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Vacation seems to have really done me good. I'm way behind on a lot of stuff at work still, but none of them are imminent emergencies—some may become that if I neglect them for too long—and I don't even really care. I'm back to work, I'm doing what I can when I can, and it's all very chill. Thursdays and Fridays tend to be low work-in-office days so it's also pretty quiet around here.
I had my first weekly 1:1 with Gabby without Eric today, so it seems I have officially fully transitioned into her being my new boss. She has scheduled them for half an hour rather that the hour Eric always had them for; he and I wound up shooting the shit and kind of socializing for a lot of it. Gabby and I actually did the same for a good ten or fifteen minutes, catching up on things regarding my vacation and also her own news from my travels: she actually did come down with covid after all. Her first time though! She said she was home for two weeks, but because she's so new and doesn't have any PTO (she really could have used PTO anyway, maybe she just didn't want to go in the hole) she worked through it, from home.
She was really worried, apparently, about me coming down with it while in Australia, and she scoured my email travelogues for any indication. I'm actually glad she never contacted me about it, it would have just freaked me out. She's certain she didn't get it from Darrell, at least, and I think she's right; she and Eric tested negative for a full week after their exposure to him, and as far as I know Eric never came down with it thereafter either. Gabby's husband apparently had a more recent exposure at
his office, and came down with it shortly thereafter; Gabby then did the same. This was all after the last time I saw her. I don't really think her recent covid had any connection to me at all.
I keep saying this: I know it may be pure luck. But, I have a feeling I remain largely protected by having had all four vaccination shots
and already having had covid, even though it's coming on a year now since I had it. But, I had multiple direct, unmasked exposures between September and December, and still have not caught it again. We'll see if I can last another six to nine months, when presumably the next annual covid booster comes out.
I never did mention this in my email travelogues: I don't appear to have caught covid (I tested negative last week, and will test again this weekend), but I did catch
something, basically my first standard cold in three years—the last one from my
last trip to Australia! It was very mild, thankfully, and just involved a dry scratchy throat for a couple of days followed by a very mild cough for about a week. And I don't think I got whatever that was on planes, trains or buses: I wore masks religiously on all of the above, excepting whenever I was eating on a plane. I did go to a bathhouse in Sydney in which the many people there were all maskless, and I suspect that's where I got whatever it was I did get. If there were any place I should have kept a mask on at all, it was there.
This is why I still wear masks on public transit and in stores. I'm not even that worried about covid anymore. People forget that all this other shit is also out there, and masking helps prevent infection from other things too.
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— पांच हजार तीन सौ इकहत्तर —
As for last night, I left work at 3:55 so I could barely make it to the Pacific Place AMC to see
Cocaine Bear, which had actually been in theaters since February 24, but since we left for Australia on the 19th this was the soonest I could go see it.
It was fascinating listening to
The Big Picture podcast discussion about it this morning, wherein the two hosts, whose opinions I usually really respect, really kind of dissed on it. It's not that it didn't meet their expectations, per se, but rather, it seemed, that it wasn't the movie they wanted it to be. It's odd for them to expect anything other than what the movie actually is, honestly.
My experience was the opposite: I actually enjoyed it more than I expected to! Another interesting thing they discussed was how they went to a screening filled with people, and it was largely silent during a movie that expected them to laugh. And yet, I went to see a 4:15 showing yesterday in which I was, delightfully, the single person in the theater—and I laughed a lot!
As I said in my review, I knew exactly what to expect from this movie, and the movie delivered exactly that. Even more, it delivered what I
hoped to get from it, without necessarily expecting it to. I would actually enjoy watching this movie again.
I honestly think people giving this movie a bad review are people coming in with strangely unrealistic expectations of it, or it's just not a movie that's for them to begin with. Sean and Amanda, the podcast hosts, claimed to go in with open minds and a willingness to enjoy it, but I still felt like a lot of their criticisms missed the point. I disagreed with a lot of the stuff they said. They even called the bad-CGI bear "a problem," and I didn't feel that way at all. The CGI could have been way worse, it's decent for a movie with a $35 million budget, and I was on board the whole time.
I would agree they didn't give Keri Russell enough to do. They gave most of the other actors plenty to do. I loved Margo Martindale and Jesse Tyler Ferguson in it. And critics seem to think Elizabeth Banks didn't fully know what she was doing with this movie, but I felt like she knew exactly what she was doing. Every dumb part of it was done with intention. Anyone saying this movie tries too hard to be like
Snakes on a Plane—and some are even saying it's worse than that movie!—don't know what the hell they're talking about, in my opinion.
So anyway, I walked home from the theater, wrote the review. I really wanted to watch the second of two episodes we had to catch up on of
The Last of Us, but then Shobhit told me Sachin happened to be on Capitol Hill and was coming over. Dammit. Shobhit opened a bottle of wine after Sachin got there, and I had a glass too, but I didn't hang out. I took advantage of the extra time, and now actually have two of my travelogue emails formatted and posted backdated on this blog:
Queensland: Brisbane & Gold Coast, and
Kangaroo Island. Two down, three to go! I'm pretty confident now that I should have all three of the rest done by the end of the weekend, other plans tonight, tomorrow and Sunday notwithstanding. It's still time consuming but it's also going faster than I expected.
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[posted 12:20 pm]
