don't fuck with my pussy, and other stuff
It's Monday again. Time to catch you up on what I did over the weekend. I know you're excited!
Friday evening was . . . shopping. We stopped at the Apple Store at University Village first, as my ear buds went kaput. For a few days they were really irritating me by pausing or skipping tracks on my iPod any time the cord -- which had no visible damage otherwise -- was bumped in any way. So, something as simple as pedaling my bike would either make the music or podcast stop, or skip it to the next one. Very, very annoying. But on Friday, the left ear bud stopped working altogether. That, I can't abide.
Oh! I nearly forgot. The first thing I did after work that day was ride straight to 20/20 Cycle on 21st & Union, because my old bike pedals -- speaking of pedaling! -- had gotten so janky. Like, seriously: a few days before, part of the pedal was hanging off one side and scraping on the ground, and I did a makeshift fix with a screw I could only get in halfway. But the other end of the pedal, which I always felt to be a bit too small for my feet anyway, had a large crack through it already. Also, these pedals were always annoying in that they had bits that stuck out into the bottom of my shoes uncomfortably on one side, so I was constantly flipping them around with my feet to the more comfortable side.
Anyway, I got a new pair of pedals. And also a rear view mirror as well as a headline, both of which to affix to my bike helmet. I always liked this place, but I had such a good experience there this time that I was actually compelled to post a review to Yelp when I got home. This is because the guy really went above and beyond. I was a bit surprised to learn that they install new pedals for you for free, but when he had my bike mounted, he just took the initiative to do all these other things that were minor but made a huge difference: he found a bolt for one side of the back fender wire to be missing and replaced it; filled both tires with an efficiency I can never manage with my hand pump; and even evened out the brake levers. I didn't even realize that last part was something he could do; the lever had been pulling so far back toward the handlebar that I was assuming the brake pad was wearing down and I would likely have to get that replaced relatively soon as well. But he just made some sort of adjustment so that the levers on both the left (front wheel) and the right (back wheel) pull back at roughly the same distance to make them effective.
At any rate, it was like getting a mini tune-up for free, which was totally awesome.
Also: I don't know why I had steeled myself for the pedals to be expensive, but twenty bucks struck me as truly reasonable. Especially since the pair I chose, which have just the right amount of grip bumps on both sides and thus it doesn't matter which side my feet happen to get to first, are wonderful. They are maybe a quarter, perhaps even a third, larger in size, which makes them perfect. And I don't know what it was about the tune-up stuff the guy did, but between the better tires, the improvement of the brakes, and the new pedals, it literally feels like I'm riding a brand new bike again. And I have now had this bike for nine years. I hope it lasts forever. I don't ever want to get a new one! I love Henry the Giant!
So it was not long after I got home from there that we drove to the Apple Store, which we were in and out of rather quickly, and then we went to the PCC Greenlake Village, where there was shockingly little I needed to buy -- almost exclusively frozen foods I bring to work for lunches. From there we drove down to the Asian grocery store in the International District where Shobhit likes to rummage through horrible-looking produce just because it's cheap. In his defense, I suppose, if you can actually find usable produce and it is cheap then, well, why not? I'm not all that insistent on organics anyway, although given a choice I do prefer organic produce that hasn't been coated with pesticides. But whatever, the world is fucked and we're all going to die anyway!
When we got home and watched my Netflix DVD copy of the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, because Shobhit is interested in watching An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power opening this coming weekend, and he had never seen the first one. He looked all over all of our streaming services for it and none of them had it; so I added it to my DVD queue for him.
And it was, indeed, fascinating to watch that movie again now, 11 years after it first came out. A lot of the blatantly visible climate change realities it presented . . . now over a decade old, with new information coming out since that reveals certain things occurring far sooner and faster than predicted. It's some scary shit. I just found my original review, and I gave it an A-. Its MetaCritic rating was 75 -- "generally favorable reviews" -- and the upcoming sequel currently has a score of 67 -- also in the "generally favorable reviews" range -- so I suppose the expectation is that it'll be good but not quite as good as the first film. I saw someone on Twitter call the new film "surprisingly uplifting," so I'm hopeful. That said, I'm not sure any movie is going to make any of us believe the U.S. Congress will make any meaningful policy change that will prevent what is now inevitable in terms of the effects of climate change -- practically irreversible industry trends toward sustainable energy notwithstanding. Those trends, in the end, are not likely to have been swift or early enough. But, how knows? Maybe this new movie will indeed elicit some real hope again. I doubt it, as I said to Laney recently, but maybe.
I'm actually surprised Shobhit has any interest in these movies at all. He's far less concerned about environmental responsibility than I have ever been.
Saturday was the only day this weekend that rates with any significance on my social calendar: I hung out with both Ivan and Laney, at separate times, while Shobhit worked most of the day.
