I guess I'm not giving up yet
Not long after I got home from work yesterday, and had had my dinner—leftover egg curry with freshly made rice that was almost shockingly tasty—Shobhit suggested we "go for a walk." Honestly, it was more like running errands, in the end, which makes me less inclined to count it on the next Social Review. On the other hand, it was a choice to walk rather than drive, which we could have done. So, I guess that kind of counts. We did do some walking just for its own sake. I guess it counts after all.
First we went to Out of the Closet, the Lifelong AIDS Alliance thrift store where we had gotten the pantry cabinet on Sunday, but which he had gone to, to buy pants for his acting gig at Amazon this evening (for a training video). The pants didn't fit quite right, I guess, and they would only allow returns for store credit. That was ten bucks, and after some fruitless searching for another pair of pants, he asked if there was anything there that I wanted. I searched for a bit and then found a collared Ralph Lauren pullover sweater in a blue color that I really liked, and it cost exactly the same amount. Perfect! I also thought of Tracy at work, who asked just last week if I ever buy any new clothes. Well, rarely: tons of the clothes I wear now I had literally ten, in many cases even twenty years ago. So now I'm kind of eager to wear this sweater to work and see if she notices.
My bladder is a fucking weirdo, sometimes allowing for long periods without needing to pee, and sometimes the opposite. We had not been gone long and already I needed to pee, when we left Out of the Closet. We were passing by the Mexican restaurant Poquitos, and Shobhit suggested I just go in there and use their bathroom. I could hardly believe how easy it was; no one even noticed me, so far as I could tell. Would that have been the case had I not been white? I walked in, peed an annoyingly small amount considering how badly I felt I had to go, and walked right out with no problem.
We then walked to the Capitol Hill branch library, basically about a mile north of there on the other side of Broadway. We stopped at Crossroads Trading Co, the thrift store on Broadway, along the way—he actually found a couple of suitable pairs of pants there. Then, Shobhit had some books to pick up at the library, and I had to pee again once we reached there. It was all of fucking twenty minutes later! Do they do bladder enlargement surgeries?
Shobhit asked if I wanted to walk back on Broadway or on 15th, and I suggested we go up to 15th. We walked most of the way back on 15th, and found a new, very small little grocery shop with lots of wine for sale, and we bought some baklava to share because Shobhit wanted a dessert. We ate it after we got home.
That was all quite pleasant, but then Shobhit became a minor lunatic, at least briefly. We got home shortly before 7:30, and I asked Ivan if he wanted to watch this week's episode of American Crime Story: Impeachment, which he was all about—even though it was unclear whether we could get the entire episode watched before he needed to leave for work. It aired yet again for roughly ninety minutes, but given the ability to fast forward through commercials on VOD, I thought maybe we could squeeze it in.
Shobhit tried to convince me to wait to watch until tonight, which I suppose we could have done, except that Ivan and I had already made the choice. I also listen to a podcast called Still Watching and wanted to get the TV episode watched before I listened to the podcast, although I didn't waste my time telling Shobhit that. Also, I really thought I could get the show squeezed in before Ivan left.
In response, Shobhit devolved into his characteristically petty behavior, because he clearly resented my insistence on watching the show with Ivan, instead of, for instance, helping Shobhit take his clothes selected for his acting gig down to the car. Which, frankly, he didn't need me for. Still, in the middle of the show's episode playing, Shobhit came up to me with hangered jackets in one hand, and insisting I put the two pairs of pants he had bought at Crossroads Trading Co on hangers for him. There was truly no reason for me to do this instead of him; his reasoning was that his "hands are full." What, you are physically incapable of leaving the jackets hung up somewhere? He got all snippy with me like I was the one being unreasonable, even though he literally did not need me for any of this, and he was distracting me from the show I was trying to watch just to be an asshole.
Does he really think I will tolerate that shit for the rest of our lives? Sadly, I think maybe he does. He is mistaken.
And then, Ivan had to ask if we could watch the rest of the episode tonight, with about twenty minutes left, because he had to get ready to go. Of course, this made Shobhit feel vindicated, although he acted sort of more playful with his "I told you so" comments. I mean, whatever. Grow up.
Shobhit then asked me to help him read through his script, which genuinely irritated me, but at this point I did not actually have anything better to do so I went ahead and humored him. The dialogue was insanely dense with technical words I could not understand ("microservices architecture"??), and also extensive; I honestly wondered if it would even be possible for him to memorize it all just by this afternoon. Then he told me they'll actually have a teleprompter for him to read from; he just wanted to get used to running through it. We went through the entire, quite lengthy scene no fewer than four times.
And then, I asked him to clarify the difference between an architect and an engineer, and he did a pretty good job of explaining it. So we were getting along again. I should stress that the point at which he was being a jerk amounted to a couple of minutes out of the whole day. I just get more and more tired of him behaving that way and just getting away with it. There's something to be said for a death of a thousand cuts, and I do fairly regularly fear that ultimately that could be the fate of our relationship.
Then, when I was scrolling through my Facebook Memories page as usual this morning, I came across this post from eight years ago: A "perfect marriage" is just to imperfect people who refuse to give up on each other.
Well, goddammit. If I believed in such things, I would absolutely regard that as a sign, a message from the cosmos. It's objectively not that, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the well timed coincidence, and continue to keep it in mind.
[posted 12:13 pm]