— पांच हजार तीन सौ सैंतालीस —
I took myself to see
Plane yesterday, the B-movie thriller about a plane crash and hostage situation starring Gerard Butler, and I had a great time.
It was at 5:00. The trailers seemed to go on and on, as usual. When it ended, I actually thought to myself as I checked for the next #11 bus coming to the 9th & Pine stop,
I'm not running to catch the fucking bus. And then, just as I walked out into the street, the One Bus Away app said it was coming in three minutes. I could make that if I ran, but didn't have to run too desperately. So, I ran. Then the stupid bus didn't come for an extra two minutes. I could have fucking walked! At least I had enough time to catch my breath before I put my mask on to get on the bus.
Speaking of masks, I have to back up a bit now. Usually 5 pm showings of anything, especially midweek, are virtually empty—like, ten people in the theater, max. There was something very unusual about this 5 pm screening yesterday: all but two of the seats in rows K
and L were booked solid—an evident group purchase, of 26 people total. I kept wondering, how or why would a group that large go to a movie?
Then it hit me: I bet all these people don't know each other
that well. Probably it was a meetup.com group or something similar. That seemed to me the most logical explanation. I tried to find evidence of a group outing like this online and came up short, but that certainly doesn't make the explanation any less logical.
The thing I did
not particularly like about this was walking in and, seeing the entire group seated in the two aisles behind mine, all of maybe two of them had a face mask on. How so many people go to places like a movie theater without still bothering to wear a mask boggles my mind. I sure as shit had mine on. Under normal circumstances, when I might have popcorn for instance, I'll take my mask off long enough to eat, then put the mask back on—but I do that in theaters with only a handful of other people present. This group kind of spooked me (my attendance at the wine tasting class last week, in a comparably sized group, notwithstanding: there was no getting around taking masks off there—and it was one of many reasons I postponed last week's plans with Laney and with Gabriel). I didn't have any snacks anyway, and I went out of my way to make sure my own KN95 masks was air-sealed to my face. I didn't take my own mask off even once for any reason during the run of that movie.
I still had a great time watching it. And, to be fair I suppose, I think it probably is more fun seeing it in a theater with other people around than watching it at home. I can easily see how it would play as just another sub-par B-movie playing on cable one day. But in the theater, it was surprisingly good, and actually good by typical B-movie standards. At least Gerard Butler seems fairly comfortably self-aware about his status as "
the king of the B-movie."
In more ways than one: I gave
Plane a solid B.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ सैंतालीस —
— पांच हजार तीन सौ सैंतालीस —
Barbara, the friend I've now known since 1996, who lived in Seattle 2000-2010, and whom I visited in Louisville, Kentucky last March, seems to have a renewed interest in my movie reviews. She used to comment on my reviews all the time with typo and grammar corrections, unable to contain her history as a copy editor (her position for the year we put out the
Seattle Gay Standard, 2000-2001), but that ended several years ago. Lately she's doing it a lot again, although now she doesn't post the comments on my review posts themselves, but comments on
my Facebook posts sharing the links to the reviews on my website. (This website, in fact. fruitcakeenterprises.com! People don't often remember this for very long, even though I always assume it will be easy to remember.)
I feel strange feeling compelled to clarify someone like Barbara, who for so many years was easily just a known entity in my life and in my blog posts. I've been using a live blog since 2002, but in the early days (2002 through 2017) I used LiveJournal, which a bunch of my friends from the Seattle Lesbian and Gay Chorus used at the same time—for a brief period, even Barbara. This allowed for a lot of shorthand, because I had a lot of friends I knew were regularly glancing at, if not reading in detail, my LiveJournal. And back then, Barbara lived in Seattle and was my most regular "movie buddy," so she was referenced more than anyone for a while there, and for a long time after that, more than anyone besides Shobhit. Her move to Virginia in 2010, the same year Shobhit moved to New York City, changed all that. In fact they moved away only within a couple of months of each other.
I'm fully aware that my readership here is radically different from that of LiveJournal. For one, there is no social networking element to this, as there was on LiveJournal: no "friends" to connect with here. To this day Gabriel will make reference to some possibility of my posting a "friends-only" entry here, and I have explained multiple times now that Squarespace has no such functionality. After my move to Squarespace, I had to make peace with the idea that if there were anyone I didn't want to see something I posted here, I would have to chose not to post about it at all. Everything in this blog is public to literally anyone who has the URL. Honestly it's probably helped me be at least a little more diplomatic in my representations of people in my life. Maybe slightly less so when it comes to my husband.
Honestly, I would be surprised to learn any single person comes to this blog every single day. Why would they? Not even Shobhit does, and he reads most days. I think Janine, Gabriel's mom, did for a while, but that was when she was working. I have no idea if she's still incorporating this into her daily routine. If there's anyone else, I would be genuinely shocked. People like, say, my parents—or more specifically Sherri—clearly read at least somewhat regularly, as she'll sometimes make reference to something she clearly read here. But I can't imagine she reads every day. She doesn't have the patience for that. I don't know anyone who does.
One thing that is fun here on Squarespace, though, is that I have access to analytics: numbers of visitors to these pages each day, and what country they're viewing it from. For instance: in the past 30 days, 80% of my visitors (a whopping 744) have been from the U.S. I might have guessed the percentage from elsewhere to be lower than 20, actually. Second-highest is nearly 6%, from Canada. Four percent from the UK, and nearly three percent—20 people!—from . . . Austria. Hi, Austrians!
Most of these people probably aren’t reading this blog anyway. I also get analytics mailed to me regularly, with the pages people are coming
to, and the vast majority of the time they are landing on some or another of my movie reviews as a result of Google searches. For example—and this is rather amusing—the top search keywords, bringing eight people to my site over the past month, were
jack champion loincloth, bringing people to my
review of
Avatar: The Way of Water. (I don't want to think about the ages of people who did these searches. He's only been eighteen since last November. Let's just pretend they were all teenagers! Or, like me, looking for information about the production—because that kid staying in a loincloth for the entirety of his screentime continues to baffle me.)
— पांच हजार तीन सौ सैंतालीस —
Anyway, I got back home, and wrote my review of
Plane, which took somewhere between 20 and 40 minutes too long because, even though it was still holding plenty of a charge, my wireless mouse disconnected from my iMac—something it keeps doing, leaving me paralyzed because I cannot navigate my computer effectively without it. I don't know if it's because it's getting on eight years old now or what, but it's sure a pain in the ass. Maybe I should look into replacing the mouse. The computer itself is a pain in the ass too, but replacing the mouse would be a lot cheaper.
Then Shobhit and I watched a couple of episodes of
Abbott Elementary. Their season two Halloween episode was particularly entertaining.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ सैंतालीस —
[posted 12:40 pm]
