Chapter 271

I took the animals out. The sky had a thick yellowish hue, and you could look at the sun without getting blinded, it was just a circle peeking between two high-rise apartment buildings. It reminded me of the old days, where air pollution could be a serious problem, especially in Jinan.

The dog and the cat seem to get along quite well, in fact, the dog seems to have matured a bit now that he has a little brother. So I left them both in the living room and they curled on the couch together.

I got to work and made some barley tea. I just bought the bag at a small store and was excited to try it. Man, my life must be pretty mundane when that counts as a highlight and even something to look for. Simple pleasures and all that. Better that than a wide open pit of depression, toxicity and despair.

So with that attitude in mind, and no real reasons to spoil my good mood otherwise, I didn’t get phased too much when the internet in the office gargled donkey shit. My VPN couldn’t stay connected for more than half a second, and it’s not the VPN’s problem by itself, more the fact that the school is cheap and likely paid for the cheapest data bundle, for a four-story building occupied by at least a hundred office drones. It’s the end of the month, perhaps they reached the end of the high-speed allowance and now we’re getting some useless 2G crap.

But like I said I can’t let that get to me, instead of listening to music from YouTube to drown the noise of the office, I played what was saved on my hard drive. I don’t have much on there, so I ended up listening to the first two albums by Bleach twice. I like Bleach a lot, their noisy, grindy punk rock mixed with quirky Japanese deviancy and high-pitched female energy is great and their whole catalog is excellent, just that I have to remind myself to save a few more albums on there.

Aside from that, well, I taught my classes like I’m supposed to. I had great fun. Another reason why the looming dark cloud of repatriation scares me somewhat... I like being a high school teacher, but don’t want to be a high school teacher in Quebec. 怎么办？

Lunch and dinner consisted of a big bowl of R. n’ S. I added eggs, and had the presence of mind to break them in a bowl first, one of them was filled with a disgusting dark brown sludge that almost made me puke on the spot. I won’t buy those crappy small white defective eggs from the stinky market, next time I’ll get the healthier-looking big brown ones. At night I rested, for the first time in four days. The DOMS was settling in, and a general sense of fatigue. I ate a lot of nourishing food and watched random stuff on YouTube, and then fired up Mount & Blade: Warband. I stopped after ten minutes, I got to a plateau in the game where I have a lot of money, run a good mercenary army that can crush enemies in battles and sieges but if I want to get to the next level I have to learn stuff like diplomacy n’ shit. Tedious. Ah well, it was fun, and in the future I might play again here and there. I watched a Hip-Hop Evolution documentary and was in bed by 20:30.