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What a difference a day makes: the office is back to being quite empty today. Those temporary accountants are not in today, which I suspect is related to there being only two people in Accounting here today. In my "section" of open-plan desks between small conference rooms and private phone rooms, there's my four-desk "Grocery Pod," next to all of Accounting, next to a few desks that account for, I think, Social and Environmental Responsibility. I mentioned Kwanteria being here yesterday and saying hi; she works in S&ER. None of them are here today either. In this section today it's just me, Craig and Chris in Accounting.
So, combine that with most of Merchandising being in Anaheim for Expo West for the rest of the week, and it's back to being rather quiet here at the office today.
This also gets combined with last night being the first without Shobhit at home, as he left for his four-week trip to India yesterday. The frequency of his late shifts where I'm home without him until late in the evening notwithstanding, the overnight experience without him felt more alien to me than I expected. It's not like I've never experienced this before; we did the long distance thing for fully six years between 2010 and 2016, after all; and he was in India for three and a half weeks in March 2019.
I think there's a key difference in the intervening time between then and now, though—and not just that in the past Shobhit usually visited his mom in New Delhi every two years or so, and it's now been exactly three years since the last time. This time, the Covid-19 pandemic also happened in the intervening time, a good 15 months of that with me working at home, and thus home nearly all the time. We just had a couple of years in which we were together far more time on a daily basis than ever before in our relationship. I'd say we weathered it better than I might have expected, but I was actually looking forward to this break, nearly a month of a kind of freedom I have not enjoyed in three years.
I'm kind of missing him almost immediately, though. Funny how someone you love can annoy the shit out of you seemingly constantly, but the moment they're gone you miss them.
I'll probably get over it within a couple of days. Also, he's going to be FaceTiming or Skyping me probably most days going forward.
His flight should have landed in New Delhi at around 10:00 this morning, but as I write this, I haven't heard from him yet. He may still be making his way from the airport to his mom's condo, I'm not sure. He did text me from the Paris airport while I was sleeping, at midnight my time. He said he had to go through security again because the flight was in a different terminal.
Fucked system, he said. And then, an interesting text:
I don't know if the service is bad for all Air France or only because this flight is going to India. Is there a lot of anti-South Asian sentiment in France? I know that France is peculiarly in denial about its colonialist past, and by extension its own forms of racism, so who knows. I found a chart on Wikipedia showing from a 2017 BBC World Service poll that in France, 39% had a positive view of India's influence and 53% having a negative view, and 8% neutral.
In the past, Shobhit's layovers on the way to India have tended to be in Asia, typically China or Seoul, South Korea. He never has any issues there.
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I left work early yesterday to take myself to see the five Oscar-nominated Documentary Shorts at SIFF Cinema at the Uptown, and overall I
quite enjoyed them—B+ experience.
I took the #8 home and spent the next hour or so writing my review, after making myself a sandwich for dinner. This meant I spent pretty much the entire rest of my evening in the bedroom. Ivan was still sleeping when I got home, and he got up shortly after 8:00, giving him roughly an hour to get his own dinner and then head out to his work shift. I only saw him briefly a couple of times.
I'd love to keep going to see movies in theaters, but it seems to be slim pickings for now. I still have plenty to watch and review, it's just that for the next couple of weeks it will be mostly stuff watched at home. I'll watch a current release available only at SIFF's website tonight. The new Pixar movie is being released exclusively on Disney+ this weekend. There's a new Colin Farrell movie I really want to see that’s only on Showtime so I will probably try to sign up for a free trial with a different email than the last time I did this. Next week there's another movie on SIFF.net and a new release I may be interested in on Netflix. The movie release landscape right now is truly wild, or it would be to the eyes of any of us looking on from the vantage point of 2019, before the pandemic. I used to be so strict about reviewing only movies that were in theatrical release, but there is no longer such a clear distinction there when it comes to movies worthy of attention and review.
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In other news, I got confirmation via text from Laney yesterday that she had arrived at her new home in the Mt. Baker neighborhood of Seattle, the day before. Presumably we will stick to our plan for a Happy Hour on Friday, in which I will be able just to take Light Rail down and go to a place in her neighborhood close to her new place where she's subletting a room. I'm really looking forward to it. Thankfully there's currently no rain in the forecast for that day.
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This just in: Shobhit finally confirmed arrival. Apparently a driver from his brother's work, along with his mother, went to the airport to pick him up and drive him home. "The luggage took an obnoxious amount of time," he said. Then he added the driver even carried one of his two heavy suitcases all the way up three flights of stairs to the condo. Nice! In any case, he's arrived now, which is good to know. It's 2:13 a.m. in India as I write this, but he may be wide awake with the time difference, I don't know.
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[posted 12:43 pm]
