A Genius for Stupidity; Impeachment; Christmas Eve, Christmas Day; Christmas Day Argument; Tony Dreams of a Road Trip

• When it comes to parking or stopping their cars, the locals have an absolute genius for parking or stopping their cars in a stupid manner. It would never occur to me to stop or park my car in the way I have seen many locals do it. So maybe they are genius parkers; if genius is a way of doing things that normal people would never think to do. Then again, maybe the definition of stupidity is trying to force genius.

• What do I think of the impeachment of President Trump? Not much. He should wear it as a badge of honor for it means that idiots really really really hate him.

• Christmas Eve, my birthday, I had a 19:00 SPC. One student came. I then caught the bus and arrived home at 21:00. Normally, I would have gotten off at an earlier stop so I could get home later, but I had been lead to hope that maybe tonight, my wife Jenny wouldn't be tiger-mothering my son Tony. I was wrong. I got to the door. It was locked. My wife opened it with a scowl on her face. Tony had gotten a poor mark on some test and she was going over with him. Now, my Chinese wife doesn't so much tutor Tony as have an extended temper tantrum. And whatever was wrong with Tony was all my fault because I was weak and selfish and wasn't helping Tony, according to Jenny. Truth is I am weak (which I have had Jenny tell me many a time) but if I was to become strong, Jenny would like it a lot less than the weak me. A strong husband wouldn't be putting up with his wife's bullshit like I have.

• Christmas Day, I drove Tony to school in the morning and picked him up in the evening. Merry Christmas! I said to Tony. They don't care about Christmas here! He replied. (although to be fair, he does) On the way back home we had to stop off at Jenny's office to pick up something. So I took a bit of a different route home. Along the way, I saw this car driving really slowly with its four way blinkers on. Strange, I thought. And the car had to go ahead of me into the lane I was in!!! I resisted the urge to give the car's driver a fuck-you honk. But then we got to an intersection with a sign that said no u-turns between 16:30 and 18:00. I looked at my car's clock to see it was 17:00 and so I can say that I had been planning to make a u-turn. There was another place I could make a legal u-turn so it was no big deal to not do one there. However, the car, I was telling you about, was planning to make the u-turn and the driver, of course, ignored the sign or maybe didn't understand it or whatever it is that enters or doesn't enter the minds of local drivers. And so I gave the driver a fuck-you honk as he made his imprudent u-turn.

• Christmas Day, I was screamed at by Jenny for the usual reasons which I won't get into, and she gave all the reasons that we should divorce. I wasn't buying it. Though the reasons she gave for divorcing me were all valid, divorce is out of the question for me: I want to be a good Catholic. And the argument left me feeling me better anyway as so much tension was released that the release might have been my best Christmas present ever.

• One of Tony's dreams is to go on a North American road trip and visit NBA arenas. He has been asking me questions like how far Houston and other American cities are from Winnipeg.

You'll Never Convince Them and You Can't Have a Rational Argument with Them; Because Everyone Does It; For a Better Future; No WeChat Moments; Two Realizations; My Father Had a Gardening Hobby

