A Very Bad Saturday
Shobhit did not get home from his all-nighter working as an extra on a local commercial shoot Friday night until around 6:00 Saturday morning. He slept clear until about noon, giving him about six hours of sleep, at which point he got out of bed. In the past he has functioned just fine on even less sleep than that, but in this case he probably could have used more sleep. He spent much of the rest of the day seriously grumpy.
So, it really did not help matters when it seemed as though anything that could go wrong, did go wrong, on Saturday.
It pretty much all revolved around our rushed trip to do grocery shopping at the Greenlake Village PCC, which we might have had more time for but for my initial decision to ride my seat-less bike over to 20/20 Cycle and get a replacement for the seat that had been stolen in the U District Thursday evening. This turned out to be kind of surprisingly easy and quick, if about twice the cost I had initially estimated: we realized we couldn't just use Shobhit's employee discount at Big 5 Sporting Goods, as they sell bicycle seats, but not bicycle seat posts, as that had been swiped from my bike as well -- being far more securely affixed to the seat; the loosening clamp is for adjusting seat height using the post itself. So, when the thief took the seat, the loosened the clamp and within seconds just slipped the seat and seat post right out of there.
So, I bought a new seat for $25, and a new seat post for a little over $20. I also got a new, more secure clamp for $6. I did have other, cheaper options, particularly for the seat: they have a bin of cheap, used seats. I could have bought one for five bucks -- but, I figured, as long as I'm having to replace a seat that was never super comfortable to begin with, I might as well get a good quality one. Also all the used ones they had for sale had rips in the fabric. Being cheap about this did not seem the wisest choice to me. So, even though it put me way over budget, I decided to bite the bullet and get both a new seat, and a more secure clamp for the seat post. Now adjusting the seat post requires a tool; you can't just flip a lever to loosen it. That doesn't make it theft-proof, obviously, and it makes it a lot harder than it was to nab my previous seat in literally a matter of seconds. The guy at the shop even said, "Those clamps really don't make any sense, especially in the city." It made me think it's kind of a miracle my seat has never been stolen, in the eleven years I have had that bike.
Anyway! Nearly $60 poorer, I was back home in probably half an hour or so, maybe forty minutes. It seemed we therefore had plenty of time, albeit kind of barely, to get our grocery shopping done before Shobhit had to be at work at 3:00. And basically that was when the trouble started.
First, since this was our shop using the 10% member coupon that turns my 15% staff discount into 25%, and the ZuZu Luxe liquid eyeliners I use are in a rare month of them being on sale, I intended to get two of them: "Storm" (a dark blue) and "Onyx" (black). We got to the Health and Body Care (HBC) section, and the Onyx was out of stock. There was no staff in the department so we asked a cashier to call for assistance, and Bobbie, who knows me, came by. She explained they had been "contaminated" by the neighborhood's homeless (I don't know what that means exactly) and so she's had to reorder for the entire department. She did write out a slip we can use to come back another time and get the eyeliner at the discount we were there to use. But then, she pulled out the drawer of backstock and was surprised to find a bottle labeled "Onyx" and she handed that to me. I was thrilled and added it to the cart -- only to discover after we got home that it was actually mascara, not eyeliner. Fuck. Well, now I have both Navy and Onyx mascaras in spares in a second drawer, which I just need to remember when it's time again to replace those. I'm still out my Onyx eyeliner, though.
I also had coupons for free product with me, gifted to me recently by a broker, and I pulled two coupons for a free bag of Brazi Bites cheese bread balls from the frozen section from my wallet. I had set them in the small section of the shopping cart where people sometimes put their babies, and is where I usually keep the coupons I want to use. If I keep them in my wallet or my pocket, I will forget about them. But then when we were ready to go pay for the groceries . . . they were fucking gone. Shobhit and I both walked through every aisle looking to see if they were on the floor anywhere. Nope. And then several hours later, Shobhit discovered them in his own fucking pocket! I was so relieved to find out I actually still had them, I didn't even bother laying into him about how much he had bitched at me about being supposedly careless by putting them in the cart where they could get lost. (Which he did, incidentally, having forgotten that he himself had picked them up and put them in his own fucking pocket.)
And all of this isn't even the worst of it. That came when we went to pay for our groceries, I told the cashier I wanted to use my monthly 10% member coupon, and he told me his screen was telling him the coupon had already been used.
What?
