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Less to report on today. I had leftover Shahi Paneer and Paneer Naan from Saffron Grill yesterday, for lunch today, which has been the highlight of my day so far.
The highlight of my evening last night, I suppose, would be the first half of the eight-episode Netflix series I watched, all half-hour episodes so it was about two hours, called
Heartstopper, just an exceedingly sweet British show about two gay boys who fall in love—and have a notably diverse group of friends, both racially and on the queer spectrum: a trans girl is part of their friend group, who herself befriends a lesbian couple in her new, all-girls school. Also, one of the boys might even be bisexual; the show hasn't yet made that quite clear, because there's a fair amount of time spent on him figuring out his sexuality.
I must say, also, that I an exceedingly impressed with the performances on the show, as well as the writing. The kids are all fantastic, and everything about the emotional, adolescent struggles they go through, particularly things like frustration with figuring out what to say in a text or a DM, really rings true and authentic. I can't say the plotting is not contrived, but everything the plot is adorned with feels uncontrived. I really can't get enough of it, and it's already made me cry, just with how genuine and sweet it is.
I had already added it to my Netflix queue after hearing about it on a podcast (I think it may have been
Keep It, with a characteristically quasi-cynical take, but I found myself interested anyway). But, I'm pretty sure Shobhit just randomly does searches for "gay" on Netflix and so he independently found it himself, and texted me that he was watching it yesterday morning before his work shift. I was like, hey I wanted to watch that! He got four episodes in and he suggested I watch them last night and so I did. And I loved it.
Side note, I didn't see it until this morning, but yesterday evening Gabriel DMed me a link on TikTok of
this video of a woman working at a bookstore, talking about eavesdropping on a conversation between a group of kids who happened to notice the original
Heartstopper graphic novels on which the series is based, and even that conversation went in an unexpected direction, one rather sweet itself. The conversation sounded to the woman like it might lead to something homophobic, and instead the kids reassured another kid that it was okay to read because "nobody dies." Indeed. There are so many reasons to love
Heartstopper and the absence of death would be a big one.
Now, I haven't read the graphic novels nor had I even heard of them until I heard of the show. But, I love the show, and just like so many great queer works of art, it gives me mixed emotions: a sad wistfulness for the childhood I never got, in which shows like this could even be around to watch (literally the only gay TV content I saw while in high school was "guest star" roles on otherwise extremely heteronormative programs, often about discrimination, dealing with hate, or dealing with AIDS), and a warm feeling for queer youth today who do indeed have this kind of content to consume.
I mean, the fact that the kid still had to be
reassured that nobody dies should tell you something about how far we still have to go. But, it means a lot that it exists in the first place.
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Otherwise, my evening was uneventful. I rode my bike home from work yesterday, and now I feel like I've pulled a muscle in my shoulder. This muscle ache has happened many times in the past, and hadn't in several months; I always assumed it was due to sleeping in the wrong position. I even got a memory foam pillow in an effort to alleviate it. This was the first time I made the connection to my bike. I think I may need to learn a new position to ride my bike in. Maybe I need to raise my handlebars or something. I don't know how to figure this out, but at least I think I may be realizing the culprit and that I had been wrong up to this point.
The bigger news today, which I got while writing the draft of everything above, is I am finally getting a new work computer! I've now had literal years of Excel regularly freezing in the middle of my work, forcing me to restart my computer, sometimes multiple times a day. No one has had any other solution that worked, and just before my vacation Andrew in IT informed me we've finally gotten a bunch of new computers, and the one I have has been in use since we moved to this office location in 2016. The hope is that swapping to a newer laptop will finally fix the issue. I'm both excited and crossing my fingers! Apparently they should have it ready for me to swap out by the end of the day.
Having learned from past experience, I've taken screenshots of all my pinned folders, documents and tabs in Explorer, Excel, Word, Chrome and Microsoft Edge. I'll probably have to re-pin all that shit, but at least now I'll have complete documented lists to use as reference. Going through a change like this without it all documented is not something I would recommend.
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This week, being after my vacation last week, has been, predictably, a bit of a challenge. Lots of things to catch up on that are unusually time-consuming in their own right just because I am catching up on them. Plus, some extra time spent correcting mistakes made by people who didn't know any better, covering for me with tasks they didn't fully understand how they needed to be done. Being out of the office for four whole hours for lunch yesterday did not help on this front at all.
Shelley made up the ad lists for the first time this month, giving me lists significantly longer than usual, with unusual requests in terms of how promo retails are keyed. It seems both a blessing and a curse that she herself is on vacation this week. She'll likely be playing catch-up herself next week, and only today have I been able to start working on the July ads. Hopefully I can have them ready for her by end of day tomorrow, but, we'll see.
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[posted 12:29 pm]
