A Night at the Opera
Like, holy shit: it actually rained yesterday. Shobhit had talked about doing something yesterday to get himself a Social Review point, but we never went anywhere. I never once left the condo the entire day. I only realized as I wrote this that the day was a total waste of makeup! Okay, not really. I've said countless times over the 22 years I've been wearing eyeliner and mascara that I do it for myself, not to "impress" anyone else -- so why shouldn't I still wear it, even if I don't leave the house?
Shobhit never went anywhere either. Even on Saturday, when he was going to walk to the bank to deposit my check for helping with the mortgage payment (what I do currently with all the money that would otherwise go into my savings account) while I took my shower, he changed his mind and decided we would drive and just stop at the bank on our way to grocery shopping. Why? Because, according to him, it was raining. I never witnessed any rain on Saturday, though. I did yesterday. Or at least, I saw the streets were all wet. It clearly didn't rain much, but it was still more than enough to be a relief, a tad invigorating.
That happened while we were watching my replacement Netflix Blu-Ray copy of Citizen Kane. It did start sticking in the playback about a quarter of the way through the movie but then it played smoothly from there to the end, which was a relief. This was one of very few famous American films left that Shobhit knew nothing about but I had not yet shown him, and his interest was piqued when I told him roughly half of critics out there still regard it as the best film ever made. (On average, the other half think it's The Godfather.) And, I will say this about it: I think I managed to appreciate Citizen Kane for the great movie it is via this viewing in a way I never had before -- not even when I watched it three times for a Film Studies class in college. I just wasn't refined enough in my cinema appreciation in my early twenties, not even in an academic context, to appreciate it quite properly. As a kid and through my twenties, maybe even some of my thirties, I still would have called the movie boring. I no longer feel that way about it.
On Saturday, Gabriel took me to the opera. Seattle Opera, to be specific -- and closing night of Porgy and Bess to be even more specific. Exactly how rude it was of me to snooze through roughly half of it is, in my opinion, up for debate. I'm fully aware that plenty of people would believe there is no debate at all, and it was unconscionable and inexcusable of me. I maintain that I had little control over it. Gabriel feels differently but whatever. He's an insomniac and doesn't have the experience that I do, fairly frequently, of literally wondering if I might have some type of narcolepsy. To be clear and to be fair to Gabriel, he was never especially upset about it; he seemed more amused by it than anything. He still debated my claim that I tried as hard as I could to stay awake. He also had concerns about how I might represent this conversation in this blog, and I'm making a concerted effort to be as objective and fair about my representation of it as I can, and I have no clue how much of a difference it will make. In all likelihood he won't even read this anyway; nearly every time I see him he comments on how he can't even remember the last time he looked at this blog.
Here are my suspicions regarding my drowsiness at the opera, the things I would guess were a factor: a) I had been up since well before 7 a.m., although that hardly always makes much of a difference; b) I did not eat a whole lot most of the day on Saturday, and then for dinner I had a carb-o-licious dish of macaroni and cheese with mushrooms; c) okay, I also had two cocktails -- in retrospect, and I'm literally thinking of this only as I write this sentence, never a good idea if my aim is to stay awake; I've fallen asleep through more than one movie with Laney because of cocktails; and d) the orchestration of Porgy and Bess's music was truly lovely, easily the best thing about it, and therefore functioned as a frustratingly effective lullaby. As in, that pretty music put me to sleep.
Gabriel's argument was that I had no will power. He refused to believe that will power really had no factor in it -- I actually did make a great effort to stay awake, even being fully conscious of the fact that it's only polite to, you know, stay awake. He even elbowed me a couple of times in the second half, after I admitted during intermission that I was having a really hard time staying awake, and I actually would have been fine with him continuing to do that. But, he gave up after two or three times -- and it's not his responsibility to keep me awake anyway. At least I didn't sleep soundly through all of it, like the elderly couple directly to my right did, those people presumably having purchased their tickets.
So, here's where I will compromise on my position regarding my sleeping through half of the opera. No, I do not accept any assertion that I could have stayed awake if I had just tried harder. A suggestion like that, to me, is analogous to being not very good at, say, baseball, and then being told you're just not trying hard enough. Either you can do something or you can't. But! In retrospect, I probably could have prevented myself from being so easily lulled to sleep if not for the two cocktails (which didn't even leave me buzzed -- but drinking anymore still does tend to make me drowsy, and I really need to start keeping this in mind more often when combining it with social engagements) combined with eating a pasta dish for dinner. Maybe I should have ordered the veggies, cheese and crackers platter like Gabriel had.
