lunch lunch
The Great Digitizing continues.
I encountered a nearly panic-inducing setback in the morning: I pressed a particular button on the camcorder by accident, and I still don't know if that did it or if it was just a coincidence, but suddenly none of the 8mm tapes would play. It was just snow, even though I knew for certain there was content on it. I tested older tapes I had already digitized and got the same thing. What the fuck?
I googled it and what I found suggested something in the camcorder had been misaligned, as all the parts inside have to be in precisely the right spot for it to play properly. Eventually I kind of wiggled or spun or swiped all the bits inside with my finger where I could, and somehow that made a difference: part of the picture came back and so did the sound, but the picture still had squiggly lines and kept flipping. Finally I just shut the camcorder off and let it rest for a while; I told Danielle about it over lunch and talked about how worried I was that the camcorder, which is now 22 years old, had finally just up and died. Thankfully, the rest seemed to work: when I came back to it later in the afternoon the tapes finally played properly again and I was able to continue with digitizing. Whew! I probably still had more than ten two-hour tapes to get through.
I was fun to talk to Danielle a bit about seeing clips from two decades ago, though. For instance, one tape is an uninterrupted two hour recording of the 50th birthday party for Barbara at her Central District apartment, in 2002. Four of us were there: Barbara, Danielle, myself, and Craig, the friend from the Seattle Gay Standard with whom I remained good friends with for a full decade (my first visit to Las Vegas I stayed with him while he lived there; Shobhit and I stayed with him and his boyfriend when we last visited San Francisco in 2010—the last time I ever saw him, in fact), and somehow over the next decade we fell almost completely out of touch. We remain Facebook friends, but direct interaction even there is extremely limited; to this day I wonder if that just happened naturally or if I (or even Shobhit?) did or said something that put him off so much he just backed away. I have no idea, although maybe six or seven years ago I do remember having a brief text exchange with him in which the drop-off in connection was broached, and he kind of characterized it as just a byproduct of the direction his life went. When he moved away from Seattle in maybe 2003, he first went to Las Vegas for his job; he moved to San Francisco after that; he went to Dallas for a while; he now has a husband with whom he lives in Montreal, of all places (this being the third guy he's been with since who he was with in San Francisco, if I remember right).
Anyway, the weirdest thing about watching that 2002 video after all this time was this: Craig is now very much a "bear" who clearly works out a great deal, is super thick and beefy and wears a mustache. He's got an insanely thick neck. He used to be quite thin. Not only that, but in 2002 he was cute. I never looked at him that way at the time; my friendship with him was never anything but thoroughly platonic. I keep wondering if how I marvel at how cute he was looking back is just a result of aging and little else: he is only a few years younger than I am, but that made more of a difference when he was in his early twenties and I in my mid-twenties, and how good looking he was at the time only registers so clearly in retrospect, perhaps, because we were all thinner and cuter twenty years ago. (Well, except maybe for me: I still maintain I got better looking as I aged.) Anyway, his Facebook persona is now pretty hypermasculine, which is perhaps misleading; for all I know he's just as effeminate in mannerism now as he was then. And he wasn't excessively so then, to be clear—but still, noticeably so. My mannerisms have always been super closed-off, a kind of withdrawal into myself, which I have always traced back to the childhood traumas of sexual molestation as a child, coupled with relentless bullying in school. No one has ever used the word "flamboyant" to describe me, is what I'm saying.
Side note: during lunch yesterday Danielle talked about how much she hates Swiss cheese and how it "smells like dirty feet." A few hours later, I was watching the video of Barbara's birthday party in 2002, and there was Danielle, saying Swiss cheese "smells like dirty feet." It cracked me up.
Okay, some possibly quasi-controversial news from McQuilkin-Agarwal Manor: we had Danielle over for a visit yesterday. It was the first social visit of any kind that we have had since the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns ten months ago.
It was not the safest choice available to us, and I do not dispute that. I still have a few defenses.
