October Holiday Approaching; Hole in the Toe of Sneaker, Tony's Extracurricular Activities; Holiday Plan: Avoid Crowds; Go Trump Go!; Don't Bother Being An Anti-Racist; I hate SaturSunday!; Advice for Newbies; Censored History Textbooks; No Mention Christ

With the October Holiday approaching, what do I have to say for myself? Not much. Perhaps I could say I am a low, mean bastard. But I could say I'm not.

On with the Motley! as my favorite pod-caster says.

I got a hole in the toe of one of my sneakers. These is a persistent problem I have with sneakers that I buy from Decathlon, which is the only store in Wuxi where I can get my size of shoes. (I am a size 47.  99 percent of the shoe stores in Wuxi stock up to size 44.) I have patched the toe of the sneaker using fabric from an old umbrella and crazy glue that I bought at the Home Mart convenience store.

My son Tony's three extracurricular activities at his school are baseball, Spanish and movie appreciation. I am glad Tony will get a chance to learn baseball. I hope to be able to practice the Spanish I have learnt with Tony. I hope Tony tells the teacher his favorite movie is Blazing Saddles. (Apparently, he was to supposed to have four of this extracurriculars. Another stupid problem that my wife Jenny tells me to fix.)

What will we be doing the October Holiday? Not much, I hope. I have six days off. (eight of ten with probably two light days of work) I hope Tony & I can do some baseball stuff like playing catch, and pitch and hit. All I want is quiet, peace, and to avoid crowds. Staying in Wuxi is one way to do this. (Of course, my wife Jenny has starting planning things and found a way to take away any hoped-for relaxation. She wants me to teach Tony science. So, I have to teach him things that I may have learned in high school but then never got around to using.

Other local foreigners, I learned, have been told that they can't leave Jiangsu province during the holiday.

Needless to say, for those rare readers of this blog, I want Trump to prevail in the upcoming election. To those who would try to dissuade me by saying how bad he is, he is still better than all else that is out there which includes the entire Democrat party, most of the Republican party, Antifa, BLM, the Globalists and all those who say they are independent (and yet seem to talk from the Democrat playbook after declaring their middle-of-the-roadness) I only wish that Trump will be more of what he said he was going to be when he campaigned: a Nationalist and Patriotic President who wanted what was best for his country, and was an unapologetic American.

To those who say Trump is the nightmare, I say: you are the nightmare.

To those who say we must fight racism, I say don't bother. Only one group of people actually has the good will to try to judge people on the basis of character, and they have been called irredeemably racist for their efforts.

Tony going to school on Sunday is annoying. I work Saturday so I will only see Tony for a bit time on Friday night and Saturday evening when I am driving him to his school. He is going to school on Sunday because of the upcoming holiday.

What advice or insights do I have to offer to newbie laowei? Welcome to a new planet. If you can stand this planet, stay. If you find you can't, leave. There are so many things you will find strange, inexplicable and annoying about China.

The history textbooks to be used at an international school in Wuxi have finally arrived. They were late for the school year because someone had to expunge all mention of China and Taiwan from the textbook.

At some schools in Wuxi, it is forbidden to mention Christmas. The logic being it is a foreign holiday. Or so I have been told.

Down the street from my school is the #2 People's Hospital. Apparently, there are four cases of Covid there. Though, officially, there are no cases of Covid in Jiangsu province. Evidence to support lockdowns? This is the way it was presented to me.

To mark the 48^th anniversary of Paul Henderson's famous goal scored against the Soviets, I posted highlight clips from the game on WeChat including Rod Gilbert giving a Red Ivan a bloody nose.

Memories; Sunday Drives; Autumn; Knucklehead Roommates; Bullied Tony; CCP Members; WeChat; Live Goose; Heroes?; NBA Style Shop; Five-Star Flag

Recently, memories from the past, that I hadn't considered in years, have flashed themselves into my mind.  It has been happening so often that I wonder if my days are numbered.

For instance, I suddenly recalled the Sunday drives my Father would take us on (that being I and my two siblings).  I then mentioned these recollections in a Speaker's Corner lamenting how no Chinese parent would do such a thing, studying being more important.

As Mid-September passes, it is feeling like Autumn outside.  People have taken to wearing jackets.  I am holding out a bit and still wearing shorts for my commute to work. (It is my habit to change into my monkey suit when I get to work.)

I was talking, on the phone, to my son Tony who was in his dorm room.  I could hear boys screaming, in an annoying and immature manner, near to him.  I then heard Tony tell them to STFU and then refer to them as knuckleheads.  I wonder where he picked up the second bit of language.  Anyway, I was impressed.  I hope he is able to stand up for himself.  In his Chinese public-school days, he was literally one against forty-three.

