up loads
I never mentioned yesterday that Shobhit came home with takeout for lunch, from a place he found at Othello Station called Café Red. He had initially suggested bringing home takeout from Hudson, the place near Costco—where he went without me to go shopping yesterday morning—but, then I guess he looked up highly rated places on Yelp. Café Red was just a few miles away and has an average five-star rating from 58 reviews. Not a huge number, but still impressive. He got a vegan breakfast burrito and two sandwiches, all of which we cut in half and shared. The burrito was meh, but the sandwiches were great and I would go back again for that reason. The trick will be just remembering the place at all in the future.
So then we get to last night, which was spent largely in the bedroom while Shobhit was attending his virtual Project Management class. He made salad for dinner, a gargantuan amount, so much so that, even though he somehow managed to polish off one of the two huge bowls needed to contain it all (one a mixing bowl, the other one of our deep pots), when I put all the rest into leftovers containers I still filled nine of them.
In the meantime, I edited and uploaded a few more digitized old home videos to my Flickr account. First was Christopher and Katina's wedding in 1995, the video clips now at the end of that photo album, the camera shifting wildly all over the place because Katina's brother Andy swirled it all around the audience in the church for much of the time. You might get motion sickness watching it.
Speaking of weddings, this got me to thinking last night about how many weddings I have attended whose marriages have long since ended. Looking at the history now, though, I realize plenty of people whose weddings I attended are indeed still together, although granted many of them are more recent: Mom and Bill made it 23 years before Mom died, but they are the only couple from that list who made it for the long-haul. Besides that, we still have Brandi and Nick (going on eight years); Nikki and TJ (seven years); Gina and Beth (five years). Britni and David are still married of course, but that's not even yet two years.
Dad and Sherri would be included in this list, except I am only talking about weddings I attended. I was seven years old when they got married—a month and a half from turning eight—and actually did really want to go. But Jim Duffy (the man we lived with and who molested me) and Christopher teamed up to convince me not to go, because divorce was "against god" (I say that in quotes as a sentiment, I don't recall if the specific phrase was used). Note here that I do not begrudge Christopher at all in this instance; he was all of eleven years old at the time himself. This was all one example, of many, of Jim Duffy's sinister bullshit. To this day I wish I had been at Dad and Sherri's wedding.
Anyway! The other video clips I uploaded were from a 1996 college Spanish class group project, which the four of us made very absurdist and I now find rather amusing: we called it Los 14 Días de la Navidad de Nela (translation: Nela's 14 Days of Christmas) and had a great time making it, and also really amusing our professor in the process. I was always much better at Spanish in writing and far worse at actually speaking it than others around me, which I think remains the case in this video, but it still cracks me up what we did. As I recall, the assignment was to make a ten-minute video, which I really could have done by tightening up the editing (to be fair, that was always far harder with VHS than it later became with digital editing), which means that because the video wound up being just over 11 minutes, with Flickr's ten-minute limit I had to split it in two.
So, you can go here to view roughly the first half, then click the link in the caption below for the second half.
I had a comparative burst of home video content between 1992 and 1994, using mostly the heavy, shoulder-carried video camera Grandma McQuilkin had. Home video content I have from 1995, 1996 and 1997 is limited to rare events where someone else's camera was used but I was able to dub onto my own tape: Christopher and Katina's wedding in 1995; this Spanish group project in 1996; Mom and Bill's wedding in 1997 (which I already uploaded to Flickr after digitizing it for the video I made of Mom after she died last summer). So, next up is 1998, when Dad and Sherri gave me a much smaller, better camcorder as a fantastic college graduation gift, and begins a long stretch of a lot home video content each year between 1998 and 2004. After that, all my video clips are already digitized, thanks to the evolving capabilities of smartphones—although it does mean there's comparatively little between 2004 and about 2008, mostly because I got so into digital photography that I stopped thinking much about taking videos.
Anyway, after Shobhit's class was done, I convinced him to start watching the HBO Max miniseries that was released just yesterday, but I heard on one of my podcasts was very good: It's a Sin, about a young group of friends, mostly gay men and one straight woman, living in London at the dawn of the AIDS crisis in the early eighties. It's very well done, although for once Shobhit isn't as excited by the fairly large amount of male nudity, because he knows that in this context it's depressingly and often fatally consequential. And it's true, I would expect it to get less and less lively as it goes on, but I still look forward to watching the rest. We watched two episodes and have three to go.
[posted 12:32 pm]