— पांच हजार छह सौ बयालीस —
I suppose I'll start, briefly, with the biggest news in the world over the weekend: President Joe Biden dropped out of the race.
I even talked about there already being talk of this being a possibility in my
post on Friday—I just had no idea it would actually happen so soon. It was such a quick thing that, when it happened yesterday, I actually learned about it before Shobhit did!
We had gone grocery shopping late yesterday morning. We drove up to the Costco in Kirkland where Shobhit knew they carried large bags of lentils he wanted (largely because of the high-percentage South Asian population on the East Side), and then on our way back home we stopped at Hau Hau Market in the International District for vegetables. We came home, and had nearly all the groceries put away when I started making chai. I was waiting for the water to boil when I opened my phone and saw the news.
"Oh my god!" I said.
"What?" Shobhit replied.
"It's already happened?"
"What?" Shobhit said again.
"Biden dropped out!"
Within minutes, quite predictably, Shobhit had the TV turned on to see coverage of the news. Here's what really surprised me, though: within minutes, he was like, "You can change it. We can watch the show." He was talking about
Slow Horses, which we have been binging on Apple TV+ (it's fantastic). Even I preferred watching that, but was surprised Shobhit was so quick to move away from the news.
Not that he seemed unhappy or despairing about the news, mind you. There's been a lot of debate about whether Biden should stay in the race, especially with polling suggesting he had little chance to win. (Gabriel keeps insisting he had "zero chance," citing the
Pod Save America podcast as if those guys are gospel. "Show me the poll!" he said more than once. Well, the last time I looked at FiveThirtyEight.com, it had models showing Biden winning 51 out of 100 times. That's hardly a surefire margin, but there have to have been some polls in his favor for that to happen.) Shobhit has been saying he thinks Kamala Harris, who was endorsed by Biden and seems by far the most likely person to take his place (if for no other reason than access to the campaign funds for a ticket she was already on), should choose another woman as her running mate, specifically Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a popular Democratic governor in a key swing state.
The reactions trickling in among my friends and family on social media have been interesting. I've been most struck by my cousin Tammy's husband Erin, a tall, large, burly bald guy who could easily be mistaken (due to nothing more than prejudice) for a small-town Trumper on sight alone, is shockingly the most vocally anti-Trump person in the family (although Beth, my sister-in-law, comes close). Yesterday afternoon he posted a meme that read, ANYONE BUT TRUMP 2024, with his own added caption,
I'm going to agree with Former President Clinton in saying that we need to back Kamala Harris in becoming the next President of the United States of America WE MUST STOP TRUMP FROM TAKING OFFICE AGAIN!!! None of this was the most striking part of it, though—that distinction went to his own comment on the post, which read,
And just so if anyone else would like to make Pro Trump comments on this post You will get unfriended and blocked no ifs ands or buts about it. Wow!
I would say that not even I have ever posted something like that, but that's really because I've never had to. I have unfriended Trumper family before, though, most notably my late Uncle Paul's wife, Sarah, who used to comment regularly on my posts during President Fuckwit's first term things like, "I'm glad he's our president." I don't tend to post proclamations like that anyway; if I find someone to be bigoted I just unfriend them and move on.
I did notice this comment on Erin's post this morning, though (and, incidentally, Erin has not unfriended this person):
So this idea of "exchange of ideas" and "tolerance of the views of others" is not something you adhere to? I'm voting for Trump. If that's reason enough to unfriend me, I'm disappointed.
I went ahead and posted this response:
"Tolerance of the views of others" is a bad faith argument when you are supporting an anti-democratic bigot. And then, knowing full well that any further exchange with that person will get me nowhere, I blocked the guy myself, so I can't get roped back into those comments with him tagging me or anything.
Anyway. So much for "briefly," right? I feel a bit more hopeful with Biden, much as I actually liked him, out of the race. The fact remains that most of the country was checked out of the idea of this election just being a rerun of 2020, and this injects some excitement, and
maybe some renewed hope, into the proceedings. President Fuckwit will find some way to dehumanize the new nominee (likely Kamala Harris) in a way that will delight his base, but all the same tired arguments he's been using against Biden will no longer work. Biden's age had become a genuine issue. Harris won't have that problem, although I do think her being a woman will, unfortunately, become a new one. We'll see, though. Even as a woman she didn't have the perceived decades of baggage people claimed to be their issue with Hillary Clinton in 2016.