• I was angry all day after a morning argument I had with my wife during which she told me that I shouldn't listen to foreigners who had similar thoughts about how mad Chinese parents were about educating their children. That evening, in a Speaker's Corner, I told my students what happened even repeating the curse words I hurled at my wife, and the curse words that came to mind when I thought of the madness of Chinese parents. A colleague witnessed my rage and told me that I was basically pissing against the wind. Exasperated I asked why they did have to use such bullshit arguments to try and convince that there was reason to their madness.... Well, said my colleague, you can't have a rational argument with the Chinese.
• Because everyone does it is the first argument the students use to defend their behaviour. Exasperated by this argument and pointing out its silliness, I did get some students a the SPC to admit that there was too much homework, but they then said that there was nothing they could do to change it. (But there is, which is to no go along with it!) I thought later of the example of massive holiday traffic jams at Yellow Mountain and the stupidly enormous amount of holiday Chinese trudging the Great Wall. These are examples of how not doing what everyone else is doing would save one a lot of aggravation. Life, I should have told the students, was full of aggravation; and there was no need to add it.
• For a better future is another one the students parrot to me. Well. the future doesn't exist. And it isn't progress if what you are doing now is worse than what you did before. And I would like to see a present, not a future, where Chinese children don't have their childhood stolen from them by their parents, where they have free time on evenings and weekends to be kids and not be tormented by their parents with a quixotic desire for a better future.
• Three weeks in December and I have successfully withstood the urge to post on WeChat moments.
• Two realizations hit me unawares on the day of my near meltdown caused by arguing with my wife. One, is that there is a new Star Wars movie is in the cinema. I hadn't known it was coming. I have heard that it features a gay kiss in it, and I am thinking – call me prude, I don't give a fuck – to not bother taking Tony to it. (Which is too bad because taking Tony out of school on the 25^th and watching the Star Wars movie would have made Christmas 2019 tolerable) Two, we are at the end of a decade. I knew 2020 was on the way but I never thought to think of it as the arrival of a new decade till I heard someone mention it in a podcast 
• According to the Chinese parents way of thinking, my father was a bad parent because he spent a lot of his free time gardening, and thus not helping his three children to do homework nor giving us extra homework; my father was a bad parent because he took us on Sunday drives instead of making us do weekend classes; and my mother who had housework to do and three children to look after was a bad parent because she didn't tutor her children every night.

Worst Christmas Ever; Tony Wants to Play Basketball but...; Argument with My Chinese Wife; The Chinese Idea of a Good Imagination; Am I All Alone?; I Wouldn't Be So Bitter If;

• Sad to say but this will be my worst Christmas ever because my son Tony will not get to experience it. He won't get any Christmas presents. He won't get to experience the excitement of a Christmas morning. He instead will be going to school during the day and then probably being tormented by his mother at night.

• Tony would like to play basketball. I took him to this basketball complex because of a flier he saw and he got get a demo coaching session, after which said he wanted to do more. But my Chinese wife Jenny seems to have put the kibosh to it. They want her to pay for a year of coaching which would mean three classes every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I now realize that the reason Tony was going to swimming classes on a similar schedule because that was what the swimming place offered. Jenny just took it. When I asked her if she could pay for one basketball practice a week, she said that that was not done. Thinking about my hockey playing days, I recalled that we would play games during the week and once or twice on the weekends. Because of the stupid school system here, the idea of letting kids do something on weekday evenings instead of homework just doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone. And so you have this situation where it is not possible to any free time on weekends. There is always some fucking practice to go to every goddamn evening!

• With these complaints in mind, Jenny & I have had a big argument. Her basic point during it that because I am in China I have to do things the Chinese way even if no one seems happy about it, and the basic argument about it all being for a better future is nonsense. During the argument, she told me to ignore the thoughts of foreigners with similar complaints and I lost my temper and said something about not wanting to only listening to f***ing Chinese people. And as of this moment of typing, I assume I am really in for it.

• I asked a student if he thought he had a good imagination and he answered that he did. When I then asked him why, he responded that he could imagine himself being rich. I suppose his idea of a good imagination was to imagine good things. It was not the answer I was expecting and of course, I was again baffled by the Chinese mind while having my prejudice that Chinese aren't capable of imagination confirmed. I and most foreigners would think of a good imagination involving being very creative and original as well as being realistic and detailed. A good imagination looks at things in many different ways and is never trite. And so to live in the Chinese mind would seem to be like living in a ghetto.

• Is there a foreigner who is in a similar situation as me? If you reader have a Chinese wife and your child is in the Chinese education system, please email me at andiskaulins@hotmail.com or andiskaulins@qq.com. I want to know your experiences and if you are happy in your situation.

• If I wasn't married to China, I would have left it a long time ago. So as it is now, I am stuck here. If my wife wasn't so narrow-minded like most Chinese about educating children, I wouldn't be so bitter about it. I have a hard time liking people who mistreat their children so.

