Chapter 309

Another day of exams. I gave the twelfth-graders a self-study period, half of them immediately fell asleep as if they hadn’t slept for a year, and I invigilated some grade-eleven exams. Then after a lunch break and a bowl of R. n’ S., I got back to the office, and started grading the chemistry exam, starting with Crazy Class and Catatonic Class. Some did OK, but most of the performances ranged from piss-poor to completely blank papers. Is this a surprise? That’s like saying that I’d fare poorly at a figure skating tryout.

I got home and relaxed a bit. I looked for something to do, and a group of friends invited me to have dinner. The dog and I rode to the microbrewery first, where I had a tasty amber ale and waited for my pals. The Portuguese soccer coach came to meet me, and we crossed to street to a Japanese restaurant I’d never been to before, where we joined some Poles for a barbecue dinner. We had a small room to ourselves, all decked out in light wood furniture, with a bucket full of hot coals in the middle of the table and a grill where we’d put chunks of meat. One of the Poles made his own limoncello and another liqueur made from berries, and we downed a few cups alongside the Asahi beers. A good time was had by all, and some funny conversations as well.

Then I rode to the main expat bar, where I had one more beer, a peach-flavored thing from the Netherlands that recently arrived in the fridge, chatting up some other pals. I was home early enough, and watched another episode of Dave. It’s a weird show, with some serious star power as cameos or guest characters for how unknown it is, and the humor is offbeat and self-deprecating to the point that you wonder if Lil Dicky really has that big of an inferiority complex. A lot of storylines are about how comically racist black people can be, and how unreceptive they are to white rappers, but then the semi-fictional Dicky just goes and proves their point by being so goofy. I really wished he had stayed a mixtape rapper, using humor intelligently and in a calculated manner, but I guess that’s not where the money is, and he went on record numerous time saying he wanted to be a comic and have his own TV show, and hip-hop was just a means to an end.