My wife Jenny then told me that she had just been told stories of how Tony was picked on, when he was in Chinese Public-School Grades One to Three, that made her cry.  Tony was picked on by all apparently, even the teachers.  In retrospect, it was to be expected because Tony was and is different, and Because-China.  How this bullying has affected Tony is hard to say.  He is a bit of a loner.  Yet, he doesn't so much seem depressed as content to withdraw into video game playing.  There is some strength in him.  And yet, it is like father, like son.  I was ostracized when I was Tony's age, and didn't have many friends in my junior high and high school days.  And find myself in a similar situation in my mid-fifties

Anyway, with Tony in an international school, I hope that this terrible phase of his life -- his Primary School Days in a Chinese Public School -- is over and can be forgotten about while being taken account of as Tony moves forward.  I just hope my wife can get over it.  She has talked on reeking vengeance on those who picked on Tony those days, including the teachers.

Anyway.  Another reason for me to look down on the mainland Chinese.

All the retired teachers who attend my Speaker's Corners have now told me that they are members of the Communist Party.  When I mentioned the Chairman Mao 70 percent wrong, 30 percent incorrect statement that the party had proclaimed, they told me that I couldn't talk about Chairman Mao.

On WeChat, I got a message from an American, who I believe lives in the States now, expressing displeasure at Trump's decision to ban the WeChat and TikTok apps in the USA.  I told him it was sad, but that it had to happen.  China has been doing the GFW thing for a while now, so they really don't have a leg to stand on when trying to say it was unfair.  Perhaps, China will try to say it was racist.

Later, the same American sent me a message saying that a court had halted Trump's order to ban WeChat and TikTok.  I didn't know the details of the decision, but I did reply that I wish the Chinese had a similar court that would halt the GFW.

Riding the bus to work, I saw that a passenger had brought a live goose on the bus.  I took a photo of it and you can see in my photo blog.

I went to a "NBA Style" shop at the Livat Shopping Mall.  There was no Houston Rockets merchandise to be found anyway.  The selection in the shop was like at the Mall's MLB shop:  they only sold the merchandise of the very popular teams.  So, no Timberwolves or Thunder stuff to be found.

I did a Speaker's Corners about heroes.  The most extraordinary answers, I thought, were given to the question of who they considered heroes:  Chairman Mao, Lei Feng, James Bond and Stalin.  I didn't say anything in response to first mentioned name; to the second I asked if he was the fellow who was killed by a telephone pole; to the third I supposed that Harry Potter was a hero to her child; and to the last I gave a Latvian perspective on why Stalin wasn't a hero.  Another person mentioned was a doctor who was said to have been heroic about the Covid-19 in China.  They told me the name and were shocked when I said I hadn't heard of it.  I told them that I was following the news about Covid from the West and was finding it hard to believe that any heroism could be coming out of it.  It was just as well that I pleaded ignorance because the only doctor in Wuhan who was heroic was said to have been arrested by the authorities who wanted to cover it up.

The October Holiday is approaching.  On the street by my apartment, they have put up the five-star PRC flag.

Mid September Blog Entry

In the middle of September, I am doing a company class, lots of Speakers Corners and a lot of kid's classes.

I like doing the SPCs the most.  Very casual, no pressure, the attendees are talking and are asking questions.

I am uncomfortable doing the company class.  The topic Business Writing.  No way to approach it without it being too difficult for most of the students.

The kid's classes are hit and miss.  They all depend on how the children are.  If the kids are well-behaved, it's alright; if not, oh boy!

I do have lots of free time, so I shouldn't complain.  I try to do the following with it:

• Blog.

• Pray.  I do the Rosary every day.

• Study French, Spanish, Mandarin and Latvian using the Duolingo App or books.

• Read novels or histories.  Come to this blog in early January and you will see a list of the readings I have done this year.

• Read poetry. Currently I am reading Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

• Read French, Spanish, Mandarin and Latvian.  I am almost finished reading Sérotonine by Michel Houellebecq in French!

• Watch movies. I just re-watched the French Connection.

• Listen to podcasts like Radio Derb, the Z Blog Power Hour, the Crackpot Podcast, Rebel Yell, the Delingpod, London Calling and Dennis Miller, to name but a few.

• I was able to converse with a taxi driver.  I learned he was from Anhui province; he came to Wuxi for the money, though he didn't care for the food; and that he had two kids that were older than my Tony.  He asked me if I was sixty years old which had me thinking how my beard (growing a beard I am) was making me look.  I told him my true age:  55, and I learned that he was 53.  I said to him:  你是我的弟弟! （You're my younger brother), hoping he would appreciate my stab at humour.