British Election Results; Old Student; Bring Back the British Empire; The Horror of IELTS Prep Classes; Mistake; What to do about Tony's Education; Accident Scene; I Had Bread for Lunch

• I will never forget seeing two "esteemed" colleagues high-fiving it after Obama won the 2008 election. Never have I seen grown adults act so stupidly. So with this is mind, I will say that the UK election results on the surface look satisfying but are nothing to get over-exuberant about. Sure, the labourites were given a well-deserved kick in the ass, but I am not sure if the result will mean a truly satisfactory, which means total, break from the EU. We will just have to see.

• There I was on the train, minding my own business, when a student from many years ago said hello to me. He told me he had good memories of his time at our school and that he had gotten very good at English. I was taken aback because I was full of sour feelings about my time teaching English in China.

• Here's an idea. Britain was better as the ruler of an empire than it is as a province of an European empire, so maybe it should try to become an empire again. Thus, I advocate for the formation of a B.E.U., a British Empire Union, a Commonwealth with a hands-off administrative approach to its extended dominions. Countries, nations are welcome to join, but the BEU won't recruit them. Let's face it! A British Empire in continental Europe would be an massive improvement on the E.U.

• All these courses with the intent purpose of having Chinese students get good scores on the IELTS test are a scam. I haven't had much to do with them till recently, and for that I should thank God; but now that I have been doing them, my view of the Chinese has also become even more sour. I always knew that these courses would be hell to teach but having known so hasn't stopped the expected annoyance from stinging less. The sight of Chinese students is enough to make one want to hang myself. Never can two hours seem so dragging long. How it is that I haven't had the urge to slap and punch them all is beyond me. My guardian angel must be keeping me in check. I have to try to teach students who resent it when I interrupt the conversations they are having in class with other students. The students are turning their back on me. These scam classes are being perpetuated by the schools. Teachers like me are asked to do the impossible. Better off trying to teach Orangutans play piano.

• I made the mistake of taking a half completed blog entry with me from work to home and adding to it and then not bringing it back to work. So, this entry will be longer than the normal six bullet points.

• What to do about Tony's education? I got to change my wife's way of thinking about it otherwise he's fucked. She is tormenting him and depriving him of a childhood and in turn of depriving me of my sanity. Her thinking is Chinese Tiger Mother. Her reasoning as far as I can tell is that by working him so hard, he will have a better future. What would be better about this future I can't imagine, because I think it would still involve some children down the line getting deprived of their childhood as well; and though it may well result in him maybe getting a good job, he will still be living a life devoid of higher purpose: the only purpose being to get his child to get high marks and so on. And the Canadian school system is satanic as well, I have heard tell. Tony has to be home-schooled.

• I walked past an accident scene where the positions of the vehicles involved made it hard to figure out what had happened. The vehicles were not at an intersection, they were a long way from any. in fact. The road they were on was four lanes wide; two lanes going either way with a double solid yellow line down the middle. The vehicles were almost at a ninety degree angle to each other; with one vehicle sitting at a perpendicular angle to the lanes, stopped on the double yellow line; while the other vehicle was faced parallel to the lanes, but stopped so that it was on the wrong side of the double yellow line, looking like it was headed in the wrong direction. Passing the strange scene, I fantasized about jeering at the drivers and telling them what idiot drivers the Chinese were. I then saw the vehicle that was perpendicular to the road lanes make a u-turn, while the other vehicle got back on the proper side of the road and continued on its way; and was able to piece together what had happened. One of the drivers had been trying to make a u-turn, and being Chinese they did it in an inappropriate spot and without looking to see if there were any vehicles about. The other driver had been following, and being Chinese, he was impatient and instead of slowing down, he tried to make an illegal passing maneuver, crossing over the double yellow line and thus running into the u-turning vehicle. Both of these drivers deserved to be jeered at!!!

• Me: What did you have for lunch, Chinese person? CP: I had rice. Not very informative but all the locals answer in this annoying way. So this is what I answer when I am asked by Chinese people what I had for lunch: I had bread and beef and vegetables at McDonalds!

