the gabriel effect
I got some texts yesterday from Gabriel, having read in Friday's post that I'll be working at the Columbia City store this week—he lives like a block and a half from there right now—and "that blows my mind."
Huh. My immediate primary takeaway from this was: oh, he's looking at my blog again now? Last time my blog was mentioned, he told me he hadn't looked at it in a long time. And he's said that so many times, I said to him, "You tell me that every time we see each other." I began to assume he just didn't bother anymore. I didn't take that personally, either; not even my own husband reads every single day. (He does read most.) My assumption is that avid daily readers could probably counted on one hand. Maybe two, based on my Squarespace analytics.
I guess I can't talk shit about Gabriel here now. I'm kidding, relax! I haven't talked shit about Gabriel in my blog for literally years. I don't even want to anymore. He's moved into this rather jarring era of his life where he's especially open-hearted, sincere, and full of earnest affection. It takes all the fun out of talking shit about someone. These days he regularly says "I love you" unironically when we say our goodbyes and I always find it jarring. Not because it's so rare among a lot of people in my life, but because it's so different from how he would have behaved toward me in years past. But, he has also told me how much my loyalty as a friend through everything he's been through has meant to him. It's kind of astonishing to me how, after all the emotional turmoil he has endured, he has emerged on the other end arguably more deliberately vulnerable than he was before. Most people respond to hardship by closing themselves off as a defense mechanism, and Gabriel seems to have done the opposite. It can be so disarming that sometimes I just don't know what to do with it. If I don't say "I love you" back to him, for instance, it's not that I don't love him—in fact I have a deep love and affection for him that is unlike what I have with anyone else, my history and relationship with Danielle being the only one even remotely comparable—but because I am still so unused to it when he does that, I find myself thrown for a loop. I'll get used to it soon enough.
Anyway. A few minutes later Gabriel actually called me, to get a better understanding of why the hell I'll be working at one of the stores, and particularly the Columbia City location. He seemed a little baffled as to why PCC would expect office staff to help out Thanksgiving Week instead of, say, offering store staff overtime. Almost to suggest that PCC was kind of being cheap about this. Well, I never get the sense that store has a lot of extra help available as it is, but perhaps more pertinently, this tradition really is more closely tied to the "cooperative spirit." To me, my deliberate avoidance for 17 years (until now) notwithstanding, it actually kind of makes sense.
Gabriel doesn't work on Wednesday and he said he's going to come by and pester me with purchases that are strangely shaped and difficult to bag. Now that the Gabriel I know. Good to know he's still in there somewhere!
Actually I now pretty much intend to stop by his place to say hi after work tomorrow and perhaps Wednesday as well, although I have movie plans with Evan Wednesday in the U District; she really wanted to see Knives Out with me, a movie we are both very excited about. We talked about seeing it together weeks ago, and although she wound up unavailable to join me for JoJo Rabbit as we had also discussed, it turns out she was available to join me for this one. This makes me happy, as ever since she and Elden moved in together in Renton, I rarely get to see her anymore. That movie is not until 7:15 though and the tickets and seats are already purchased, so I will probably have time to stop by at least briefly at Gabriel's place. I'll have more time to hang out tomorrow.
I do kind of love that Gabriel lives in Seattle proper now, although I have little faith that he will in the long run—he just loves Tacoma too much, but then if he's with Lea for a long time and she stays employed at UW that could keep him here for the long haul. Yay Lea! Let's all send our thoughts and prayers to her getting tenure at UW (and at UG, University of Gabriel). It's just so much easier for me to visit him this way, just a roughly 20-minute Light Rail ride. It makes door-to-door closer to 35-40 minutes, which isn't that different from when he lived in Tacoma (well, except that he lived so deep in Tacoma that it always took nearly an hour to get to his place), but in this circumstance I can booze it up on the trip there!
In fact, that's exactly what I did in Friday—the most eventful day of this past weekend for me, because after I went home from work and baked some Costco eggplant parmesan for dinner and also had myself a stiff drink of apple cider and rum, I took the train down to Columbia City. It had been my suggestion that I come down and watch this week's episode of The Mandalorian with him. I had even texted him this suggestion as early as last Monday, and to my genuine surprise he basically confirmed right then. He doesn't usually plan even a few days in advance. Sheesh, I don't even know him anymore! Okay that's just a joke; do you have any idea how many times I've tried to say that? Hell, it happened when he shocked the shit out of me by being really into Madonna's Ray of Light album in 1998. Come to think of it, Gabriel has—for lack of a better word, get off my back, scientists!—evolved as a person probably more than anyone else I've known my whole life.
I would have liked to get down there by 6:30, but only made it by 7:30 mostly because of how long the eggplant parmesan had to bake. It was worth the wait because it was delicious. So then I was down at Gabriel's, hanging out with him at Tess (Lea, once again, was out of town on business), for just over two hours. The Mandalorian episodes tend to be little more than half an hour in length, but Gabriel was fond of pausing it frequently for discussion, so it probably took us more than an hour to get through it. Which was fine.
I actually would have liked to hang out longer, and I even could have gotten away with doing so, but I just wanted to be home at least soon after Shobhit got home from work, so I caught the northbound train at Columbia City Station at 9:51. It's easier to accept these shorter visits with Gabriel since it's easier to see him a lot more often these days. He's going to shoot up the charts on the next Social Review.
On Saturday, it was barely worth putting on makeup. I only walked to the library in the late afternoon to pick up a book, and that was the only time I left home all day. Otherwise, after watching The Crown in the morning with Shobhit before he went to work, I had my double feature of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. I actually had the theater downstairs reserved for this, and I bagged even using it; my attempt at having friends over for the multiple Star Wars double features this go-round has been a total bust, not one person showing up for them the last two double features I had, so I've stopped even reminding people I'm having them. 2019 is way different than the Star Wars anticipation that existed in 2015, it turns out. And also, predictably. How many times do I have to say having a Star Wars movie release once a year for five years straight would oversaturate the market!
Anyway. In another three weeks, I'll be watching a double feature of The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi, less than a week before I join Gabriel to see The Rise of Skywalker. I actually still don't own any of these new-trilogy movies on DVD, and I was a little concerned about that with this series of double features at first. Would I need to buy them just so I could watch them in the theater downstairs at The Braeburn Condos? Well, it doesn't matter anymore because no one is showing up for these! So, like I did this past weekend, I'll just watch them in the condo again—The Force Awakens is available on Disney+ and The Last Jedi is currently on Netflix. That makes it easy.
When Shobhit got home Saturday night, we watched more of season 3 of The Crown. I have no idea why, but I did not get tired at all that night, and we watched clear until midnight, which was very unusual for me. We watched another episode yesterday morning before Shobhit left for work yet again (the three days we take in December for the trip to Wallace, Idaho and Christmas Day will be his only days off until the new year; he's even working until 6:15 pm Thanksgiving Day at Total Wine—we still haven't even decided what we're doing for dinner afterward).
I actually hitched a ride with him on his way to work, and he dropped me off in the U District so I could go to the noon showing of A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, which I really loved. It will almost certainly be on my top 10 for the year. So, I bussed home afterward, and wrote the review. I worked a bit on my year-in-review video, which I am having trouble whittling down to my standard length of 10 minutes (and that's with a month and a half of holidays yet to yield more images and videos for the year). I watched a couple of comedy specials. I made veggie burgers for dinner, and had just-prepared chai ready for Shobhit with his burger when he got home. We watched one more episode of The Crown and then he spent an inordinate amount of time telling me about British royal succession going back centuries before I finally went to bed.
[posted 12:19 pm]