Chapter 126

I went outside with the dog, he ran into Qiuqiu, the ugly poodle who hates him. Dogs relationships are strange, sometimes they sniff one another with their tails wagging and don’t want to part ways, sometimes they fight, and sometimes one wants to play but the other just barks and grunts. I don’t know what triggers that.

There were exams at the school, and I had to do a few invigilation shifts. One of them was at the physics lab, I took the seating plan and called the students so they’d line up in the order listed, and there was one left at the end, wearing a hoodie rather than the school uniform.

“And you are...?”, I asked him.

The students all erupted in laughter. Turns out the guy was the lab technician. Hey, it’s not my fault if Chinese people under the age of 35 look like teenagers.

I listened to the Metal Minded reviews. Two new death metal releases had extremely positive scores by all three guys, one of them even giving a rare 10/10. I listened to them both afterwards, Death Chamber from Germany and Crypts Of Despair from Lithuania, and they were pretty good but nothing that made me go “Woaaaah!”. They also talked very positively about the new Chadhel tracks that the Saguenay grindcore four-piece just dropped, and it is indeed some excellent shit, too bad they clock in at only 10 minutes. They’re part of a split with a San Diego-based band called Assiduous Assault, and all three reviewers from Metal Minded absolutely hated those tracks, I might give them a listen or just keep the Chadhel side.

I had another invigilation period, then watching the kids study. I clicked on a mixtape by a rapper named Sadat X, I never heard of him before and he’s pretty good, with an unorthodox flow and a nasal high-pitched voice, which could be a deterrent for some but hey, one of my all-time favorite rappers (B-Real) has a nasal high-pitched voice so I can’t bitch about that.

I got home and watched some history documentaries: one about the Celts’ migration and one about the different crises of past centuries and how we could predict one coming up. The problem about that is there are so many new factors at play, regarding globalization, technology, the size of the world’s population, among others. Still, it’s something to think about. The ship has been running (mostly) smoothly for a while now.

Lazily scrolling Facebook, something caught my attention and made me laugh quite a bit. Some health insurance company is targeting expats in China, and the picture they used on their ad is one of the country, somehow designed to offend zealots from every side. There is the famous “nine-dash line” encompassing everything in the South China Sea, from Vietnam to the Philippines to the coast of Borneo, yet Taiwan is in a different color and labeled a “disputed territory”, like a few nuggets of land in the Himalayas. I knew the comment section would be hilarious and it didn’t disappoint, with snarky comments like “Oh so they even cover me in international waters?”, tons of comments in broken-ass Chinglish by Chinese and Taiwanese butthurt nationalists, and questions about VPNs.

The girlfriend had thawed a chicken and made soup, that I ate/sipped with cream cheese crackers. No beer tonight; I’ll abstain from the beverage if I haven’t exercised that day.

I watched two more WWE matches from Wrestlemania 2021. Two black guys beat the hell out of each other, and then a tall lesbian and a chunky Japanese chick with pink hair beat the hell out of each other. Also they listed the Hall Of Fame inductees, for some reason Ozzy Osbourne was in there. I think there’s one more match, I’ll watch it tomorrow or later.

I also watched two videos about overland travel from the channel The Road Chose Me, which led me to get a piece of paper and a pen and list modifications we should do to our car if we want to road trip this summer. I did it in bed, with a glass of Chairman Rum, from the island of St-Lucia.