Chapter 153

 Another day another dollar. I woke up at 7 and didn’t have time for yoga, ah well. So I went to school, I had two classes with the eleventh-graders in the morning, giving them organic chemistry review. They were the only two 40-minute sessions on my schedule today, and it still counts as a pretty busy day, as we’re on the last mile before the summer vacation and most of my days are spent doing very little.

I listened to the Lotus Eaters podcast, one piece of news they covered was WWE wrestler turned actor John Cena apologizing to China after calling Taiwan a country. I knew John Cena can speak basic Chinese, I remember seeing an ad he made for Laoganma chili paste and thinking he’s seriously not bad, much better than Zuckerberg and other celebrity retards who think they can speak Chinese, so I’d have thought he’d know how to avoid such a blunder in the first place if he wants to keep getting all the China bucks. So yeah, it was a pretty pathetic grovelling apology and he got slammed by the whole political spectrum for that.

Regardless how you feel about China, it’s fair to say that they are the main geopolitical competitor to western superpower status (I thought about writing “enemy” but it’s a bit strong, for the time being) and all this pandering just empowers them and feel them entitled for more and more and more. Give an inch, take a mile, all that shit. The same can be said about the islamists in western countries who constantly have the “infidels” kneel in front of them and submit to their unreasonable demands. I don’t really read Chinese news, whether in English or Chinese, but am a bit curious regarding how they feel about this John Cena story. I assume it is a sense of smug superiority from the politicized ones, and condescending mild amusement at seeing that big bumbling white guy mumble some broken Chinese phrases about how much he loves and respects China.

I went to the small market to buy vegetables, it smelled a bit bad in there. They don’t have the strongest hygiene and the refrigeration in the meat section is piss poor, so the warmer the weather the more it reeks. I still buy my stuff there because it’s convenient, and frankly that’s what mankind has been doing for 99% of its existence. I got home and made a big batch of hummus, that I ate with carrot sticks, tortilla bread and Italian cold cuts.

In the afternoon there was some kind of talent show at the school’s auditorium. A physics teacher acted as MC, and not a single English sentence was uttered. God forbid the grade 10 and grade 11 students learn any English aside from the bare minimum rote memorized in order to tick the correct boxes on the exam, some onlookers might think we’re an international school program or something. People got on stage and did a presentation about what they did in the extracurriculars clubs, the skateboarding club I used to supervise kinda dissolved when the cold weather came, and later in springtime the students were too busy cramming for their exams so we were not part of the show. The Japanese culture club did a slideshow about the matcha tea ceremony they organized, the music club did a little concert, and the baking club presented a video. It was narrated by a student who used the grating “laowai accent” that they find so funny and that I understandably hate to no extent, a kind of toneless goofy intentional mispronunciation that I see as a huge microaggression when used in my presence. I should start speaking some broken Chinglish. Then it was the dance club. It’s a bit creepy and unsettling to have my students, whom I see as androgynous asexual beings, cake themselves in makeup and show legs and midriff and gyrate to K-pop like that, but hey, they’re teenage girls, that’s what they like. It’s good that they dedicate time to something physical and that requires a lot of practice, but it’s not for me at all.

I got home and took a nap, waking up in the middle of deep REM sleep that had me feel like I was walking through gelatin. I splashed cold water on my face and got my stuff ready to go to BJJ practice, listening to an album by Suicidal Tendencies along the way. The vocals are a bit grating, but their punky thrash metal is excellent and got me all pumped for a session of simulated killing in a padded room with my buddies. We drilled a few sweeps and guard passes, and then started sparring. My fellow spazzy white belt/gym nemesis had a few nice clumsy scrambles and I started locking a guillotine from three-quarter mount, he bucked his hips but I held on his neck with both hands, which got me landing on the side of my head and twist my neck awkwardly. I freed my leg, grabbed my own collar with the guillotining arm and bent my back upwards, and got the tap. Then we reset, he swept me and got my back, I tried to crawl backwards through the backdoor but he moved his legs and secured the hooks. We’re both improving at a similar rate and moves that used to work on one another are now countered.

The bell rang and immediately the pain set in my twisted neck. “You got the tap though! That’s the most important thing!”, the Italian blue belt joked. But if I were to do it again, I’d release my right arm to protect myself, even if this means losing the submission, so that I’d live to fight another round rather than sit out and suffer.

I got back home and the girlfriend proposed we go walk the dog. I was tired and sore and hungry but I went along, we walked to a drug store and got some topical medicine for muscle pain, the kind of Chinese medicine that smells like Jagermeister. I asked the pharmacist if they have some zinc supplements, she gave me a box with cartoon drawings on it.

“Why did you get this?”, the girlfriend asked.

“I’m out of zinc capsules, it’s a good supplement for men my age”

“But it says it’s for children who are growing too slow!”

After walking back and taking a shower, we applied the medicine, a giant sticker on the side of my neck. I opened a homebrew, made some curry with steak and leftovers from the Indian restaurant, and got the hummus from the fridge. I watched YouTube videos about wrassling and criminal psychology and called it a night. I got to bed, read a chapter from the newest J-P Baril-Guérard novel and passed out. Good night y’all.