Ivan and I went to lunch, yet again -- as we did two weeks prior -- at the HoneyHole for sandwiches. I really love their El Guapo hot vegetarian sandwich, mostly because of the cheese and the ranch sauce they put on it. It's super tasty. We did have a relatively long wait for the food to come, again, but I think the wait was slightly shorter this time at least. We actually finished a bit earlier than expected and had some extra time before we needed to leave for our movie. Ivan suggested we go to Old School Frozen Custard because he found out recently they started offering ice cream sandwiches and he wanted to get one.
I suppose I could have just accompanied him and not gotten any ice cream. That's probably what I should have done; I was already planning on going the next day when their Flavor of the Day would be Salted Caramel. On this day it was Blueberry Cheesecake, which I wasn't that interested in -- and then got a scoop of anyway, with graham cracker topping, something someone there suggested to me some time ago for the Apple Pie flavor, as it creates the impression of crumbled pie crust. That worked pretty well with this Blueberry Cheesecake flavor too.
I almost wished I had gotten the ice cream sandwich Ivan got, though. It was vanilla frozen custard between two surprisingly large chocolate chip cookies. I told him it looked good, so he immediately picked it up and shoved it right toward my mouth. I grabbed it and took a bite and it was delicious.
I checked One Bus Away for the next buses, and there was one coming in 14 minutes and the one afterward was listed as 15 minutes late (which later changed to being on time; it's very annoying when that happens), so I suggested we leave then to make it over to 15th and John to catch that first #8.
And then we bused down to the Uptown theatre on Lower Queen Anne, to see Lady Macbeth, which was a lot darker than I was expecting. I guess the critic quote that had been heavily featured in the trailer should have left me unsurprised: "suggests what might happen if Alfred Hitchcock directed Wuthering Heights." In retrospect, that comparison was very apropos. The title character turns out to be quite the monster, kind of shockingly so.
This was the third and final one of a trilogy of period films Ivan and I had been looking forward to seeing this summer for months, the other two being My Cousin Rachel (seen on June 10) and The Beguiled (seen on July 1). Those two wound up with solid Bs; Lady Macbeth, as I expected, turned out to be the best of the three, and got a B+ -- in spite of it having some problems of its own. But it's certainly the most memorable and features by far the best lead performance.
We rode the bus back home together, and I pretty much immediately went to write the review. I had only about an hour before I needed to leave again.
I then walked over to Laney's, for our new regularly schedule social programming: this is the first instance of our meeting on the fourth Saturday of every month, to watch one or two (or probably two, as we did this time) episodes of Mad Men, which we're re-watching together from its very beginning. This will thus make it the first TV series of the Netflix Era that I have ever re-watched. It makes sense for me to choose this show, though, as I have long considered Mad Men the best show ever produced.
As I mentioned to Laney, though, there's always the risk that, after some time has passed, a beloved show doesn't hold up as well as you expect it to. Not so with this one. In fact, I mentioned how, when I watched the pilot episode the first time, I had found it to be slow and that it didn't feel like anything really happened. I did not feel that way at all this time; the pilot episode in particular is packed with relevant information, a lot of it particularly fascinating in retrospect now that we know where these characters wind up -- particularly Peggy and Joan. Also, this show always had a lot to say about women and their changing place in American society, and that element in particular is very much at the forefront from the very first episode. Don Draper may be an awesome character who is the main protagonist, but in many ways this show is about the burgeoning of feminism in the sixties.
In any event, I was even more impressed the second time around than I had been the first.
Laney and I spent some time visiting before starting the first episode, and she even walked with me over to the QFC a block away to get some cheese and crackers to snack on. My sandwich for lunch had been super filling, particularly with the frozen custard consumed afterward, so I knew I did not want nor need a regular meal for dinner. I just wanted something to snack on while watching the show. And the rice crackers and small cheese log were still more than enough; my weight was up slightly the next morning.
I think Shobhit might have enjoyed joining us for Mad Men, but because he had to be up early again for a 6 a.m. shift the next day, after ending a shift at 5:30 on Saturday, he opted to stay home before going to bed relatively early. He was still awake by the time I got home, after he sent me a few texts that escalated from nagging to outright psychotic, merely because the cat, Shanti, was driving him crazy.
Shanti sometimes goes into whining fits at the door, particularly when I am gone. Ivan used to comment on this when he lived with me in 2014; Tommy mentioned it a couple of times when he lived with me in 2015 and 2016. She does this occasionally even when I am home, yowling for no discernible reason out in the living room while I am back in the bedroom. She'll shut up if I come out and give her some attention.
