pride prep
I've got a pretty quiet week this week, until Friday kicks off a typically crazy Pride weekend. I discovered over this past weekend that not only does Jennifer want to join me for Pride with her boyfriend Matthew, her gay daughter Hope and Hope's gay best friend Josiah in tow -- that makes six of us on its own -- but both Gabriel (which is not at all unusual) and Danielle want to bring their daughters as well. This is totally fine and truly the more the merrier; it just means a potential group of us that numbers eleven.
Now, granted, a group that large as expected just by default increases the chances that someone will peel off al the group will wind up being smaller than anticipated in the end. I'd actually be delighted if everyone does show up. I do think I can pretty much rely on Gabriel showing up at the last minute before the parade begins. Then again, who knows what kind of influence Lea might have? Whatever the case, given Gabriel's strong history of joining me for Pride, between the two of them, Danielle is the one probably more likely not to make it. But! Danielle's intent is to bring Morgan, and they have semi-strained relations right now that could motivate Danielle to do something they can kind of bond over. Or, they could have some kind of mother-daughter drama that prevents them from coming. Who knows!
All I know is I have three friends or family members expressing interest in joining me, all three of them with kids somewhere on the LGBT spectrum: 16-year-old Hope (Jennifer's daughter) is gay; 14-year-old Morgan (Danielle's daughter) is . . . shit, not even I can keep up, I think maybe I had heard at some point she identifies as "pansexual"; Gabriel's 11-year-old daughter is transgender. All my best friends have queer or trans kids! That's kind of delightful, actually.
Anyway, God knows what kind of challenge having four overnight guests Saturday night might make this, but my aim is to get down to my favorite spot at 4th and Vine no later than 10am, preferably earlier, with at least four blankets to stake out space for up to eleven people. I like that spot because it's between the crowd barriers on the curb and a row of hedges, which helps prevent the crowd from squishing us in from behind.
As for last night? Shobhit and I watched the last two episodes of the current reboot season of Tales of the City on Netflix, which had a pretty predictable -- and definitive -- end, but made me cry anyway. I saw all the other iterations of this miniseries and its two sequels many years ago, albeit still well after their first airing in the late nineties and early 2000s, and I can barely remember it, but I still have a sense of them having been very much queer soap operas. So, even though Laney is right that the current season is largely very corny, that's not actually a huge change. I texted Laney when it was done, and one thing I said was that it tries a little too hard with its self-conscious "intersectional inclusivity," but that's still preferable to not trying at all, and in the end I quite liked it and was still moved by it.
One of the episodes is a flashback story about Anna Madrigal, the elderly trans woman played by Olympia Dukakis, only now it's her as a young woman arriving in San Francisco in the sixties -- and both Anna and many women she meets are played by actual trans actors, something earlier iterations of this show never even considered a possibility. So there is that, and I kind of love that every episode ends with the Pride flag stripes -- including the additional black and brown ones -- filling the screen; the one exception is this flashback episode, which ends with the Trans Pride flag stripes.
After that we watched Sunday's episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Prior to all this I walked with Shobhit to the post office, US Bank and QFC, and then we walked to the new Little Big Burger to get a veggie burger and fries, just so Shobhit could get a Social Review point for the day. He's got swing shifts all the rest of this week, through Friday, so this was the last chance until Saturday for me to spend any real time with him. We only shared the burger at a table, and we took the fries home because he wanted to be able to put his hot sauce on his half of them.
And then? This morning I got another fucking flat tire! Same wheel, the back one, two weeks to the day after I had that very tire replaced at 20/20 Cycle. I got the flat less than half the way to work this morning, so I took it on a bus the rest of the way from 3rd and Pine. I'll be taking it on the #2 directly back to that store after work today now, so I can get it fixed again. I have no idea if it was any error on there part, or if there is something about the wheel that makes it more prone to flats, or if -- and this is perhaps the most likely -- it's just a random coincidence.
All I know is it irritated me. It's never fun to get a flat no matter what, but given a choice I would much rather it happened on my way home from work rather than on my way to work in the morning. What a pain in the ass. And I don't even have a book with me to read on the bus!
[posted 12:16 pm]