I spent an almost certainly record amount of time with Laney for Happy Hour on Saturday, really just because I had planned to go straight from her new place in Renton to Gabriel and Lea's house in Federal way for a Movie Night, and Gabriel and Lea were delayed due to an unexpected need to drive Tess all the way to Stevens Pass for a skiing trip. I later told Lea that I had just spent seven hours with Laney, but I realized later that I had accidentally lied; I was thinking seven hours only because I left Laney's place shortly after 7:00. But, I had not gotten there until shortly after 1:00, which means I was actually only with Laney for six hours. Oops! Consider this my official correction.

The thing is, six hours with Laney wasn't exactly a challenge or anything. In the past when we had afternoon Happy Hours we have several times hung out for a good four hours just by default. Granted, six hours is a 50% increase from that, but it's not like it's hard to kill two extra hours with a friend with whom we never run out of things to talk about. We even took a brief walk at one point, at my suggestion, just because I thought it sounded like a nice idea—even though it was lightly sprinkling. Laney took a small umbrella out of her van for me to use. We didn't walk super far; it was very cold and wet so we turned around and headed back after going maybe a quarter of a mile.

If I remember right, she said she moved into this new place on December 22. It was just shy of one month after her move, and I totally assumed that at least her daughter Jessica had been by so far. But, I learned, I was actually her first visitor. She was well settled in, and even after spending two years living out of her van, the limited amount of stuff she had was so well organized that it still filled the one-bedroom apartment well. She did get some new furniture since moving, including actually buying a new couch, which you see us sitting on in the photo above. She did also have some stuff in storage that she took back out for the apartment.

Her apartment building is right across the Cedar River from downtown Renton, and is thus called Cedar River Court, a surprisingly large and wide, four-story senior living facility operated by the amusingly named organization SHAG, which stands for—and honestly I think this is a bit much—"Sustainable Housing for Ageless Generations." With an acronym like SHAG, I feel like it might make more sense for it to stand for, say, Senior Housing for Amorous Geriatrics.

I just texted that to Laney and she countered with an even better one: Seniors Having A Gangbang.

That aside, the facility is very nice, and almost shockingly nice for Laney to be able to afford on her extremely limited retirement income. She did say she lucked out having this unit become available when she needed it; she said there are elderly people who have been living there for many years. It sounds like a lot of people basically move out of there into either assisted living (which this building is not) or hospice, depending on the circumstances.

Laney gave me a brief tour of the ground floor, after I found surprisingly easy, free street parking in front of the building, but then got confused as to where the entrance was, walking all the way around it and back again before finding her outside waiting for me. She showed me the building's community library, with books on the wall to the right and a row of four or five shared computers to the left (this is now Laney saves on any Internet bill); a theater room much like ours at the Braeburn, only in a larger room much more like a family room and with a smaller number of seats (although the seats are plush and recline, much like Regal Cinemas do, not that theirs will last much longer); and a quite spacious dining room and kitchen. I met about three people along the way: a woman sitting in the library, a Black man watching a game on the mounted TV in the dining room; and a guy who walked into the kitchen to tell Laney about all the free food some organization had dropped off for residents. There were countless large bags of Asian noodles put into the refrigerator, which is something Laney no longer eats, so after being offered I happily took one. The sell-by date was January 27 so we'll want to cook something with it soon.

Laney already knew all these people's names, which was on brand for her.

Laney's unit turned out to be on the ground floor, which was apparently what she would prefer. She has a sliding glass door that opens right out onto the parking lot I had parked across the street from. "I could have just come in here!" I said, but then Laney countered that she wanted to give me the tour. That made sense.

