jacked
I've taken to homemade chai as my workday morning beverage of choice on Fridays, the sweetened drink I allow myself once a week. I made the switch because the flavoring syrup sweetened "London Fog" teas I would make kept giving me headaches. I have no idea why, either; I thought maybe it was a high fructose corn syrup thing, but last week I checked the ingredients on the bottles in the kitchen at the office where I would get it from, and they all say "pure cane sugar" as the sweetener.
I put regular sugar in the chai, so the only difference is that one is granules and one is liquid. Why would that make a difference in what gives me headaches? I so don't get it.
The thing is, chai happens to be way tastier anyway. Like, I'm now thinking I may stick with this even after I start going back to the office—I'll just bring the chai in a thermos every Friday. The only downside is that now I'm left on Friday mornings feeling a little . . . jacked. Is this what it's like to be a coffee drinker? Am I going to develop a caffeine addiction now? Maybe the key to avoiding that will be that I drink it once a week (okay, sometimes two or three times) rather than every day. I hope so!
I'm still mystified by the headache thing though. Could it be one of the other ingredients in the syrup? "Water, natural flavors, natural vanilla extract." Seems doubtful. Coud it be something about the different level of concentration when it's in syrup form? I wish I could find some place that could explain this, but my google searches have been of no real help whatsoever.
As for last night, the advance screening I thought I would have access to never materialized; the email Shobhit had been expecting never came. Not the end of the world; it gave me time to watch the two new episodes of the fantastic HBO Max show Hacks (these are half-hour episodes but two are being released every Thursday), and then I finally got started on the new, third season of Master of None on Netflix. The latter is fascinating is that the reviews aren't nearly as good as the stellar ones it got for the first two seasons but are still pretty positive, but the fan reviews are abysmal. I take far less stock in user reviews, though, and although I would agree that the show has taken a pretty radical tonal shift and also switched focus onto the lesbian best friend (indicating a pretty large amount of mysoginy amongst the bad user reviews), by the time the episode actually ended and I could regard it on the whole, I still rather liked it. It's pretty downbeat, though.
Shobhit had his Project Mamagement class while I watched these shows. He's back at work right now, a somewhat earlier shift than usual; I'm going to make pasta for dinner and then wait for him to get home before we watch Raya and the Last Dragon, finally available streaming at no extra cost on Disney+.
Shobhit has taken to counting down the days until next weekend. I think he's looking forward to going to Portland for our anniversary, but he's far more just excited to be getting several days off of work. We don't leave for Portland until Saturday, but he also has Friday off—and we're going to see In the Heights that evening. After today, he has only five more days of work before fully four days off in a row, which hasn't happened for him in I don't even know how long.
He told me this morning he wants to go to Silverado, the gay strip club where they can strip down nude (which is legal in strip clubs in Oregon). I immediately rolled my eyes, which I'll admit I should not have done, even if it's because I find it tedious that he obsesses over hot naked guys in any and all contexts possible. The way he lashed out in retaliation was entirely out of proportion, however, when he snapped "Don't roll your eyes!" and then basically threw out an empty threat that we won't go to Multnomah Falls if I don't want to go to Silverado.
First of all, at what point did I even hint that I would refuse to go? A roll of the eyes, while admittedly not helpful, does not equal refusal. Jesus Christ. (The fact that a strip club is indoors and a waterfall is outdoors and therefore these are radically different things, especially while we remain in a pandemic—are the strippers going to be wearing face masks?—we'll just set that aside.) Secondly, Multnomah Falls was always the biggest reason I wanted to go back to Portland. Okay, that and the Portland Aerial Tram, which I just now discovered is still restricted to usage that will exclude us. Goddammit! When the fuck am I actually going to get to ride that thing? Well, whatever. I guess it's still something that will be on a list of things I haven't done and will compel me to visit Portland yet again in the hopefully near future.
I checked Silverado's website and they've been reopened since February. So there's that, I guess.
[posted 12:51 pm]