He even turned the screen around to show me: it said I had already used my coupon. But, I had not. I began to doubt myself a little, so I looked into my budget spreadsheet – which I could even bring up on my phone because I am just OCD like that – and the one other time this month that we shopped at PCC, we spent only spent $36.55. Not in a million years would we waste our coupon on a transaction that small.
Also, another minor miracle discovered at home later: I still had my $36.55 receipt from 7/13! I remember specifically that the cashier on 7/13 asked if we wanted to use our member discount and we said no; maybe he had actually applied it without us realizing it? But, the total discount listed on that receipt only amounted to 15%.
So, the cashier this past Saturday asked for someone to come and assist us to try and look up when our coupon had supposedly been applied. A tall-ish gray haired guy came over, took my member card, and went upstairs with it. Shobhit and I waited for several minutes, to the point we began to wonder if the guy would ever come back down – we were in a bit of a hurry as Shobhit's shift started in just over an hour at this point. But this wait was long enough for Shobhit to really turn into an asshole, because he wanted to put all the blame on me for not having grabbed the larger tote bags out of the car; I only grabbed three standard sized totes out of the trunk; and so we had to use three paper sacks for all the groceries that did not fit into the three tote bags. He asked me no less than three times why I did not think to get the larger totes, until I finally said, "Because I'm a moron, okay? Can we just move on?" And he literally looked me in the eye and said, "Yes. You are."
That actually hurt. I took a beat, and then said, "And you're an asshole."
He replied, "Yes. I am." At least we're on the same page, I guess. Shobhit gets into these modes of such vindictive maliciousness, when his anger gets the best of him and all rational thought goes out the window, I sometimes wonder why I even stay with him. (I actually know why. It's because most of the time he actually is a sweetheart. Also, I could never live the life of comfort that I have without him. He's my anchor into a standard of living I don't want to give up. It's always good to note, I am not always a saint either.)
The guy who had taken my member card finally came back . . . and: he said he could not find the record of when the coupon had been applied. He also tried looking up his own, and Bobbie’s (we had just spoken to her for another reason over in HBC), and he could not find theirs either!
So, to his credit, he just went ahead and took my credit card and rebated me another 10% off the receipt as I had already paid for the nearly $200 worth of groceries (specifically, $197.35 after only getting 15% off initially). So then I got $19.74 back. Shobhit and I both felt better once we had at least gotten our proper discount, although we sure went through a hell of a lot of bullshit to get it.
We had our three totes and three paper sacks of groceries in the shopping cart, and we took it to the elevator down to the parking garage. The door opened, there was all of one bump of the wheels against the crack between the elevator floor and the garage floor, and . . . out of nowhere, one of the Cream Soda cans of Zevia Soda started spraying all over the place: on my arms, on the walls of the elevator. What the fuck? I pulled the six pack out of its bag -- unfortunately, one of the paper sacks -- and saw a small puncture on the side of the can, where the thin line of fizzy spray was bursting forth. It calmed down, and I carried the six-pack back upstairs with the punctured part pointed up to keep it from spilling. We did nothing to that can, so it must have been punctured already, and it was just the bump that shook the soda and made it start spraying out.
All the cashiers I could see were busy, so I flagged down the first employee I saw, a very young man who was probably just a bagger or something, certainly not part of store leadership. I told him I had just bought the soda and it suddenly started spraying everywhere, and could I exchange it for another. He was initially clearly a little suspicious, but then he said I could. I mean, it's not like I did not have the damaged product right there in my hand, and it would not have come from some other store -- no other place anywhere near there also sells Zevia Soda, to my knowledge.
We finally got everything home, and when we gathered up all of the bags from the trunk, one of the straps on one of the tote bags, which we have been using for ages, snapped and its contents fell all over the garage floor.
"This is just a bad day, isn't it?" Shobhit said. He then went on to start talking about how something wrong will probably happen at work and he might lose his job and the day wasn't over so plenty more bad things are bound to happen. I said, "Well of course they will if you expect them to." I didn't get this detailed, but this is the issue: when you expect your day to be bad, it will be, not because of some metaphysical force, but because you're too ready to react badly to things, not because bad things are ready to happen. There is truly no reason to expect the rest of your day to be bad just because it was bad earlier. That is patently dumb.
