Chapter 312

I woke up at 6:30 and went through my morning routine. I started a Jocko Willink podcast, his guest was a former Navy SEAL dog handler, I was a bit surprised to read that various special forces units employ dogs, not just as guards or bomb sniffers, but also to attack and kill terrorists. Notably, there’s one dog who jumped out of the helicopter alongside all the armed men on the operation that led to Bin Laden being riddled with bullets like he deserved. I looked at my own dog and thought about how much of a NEET he is, staying at home all day doing nothing and not contributing to the finances of the household, while other dogs have various jobs.

I got to the school, and after dropping my bag in the office, I went to get hot water for my tea. I ran into a British coworker. “I saw a video being shared yesterday, some of that... fighting thing. You like that, don’t you?” Zhang Weili is getting her fifteen minutes of fame, and the highlights of her title match are making the rounds on WeChat. “It’s very... violent, no?” We discussed it a bit, I can’t say I disagree.

I had two classes with eleventh-graders, and watched some grade-12 midterm exams. I was also the unlucky invigilator for a resit exam, which took place during lunchtime, so I had a much shorter lunch break than usual.

In the afternoon, I invigilated a statistics exam. As soon as I had collected the last paper, the students all erupted in a noisy rabble about how difficult the exam was, most of it being extremely vulgar language. That’s something that puzzles me a bit about Chinese culture. You’re often condescendingly lectured about “harmony” and “how refined our Chinese peopur are, with our five trillion years of history, compared with you worthless foreign barbarians”, yet, without exaggerating much, about 20% of what comes out of teenagers’ mouths is “fuck your mother”, “stupid cunt”, and “your mother’s cunt”, mostly used as adverbs or punctuation. And adults don’t seem to be phased by it the slightest. Weird.

The statistics exam was only 50 minutes, and then I had to stay in the classroom to watch them study. I knew they wouldn’t be silent, and I came prepared, with my laptop and headphones. I put on an epic black metal album by Minenwerfer called Alpenpässe, there’s quitte a lot of quality WW1-themed black metal coming out these days, from Kanonenfieber to 1914.

Then I got home, watched Clown World news videos, and headed to the gym. As always, there was just three of us. Recently, a new guy joined, he even bought the gi, but then he disappeared, or rather he comes to the gym but just goes to the weightlifting room. The big Kazakh, or rather the medium Kazakh now that he lost a bunch of weight, is mostly running on the treadmill and nursing his injury. Ah well. At least the training is worthwhile and both guys are better than me, so I can only improve.

I got home, walked the dog, and then ate a big meal of dumplings, stewed beef and scrambled eggs. I watched a Dark Side Of The Ring episode about a shady extreme wrestling promotion called XPW, infamous for that absolutely insane scaffold match where New Jack threw Vic Grimes 40 feet down and nearly killed him, and also for having an owner who also ran a creepy porn company that got prosecuted under obscenity laws. It was a pretty insane documentary.