Chapter 333

I started my day with some good fucking death metal, a Thai band called Oldskull. They delivered masterfully, when death metal is done right there isn’t better music on this planet.

I browsed Facebook a bit, a friend of mine who lives in Shanghai posted pictures of her sleeping on the floor of her office in a sleeping bag. She had to quarantine over the weekend, amidst the new variant scare and a possible case in her district. The funny thing is, she learned about that on Friday afternoon, and was allowed to go home to get her stuff first. How does that make any modicum of sense? I guess they want to minimize people’s movements and facilitate monitoring, not stop them completely from living, but still, it sounds silly as hell.

I then had a class with the twelfth-graders. I do a lot of review with them, going through past papers. At times I can get quite impatient, wondering if I should review or reteach everything, when I get blank stares or mouth droops after asking simple goddamn questions about things we’ve already seen 834 times. I have to avoid using “or” questions, because then I just get 50-50 blind guesses, and also I get very annoyed at how they can’t read new words. Yeah I get it, English is messed up and has a lot of illogical pronunciation, but most of the time you can still read a word out loud and not be too far off, can’t you? Well, that’s not how a Chinese brain operates, if the word is not memorized in their database, it’s a no-compute.

I went home for lunch, ate leftovers, and opened a box we just received in the mail. I ordered a bunch of food from a delivery company, and was all giddy when I saw it all. Bagels, pies, sausages, steaks, a block of goat cheese, and various other goodies. I just went there to order a Thanksgiving pumpkin pie but before I knew it I had put 750 yuan worth of stuff in my cart.

In the afternoon I had a double with the other twelfth-graders, and then went downstairs to the lab prep room and mixed the solutions for tomorrow’s practical. It took me about an hour and a half. At some point, I heard a loud, shrieking, machine-enhanced noise that startled me (in a country where loud, shrieking, machine-enhanced noises are pretty much the national sport). I investigated where it came from, it was from the open door of a second-floor classroom, a grade-10 teacher was teaching with one of those headset microphones that amplified and distorted her voice. I can’t imagine being one of those poor kids, holy hell that must be painful. I quickly fished for my mp3 player and drowned the noise.

I got back to the office and chilled for a bit. Some friends on Facebook were talking about the Messe des Morts black metal festival, which just took place in Montreal. Good to see the world is emerging from that long Covid-induced hangover, though who knows what it got in store for us. I listened to one album from a band that was featured on there, called Délétère. It was some decent melodic black metal but nothing that made me go all “woah”.

I went home, put meat in the slow cooker, watched BJJ instructionals then went to train. We drilled moves from top and bottom half guard and then had some solid rolls, a good time was had by all. Then I met the girlfriend and the dog at a park and we went home together. I ate a giant pile of meat and then went to bed early to read a few chapters before crashing.