One the paper sacks had only a couple of things in it, and after we had rebagged all the stuff that Shobhit had spilled, the handle on my third paper sack snapped as well. At least that one was more quickly salvageable. I was sure careful about carrying the two paper sacks to the elevator though -- they were both packed rather full and they had not been double bagged.
Still, one silver lining: I can use those paper sacks for the recycle bin under the kitchen sink, and postpone the use of the plastic garbage sacks. Having to use a few paper sacks wasn't entirely useless. And when we had gotten back into the car at PCC Shobhit actually tried to yell at me about not grabbing the large tote that was under my seat as I sat in the passenger seat. Except, as I quickly pointed out to him, I had driven us there, at his request; he had been in the passenger seat when we arrived, and he did not grab those totes that were under his seat. And I added, "You're acting like this is a mistake I always make, and it is not. I didn't grab the tote bags, so what? I made a mistake! It's not like you never make mistakes." I mean, Jesus fucking Christ. They're just bags!
As I was putting the groceries away at home and Shobhit was getting ready to leave for work and was calmed down, he began acting more appreciative of things I was doing, and even apologized: "Sorry. I'm just tired." I replied, "That may be but it's not an excuse to be an asshole." I don't know how constructive that was, but I couldn't abide by just saying "That's okay," because it fucking isn't okay. Still, I quickly changed the subject so that wouldn't just hang in the air for too long, and things were pretty much fine between us the rest of the day and the rest of the weekend. He wanted to spend time with me when he could, outside of his many work shifts, and he even took me out to dinner last night at a place we both had never been to before and quite liked.
The rest of my weekend was rather nice by comparison, unusually low key and relaxed, actually.
I had a surprise run-in with Laney on Friday after work, for which she gets a surprise Social Review point, just because we sat down outside her apartment building and chatted for probably half an hour at least. That's social activity, it counts!
She lives right across the street from the Capitol Hill branch library, which I had decided to walk (not having access to my bike on Friday, as its seat had been stolen the night before) straight there to pick up another book that was ready for me. I was still only about halfway through John Waters's latest, so it was a good opportunity to spend that hour or so reading as I walked. (I did notice, still, no fewer than three construction holes for roughly 40-story residential towers along Denny alone; I came across yet a fourth yesterday.) I was just approaching the library, my face still pointed at my book, when Laney pulled up in her van, just coming home from work, and shouting out her window at me: "Hey!"
I wanted to get into the library before they closed so I still did that first, then came back outside and met up with Laney in her building parking lot. We wound up sitting in the shade on top of a short-ish concrete wall on the other side of some parallel-parked cars. She asked me what I was doing that evening, and I said I didn't even know for sure; I had considered contacting Gabriel but decided against it because a) he almost certainly was busy and not around Seattle, and b) even if he weren't, and we went out somewhere, I'd wind up spending too much and I was already over budget in my projected spending even though I just got paid that day. I thought kind of half-heartedly that maybe Laney and I could hang out for a bit, but she said she needed to take a shower and wanted to get to bed early. She had just done a bunch of unusual manual labor taking loads of junk from a property her company had purchased to the dump and to a recycling center. She was indeed pretty disheveled and, although I would not use the word "gross" as she did, I could she she'd probably at least feel better after a shower.
Nevertheless, we sat there and shot the shit for quite a while, and caught up on each other's lives. Laney is kind of rare among my friends in that we see each other more frequently than I see any of my other closest friends, and even if it's been only a few days since we last got together, we can still come up with plenty to talk about and catch up on. Although I did just realize, to be fair, in this particular instance we hadn’t hung out since the Kinsey Sicks show in Tacoma on July 12 -- fully two weeks prior. So, in this case it had been a longer span than usual between seeing each other. (We next get together this Friday, four our August Happy Hour.)
I then walked home and spent the rest of the evening by myself, drinking a couple of Black Opal cocktails and listening to the fantastic new Beyoncé album The Lion King: The Gift, which has only one song actually in the movie but otherwise is thematically attached to it, with lots of interludes featuring dialogue from the film, but otherwise packed with great songs featuring African musicians. It's kind of a "celebrating blackness" approach to the same kind of album that had been 1990's I'm Breathless by Madonna, which was "music from and inspired by the film Dick Tracy," and itself featured only three songs actually in the movie. Only in this case, it's both a better album and a far better movie.
