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The ups and downs of Shobhit's campaigning continue. He was very disillusioned yesterday afternoon, by the number of people he assumed would support him but aren't. Then, after he spoke with another couple who lives two doors down from us on the fourth floor, a seeming miracle happened: they not only signed the document of support and allocated their Democracy Vouchers to him, but they gave him a $100 donation
each! This is still chump change compared to what other candidates have yet accomplished, but compared to where Shobhit had gotten thus far it was like a windfall.
He also noticed in the online logging of allocated Democracy Vouchers the other day that
Susan Dennis had allocated her vouchers to him. Thank you Susan! We both really appreciated that.
The point is, there have been some very positive developments in all this, alongside the inevitable disappointments. As I have noted to him more than once, these things go with the territory.
We had our Action Movie Night at the Braeburn last night, and Shobhit only came for the dinner and socializing before the movie, because he was still hoping to chat with other residents in the building over the rest of the evening while the movie was playing (this was when he got those huge donations). He brought copies of the signature forms as well as copies of his rather-too-long platform (14 bullet points), which, unsurprisingly, few people in the moment wanted to read over carefully, if at all. Still, he did get multiple signatures and a couple of small donations out of it. When Derek discovered Shobhit did not have change to break his $20 bill, he just went ahead and changed his donation from $10 to $20.
Jake was the one who read over the platform document, which was printed on two or three pages and stapled together. He made some very good points about certain issues that were really under the purview of state government and not city government, and I actually agree that he should just pull those out of there. The whole document is rather too long for the average voter with a short attention span.
I'm not especially comfortable with the idea of going around pleading for support from people; I'm always afraid of some cringeworthy aspect of it. But Shobhit is comparatively unfazed by such considerations, especially given the amount of time he spent in New York and Los Angeles trying to get acting work. There's a lot of overlap in the nature of these processes.
Also, the guys at Action Movie Night were generally gracious and polite and engaging with him anyway. Tony, the guy who basically hosts these movie nights and also happens to be our neighbor on the fourth floor on the opposite side from Alexia, had already given his signature and given a small donation at the kitchen open house on Sunday, as did his wife, Sarah. At the potluck dinner last night (which turned out to be exclusively pizza, save for one bag of jalapeño potato chips), Tony said, "When your neighbor runs for City Council, you support him!" I thought that was an interesting way to contextualize his support, but also I found it sweet.
I think a lot of Braeburn residents who are supporting him are indeed doing so because they know him, and they also understand his work ethic as someone on the Board. The trick going forward will be convincing the voters who don't actually know him.
Anyway. Tony actually ordered two pizzas for delivery. Shobhit and I made pizzas at home and brought them—two of them, but each small enough that combined they'd be about as big as one of Tony's large pizzas. Shobhit and I worked on that during the hour prior to the meeting time; we also both made cocktails to bring down with us. Eight of us came last night: Tony, Jake, Ben, Ryan, Derek, Jesse, Shobhit and myself. But, as Shobhit did not stay for the movie, seven of us watched in the theater.
It was Ben's turn to pick, and it was an interesting choice: the 1993 Michael Douglas film
Falling Down. Some aspects of it aged very poorly (bizarrely random digs at Italians; the wife of Robert Duvall's character being inexplicably unhinged), but a lot of it actually aged surprisingly well—most notably, that Michael Douglas's character really isn't the good guy.
I hadn't seen it since the mid-nineties, but I had seen it before; Tony jokingly said he and Ben took bets on who else had probably seen it before, and they guessed Ryan and me. They were right.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ सत्तर —
— पांच हजार तीन सौ सत्तर —
So. What else? I'm still plugging away at tagging my photos from Australia, bit by bit. The biggest challenge there is simply finding the time to work on it at all; in the limited time I am at home and not at a movie our out socializing, we have TV to catch up on or Shobhit just wants me to spend time with him. I'm not saying I resent that, far from it. But, it does make making real headway on tagging my photos an incredibly long, arduous process. Right now I've gotten about as far as the first day of our first weekend I Sydney.
I do keep occasionally finding photos that were actually duplicated—another pain-in-the-ass glitch of importing photos via Microsoft's new "Photos" app on Shobhit's PC laptop, and to say that was glitch-heavy would be an understatement. This is the worst of its offenses, where it would import photos and show them all properly in the Photos app import, and then once loaded to the hard drive, the image actually showing would be for another photo, already imported properly in its correct location. And when I find these, I have to open the
Apple Photos app on my iMac, find the correct photo, save it to my hard drive, upload it to Flickr and delete the photo it's replacing.
At some point I need to buy a new computer and I need it to be a Mac laptop, so I can just take that with me on trips and avoid all these PC glitches.
As for captioning all the photos from Australia, barring another pandemic (that being the only reason I managed it after our 2020 trip), I have very little faith I'll actually get that done. I am adding captions to all the photos I include in these Daily Lunch Updates, however, and occasionally adding captions when I find it either convenient or prudent in the midst of all my tagging. So by the time my tagging is done, not all the photos will be captioned, but a lot of them will. I may have to accept that as good enough.
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In other news, Shobhit had to take the day off of work today and drive down to Olympia, because he is required by law to create a nonprofit with which he can open a specific bank account for depositing campaign contributions, and it was taking far too long for the process to finalize. He found out he could go down to Olympia to request an expedited process for an additional fee, so that's what he did. There was a sense of urgency here because I guess there's some law about how soon you have to deposit donations after they are given, but he needed the account open in order to be able to do that.
He was afraid he might just run into another snag and discover the drive was a waste of time, but thankfully, it all seems to have worked out. He did have to call me for my social security number at one point, but shortly after that he texted me that it was all done and he was headed back. That was at about a quarter after 9:00 this morning; he left around 7:00 just as I caught the bus downtown, so he could drive down and mostly beat rush hour traffic.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ सत्तर —
[posted 12:29 pm]
