Chapter 89

I did almost one hour of yoga this morning. I really like it and give a shoutout to my old pal Matt and his channel Yin Yoga With Matt. There are obvious health benefits both on the physical and mental side of things so I like to get my yoga on in the morning, starting the day well. Green tea (or occasionally black tea) and a walk with the dog complete my routine, and I’m all loose and happy when I make it to work.

I also listened to music once yoga was done and I was getting ready. I finished the Sonic Youth album I started yesterday before bed, and I really liked it. That’s a band that hit its stride way before I came of age, and I obviously heard the name, but it was the first time I listened to an album. Will repeat. Then the next Top 500 entry was Tom Waits, seems like that guy is well regarded but I never cared for his weird minimalistic storytelling music and that Rain Dogs album didn’t change my mind.

In my mp3 player on the way to work, I listened to Ryan Long’s Boyscast, it’s an old episode and he was talking about the Trump-Biden debate. It’s only about 6 months ago, but it feels like so many things happened since.

At the intersection, I saw that they just painted lines for a bicycle lane beside the zebra crossing. There’s constant infrastructure work around the city, whether it’s functional or decorative. It’s a rich city in the Yangtze River Delta, probably the wealthiest part of China, and I have to say it’s a pretty pleasant place to live. All the public funds being allocated that way fills the dwellers with optimism, unlike cities that are stale or falling apart due to a lack of money or local officials embezzling everything.

I made it to work, and ran into my Zimbabwean coworker in his labcoat.

“Hi, do you need help setting up the lab exam? I’m free for the first two periods”

“No, it’s all good, we’re almost ready. I set it all up on Sunday”

“On Sunday?! You’re a trooper”

The lab is fun for everyone involved, but also quite a bit of work. I’m grateful that he’s usually the one doing it, and I do the easy part. I got upstairs, brewed some pu-er tea, and sat at my desk for two hours browsing the interwebs and grading papers. I looked for more music to listen to, a friend posted a link to an album by Ancst, a German black/crust band. It was sehr gut. Then I saw that Nine Treasures just released a new album and nearly fell off my chair. I must be one of the biggest Nine Trez fans on this planet, but turns out that this new album, titled Awakening From Dukkha, is some kind of best-of, with re-recordings of some of the tracks from their first three albums. I think they sound great as is, so I was a bit apprehensive diving into the new album on Bandcamp.com, hoping the new versions wouldn’t be stale or overproduced. They turned out awesome, and I was tapping my feet the whole time.

I let the twelfth-graders work on a past paper while I sat there grading. There’s beenn a schedule change, and now I have an extra period with them on Wednesdays, bringing it to a total of seven a week. I don’t need that much, in contrast, I only see Attitude Class for four periods weekly. So I had an idea, in order to do something different that is still somewhat educational, I’d use that period for an extracurricular of sorts. I asked them to vote between French, Spanish, history and styles of hip-hop, history and styles of heavy metal. Hip-hop won almost unanimously. So that’s what I’ll teach them once a week until the final exams.

I listened to the Metal Minded podcast from yesterday, the guests were two guys from a new death metal band called Obvurt, they had really interesting stories to tell. The guitar player had a serious car accident which left his hand incapacitated and had to learn to play left-handed, and the drummer was a Frenchman with years and years of touring and session work in bands of a serious caliber (in the world of extreme metal). Then the internet died, so I pulled out my mp3 player and listened to Ingrowing. I said a few days ago that Nasum is the greatest grindcore band, well, Ingrowing is my favorite grindcore band. Everything about that Czech fourpiece is pure excellence, especially their albums Sunrape and Suicide Binary Reflections.

I went home, heated some leftover fried rice from the Japanese restaurant, and ate it in front of the TV with an orange for dessert. I watched a documentary about the Children’s Crusade of the year 1212.

The afternoon was lab exam time. I supervised half of the first session, and then was the head supervisor for the second session. I had to read the list of chemicals and apparatus to ensure all the candidates have everything, and do the experiment in an empty room to get data to compare the students’ data to for accuracy points. Responsibilities n’ shit. It went well, can’t complain. Shoutout to my Zimbabwean coworker for setting up the whole thing, and to our lab technician who is always on the ball.

I got home, strapped the dog in his harness, and rode the longboard to a little eatery to go meet the girlfriend, as planned. Well first I took a dump, and got a message asking “Where are you?” “我拉个你” I replied (I’m dropping a you), and told her I’m coming soon. Well by the time I made it I got another message, she went to get her hair done with a coworker. So I just sat around with a Kirin beer can from a Lawson corner store from down the street, as the restaurant didn’t turn its fridge on, and neither did the shitty little Chinese chain store next door. The hot weather is coming, and those lazy cheapskates stores who don’t stock beer at acceptable temperatures will soon become the bane of my existence.

The eatery only has two tables, and a menu of simple but expertly executed favorites like fried rice and fried vermicelli, as well as a bunch of soupy noodles. The old guy also makes flatbreads stuffed with pickled herbs, that he cooks in some cylindrical oven similar to an Indian tandoori. He reaches in there with the disk of dough, sticks it to the wall, and takes it out a minute or two later.

The girlfriend came, we ate our food, and drove to Metro to stock up on imported food and booze. We got home and stored it all away. The girlfriend wanted to listen to Latin music so I put on an album by Abraxas Pool, from a collection I downloaded a while ago, it was pretty good. I ended my evening watching a 2005 wrestling match between Sabu and Abyss, which featured a lot of barbed wire and some insane bumps. Sabu is my favorite wrestler, he’s an absolute madman.