Chapter 68

This time I did yoga instead of tai chi, other than that, it was a normal morning. I always feel like staying in bed a bit longer but have to say it’s nice to have a good hour and a half for myself to enjoy and then go to work relaxed rather than just roll out of bed and rush. Let’s keep this habit up.

I listened to Jocko Willink’s podcast, he said that contrary to popular belief, there are such things as stupid questions. As a leadership consultant, he advocates humility, open communication and what he calls “extreme ownership” (accountability and owning one’s mistakes) but also says you should do your homework beforehand and not have to ask about things you should already know. He’s 100% right, I’ve always disliked that cliché.

I got to the school, dropped my stuff in the office, and went to the hot water dispenser to make tea. A Chinese physics teacher was doing the same, we talked tea for a bit and I proposed we make a trade, so I went to my office, put a few loose leaves of Huang Shan tea in an empty container to trade for his bag of white tea. It then dawned on me that I don’t even know his name, though we’ve been working in the same school for two and a half years now. It’s a weird thing about my life in China, I don’t know the names of my coworkers except those in my office, I don’t know my neighbors’ names, I don’t know the names of any of the girlfriend’s relatives except her parents and her two cousins. In many cases I’d be surprised if they even know mine.

In the morning I prepared lessons while listening to a vaporwave compilation and then a live set from Put, the Russian black metal band. I call them Put because that’s the transliteration of their name in Cyrillic (путь) but the video description translated it as Pathways, which sounds better, so I’ll use that from now on. I will keep calling their album Песни смерти “Skeleton Playing Accordion In The Snow” though. The one-hour set was pretty good, and I have to appreciate that not only they use a real accordion, it’s also well recorded, unlike a lot of folkloric instruments who unfortunately get buried by the drums and electric guitars oftentimes.

I had a double class with twelfth-graders and it went well. Some got sleepy, what can I say, nuclear magnetic resonance is not a fascinating subject at all.

I didn’t go home for lunch. I headed to the outskirts on my bicycle, where I did one practice run on the driving exam circuit. The instructor knew my time was a bit tight so he let me go first, while two other trainees sat in the car. It went well and I hope I just pass this test and get done with it.

On the way there and back I finished a Ryan Long podcast, his 23^rd episode. It was absolutely excellent, as I keep repeating he’s both hilarious and on point in his criticism of woke culture. It was titled “No Fun, Only Activism” and the main topic was people saying you shouldn’t celebrate the Fourth Of July because the USA is a flawed country and there are problems in the world. He also talked about the Blacklivesmatter activists pushing people to virtue-signal about their cause and implying that if you post other shit on your Instagram or Facebook (like pictures of your dog or a hike or the food you cook or whatever) that’s an example of privilege and white supremacy. I vaguely remember that. The thing is we live in such a Clown World, you tend to forget about some of the hundreds and hundreds of weird instances of pure narcissism like that.

I hauled ass on the way back, and made it to the city with enough time to eat Muslim noodles at an eatery before going back to work. I had a lab period and played Creedence Clearwater Revival on my little speaker, some students were gently bobbing their heads to their classic rock. CCR are pretty damn special, not only do they have tons of great songs, they also manage to have a distinctive recognizable sound AND not having every song sound the same.

We had a meeting in the mid-afternoon. The principal talked about the upcoming final exams, and how we need to be on our toes to prevent cheating. Another topic that was brought up is how apathetic some of the twelfth-graders are, the most capable ones having already been offered a place in a good university and the weakest ones just not giving a fuck. Some of them even gave up on the idea of studying abroad, or more likely their tiger moms decided they wouldn’t go. I still have a great time teaching the seniors, even Attitude Class, the key is having proper expectations and choosing battles.

Speaking of Attitude Class, I taught them one period after the meeting, going through an exam paper from 2016. They paid attention, noting all the different nitpicks that the British people who’ll grade the exams can hold against them.

I got home and fed the dog, he had skipped lunch, poor thing. I rewatched an old UFC fight, Amanda Nunes has now won her last twelve fights, most of them by murder, cementing her place as baddest woman in the history of combat sports, but she does have losses on her record. So I watched her fight against Cat Zingano in 2014, in which Nunes started strong and beat several layers of shit out of Alpha Cat before the tables turned. Cat Zingano was one hell of a scary woman back in the day, truly one of MMA’s biggest “what if”s, due to injuries and psychological issues due to the death of her husband. The fight was seriously sick and included two extremely violent takedowns that looked like the DDT move used in pro wrasslin’, something we don’t see in MMA often, if ever.

I wrote this entry while listening to the album Morning Star by Entombed. Vocalist LG Petrov died at age 49 yesterday, which prompted a lot of my metal friends to post a little tribute on their Facebook, so I clicked on that album link. Their debut Left Hand Path is legendary (the title track!!!!) and I like the death n’ roll approach on Clandestine, but I had never heard Morning Star, their seventh studio effort. Parts sounded like the Entombed of old but big swaths of the album were either boring or plain bad. After that I listened to an aggressive thrash metal album by a band named Incinerate, a release from three days ago, and it was good stuff.

At 8 or so I rode my longboard with the dog to the girlfriend’s workplace, and we came back home. I mixed myself a negroni, read a bit, and went to sleep. Just another day in paradise.