Chapter 151

I woke up at 6 and did an hour of yoga. It felt amazing. I’m probably too pragmatic/cynical to appreciate all the spiritual practice within and pseudo-scientific stuff like “releasing toxins” but it does clear my mind and makes my body all supple.

I got to work and had three review classes in the morning, they went OK. During the long break I listened to an album by Excruciate666, a black metal band from France with a friend of mine behind the drumkit. I then put on a split by French grindcore bands Gummo and Insane Order. All three bands were good enough to keep my attention but none made me go “Holy shit, yes!” Out of all the music I listen to, some rises to the top, some sinks, and some just floats.

Not sure if it’s the pu-er tea I’d been drinking all morning, but I had a bad case of the shits. I had to rush to the toilet between two periods, and when I got home, I spent some time on the throne as well. I was not in a condition to exercise, so I postponed my calisthenics routine till the next day. Lunch was R n’ S, three boiled eggs and a juicy mango, that I ate watching videos about MMA and Clown World news. One piece caught my attention, about a university professor who told his students that a “filler word” (think “hummm” or “like” as in “you know, like, that guy, he, like, drank all the beer in the fridge!”) in Chinese is 那个, which sounds exactly like “nigga”. Merely for stating that most hilarious and awkward of facts, he got in trouble, the usual shitstorm of accusations of racism and of fostering an environment that is uncomfortable for BIPOCs.

I’m obviously aware of this comical particularity of the Chinese language and have been since literally day one, when I asked a kid on the college campus where the foreign language building is, and after a bit of hesitation and mild panic due to interacting with an overseas barbarian, he replied “Nigga... that way”. I was utterly confused and thought he had been watching too much MTV or whatever, until one colleague explained it to me. In fact I’m wondering how often it leads to utter awkwardness or even violent confrontations.

In the early afternoon I didn’t do much aside from browsing internet memes and listening to an album by Intonate, a Montreal technical death metal band that my friends just interviewed on their podcast. Tech death is a subgenre I find overall very uninteresting but I don’t hate it enough to want to turn it off when it plays in my speakers or headphones. Then I went to the chemistry lab, the practical exam was set to take place the next day and my Zimbabwean coworker and I prepped the rooms and discussed how we will do it. We have a lot of students, who do it in two sessions, so we have to make sure we can get everything ready quickly between the two sessions.

I went home and took a quick nap before heading to BJJ practice. There were four of us, so after warming up and doing a few drills from the De La Riva guard, we rolled for three rounds against one another, and a good time was had by all.

I rode back, opened a beer, showered, and cooked two steaks on the pan, that I ate with hash browns while watching a history documentary about Caesar’s civil war in Spain.