far from the bayou
I've got two social events to report on this weekend!
First is Virtual Happy Hour with Laney, which we did on Friday after I finished work, rescheduling the March Happy Hour set for the 12th to that date, so we could take advantage of the free wifi in her campground just outside New Orleans. She's there until Thursday this week, and within that time frame Friday last week just worked best for both of us. It also meant two Virtual Happy Hours technically within the framing of the month of February—the previous had been on Tuesday February 9, when we had to do it just over the phone because she had no wifi signal to use along the coast line of the Gulf in Texas.
I still need to upload the shots we took to Flickr, but you can see them in my Facebook post about it, which included a pretty funny video clip of me trying to figure out how to do a screenshot, and accidentally recording the call instead. It wasn't really my fault, because the button literally said "screenshot," but Skype kept recording when I pressed it! Even though they have a separate button for "record. Like, whatever!
We scheduled the call for 5 p.m. Pacific, 7 p.m. Central, just so I'd have half an hour to get situated before we sat down to talk. I made myself a quick veggie hot dog for dinner, then heated up a nice mug of hot apple cider with three shots of apple brandy in it.
We did not stay connected for quite as long that night as we had on the previous call, and now I can't even really remember why. The connection was not excellent, but it was serviceable; we never lost sound or picture or anything. It was just very low quality, but at least we could understand each other. The picture of Laney did freeze for several seconds a few times, but it was nothing we couldn't handle. According to my Skype records, the call lasted an hour and 41 minutes, which means it was a quarter till 9 p.m. her time (Louisiana) when we hung up. That was a quarter till 7:00 my time, which still left a couple of hours before Shobhit got off work that night. I would have then worked on some of my editing and uploading digitized old home videos to my Flickr account.
The other was the second Saturday in a row that Gabriel and Lea watched an online comedy show concurrently with me as I did. We cannot get the sound to sink on both ends while we stay on FaceTime, so we connected briefly before the show, texted a few times during, and got back on FaceTime again afterward, albeit more briefly than we had the previous week.
They both got very angry with the opener, Jackie Kashian, when she began to bring gender identify into her bits. This evidently makes no difference to Gabriel, but her heart was in the right place; it was the execution that was misguided. As Gabriel put it, he had to close the ongoing chat window that is next to the live feed, because "She's connecting in the wrong way with the wrong people."
She brought in the argument that people should be able to "identify" however they want, and went to a place many trans and nonbinary people are sick of this being taken: that she wanted to be all sorts of things as a child—including Snoopy, a dog—and there's no good reason not to just indulge people in such matters. The problem is that it upholds the trope that gender identify is a passing phase, which is problematic to say the least, and it inspired Gabriel to just write her off and say "Fuck her." That's the part that doesn't sit well with me, though, especially when someone is clearly not anti-trans, but rather revealing a fundamental misunderstanding of what it really means.
I believe strongly that we are all much better served when such people are met with gentle education rather than outright dismissal and fury. I started thinking about actually sending her a message about this directly—she does have a contact link on her website—but, I'd really like to find a web page from a reputable organization that deals with gender issues and addresses this particular microaggression, so that I can provide sourcing by people speaking for themselves rather than it just being me speaking for others. That part I'm having trouble with, but I intend to keep looking.
Gabriel also had issues with a couple of jokes she made about a reality show set in China, particularly a crack she made about the populations of their cities, which he deemed racist and I found pretty harmless; his argument is that people, including comics, need to stay in their own lane, and given that she is a cisgender white woman, that is a fair argument. In any case, I have heard her on several of the many comedy podcasts I listen to and generally enjoy listening to her there; I cannot say her bits on Saturday's show were especially funny.
Maria Bamford, the headliner here, was much better, albeit far more "scattered" (to borrow another word Gabriel used) than her typical standup sets on actual stages. Virtual comedy shows are just incredibly poor substitutes for the real thing by definition, but I'll give her this much: I got plenty of good laughs out of her meandering set, which was a lot more than I could say for Patton Oswalt's "show" a week earlier, which featured no prepared material and was just an extended Q&A with fans. The ticket for Patton cost more (about $22), and I felt slightly ripped off; Maria Bamford was a little cheaper (about $17) and I thought her show was worth it, albeit barely.
The Big Event yesterday was the Golden Globe Awards, that fundamentally meaningless award that nevertheless continues to be afforded undue weight in the annual awards season—discussions about its corruptness and lack of diversity having recently come to the fore in a way it hasn't in ages, thanks to a Los Angeles Times expose published the week before last, which I still need to read.
Now, mind you, this was also after I had watched and reviewed a movie, which I also did on Saturday; I nearly forgot to mention these: Saturday was The United States vs. Billie Holiday (meh: B-minus, although lead actor Andra Day's Golden Globe win for the role last night, maybe the biggest surprise of the evening, was deserved); yesterday was the foreign film from Denmark, Another Round (very good: B+). What I am actually most eager to watch is the widely critically acclaimed film Minari, but it was only released on VOD last Friday at too high a price ($19.99 is still way too much for any movie when it's literally more than I'd ever have to pay at an actual movie theater). But! It is nominated for SAG Awards, which means Shobhit has digital screeners, and we shall watch that one tonight. Yay! I hadn't expected to review three movies in as many days this stretch, but that's fine.
We still watched another one of Shobhit's digital SAG Award screeners last night after the Golden Globes were over. Frances McDormand had won for Nomadland, which I already saw and reviewed a week ago, but it made Shobhit most interested in seeing that. He commented on how sad it was, and was surprisingly engaged for maybe three quarters of it, but then started doing a Washington Post crossword puzzle, only half paying attention, which I found very annoying. Why was I pointlessly re-watching this movie with him if he wasn't even going to give it the attention it deserves? Well, whatever: I had thought it was perhaps not the most rewatchable movie in the world, excellent though it was, but I found myself appreciating it even more the second time around, so it wasn't really a waste at all.
Should I mention what video clips I got uploaded over the weekend? I was able to create photo albums for certain holidays that had been missing for ages because I never took still photos at them and only did video: Halloween 1999 (this one being another massively dull collection, where I just set the camcorder down and let it record like surveillance video for way too long—that was not the brightest idea I had as a 23-year-old), Thanksgiving 1999 (this one is a bit more compelling, as I separated several video clips to focus on each person I asked to tell me what they were thankful for), and Christmas 1999. This was one of the rare years I spent Christmas in Spokane rather than in Olympia, having swapped them around that year since several of us went to a campground in Chehalis to spend Thanksgiving with Grandma and Grandpa McQuilkin.
Oh, there was also Gabriel and Suzy's college graduation in 1999, to which I added four video clips. Suzy is such ancient history now, it's kind of a trip to see those. Gabriel looks strikingly young (I mean, he was only 22). I uploaded some other clips too but those are the most notable ones.
In summary, given that my two social activities were virtual, I never went anywhere all weekend. The farthest I went at any point was to the mail box in our building lobby on Saturday. The last time I left the building was on Thursday when I went to the office to swap out paperwork, which I also will be doing this evening. I need to go get my STI screening as well, even though I don't need it at all—I've been monogamous since February of last year, thanks to the pandemic. (That will likely change later this year, and to be perfectly frank, I can't wait.) I still have to get an HIV test just to get my PrEP prescription renewed, as I never bothered stopping the medication just so I would not fall out of the habit. And now that I've veered a bit into TMI territory, I need to get back to work!
[posted 12:38 pm]