When she was doing this on Saturday evening, apparently Shobhit let her out into the hallway outside our condo a couple of times, in an attempt to get her to shut up. But she kept at it, and he texted me, Shanti is miserable so maybe we should put her out of her misery if you don't have time for her
There's actually a lot to unpack there. It's clearly partially a reference to my recent Facebook post about suicide, in which I state that there are some people so mentally ill that some of them actually do deserve being put out of their misery as an act of compassion -- not all, but some. Here, though, by shifting the focus of that notion to a cat, Shobhit was actively trivializing what I was saying about suicide. (Shanti is not actually depressed. Also, she's a fucking cat.) This was also an expression of Shobhit's resentment that I was spending the evening after he was home from work with a friend rather than at home with him, as though my social life, much of which is scheduled far in advance, should be beholden to his currently sporadic work schedule.
And so the cycle went: the cat was irritating; it made Shobhit angry; in typical fashion that is very on-brand for him, he expressed that anger in a definitively irrational way.
I really thought he was just joking at first. I responded with, lol that was mean -- it actually had made me chuckle. I'm never averse to dark humor, after all.
But what did Shobhit do? He doubled down to make me think he was actually serious: No I mean it
I seriously consider this to be one of the most reprehensible, horrible and disgusting things Shobhit has ever said to me. I didn't even know how to respond, and via text, I just didn't. Acting like he's not joking? About KILLING OUR CAT. It's two days later and I can't stop thinking about it. This coming from the guy who constantly acts like I don't do enough to pamper these animals, the one who typically obsesses over them way more than I do. And now he's literally suggesting we kill one, just because she won't stop meowing at the door and it's making him angry. I don't usually like using this word, but to say it was triggering to me would be an understatement.
But this is how Shobhit works, something I have been knowingly dealing with for more than a decade: when he gets angry, a switch flips, and he literally turns into a fucking monster. It's like being married to Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, a person with split personalities. To be fair, it's never been that extreme, but it's still very much an apropos comparison: he literally turns into a different person, with different capacities and capabilities when it comes to emotional expression and rational thought. Most of the time I can tolerate it with my own coping mechanisms (all of which can use fine tuning and improvement themselves), but when he's suggesting we murder our pets, that's far over the line. I won't stand for it. He really needs to understand that. The problem there is that, when he's turning into an emotional version of The Incredible Hulk, capable of nothing but expressing fury, he's never going to understand it.
There's also a "cry wolf" element here, because this behavior does nothing more than to condition me not to take him seriously. He's not actually going to kill the cat. Still, the mere suggestion was genuinely disturbing. I don't doubt that her yowling was annoying, maybe even crazy-making. That doesn't mean that I should sacrifice my social life. I don't know what the answer is, and maybe I'll brainstorm and research for possible solutions that work for everyone. None of it justifies saying something so truly horrible.
When I got back, Shanti was clearly glad to see me. I went to get my book and sat with Shobhit on the couch while he watched some TV. This after we already had a brief discussion in which I told him how disgusting it was for him to send that text to me. He leaned over to half-lay in my lap while watching TV; this, I suppose, being his version of an apology -- just as my deliberately sitting on the couch with him was my version of an olive branch. We still have our own ways of working through things, I guess. It's perhaps not the most healthy way for us to deal with each other, and I'm not sure we'll ever get there without perhaps getting into couples therapy.
Shobhit worked a really long time yesterday -- an eight and a half hour shift in the morning and early afternoon, then a four and a half hour shift from late afternoon through late evening -- totaling 13 hours of work, with a break of only an hour and 45 minutes between. So, I had most of the day to myself, although I did watch a movie with Ivan in the morning.
I had previously expressed interest in seeing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which he had in his own Netflix queue, and which had arrived recently. A couple of nights before, he showed to me to indicate he had it, and asked when I would watch it with him. I suggested Sunday before he went to work, and he was down with that. Not only that, but he even went out of his way to remind me when Shobhit and I headed for bed Saturday night around 10:00: "Don't forget!" Um, I'm not going to forget.
Shobhit woke me up briefly when he got up to make it in time for his first shift starting at 6 a.m. Whenever that happens, though, I always sleep later after falling back asleep than I would have had I slept through without getting woken up. This wasn't really his fault; I just rarely sleep very deeply anymore.
At any rate, I finally got out of bed around 7 a.m., having slept thus for pretty much a solid eight hours -- slightly too much for me; my sweet spot tends to be seven hours. When I sleep too long, I'm sometimes more groggy for the rest of the day than I am if I get less than seven hours sleep. So after I had showered and gotten ready for the day, and was out in the living room reading my library book until Ivan was up and ready to watch the movie, I nodded off a few times. That always makes reading a little bit of a challenge.