— पांच हजार छह सौ बयालीस —
Okay, let's back up now. Shobhit got home from his conference trip to Wenatchee on Friday. He texted me to ask if I had watered his plants in the p-patch, which I had promised I would do every day while he was gone—and then completely forgotten. It literally never once even entered my head. I absolutely should have created a daily reminder, and I will do that any time he goes on a trip without me again. This was a fuckup a felt deeply, genuinely bad about, and I even apologized a couple of times over text.
I had no idea what mood he would be in as a result of this, once he finally got home from work that night around 10:30. I was sitting at my computer desk in the evening when, as he often does, he texted me just to start conversation,
Moew.
I told him that I knew it was likely too little too late, and he probably already did it earlier in the day, but I had finally actually gone down and watered his p-patch plants. Thankfully, even after five days of heat with no precipitation, the plants generally seemed to be doing okay. I did this after getting back from the Central District PCC, which I had ridden straight to on my bike from work, to get a member offer of a free pint of blueberries. After I watered the plants and put away the blueberries and a couple of condiments I bought for the "purchase necessary" to get the offer, I also walked up to Trader Joe's and got a new gallon of milk and a new packet of green onion pancakes.
I had the very last of the leftover lentils I had been eating all week with one of the onion pancakes, and then I later actually made Shobhit dinner: the last Deep Indian Kitchen naan pizza we han in the freezer, to which I added some of the last of the yellow onion, bell pepper, and tomato we had still in the fridge—stuff I might have used for other stuff had I needed to make my own dinners, except the huge amount of lentils Shobhit left behind lasted me all week. Shobhit had a leftover container of French fries in the fridge as well, so I surrounded the pizza on the cookie sheet with those mixed with the leftover chopped bell pepper and onion. It actually looked quite pretty; I even
took a picture of it.
Aside from riding and walking around to grocery stores and making Shobhit's dinner, for some reason I can't remember at all what the hell I did with myself on Friday night. Maybe I watched something? I mean, I couldn't have spent the
whole evening jerking off.
— पांच हजार छह सौ बयालीस —
Saturday would have really been the Main Event of the weekend, when I spent from mid-morning to late afternoon hanging out with Alexia: we went on another Seattle Archtecture Tour, this one called "
South Lake Union: Then & Now." This one really interested me because no other neighborhood in Seattle has been redeveloped so completely over the past twenty years or so, to the point that, compared to how it was before, it feels like a completely different city. And, it was indeed an incredibly fascinating and informative tour, offering many hidden gems we never had any awareness of. It was guided by an actual architect named Aaron, and that's always helpful.
Alexia lives in Issaquah now, and has to drive over when we get together to hang out. She had aimed to meet at my place at 9:15 to then walk down to the tour meeting spot at a tiny triangle park on Denny & Westlake. She texted me that she had hit a bit of traffic and might be late; in the end she got great "parking karma" and actually got to me only five minutes late—hardly a big deal as the tour started at 10:00 and the walk down there was only expected to be about half an hour. Side note: she still has a guest parking pass from when she lived on Capitol Hill, which does not expire until 2025, and that made finding parking for her a lot easier. I really need to get a guest parking pass too; I tend to rely too heavily on just moving our car to park on the street so we can let guests park in our spot. I've gotten a guest pass in the past but haven't in many years.
Anyway, the tour was great, and it yieled
65 shots for my Flickr photo album. Later in the day, after Alexia went home, I spent basically all of the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening, a pretty huge amount of time actually, working on the editing, tagging, uploading and even, unusual these days, captioning
all the photos. Tagging was itself very time consuming, as I did a lot of online research to make sure I was getting correct names of buildings, public spaces, and public art that we saw and I took pictures of. Then came the captioning, which I completely for all the photos mostly so that would be complete when I sent the link to Alexia, and also included a lot of hyperlinks to web pages about the subjects of the photos.
I could write a whole lot more about that tour here, actually, but since all those details are already in the photo captions, I figure you can just
go there to read them.
The 65 shots were almost exactly the same as the number of shots I got for the photo album the last time Alexia and I went on an architecture tour, "Through the Looking Glass," focused on glass architecture, which we did last September. These albums are part of my "
Architecture Tours collection that dates back to the first Seattle Architecture Tours I took in 2007, but includes other building tours not affiliated with the Seattle Architecture Foundation; I edited the title of that collection of "Architecture Tours (All)," and then created another collection of
only Seattle Architecture Foundation tours (guided or self-guided). This still includes fully 14 photo albums now, 12 of them concentrated between 2007 and 2009 (three of them guided, nine of them self-guided, from a book of self-guided tours published by the Seattle Architecture Foundation at the time); the 13th being the one from last September—after a 14-year break from Seattle Architecture Foundation tours—and the 14th being from this past weekend. (The five extras in the "All" collection include two guided tours of the Bullitt Center on Capitol Hill; an album on the redevelopment of Rainier Square; another focused on original World Trade Center designer Minoru Yamasaki's local projects in Seattle; and the "Lid I-5" walking tour I did with Shobhit last year while he was running for Seattle City Countil.)