Before Laney retired, she had lived right up there on Capitol Hill for several years, all of a mile away from Shobhit and me. It was an easy walk to meet up with her, at either of our places or anywhere else in the neighborhood. She had a job then though, and now that she's retired she can't afford to live in Seattle proper. (Laney is 65 now. At Cedar River Court, at least one member of every home has to turn 61 by the end of the first year they move in.) Now she's 14 miles away, but after two years of her being on the road, comparatively it still feels like she's right next door again. Besides, as opposed to Danielle, who lives another seven miles or so to the east of downtown Renton, Laney is right on the edge of downtown, where there is a transit center, which means we can easily visit each other using transit if we need to, and technically we both have cars as well. (The car is really Shobhit's, but, as in Saturday this past weekend, I took it to drive down for this visit. Laney actually recommended bussing because she thought parking would be a challenge—in the end it wasn't—but I needed the car so I could go directly from her place to Gabriel's.)

Besides, this new apartment was at least as big as Laney's one-bedroom on Capitol Hill had been, maybe even a little bigger. I think her bedroom was bigger at the other place, but this place has a kitchen that is far bigger, and also a bathroom that is astonishingly large and wide—complete with bars on walls, clearly to be ADA compliant for senior housing.

So anyway, I've been skipping lunches for over a week now, a new tack that has finally been effective at reversing my weight gain, which I really wanted to have happen before going to Australia. I've lost about five pounds so far. However, I needed to be strategic in a different way on Saturday, because I knew I would be bringing alcohol to drink at Laney's. It would be a bad idea to have breakfast early and then go drink over lunchtime on an empty stomach, so that day the meal I skipped was breakfast. I brought a relatively small serving of leftover pho' that Shobhit made (I've been eating it for so many days now that although it was very tasty I'm starting to get sick of it), adding to the serving size with a healthy amount of broth. The drink I brought was just a three-shot cup of straight peanut butter whiskey. I chose this because I thought I might blow Gabriel's mind later and ask him to make me a whiskey drink, and in so doing have one drink to nurse over several hours, rather than a sweet drink I would practically chug (a practice Gabriel has long reacted to with an even mixture of amusement and frustration). Anyway I'll get to that later, but the thinking here was to not mix liquors, as I am at an age now where doing that tends to result in awful hangovers.

Laney opted to switch up alcohol for coffee. Her drug of choice on Saturday was caffeine. I proposed that perhaps one of these days we just do a Caffeine Happy Hour, and I can bring chai.

Beyond that, and besides the brief walk we took—which included a nice stretch right alongside the Cedar River—we basically just shot the shit for a solid six hours, checking off everything we both had wanted to talk about once we got together again. This included her consideration of a local church chorus she may join (she needs to attend one or two of its Unitarian Church services to make sure they don't preach anything that will make her roll her eyes), and a fairly lengthy conversation about the book we both recently read (and she actually re-read, and then recommended to me), called The Book of Strange New Things.

I had texted Gabriel and Lea on Friday night to confirm that we were all still good with me coming over Saturday night. We had spoken briefly about it earlier in the week and Lea had confirmed it could probably work. On Friday, Gabriel had to let me know they were going to Stevens Pass on Saturday, so they weren't certain when they would get back, but I was still welcome to come over if I was okay with that uncertainty. I was, and decided I would just hang out somewhere in Renton for a while if Laney had other plans before I would otherwise need to leave.

I got the text from Lea at about 5:30 that they were headed back and expected to be home around 7:30. I had very much hoped for earlier than that, but decided I could live with this; Gabriel and I have been talking for weeks about my coming over to watch Tár with him, and I really did not want to postpone yet again—we had already made a tentative plan to meet the weekend prior, which I made the choice to push back after I had been around way too many unmasked people over the week prior. I'm guessing Gabriel and Lea appreciated that.

