— पांच हजार एक सौ इकतीस —
Since I like to make other people's birthdays about me, I think I'll mention that I'm feeling old today, not just because it's my eldest niece, Brandi's, birthday—but because she's
thirty-seven. It was bad enough both when she turned 30 and when she turned 35, but this one hit me unusually hard. Granted it's still three years away, but
she is now far closer to 40 than she is to 30. And I'm nine years older than her!
She even told me a few years ago how I "seemed so much older" when she was little, but now that we're both adults our age difference doesn't seem so great. And objectively that's true; nine years may be nearly a decade, but it's not that huge a difference when one of us is in their thirties and the other in their forties. Still, I will be 46 in April. Bleh.
Oh I just realized something. Because I am nine years older than Brandi, I have long said I was nine when she was born. Not true! She was born nearly three months before I turned nine. I was eight when she was born, actually. Kind of barely but the fact remains.
How young I was when she was born notwithstanding, it's tripping me out that within three years I will have a niece in her forties. What a weird thing to consider. I guess this sort of thing happens more blatantly with people and their children. Thankfully I don't have any children.
Could I have children in an alternate universe? With a woman?
I'm married to? Holy shit, I never thought to wonder this: how does sexuality travel across dimensions? Does it stay the same? Or are there straight versions of me in the multiverse? This is going to keep me up at night.
I posed the question to the text thread I'm on with Gabriel, Lea, Mandy and Andy. Are some of the multiverse Matthews straight? Mandy responded with,
All gay except for one. That one is really weird though. Ha!
After a bit of further text conversation, though, Gabriel finally chimed in with
You all need to back out of Marvel thinking. It's two bit science. 👎
Well, all right then! I'm good with that, as now I can rest easy with the idea of my sexuality remaining pure and consistent.
— पांच हजार एक सौ इकतीस —
— पांच हजार एक सौ इकतीस —
Last night Shobhit made golgappas for dinner. Also known as Panipuri. I guess it's a
common street vendor snack in India, consisting of deep fried hollow, round puris that you break a hole into one side of, then put in several different ingredients: potato, garbanzo beans, chutney, a tamarind mix, and then a flavored water liquid. You then put the whole thing in your mouth and chew so you get an explosion of liquid and flavor. It's very, very tasty and hard to gauge when you should stop eating.
Whenever Shobhit makes it, maybe once a year, it's like an assembly line, where you take a puri and then go down the line putting all those things from separate dishes into it. I probably ate 20 of them or more. Shobhit certainly had more than I did.
It was a very tasty and very satisfying dinner.
Then we watched this week's episode of
The Gilded Age on HBO Max, a show that is proving to be utterly ridiculous and entertaining in equal measure. It's kind of a poor-man's version of
Downton Abbey (ironically, with a far larger budget), created and written by the same person—Julian Fellowes—but, in the absence of
Downton, we take what we can get.
After that I watched this week's episode of
Somebody Somewhere, also on HBO Max but this I watched on the computer in the bedroom. And then I went to bed early, at around 9:30. I must have gotten maybe four hours of real sleep on Sunday night, because I definitely drank too much chai on Sunday, and that left me feeling inadequately rested at best, definitely sleep deprived, all day yesterday. I was seriously tired by about 9:00 last night. Shobhit still came to the bedroom to read his book, which I never like because it means going to sleep with the light on. I never sleep as well with the light on, but I was so tired I still fell asleep pretty quickly.
— पांच हजार एक सौ इकतीस —
[posted 12:32 pm]
