— पञ्चसहस्राणि पञ्चशतानि षट्नवतिः | —
I am one payment away from making the final of 12 payments on my Apple MacBook laptop, which I bought last May—I had decided I really needed one after trying to use Shobhit's photo app on his PC laptop in Australia was such a ridiculous, pointlessly tedious pain in the ass, and this way I could sync photos between a phone and laptop that were both Apple devices, on the go. It has been the godsend I hoped it would be, and I've taken it on all my travels since. It's especially useful on longer trips, like when I was in the Twin Cities for nearly a week last summer.
Thus, I was happy to learn that the cabin I would be sharing with Gabriel, his brother Garret, and his friends Andy and Brian over last weekend would have wifi. I did not think of this, but it should have occurred to me that it would have a pathetic signal, which really hampered any attempt at processing photos by the day. I managed to get photo files from Friday exported to the laptop's hard drive but that took literally hours, and trying to upload them to Flickr was a fool's errand.
Plus, it soon became apparent that four out of the five of us were interested in watching streaming sports on the cabin's TV. Sports, sports, sports! They watched a lot of soccer, they also watched basketball and at one point they watched car racing. I'm tempted to say it was NASCAR but I don't think that's right. I don't know what the fuck it was. To his credit, though, Gabriel got me interested by having me look up several male racecar drivers and reporting on how hot I thought they were.
Tangent time! I suppose I'll mention this here, something I never even bothered to mention in the email travelogue I sent out last night: it was never any issue for me whatsoever that I was the one gay man out on a weekend island cabin getaway with four straight guys. Twenty years ago, the very prospect of this would have terrified me. At that time, I'd have been totally comfortable traveling with Gabriel (indeed, Gabriel noted once over the weekend that on our trip to Provincetown we actually shared a bed, which I noted was because Gabriel had insisted there would be no reason to book a place before getting there—"I was young then," was Gabriel's response), but these other guys I did not know very well? I'd have been an anxious wreck.
Time and age makes all the difference, and besides, Andy was already Best Man at Gabriel's last two weddings. His brothers were there too. Between that and other sporadic times I've been around them, I've kind of gotten used to these people. I know they're good. In fact, I was comfortable enough with them all that when Gabriel made a comment about what title I might give a written account of the weekend—he actually made a suggestion that I can't even remember—I said, "Actually I was thinking of calling it
Four Bros and a Faggot." That got a pretty good laugh out of the room.
A couple of times Gabriel repeated the hypothetical title in the ensuing conversation, but very conscientiously did not actually use the slur:
Four Bros and an 'F'. Which was cute. These guys clearly all understood that only I was allowed to use that word, at least in that room. And for the record, I don't particularly like the word, even in this sort of context most of the time; I'm not a "Hey faggot!" kind of guy even with gay friends. But, I won't miss an opportunity to use it as a particularly effective punch line.
— पञ्चसहस्राणि पञ्चशतानि षट्नवतिः | —
— पञ्चसहस्राणि पञ्चशतानि षट्नवतिः | —
Anyway, back to the travelogue, which relied heavily on photos already having their files renamed, the photos themselves edited and uploaded to Flickr—I need them online to be able to right-click the images to copy and paste them into the body of the travelogue email. And, as already noted, I could not work ahead on this while on the trip because of the crap wifi signal. Any time I tried to upload anything on my laptop, it sucked up the signal to the point that the sports on the TV, which again was streaming and not from cable, would start pausing to buffer.
I thought I
might get some of it done at the cabin on Sunday morning, after I finished getting ready and everyone was still asleep. But, both mornings everyone started waking up right around the time I finished getting ready, so as soon as I sat down on the couch with my laptop and attempted to load some photos to Flickr, within minutes someone turned the TV on to another soccer game. Goddammit!
Thankfully, we all caught a very reasonable ferry from Lopez Island back to Anacortes on Sunday: the 1:35 pm. We kind of had to, because the ferry schedule has a three and a half hour break after that, with the next ferry not until 5:00. Our ferry reached Anacortes at 2:15, shortly before which we all exchanged our final hugs and goodbyes, and I was home at about 4:35. I'd have been home half an hour earlier, but I had to stop at the Costco in Everett to use the bathroom, and the ETA on my GPS literally pushed back another 30 minutes by the time I got back to my car. This was why I had pushed on rather than stopping to use the bathroom in La Conner, but I just couldn't make it.
Still, this at least gave me just enough time, after getting home, to process and upload all the photos, as well as unpack, and watch the season finale of
The Regime on HBO. I didn't quite have time to work on the travelogue, though, so that had to get done yesterday.
This alone was fairly time consuming, and email with 21 photos and captions, which I then also slightly altered for a version—with extra embedded video clips—that ultimately, finally got
posted to this blog, maybe an hour after I sent the email out, at 7:19.
I had thought briefly about trying to get the email addresses for Garret, Andy and Brian so I could just include them on the initial email. Laney even suggested it when she responded to the email, but as I told her, I made a conscious choice about this, where I would just leave it up to Gabriel. If he wanted to share it with the rest of them, he would.
I just just gone to bed but looked at my email on my phone, and shortly after 10:00, Gabriel did exactly that. I send my travelogues out from my Gmail account, but he presumably just went with autofill so his message got forwarded to my Comcast account, also CCing Andy, Brian and Garret. Gabriel wrote:
Every now and then, Matthew writes a nice thing. At the risk of having you all read his unsolicited take on you, which I have done too many times, I present the following tome.
Gabriel
Sent from my iPhone
Hey, fuck you, I write nice things all the time!
And the rest of them would have no reason to assume otherwise, Gabriel regularly stating so notwithstanding. He actually texted the group chat to note that the email had been sent, and that was where I actually got quite lovely feedback from all of them:
Brian: "Thanks for the thoughtful travelogue Matthew! Truly an American Treasure"
(Brian clearly had to get that in because Gabriel had already mentioned over the weekend how I sign all my emails, which he feels is utterly ridiculous.)
Garret: "Well done Matthew! That was an enjoyable read ❤"
Andy: "Agree! Truly lovely. Very much the tone of the entire weekend"
Brian's text came last night and Garret's and Andy's this morning. I will say, I did make a very consicous choice not to include anything critical of any of them, and especially of Gabriel, in that travelogue; I wanted it to be the love fest it kind of really was in person—and given the structure I had given it where I went through each person in turn, talking shit about Gabriel's other friends was clearly not an option. There was no shit to talk about any of them anyway, truly. And no shit to talk about Gabriel either.
The slight irony is that, when I re-read that travelogue about three times before sending it out, the only slight alterations I made were with another person who had not made it in mind, in an effort to miminize any "FOMO effect." And it wasn't even changing what I said, but rather changing the
way I said certain things; I edited the language slightly.
The only glitch was that, evidently because Gabriel forwarded the email from his phone—and I have seen this happen myself with Gmail—the version of the email I got at Comcast had all the images mixed up and thus with the wrong captions. I don't have a clue why Gmail does this, it's very annoying. I just went back to Gmail and forwarded my original email from my laptop so the photos would be in the right order, copying and pasting Gabriel's note in there so it would be as though the entire thread had just stayed at my Gmail account. Assuming others received the forwarded email the same way I did, Brian read it before I managed to do that (I wonder how long it took him to realize what was going on?) but Garret and Andy read it after, hopefully with the photos in the right order.
Either way, it's properly live
right here on my blog as well.
— पञ्चसहस्राणि पञ्चशतानि षट्नवतिः | —
[posted 12:32 pm]