First, and by far the most important: Danielle has been vaccinated. I do have at least one other friend who has also been vaccinated, but that person's comfort with any in-person socializing is far different, and it's also relevant that that person interacts with others, family members, who are immunocompromised. Danielle does not.
Well, okay: not immunocompromised family members, anyway. Danielle is also a nurse, which does indeed mean she interacts with actual COVID patients. She is covered in multiple layers of PPE when she does so, and it's not like she brought any of that hospital accoutrement with her. It makes a difference to me that Danielle is a nurse and has a sense of what is what level of risk. I would never say someone being a nurse precludes them from being an idiot—Danielle herself knows several nurses who are idiots—but she has a level of intelligence herself that I feel I can trust.
Also: for the majority of the time we were together, even though she has been vaccinated, we all still wore masks. Now, we did also have lunch together, and for that we removed masks, during which time we sat on opposite ends of the living room from each other. Of course, I do know that if she brought COVID in with her somehow, that "social distancing" inside and behind closed doors would not likely make much difference in terms of protection. That said, she did note that this setup was essentially the same as what they're doing with staff at the very hospital where she works. My only point is that we had multiple layers of precaution going on, most important of which is that she has been vaccinated. Had she not been, I still would have refused to let her visit. Shobhit and Sachin have on multiple occasions tried to convince me to let Sachin visit, and I still refuse. We will be seeing him on the 14th, but we'll be having brunch somewhere outdoors.
In short, I know it was a risk. And it was a calculated risk. With all associated details considered, the probability is low that she somehow infected us with COVID. If I ever do catch it, the greatest likelihood remains that it will be from Shobhit bringing it home from work. Thankfully, probabilities are low there as well, as he works masked, they require customers to be masked, and all interactions with the public are brief. All these things work in our favor.
Anyway, so why did she come over to begin with? It was actually so she could get together with Shobhit for financial advice. They had started the discussion over FaceTime last week, and although yes, even yesterday's discussions could have been done virtually, it was just far easier for them to do it in person. The idea of her coming over came up as a suggestion when they realized they both had yesterday off of work, and at first I had mixed feelings, and then felt at least a little better when Danielle herself said they would still wear masks.
So, actually, for most of the roughly three hours she was over, I was still in my work shift, in the bedroom, working at my computer. When lunch was not being eaten and they were just discussing the finances, Danielle and Shobhit were out there with their masks on. Once it was lunch time, Danielle had brought over the fixings for caprese sandwiches. She had spaced the fact that I'm working from home and only had two bread rolls for sandwiches, so Shobhit just made his with one of our own bagels from Costco. We had salad as a side.
Shobhit also made chai, and it was spectacular—I never quite make it that good. I over-extended my lunch hour to about an hour, just because it was so great to see Danielle, whom I have seen so seldom over the past year or so. It really was wonderful to get to see her, which was the first time in-person since we had met her for outdoor pizza at Seward Park in November.
Oh wait, I have another lunch to tell you about—today's! This one was back to virtual, though: our 26th Office Lunch Meetup via Zoom. We had five in attendance again, all amongst the most regulars: Rebecca, Noah, Adrienne, Katherine and myself. We talked a lot about the $4 hazard pay that has to be paid to all store staff in Seattle. You may remember my mentioning yesterday that I planned to attend the Board Meet and Greet, and guess what? The meeting was at 4:30, my usual end of my work day, and I just logged off and shut down my work computer on autopilot, and then completely forgot all about the damned meeting!
Adrienne, the Executive Assistant, was on the lunch call today though, and she mentioned that all attendees on the call had to be on mute just because of the number of people, and they only responded to questions sent in ahead of time. She said they basically responded to the large volume of questions that came in that way based on "themes" of questions. In short, I assume that means PCC responded by not truly saying anything at all. I have a feeling I didn't miss much.
Anyway! We have our "All-Merchandising staff" monthly meeting right after that lunch meetup, so I am writing this literally as that is going on. There's a Merchandising meeting every Wednesday but I am one of the few staff who do not have to attend every week; they ask for the full department on the first meeting of every month. So I should post this and start paying a little more attention.
[posted 1:13 pm]