Also, to further clarify, I was the "understudy date" here. That does not diminish how generous it was for Gabriel to offer me this ticket apparently worth over a hundred bucks (!), but it does alter the context of what my social obligations to him were. There was no romantic element here, and Gabriel had once had a planned date for this, and then had to postpone and alter the day twice -- ultimately pushing it to the closing night of the show, in the hopes of finding a date to take. And in the end, he took me.
I bought dinner, at least! That counts for something, doesn't it?! Gabriel certainly wasn't expecting it, which was what made it fun. I even managed a fun way to spring it on him. I went to use the bathroom, and when I came back out, Gabriel was looking at his phone and paying not the slightest bit of attention to what I was doing. Here is one upside to mobile devices in 21st-century society: they are so distracting that it's really easy to pull one over on someone. So, even though Gabriel had only to glance up and see me take the few steps over to the bar across the room at Solo Bar on Lower Queen Anne, he never did. I gave the server lady my Visa card and told her that when we were done I wanted the entire bill put on that card. She kept the card and I came back to the table.
Once Gabriel finally indicated to the lady that we would not be ordering any more, she simply came back with my card and a check for me to sign. Gabriel was genuinely surprised: "A. You don't do that," he said, "And B ... how did you do that?" He then added that had he known I would pay for dinner, he wouldn't have ordered as much. Um . . . that's the point. On the rare occasions (and I do mean rare) that I pick up the whole tab when going out, as a general rule I don't let them know before ordering. What's the point of that? That just makes people self-conscious about how they're spending my money, and I never want that. It's much better, it's more fun, and it's more effective for it to be a surprise at the end of the meal. Protip for any time you're feeling generous at restaurants!
Besides, if you want to get into specific comparative value, how much I spent on dinner barely put a dent into how much Gabriel spent on opera tickets. If you want to know the truth, even if I had managed to stay awake the entire time, I never in a million years would have regarded that as worth a hundred bucks -- let alone $200 for two people, or however much it was; it was certainly some amount more. Let's just say that the opera isn't my bag. Or, perhaps, American opera. I should give it another chance sometime, and see it in Italian or German or French. The way we saw it on Saturday was less like seeing a foreign film with subtitles than it was like watching an American program in English that is difficult to decipher, and so you have the closed captioning turned on. During the time I was actually awake, probably too much time was spent linking the text to what I was hearing being sung in my brain. Anyway, should that ever happen (and at those prices, maybe it never will), I will also take care not to carb load on top of three shots of vodka. (I had only one Happy Hour cocktail at Solo, but I'd had a cocktail at home in the afternoon with two shots in it.) That part, I have no choice but to take responsibility for. It still makes it my fault! Totally my bad! I am a terrible friend! Are you happy, Gabriel? I'm just kidding on that last part, I'm far from a terrible friend. Even if I do get sloshed and then pass out at the opera.
Under normal circumstances, there would have been things I could do to help keep myself awake. When this happens to me at work, and there have been many a mid-afternoon when it has, I can get up and walk around. Not so at the opera, where they'll let you leave if you need to, but they don't let you back in again until the house opens for either intermission or the very end. I suppose it would have been all the same in the second half though, as in my case I might as well have gone out into the lobby and slept on a couch. The ironic thing is that had I done that, gotten up and walked around, I would not have been tired anymore. (I did tell Gabriel during intermission that I was literally pinching my own nipples to keep myself awake, and let's just say he had mixed feelings about knowing that. I stopped doing that during the second half, and perhaps I should have kept it up?)
I can tell you this much. Porgy and Bess had spectacular set designs. They were beautifully designed, constructed, and lit -- especially one set of a rundown amusement park with a giant A half-buried in the ground. Gabriel had much to say about the story itself -- how difficult it also had been for him to engage with it during the first half, and then how all-in he was with the story in the second half -- but, I could not offer much in the way of my own insights.
Gabriel gave me a ride home, as I had ridden a LimeBike down there before meeting for Happy Hour. Apparently Gabriel saw me "huffing and puffing" from his car when he arrived. He was most fascinated by how bikeshares work. I never even got to how affordable they are: $1 per ride, so long as each ride is half an hour or less. It's the same with Pronto Cycle, the first bike share I signed up for, the problem with that one being both that they have far fewer bikes around town and their fucking app seems to have stopped functioning for me.
