Chapter 257

I woke up a bit after 6 and slowly started my day. I played an album by Myspirming, a melodic black metal band that’s making waves among fans of this music genre, and is spearheading the robust Icelandic scene. Then I rode to work. One of the last remnants of anti-Covid measures was that the security guards would take my body temperature when I’d roll in, now they’re just sitting around in their cabin and are letting a robot do their job. The thermometer is mounted on a tripod, and when I scan my wrist, it shows the temperature on a screen and emits a cheerful read with its high-pitched female voice. Very cyberpunk. I wonder what would happen if my temperature is too high, does it start beeping loudly? Does it transform into an attack android like the Galactical Federation-issued butler in Rick and Morty?

The second floor of my school is now completely occupied by a Japanese-language program, that wasn’t there only two years ago but has been growing steadily since. Maybe it’s another sign that those English-language CIE or AP or IB curricula are doomed, and that more rich parents will want to send their kids to Japan instead. One tenth-grader ran into me in the hallway, bowed and greeted me in Japanese, before realizing her mistake, blushing, and running away giggling and muttering “Sorry”. It was quite comical.

I had one class, then went downstairs to prepare the lab session. The past years, I supervised labs but my senior coworker was doing all the prepping, now I’m the one taking over that responsibility. The lab tech, a middle-aged Chinese woman, had already distributed all the glassware, my job was to prepare the solutions. That entailed diluting some concentrated hydrochloric acid, as soon as I opened the bottles, thick white fumes filled out the whole prepping space. I pressed the button for the fume hood and of fucken course it didn’t work. You have to be careful handling that, it’s filthy corrosive, splashes violently if you put water in it (remember: acid in water: clever; water in acid: stupid, or acide dans l’eau, c’est beau, eau dans l’acide, suicide) and if you take a big whiff of those chlorine fumes, you’ll feel like a French soldier in the battle of the Somme.

The students came in the lab. One of them looked at my stained lab coat and asked “What on Earth are all those stains?” I complimented him on his use of idioms and fake-smugly said that I’ve been around the block a bit, a chemist with a pristine lab coat isn’t a chemist who’s been at it for long. The lab itself went fine, it’s their first time so we just went over safety regulations and how to use all the equipment. It sure is more fun than being in the classroom, for everyone involved, even if it’s a bit of work.

I rode home and made fried rice with whatever I found in the fridge. I watched a bit of Clown World news: apparently, in Australia, people have to download a mandatory government app that texts them at random times, and they have fifteen minutes to reply with a selfie and a location, otherwise they get fined. Most of the news coming from Australia are grim, it’s weird when a country is even more of a fascist cyberpunk dystopia than China. We also often hear of vaccine mandates, but here there hasn’t been one implemented yet, a large fraction of the population is vaccinated but I don’t think it’s mandatory. I asked an Australian coworker later about this and he said he has no idea, likely it’s only for people in quarantine. Some of those Clown World news are entertaining, but you have to take them with a grain of salt, it’s not only the mainstream legacy media who lies and obfuscates facts.

I got back to school and went through my afternoon without anything really worth mentioning. Between two classes I was grading homework and played the debate between the five prominent Canadian political parties in the background, in my headphones. The Green Party leader, a bald black woman, started her speech by thanking the Algonquin nation and acknowledging that she is on an unceded territory. I couldn’t stop my sudden snortling burst of laughter, and some of my coworkers looked at me awkwardly. I listened to about an hour of the debate, it was in French, which two of them spoke natively and the other three were fluent enough but a bit robotic, repeating the same tired political clichés. I honestly have no idea who’s going to win, federal elections have been a tennis rally between Liberals and Conservatives for a hundred years or more, the switch taking place usually every decade or so.

On the YouTube channel dedicated to the debates, there were a bunch of simultaneous translations in Native American languages. They all had barely double-digit views. I wonder how much it all cost, and how many Natives can’t speak English. But hey, inclusivity and all that.

I went to the supermarket, bought supplies to make chili, which I’ll chop and mix and put in the slow cooker overnight. I watched a Hip-Hop Evolution documentary about the waves of innovations that came from the South: chopped and screwed in Houston, horrorcore in Memphis and crunk in Atlanta. Not all of those hip-hop offshoots are good or have aged well, but for sure they all had tremendous impact. That made me want to listen to Three Six Mafia, it had been a while.

I rode the skateboard with the dog to go meet the girlfriend, and she drove us back. Her phone was mounted in the car, she was listening to a livestream by a designer with a lisping Taiwanese accent.

I got a “Hi, how are things?” from my former British principal on WeChat and we had a bit of a conversation. He’s now working in an international school in Germany, and is always trying to convince me to leave China, in fact he was already saying that back when I worked under him and he was mentoring me through my PGCE. I had a very good relationship with him, going as far as considering him a friend, but he was having a shitty time in the school, a combination of him alienating some foreign and Chinese staff members, not seeing eye-to-eye with the higher-ups, trying to change things that were never to change (Chinese workplace culture isn’t very flexible or receptive to feedback), and general culture shock. Also, back then, we hadn’t moved yet into our own building, so we had to use crumbling third-worldy facilities, which got on everyone’s morale. My own morale back then was rock-bottom, having to adapt to a new curriculum and ploughing through that hellish PGCE, but now I’m pretty damn happy. I’m into a nice groove where I know what I’m doing and only gradually take on new responsibilities, I get along with nearly everyone at the school, I like my living environment, and pile up my money.

And well, I’m Catholic by culture, I work to live, I don’t live to work, so my life doesn’t start and end with my career, it’s a means to an end to finance my travels and indulging in my hobbies. As a result it’s a bit grating to hear all this negativity from him, which borders on condescension at times, like when he says I should go work for a “real school” and that I’m “brainwashed” by China. Hey hey hey hey! I’ll make a move one day, that’s the girlfriend’s plan as well, but now seems like the worst time and also why rush it?

I was in bed a bit after 10 and slept like the dead.