bicycle hegemony
It took me a few minutes to bike over to Pacific Place after work yesterday to see the wonderful movie Tony, partly because it was slightly after 4:30 before I even left; I kind of got "in the zone" cleaning up my extant backlog of emails still in my inbox from the trip—I got through a few hundred of them, leaving with less than 60. The showtime was 4:45, which is of course plenty of time, but it was maybe 4:40 by the time I was actually coming up from the garage where I lock my bike on the bike racks. There were no other bike racks down there; I don't think many cyclists even realize they are there. After I got to the AMC on the 4th floor and went inside, I walked pretty quickly through toward the escalators to the second level, even though I knew I'd still be sitting through half an hour of previews, because I knew I'd need to use the bathroom first.So I walked up the escalator as far as I could, until I approached a young man, whose hairless and pale but quite solid legs sticking out of short-ish, thin-fabric light blue shorts had me all but salivating right then and there.I really did not expect this guy to notice me, but he turned around, saw that I was holding a bike helmet in his hand, and lifted up his own helmet that I did not notice until this moment, and said, "Bicycle hegemony!"I chuckled politely, but did not bother to tell him I was not exactly sure what hegemony means.We both walked pretty quickly after reaching the top of the escalator, and for a second I wondered if we were headed to the same theater. But then he zipped into a theater closer to mine, and I headed to the bathroom. An older guy in there peed and then left without even a glance at the sinks to wash his hands and I nearly threw up.I stopped just outside of my own theater to look up hegemony. "Leadership or dominance, especially by one country or social group over others." Ah. Okay. Why not go further? Bicycle supremacy!...Apropos of nothing, when I was helping Shobhit make kachoris to have with our dinner last night—and holy shit, were they delicious—I had put the plate for them, covered in two paper towels as usual, on the small bit of counter space between the stove and the refrigerator. In the back of this space is our large, wide jar container of spatulas and other utensils, plus the copper compartment-box for spices that used to belong to Alexia's mom and Alexia gave to us. Shobhit pulled the jar back for a spatula a bit too far without thinking, and pushed that plate right off the edge of the counter—and directly onto his toe, before it shattered all over the kitchen floor.So that was a bit of an adventure last night. We has to pause the cooking for several minutes to pick up all the pieces of the plate. We had to pull the bottom drawer under the oven completely out to get it all, so I guess that was a silver lining: we found two spoons and a metal straw under there. Shobhit's toe really hurt for a while and he kept wondering whether he broke it. It still hurts this morning, he says, but not as much.We had just been looking at buying a new set of plates recently. We now have three plates left from a nicer, more recent set of plates we've still had for years; plus two still from the set that Dad and Sherri passed on to me when I first moved to Seattle. I have a deeply strong feeling of sentimental value for those, although one of the two left has a kind of Y-shaped crack almost all the way across and will likely fall apart soon as well. Shobhit noted last night that it's still lasted longer than our newer plates. We have five of them left total now, and before last night we had six, which was still not enough to cover the seven of us who will be here this weekend, when Shobhit was considering making pancakes for Jennifer and her family tomorrow morning. I suggested we just go down to the community kitchen, where are lots of plates and much more space anyway. So we may do that, I just need to find out if all of them even like pancakes.Those are just the large plates, by the way. Among the small plates we still have quite a large stack, from both sets still. They're just not really big enough for pancakes.I really made this post a hell of a lot longer than I imagined it would be, to talk about Bicycle Hegemony Guy and the broken plate. I really can't shut up, can I? I have a problem.
[posted 8:30am]