Anyway. Sleepy or not, I had a really fun Saturday evening, and was glad to get a chance to hang out with Gabriel again, as it had been over a month. I suppose I could have seen him sooner than that otherwise, but I just had three weekends in a row where I was either out of town all weekend (two of those weekends) or had a houseguest all weekend (the middle weekend). This was a rare downtime weekend.
. . . And that will change yet again this coming weekend! Jennifer is coming to stay the night both Saturday and Sunday nights, probably arriving mid-evening at the earliest Saturday as it will be after her shift delivering mail on her rural route in Shelton. Shobhit had thought he might go camping again that weekend but finally decided against it when the weather forecast calls for it to be only in the seventies here, meaning it'll be in the sixties at the warmest there. So, Shobhit will be home for the whole weekend. As long as he does not try to avoid talking politics with Jennifer -- which even Jennifer and I largely avoid doing now -- then it should be fine.
Other plans recently cemented for September include taking the day off on Thursday the 13th to attend the Washington State Fair with Gina and her friend Jennifer (different Jennifer), to relive the day the three of us went in 2015. And, finally, Danielle nailed down a weekend for us to go visit her friend Jeanna at her house in the woods north of Spokane: the 21st through the 23rd. At Danielle's request, I will take a vacation day that Friday the 21st so we can spend that day traveling and have the afternoon and evening there. I'll already have Labor Day off as a holiday from work, so that means I'll have three days off in September.
Oh, and Shobhit does get a Social Review point for Friday, though! He didn't want to come to the movie that night, but he wanted the point, so we went to Diesel for Happy Hour -- where they pour the cheap vodka about 3/4 of the ice-filled glass before barely adding the mixer (in my case, orange juice). That really was some shitty vodka, I must say -- and shitty orange juice, actually. It was a shit drink. But worth four bucks! I mean, I still got a temporary buzz out of it. We also ordered both a plate of nachos and a plate of quesadillas; I could have easily split just one of those but we split both. This is quite often how I wind up eating more than I need to, but whatever. It's not like I have much room to talk when I still stopped at Old School Frozen Custard afterward. What was I supposed to do, not have the Banana Cream flavor they were offering that day? Which is perfect to have with Reese's Peanut Butter Cup topping? Get real.
Amusingly, I found out the next day that Shobhit also stopped at Old School Frozen Custard, for the very same flavor, on his way home. He didn't have Reese's topping though because he hates peanut butter, a clear indication of mental illness.
Anyway! The reason we did not go home together that night was because I met Laney at the Egyptian to see BlacKkKlansman, which I had already seen but knew she would want to see and be very glad to have seen, and I told her I'd be perfectly willing to see it again. So we once again ditched what otherwise would have been a planned evening to watch a couple Mad Men episodes at her place and went to that movie instead. I didn't get as much time to just visit with Laney as I typically would like, but that's okay. It was still nice to see her as always. We chatted a little bit outside the theatre for a couple of minutes, but then the #49 bus pulled up and she had to hop on. So I walked home.
So, apparently the higher-ups would like more obvious "communication" happening between people at work, so Scott as of today has initiated a weekly morning meeting for those of us in Grocery. Noah is on vacation so it was just Scott, Helen and me. Yay for potentially pointless regular meetings! To be fair, this morning's meeting was engaging, productive, and -- dare I say -- fun. So it was fine.
Also: Scott wants a new hire who can serve as "clean-up" and be trained on time-sensitive stuff some of us can't get to while out sick or on vacation. Or, can be trained on certain things that need taking care of it someone resigns. "God forbid, you should move on," Scott said, after also referring to the time when I pseudo-contemplated moving to L.A. to live there with Shobhit. Then I said, "I'll probably die of old age at this job." That seemed to kind of open a door for him for discussion about potential broadening of my duties here.
He referenced getting involved in the ad order guides, even in a little bit of category management, and most strikingly, possibly even hosting meetings with vendors and brokers when neither Scott or Noah are available. Really? I can't imagine that will happen any time soon, but now I'm imagining it happening sometime. It's a fascinating thing to contemplate, actually. Ten years ago I would never dream of such a thing, regarding myself as not much of a people person, and tying that to why I have never worked the floor at any of the stores. Now, though, I already have spectacular relationships with a bunch of brokers and vendors, so now that I'm considering that idea for the very first time, it's hardly a far-flung idea.
[posted 12:31 pm]