no homework assignments and/or I have at least five colleagues who could testify that he/she has been a complete little shit, I keep it positive. For the student’s sake, as I don’t want them to be chewed up by their tiger moms more than they already are, and for mine, because I aim for a simple life.The whole thing is pretty tedious but we’ve been told we can write template sentences and copy-paste, which I gladly did.

I passed by the math teachers’ office and had a chat with my African coworkers. The Ugandan said “Have you seen the news? Bobi Wine is seeking to be elected as president.”

“No way! The reggae singer?”

He knows I visited Uganda a few years ago and was quite fond of the country.

“We’ll know the results tomorrow”

“Does he have any political experience?”

“He’s been in Parliament for a while now. A lot of people like him, he’s exposing the corruption of the government”

“I like some of his songs [especially Badman From Kamwokya] but I have to say he lost a bit of my respect, the guy is quite homophobic”

He made a smirk of disgust. “Yeah, we’re not really down with that”

The South African guy across from his cubicle said “It’s just South Africa, Mauritius, and... what country again? I think there’s only three places in Africa where homosexuality is legal”

The Ugandan, in disbelief: “South Africans are OK with that?!?!”

“Not really, but two men, they can go and get married”

“Woaaaah!”

I brought up the “Why are you gae?” viral video. They both had seen it and found it hilarious. The South African especially was bent over belly-laughing, reminiscing the extended version of the video with a guy who brings plastic bananas and other fruit, to demonstrate what is wrong with man-on-man lovin’.

“That stuff... corrupts our culture. And people have been using it to get asylum in England and other countries”

“Could it be that they feel in danger?”

He argued that the gays are not persecuted or subjected to violence, just frowned upon... heavily. I for one am cool with the homos and lesbos, I struggle to even find a single reason why not. And with all the respect I have for my African friends, I kinda wish they were a bit more tolerant in that regard.

We changed the subject and started talking about financial stuff. We get a pretty juicy flight allowance for the winter holiday, that obviously none of us is going to use, with covid and all that shit. It’s not taxed, so we don’t get the paperwork that lets us send it home through a bank transfer. Then we started talking about purchasing bitcoin or other cryptocurrency, which can be done directly with Chinese yuan.

“Oh you have bitcoin?” The third African, a Ghanaian, took off his headphones and joined the conversation.

We talked about it a little bit. He bought some bitcoin a while ago.

“How much?”

“100 cedis, which was about 16 USD at the time. It’s worth 20 USD now”

He’s not a high-roller, it seems. Neither am I, but I did put a few thousand last summer and I kick myself for not having bought a bit more, now that the price went up fivefold.

I got back to the office and watched a video about American politics. Apparently Biden has assigned to a civil rights position in his cabinet a woman with seriously questionable views on genetics and how melanin makes black people superior. We truly live in bizarro world. I didn’t want to get depressed further so I switched to the uplifting music of a band called Iron Monkey, who plays ear-ripping crushing sludge metal.

I got home, walked the dog, and then rode my bicycle to a shopping mall at the southern edge of the city. They have a climbing facility there, three American friends of mine go quite often and I joined them. Rock climbing is a pretty awesome way to exercise and my forearms, wrists and fingers were completely drained after going up a few routes. I am anticipating some serious delayed soreness tomorrow but it’s all good.

Then we bounced to a Xinjiang restaurant. Those Turkic Muslim dudes from the northwest make excellent barbecue and some kind of mutton meat pie to die for, one of my favorite things to eat on the whole planet. We had a long chat over Xibang and Wusu beers, talking about our jobs as high school teachers, the good the bad and the ugly. I quite like my job as of now, some of my friends from other schools not so much.