Chapter 327

I had all sorts of weird-ass dreams, in one of them I was a passenger in Kim Kardashian’s Mercedes and she was crashing into other people’s cars on purpose to get revenge on her boyfriend who dumped her. The thing is, I don’t even know what Kim Kardashian looks like, so in my dream she was just a generic dark-haired attractive woman. And why was I even there? Then I was walking in a dark parking lot of some shithole third-world country, and some sketchy guy tried to sell me something. He only spoke Spanish, and though I speak I guess what would be called lower-intermediate Spanish, he was speaking fast and I couldn’t understand what he was saying. So there’s a subconscious part of my brain that can recreate Spanish better than my conscious brain can?! I often wondered about that, when I make dreams involving foreign languages. The sketchy guy tried to grab me, and I saw he had something in his hand, maybe a syringe. I ran to a bus stop and some pot-bellied cop shooed the scumfuck away, before saying something about kidnapping and slavery. I then woke up, and thought about it for a while, the world can be a bad place, full of bad people.

I took the dog out, and then rode to work listening to Traumaturges, a hip-hop crew from Montreal that dropped a gritty as fuck album in 2000. The first two tracks are some serious boom-bap bangers reminiscent of the NYC golden age and talk about developing a distinct Quebec sound rather than imitating French rappers, but there are also a few tracks that are lazy both in production and lyrical content. I appreciate and even love hip-hop even though the political orientation of a lot of “socially conscious” rappers is much more to the left than I am, but in one verse talking about racism, one MC of Haitian descent says something like “my parents should have never moved here”. Oh really?! You’d rather be in Haiti? Well, what can I reply to that other than the painfully obvious?

I got to the office, and listened to a few country music tracks a friend suggested on Facebook. We discussed country a bit, and that reminded me I’d been meaning to check out Superjoint Ritual, the Phil Anselmo-fronted hardcore/metal band in which Hank Williams III played the bass. I listened to an album called A Dose of American Hatred and it was pretty much exactly as expected, some dirty Louisiana metal that makes you want to get in a beer bottle fight with a bunch of bikers.

I had a few classes that went well, and then ate a quick tuna sandwich lunch at my desk before heading out to the sports field. There’s a soccer tournament, last year myself and a few other teachers played in teams of students but this year I was asked to be a coach. So I stood by the sidelines yelling nonsense, and aside from that and being in a group picture, my role was quite limited. The game was quite hilarious, aside from a few kids, most players were clumsy and there was even a sequence in which no less than five throw-ins in a row were made, all of them illegal due to the player jumping or not throwing the ball over their heads. My team won 2-0.

In the afternoon we had a professional development session, conducted over Zoom since the big wigs from the corporate office are not allowed to leave Shanghai due to Covid. So they could come off the clock, lick every door handle in the whole city, and get back on the train with nobody stopping them, but they are stopped from coming in a professional capacity by the Education Bureau. Weird. It was a good session nonetheless, centered on “reflective teaching”, with discussions and strategies to implement. They opened it with a quote from some academic journal, which I paraphrase here as:

“Teachers should reflect on their teaching practice (Grumble and McPumpernickel, 2003). That helps them improve and optimize the outcome of their lessons (Ingleburtonberting and Facedesinge, 1981)”

That got me thinking, do we really need to refer to so-called experts for statements that are, well, pretty goddamn obvious? It’s as if we wrote:

“In winter time, it’s a good idea to wear a coat (Bubblegut and Plunknugget, 1993). A thick coat can help you maintain your body heat in cold temperatures (Van Den Schlafenbing, 2004)”

The whole thing reminded me of my post-graduate teaching certification and all the pseudo-intellectual drivel I had to write in my essays, supported by quotes and sources and a beefy bibliography. I’m a teacher, not a crusty academic. So as much as I do enjoy professional development sessions, it’s mostly for the discussions with fellow teachers and the ideas I can get to improve my craft. One strategy that was mentioned was “writing a diary or blog”, hey, it means I’m a reflective teacher!

Then I taught the twelfth-graders. The topic was chromatography, and the concept of “retardation factor” came up, which led to a student pointing at his neighbor and say “Hahaha, you’re a retardation factor!” I was impressed by his vocabulary.

I stopped by the stinky market and bought the whole tray of Harbin sausages. Yeah, baby. Then I got home, ate one, with a mango-flavored beer. I started drinking during the week again, but only on days I don’t exercise. And moderately. I browsed YouTube, watching whatever caught my eye, and when the girlfriend walked in two hours later I was pretty damn deep down the rabbit hole, and I was watching dambe matches, some kind of boxing done in Nigeria in a sand pit, with one bare hand and one hand wrapped in rope.

“Help me put the meat my mother sent us in the freezer”

“Wait, wait, I want to see who’s gonna win, Dogon or Buhari!”

We ate fried rice and meatballs for dinner, and then watched an episode of Foundation. The trope about the three clones of the same guy, but conceived at different times, ruling as a triumvirate is quite disturbing and original I’d say.