The problem with Tony's international school is that it has too many Chinese parents involved. This in turn means that Tony has Chinese roommates in his dorm. I was having my daily conversation with Tony on the phone and I asked him about the arrangements he had to make with his roommates when it came to taking showers. His roommates he told me don't take showers. Oh!
I then asked Tony if they stank.
I asked a woman in my SPC if she was studying German as she had told me before that she was about to do it. As I asked this question, I did an exaggerated John Cleese, Fawlty Towers goose-stop as I put two fingers under my nose.
From Project Gutenberg, I have downloaded Poems Every Child Should Know. I am reading and enjoying even though I haven't been a child since the previous millennium. If this volume was published today, it would in fact be entitled Poems Every Dummy Should Know or Poems Every Idiot Should Know.
Tony was home Friday night after a week at school. He was listening to music on his computer. He started listening to the Jam (not to be mixed up with Pearl Jam, the Jam were a British Punk Band with a The Who aesthetic). Then he was listening to Public Enemy. He said he didn't like rap but for whatever reason he liked Public Enemy. And finally, I heard him listening to Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin. I teased him about it, but he said that it was Led Zep's most popular song and that he liked it very much.
And later: I was driving Tony to his school and he asked me to play songs by ABBA.
One of the frustrations of teaching is that you can never assume what the students will know or won't know. So best made plans can be frustrated by student's ignorance or knowledge.
I did a class where the students' ignorance made the class better for me. What didn't the students know? These young children didn't know how to write their names in English. This surprised me, but it made the exercise I had students do to run out the clock necessary, which was to have them write their names on the board. I saw that the little kids were looking at names that had already be written on the board for guidance in writing their names and this really surprised me because they could easily say their names in English and it never occurred to me that they wouldn't know how to spell them.
Haters hate. Hate-Haters hate hate. Hate-Haters hate Haters. Haters love or like things that they don't hate. Hate-Haters love things that don't hate. Hate-Haters think they don't hate. Since it is impossible to not be a Hater, Hate-Haters actually hate more that Haters.
I hope you can follow my logic because I find the Hate-Haters are logically-inconsistent.
I was behaving badly on a recent Sunday and Monday. I couldn't deal in a stoic way with the driving habits of the locals, and went crazy honking at them or giving them a middle-finger gesture for trying to cut me off, using their horns because they were impatient, or neglecting to use turn signals.
But the piece de la resistance of bad-behaviour I did was when I went to get the K-Family Car washed on a Monday morning. My wife Jenny had a coupon in the car that was for a free car wash in an automatic setup. I drove by myself to it. To actually use the car wash, I had to scan a QR code using the WeChat app in my phone, enter a phone number and our vehicle license plate number. The problem was that I didn't know Jenny's phone number by heart though I had recorded somewhere on my phone. As well, as I was a dumb idiot about using the car wash interface because it was in Chinese. I was further an imbecile in that I resented very much the staff trying to help me. Because the staff did the awkward, nervous Chinese habit of laughing when dealing with a foreigner, I seized on this as a pretext to lose my temper and swear at them and call them the foulest of names. The staff, instead of being rude back, repeatedly assured me that they meant no offence, but I was still full of rage to acknowledge it. I was, after ten minutes of farting around, finally able with the staff's assistance, to get the car washed. As the car was being washed, I became full of shame, and realised that I had to apologise to the people to whom I had been so rude. So, I pulled out of the carwash, parked the car, and walked back to apologise to them. I told them that everything I had said that they were was, in fact, what I was.
There is a lather-rinse-repeat to this incident. This was not the first time that I behaved abominably and then apologised a few moments afterwards. It happens a lot. I could say it is better than being forever angry about something and never questioning myself. But the fact is I have a short fuse at times and I lie to myself afterwards when I think myself a good fellow for apologising afterward. It would be better if it never happened at all.
But why is it happening? Am I in a situation that is difficult? Am I afflicted with an aspect of my personality that I can't control? What is that I am not doing that I should be? Should I living with people who are so much different than me and with whom it is hard to have meaningful relationships?
It is curious that Twitter was censoring the Hunter Biden email story. They tried to justify it by saying it had to be fact-checked. Why hadn't they fact-checked all the lie-tweets about Trump like the ones that said he was a racist, a Nazi and the ones that pass on the lie about what he said about Charlottesville? Hmmm?
Trump is no more or less a racist than the "Saintly" Barack Obama. In fact, Trump is probably less of a bigot that Obama, Biden and Harris. As I said earlier, it is Hate-Haters that do the most hating.
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