In between the tour and posting and captioning photos about the tour, though, first Alexia and I stopped for lunch at a place that happened to be on the tour. The restaurant is called "Sizzle & Crunch Vietnamese Grill" (love that name), located in an easy-to-miss spot inside "The Galleria," a beautiful public space that cuts through the two Amazon buildings on what they call "Block 44" in South Lake Union. Our tour guide told us the place had the cheapest Vietnames food in the neighborhood, so when Alexia said she wouldn't mind getting some food before walking back home and I suggested this place, she was all for it.
I really cannot stress enough how cool that "Galleria" space looks. I took
nine photos in there—the second-highest number of any of the stops on the tour. (The highest was the
12 photos I took at the
very cool CitizenM Hotel.) We both had banh mi sandwiches, a type of sandwich Gabriel introduced to me several years ago, and they were delicious; they also had outdoor seating, so the next time Gabriel calls me up and asks for some outdoor seating place we can go hang out at, I'm going to insist on going here, even if we have to drive from some other neighborhood. He has to eat at this place at least once!
This also gave us some rest, after walking the 1.3 miles to the tour meeting spit, then walking on and off for a solid two hours after that, and before walking the 1.7 miles home from Sizzle & Crunch.
Once back home, after catching our breath, we
finally returned to the Harrison Ford-athon, after a four month break from it! (She even said to me, "We're still limping along with that?" Yes!) That said, we have had
another movie night since then; she came over in June, but that was when I finally got her to watch
Inside Out.
The movie we watched this time was
Cowboys & Aliens, which is dumb, engaging, forgettable, and as Alexia pointed out, something that should have been more fun and tongue-in-cheek. This movie takes itself too seriously which is kind of a mistake.
We've already booked another architecture tour for next Saturday, this one being the one I was actually more interested in as it's about pedestrian spaces. This is unconfirmed but I'm hoping we can do another movie after, just like we did this time. Next on our list will be
Ender's Game, which Alexia is legitimately looking forward to and which I have never seen.
— पांच हजार छह सौ बयालीस —
As for yesterday after the TV watching was done and Shobhit left for his 4-8pm work shift, I walked down to meet up with Laney, chatting with Gabriel on the phone for a few minutes as I walked. This was the "Show me the poll!" conversation. We hung up a minute after I got to Laney's apartment building, and we walked together down to Pacific Place, having our our chat about how Biden dropping out of the race changed the game.
Both Shobhit and I had
really liked what Laney had posted on Facebook that a friend of hers, someone I don't know named Allison, had apparently said: "I can think of few things more patriotic than voluntarily giving up one of the most powerful positions in the world for the greater good of one's country." Indeed, and God knows Former President Fuckwit would never sacrifice a sliver of anything rather than go with whatever is the most self-serving. I actually have a lot more respect for Joe Biden now than I already had, and I already had plenty.
As for the movie we saw, it was absolutely spectacular, and knocked
Dune Part Two out of my #1 spot for the year. It's about queer people in rural America, beautifully constructed, performed and executed, and it's called
National Anthem. A+ review from me. When we left the theater I said to Laney, "I absolutely adored absolutely everything about that movie." Which was true. It was Laney, actually, who had the minor criticism of there not being any fat people on the queer commune-type ranch the main character finds himself staying at, and while I do think it's a valid thing to bring up, I found myself addressing it early in my review as something I found easy to overlook.
Laney and I walked back up the hill together after the movie, which had a 4:50 p.m. showtime, and went our separate ways at Broadway and Pine. I walked the rest of the way home and spent the next hour or so writing an unusually long review in which I basically enumerated all the many ways I truly loved this movie.
I heated up leftovers, including slices of a delicious loaf of rosemary parmesan bread we got at Costco, for Shobhit and me to eat once he got home, and while we watched this week's episodes of
House of the Dragon and
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. The latter was a little bit of a trip, as he had been off for nearly a month, briefly summarized the nuts news over just the past week, and commented on how they tape on Saturday and had no idea what Sunday would bring—and it was Sunday when Biden dropped out of the race. We'll see how much focus this gets on next week's episode, by which time for all we know there will have been a bunch more extraordinary news.
— पांच हजार छह सौ बयालीस —
[posted 12:29 pm]
