Chapter 320

I woke up when the triangle-faced animal poked me in the face with his underbite, then started my day the way I usually do. In the morning I had a lab session with the strong eleventh-graders, they’re good but they tend to overthink everything.

I went home at midday, and the retarded dog immediately hid under the dinner table, he had been chewing some of the girlfriend’s art supplies and her poster of James Bond. I was thankful he didn’t puncture the acrylic paint tubes, which would have caused a huge mess, but still he was thrown in jail unceremoniously.

Lunch was a reheated seafood chowder with a whole box of crackers, then I rode back to school. I had a few classes, and we also had a staff meeting, in which the problems of Crazy Class were adressed. The mid-term parents’ meeting got canceled due to Covid, one of those weird remnants of restrictions imposed by the champions up there in the Department of Education, who mostly seem to be spinning wheels of fortune to make their decisions and justify their positions. This is bittersweet, on one hand the parents’ meetings are exhausting and off-hours and feel very unproductive at times, but it’s also good to establish a rapport with the students’ guardians, praise those who are doing well and urge them to keep it up, and light a fire under the ass of the lazy or failing ones. One teacher talked about organizing his own little parents’ meeting, on a one-on-one basis, perhaps that could be useful.

I went home, and the girlfriend came soon after. We drove across town, and since I was halfway through a Jocko Willink podcast on my mp3 player (he was talking to a former Marine named Dakota Meyer), I let her choose the music. I’m brave like that sometimes. The pizza restaurant we wanted to try out was mysteriously closed, so we went to another place, a quiet pub popular with the expats who live in the western half of the city. We had a spicy sausage pizza and chicken wings, and I had a draft beer, saving 5 yuan by ordering it one minute before Happy Hour was about to end.

The girlfriend perused the new and improved cocktail menu. “Fuck it, I’ll have a margarita. I’ll call one of those guys who can drive your car home.”

China has got a pretty cool service, you can have a guy come on a foldable electric scooter, he puts his scooter in your trunk and then drives your drunk ass home. Kinda like Opération Nez Rouge but year-round.

We discussed future plans. She wants to do a master’s in either art education or art therapy, which implies moving to London for one year or two. I don’t particularly want to go to London. But I’m a supportive husband, and if that’s what she wants to do, we’ll make it work. Maybe I can stay in Quebec and go visit every few months. It’s just one idea though, who the hell knows what the future has in store.

She left, two of my pals came, and we played chess. I went 1-2, I can play chess okay but I’m super rusty. Then I rode my longboard all the way home, with the dog running along. He covered the 5-km distance effortlessly like the predator of the great plains that he is, and drank water for two minutes straight when we arrived home.

I browsed the internet a bit before bed, a minor piece of regional news from the old country was about a guy cursed for asking to be served in French in a café... in Gatineau, Quebec. Weird. Sometimes I wonder what kind of Quebec I’ll eventually go back to.