back to basic—crap
Back to work!
I'm tempted to say this was the least productive Labor Day weekend I have had in decades, but, let's face it: I did not have any kind of "average" Labor Day Weekend in the past either. That said, this year's was certainly less social than last year's, even with last year's being probably less social than most people's: I did meet up with Laney the Friday of that weekend last year at Cal Anderson Park, for an outdoor cinema showing of the 2005 movie Kinky Boots. Based on my own archives, aside from taking myself to see two other movies in the theater (*sigh*—I do miss theaters), the closest thing to something "social" I did was take myself to Steamworks on Sunday night (*sigh*—I do miss being slutty). In other words, even accounting for "the pandemic effect," my Labor Day Weekend was indeed less eventful this year than last—but, not by much.
However! I did—finally—get back into movie reviewing! I posted not one, but two movie reviews! On Saturday, streaming on Netflix, I watched and reviewed I'm Thinking of Ending Things, the latest Charlie Kaufman head trip, which you have to actively find "further reading" to quite understand (and that alone I kind of take issue with). On Sunday, available for $2.99 rental on Amazon Prime Video, I watched and reviewed Fist Cow, which I quite liked but could think of few others who would like it much.
Because I am just a sort of lover of words, I kind of love that my first posted review after five months was called I'm Thinking of Ending Things. I also kind of love that the follow-up, only a day later, proving I am definitely not actually ending things (they were just put on pause), was called First Cow. Well, I like the "First" part of it; I can think of no extra meaning to the "Cow" part.
In any case, these activities killed a lot of time over the weekend, both the movie viewing and the review writing. They certainly prevented me from spending a lot of time on continuing to clean up my completely fucked up iTunes library (which took a big step backwards when I did nothing more than restart my computer; fun), or finally getting back to systematically digitizing my large library of home video cassettes. All of this is not to mention either my eventual "2020 in Ten Minutes" video collection I still plan to create and post by the end of the year; and this year's calendar design for Christmas gifts, even though God only knows what Christmas is going to look like this year. It's already September, which I really need to keep in mind: the year will be at its end before we know it. Frankly I'm anxious just to get past Election Day. Shobhit keeps saying it's "very likely" President Fuckwit will remain president next year, and I just pray he's wrong.
But I digress!
I did take a short walk (well, short for me—it's about two miles round trip) on Sunday to Volunteer Park and back, book in hand, just to get out for a while. And even though I got dressed and put on makeup as normal yesterday, I really could have gotten away with not bothering: I never even left the condo. Shobhit and I had watched two episodes of the Hillary documentary on Hulu Sunday night, but he watched three—I was on the phone with Gabriel and Lea and had missed the first episode, so I watched it yesterday while Shobhit was at work to catch up. I then finally, after a few weeks break, watched a few more episodes of Barkskins, also on Hulu.
When Shobhit got home from work we watched the last episode of Hillary, and I was very impressed with its presentation, especially given the last episode coverage of her devastating loss to the most despicable man in the universe in 2016. The episode wisely did not spend that much time on the devastation—just a few minutes—and then ended on an appropriate up note, with how President Fuckwit's win resulted in a kind of civic engagement and protest not seen in decades. And it's almost certainly true: this wave of movement in social justice would never have happened to anywhere near the same degree had Hillary won, and it would not have been any less needed, honestly.
I did have roughly ninety minutes or so of quasi-socialization, though, on Sunday evening (hence my missing that first episode of Hillary—which, again due to the "pandemic effect," I'm going to go ahead and call "social." Now granted, the call with Gabriel, and largely also with Lea as he put me on speaker, was not a video chat, so it was really just a phone call, which I don't generally count. But! It was sort of a "party line" call, in effect, which makes it different from a standard phone call, as does the very specific activity we did while talking, which to me is basically the clincher in its social classification: we concurrently looked through and commented on old photos of Pullman living while Gabriel and I were in college.
I was kind of astonished to realize the first year Gabriel and I met was 25 years ago. The "20 Years with Gabe I Mean Gabriel" video I made was already five years ago now—he was still with Kornelija then and even that already feels like ancient history.
Anyway. Gabriel and Lea were apparently comparing and contrasting their respective college dorm experiences, and Gabriel texted me to ask if I had any photos. Within minutes I responded and was like, "I have an entire photo album." I started looking through the photos, which I had not done in some time, and called him before he had even gotten to looking at them. He was trying to project them to his TV screen from his phone but was having trouble doing so while also talking to me, so I texted the link to Lea, and we all discussed the photos together as we tabbed through them concurrently. We looked at two different "Pullman living" photo albums and also found a few other photos from the time, most notably photos taken for the cover of Gabriel's and my first "talk tape," recorded in early 1996. Here's a choice shot, incorporating the lizards he had at the time.
It was a really fun trip down memory lane, actually. I also learned that Lea started college as a Freshman in 2003, which would be nine years after I did. "I'm going to go throw myself off the balcony," I said. Spoiler alert! It was an empty threat.
In other news, just when we thought 2020 had nothing else new and shitty to throw our way, after a brief break from it last year we once again have forest wildfire smoke from Eastern Washington blowing into Seattle, causing unhealthy air quality and smog. Blech. The weirdest part of it is that everyone is already wearing face masks anyway, for a completely different reason. I wore one once while riding my bike home from work a couple years ago and felt weird doing it. Now masks are just an everyday part of life. In any case, this animated gif from the National Weather Service is a pretty vivid demonstration of how the smoke is getting here—Shobhit was finding it hard to believe the Cascade Mountains would not block the smoke from us, until I showed him that.
And, once again, the smoke seems to be accompanying a heat wave, something we had blissfully avoided for most of this summer: forecast high of 86° tomorrow, 89° on Thursday. Blech! At least the high winds are also forecast to change by Thursday, so hopefully the smoke will have shifted back away from us by then.
Either way I am so ready for some fucking rain.
[posted 12:36 pm]