— पांच हजार अड़तीस —

Given the kind of insane amount of plans I've got going on both next weekend and the weekend after, this past weekend wound up having a bit more activity than expected. Nothing anywhere near "insane," but I had plenty going on.

Friday, for instance, Shobhit and I went out for Happy Hour, just the two of us. It had probably been a couple of years since we had done that specifically, mostly for obvious reasons. (The pandemic stay-home orders, for those of you reading this ten years from now, assuming society is sill functioning then.)

We used to like to go over to Diesel every once in a while, especially for Happy Hour. This is a gay dive bar not far away at all, on 14th Avenue just off Union, making it all of three blocks or so away. They have outdoor tables which I would have much preferred sitting at, but I think Shobhit, on a subconscious level, wanted to feel like he was existing in a sort of community space—he might have wanted to sit outside too if enough other people also were. So, he wanted to sit inside, and I went along with it.

I walked in with my mask on, and found myself to be literally the only patron inside with one on. Only the single bartender working was also wearing one. I took mine off to start drinking my Long Island Iced Tea, and didn't put it on again for the rest of the relatively short time we were in there.

On the upside, it was not crowded in there at all. There might have been ten other people in there at the most, and we did not sit near any of them. Not that that makes any real difference in an indoor space, but the place was incredibly well ventilated—so much so that I felt a breeze at all times and could not even find where the hell they had any vent or fan or whatever.

I think Diesel is kind of a "bear bar," at least judging by their décor. There's an elevated level to the right of the entrance, with bar seating overlooking the rest of the space (including the actual bar), and I found myself thinking about how many gay dive bars I've been in which just casually have gay porn either on the walls or on monitors. Here, they were playing John Wick on their TV monitors. I did notice, however, that two sections of the west walls, I think near the bathroom, were basically wallpapered with black and white photos of men in various states of undress and semi-porniness. It was weirdly comforting in a retro-gay sort of way, actually.

Shobhit decided he also wanted to go for a walk, so after we left there, we walked up Madison to the Whole Foods on Broadway, where we did not buy anything. Then we went up Broadway to Pine and back home again.

— पांच हजार अड़तीस —

Saturday was easily the busiest day of the weekend, starting with a late-morning start on a virtual watch of Fast & Furious 6 with Gabriel and Lea. We had aimed for 11:00 and got started closer to 11:30. Shobhit had a kind of breakout session group call with people in his Project Management class starting at 10:00, scheduled until 12:00 but seemingly ended a bit early so he watched some of it too. Because of his class, I had to watch in the bedroom, but then Shobhit came back and lay on the bed to watch along. He later had some kind of follow-up with his class about an hour into the movie, which took him maybe 20 or 30 minutes, but then he was back again. In any case, he participated, which gave him a Social Review point and that made him happy.

I was somewhat surprised to find that I think I like Fast & Furious 6 to be my favorite so far. It's the first time I really started to "get it" when it comes to franchise fans, even though Fast Five is widely regarded as the watershed moment that turned the franchise into what it is now. But, although I enjoyed that movie's climactic chase with Dom and Brian pulling a giant safe through the streets of Rio de Janeiro with their cars, I found a lot of the rest of the movie very tedious with its incessant gunfire with no choreography to speak of. Just groups of people standing and opening fire: yawn. There was a lot less of that in Fast & Furious 6, and more of the fun car chases and even more exciting hand fighting. Some of it between women, which always makes me more interested.

Not that the "plot" is any more or less memorable than any of the other movies, mind you. Plot is incidental. You just go with whatever is happening, and either it's exciting or it's not. Also, I think this movie benefits from all five of the previous films serving as one form or another of set-up for everything in the franchise thereafter. Even Fast Five has to spend energy retconning and bringing disparate characters together which in previous films gave no indication of having anything to do with each other.

The thing I still struggle to get past with these movies is their naming conventions, which have no consistency whatsoever. I'm only getting to a point where I finally know which is which and what number just by virtue of looking them up enough times:

1. The Fast and the Furious (2001)
2. 2 Fast 2 Furious (2003)
3. The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006)
4. Fast & Furious (2009)
5. Fast Five (2011)
6. Fast & Furious 6 (2013) [even more confusing: this was marketed as Furious 6, which is even the title card in the movie, but its official title is still Fast & Furious 6]
7. Furious 7 (2015)
8. The Fate of the Furious (2017)
9. F9 (2021) [originally scheduled for release in 2019; delayed three times before it was even 2020; only two of its eventually five delays were due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ultimately releasing on June 25]

Apparently there are already two more films in the direct chronology of the main franchise (that is, not including spinoffs like Hobbs & Shaw, which Gabriel insists doesn't count, and I'm fine with that), although they have not yet been titled. Many have suggested, and I am totally on board with, Fas10 Your Seatbelts.

When the movie ended, Gabriel actually asked if anyone else had cried. What? Seriously?

