Chapter 284

Up at 6:40. I put on a Russian post-punk compilation, also refered to as “doomer music”, stuff I’d been listening to a lot recently. YouTube (and the internet in general) is a goldmine for melomaniacs, and I’ve been discovering so many styles I now love and probably wouldn’t have heard of otherwise, like old-school British dubstep, vaporwave, Japanese city pop and of course thousands of obscure evil metal bands.

I had a day packed with classes, and during breaks I couldn’t just sit around the office, I had to go prepare the chemicals for the upcoming laboratory practice. I couldn’t even do it in one go, I had to go for two hour-long sessions, weighing compounds and dissolving them in distilled water to make solutions. It’s pretty fun actually, and reminds me of my careless years as a university student.

I went home, after a small detour to a restaurant for an order of fried rice to go. I fried slices of sausages and eggs to add even more protein, and ate that mouth-watering R. n’ S. in front of the TV, before going back to the school. The lunch break has been shortened by 15 minutes due to the new schedule, and I’m not happy about that. Still, what’s a boy to do? Could be worse. For instance, I could have been born in Kiribati.

I talked to a coworker, he was very angry at how the students are always sleeping on their desks, and barely function through most of their day as sleep-deprived zombies. It is frustrating, on more than one level. It’s discouraging to be in a constant position of keeping them awake (let alone teaching them something), and also I see it as couterproductive at best and inhuman at worst to put such a huge workload on them. I remember my distant high school years, I can’t recall being dead tired even once. Bored out of my skull, yes, at times, but drowsy? No. There was one guy who feel asleep in class and it was the talk of the school for a week, but now that I’m on the other side of the fence and the other side of the world, it’s an hourly occurence. I sometimes was falling asleep in college, when I had been drinking beer till 4 AM, and in the army, when they would work us to the bone and make us sit through theoretical classes in the morning after a 4:45 rise, a PT and a greasy breakfast. But in high school?! No. That shit ain’t natural. But what’s a boy to do?

I went home, watched MMA videos to pump me up, then went to the gym. We had a relaxed but productive BJJ practice. I went against the blue belt who used to smash me and tap me out several times in a round if he turns it up, but now I can hold my own much better, and I even took his back at some point, and took it again after he managed to break free. I went for an armbar and he got out easily, taking control and submitting me with a painful hold that was choking me and crushing my face. A good time was had by all.

I went back home and refueled with sausages, brussel sprouts and radishes. I used to hate radishes when I was young, now it’s one of my favorite vegetables. I started reading a book titled A Distinct Alien Race: The Untold Story of Franco Americans, about the migration of Quebecers to the northeastern USA from 1840 to 1930 or so, and how they were treated like dogshit. A somewhat astonishing fact is there are more Americans of French-Canadian descent than French-Canadians, and reading the Amazon reviews, a lot of people mentioned being interested in the topic because they have grandparents or great-grandparents who emigrated from Quebec to Maine or Massachusetts or whatever. Truly tragic that their culture was lost like that and they had to live in slums and go toil in cotton factory, at the time Canada was expanding westward into present-day Saskatchewan and Alberta and importing Ukrainians, Poles and Germans to settle there and ensure the WASP orangist cunts don’t get sandwiched between two territories filled with troublesome Catholic pea soups. I foresee myself getting angrier and angrier as I read the book.