Colton who?
I got back to watching my virtual SIFF films last night, this being my fifth one with only one left to go. It was also the worst of the ones I have seen so far, a French gay teen love tragedy called Summer of 85. I kind of liked it for a while, and then it took bizarre turns.
Watching it and writing the review took the bulk of my evening, while Shobhit was on his virtual Project Management class between 5:30 and 8:00, but then, as seems to be customary with this new class, he was in discussion with classmates for a while after the class ended.
It was just as well; I took about 45 minutes longer than expected to get the review written, because I took a break of about that long in the middle of the movie to take a phone call from Gabriel. We talked about The Bachelor and former Bachelor Colton Underwood recently coming out as gay—even though I have never watched a single minute of any episode of The Bachelor, nor had I heard of Colton Underwood until I saw his name trending on Twitter. I follow enough gay comedians on Twitter that any time a high-profile coming out happens, I will learn about it through them even if I have never previously heard of the person.
Gabriel still wanted my perspective on part of it, though, precisely because of how little I know about the franchise or about the person—because so many other gay men, who know just as little about Colton as I do, are jumping to judgment. Which is something I find a little odd, and arguably even untoward. It may very well be that there is plenty of reason to judge him, but I would certainly need more information about the guy than I have now in order to do it. And honestly, based on what little more Gabriel told me about, I have more empathy for him than judgment, in spite of the bizarre context of reality TV in all of this. And so does Gabriel, and I think he was kind of looking for a little validation in that. Which I was happy to offer! Honestly, the whole story is fascinating on countless levels and sounds like the kind of thing that would warrant deeply nuanced discussion in a Queer Theory university classroom.
It was a little jarring returning to the SIFF movie after hanging up with Gabriel, because it was at that exact moment that the movie shoehorned in a left-field sequence involving totally unnecessary cross dressing, and I was like, Wait, what? It made for a very odd viewing experience, and between that and the little bit about how Jewish people bury their dead, the movie completely lost me almost instantly. I keep wondering if it would have been as jarring had I not been interrupted by the phone call, but either way, the movie goes downhill fast.
I plan to watch my sixth and final SIFF film on Sunday, a documentary about Sesame Street. For that one to be bad, they'll have to work pretty hard to make it so, I think.
In the meantime, I have an otherwise unusual weekend ahead of me. Tomorrow I have my first hair appointment since February 2020, which is likely to last upwards of three hours. And this afternoon I go into the office for two reasons: for the send-off small get-together on the outside patio for Zaira, the receptionist who is leaving; but also to swap out my laptop for a new one again only one week after doing so the first time, because Andrew can't figure out why neither my external headset or my internal camera are working. That's why I processed my receiver paperwork today instead of yesterday as usual, so I could kill three birds with one stone and just swap out that paperwork at the office at the same time as well.
I am deeply, deeply eager to be working at the office again, but it remains wildly unclear when the hell that might happen—as long as COVID cases are on the rise a fourth time, it seems unwise. And I keep hearing people on multiple podcasts I listen to talking about how we're headed into a phase of returning to some semblance of normalcy, except none of them also mention rising cases across the country. And here I am, once again, finding myself combating stupid misinformation in comment threads on Facebook posts, particularly those by my niece Brandi, who posted two separate ones to ask: Why is the Pfizer vaccine not approved by the FDA; and why was the Johnson & Johnson vaccine pulled when only six people developed blood clots? In both cases I was the only person to post a response that was even remotely educated rather than speculative, most of the others being wildly misinformed and paranoid.
Brandi is a very odd case to me. She often posts shit just to stir up shit and entertain herself, posing hot-button questions that might suggest she believes one thing when she doesn't necessarily. In these two examples, she posed the questions in what appeared to be good faith—and then both posts were met with argumentative comments clearly made in bad faith. She has a lot of people in her life who are like this, as evidenced clearly by the comment threads on so many of her posts about vaccines or masks or whatever. She's already made it clear she's going to wait to get vaccinated herself until she can "see how it plays out" with everyone else—the problem with that being that it defeats the purpose of reaching herd immunity sooner than later. I responded to one dipshit in her comments twice over before finally turning off notifications for the post, because I couldn't take being sucked back into these people's ignorance any longer.
And the thing is, I do not think Brandi is an idiot. I also think she's a fantastic mother. But, based on her Facebook interactions, she sure seems to surround herself with idiots. I'm just mystified by that.
[posted 12:33 pm]