"Maybe it's a straight guy thing," I joked. But then I was reminded that Gabriel cries at pretty much everything—oh yeah, right—so it's really more like a Gabriel thing. He really, really loves this franchise, so naturally he gets emotional about it. Even though it's patently ridiculous, like when in this sixth movie Dom saves Letty by catching her mid-air between two elevated freeways and then having the windshield of a car break their fall. That shot was hilarious. But, that gets into where this franchise becomes the great thing that it is, which is something Gabriel mentions frequently: it never pretends not to be ridiculous. These movies know exactly how dumb they are, and they revel in it. This is the kind of self-awareness I can get into.

— पांच हजार अड़तीस —

— पांच हजार अड़तीस —

That wasn't the only movie I watched on Saturday, though—and it wasn't the only one Shobhit watched with me, either! When I told him I had made plans with Tracy to see Respect at the Regal Meridian at 5:40, he expressed interest in joining us. So, Shobhit and Tracy finally got to meet each other.

Shobhit is already making assumptions about her, though. Or at least, he did before we actually went to the movie. After having read in my blog about her bailing on several things in recent weeks (Claudia's going-away happy hour; our original plan to see this movie on Thursday; our office lunch party on Friday), he actually said to me on Saturday afternoon, "There's a fifty percent chance she will cancel anyway."

Not so! At least, not so far. This could change, but there is a key part of her pattern thus far that Shobhit is not recognizing, which is this: with only one exception, her last-minute cancelations have been for things involving other people, which meant I did not have to cancel my plans completely, only that she was not going to be part of them. That applies to Claudia's get-together, and it applies to the office lunch party. The one exception was when she opted out of seeing the movie on Thursday, and I really should have known better than to suggest seeing a movie only the day after she returned from a several-day trip to L.A. anyway. I didn't take that one too personally.

Now, if cancelations or postponements like that on Thursday do persist, then my attitude may change, and I may become less inclined to make plans with her. So far, even though we have had to make changes several times, they have generally been plans that could pretty easily be improvised. It's been within a context I can work with. I also have to play a lot more by ear than I used to with plans made with Laney, and those have always been for understandable reasons as well and I don't resent her for them.

So, anyway. Shobhit and I walked to the theater, and met Tracy there. Somewhat to my surprise, I'd say we were three out of maybe eight total people in there. I was talking to Scott at work about this this morning, and it's easy to have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, seeing a movie in the middle of an unprecedented daily case rate surge of COVID is a lot more comfortable to do, even while both vaccinated and masked, when the theater is mostly empty. On the other hand, at this rate, theaters will never be able to sustain themselves. And I want movie theaters to keep existing!

Now, it's true that Respect opened the previous weekend and I only waited to see it so I could see it with Tracy, and this means we saw it eight days after opening night. Still, in the Before Times the movie would stay in theaters at least a month or two, and I'll be surprised if it's still playing at all a week from now.

It's also getting mixed reviews; even I gave it a solid B. I was initially leaning toward B+ but then I reconsidered. The acting is great in it, though; I think we all agreed. That said, Shobhit was convinced Jennifer Hudson would win the Best Actress Oscar for this before he saw the movie, and seemed less certain afterward. Not because of her performance, which was still stellar, but because of the movie overall. He kept referring to Rami Malek's win for Bohemian Rhapsody, but that movie was a box office success, and this one is clearly shaping up to me much less so. That always makes a difference. And, we have tons of Oscar bait, much of it delayed from last year, set to be released over the course of the coming fall.

When we left, Shobhit decided he wanted to get some cheesecake to go from The Cheesecake Factory. I would have loved just to go out for dessert, and got the feeling Tracy would have been up for it, but The Cheesecake Factory was way too busy, so we just ordered to go and then went our separate ways afterward. Shobhit and I walked home.

— पांच हजार अड़तीस —

Although Ivan had a night off of work Friday night, I saw comparatively very little of him over the weekend, especially considering he seems to have gotten into a recent routine of, instead of getting into bed shortly after getting home from work in the morning, sleeping later instead so that he basically gets up in the evening and goes right to getting ready for his next night of work.

He also had some trouble, though: he didn't work Friday night, but could not sleep overnight. I think he intended to sleep through Saturday, but he had to do some laundry and during one brief moment that we crossed paths, he wasn’t looking great. "Are you getting any sleep?" I asked, and he told me he wasn't able to get much sleep that day. I had already overheard him telling Shobhit Saturday morning that he had been unable to get any sleep at all overnight, and here he was clearly still not getting any real sleep through Saturday either.

And then, he worked all night Saturday night. Yesterday, Shobhit and I left around 10 a.m. to do some shopping, which took so long to get done it was genuinely annoying, in large part because he would take so long to decide whether to get one thing or another on the shelf, over and over. First we went to the Costco up in Kirkland, so it would then be easy to move on to the Mayuri Foods Indian grocery store in Redmond. I swear, we must have been at Mayuri for upwards of an hour. On the upside, we got two four-packs of cashew cookies! Maybe that makes it all worth it. Can't wait to have some of those with my next cup of chai, maybe tonight.

