This Is Yesterday
I did not spend quite as much time with Shobhit's brother last night, for two reasons: First, I took myself to a movie straight after work yesterday, kind of just going through withdrawals after I've had far fewer opportunities to see movies, both because the pickings have been slim the last few weeks, and because of the distraction of lots of other things going on (Pride; 4th of July; both Ivan's and Puneet's visits). Finally abandoning my hope of seeing it with Gabriel -- as he himself had suggested months ago -- I took myself to see Yesterday, which was, honestly, meh. When I got home and Shobhit asked how it was, my response was, "Not as good as it should have been." A lot of it is well done, just not the script. So, even though Gabriel loves to go on and on about how I "only" give movies grades between B- and B+ (I will concede that does represent the majority, although I'm getting rather tired of explaining over and over how and why that's actually reasonable in the context of my personal approach to movie-going; still, out of 55 movies seen thus far in 2019, ten of them have been outside the B range -- that's 18%), I stand by the B- grade I gave it.
The second reason is that Puneet wasn't around for most of the evening himself: he didn't even get back from his education conference at the Convention Center until a few minutes after I got home. Shobhit made a quick dinner of taro root and frying some of our frozen parathas (which I helped with), and the three of us ate together in the living room, at which point I was having to take a break about halfway through writing my movie review. There wasn't a whole lot of talk or discussion this time, although there was some.
There was one kind of funny moment, when I had gathered most of our dishes and brought them back to the kitchen, and I was rinsing Shobhit's and mine before loading them into the dishwasher. Puneet had carried his own dishes, and was standing with them in his hands on the other side of the open dishwasher from me as I stood in front of the sink. I tried to just take his dishes from him, as logically that actually makes the most sense: it's not like the job I was doing was hard, and I was standing in the better spot for it anyway. But he truly, seriously refused to let me take the dishes out of his hands; he insisted on rinsing them himself and loading the dishwasher. This must have to do with his being our guest and wanting to feel helpful, but that sure was unnecessary. I kind of chuckled and just said, "Okay!" before heading back to the living room to finish writing my review.
When I was done and had posted the review, I came back out to the living room and Shobhit and I made chai for the three of us. Then Shobhit and I watched the third episode of Sex Education on Netflix, which Puneet kind of half-heartedly watched with us. He has been getting pretty sleepy fairly early each evening so far, which probably can mostly be chalked up to jet lag. I kind of wondered what he might have been thinking about a show so very frank about sexuality, assuming they don't tend to get shows even remotely like it in India, but by all appearances, he was pretty unfazed by it.
After that third episode, by the way, it pretty much cemented my opinion that I quite like that show a lot. It surprises me a bit that Karen, of all people, had recommended it to me; I would not necessarily expect her to have an interest in something so overt about its sexual themes. Shows what I know! I am particularly impressed with Gillian Anderson's performance as the mom, so completely does she disappear into the role that I was shocked when I realized it was her. For a long time I was incredibly depressed by how convincing her British accent was, having seen last week that she was born in Chicago -- turns out, she spent more than half her childhood in Britain, and to this day speaks in a naturally either American or British accent just depending on which country she's in; apparently she does currently live in London. In essence, the American accent she had in The X-Files and the British accent she has in Sex Education are both natural accents.
We didn't even get that episode started until just after 9:30, so it was 10:35 or so before I could even start getting ready for bed and around 11 pm before I was asleep. So that pretty much gets you caught up then.
[posted 12:21 pm]