Chapter 117

I woke up a few times in the middle of the night, with severe pain in my neck. I hope it’s just a normal ache that will vanish with a bit of patience and self-care and not something serious. First order of business, I did a 60-minute yoga session focusing on the spine, and while it was a bit hard to bend my neck at first, eventually I managed, and felt so much better afterwards.

I got to the office and listened to music, mostly underground Chinese metal bands. Some students came to ask me chemistry questions and I was happy to help, then I had a double with the twelfth-graders. I rode home, reheated some R n’ S and ate my meal with green grapes for dessert. A friend shared a video on Facebook, it was a 45-minute documentary from 1988 about the Canadian army boot camp. Aside from some small changes (VHS quality of the footage, older uniforms, cheesy 80s music) it really reminded of my own time in the military, and it was quite funny to hear the narrators being shocked at things that I now see as perfectly normal, after going through that mountain of shit sandwiches. They called it “hell on Earth” and yes, it’s a brutal experience, but judging from the comments on the video and from my own experience people tend to remember it quite fondly.

Another friend sent me a link to a very bizarre story: a blond-haired Russian guy joined a Chinese TV reality show, in which the goal is to survive until the end without being eliminated by weekly votes from the audience. Most of the show’s content is about singing and dancing, and the finalists get a contract as members of a boy band. The Russky hated the show, and tried to get eliminated by botching the contests, antagonizing the other participants and trying to be unlikable, but that only endeared him to the young female audience and he kept coming back in. White privilege is one hell of a superpower, even when you try your best to fail, they don’t let you.

At least that’s what I understood, perhaps I got it slightly wrong. I’ll ask the girlfriend if she knows anything about it. That reminded me of one of the funniest books I read in a long time, NFL Confidential, about an offensive linesman who hated football and tried his hardest to be a bench-warmer instead of a starter.

I went back to school and sat in the lab while students did a mock practical exam. I then sat in the office and did a bit more volunteer translation work, the parts from English to Chinese I really wasn’t sure about, it’s probably intelligible enough but with totally mangled grammar, I’ll need to get it proofread and corrected. Most translators don’t work with anything but their native tongue as the target language. I listened to the trip-hop album Mezzanine by Massive Attack (or the other way around?), one of the few I discovered from that Top 500 that I liked. I’ll dive back in there eventually, not very enthusiastic about it for now.

I had another review period with Attitude Class and went home. I took the fermentor to the kitchen alongside a big pot that I filled with water and two sterilization pellets, washed my bottles and caps, added sugar to the fermented proto-beer, and filled the bottles. I opened one homebrew from the last batch and it violently volcanoed, causing a big mess. I probably added too much sugar and tried my best not to repeat the mistake, using my little scale to weigh 5 grams of sugar per liter of beer. There were not enough bottles and I didn’t want to waste beer (the ultimate sin) so I just filled up empty bottles of rum or other spirits. There must be a reason why homebrewers don’t do that but I’ll try, not as if I have much of a choice. I made sure they were capped tightly and put them in a box where they have zero exposure to light.

That took a big chunk of my evening, and I brought a little tinny speaker to the kitchen to listen to another Jocko Willink’s podcast about the Korean War. He told the story of a company of Marines that got surrounded and 90% of them died from repeated enemy attacks or hypothermia, and concluded with the rather obvious but too-often forgotten life lesson of how imperative it is to appreciate life, get after it and stop making excuses, knowing about the hellish experiences others had to go through that makes our problems pretty damn trivial in comparison. I’d rather hear that than the too-common nihilistic whining that infests so many.

That also got me thinking, opposite US forces in the Korean War was the Chinese People’s Liberation Army, and I wonder if I ever met veterans from that conflict. Maybe the 85-year-old walking his poodle in front of my apartment complex killed a bunch of Americans back in his day, and the sight of white people gives him flashbacks.

I made spaghetti with lots of sliced garlic, ham and parmesan, and watched four UFC prelim match-ups. They were pretty good. Then we watched one episode of The Office and went to sleep.