lazing on a monday evening
Shobhit had another day off from both his jobs yesterday, and as he said to me in the evening, "I just lazed around all day." I don't think he ever even got dressed. He just hung around at home all day in the shorts that he wears. Technically they're swim trunks. I was dressed, of course, but my entire evening was basically the same -- except that I did make spaghetti for dinner, so I guess that's something productive I did at home. And Shobhit chopped about half the vegetables I put in it. It turned out to be far more tasty than I even expected it to be, too.
But then we spent pretty much the entire evening watching TV. I watched both last week's and this week's episodes of The Big Bang Theory, and Shobhit suggested I watch the season premieres of both The Simpsons and Family Guy, as their respective season premieres were concept episodes rife with meta-humor and tons of guest voices by the very actors they were lampooning. The Simpsons took on Game of Thrones and plenty of other fantasy franchises as its overall focus; Family Guy ended with its own Game of Thrones reference but was mostly a bunch of rapid-fire parodies of other shows that win lots of Emmys. Both episodes were better than they usually are on either program anymore.
I also watched one episode of Great News on Hulu, then moved on to The Golden Girls, of which we wound up watching three episodes. So that's, what? Seven half-hour episodes of television, I guess. I don't think I'm forgetting anything else we might have watched.
We did break from TV for a while to work on the New York Times crossword puzzle. I guess that's a bit more of an intellectual pursuit, right? For like, forty-five minutes maybe?
Shobhit also fell asleep for a while as I watched the two episodes he'd already watched himself earlier in the day. I guess he was exhausted from all that "lazing around."
. . . And that's kind of all I've got today. I suppose I could give my take on current events, but . . . Jesus. Who wants to even think about all this shit? I guess to a degree we have to.
I do keep thinking about the calls for help, donations, giving blood -- although in the latter case, I'm not allowed because the U.S. government still thinks of me as a "dirty gay." (To clarify: until 2015, any man who has had sex with another man since 1979 was disallowed from giving blood. Now? It's been "improved" to limit it to any man who has had sex with another man in the past twelve months. In other words, any "active homosexual." Um, that's still most of us.) More to the point, I made multiple donations to the Hurricane Harvey Relief Fund.
Have I donated to anyone else? For Hurricane Maria relief, or specifically jaw-droppingly devastated Puerto Rico? The massive earthquake in Mexico? Or now, victims of the mass shooting in Las Vegas? Nope, nope, and nope. It's not that I don't want to. It's that I still have a responsibility to keep my own budget intact, and where do I draw the line, anyway? These past few weeks have been unrelenting in their unspeakably horrific events, and I can't help everyone. Should I divert my monthly donations to Planned Parenthood and the ACLU to these efforts? Which should I regard as more important? You really could make persuasive arguments either way.
I suppose Shobhit would push me into donating to relief efforts in Puerto Rico by declaring that they were all getting what was coming to them, like he did all Texans. Except he's not going to do that because Puerto Rico is overwhelmingly Democratic -- to such a degree that there is even speculation that residents forced to move to Florida could finally make Florida a reliably blue state. So anyway, I make my contributions where I can, even though it's sad I can't (or won't) do more.
I just ate my lunch out on the patio again -- it's like 63° and sunny today, and I saw Alicia sitting out there and decided to join her. I said that as much as I'd love the rain to come back, I should still take advantage of these days while we still have them. Mimi also joined us later and I wound up in very engaging conversations with them both in turn, from pets to politics to finding ways to feel gratitude. It was really quite a pleasant lunch.
