Chapter 81

Up at 6, green tea in the pot, a 45-minute yoga session, and a walk with the little triangle-faced animal. The sun is finally out. Then I was suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to listen to Testament, for an unknown reason. Probably just because Testament are awesome. I saw that in 2018 they re-released their album First Strike Is Deadly (under the name First Strike Is Still Deadly) and the more modern recording gives those classic thrash anthems even more punch.

The mock exams start tomorrow, so I gave all the classes a free self-study period and sat there finishing up the gargantuan blog entry from yesterday. When I started writing this navel-gazing piece of shit, I tried to finish it before midnight, but now I prefer putting the finishing touches and proofread it the next day, which allows me to have a relaxed evening.

I wrote on the board “study”, “ask the teacher questions” and something that could be roughly translated as “behave well”, with thumbs up or check marks, and “sleep”, “talk” and “play with your phone” with an X or a thumbs down. One of the eleventh-graders let out a burp, which echoed in the silent classroom and caused immature laughter, so I added “burp like [the student]” in the X column, to even more laughter. I wrote his name wrong on purpose as a throwback to an old inside joke at my expense: his name contains the character 宁 (ning) but for the longest time I said 宇 (yu), and I was always wondering why the little bastards were giggling when I called on him to answer a question or draw a molecule on the board. It took me months before I realized I’d been calling him the wrong name and nobody bothered to correct me. I’m not mad though, it’s all good fun, and like I said before I empathize with them being stuck in that cram school for way more time that is healthy so when their youthful spirit manifests itself (in ways that are not disruptive or grossly disrespectful) I’m all for it. I have quite the childish sense of humor myself and that’s one reason why I like interacting with snotty teenagers.

I bought some shrimp fried noodles at the corner restaurant, and this time they made sure there’d be no mushrooms. I got home and saw that the dog got into the girlfriend’s art supplies and made a huge mess on the floor. I yelled at him but gave him the silent treatment for the next hour, as I ate my noods and watched YouTube videos. Only when I was about to leave did I call him over and he came, his head down, his tail wagging apologetically. He might have abandonment issues when we leave for work, but I hope soon enough he’ll become mature enough to understand that unlike him, we’re not NEETs, we have day jobs.

I listened to a Ryan Long podcast, in which he astutely and hilariously broke down a newspaper article with advice for mothers who are concerned that their teenage boys are being “radicalized” by browsing the internet and getting exposed to right-leaning memes. He pointed out how in the article the writer “almost got it” but falling short of having sufficient levels of introspection, how a lot of this edgy humor is reactionary more than anything (with left-wing comedy being a combination of painfully unfunny, condescending and dominating the cultural discourse, which makes teenage boys totally unattracted to Trevor Noah and John Oliver and the like), how deconnected she is from the world outside of upper-middle-class white bubbles, how self-righteous those woke types are, and especially how if you want 14-year-olds to not spend all of their time in the admittedly putrid depths of 4chan, having their mom telling them not to is probably the most counterproductive approach.

I sometimes wonder about my own students and how much of that deep internet cred they have. A few years ago, I browsed Chinese message boards and meme dumps, and the whole thing was utterly incomprehensible, even if you can read Chinese. The level of slang almost made it another language altogether, taking advantage of all the homophones and the limited sounds that several thousands of characters make, and was evolving constantly to elude the censors. There wasn’t that much politics on there, mostly crude jokes, copypastas and memes that were long dead on the American internet and used the wrong way, notably a fuckton of rage comics. Most stories had an autobiographic twist to them but had Wang Nima (Nima = your mom) or his sister Wang Nimei as the protagonist, and an alarming number of them took place in middle and high schools, which led me to wonder if I’ve been a secondary character in one of them. It must have happened, by mere virtue of statistics and due to my at-times eccentric personality. Good fucking luck finding out though, with the hundreds of millions of Chinese internet users constantly dumping shit all over message boards. The gif game was on point though, and still something I use a lot in WeChat shitposting groups.

I spent a big part of my afternoon stapling and folding exam papers, an annoying and repetitive job, but one that can be done with music or a podcast on. The Metal Minded guys interviewed a solo artist with the cool name of Anna Pest, and it was an interesting conversation. Just before pressing play, I listened to one of her tracks, and it’s a truly eclectic mix of deathcore, tech death, slam, industrial, screamo... so, a bunch of styles I don’t care too much for, but I could only nod my head at all this originality and creativity.

I had a double with Attitude Class and let them study, they have a math exam tomorrow. So all in all it was a pretty relaxed day. I ran into my British coworker on the way out, his day was much more stressful and tedious, since he was giving speaking exams to the tenth-graders. I don’t envy him at all. From what I keep hearing, the school had a hard time recruiting students because of Covid and the level of the tenth-graders is pretty low.

I got home and praised the dog for being a good boy and not destroying anything. We went on a walk, and then I took a taxi to my last driving practice. It lasted three hours and now that I know what it’s about, it didn’t suck as much. I know the circuit by heart at this point and expertly drove like a retard to fit the exam stipulations, which gave very little to the rude cunty instructor to yell about. The rest of the time I enjoyed sitting on the back seat, listening to Crucified Barbara and reading my Kindle. I started a book called Everything Is Fucked, about sense of purpose and anti-nihilism, and it’s pretty good so far. The author Mark Manson, of The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck fame, does a good job at vulgarizing behavioral science, psychology and philosophy, I just wish he’d refrain from throwing in stupid jokes every second paragraph, or maybe make funny ones. Most of his humor falls flat and makes me cringe.

Finally I’m done with that dumbass course, time to celebrate with a nice beer. I got home at 21:30, famished, cracked open a Pacific Amber Ale, and heated some Pakistani food from an aluminium bag, chick peas and paneer in a curry sauce. I ate it with tortilla bread toasted in the pan, it was absolutely delicious. I also pan-fried slices of tempeh, tempeh is some kind of vegan foodstuff made with beans and it’s pretty good, like tofu it doesn’t have much taste but it’s nice to dip it in hot sauce.

I watched an episode of the new Netflix series about samurais with a cup of sake. It’s well done, but I can’t get into it as much as I’d like to. I never manage to remember who is who, or really care about what’s happening. As much as I’m a huge history buff, Japanese and Chinese history has very little appeal to me. Does it mean I’m a racist? Nonsense; it’s been established a long time ago that I can’t possibly be racist, I have a black friend.