Chapter 131

Another slow and lazy morning, gradually getting in gear, doing 15 minutes of tai chi like the elderly Chinese man I’m slowly becoming, walking the dog, and going to work. Again, I didn’t have much planned for the day, the twelfth-graders finished all of their chemistry exams, and the eleventh-graders were self-studying. I only had one task to do, a small but mildly annoying one: one student applied to a Korean university, and rather than just taking the recommendation letter I wrote, they asked me to fill out some kind of form. I printed it, ticked the boxes they wanted me to tick, and wrote “refer to recommendation letter” when they asked me to elaborate. This is just dumb, like when you apply for a job and they ask you to input every goddamn thing from your resume separately, yet also ask you to attach the resume.

I listened to the Rorcal & Earthflesh album again, and read an interview that a friend of mine did with them for an online metal zine. I decided to investigate a bit more and check out their catalog, starting with Earthflesh. Seems like that solo artist from Switzerland is quite prolific, with a lot of projects and collabs released in 2021 alone, I clicked on the most recent one. It’s a type of music called “harsh noise” and well, that describes it adequately. You feel like you’re listening to a rusty washing machine with screws missing, layered with the noise from a radio stuck between two stations, it’s by design very oppressive and disturbing, and you’re wondering what the fuck is there to like. I like noise when it’s used as intros, outros or interludes side-to-side with extreme metal genres like grindcore or doom or black metal, but without “real riffs” eventually starting, noise music just feels like interrupted penetration. It’s a VERY niche genre, with a hardcore underground following, but don’t count me among them. I talked to a friend about it and he said he learned to appreciate noise when he saw it live, and yeah I imagine it’s quite an experience if done well.

I put the finishing touches to a travel story about Armenia. Check it out at https://quesstuvascrisserla.com/2021/05/11/armenie1/

At lunch I went home and did a calisthenics workout. Pull-ups, ATG squats with a big-ass kettlebell, chair dips, one-legged deadlifts, push-ups, bodyweight rows using straps attached to my pull-up bar. I first put on a G-funk compilation but it was a bit too smooth for my mood at the time, so I switched to something a bit more hard-hitting, from the grindcore tracks I had saved on my external hard drive.

There was a burger in the fridge that the girlfriend had ordered the night before but not eaten, I reheated it in the oven and pimped it out, adding a fried egg, a slice of ham, sauerkraut and spicy mustardy sauce. I ate it while watching videos of Gavin Mcinnes doing man-on-the-street interviews with Trump supporters and antifa militants.

I got a message at 12:40, from a Chinese colleague asking me if I can switch her invigilation period with mine, as she wanted to do a review period with one of her classes. The problem is we were scheduled at the same time. I rushed to school and did a double, starting at 1 PM, and the Ghanaian math teacher switched with her. I forgot to bring my water bottle and was parched for a bit, but then I remembered it is Ramadan now and my muslim friends spend every day famished and thirsty like that. Doesn’t sound very fun. As I get older and dabble in all those health trends and talks, I hear about the benefits of fasting and practice intermittent fasting myself (AKA “skipping breakfast”), but at least water and non-caloric beverages are allowed.

Bored out of my skull, I paced around, looking at the students hunched over their physics papers. Every single one out of the 180 or so present was writing with his/her right hand, no exceptions. I know there’s probably a predisposition for humans to be right-handed, but there are supposed to be some exceptions, no? I imagine this is nipped in the bud as soon as they begin their incarceration in the Chinese school system.

In the afternoon I listened to the Olivier Aubin-Mercier podcast. OAM is an MMA fighter from Quebec who cracked into the top 15 of the extremely competitive lightweight division after winning seven out of eight fights, but then he lost his next three and was cut from the organization, sadly. He’s an extremely laid-back guy and his podcast is quite fun, I used to listen to it before the pandemic. His guest on this one was Marc-André Barriault, a hard-hitting middleweight, one of the two Quebecers left in the UFC. It was an interesting discussion, Barriault is quite well-spoken and insightful, I do not want to imply I half-expected him to be a dumb meathead but to be perfectly honest I kind of did. Then I listened to an episode in which OAM and his sidekick dissected UFC 261, I didn’t like it as much, as even though they are hardcore fans of MMA they were dead wrong on some takes (notably the state of MMA in China) and I felt like I knew more than them on many topics they were talking about, me being an obsessive MMA nerd and all that. It was a good back-and-forth though and it was nice to hear what they had to say.

Speaking of the UFC, when I got home I opened a homebrew bottle and fired up last weekend’s main card. Some fights were excellent, some were duds, the most exciting and most significant was a lightweight contest between Gregor Gillespie and Diego Ferreira. Then the girlfriend got home and we went on a walk with the dog, I’ll keep the co-main and main for tomorrow. We bought fish and vegetables and made dinner together in our cramped kitchen. While the fish roasted in the oven, I made a stir-fry with cabbage, carrots, Sichuan peppers, ham and duck hearts, in bacon fat, and she made a chicken noodle soup. We ate while watching The Office. A great time was had by all.

I made a negroni and read Houellebecq in bed. I remember when I read Plateforme for the first time, I was in Thailand, coincidentally. Very few novels had the same emotional impact on me, after the horribly brutal ending I stayed in bed staring at the ceiling, numb and mouth-gaping, for a long time. Even on my fifth reading it still hits me like a left cross to the liver.