Chapter 76

Same morning routine as always. After 20 minutes of yoga and before going for a little walk with the dogs, I browsed Reddit and with the magic of random clicking ended up in a place where hot sauce enthusiasts congregate. One guy talked about a homemade sauce he made with coffee, that got me thinking about a project. I don’t drink coffee, so I asked the girlfriend if she could spare me a few spoonfuls of ground up beans and a filter to wrap them.

GOODAH MAW NEENG!!! The friendliest security guard yelled his enthusiastic and approximately English greeting when I rode in. He scanned my wrist with a thermometer gun, pretty much the only relic of Covid I still see on a regular basis aside from an occasional mask. I’ve always wondered if that whole temperature monitoring is really indicative of anything.

I had a double class with the stronger class of eleventh-graders. In my experience, stronger groups of Chinese students can be a bit frustrating to teach, they are quite capable but also self-conscious and don’t want to answer questions unless they’re really sure about the answer. Also I took the opportunity to review some old material about qualitative analysis, and I could tell that they know the answer but forgot the English words, as their Chinese teacher never ever speaks any fucking English in class or in the qualitative lab. It’s very tiresome, like the engineer in Empire Of Dust says.

At the beginning of the lunch break, they play music on the speakers, and it’s always absolutely awful shit. I limit my exposure to it as much as possible by having my earbuds in, but I took them off to make small talk with a British coworker as we walked to our parked bikes. The song that was blaring was a syrupy cover of Sound Of Silence. The Brit said:

“I asked who chooses these songs, it’s the students. Some of them must like Simon & Garfunkel”

“Or piss-poor cover bands. I feel like a reverse boomer, whenever I borrow a student’s earbuds to hear what they’re listening to, it’s some lame shit.”

When I was a teen, we listened to the most offensive music possible: Slipknot, Rammstein, punk rock bands with crude sexual lyrics, rappers from the early 2000s bling era and seriously violent, misogynistic, homophobic lyrics. Now it seems like it’s all about copycat Korean bands, poor James Blunt clones and trap, except that instead of having a lean-sipping, weed-smoking black dude from Atlanta mumbling the lyrics, it’s a rich fuerdai marshmallowy Chinese kid.

I was really hungry, so I ate a BLT sandwich and a grilled cheese for lunch, while watching more UFC prelim fights. I often go to FOTN.tv before watching a card, it’s a website where people rate fights without spoiling the result. I noticed a lot of women’s fights are rated lower than they should be, and it’s clear from reading MMA forums that a lot of fans have a bit of a sexist bias. Sure, the talent pool in WMMA is much shallower as a whole and in the case of the 125 and 135 divisions the gap between champion and contenders is so large it makes the whole thing a bit stale, but it also has gone a long way and from watching nearly every card start-to-finish I don’t think the proportion of duds among female fights is much higher than in male ones. The fight between Jinh Yu Frey and Gloria De Paula was rated at 45%, but it wasn’t that bad. But hey, people are entitled to their opinion, and it’s a fan-driven sport, no matter how idiotic some of the fans’ opinions can get at times. That’s why Usman is going to rematch Masvidal and McGregor is probably going to fight Poirier again.

I knew I wouldn’t have the time or motivation to walk the dog later that day, so I went on a longer loop during the lunch break. I rode my longboard and he spritely ran along, all the way to a small supermarket that stocks fresh chili peppers. Back home, I chopped them and put them in a fermenting jar with an airlock, along with the coffee.

Back at the office, I felt like listening to Keny Arkana, one of the best French rappers of all time, with her technical ability, energy, lyrics and engagement towards socialist causes. I put on her very latest track, released a few days ago, and I was surprised that it aligned with a lot of (mostly right-wing) conspiracy minded people on Facebook and all that, denouncing the mask mandates, lockdowns and the vaccination campaign. I guess she’s just really anti-authority, and so are those libertarians, they end up agreeing sometimes. Then I put on a live set of hers at a festival, and it was really good. About half the tracks were not even hip-hop, or at least not in the purist sense, with acoustic guitars or other folkish instruments.

On Wednesdays in the mid-afternoon, one period is dedicated to extracurricular activites. Just one measly 45-minute period a week, but hey I’ve seen worse, I’m surprised the administration even allows that, as it’s time taken away from mindless cramming and rote memorization. I’m in charge of the skateboarding club, but these days the students don’t really want to go out, they’ll wait until the tiny window between the frigid and humid winter and the sweltering summer in which the weather isn’t ass. I walked around, checking out what the others were doing. There is a music club and some of my students were playing the piano or singing, and one of my coworkers was knitting with a handful of grade-10 girls.

After that there’s still one regular class, though it would make more sense to just end the school day on that informal note, but hey, we don’t take kindly to that whole makin’ sense ‘round here. One of my students came in a few minutes late, holding the t-shirt she had just made at the art club. It was seriously pretty cool, with a colorful hipsterish graffiti style. The front had a cartoon with “Drunk Youth” as a caption, and in the back it was the word FUCK written in a few different handwritten styles. I made my obligatory comment about how she’s not supposed to be using profanity, but could only compliment her on the value of the artwork. I said “Thank you” and jokingly put it in my bag, and she said “It’s too small for you”. “Are you saying I’m too fat?!” Everybody laughed. I’m trying to lighten the atmosphere, especially when we’re doing joyless analytical chemistry review. That student is obviously quite smart, and she speaks Spanish since she lived in Spain for a few years, but she’s doing quite poorly at chemistry, mostly because she doesn’t give much of a shit about it. And I can’t be mad at that, really, it’s the whole one-size-fits-all education program.

I went home, took a nap, and it was pretty damn hard to pull myself out of bed at 18:20, after a few days of accumulated sleep deprivation and a queasy stomach from the protein shake I injested before crashing. I really wanted to go to BJJ practice, so I kicked myself in the ass, packed my gi, a towel and my mouthguard, and hopped on my bicycle. Turns out it was a great idea, and I felt much better after the 90-minute session (plus the 9-km bicycle round trip). The gym where we now train is not ideal, with a mat that’s too small and requires constant breaks in the action when we’re sparring and also a lot of ambient noise from two TVs playing different channels, crappy music coming from Bluetooth speakers and Chinese gym goers yell-chatting. The de facto leader of our group retorted by saying the kickboxing gym is also quite noisy, and he’s right, but I’m bothered less by the sound of people hitting bags and pads than the noise of a commercial gym, the main reason why I built my own home gym. Overall I’m just happy we get to train again.

I got home and the girlfriend was reading in bed. She asked me for a “pink one”, her favorite cocktail made with gin, fruit-infused baijiu, triple sec, lemon juice and a spoonful of jam or marmalade, so I got the shaker and made her one. I opened one of my homebrew, and it exploded in a volcano of foam. Maybe I put too much priming sugar before bottling.

I roasted tomatoes, garlic and hot peppers in the oven, and then made a salsa that I put on my tacos. It burned my whole face. Holy shit. I had to open another beer, a German hefeweizen, to extinguish the capsaicin fire, and a few minutes later I sat on the couch with the satisfied, slightly masochistic afterburn consuming me. One YouTube video that was recommended in my feed and intrigued me was called “Carts Of Darkness”, a documentary about homeless men collecting cans and bottles with shopping carts, and racing downhill with the same carts. It was really interesting but I paused it at the halfway point, as it was already past 10 and I didn’t want to stay up too late. I'll finish it tomorrow.