lazy weekend
I did so, so little the weekend! This is kind of a relief on two levels. First, it means I don't have to spend any inordinate amount of time catching you up on the goings-on of my weekend, like usual. Second, it was just a nice, unusual experience -- so many of my weekends are cram packed with social activity, it was just nice to veg out for a while, which I rarely do.
We watched a lot of TV. I started watching Cheers on Netflix a few days ago, and although Shobhit knew really nothing about it, he predictably got into it pretty quickly. The entire series, some 11 seasons airing between fall 1982 and spring 1993, is available -- I watched plenty of it in its original run, but am realizing now that although I did see plenty syndicated episodes from earlier years back in the day, I would not have seen new episodes as they aired for the first time until fall 1985 at the earliest, and I don't really remember watching it much until a few years later. I wasn't allowed to watch TV in the early eighties, but we watched a lot by 1985, when Mom moved Christopher and me to Spokane. I can even still remember news coverage of the cast party after the seasonal finale in 1993. Specifically I can remember George Wendt (Norm) being visibly drunk on camera. I think more were too, and I remember Mom chuckling that they were all drunk.
I haven't watched the show in ages, though, and as a kid I did not have the experience, education or developed worldview to have any idea how truly good the show actually was. Even Shobhit remarked within just a couple of episodes of its first season -- which apparently had by far the worst ratings of the series run -- how good the writing was. And now that we're closing in on finishing the first season, I have more than once marveled at how progressive the show was for 1982 and 1983, especially regarding gay issues in a show set at a bar filled with "regular guys."
Anyway, as often happens, Shobhit expressed little overt interest in it until I actually started to play it, and then he got sucked in pretty quickly. And we watched a lot of episodes yesterday, probably 15 or 16. I mean, each episode barely passes 20 minutes in length, but that's still around five and a half hours of TV watching.
And I still even found time to read my book for a little while yesterday afternoon. At home, and no on the bus or walking home from work! That's very very rare.
I did take myself out on Saturday, to see the Nicole Kidman movie Destroyer, which was all right. That's kind of the baseline for movies in January: "it was all right." A lot of solid-B movies at best, now that the Oscar-bait cycle is over. Shobhit actually had a job interview at 1:00 or thereabouts, and I saw an 11:15 a.m. movie showtime, which had us both getting home at about the same time. And we then went out to do a little shopping later, to get gas at Costco, produce at MacPherson's on Beacon Hill, and a few final things at Trader Joe's. And that was all basically the highlight of that day.
I can't really remember now what we even did on Friday, although that may have been the evening we started on Cheers. As I said, we just watched a lot of TV. Oh! We watched my Netflix copy of The Limey starring Terence Stamp, his most recent notable role that I remember garnering him a fair amount of attention. Neither Shobhit nor I thought it was that great of a movie in the end, but we did finish it. It seemed like the kind of late-nineties movie that had a very late-nineties sensibility and thus came across as snappy and edgy at the time, but didn't actually age all that well.
So then we moved on to Cheers. The show was filmed at Paramount Studios in L.A., but the establishing exterior shots for the Boston-set show was a real place, and Gabriel and Suzy took me there to see it when I visited them in 2000. Here's the proof.
In perhaps more pertinent news, I had my doctor appointment this morning, combining my annual physical with my quarterly checkup required for continuing the Truvada prescription. And so, the appointment was not much different than most every three months, actually, as Dr. Brandon noted we already cover a lot of stuff an annual physical covers. He did press around my body just a little bit more than usual, but otherwise it was the same standard quarterly appointment. I've now dropped my pants for an anal swab so many times that I'm pretty much indifferent to the process.
I did tell him I'll be very annoyed if I test positive for chlamydia a third time in a row, as I have been much better with carefulness regarding safe sex than I evidently had been the previous two times. I'm pretty sure I won't, since I have also not had any noticeable physiological reactions like I did the previous two quarters. But I'm still slightly worried about it just because I tested positive twice before. I will feel much better once the test results come back. Oh, and because it's an annual physical as well, my blood will also be tested for cholesterol levels.
Kind of surprisingly, this was the first time I told him about my mom's 2014 stroke, which is obviously relevant information regarding family health history. He did reassure me that I am very healthy and don't have any greater risk for a stroke than any average person at the moment. (Maybe less, given the amount of exercise I get, and my lack of any other major health issues.) I also talked to him a little about my frustration with maintaining a goal weight, and he noted that just on average, you gain at least one pound per year just by getting older, and that only changes if you exercise more and eat even less. Fucking middle age metabolism! What a pain. That said, I'm still well within the healthy range of a BMI so whatever.
I even had a brief but interesting conversation with him about depression and anxiety, because he noticed the Hillary "H" from her 2016 campaign I still have pinned to my pea coat lapel. "Yeah, I'm keeping that until this man is no longer in office," I said. I also mentioned that I gained like 10 lbs stress eating after that election, but he also noted a noticeable uptick in antidepressant prescriptions after that election. I talked to him about my unusually laid-back attitude to life, and my aversion to anything I know will bring added pressures or stress (such as ambition at work -- and he told me he basically feels the same way, even though he's still, you know, a doctor -- I do data entry). And he brought up the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck (which, amusingly, he stated in its entirety -- doctors have changed!), which I have seen and considered reading and have assumed would mostly just affirm ways I already feel. But, since he brought it up, I think I might add it to my library reserve list after all. I might still learn one or two new things from it, right?
[posted 12:31 pm]