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I always have such a backlog of DLU (Daily Lunch Update) photos that are Halloween-themed . . . this year I thought pretty early to start burning through them. By the end of this month, I'll have amassed many more.
The first photo, above, is from Halloween 2020, the first year Alexia and I walked the neighborhood around Capitol Hill on Halloween Night. Many of the houses did not pass out candy in person, and just left candy out for people to take on their own. Sometimes, as in (also) the above photo, they included hand sanitizer. Honestly the ubiquity of hand sanitizer is pretty useful no matter what year it is.
Still, I can remember talk of "the long tail of effects" of the pandemic—for me, usually in the context of the entertainment industry. But, it applies in countless other contexts as well. Like running across a photo like this, from when we were still in the middle of a solid year of stay-home orders. Sometimes it's a little eerie to look back on what a dark, genuinely frightening, unsettlingly uncertain time that was. We had a transitional period of a "new normal" combined with things still feeling very, very weird.
It won't be long before March 2025 is upon us, and it will already be half a decade since the lockdowns began, those first couple of months being scariest of all. What a wild, surreal time that was. And, speaking of "long tail of effects": I am at work as I write this, in a section of 24 desks, only 7 of them occupied. Everyone else is working from home—no longer a necessity but something many people found worked very well for them even after the immediacy of the pandemic fell into the background. This as much as anything is why we'll be able to move our office into a much smaller space next summer.
And after that, although how full the office is will continue to wax and wane depending on the day, I'm going to have more people closer to me every day. I'll probably catch colds more often again, come to think of it. Maybe not. I guess we'll see. The last couple of years I've been back to about two a year, though thankfully they have tended to be mild.
— पांच हजार छह सौ इक्यानबे —
— पांच हजार छह सौ इक्यानबे —
Anyway, I have no socializing to report from last night, but I did take myself to a movie:
A Different Man, which I was a bit mixed on until in the end I quite liked it. It's kind of a perfect companion piece to
The Substance, which I did see with Laney but she had other plans last night. It's too bad because we would have had a ton of stuff to talk about after seeing it.
It was a much later showtime than usual or than I prefer, though: I went home first after work, and Shobhit was already at his evening shift. I took Light Rail to the U District to see the movie, for the second evening in a row. At least the trains were more reliable this time. There must not have been a Kraken game.
Anyway Shobhit was home from work before I was home from the movie. I had no time to write the review before bed so I wrote it this morning.
— पांच हजार छह सौ इक्यानबे —
[posted 12:30 pm]