Ivan has taken to scaring the shit out of me by suddenly blurting out "Hello Matthew!" before I even realize he's walked into the living room. It severely startles me every time. Within a few minutes he had brought out the movie and we put it on, probably around 10 a.m.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is widely regarded as one of the best movies ever made. It's certainly still very well-done, but I'm not certain it holds up as well now as it had continued to, say, twenty years ago. It's certainly got an astounding number of actors who went on to long careers, and are stunningly young in this movie: Danny DeVito is all but unrecognizable; there's also Christopher Lloyd, and of course it's one of Jack Nicholson's earliest roles -- although he wasn't super-young: his character was 38 years old, and so was he. I'll grant that the movie is impressively compelling even by today's standards, but I also don't feel like I'll need to watch it again for a great many years to come -- until I once again don't really remember any of it anymore.
Between Thursday last week and Monday this week, Saturday was Ivan's only day off, so he was soon to be getting ready to go back to work when I left at around 1 p.m. to ride my bike back to University Village. I discovered on Saturday that the replacement ear buds I got had only the "lightning connector," thus being designed for the latest version of the iPhone -- which I do not yet have, but will have to deal with the next time I upgrade -- and I needed the version with the standard headphone plug. I mean, the iPhone I have does have a lightning connector with which these headphones can be used, but the iPod classic I still use for my music does not. So, I rode my bike -- with its new and improved pedals -- back to the Apple Store to have them exchanged.
I was surprised by how easy it was. I explained that I got the wrong kind on Friday and asked if I could exchange it, and the guy scanned the two boxes and sent me on my way without so much as asking to look at my receipt. I then had the ability to listen to Janet Jackson the standard way on my ride back home.
I have yet to ride at night to test the new helmet headlight, but I'm struggling a little with the attachment of the rearview mirror. Riding over bumpy areas kept moving the small circular mirror and I was constantly having to readjust it. Riding to work this morning, though, I moved where it was affixed to the helmet and that seems to have helped.
I heated up some lunch for Shobhit to have when he came home briefly between shifts. I came back from the Apple Store not long before that, with just enough time to go back to Old School Frozen Custard to get the salted caramel flavor I'd wanted to begin with. I fried some tortillas for him and even chopped some jalapeños into his Indian meal packet poured into a bowl for him, which made him happy.
We then left together, when he was off to his second shift, and I was off to meet Laney at the Light Rail station, so we could head downtown and see Atomic Blonde, which we both enjoyed a great deal. We got to the theatre rather early -- half an hour -- but that gave us time to chat and the time still went by quickly.
We then took the train back up the hill, and I walked the half-mile home from there, library book in hand. I proceeded to write the movie review and after that it wasn't much time before Shobhit was due back for the evening. I did watch half-hour comedy special on Netflix by Nikki Glazer. It was fascinating to watch a woman talk so openly about enjoying anal sex. She was fairly crass about it -- of course -- and yet managed to give me insight I never had before on how a woman might like it. I always thought it made more sense for gay men to like it, given the stimulation of the prostate, which is a body part women don't have. But her explanation actually made sense. (I even have a straight female friend who once told me the most intense orgasm she ever had was during anal sex. So I should definitely stop making assumptions about women and anal sex. Some of them hate it, some of them love it, just like any sex act taken on by people of all sexualities, and they have perfectly rational reasons for their varying preferences.)
I'd had a veggie hot dog for dinner. Shobhit made himself more Indian meals with tortillas when he got home, and we did the New York Times Monday crossword -- which I really loved. It was all about Seattle! I could hardly believe it.
Oh! One last thing, which I nearly forgot to mention: you may or may not recall when I wrote about ten days ago (in the final section of that day's entry) about what I wrote in my note to a woman who not long ago left PCC, and who just recently lost a child in a car accident. I hoped what I wrote would make some kind of difference to her, but knowing the severity of the grief she must be experiencing, I chose not to assume it would.
Well, I found out today that apparently it did. Robin, whose desk is right next to mine, brought it up to me this morning. That box full of sympathy cards from PCC had been delivered to the grieving mother in question, and apparently -- and amazingly -- after stating that the first card she opened was "the most important," mine was the first one she pulled out. And according to Robin, she was really moved by it.
And just now -- reminding me of it again, so I am now editing this entry after having posted it without initially writing about this -- Jill even came to my desk to bring it up too. I guess she had been there as well. The card, when opened, had been read aloud to the group who was there. Jill reiterated that it apparently made a real difference to this woman -- who, of course, has a name, but given the delicacy of the circumstances, it seems best for me not to use it here.
I thanked both Robin and Jill for telling me. It was certainly nice to hear. I had really struggled with what to write in that card, because simple platitudes ("My condolences" or whatever) would have been worthless. I'm now really glad I didn't give up and that I made the effort.
