Mala and Vega 2020
I did some more socializing! Back at it after a six-day break; 11 days if you exclude lunch with Karen last week.
I guess I'll get this aside out of the way first: going out after work last night took me in the opposite direction from usual, which resulted in my incredibly narrow miss with yesterday's mass shooting downtown that killed one person and injured seven others. It happened outside the long-sketchy McDonald's on 3rd & Pine, the intersection I get off the bus at in the morning before walking the rest of the way to work, and which I walk through on my way home after work most days—at least, in winter months when I am not biking (I take a different route on my bike).
The shooting apparently occurred at 5:01, and I usually leave work at 4:30—and did yesterday. It typically takes me just under half an hour to reach that intersection, which would have gotten me there within minutes of it occurring. I read there was an altercation between certain people outside the McDonald's before guns were drawn. The way I see it, in all probability I would have walked through there just before it went down, and narrowly avoided an apparent transit shutdown downtown that lasted several hours. It's possible I would have even seen the beginning of the argument, at which point I would have just moved swiftly on my way anyway. Honestly I think I probably would have passed through even before the altercation started, and then later marveled at how narrowly I missed it.
As it was, though, because old Trikone-NW friends Mala and Vega were briefly in town, I actually walked north instead of south after work yesterday, meeting up with them at Daniel's Broiler on South Lake Union. No one at the restaurant was looking at the news, and we spent so much time just catching up that we were all completely ignorant of the shooting downtown until much later. In makes sense it would take a while anyway; it was just after 5:00 when I arrived. In fact, I learned of it from a text that came from Laney at 6:50: Hey just checking in. Shooting today again downtown. I think it happened later than you leave work but let me know you're alive 😊
It turns out Lynn actually messaged me first, I see only now that I'm looking at the time stamps, at 6:44 on Facebook Messenger: You ok? was all she sent. I'm glad I did not see the notification of that message until after I got Laney's text, because that would have confused me: Why wouldn't I be okay? But now I knew what she was talking about, and I assured her I was indeed okay. And for this reason—getting two texts from different friends barely more than five minutes apart—I posted the reassurance to Facebook as soon as I got home.
But before all that, it was just about visiting Mala and Vega. Amazingly, it has now been more than a decade since they moved to Maryland; they left Seattle in 2009. I first met them as major organizers in Trikone-NW when Shobhit and I got together in 2004, which means I knew them all of five years when they moved away, and more than twice that span of time has elapsed since. I sure am glad they come back to visit every few years, though; in fact I last saw them back in February 2018, for the Trikone-NW 20 Year Celebration. Two years ago was recent enough, I decided not to get a photo with them this time. I will next time, probably.
The email they had sent out said they would be at Daniel's Broiler between 4 and 6 p.m., and when I arrived at about 5:05, I was first to arrive besides them, which gave me just a few minutes to visit with them on my own. They had apparently been there since 4:20. I learned about how busy they are, as always, and that they currently live in a condo across the hallway from Mala's 82-year-old mother, for whom she works as care giver (which is why she can never travel for very long periods), living in her own condo. This is in Silver Spring, Maryland, across the street from the city limits of Washington, D.C.—which Vega said was very deliberate, as they like to be that close to Washington (as in, directly across the street from it). But, apparently Vega's parents, who are 80 and 85, found a condo of their own in a place roughly halfway between D.C. and Baltimore—I forget the name of it—at which Mala and Vega found a new condo for themselves, with another new condo for Mala's mom once again across the hallway on the same floor, in another building next door to Vega's parents in the same development. They'll be moving there in April, and thereafter will not only be across the hall from Mala's mother but in the building just next door to Vega's parents. Apparently Vega's parents previously lived in the north side of greater Philadelphia, which was a much longer way for Vega to visit. Now it will be obviously a whole lot easier for them all the way around.
I got all that information before Shobhit even arrived, at around 5:40 as he got off work in Northgate right at 5:00, and I relayed it to him when Vega was struggling to finish chewing some of her food. I had also gotten the shocking news from Mala that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer just this past September—but they caught it so early that, by all accounts, she is now fine and will be fine. She did have to get radiation treatment and she is experiencing a lot of soreness, which is why when I first gave her a hug she said, "Gentle hug, gentle hug!"
A few other people arrived after I did but before Shobhit, a couple of whom I recognized from Trikone-NW and one woman, named Alison I think, who recognized me from some event many years ago but I did not remember her; we wound up chatting quite a bit for several minutes, largely about public transit and urban living, in my case without a car. The first couple of women to arrive came with a baby in tow, and I had met Mala and Vega at a tall table in the bar; the group moved out to tables in the lobby where our waitress said she could still serve us, but she could not allow the baby in the bar. Apparently the Washington State law against anyone under 21 in a bar is very strict and also applies even to babies: "I could literally lose my job," she said. She was very gracious about it, though. So, we all went out to the lobby for a while, and that's where we were when Shobhit arrived. He parked in a pay lot without paying and made a calculated risk, which paid off: no ticket when we left maybe 45 minutes later.