• Channeling Rick & Morty as an example of Western Culture.  Tony's school is Western in setup.  He has a homeroom but he goes to other classrooms for classes.  The hallways and corridors are indoors.  I asked him if the lockers were in the hallway like in the Rick & Morty cartoon series and he said they were. (In Chinese schools, the students stay in one classroom, the corridors are like balconies -- exposed  to the outdoor elements -- and the lockers are in the classrooms.)

• There are people leaving their cigarette butts on the hallway floors of our apartment building.  I find it annoying, but other than kicking the butts around and swearing, I haven't protested much.  So, I was pleased to see that other residents of the building were annoyed.  One of the residents took the time to make a sign, on which they put some of the discarded cigarette butts, to show their displeasure.  They put the sign on the floor so that anyone coming downstairs could see it.

International School Portals are for Shit!; Because-China!; Thoughts and Observations about Tony being in an International School

I have two sources that can vouch that the internet portals that international schools use in Wuxi to communicate with parents are foul-language inducing.  One of them is I, a parent who has to use this Canadian Federal Government like way to communicate with the school that my son Tony is currently attending.  The first time I tried to use my son's school portal, I could tell right away that there was something off about it.  It was slow, in a Because-China way.  I bet its servers are not in China.  And what really got me to be completely against the portal was the process I had to go through to try to get Tony registered for some curricular school activities.  The site was working fine, I was all set to make bookings until it was the time, 9:00 AM, to make bookings when the portal suddenly became slow and then unavailable.    I had an hour before a 10:00 class to try to book activities for Tony, but it was an hour wasted as the booking page was either unavailable or unable to let me make a booking, even if I was on the page!  Boy, was I swearing like a sailor!  I was going to send an email to the portal saying something along the lines of it being for shit, but I instead choose to publish my informal unexpurgated thoughts here instead.

That's the first source.

Two, I have it on good authority that another international school in Wuxi uses a similar internet portal to my son's school, and that the teachers hate the portal for the same reasons that parents hate it.  It is slow and unresponsive, Because-China!  The teachers are required to use the portal and their office is full of swearing when they try to get on it.

(Because-China!  This phrase can explain a lot of the trouble I have with the Internet.)

Tony's moaning about being in boarding is subsiding.

I help Tony with his homework now.  One of the things I had to do was help him finish a S.M.A.R.T. statement for his term goal for his I.L.P.  Jesus! I thought.  He is only thirteen years old and they are exposing him to acronym gobbledygook.  I didn't have this nonsense when I was a child.  I told Tony his goal was to read and write in English better.  How specifically and exactly and time-bound and achievable was this goal? (This is what the acronyms were about)  I  had to make things up to say that showed that the goal I set for Tony was S.M.A.R.T.  Aren't the goals of learning for a young one to get better at the three R's?  What other goals could there possibly be?  After these are accomplished, shouldn't life be allowed to take its course with the gobbledygook?

Tony's school is a forty-minute drive from Casa Kaulins, as I have been saying.  The problem with this is I haven't been able to attend any school parent events.  I can only communicate with the teachers via the damn internet portal.  The portal leaves me with same feeling that I got when dealing with the Canadian Consulate in Shanghai:  there is a wall between the government workers and the people they are supposed to serve, and so one feels the institution is very impersonal.

China Taiwan; Tropic of Cancer; Basketball Tony? Cars Evolve; Praying; Teacher's Day; Down with Teacher's Day; Impersonal Service;

• At another one of my school Speaker's Corners, a retired teacher told me news that the Mainland Government had passed some law saying that products brought to the Mainland from Taiwan must say something along the lines of made in China Taiwan. She thought this was a great idea and pumped her fist to show me how great she thought it. I asked her if Taiwan could become an independent country by holding a referendum and voting for it. She replied that history said that Taiwan was part of China. I then talked about how it was the Communist government that was the stumbling block to unification. Only a strident minority ever wants to be ruled by Communists I told her.

• Tropic of Cancer is a great read. It has passages that are poetic and that are read smoothly like fresh engine oil

• My son Tony tried out for the school basketball team. Hopefully, he has the talent to get on the team. Hopefully, as well, his pissy attitude about boarding doesn't make him look the sourpuss and thus disqualify him even more. (The last time I talked with him, he seemed in a good mood.)

• Cars evolve, but always at the hand of man.

