Chapter 34

I woke up in the middle of the night, with a holy tetrafecta of a parched throat, a stomachache, heavy sweating and you guessed it, insomnia due to weird nightmares about a certain driving exam. I went to poop, it was spicy and a bit painful. Every time this happens I tell myself I’ll stop eating Sichuanese or Hunanese or other pepper-heavy cuisines, but... nah. Won’t happen.

The girlfriend made spring rolls for lunch, and we ate them with some of my homemade sweet and spicy pickles while watching The Office. It was a particularly hilarious episode, the one with the safety briefings and Michael pretending he’s suffering from crippling depression and staging his suicide, to show the warehouse workers that they’re not the only ones who deal with workplace hazards. I like the dynamic between the office staff and the warehouse, it always leads to funny moments.

I spent a big part of the afternoon at the pool hall with two friends, a Chinese girl and a British guy. We shot games of 8-ball and then cutthroat (protect your balls), a game three people can play. I went to the front desk to grab some beers, but the idiots there left the fridge unplugged so I went outside, ran to the Japanese restaurant a block away, and came back with ice cold Kirin tallboys.

A skinny teenager working there came to talk to the girl in our group, who used to be his teacher.

“What did she teach you?”

“English”

I switched from Chinese to that language. “Oh so you can speak English then?”

Major flash of panic on his acne-marked face. He replied in Chinese “No, no, I can’t!”

“So she’s a bad teacher then?!” I joked. Bent over the table about to take her shot, she glared at me and made a smirk.

“I’m just lazy, I’m not good at English”

It’s pretty common in China, and elsewhere in Asia too, from experience. People spend a lot of time and money to “learn English” but end up unable to do anything with the language except maybe recite memorized phrases. The fact that a lot of teachers are themselves lazy as all hell and use ineffectual methods doesn’t help. Meanwhile, you go to parts of Africa, Melanesia, Polynesia, and the Indian subcontinent and you have people with very little education who speak English more or less fluently. Makes you wonder.

I came back home the same way I went, riding my longboard. It was truly a beautiful sunny day. I did some writing, reading, and about a half-hour of Chinese studying. I copied a text from the webpage of a badminton club and annotated it. It was something about membership fees, that part I could understand well without help, and then there was a bit of legalese about the club not taking responsibility in case of injuries, which required me to use my dictionary a bit as some of those words and grammar structures were difficult. Nothing that exciting, but just the kind of stuff I need to be able to assimilate if I want to go from functional illiteracy to be a model immigrant with a near-mastery of the language.

I kept going with the French hip-hop I’d been into for the past few days, putting on a set by a guy named DJ Kiln, who was mixing tracks from the golden age (1995-2000). Then I listened to another DJ set, more focused on Detroit techno and house, and after that I followed a recommendation I’ve seen somewhere and checked out The Qemists and Zardonic, with their heavy drum n’ bass that flirts and overlaps with metal at times. Of the two, I much prefered Zardonic, according to Wikipedia he’s got a pretty extensive catalog, I’ll check out more of it.

The girlfriend made dinner once again, chunks of beef over rice with mashed potatoes and some of the gumbo gravy that is still in the fridge. It was delicious. Then we drove to Metro to buy groceries, the parking lot was completely full, which is never a good sign.

“Did you bring your mask?”

“You mean, my stupid little useless glassfogger?”

I had one crumbled in my coat pocket, in case they’d ask me to put it on. But no, today all I had to do was get a wrist scan for body temperature. As always, the first thing I did after entering Metro was to locate all the little bullhorns playing annoying advertisements in a loop and turn them off, one of them was fairly well hidden, behind boxes of soap. I had to move the boxes from the shelf to be able to reach it. No idea if they did it because of me, now that would be flattering. I like a challenge.

Despite the crowded aisles, it was a pleasant shopping experience. I went a little crazy in the imported beer section.

Then we went to the indoor soccer pitch, a few blocks away. We got there too early for the 9 o’clock game so we walked the dog on a deserted walking path along a canal.

The boys and I played for two hours, three alternating teams of seven. The pitch is a bit small for that, so the midfield got crowded at times, six on six is more ideal. Nonetheless it was a good time, I got a lump on my leg from a shin-on-shin contact but nothing crazy. The dog was proudly wearing his Corinthians little doggy shirt we bought in Brazil, watching the games.

We got in the car, and when she turned right on the main road, she didn’t look left first, went straight to the far lane, and was way, way, way too slow to accelerate, put-putting at 20 km/h in second gear in the fast lane. A pretty big trifecta of dangerous maneuvers, on a poorly lit country road no less, and a car passed us from the right lane, honking. I told her what she did wrong, and already stressed as she always is when driving, she yelled “SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!” There was a bit of an awkward silence for a while, me responding in monosyllables when she’d ask for directions in a sheepy voice. Then she apologized for her outburst.

“Should we just give the car back to your parents?”

“Why?”

“We almost never argued [the Chinese word translates as “noise-fighting”] before we had it”

I was joking of course. The truth is she’s a very inexperienced driver, and the only way to get better is, well, by practicing. The pointers I give her aren’t nitpicky nor are they meant to be demeaning, I told her, so she should stop taking it so damn personal. There’s already a big improvement from the first time we went out, which was a near-total disaster, but she needs to listen to me. And yes, I’m aware of the irony of me being the derp who keeps failing his driving test.

We got home and had to park outside the apartment complex, since we don’t have the parking registration that opens the gate electronically and the security guards were gone. That meant carrying heavy-ass bags of groceries on foot, but hey. I took a hot bath with a nice glass of Oettinger black beer, and then watched an episode of Unresolved Mysteries with a glass of whiskey or three.