Mala and Vega did not want to lose their table in the bar, so some of the food was left in there, and when a couple more people arrived, Vega took part of the group back there. Mala clearly preferred to keep the entire group together, but we had to split up for a bit until the lady with the baby left and the rest of us could go back into the bar, which we did. And Shobhit ordered a Manhattan and a fries basket with tartar sauce. I had budgeted $40 for this, then decided against ordering anything because even the Happy Hour cocktails were too much, and then Shobhit ordered the fries and drink and paid for them himself—so, still recouped my budgeted forty bucks, yay! I opted not to have anything more for dinner when we got home, knowing the fries would be a massive calorie bomb; I was right: my weight was up 0.2 lbs this morning, and it would have been by a wider margin had I still had something else for dinner. These things really do affect my weight on a day to day basis.
Anyway, many of the rest of them were headed over to MOHAI afterward—that being the reason for the choice of nearby Daniel's Broiler—to view the "Beyond Bollywood" exhibit about local Indian Americans, which ends on the 26th and apparently features a Trikone-NW photo from 2004. The photo will definitely have Mala and Vega in it, and it might even include Shobhit. But, Shobhit and I had to be somewhere else by 7:00 and so we had to go; also I'm not sure it's worth paying the $21 admission just to see a photo I've already seen before. I do think it's very cool that the exhibit is there.
We then needed to go to the Xfinity Store, which we barely made it to before they closed at 7:00—and I do mean barely: after taking a wrong turn (which Shobhit had insisted I do while I was driving and complained about how people don't listen to him when he "always knows what he's talking about" . . . uh huh) and going partly up Capitol Hill and turning around, then overshooting the final turn and turning around yet again, I still managed to park and rush over to the door at literally 6:59. There were still some other customers in there anyway. In any case, we needed to reassure Shobhit, and clarify some confusing things the customer service agent I had called earlier on the phone had told me, but I signed up for a new 12-month contract that gets the bill I just got that was $175 back down to roughly $155. But, contrary to what I had been told on the phone, I did not need to swap out our DVR for a new machine.
I think Comcast—or Xfinity, what the fuck ever—really has some organizational issues, and maybe they are just too big and lack what should be far better uniformity of messaging across places and sources. Such as, say, between employees on the phone and employees at the store. We had just been there on the 10th and at that time they said they had no packaged contract to offer us and give us a new, lower price, and that was after the bill had already jumped up roughly $20. We explored what options they said they had, and thinking it would just be $165 for the foreseeable future, I then got the next month's bill and it jumped another fucking ten bucks! One consistent message we did get was that this was due to the previous contract expiring mid-billing cycle. They recommended coming in to ask for a new package deal before it expires next year, except that was precisely what we were trying to do on the 10th of this month and on that day they said they had no fucking offers! Jesus Christ. They can't even tell us the same thing from the same place on different days.
But whatever, I have a new 12-month contract and I can live with it being increased all of ten bucks a month, which is way better than a $30 increase. Hell, maybe they put us through this bullshit just to make us feel okay about a ten-dollar increase!
So I finally drove us home after that, where I made the smart decision of not eating any more. I updated my budget, we watched the second episode of season 2 of Sex Education on Netflix, and I went to bed.
And today, only six days after the last one (because last week's had been postponed from the week before), I just got back from another lunch with Karen down at the Six-Seven Restaurant at the Edgewater Hotel!
I didn't even realize until just after lunch and we were parting ways that, considering the postponement that resulted in lunch last week, we would have done well to postpone this one to next week. Our defaults are the second and fourth Thursday of every month, and just because of the day on which February starts, the second Thursday in February is not until the 13th—just one day shy of the latest a second Thursday could ever be. That means it's not until three weeks from now, and we already just canceled our February 27 lunch completely, as I will be with Shobhit in Sydney on that date.
And of course, we talked a fair bit, yet again, about my Australia plans, and about the bushfires, and how much devastation from them we are bound to see. It did occur to me that, since we will spend most of our time in major cities, there are only three days in which we are even likely to see charred earth: the two days on Kangaroo Island, nearly half of which has been burned; and the all-day train ride between Sydney and Melbourne, parts of which had to be replaced by rerouting bus coaches due to fires in that region—although that may be done now, and almost certainly will be when we're there. But, presumably, we will still see fire damaged areas during our 11-hour train ride.
Karen also told me about a book she's reading, called Old in Art School, and how its descriptions of sixty-something women so well described her. I had forgotten she is 61 already. "I still think of you as in your fifties!" I said, and she replied, "Feel free!"
We shared the flatbread this time, which is both lighter and cheaper than the gyro sandwich, which for once I decided to skip since we just had it six days ago and we haven't had the flatbread in ages. Also, we made tentative plans for me to come by her place on Saturday and look through her box of international travel supplies, and see if maybe I can get another power adaptor without having to buy one or two more.
Now though, I should probably get back to work.
[posted 1:23 pm]