I did the same with Laney, who was as much a part of this consideration as they were. Gabriel always asks for a covid test from visitors before they come; Laney does the same—in fact they are the only people I know who do. That's not a judgment, as I totally get it on both counts: Laney is older and technically immunocompromised on heart medication after her heart attack going on a decade ago now; Gabriel has grandparents he spends time with who are in their nineties—and even aside from that, they don't want to get sick. Unlike most of the rest of us, neither he nor Lea have gotten covid even once thus far, almost certainly because they never seriously relaxed their strict precautions. I took the covid test Saturday morning, and sent the same text with a photo of the negative result to both Laney and to Gabriel and Lea: I'm not pregnant. Laney's response was, Oh darn it, it would be fun to have a little baby Matthew running around! (Would it . . . ?) Lea cracked me up when she replied with, I'm sorry

So, a couple hours into the visit with Laney, I asked if she had plans later, and if not if she minded if I hung out until it was time to head over to Federal Way. She didn't have any plans and was fine with that. So, when I got the text from Lea, I told her I'd be hanging out another ninety minutes or so. With Gabriel and Lea expected home around 7:30, I figured I would leave Laney's at 7:00 and it would take about half an hour to get to their place in Federal Way.

— पांच हजार तीन सौ पचास —

I figured it would probably be best not to leave at 7:00 sharp. It was closer to 7:10 when I left. I naively thought maybe Gabriel and Lea would have just gotten home when I arrived; I probably should have left at 7:15 or 7:20, but whatever, I could just sit in the car and wait a few minutes, I figured. Honestly not a big deal, although it became clear that Gabriel found such an idea kind of unacceptable. It's kind of ironic how concerned he is with being a good and gracious host, even when it's me, when I never really overburden myself with such considerations when I have guests myself. As far as I'm concerned, my close friends can just chill and be at home at my place the same they would at home without any guests. But also, "propriety" was never really my bag.

So I was driving along, taking that four-and-a-half mile stretch down SW 320th Street through Federal Way from the freeway, and Gabriel called me. He asked where I was and I said I was five minutes away; it became clear I would beat them to the house.

So we were basically on the phone from then until I reached their place, so they could give me a code to get into the house via the garage door. At first I thought they were saying the code was at the front door—in my defense, not knowing any different, any logical person would assume as much—but then I had to go back to the garage. Lea texted me the code so neighbors would not overhear them on speakerphone. I got into the garage, and then made it into the back door, at the top of a staircase and directly in through the kitchen.

Lea's dog, whose size never stops surprising me every time I see her because she's about ten times the mass of a single one of my cats, is named Lady. This never stops cracking me up because I am dying to call her from down the street shouting "Hey Lady!" Anyway, Gabriel instructed me to completely ignore her, or else she will get so excited by the renewed attention (literally from anyone; it was made clear that it could have been me, or a burglar; Lady would react the same way) that she would pee on the floor. Lea was far less insistent on this idea; she's Lea's dog, after all, and Lea loves her. But, I decided to follow Gabriel's instructions, as I already knew from previous experience with this dog that I could trust Gabriel on the matter.

I walked in the door, moving past the dog, and joking, "There's nobody here! The house is totally empty!" I was still talking into the phone though, Lady didn't know any better. She wagged her tail and all and came up to me, but as I ignored her, she didn't get overly excited or try to jump on my or anything.

Still, after I took a minute to find some light switches, and I continued chatting on the phone with Gabriel and Lea as they approached the house, Lady sat halfway up the staircase in her very special way of trying to get my attention. Now I couldn't help myself; I had to take her picture and text it to them.

Okay, so let's talk about dinner. I suppose it was presumptuous of me to just assume they'd have some kind of food for me to eat. I had only gone to Laney's for a lunchtime Happy Hour; dinner plans had never been a part of it with Laney. I think Gabriel and Lea didn't quite realize that I would not have eaten dinner, and didn't register the possibility when, after they dropped Tess off at Stephanie's, Stephanie had a dinner made for the two of them to share.

Still on the phone, I was like, "That's okay, I'm trying to lose weight anyway." Which is true! Granted, I still hoped to get some dinner. I honestly expected something along the lines of making a pizza with ingredients from the grocery store or something, like we did one of the last times I came over. They told me to look for a snack in their kitchen. I found some white chocolate chips in their pantry. Raisin Bran, blech! They told me there was some good sourdough bread in the bread box, which I did find. I even had pulled it out of the bag and was about to slice it when they said they were arriving, so I decided fuck it, and just put the bread back.

