Chapter 351

I woke up at 6:30 and started my day. Going downstairs with the dog, I saw a new ad in the elevator’s TV screen. It was for Lay-Z-Boy, and featured a light-skineed black girl and a white guy, alongside a few Chinese people. Pretty much all the ads in China feature only Chinese people (what a head-scratcher, I know) and sometimes a celebrity like a basketball player and that Israeli actress with a big forehead, so it was a bit weird to see this “diversity”.

My day went by like my days normally do. I taught classes and the students mostly didn’t piss me off. I can’t really say much other than that. In the late afternoon, after I finished teaching Crazy Class, I created an account on chess.com and played a few games against bots and against real people. I stuck around a bit longer in fact, and a bit before 6 I headed to the Marriott for our Christmas dinner.

As I approached the doors of the luxury hotel, I was overtaken by a shockwave of anxiety. I thought there would be some shurgwaydinger at the entrance telling me to put a face mask on, and I’m tired of all that shit, it’s been nearly two years now. But thankfully there were none, and I just waltzed in like a normal person and took the elevator to the 35^th floor.

The Christmas dinner was pleasant, I piled up all the somewhat mediocre but varied and abundant buffet food on my plate and had a few glasses of wine. Corporate office in Shanghai pulled out some excuse to not pay for it, but the principal and the liaison officer footed the whole bill from their pockets, which is extraordinarily generous of them, they even paid for the significant others that came (like mine). We talked about various topics and stuck around drinking more wine before going home.

I got on the computer and played more chess games, and stayed up way, way too late. It’s easy to rationalize by saying chess is an intellectual game and becoming better at it is a worthwhile pursuit, but it’s still an addiction that can get in the way of my sleep or possibly my social life. And yeah, maybe being addicted to online chess is better than being addicted to shitty phone games or heroin, but still, I’ll have to discipline myself.