You make me feel so nasty

What a foul mood I was in yesterday. The funny thing about my foul moods is they're not particularly in my head, but in my mouth; that is, I feel okay but then release mighty streams of catty bitch when I speak, or else feel it a mighty effort of compression to not release a mighty stream of bitch. Maybe it's from having to be polite all day and then really engaging myself with my student in the most patient way possible. He's already being Herculean speaking as much as he does, considering how Korean schools in his time didn't let children speak in language classes. It isn't purgatorial - he's really sweet and pretty interesting, from a part of Korea I haven't had students from before. But it is an effort and I'm not used to making any efforts at 5:30 in the evening.

Anyways, last night he was asking how my plans to split are going, so I told him, and he gave that iconic Korean nod and said he thought living in Europe was better than Toronto. That piqued my interest, of course; I know how hard he finds the nasty fuckin' cold and the comparative filth, so I was curious to know why he came here rather than Australia or New Zealand (which would have been cheaper) or the U.K. or Ireland (which would have been warmer). Apparently, it was all about Major League Baseball and Toronto being the only non-United States city that had a team. He went on to point we also have the NBA team and are getting a lovely big soccer franchise and that David Beckham will make his league premiere here.

I guess this is a nice sports city in a way lots of European cities are not. What's left after you've poured your partisan soul into the local soccer team? In Italy and France, not much; there's the rugby and basketball there, but comparatively speaking nobody cares. And if you're from a country that wasn't a British possession, how much of a fuck can you possibly give about cricket and the other things those people get excited about? And if you are from an old American satellite, I guess you would care about a sport like baseball a good bit. I guess Toronto just ended up with the right mix of ethnic groups and demographics to have lots and lots of sport.

What a funny thing international sport is. I understand passion for soccer - I don't know why, but I do understand how you can identify a team's performance with your civic pride - but otherwise I can't understand how people watch sports without getting stupidly drunk enough to be fooled into finding it interesting.