Shortly after Gabriel and Lea got inside, Gabriel had to use the bathroom, and Lea asked what I'd like to eat. She offered both Impossible Chicken Nuggets and tater tots, and both sounded great to me. I'm not kidding, either; I genuinely love veggie chicken nuggets! I'm quite partial to tater tots too. Lea asked how many veggie chicken nuggets I wanted, and still with my weight maintenance in mind, I just looked at the bag to see what the serving size was and then told her, "Five." Then she asked how much of the tater tots I wanted, and the bag was almost done anyway so I said I would just take the rest. There was actually less in there than it felt like. She used their air fryer to heat up both, and they were ready in just a few minutes.

But then Gabriel came back into the kitchen, and immediately set out to dividing the lasagna Stephanie had made for them into three portions. I was like, "You don't have to do that!" but he said they weren't going to sit and eat a delicious dinner in front of me while I had to eat veggie chicken nuggets and tater tots. Come on, I also think veggie chicken nuggets and tater tots are delicious! Lea even mixed some relish and mayonnaise for me since they didn't have any tartar sauce. If the roles were reversed, though, would I also have divided up the lasagna? Okay, if you press me on this, I suppose I actually probably would. That doesn't change the fact that had they just shared the lasagna on their own, I would have been completely fine with it. I was the one who put them in that position anyway, assuming I would get dinner. By 7:00 they were totally logical in assuming I may have already eaten. So I still didn’t see what the big deal was.

Gabriel set out three plates and three little bowls, into which he divided the salad that had also come with their meal. He separated out the lasagna, and then also divided the veggie chicken nuggets and the tater tots between our three plates. Lasagna, veggie chicken nuggets and tater tots! Call it Italian-American Fusion Cuisine.

Gabriel assumed I wouldn't want red wine, which he would not be drinking (he can no longer process the acidity) but Lea would. Okay, screw whiskey then. Red wine is way better! I was like, "Sure!" And then he poured me a pinot noir that had a seriously smoky taste. Talk about weird. Still better than whiskey though! I mean, maybe. Next time I may still ask Gabriel to make me a whiskey drink. I've been anti-whiskey for ages but the peanut butter whiskey Shobhit buys for me has kind of turned me around. I still like that way better than regular whiskey, but, Shobhit often buys whiskey that is so high-end that I can now sip even that, and find it at least semi-palatable. I used to straight up hate the shit. (The same goes for wine, which Gabriel was clearly remembering.) And drinking whiskey, as already noted, makes it easier to nurse a drink over a longer period of time. I've actually had Manhattans I've kind of liked. Although the last one I had, at a Book Club meetup, was kind of gross.

Tár is a very long movie, at 2 hours and 37 minutes, so I really had this unrealistic hope that we could start it at least by 8:30. I still had a forty-minute drive home from there. Still, we sat down for a pretty relaxed (and very tasty, on all fronts! except maybe the wine) dinner. Totally worth the time, since it yielded the hilarious moment when Lea got up to take our picture, saying, "Two old men talking about music." Gabriel and I had been discussing how bad early-aughts popular music was, but was also the music of Lea's formative years so she loves it. (Lea is seven years younger than Gabriel. When Gabriel graduated high school in 1995, Lea was 11 years old. She loves to point out these things, which perturbs me as well as Gabriel. I'm a year older than Gabriel, so I'm actually eight years older than Lea.) Anyway, Gabriel and I laughed really hard at the "two old men talking about music" comment, which was what she captured in the photo. I later asked her to text me the picture, which I discovered to have been taken with Live Photo. This allowed me not only to save it as a two-second video of Gabriel and me laughing our asses off—which I love—but to save three different screenshots from it.

