Chapter 330

Another day, another dollar. I walked the dog, shit-showered-shaved, went to school, taught my classes. Not much else to say.

During the twelfth-graders’ PE class, I went to play badminton with them. Some of them play OK, but overall it’s not much of a challenge.

In the afternoon, two students came to the office to ask questions about the stuff I’d been teaching recently. And then one said “We saw a video of you in some kind of judo match! It’s on Bilibili (some kind of buggy Chinese video-sharing platform)”

“How did you find it?!”

“We searched for your name on Baidu!”

I did just that, and yes, the first (and only relevant) link was John Guotong vs Some Chinese Guy at my first BJJ tournament, last year. I didn’t even know it had been filmed and uploaded.

That reminds me of a story that happened several years ago, at another school. Some students with a VPN searched for all of our names on Google. Some teachers had names that were way too common to yield anything, mine had only a link to my Facebook page and an antiquated site with my teenage cross-country skiing racing results, but the physics teacher was somewhat of a public figure. He had ran for public office in his American city, and calling him a “libertarian conspiracy-minded kookoo” would be an understatement, if anything. I was already aware of his rather radical political views and general eccentricity, though I liked him as he was generally quite nice, and didn’t constantly talk about racial hierarchies and how we should ditch the dollar and use only silver and gold and how Barack Obama tried to poison him because he knows the truth about global warming. But now, our more advanced senior students had stumbled upon a video taken from an ABC news report in which they talked about death threats he made to doctors going to vaccinate children in schools, and told me and another teacher about their worries.

(That was years and years before Covid, and refering to the meningitis vaccine if I recall. I’d be hella curious to hear that guy rant about Covid, I haven’t kept in touch since he left that school)

I had a bit of time chilling in the office and doing class prepping, I listened to Clown World news and an album by Skeletal Augury, a Chinese raw black metal band. Then I went home, and shortly after that headed to the gym. I did my workout, got back home, walked the dog, refueled, and spent a relaxing evening reading and watching stuff on YouTube. I also indulged in a few cups of sake, and went to bed a bit later than I dare to admit.