Chapter 313

Yet another day. I browsed the news and mindlessly scrolled down through social media, there’s been some municipal elections in Quebec, for whatever reason every major city does it at the same time. A lot of people were rejoicing in the fact that a lot of women and immigrants got elected, all over my Facebook feed. Very little was said about their policies or views, the thing that matters the most is that they have uteruses and/or they are of non-European stock. That puzzles me. There have been women in mainstream politics for longer than I’ve been alive, why is it such a big deal?

I looked at my phone, we got a message from the center coordinator, apparently someone at the school has been using the internet to mine bitcoins, and the police found out. That person could get in hot water, and he strongly recommended he/she stop doing that. He also said the police might come and inspect our computers, now that sounds a bit scary. I have nothing grossly illegal on there but I don’t want some cop putting his greasy fingers on my machine and browsing my folder of dank memes.

I conducted a lab and then I invigilated a grade-12 math exam. I curiously looked at the content, it might as well have been written in an alien language. And yeah, I know I made the same observation in Chapter 15, but you can’t write a 300 000-word diary and not get a bit redundant at times. Speaking of which, I’m not sure if I should be proud or ashamed that I haven’t missed a single day since January 1^st, and am on track to publish Chapter 365 on New Years Eve.

So even though I couldn’t even understand what the hell the questions even meant (I think I recognized something about matrices, that’s it), the students were busily writing line after line on their answer sheets. I sometimes underestimate their intelligence due to how little they know about the world and how they’re unable to use logic but they must have quite high IQs to make sense of all that complicated mathematical mumbo-jumbo.

I went home for lunch and cooked bacon in a pan. The pack was labeled “Classic American bacon” but it’s more akin to ham than the fatty bacon we’re used to, it’s lean and doesn’t render much fat. A lot of expats constantly bitch about Chinese bacon and how it’s inferior to “real bacon” (among the endless list of grievances these pathetic losers constantly bitch about) but I like it. I also ate a bowl of seafood pasta we just took out of the freezer. It was delicious.

Before heading to work, I grabbed a stick of gum, and while I was riding my bike and chewing, I pinched a nerve in my jaw, by my right ear. It was one of the weirdest things ever, it didn’t cause pain or numbness, but it made a loud CLACK sound.  Fucking hell. Even my jaw isn’t safe from all this old-man shit my body is experiencing?! I know I’d had my face squeezed, sometimes very hard, in jiu-jitsu practice, and I would have to chew carefully the next day, but that’s a first. At least I don’t get the whole lower jaw misaligned like when I was boxing.

In the afternoon I had a few more classes, and exam watching. Quiet day. I have a lot of grading to do, and went through the pile during my free time in between.

I considered going to the gym, but my body was telling me “day off, pleez” and I have to listen. I’ve been nursing a mild cold for a few days now, and my shoulder was jacked from being in a leaning posture a big part of the day, hunched over the computer or a pile of exams to grade. I did one hour of yoga, and then floured and fried some chicken breasts to make chicken burgers. I found two burger buns from last week and thought they’d have gone moldy by now but no, weirdly enough they were good to go, they must be pumped full of weird preservatives. We ate them with steamed broccoli and a bowl of chicken broth while watching The Office.

I took the dog out for a spin, all bundled up because it’s getting damn cold. I watched a history documentary about the siege of some Anatolian city by Alexander The Great with a small glass of rum, and then was in bed early and read a few chapters from Apocalypse Bébé.