In many of the early years of Gabriel's and my friendship, we established a pretty lengthy history of both affection and contentiousness. I'd say it's been a long time since we've had any true contentiousness (not since he was still with Kornelija), but sometimes he likes to act like it's still there, just having fun with it. It's never particularly serious. We've both softened in multiple ways as we've aged, and we're coming on nearly three decades of knowing each other, with what I would call a deeply rich shared history throughout. (I even officiated his second wedding. Badly. I didn't mean to! He was never anything but gracious and appreciative, and I have never stopped looking back at the subpar job I did on that with embarrassment.) I may be a lot of things, a lot of which have historically not been exactly ideal to Gabriel, but I think I can say I am an unusually loyal friend, and that has been something Gabriel has appreciated. The same is true of him as a friend to me. I actually have over a thousand photos of him, and nearly three hundred photos of him and me together, spanning 28 years. Plenty of these show us having fun together, but I'm not sure any have captured the pure, abject joy that emanates from the picture Lea took of us this weekend. That's why I love it.

It was past 9:00 by the time we were finally settling down to watch the movie, which Gabriel has been eager to see for months (but ever since covid, he does not see movies in theaters). This was my second time seeing it, and I was eager to see it again after already seeing it once. I kind of forgot how deeply esoteric the first couple of sequences are, with dialogue providing little context for anyone with no deeply intimate knowledge of classical music and conducting, which would be about 99.5% of the movie's audience. Gabriel even asked if it was going to get less esoteric, as he rightly didn't see how it would be such an awards contender and considered such a masterpiece otherwise. The movie almost immediately shifted to the scene with the college kid belittled by Lydia Tár in the Master Class she teaches, and I noted that this was a crucial scene. And slowly but surely, as the movie went on, Gabriel clearly gained a real-time understanding of this movie's position as something widely acclaimed.

Gabriel talks often about how truly nothing gets past Lea when she watches TV or movies, and she often predicts where things are going far earlier than anyone else would, and I got to see this in action. Gabriel said this is pretty much exclusive to watching TV or movies, as opposed to this skill being applicable elsewhere, but the way I see it, Gabriel should pay more attention even when they're not watching something on their TV. Gabriel paused the movie a few times, which only extended how long it would take to finish—it started to get so late that Shobhit was terrified of me falling asleep while driving home and even texted me around 11:00 to stay the night there. I was actually less tired than I usually am by that time and I was sure I would be okay to drive home. Nevertheless, I hoped to get going sooner than later, and at one point when Gabriel paused the movie Lea said, "Matthew wants you to stop pausing the movie."

I hadn't even moved. I barely moved a muscle in my face, so far as I can recall. But, Lea was right, and she caught my vibe with absolute accuracy. She did exaggerate how frustrated I really was (I wasn't especially angry or annoyed; I just didn't want the movie paused a lot of times), but there's still no question that she picked up on it, no matter how subtle it might have been. "Lea notices everything," I said. "I was just thinking she should switch careers and become a mentalist." Gabriel laughed at this, and I said she could convince people she's psychic. There was another moment when Gabriel mentioned that Lea truly knows him, in a way no one else ever has, and I am certain this is a big part of that. Whatever signs or signals there are to see about a person, she clocks them. I really don't think this is just about easily predicting where plots are going.

I have an established history of saying this about basically every long-term relationship Gabriel has ever been in, but I think Lea is finally going to be The One That Lasts. This time I'm right, goddammit! The key difference between Lea and others is that Lea's worldview, the way she looks at, observes and interprets the world around her, is much more in line with Gabriel's. There are still differences, of course, but the really crucial difference here is that she can also see and understand how Gabriel moves through the world, even when it might be different from how she does. I think people can often be either an intellectual match or an emotional match, and rarely both, but the sense that I have is that Lea is very much both for Gabriel, and that is precisely what he needs and is fulfilled by. As such, even after two divorces convincing Gabriel he would never marry again, it's not that much of a shock that they are now officially engaged.

