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Today's Random Wormhole Moment
I got a notification on Flickr inviting me to add
this photo, of the top layer of Shobhit's and my 2013 wedding cake still in its tin foil a year after the wedding but still in the freezer, to a Flickr group called "
Freezer Full!" Like, what? Check out the group page description:
Make one or more beautiful photos of a full freezer.
(Upright freezer, Fridge freezer, Chest freezer)
All people who likes a full freezer are welcome!
All righty, then. The group has 28 members. 487 photos have been added to it so far. Of the contents of people's freezers.
I didn't dive into that. I mean, it's fascinating how you can think of the most random and things and you can find
a community of people interested in that thing—but, for me, the contents of freezers is not it. (I did add my photo though. I was like, why not? I'll give these people what they want.) What I
did dive into was the photo album of my own that the photo was from:
1st/10th Anniversary Party, when we went to eat the top of our wedding cake the traditional one year after the wedding, at Golden Gardens Park (where the actual wedding had also occurred), in June of 2014.
This was now over eight years ago. Danielle, her mom, and her two kids were there, and eight years makes a particularly big difference when kids are growing up—Morgan and Rylee are now 18 and 13, but in these photos, they were 9 and 5! (Nine years difference in age with Morgan is because she's already had her birthday this year, and hadn't yet in 2013; but Rylee hasn't yet either year—although she will be 14 on October 19.)
Shobhit and I were both much thinner then. I am now all of 2 lbs shy of my peak weigh of 70 lbs that I had reached around 2008, but in 2010 I lost 30 lbs, but currently am in this vicious cycle where it seems like the more I think about wanting the lose weight the more I eat. I just took my annual Health Assessment for Aetna at work and it seems my being 10 lbs heavier than I was last year has shifted me from the "moderate risk" category to "high risk." I'm even barely above "normal" BMI, although it's widely known now that BMI is a bullshit metric. On the other hand, when it comes to averaging things out and figuring out costs, I suppose it's the simplest metric they can use. God forbid they come up with more elaborate means, but whatever.
We had a lot more people come to the wedding in 2013 than came to our "1st/10th Anniversary Party" at Golden Gardens Park, the same location as the wedding itself. The wedding was in the Golden Gardens Bathhouse, but for our return a year later, we just found a log on the beach and also brought a blanket.
There were about 10 people gathered for the 2014 gathering: Shobhit and myself, then Danielle with her mom and two kids made six; Sachin came and brought his mother, making eight; Stephanie, who had made the beautiful cake for us, also came, bringing along a friend of hers whose name I can't recall and who I don't think I ever saw again. That made ten. Overall, though, being from now that long ago, it was really fun just to click through all the photos again. To this day I deeply appreciate the massive amount that so many of our loved ones did to make our wedding one of the greatest days of my life, and seeing even these photos from a year after the wedding really fills me with warm fuzzies.
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Last night was mostly spent hanging out again with Alexia at her place, the first in our
Star Wars movie marathon where Shobhit wasn't with us. We watched
The Force Awakens (2015), and Shobhit is both out of town in India right now and he recently watched the sequel trilogy films on cable on his own anyway.
I really had a good time watching this one, and I particularly looked forward to these as I have seen them the least number of times (the most recent one,
The Rise of Skywalker, is the only one I have only seen twice and the only one I have yet to see since it left theaters), particularly among the trilogy films. Now, I will say there are some stretches of
The Force Awakens that have strained and clunky dialogue, particularly in scenes where Solo and Leia are talking to each other. This element is a lot easier to identify, also, a good seven years after its initial release.
Furthermore, there's a lot of time spent in that movie with people introducing themselves to each other so both they, and us as audiences, can learn their names—something that stales quickly upon repeat viewings. This doesn't happen in previous films: you learn characters names when someone addresses or calls to them, which is a lot more organic. For the first time, I'm really seeing a way in which George Lucas himself did something better than other directors in the franchise.
In retrospect, I think the sequel trilogy films on the whole suffer from being rush jobs. I mentioned to Alexia last night that the original trilogy and the prequel trilogy films were all released three years apart, which is ideal, and gives these huge blockbuster movies time to breath. The sequel trilogy films, Episodes VII, VIII and IX, were released only two years apart, and the two stand-alone films (
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and
Solo: A Star Wars Story) were released in the single years that were otherwise short buffers between them. This means that between 2015 and 2019, five Star Wars movies were released in as many years, which had never been done before and was, I even felt then, a misguided approach. The "Marvel-ization" of Star Wars was never a great tactic, and the market never particularly wanted to be flooded with it.
Granted, we now have had several Star Wars series, with varying results. I'm actually really enjoying
Andor and think it's as good as
The Mandalorian was and arguably even better and thus the best series to date. Still, the shows occupy a different pop culture space than the films, which have captured the public imagination as a franchise in a way no other ever has.
Back in 2015, at least, all we had for the moment, out of the total five new movies to come, was
The Force Awakens, and it was a very, very exciting cultural moment. It had been ten years since the previous Star Wars film (
Episode III: Revenge of the Sith) and there were high expectations of something that made up for how terrible fans though the prequels were. In 2015, that promise seemed to have been met—although I have to say, for the first time, after seeing the prequels recently and then watching
The Force Awakens last night, it could be argued that
Revenge of the Sith is actually better.
The sequel trilogy never had a strong vision of is full, three-movie arc, in stark contrast to both the previous trilogies—and even though Lucas made momentous decisions in between movies in the original trilogy, the whole thing still managed to make sense by the end (the Luke-Leia kiss in
The Empire Strikes Back notwithstanding), and
The Rise of Skywalker falls far short on that front.
On the other hand, this trilogy may work better than expected upon re-watch of all three films in succession, which I am currently doing for the first time since
The Rise of Skywalker's initial release. Rey has a vision in
The Force Awakens that actually does link to
The Rise of Skywalker in a way I had not remembered.
Anyway, the movie ended, Alexia said, "That was really fun!" and soon I was headed back to my condo, where I finished my library book. My budgeted 34 pages per page had already been met when I did some reading before going next door (helped largely by Alexia needing to postpone by half an hour), which took me to within five pages of the end of the book. So, I just finished it. Whew! I finished that book in 21 days, the second-fastest read so far this year, and the fastest is kind of a cheat because Sona Movsesian's
The World's Worst Assistant, which I read in 10 days, has far fewer words per page and a lot of cartoon interludes.
Having read a bit ahead last night to finish that book, though, I re-budgeted with the new book, which I now need to read 32 pages of each day in order to finish by Thursday next week and be prepared to discuss it at Book Club on Friday the 21st. Thankfully, both these books are each barely more than 250 pages long before they reach the Notes sections, which made it a lot easier. I'd have a lot harder time reading them both on time if they were, say, 450 pages long each. This book club is specified as nonfiction only though, and mercifully nonfiction books on average are not that long.
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[posted 12:36 pm]
