Chapter 238

I woke up reasonably early, took the dog out, did a bit of tai chi like the elderly Chinese man I am, and caught the beginning of the Metal Minded weekly review podcast. Halfway through, I had to get dressed and go to school, as we had our first meeting of the year. It felt weird to put on long trousers.

On the short bike ride there, I listened to the album Die Miserable by Fuck The Facts, one of their newest offerings moving away from pure grindcore sound while still being extremely abrasive. Despite the title of the album, I was quite cheerful, I can’t say I wasn’t looking to go back to work somewhat and that it hasn’t been a long vacation.

The principal, just released from 23 days of mandatory quarantine after coming back from his home country, went over a few points. Three guys were absent, one is still in quarantine and two are unfortunately stuck out of the country, for sure it’s a bit of a gamble to travel in and out of China these days. The meeting was over in less than an hour, and we were free to go until Monday. Cool.

So I went home, opened an 11 AM beer, and ate sesame noodles while watching Clown World news. Some schools have been in session for a few days now, and there are teachers getting a bit of attention from the internet for posting bizarre videos or Twitter rants. Most were innocuous enough if a bit out of place, like the young teachers showing how the first thing they did in their classroom was to plaster it with rainbow and BlackLivesMatter flags or discussing alternative transgender pronouns with five-year-olds, but some definitely crossed the line for any sane person, like the transgender talking about teaching pre-kindergarden children about gender identity and sex education and “kink”, and the high school teacher who got filmed yelling about how much she hates Trump. How’s that relevant to anything? “This is a chemistry class!”, one student is heard saying in the background as she screeches. I seriously can’t recall knowing anything about my teachers’ political position on any issue when I was in high school. The latter two got fired.

I love the contrast of the faces of the Lotus Eaters show hosts as they react to this. Carl's face shows he's been around the block for many years now, ever since he was doing the This Week In Stupid series, trying not to laugh and overall not being very surprised at anything. His sidekick Caleb's frowning with his head cocked, even throwing a few facepalms in.

I'm teaching in a British school program in China. The education about "racial harmony" to these ethnically homogeneous kids starts and stops at "Your physics teacher is Srilankan, your chemistry teacher is French Canadian, your math teacher is Ugandan, your economics teacher is South African and your English teacher is a black American, and they're all specialists of their subjects with your academic excellence and growth at heart" and it's more than enough. And as far as the LGBT stuff goes, I don't think it's relevant to anything in my syllabus and goes further than disciplining bullies who mess with the gay kid if it ever comes to my attention (it never happened in all my years here)

In the afternoon there were professional development presentations done by the corporate office. Normally we have a three-day conference with all the teachers from the satellite schools all over China, but due to the pandemic they run it on Zoom. Attendance was optional for returning teachers, but I went anyway. I sometimes get ideas and though some of it can be circlejerky at times, I enjoy talking about pedagogy with other classroom foot soldiers (though I severely, severly dislike discussions about pedagogy by academics who just throw jargon and acronyms around).

Then I listened to some new metal releases that the Metal Minded homies talked about. Tombstoner with a Cannibal Corpse-esque death metal, and Wolves In The Throne Room with some masterful atmospheric black metal, a band that I don’t listen to that often but is close to my heart for being one of the first to expose me to that subgenre way, way back in the day.

I have a bunch of vacuum-packed kebab meat in the fridge and looked up how to make Lebanese garlic sauce. Turns out it’s dead easy, and only involves three ingredients. So I whipped it up, chilled it in the fridge, and went to buy vegetables at the stinky market. I put the kebab meat in heated tortillas (an acceptable substitute for any sort of flatbread, don’t sue me) with a heaping spoon of the garlicky goodness and hummus, tomatoes, lettuce and some kind of Chinese pickles I found in the fridge. It was delicious, and gave me nostalgia of my old life in Ottawa. The only thing missing was some of that thick mango juice you could only find in those shawarma shops, and a guy named Faroosh or Nasseem saying “Ça va être tout, chief?”

I watched the season finale of Bad Blood and a few other odd videos on YouTube and then played Mount & Blade for a bit, campaigning against the Khergit nomadic scum. Their castles were fairly easy to take but the pitched battles were frustrating, now I understand why the Mongols took over half the world, not necessarily because their mounted archers are that strong, but because they’d piss off everyone until they ragequit.