Anyway, it was quite late when the movie ended, but I was still really happy I had come over to watch it, as I particularly thought it would be fun to watch with Gabriel. And it was. We chatted about it for a few minutes after, during which I got up and put my jacket on. Gabriel was sort of like, "You see how he is?" and Lea was like, "It's late, I get it Matthew!"

Gabriel walked me out to my car, even though the car was like twenty feet from the front door. We chatted for a few more minutes, and then set the GPS on my phone and shared my location with Shobhit, at his request, I guess so he could see if I stopped anywhere for too long and he could assume I fell asleep and crashed. I listened to a podcast which helped keep me alert and engaged on the road, which I had to pause to answer a call from Gabriel shortly after I left—just to thank me again for coming over. Why does he have to be so sweet like that, it's very annoying! I actually would like to try and get together more often than we have been, though. I still think the monthly commitment Danielle and I made would be far too unrealistic with Gabriel, but more than just two or three times a year would be nice.

I got home at about a quarter till 1 in the morning, as I pulled out of Gabriel's driveway right after midnight. I'd have never stayed that late under normal circumstances, but we had a long movie to watch, and got a somewhat late start. It was a small sacrifice in order to finally make this happen. I wound up hanging out with them for a good four and a half hours.

— पांच हजार तीन सौ पचास —

. . . And I just wrote all that, and all it had covered was Saturday! So what about Friday?

On Friday we had Alexia over for the nest title in our Harrison Ford-athon: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, with its deeply problematic depictions of the people of India. After the dinner banquet sequence in which the characters are served the likes of live snacks and "chilled monkey brains," even Shobhit—who usually has a surprisingly high tolerance for this kind of stuff—said, "That part was obnoxious."

On the other hand, the villain in that movie is an Indian actor who apparently went on to become a popular villain in many Bollywood movies, and Shobhit recognized him immediately. The guy speaks mostly Hindi in the film, and although his Hindi is never subtitled, it is coherent, and Shobhit often laughed and then would translate for us. The moment when he pulls a guy's heart out of his chest and then holds it up for the crowd to see, he apparently says in Hindi, "His life is in my hands!" Shobhit translated two or three other lines like that.

When the movie ended, Alexia was convinced she had actually never seen this one before. "That movie goes non-stop," she said. "I'm exhausted!"

Yesterday, on the other hand, was spent with Shobhit, doing a few errands, such as going back to the Xfinity store for the third time this month because we got a confusing email telling us to agree to the terms of a contract that, it turned out, was for incorrect changes from our previous visit that have since been corrected. In the end we were instructed just to ignore the email.

We then went back to Home Depot, hoping to find a replacement glass dome for two of our ceiling light fixtures in our condo, one of which I recently partially shattered after trying to remove it the wrong way. (Turns out all you have to do is spin it counter-clockwise and then it pops out.) We also needed replacement bulbs for the range light above our stove, and maybe even the glass covering over them, which is now cracked. The guy we talked to at Home Depot this time was unable to find us the products we need as they are too specialized, but he was still very informative and helpful. Playful, even, as he joked around a lot, stopping just short of feeling like an attempted comedian. And then at one point, as we were following him back to his desk, he said, just like it was an aside, "I like your blue mascara." I just thanked him, but I can hardly believe how often people compliment my makeup lately. It never used to happen, and I must have been complimented on it, usually by total strangers, five or six times in the last year alone.

Not long after we got back, Shobhit began his fasting in preparation for a colonoscopy this afternoon. By 6:00 last night, just as we started last night's episode of The Last of Us on HBO, he had to start drinking the liquid that is used to completely clear out his digestive tract. We did a lot of pausing, both for him to drink eight ounces every fifteen minutes, and soon enough to be using the bathroom. He called in sick today and has to drink the second half of the gallon this morning. I'm actually leaving work early this afternoon at 2:15 to take him to and from his appointment. Once that's done, he'll be delighted to be able to eat again, and hopefully can have a very filling dinner.

— पांच हजार तीन सौ पचास —

[posted 12:35 pm]