— पञ्चसहस्राणि चतुःशतानि सप्तनवति च —
Let me tell you why it pays to be such a meticulous planner, far in advance.
Today, I came to work to find the dreaded "holiday store shifts" email. Consider this paragraph:
This year, we would like everyone in the co-op Office and Board to make time for a total of at least two 4-hour shifts across Thanksgiving and Christmas. Ideally, it would be great to have everyone do at least one shift during the week before each holiday (when the need is the greatest) but understanding that some of us may have already planned PTO, it’s OK if you can only do both shifts in support of only one of the holidays. I would simply ask that if you have NOT made any plans for these holiday weeks yet, that you please prioritize this important contribution ahead of anything else. Everyone is of course always welcome to sign on for more than two shifts 😊.
I like to think of myself as reading this with "lawyer brain."
If you have NOY made any plans for these holiday weeks yet—bingo, there's my loophole! I already have planned
and approved PTO scheduled both the entire week of Thanksgiving and the four weekdays prior to Christmas.
I am literally out of state the week of Thanksgiving, but actually am in town the three days prior to Christmas, which includes weekend days. We just won't focus too much on that or make it part of the conversation, okay? I do have shit planned!
This means of weaseling out of holiday store shifts will have worked two years in a row, and it's entirely possible that one of these years someone will come up to me and say it's no longer acceptable. I'll worry about that if and when it happens. In the meantime, I am fully content to be a calculating and sneaky bastard by taking myself off the board in whichever way I can.
Side note: I like the way that paragraph starts with "This year," as if they don't throw this obligation on us every single year. To be fair, the stores always do really appreciate the extra help, although we now have so many store locations that we simply don't have enough office staff to cover the overall extra need over the holidays. One could argue that makes the need even greater for as many people from the office as possible to offer the help, but I'm deciding to regard that as not my problem. We all have full time jobs with more to do than we can get done, and now they want us to take time away from that to work in stores.
Granted, for only four hour shifts a minimum of two times. And, I'm taking PTO anyway, so I hardly have an argument to make about scheduling. Whatever! Leave me alone!
— पञ्चसहस्राणि चतुःशतानि सप्तनवति च —
What about last night, then? First, I walked north on Elliott Avenue to 15th after work, headed up to meet Shobhit when he got off work at Total Wine at 5:00. I had to hop on a bus the last five minutes so I'd get there on time. Then, we went to the neighboring Petco to get pet treats. Shobhit feels it's very important to have treats available for the cats, because Guru in particular always expects them, which is only the case because Shobhit gives me treats every time he comes home!
Shobhit had sent me some sides to print out at work, which I never got around to doing, generally because . . .
I was working. He got increasingly angry as we took my MacBook down to the communal printer at The Braeburn after we got home, trying in vain to figure out how to connect to the printer within the twenty minutes I had before Tracy was coming to pick me up. Neither of us could figur out how to connect a Mac computer to the printer, which only further frustrated him, and he could not easily find what he was looking for on the MacBook because he is unfamiliar with Apple computers. I couldn't find what he was looking for because I have never connected a Mac to an air printer before.
So, he just got mad at me for not having printed out the sides, and then for not being able to connect the MacBook to the printer, which led to him, as usual when he gets angry, just grabbing shit out of thin air to get mad at me for. Fuck all of that shit. If he were to learn how to manage his anger, that might be the one and only thing to secure the continued success of our marriage.
— पञ्चसहस्राणि चतुःशतानि सप्तनवति च —
— पञ्चसहस्राणि चतुःशतानि सप्तनवति च —
Tracy was at my building to pick me up at 5:50, right on schedule. She then drove us over to Central Cinema, where she found a lucky parking spot basically diagonally across the street at Union & 21st.
We had a weird issue at the register, which worked out wildly in Tracy's and my favor. As far as I can tell based on Google Calendar, I have not gone to see anything at Central Cinema since Shobhit and I went to see the 2018 Oscar ceremony there, in March of that year. Five years ago! More than five and a half, actually. I knew that with the pandemic it had been some time, but I didn't realize that it was even two full years before the pandemic even really hit.
Anyway, I have a punch card that is many years old now—probably from a few years even before 2018. The whole time, I was thinking the cashier was misunderstanding, but now I think maybe I am: I thought it was 10 checks off boxes and then I get a free admission, but the card literally says
Punchcard good for ten single admissions. That was how the guy interpreted it, and I even tried to argue with him, and Tracy was like, "Matthew, step away fro the counter!" so I wouldn't convince him we were actually supposed to pay.
The guy had never seen the card before, and went to the back to ask about it. He came back saying they would honor it, and told us as we were walking back, "We make our money off concessions." I have one box left on it, which presumably means I can come back with admission covered again.
Hey, wait a minute! I could just check my balance worksheet I've had since 2005. I bought the 10-movie punch card on Group on in . . . March, 2015. Holy shit. I went to Central Cinema another 13 times after that, so there were either special events the card was not good for or I forgot it on some occasions.
So that's really what it was. And here I was the idiot thinking it was a punch card for a free admission once filled out. Der. Either way, I had budgeted $50 for last night and only spent about $26. I made the choice not to get a cocktail which made the biggest difference there, as well as not having to pay for admission.
Anyway, Tracy had neither ever been to Central Cinema nor had she ever even heard of it. "This is cute!" she said, as we entered the house and found a seat. We got there at 6:00 at my suggestion, to get ahead of the dinner rush and get good seats. Central Cinema clearly isn't getting the numbers they did pre-pandemic, and we could easily have arrived at 6:30 and been fine, but whatever. It gave us time to hang out. By 6:30 they showed pre-show videos and cartoons and shit and made it harder to chat.
The movie we saw was
Beetlejuice, and it may have been my first time watching it in a theater. That's such a fun movie.
Tracy drove me home afterward, and we did not chat in the car a long time like we often do after movies. I went back upstairs, and now Shobhit was much more subdued. I asked if he wanted to get dressed and re-shoot the video audition from the day before that he had been unsatisfied with. He asked if I'd be home tonight, and I've decided I will be since I have plans every night for the rest of the week, and we'll reshoot that and shoot another video audition then instead.
I took my laptop out to update my budget sitting with Shobhit for a bit, then went to bed kind of early. I was super tired last night, I don't know why.
— पञ्चसहस्राणि चतुःशतानि सप्तनवति च —
[posted 12:32 pm]
