too many shots
Not a lot to report today. I finished work yesterday, and then rode my bike to the office and back to swap out paperwork, the third time I've managed that so far this year. Whether the weather would allow for it was touch and go for a bit; it had rained earlier in the day—we even got one huge thunderclap. But, by the time 4:30 rolled around, it was sunny out. Not especially warm, but I had my fingerless gloves to wear and, with my light jacket zipped up, I was all good.
Then, when Shobhit got home from work, we made dinner together. The main ingredient was calabash, a vegetable Shobhit calls opo. I thought that was Hindi, but perhaps not; nothing in my Googling seems to connect it to that, and rather ties it to the Philippines. It may be just that it's an Asian vegetable and that's how he sees it labeled in Asian grocery stores he shops at (including the Indian grocery store, maybe). Anyway, the dish had onion, carrots, lentils, and the requisite spices and seasonings he added to it. He seemed to like it a lot; I thought it was all right—not my favorite, but I certainly didn't hate it either. We baked frozen naans to have with it.
And, we just spent the rest of the evening watching TV shows: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver; Lincoln: Divided We Stand, the sixth and final episode of that docuseries on CNN; and an episode of season one of The Expanse. And then I was ready to start getting ready for bed.
The only other thing I can think of to bring up is the mass shooting in Boulder Colorado just yesterday. Ten fatalities there, coming all of six days after the Atlanta spa shootings that left eight dead, six of them Asian women.
It's dark and depressing to realize this is as good a sign as any that we are nearing the end of the pandemic, with mass shootings coming back to being routine. How desensitized can we get to this shit? One of the few nice things about the past year was how these stories were not constantly replacing the last one dominating the news cycle. I regularly think about the chance that I might wind up dead myself in one of these incidents, since you never have any idea where they might next happen. Speaking strictly in terms of probability, even if one happened here in Seattle, the probability is low that I would be at it. But that same probability would also apply to the victims.
And it's not like mass shootings don't ever happen here. In the list of deadliest mass shootings in the U.S. since 1949, a 1983 shooting in Seattle is ranked 16th, with 13 fatalities. I've never even heard of that incident, but interestingly, it occurred in a Chinese gambling glub in the International District. That list only shows incidents with fatalities of 10 or more; there was a shooting right here on Capitol Hill in 2006 that killed seven.
Americans and their guns. It's either exhausting or it's fatal, and for far too many of the ones for whom it isn’t fatal, they literally don't care.
[posted 12:37 pm]