So, yesterday I got two hours with Gabriel. Actually, closer to an hour and fifty minutes . . . I decided to give him a few minutes instead of being a hardliner about the 4:00 time we had agreed on the time before. That actually prompted him to call me before it was quite yet 4:10, and when I said I was giving him "a ten minute buffer," he clearly took it as a dig, which I did not intend it as. I was just trying to be flexible. Then, when the call ended, it was mostly because his iPad battery was dying. And when did it die? The screen went black at 6:00 on the dot! How's that for nice and organized? Or serendipitous? Or . . . you know what, never mind.

I managed a nice 25-shot Flickr photo album yesterday, with only, let's say, two photos I would call filler, meant to pad out the album. I guess you could use that word also for the four staged photos I took with Gabriel's screenshot photo on my iPad in the Braeburn Condos p-patch after the call was over, but I did that less as "filler" than as a means of finding some scenery other than just the interior of my condo, which gets old fast, when it comes to photos. If I had a 3G connection and could actually get on FaceTime outside anywhere, I would actually hold these calls in these places. But, since I can't access wifi in places like the p-patch, I have to make do with staged photos. Besides, I'm also amusing myself by doing that, and that's what counts! Right?

For my drink of choice, I had a rare shot of the straight Selección Suprema Tequila, just because I felt in honor of Gabriel I should imbibe something pure in terms of spirits—he always just has a straight glass of bourbon, after all. And that's what he's holding up on the iPad in the photo above.

Anyway. Gabriel indulged me for a couple of hours, which was kind of him. He was out on the roof outside Tess's bedroom window when we got on FaceTime, both of us on our iPads. Fully in character for him, one of the first things he brought up was how Laney had made a "Happy Birthday" sign for me on Friday and then Jennifer had Hope create one that blew Laney's out of the water on Saturday (I do not think that was the aim, mind you; Hope is just incredibly talented), and he was absolutely not making any kind of sign or doing anything visually elaborate for me. He felt that it would be too easy for my daily posts of what people have done to become a competition where people felt they had to one-up the person from the day before, and he was here to break that chain. Furthermore, that would release anyone who came after him from feeling any obligation to up the ante thereafter.

My friend, Gabriel: not the hero we want, but the hero we deserve.

For some reason, though, he still sang me "Happy Birthday." With a used but lit menorah candle, stuck into a pumpkin scone. I mean, that alone was an effort, still more than I expect from anyone, and I would argue even more than he was trying to say he would refuse to do. I think his point was that his "Happy Birthday" moment to me was deliberately janky, but I loved it anyway, so, joke's on him! I thought it was hilarious.

Gabriel likes to sit out there with his legs dangling over the ledge, waving at people both walking and driving by. It happened several times during our call. And then after talking about all sorts of things, many (but hardly all) of them inevitably COVID-19 related, he took me back into the apartment via Tess's bedroom window. I wanted to be able to say hi to Lea too—I would have wanted to include Tess as well, but this was the half of the week she spends over at Stephanie's.

Lady was very eager to be included as well, however.

I'd say we spent maybe ten or fifteen minutes chatting along with Lea there. I had asked what the best show is that they watch together, and it turns out there's not a huge number of shows they watch together, besides RuPaul's Drag Race. They are apparently just waiting for an appraisal to go through and then they will be on track with a plan to move into a newly purchased house in Federal Way at the end of June. I have a feeling I won't get to spend time with them in person again until we're in vaccine territory, though, which takes us well into 2021 at the soonest. That makes me sad.

They had already paid for both a birthday present and a Christmas present for Tess, and both had to be canceled: a Taylor Swift concert, and a trip to Disneyland. The closure of theme parks like Disneyland is fascinating to me. I wondered aloud when that might open again, and Lea said they projected it would be 2021. Again, because it will have to wait until there is a COVID-19 vaccine. And of course, Disneyland is just one of a huge number of massive revenue-generating places, events, and attractions that are on hold indefinitely. We're many weeks into this now, with likely months of it to go, and it's a strange thing to have a simultaneous sense of a "new normal" and an endless sense of being in surreal circumstances. How I'm having to approach my Birth Week this year is a comparatively minor case in point.

So, Gabriel's iPad died at 6 pm sharp, and almost immediately afterward I went down to the p-patch to stage those photos with Gabriel's face on my iPad. I kept thinking about how virtually every condo surrounding it with overlooking windows probably had people home, and some of them might have looked outside and seen some schmo doing something . . . very odd. Whatever! You cope with these circumstances your way, and I'll do it mine. I texted Gabriel the photos I took, and he either was indifferent to them or annoyed that I was outside without a mask on. Hey, no one else was out there!

I came back inside, did my requisite Birth Week social media post, and then heated up leftovers with fried-up frozen parathas for Shobhit and me to have for dinner once he got home from work close to 8:00. I also made chai, and we ate while watching this week's Westworld, which I actually thought was kind of terrible. Shobhit said the show was renewed for a fourth season, which genuinely shocked me: not just that they renewed a TV show in the middle of a long stretch of no TV or movies in production, but one that has had significant declines in viewership with every season. And I'll probably still keep watching, because I'm too easily attached to characters, I guess, even when they become preposterous.

I kept myself relatively busy earlier in the day before the call with Gabriel. I watched the second episode of The Plot Against America on HBO Go. I also made cashew butter chocolate chip cookies, stupidly leaving them in five minutes too long when they seemed too soft after the recommended 10 minutes (rookie mistake). Otherwise I just farted around online most of the morning and early afternoon—oh, except that Shobhit made pancakes from scratch for breakfast, which was very nice. One of these days I'll actually pick up my library books and start reading again.

[posted 12:22 pm]