October 26th: halloween lesson and slacker come-uppance

Day 39

Woke for Chinese breakfast. They tried to give me four bean paste rolls again, but I only let them put in two. Then two of the sausage rolls and an odd round one with a red dot on it, which turned out to be filled with bean paste. D’oh!

I wore my new custom dress pants today which fit a little loose because I tried them on over a set of pants to begin with. I’ll have to gain some weight to properly fit them. (When will I ever be saying this again?)

The Halloween lesson was fun. I explained the holiday, went through some vocabulary like vampire, werewolf, witch, ghost, skeleton, etc. Every time I asked if they knew what the word was, they would say no. I eventually yelled at them (jokingly) “You liars! You just want me to draw them on the board!” They smiled, didn’t disagree.

I taught them the basics of trick-or-treating, how to make a jack o’ lantern, and what the game bobbing for apples entailed. I showed them pictures of my Edward Scissorhands, Raoul Duke, and McDeviltoast costumes.

The last class, the “apathy crew” really tried my patience. About four slackers didn’t write anything down after repeatedly being told.

I kept saying, “I don’t want to feel angry today. Please don’t make me feel angry.”

I had to tell “Mary” and one other kid to stop spinning their workbooks on their finger. By the end of class I was fed up and went to the English office.

I asked a teacher, “If I have bad kids, do I send them here?”

She shrugged.

“Oh, are you Chinese teacher?”

She nodded.

“Ni hue shou ienwan ma? (Do you speak English?)”

“A little,” she said. “I am just learning. It is very difficult.”

“Wuh hue shou edyar foh tong wah. (I know a little Mandarin.) I am just learning, too. I think Chinese is difficult.”

She referred me over to another woman whom I recognized from the dining hall. I explained the situation. Her eyes widened.

“You had bad kids?”

“Yes. They would not write what I write. They talked when I talked. I just want to know, if they’re bad next Tuesday, do I bring them here?”

“What class? 5?”

“Yeah.”

She marched down there and I continued my limited conversation with the Chinese teacher. A few minutes later she came back, preceded by two of the slackers, who hung their heads and tried to look as pitiful as possible. The rest of the miscreants had escaped to the playground. I was entertained as she bitched them out in a torrent of Chinese, then gestured toward me. They shuffled over, and stood hangdog in front of me. She barked something in Chinese which had to have meant: “Well, what do you say?”

“S-sorry,” they muttered.

“Ok,” I said (trying not to laugh), “Next week, write what I write, and don’t talk when I talk.”

They nodded and took their place in front of her as she laid into them again. She kind of bopped them on the head lightly, more symbolic than anything.

I felt relieved that this woman had my back should any other slackers try my patience. I walked downstairs and was hailed by Pete and Jimmy’s class.

“Willis! Willlis!” They waved for me to come in.

“I do not teach you today.”

Jimmy beckoned, held up a newspaper, pointed to a picture of a woman leaning over a student.

“Who is she?”

“Her? Is she American?”

Jimmy nodded. I thought maybe it was some celebrity but I didn’t recognize her.

“Your friend,” he said. “It’s ‘she.’”

“Who? Ms. Rock?”

Jimmy nodded ecstatically.

“No, that’s not Ms.Rock. It looks like her, but that’s not her.”

Their teacher came in and I waved bye, told them, “See you Friday!”

It was funny. Maybe all white people look the same to them.

Dinner wasn’t much better than lunch. Simon ate with us, but Pete and Jimmy were at another table across the way. Simon pointed out the math teacher and the man sitting with her as her husband. The math teacher must be every teen boy’s fantasy at the school. And she is quite lovely, though she rarely uncages her smile.

Erin and I pedaled to the supermarket and the wind had a definite autumn chill on it. I got some Pocky, red wine, Mochaccino, bread, and some variety pack of potato-based snacks. I reached my pizza-flavored Pretz threshold two days ago.

I played piano for a bit, working out the new one(even have a bridge now) and practicing some vocal bits to other tunes. I still haven’t memorized the words to “Flashpaper” a song I wrote the music for right before I left, and finished the vocal melody and words here.

I finished “The Sound and the Fury,” borrowed “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” from Erin after helping her with a computer problem. (Speaking of computer problems: To whomever designed the keyboard: Why in the holy fuck did you put the Insert key so insanely close to the backspace key? This was designed seemingly and cruelly to derail writers lost in their mental narrative porridge; whereas they suddenly look up and find the paragraph they thought they were adding to has disappeared except for an amalgamated accidental word at the end: Example: “close.onality.” It is the bitterest frustration at having to retread that thought which was put so perfectly just seconds earlier. The rewriting of such a thought, unconscionable, for that unique set of words were arranged in a fevered bout of sightless typing, where the monitor gave way to a black window of thought, every synaptic pane teeming with chimera and deep-rooted polysyllabic truth, never to come again, never to be as pure and kinetic as the first sure-tapped mapwork of fingerstrokes. For that reason, I give a hearty, cordial “Fuck you” to the designer of the computer keyboard. In the name of all my writing brethren who have stood at the grave of their short-lived brilliant nuances, haunted for all time by what could have been and left with a meager bastard of rewritten bitterness, forever clad, for the author, in a cloak of quasi-cliché, mourning the first-born who never saw the light of a reader’s eyes.)

Drank some red wine, watched BBC, called it a night.