potatoes & more
Yesterday after work, I walked home as usual, this time going half a block out of my way on Broadway to the Bank of America Versateller where I took several hundred dollars in cash out of my checking account. Uncle David and Mary Ann are apparently taking another cruise next year and, although it has no U.S. stops (closest being Vancouver, B.C.), apparently U.S. currency is what is used on board. In a recent email he said that it would be easiest for them to do all the paying with their credit card when we visit them in South Australia, and at the end we can give them some American cash which they can save for us on that trip. This request is more than fair, and I'm glad to have it in hand and already be prepared now. Shobhit and I are about as prepared and efficient with our planning of this trip as we possibly can be, and even acknowledging the likelihood of some surprises and complications here and there, I am feeling very confident and comfortable with our preparedness thus far.
I mentioned to Scott and Noah just yesterday that this will be by far the most expansive—and expensive—vacation I have ever taken. I keep making the mistake of thinking of my time off from work as only two weeks, except it's the trip itself that is two weeks (that alone being double the longest I have ever been away from home in all the time I have had a permanent, full-time job; my trip to San Francisco with Grandma and Grandpa McQuilkin in 1999 was three weeks long, granted, but I did not have a job at that time). But because we leave on Monday next week, and return the evening of Monday two weeks later, I am thereby making the tactical decision of not coming in to work the first day after that either, just to spend time recovering and getting my bearings back to the Pacific Standard time zone. This means my time off from work includes next week, the week after, and both Monday and Tuesday the week after that: effectively, two and a half weeks off.
This year will also therefore have more time off of work than I have had since I was taking two days off a month to visit Shobhit in L.A., and that ended in 2016. Taking the monthly trips to see Shobhit out of the picture (so, excluding 2010-2016), this is the most days off I'll have taken in a given year since . . . holy shit, since 2000! Although the 28 travel days in 2009 came close.
So, anyway. That's twelve weekdays off of work for this Australia trip alone. And although Australia is precluding any other major trips in 2020—as in, no other travel outside the Pacific Northwest—I do still have the requisite 5 more days off planned for my Birth Week; at least one day off for Shobhit's and my anniversary which hopefully will involve the weekend stay in Portland that had to be canceled last year; and at least one day off each for two visits to see Mom and Bill in Idaho. Added to the day off I already took for New Year's Day, that makes a total of 21 days PTO planned for the year 2020, which is more than I have ever taken off at this job outside the years I was visiting Shobhit in New York or L.A. And actually, in those years I took a lot less PTO strictly speaking because I was working an extra hour every day I worked so I would not have to use vacation time for the two days a month to see Shobhit. That means in 2020 I'll be using the most PTO hours I've ever used, by a pretty large margin. And that's with Australia as the only time off that is out of the ordinary or extra in any way—but, twelve days' worth of PTO is a lot of extra!
Shobhit got home from work just a little while after I did yesterday, and he asked me to do some chopping for him: onion, green onion, celery, peppers, radishes, carrots. After he was home I also chopped some weird variety of mushroom I had never seen before which he apparently got at an Asian grocery store when I wasn't looking, and also one of the blocks of paneer. He chopped a bunch of small potatoes. His aim right now is to get through all the perishable foods we still have at home because we'll be away for two weeks and it will go bad otherwise. It's a smart idea.
We watched this week's episode of The New Pope, and then barely managed to get through this week's episode of Avenue 5—not nearly as good as it was last week—through endless fits and starts, because the HBO Go app on the Apple TV box kept crashing. It was driving me insane.
During The New Pope, though, we wound up getting into a profoundly ridiculous argument, because a simple question I asked about a character motivation, which truly had nothing to do with modern American politics, somehow incited him into a wildly crazy diatribe about Bernie Sanders, and how he refuses ever to vote for that man even if he is the eventual Democratic nominee. He's just so incensed that Bernie supporters in 2016 who refused to vote for Hillary Clinton thereby gave us Donald Trump—something that is, arguably, largely true—he's willing to accept even promoting a current status quo that hurts himself just in the name of achieving the goal of not giving Sanders supporters what they want.
What the fuck any of this had to do with what the Secretary of State of the Vatican was doing on the TV show The New Pope, even now I haven't the slightest idea.
The even crazier thing is, it remains totally unclear, maybe even still unlikely (god, I hope), whether Sanders will get the nomination. If he doesn't, then all of Shobhit's histrionics will have been for nothing (well, they will have been for nothing either way, really). Even Sanders does get the nomination, he will surely carry Washington State whether Shobhit votes for him or not, so really, functionally speaking, Shobhit can vote for whoever the fuck he wants. This would be a lot bigger deal if we lived in a much more typically contested swing state, say, Wisconsin or even Ohio. Still, Shobhit worked himself into such a frenzy about this, he even went so far as to say "If it means we'll end up getting a divorce, then so be it!" What the fuck? If I didn't know any better I'd wonder if he was having a psychotic break. And all this over something I never brought up to begin with! All I did was ask why a character on a TV show was suddenly behaving counter to his professed beliefs up to that point. Somehow, that clearly touched a nerve.
After a few minutes, Shobhit mentioned being "drunk," almost as if to explain away his thoroughly irrational behavior—and there was a lot more that went into this conversation, which was very indicative of Shobhit's depressive state of mind regarding his professional life and future prospects. Shobhit gets upset and he lashes out, at innocent bystanders, which most of the time is just me. He settled down after a while, and thank God I did not get overtly hostile through all of this (and it would have been very easy for me to), or else the whole thing would have been way worse. After some time he asked, "Are you still mad at me?" That age-old question that is always functionally rhetorical, because it never indicates any desire to get to the bottom of any of the issues we're having—only a desire that the most recent manifestation of those issues be over. Which is not the same thing, and does nothing constructive for either of us. My answer this time was just, "That's a complicated question," and he responded with a surprisingly sincere sounding, "It is." Which, in its own way, was some tiny bit of progress.
But then the fucking Apple TV box was making me more mad than anything, by which time I really was not feeling any animosity toward Shobhit, but I was so over the technical issues that I finally just went to get ready for bed.
[posted 12:39 pm]