Sports cards and Game Cards: So far, so good; Christmas; No Christmas in China; Vieglas Smiltis, Well-Worn Path

• Tony asked me if I preferred Sports Cards or Game Cards. I knew he was referring to Sports Cards as the Hockey and Baseball Cards I collected growing up and those Pokemon cards that Kids seen to like now. I told him, of course, that I preferred sports cards. He then told me how most of his classmates were into the Game Cards and how he was but one of the few or the only who liked Sports Cards.

• Still no posting on WeChat. No one seems to have noticed. Whatever urges prompted my WeChat postings will have be directed to this blog.

• A whole gamut of emotions, from despair to elation, are what I feel in the weeks leading up to Christmas. I despair because I can't say that I have had a good Christmas since I was young. Many of my subsequent Christmases I felt very lonely because of teenage angst and then because I was very lonely. I never got in the habit of doing Christmas decorations. I have never had a season of Christmas party attending. This Christmas, I am hoping that I don't go to any. I would like to be invited to one just so I could refuse and tell the inviter that Tony has to go to school on the 25^th, it being a Wednesday, and so I can't do anything for Christmas because it would be without him which just won't do. But sadly, there will be no invites. But at least, I won't be attending a hotel dinner where you end up feeling like you were a victim of a squeeze-them-in-as-tightly-as-possible-and-extract-money-from-them racket. On the bright side as well, I hopefully won't be attending any Chinese Christmas parties which are all Santa Claus and no Christ. (I cross my fingers.) The best possible Christmas for me will be to stay home on the 25^th, treat it like a day off except that I have to phone my Mom and Brother in Canada, and I will read lots of literature about the Christ and the birth of Christ.

• It may well be that Christmas may not be celebrated by our school because the Chicom powers that be have decreed that the schools don't observe it. This will be fine with me. Chinese Christmas is a poor substitute for a real Christendom Christmas which aren't even celebrated in the West anymore.

• Ingrida, an aunt of mine, married to my father's half-brother, died on December 7^th. Her husband, my uncle, had died in early September. I have childhood memories of going to visit them in Minneapolis in the seventies and eighties. Ingrida was solid Latvian, a type that has gone extinct among my relations. The old Latvians are dying off and aren't being replaced by new ones. Some of like me never thought to embrace Latvian culture and identity till it was too late. Vieglas Smiltis

• I get to do a company class on Wednesday evenings. The interesting part about it is the drive to the company site. It takes about forty minutes and I go through parts of Wuxi that I hadn't been to in a while or just hadn't been to, and it makes me realize how routine and dull my life has become and how well-worn is the path I normally take every day.

Guardian Angel?; So Far, No Moments; Cross My Fingers; Mad I get; Lovely Thing for a Change; Three Accidents

• Since hearing Mother Angelica mention them in a podcast, I have occasionally wondered how my Guardian Angel affects my life. Sometimes, I think the GA is putting reminiscences in my mind of when I did things of which I should be ashamed or embarrassed. I have admit that in my late teens and early twenties, I had a feeling of being in a higher station than really I deserved to be; and so quit jobs because I felt they weren't good enough for me. A couple of those occasions came back to me recently, seemingly out of the blue.

• Since American Thanksgiving, I have not posted on WeChat moments. I am planning to start posting again at the end of Lent. So, I am looking at a good three months of WeChat silence. And the thing is, I don't think anyone who gets my moments posting will notice, which is most likely a good thing.

• So far, there has been no mention of our school having a Christmas party this year. I cross my fingers and hope that this will be the case. I am thinking my hope will be realized because the school would have already planned one if they were because we already know when and where the school will be having its Chinese New Year slash Spring Festival dinner.

• Things I shouldn't get mad about, after all these years I have spend in China, but still do: First, I was making a left turn and waiting for a car, coming from my left, to pass by so I could in fact make it when its driver made a right turn before me without making a turn signal. Second, I was trying to get off the train but was blocked by this old man with child trying to board. The signs and announcements all tell the locals to let the people off first before boarding.