Side note: Shobhit and I watched the Tom Cruise / Jamie Foxx movie Collateral yesterday afternoon, while Ivan was sleeping. I wanted to watch it after finally being able to see the fabled 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, about the history of that city's depiction in film, which we watched in two parts Saturday evening and Sunday morning. The ironic thing about Collateral is that it's probably my favorite film that basically makes the City of Los Angeles "a character" in the movie, and it came out the year after that documentary did. I've probably seen it at least three times now, having re-watched it once somewhere along the line during the five years between 2011 and 2016 that Shobhit was living there, but I cannot now find any record of when I did. I can only find my LiveJournal entry noting when I watched it the first time, I think in 2005. It's turning out to be one of those movies that I don't quite regard as a masterpiece but it still compels me to revisit it every few years. And in three more years the fucking movie will be twenty years old! I'm making a point of mentioning it now only so I can hopefully find this reference to having watched it when I inevitably revisit it in another five or ten years.

Anyway, I later heard from Ivan that he had been "wide awake" briefly in the afternoon, presumably while we were gone, but he was clearly asleep when we got back yesterday afternoon, and we did not see him until evening, right before he had to head back to work. I thought maybe he had simply zonked out all day because he'd gotten so little sleep the day before, and Ivan basically confirmed that was the case.

Still, Ivan's silence and lack of activity the whole time we were at home started to weird us out a little. Shobhit kept thinking maybe he'd left and gone somewhere, but his keys were still on the key rack by the front door. And then, while we were burning through some of season 3 of Schitt's Creek on Netflix and it got to be around 9:00, we started to get genuinely worried. We spent maybe five minutes debating whether we should wake him up.

The thing is, his schedule can change on short notice, or he could have called out sick (more accurately, tired), or whatever. For all I knew, he had a new plan wherein he wasn't working last night after all. But, what if he didn't? So, finally, I went and knocked on his door and called out, "Ivan?"

I could tell I woke him up when he answered me. I then asked, "Are you all right?" Then I could tell a realization had come to him, and he said, "Oh—what time is it?" I told him it was nearly 9:00. "I overslept," he said.

I immediately told him we'd give him a ride to work if he wanted, and at first he said, "I think I'll be okay." But, after he came out of his room and made his customary cup of coffee, Shobhit offered the ride again, and I think Ivan reconsidered. "Yes, that would be nice," he said, realizing that otherwise he'd have been late, trying to get there on the bus (or maybe, as I know he has used the service multiple times in the past, taking an Uber or Lyft). He said it still would have been fine if he'd been late, but he took us up on our offer anyway.

I finally remember the specific phrase for the section of Foss he works in: "Transitional Care Unit." (Also known as "Post-Acut Rehab".) And, I learned some interesting things about his workplace on the ride up there last night.

First, a couple of things I already knew: he wears an N95 mask, which is specially fitted to his face; he's now told me more than once about how they spray him with some kind of substance until he can't smell it, or something. I forget the whole process, only that they spray him with something as part of the fitting. He wore his all the way from our condo to the facility last night, although I do know that when he walks to the bus he doesn't wear it while walking outside. I did learn for the first time last night, though, that he wears the N95 mask and a face shield for his whole shift.

Also, due to the current surge, they are apparently not admitting any new patients; they have limited all entry and exiting in the building to one entrance; and, all staff there are getting COVID tests twice a week. Now, they are rapid tests for which they get results in 15 minutes rather than PCR tests, but still, I found an unusual kind of comfort in that. I mean, allowing that of all things to give me a false sense of security would be moronic, but if nothing else, were he to have a breakthrough case of COVID, we would likely know it very quickly.

What I don't know is what the likelihood is of Ivan getting it from Shobhit and me were either of us to catch it. After all, most vaccinated people still don't get it even after exposure, and all three of us are vaccinated. So, it's probably still pretty easy for it to go undetected if either Shobhit or I had it without knowing. Theoretically I could just go ahead and get another test just for peace of mind—I know Gabriel and his family has done that a lot, including shortly after our visit with them last month—but, then again, given the surge, tests should probably be reserved for people with symptoms or known exposure right now. I mean, I don't know. I have been considering getting tested sometime this week just as a precaution ahead of Auntie Rose's memorial service this Saturday, but we'll see. Given that it's set to be an outdoor ceremony anyway, I haven't decided how vital it is to get tested preemptively. I do worry a little bit, though, about who might be there who is unvaccinated.

After Baton Rouge General Hospital shared infographics of their record COVID hospitalizations and the vast majority of those admitted being unvaccinated, I have been looking for similar numbers for local hospitals in Seattle. On August 16, Swedish Medical Center posted that, across all their campuses, they had 64 covid patients in the hospital, 87% of them vaccinated; and they had 21 in the ICU, all but one of them (95%) unvaccinated. And we actually have lots of hospitals here in Seattle, three of them on First Hill alone (hence the colloquial term "Pill Hill") and another on Capitol Hill, but I cannot find similar posts by Harborview or Virginia Mason (where my doctor is) or Group Health, which is honestly kind of disappointing. UW Medical hasn't seemed to either. Most of them have posts of some kind about COVID-19, but I wish they all published their hospitalization numbers and the percent unvaccinated. This really cannot be hammered home enough.

— पांच हजार अड़तीस —

[posted 12:30 pm]