• Pray the holy rosary I do, every day. But I have to battle being distracted as I do so. Sometimes, I start a Hail Mary and then I am recalling some incident from my childhood or I am thinking about what I will do when I go to work, and then I realize I can't remember how many Hail Marys' I have recited.

• Teacher's Day. Thankfully, in my current work situation, I am not getting any presents for Teacher's Day. I am not close with any of the so-called students I am paid to spend time with. And I don't think I doing anything of use to anyone. So, I am thankful because I don't deserve any accolades for being a teacher and don't even have to be subjected to the falsity of being given presents on Teacher's Day while all the while knowing I was a phony.

• I don't think there should be a Teacher's Day. (I also don't think there should be Children's or Women's days). There is a Teacher's Day because of the false worship of "Education" which really is schooling. Schools are just places for babysitting kids. If we lived in a rational world where men went to work and women stayed at home looking after children, what schooling there would be would be more rational. Heck, you might even be able to get an education at a school! Now, schools are bureaucratic monsters that have become a limb of the ever-growing State. So, teachers are just civil servants. Working for the state, they are bureaucrats who don't provide service.

• I hate how the fast-food chains are making customers use touch screens and mobile phones to make orders. If you want into a place wanting to place your order with a human, you feel like you are an afterthought. I walked into a Burger King and had to wait five minutes before I could order. When I walked to the counter, there was no one behind to serve me. All the staff were in the kitchen.

I'm Back; Tony's in an International School; the School is Bureaucratic; Gratitude; Good Decision; Old Footbridge; Isolation; Huawei Woman and Two of the Three T's; My Current Mask-Wearing Habits

• Sometime during the Summer, I stopped blogging. I got into a panic about actually being busy at school and I also found other ways to keep occupied like playing with my Duo app and reading a lot of e-books. I did start up two entries but never got around to finishing and publishing them. Perhaps I will publish them after I publish this one.

• Big news in my life now: my son Tony is boarding at an international school which is a forty-minute drive from Casa Kaulins. After the first week, he is depressed because he would much rather be at home. He even suggested that he would rather be at his old school which is a horrific Chinese public school. When I told him that he would have been boarding at that school as well, he countered that it was closer to home. So, when I asked him which school he would prefer if they were both close to home, he said he would prefer his current school. Perhaps, we will rent an apartment close to the international school and Tony can be with me every night. I suppose this violates some rule of parenting but Tony & I are best buddies.

• I find his new school to be bureaucratic. There is this internet portal that parents have to access to get information about what they are doing with the kids and it leaves me with the impression that this school might as well be the federal government of the Canada. The portal is slow and confusing to use, and the messages that are published in it reek of bureaucratic dialect. Homeschool! Homeschool! Homeschool!

• I did a Speaker's corner about gratitude. One of the retired teachers told me she was grateful to the Communist Party because she had a pension. Okay, i thought.

• I sometimes take the train to work, though I'd rather not because of the mandatory mask wearing. I choose if I can to sit in the car in the front or the car in the rear. Usually there is no one else sitting in these cars. One time, it looked like I would have an empty car all to myself, but then I saw a pram with child and a grandfather and another woman coming to the car I wanted to enter. I decided to move away from them which proved to be a good decision because I looked down to see them fussing over the child and talking in a loud manner. I was wanting to read my Tropic of Cancer.

• I had found this old footbridge that I liked to go to that was in a park that is near Casa Kaulins. To get to it, one has to walk through some woods and then climb a bit of slope and then follow a path. The bridge spans a canal and the area around it is quite quiet and interesting to explore. I hadn't been to it for a few months, I had some free time and so I decided to visit it. I was disappointed. To get to it, I walked through bushes and weeds that had grown since I had last visited it. And when I got to the bridge, I saw that it was being used a sort of stopper for the canal growth that accumulates on the surfaces of all the canals in Wuxi. It was like the canal that the bridge spanned had turned into a dump for mulch.

• Despite being around so many people, I am isolated. The problem is that these people are Chinese and I am not. Isolation, I read, makes people's social skills atrophy from lack of use. Not that I had great social skills to begin with, but I really can't be bothered to talk to anyone and don't relish the opportunity to meet other expats. Still, I crave company. But no one around me measures up.

• I had a SPC where the Huawei woman and Tibet and Taiwan came up. I should let them have their say and not responded and been evasive, but in a very obviously evasive way so I don't feel like so much of a schmuck.

• Mostly, I haven't been wearing a mask and make a point of putting it over my Adam's apple in place where wearing it is mandatory. I read about the lengths to which enforcement of mask-wearing has been enforced in North America and I am flabbergasted. I thought I was living in the totalitarian state!!!