• I saw a lovely thing for a change. A man on a wheelchair got on the subway. A bit later, I saw a little girl sit on his lap. I assume the girl was his daughter. I was a nice sight. I then thought I saw a couple, sitting opposite me, praying which would have been better if that is what they were in fact doing.

• I passed three accident scenes while driving Tony to school in the morning. First, there were two cars that had obviously collided because of improper lane changing. Second, I saw that an SUV had hit an e-bike. Who was at fault was hard to say. The e-biker could have been ignoring a traffic signal; the driver could have made a right turn without looking. Finally, I saw a car ran straight into the end of a traffic fence slash barrier. As I have blogged before, the authorities put what is basically fencing on the center lines of roads to get drivers to stick to their side of the road. But there have to be gaps in the fences so people can make turn. It was at one of these gaps that I saw the collision aftermath. The driver was female. This scene was one when you really had to wonder what the woman had been doing. She drove straight into the barrier end like she didn't see it was there. She was making a left turn. If she hit the fence end because she was inattentive seemed hard to believe. I speculate that another car must have been involved that had forced her to hit the fence end. Either the car was driving very quickly on the road already or another car making a left turn had the same time tried to overtake her so that she got startled and hit the fence end before she knew it.

Old Women Annoying Me; Serotonin Book; Tony's Christmas Wish; Running out the Clock; No Christ in Chinese Christmas, Christmas will be on a Wednesday

• I like to sit at back of bus which I take to work. There are four seats there in that back row, and I often have them all to my self. However, one day these three women had to sit by me. They nattered like hens so that I couldn't concentrate enough to enjoyably read. I got off the bus in a bad mood and then lost my temper at a old woman who cut in front of line of me at the bakery I always go to. I call her a f***ing bitch three times loudly. Everyone in the bakery stared and me, and I believe they understood the foulness of my language, but the old woman I was screaming at looked at me blankly. I couldn't tell if she was deaf or was incredibly inscrutable.

• Finished reading Serotonin, a novel by Michel Houellebecq . I sympathized with the novel's main character's alienation from the society; however, I envied his sex life and financial success. I felt like a real loser after I finished the novel.

• Tony doesn't know what he wants for this Christmas. I asked him one early morning in early December, and he quickly answered that he didn't know. He then came back to me later that day, and told me that he still couldn't think of what he wanted. What does tell me? Either he has everything he wants, or the only things he could possibly want are to be had on a computer or his Iphone.

• I had a few classes where I was really, really just trying to run out the clock. I had this two hour class where I was to prep these high school age students for the speaking portion of the IELTS test. Two students showed up. One of them, a male, didn't have the English ability to understand anything I was saying. The other, a female, had spend a year in an American high school and so I had to wonder what was the point of having her in the class. They both were more interested in their smartphones. The last ten minutes of the class seemed an eternity to get through and when I finished, I quickly stood up and gave them a goodbye with I hope I never see you again tone. I then had another class with young kids who didn't want to be there. Despite telling them constantly that they have to answer with more than just a one word answer, they would always answer yes or no and mumble the rest of the answer when I asked for more. Trying to explain a phrase to them, I saw that none of them were paying attention. The last twenty minutes of this class was an eternity. I couldn't run the clock out fast enough.

• No point in celebrating Christmas in China. It is Christmas without Christ. The Christmas parties, I have had to go to here in the past, are nothing better than a cake and cookie party for kids accompanied by clueless parents. I have this nightmare that our school will have a Christmas party this year and that they will ask me to be Santa Claus. Thinking about the nightmare, I wonder if I would have the gumption to tell those asking me to fuck off.

• Christmas is on a Wednesday this year. I don't think I will have any luck asking Jenny to let Tony stay home that day. Consequently, I won't be doing anything for Christmas. If it means not going to a school Christmas party, that won't be such a bad thing. I will be happy to have the 25^th off. I will observe the religious aspects of the holiday with the many prayer apps and prayer books for which I have access.