Chapter 364

I took the dog out for a walk, and he played with his little Pomeranian friend. Well, not sure if they’re friends or enemies, but they like to play fight and then sniff each other’s genitals.

I was in the office, and one mouthbreathing student I don’t know walked in. He must have not felt the temperature rise by 20 degrees when he went from the unheated hallway to the air conditioned confines of the closed space, because he left the door wide open. I told him to close it, he started mumbling fragments of broken English “Uh, I..., derp, uh, uh, nigga, uh...” before just saying in Chinese “I’m going soon” in a tone that was a tad bit too brusque for a snotty teenager to address a teacher, before grabbing a pile of homework papers and leaving. A Chinese coworker heard it and instead of yelling at him, she started guffawing like a goose. “WOAH!!! HAHAHAHA!!! YOU JUST SPOKE TO IT IN OUR LANGUAGE!!! HAHAHAHA!!!” This shit is infuriating. When my own students do it I give them an earful, or when they speak Chinese to me in what is the equivalent of the Apu accent in the Simpsons. But is it worth getting mad over it? I can also just shrug.

In the afternoon I was also in a bad mood, usually Crazy Class is in the lab, which means they’re upright and blood is flowing to their brains, but now they were still dead asleep from their midday nap. Teaching them feels like a mix of trying to create a hole in a ball pit and talking to a brick wall, and one student yawned audibly twice. The first time I warned him not to do it again, because it’s rude, but he did just that. I don’t think he was being impolite on purpose, he just doesn’t possess the social intelligence to know what is rude and what isn’t (and please spare me your fucking cultural relativism de mes deux) and also doesn’t have the analytical intelligence to at least learn how to overcome or alleviate his social awkwardness. I expelled him, and he looked happy, as if it was a reward.

Soon after that, I taught the strong eleventh-graders’ class, and it was night and day. They’re so good, I’d teach them for free.

I went home, downloaded a bunch of new podcasts for my mp3 player, and went to the gym. I listened to the first episode of Les Pires Moments de l’Histoire (the worst moments in history), a funny history podcast by a young Quebec comedian, and then an Chris Williamson interview with a psychologist dropping some uncomfortable truths about human nature. I did my shoulder workout, went home, ate a salmon burger and some halloumi cheese. I hadn’t had halloumi forever, it’s some kind of Mediterranean salty cheese that doesn’t melt when fried or grilled, and I love it.

Then I rode the longboard with the dog and met the girlfriend at her workplace. Back home, I started listening to some underground old-school hip-hop albums and mixtapes that dropped this year, from a Top 25 list on GoldenAgeHipHop.com. They were great, I really, really dislike most modern rap but it’s good to see there are still underground gems. I played online chess for over two hours. I won one game with a sneaky checkmate, one game by stalling and having the opponent run out of time, and one by resignation after eliminating a few strong pieces early, but lost more games than I won. Ah well.