getting through it
I'm starting to get tired of how consistently stressful my job is becoming lately, and I really think the biggest reason for it is just volume: 15 stores now, emails coming in from all of them. Almost never all fifteen at once, thankfully, but enough of them to put a real burden on my work load. And, increasingly, people from different stores have their own opinions about things that should be done or how they should be done, resulting in even more email responses explaining that something has to be done a certain way or why.
And you know what else? This would all be notably less stressful if I were working at the office, I am fairly certain. Work stress is more than enough without added stresses from home: regular distractions from Shobhit while he is at home; my fucking cat meowing so incessantly I want to throw him through the window; cleaning up cat vomit, etc. There's a reason we want to separate our work lives and our home lives, and here I'm bitching about cats—I cannot fathom the crazymaking distractions of children while working from home. I would truly go insane.
I guess I feel a tiny bit better just having vented about it. I mean, whatever.
Let's talk about what I did over the weekend then. I did watch and review three movies in as many days: Friday was Nomadland (excellent: A-); Saturday was I Care a Lot (pretty good: solid B); yesterday was Supernova (very good: B+). The latter two were watched before it was even noon; I even had the review on Saturday written and posted by noon—yesterday's about an hour later than that. This was mostly just because Shobhit started work an hour later yesterday than he did on Saturday, 9 a.m. rather than 8 a.m.
This in turn gave me time in the afternoons to work on editing digitized old home videos into manageable clips I could upload to Flickr. I feel like I made good progress on this front, getting everything uploaded through Christmas 1998 (I had already uploaded that particular Christmas a while ago anyway).
I now have all the relevant video clips uploaded to my college graduation photo album, and then the move to Seattle. In between them is an album of the tape I recorded with Gabriel and Suzy my final night in Pullman in June 1998, but I have marked all of those as private so no one can see them, just because of some of the kind of R-rated subject matter we talked about, and knowing Gabriel wouldn't want that public. Then there was Barbara's visit in July 1998 (5 video clips added); Independence Day with Danielle, Seth and Shannon (one video added); Peng as a kitten as that was the year I got him (this clip is especially adorable); and Thanksgiving 1998.
I did add just one more edited clip to the 1998 Christmas photo album (during which I strangely never took any still photos, only video), so I could send it to Sherri and Gina: the present, if I remember right, that Gina had given Sherri as a kid, Sherri gave it back to Gina, and so Gina gave it to David to give back to Sherri again as a present. Everyone thought this was hilarious, and Sherri told David she was going to save it to give it to his wife when he got married. I don't think David and Jackie are married (or are they? I can't keep track) but I texted the video to them as a possible Christmas gift to Jackie this year. It's hard to tell what it is in the video; Gina said over text this morning it's a cat with a tail you store rings on.
Unfortunately that tape of Christmas 1998 is more degraded than any of my other tapes were, and so in the digitized clips there's a lot of picture fuzzing and flipping vertically. I edited the clip as best I could.
I did also do some socializing over the weekend! One was planned; the other was sort of impromptu, but since it was over FaceTime I'm going to count it for my next Social Review: I chatted with Danielle for some time, after she tried to call me just to say hi on Friday but I told her I was in the middle of a movie and would call her back. I tried calling her back later in the evening and there was no answer, and I finally connected with her again on Saturday afternoon.
I actually even saw both Patrick and Rylee briefly, even though the kids were at Patrick's for the weekend. They had just been taken to get haircuts, and were stopping by the house so Rylee, who has apparently started playing, could pick up her guitar. Danielle loved the new haircut and tried to show it to me, but Rylee didn't want "to be recorded," even though recording was not actually what was happening. The haircut was cute, although I did wait until Rylee and Patrick had left to note that it made her look like a nineties lesbian. She reminded me of Ruby Rose, who I guess isn't really from the nineties. The lower-sides and back on Rylee's haircut were much more closely shaved, with longer top and bangs hair.
Anyway, Danielle was taking the day off of work because she threw her back out moving a couch she's had to send back to the place she ordered it from because the cushions had two inches of space between them and also part of it had a broken board inside it or something. She spent a lot of the time talking to me while laying on her back on the temporary couch she got off Craigslist.
The other friends I spent time with on Saturday were Gabriel and Lea, with whom we tried to watch Patton Oswalt's RushTix comedy show online at the same time. Except, we couldn't get our respective audio to come anywhere close to syncing, so we gave up and decided to just text occasionally while watching, and then connect on FaceTime again after it was over.
The show was basically disappointing to all of us, just to varying degrees depending on which of us we were talking about. Gabriel thought it straight up sucked; Lea didn't rave about it but still seemed to have the fewest complaints; I did concede it was not quite what any of us wanted it to be: which is an actual standup show with prepared material. Instead, it was mostly just Patton responding to fan questions in the group chat. Gabriel particularly didn’t like it when Patton's wife Meredith kept butting into the camera to sit down and plug the charity they were trying to support; I was relatively neutral to that, although I would again concede that it didn't exactly enhance the show. Gabriel also could barely stand all the people in chat wanting to know the name of their cat who hopped onto the back of the movie theater style seats Patton was sitting in, but that's just because Gabriel basically hates any and all household pets of any kind. (I would venture to say he tolerates Lady, Lea's dog, for no other reason than she is Lea's dog. He even takes her for walks every day. The things we do for love.)
We also all have tickets to the RushTix online show by Maria Bamford next weekend, and we're all just hoping that one is better. In all likelihood it will be, just because she is kind of bonkers by default at all times.
[posted 12:30 pm]