As for my Saturday while Shobhit was at work, I took myself to SIFF Film Center at Seattle Center -- riding my bike on its brand new seat -- to see The Third Wife. It's the best movie I have seen so far this year, and I decided to stick with the solid A I gave it, in spite of some arguably dubious casting choices. The review itself even got a rare compliment by Faith on Twitter.
I had ridden back home on my bike, and then spent about an hour writing the review, and then I made pasta for dinner, which yielded four containers worth of lunches for the next week. I did a little bit of reading, but that pretty much accounted for the rest of my afternoon and evening. Shobhit got off work that night at 10:15 and he asked me to stay awake for him, because he felt like he hadn't been able to see me the past few days, which was true. Although we had just spent all morning together, albeit kind of at each other's throat. As is very common in such situations, he spent a lot of time afterward feeling bad about it. He never really says out loud that he feels bad, but given the effort he makes to be nicer, I can tell. I had a glass of brandy out for him at his request, along with a just-heated bowl of pasta for him to eat when he got home. I stayed up late enough for us to watch one episode of Cheers on Netflix, but then I was too tired and went to bed.
I then took myself to see yet another movie yesterday, this time at SIFF Cinema at the Uptown on Lower Queen Anne (which is all of about two blocks from SIFF Film Center at Seattle Center), to see the Marc Maron movie Sword of Trust. And even though after I described the premise to Shobhit last night he said, "It sounds awful" (and you know what? if I see a movie I think he'll like, I always tell him; why does he have to go out of his way to ask me how a movie I saw was just so he can shit on it?), it was actually very good, on its own, unusual terms. It's mostly improvised and given that, it's incredibly well put together and tightly edited, with a clear through line of its story and plot. I liked it a lot.
I went to the 11:15 am showing, and Shobhit had a shift yesterday starting at 11:00, so he gave me a ride. This was after we followed an online recipe to make blueberry pancakes from scratch, which honestly were not fluffy enough. I should see if I can find other scratch recipes that can make them fluffier. Maybe I just added too much extra milk when Shobhit declared the batter too thick. I didn't think I added very much, but maybe I did. We can always try again. The flavor still wasn't too bad.
Anyway! Even though I had the bike as an option, yesterday I took Shobhit up on his offer to drive me to the theatre on his way to work, so I could then walk home after the movie reading more of my library book so I can burn through more of it. It's due back at the library this weekend and I already have another book at home to start.
Then I wrote that review, which took me to about 3 p.m. After that, I actually spent some time reading some more, not particularly in the mood to burn through my Sunday afternoon watching something. I also fell asleep and napped for a while in the living room, suddenly insanely tired, which was weird given that my alarm did not go off when I thought it would in the morning (because I had accidentally set it to pm instead of am), resulting in my sleeping over eight hours and the Sleep Cycle app telling me -- for the first time, I think -- that I'd had "100% sleep quality." I think its parameters for such measurements are pretty simple, though: length of time sleeping and amount of "rustling" or snoring that it detects through the night, which can easily get skewed by detecting the movements of a second person in the bed. But you know . . . whatever.
When Shobhit got home from work after getting off at 6:45, so he was home around 7:15, he asked what we should have for dinner, and I said, "I though you could take me out for dinner." And so that's what we did. That was easy!
He asked me to search online for ideas, and I got onto Yelp and found A-Pizza Mart, a new-ish place on 11th off of Pike Street that Shobhit has said in the past he wanted to try. So we went there.
We ordered way too much. We ordered two calzones and one to share was more than plenty. So, we packed the second one to take home, where I split it into halves and we have that for our lunches today. He also ordered a "pesto cheesy bread" appetizer dish that people online rightfully raved about, and we could only get slightly less than half that one down, after eating half a calzone each. And that actually wound up being split into two more lunches. Between that and the four leftover boxes of angelhair pasta from Saturday, I think we're both set for lunches for at least three days this week. So that's good.
We also used a coupon to buy two-for-one pints of ice cream at Cupcake Royale on our way home. I just took a couple of -- truly delicious -- bites of the salted caramel cupcake one. Shobhit himself had some angel food cake, and then some of the leftover pasta from what I had made for him on Saturday -- he really threw back a lot of food last night, it was getting a little ridiculous. I knew already my weight would be up this morning after that "brunch" of pancakes and then all that pizza last night. At least the damage wasn't too bad when I weighed myself this morning -- up as expected, but only by all of 0.3 lbs. The trick today is to stick with my commitment to not snacking on anything between meals at work.
[posted 12:18 pm]