low key weekend
Pretty low-key weekend, although Shobhit and I spent about half the day yesterday on the Eastside with Sachin. I wound up not going anywhere at all on Saturday. I had hoped to go see a movie at Central Cinema with Claudia that evening but it just wasn't in the cards. Shobhit and I spent most of that day watching TV shows.
I did spend a fair amount of time with Ivan over the weekend, particularly Saturday, when he evidently didn't have anything going on either. That was nice since it was the second-to-last weekend before he moves away for good. He already canceled his disc delivery subscription to Netflix, and had asked if I would get the Australian movie Picnic at Hanging Rock, which we all watched really quite soon after he got up late Saturday morning.
That is one strange movie. It's rather slow-moving, which usually has Ivan looking at his phone the whole time, but he seemed riveted by it. It's a very mysterious movie with unresolved elements that people have apparently obsessed over, so there's that. Ivan has his own theory of what happened to the girls who disappeared at Hanging Rock: they were buried under a landslide. I think he's right that it may be the most plausible explanation. The most interesting thing to me about this is that people obsessed over these theories as though it were a true story, but this was fiction -- a movie based on a novel of the same name. Ivan said he actually sought out the novel in book stores when he was in high school, and read it then.
Even Shobhit was unusually engaged with this movie. This was kind of extraordinary to me. If I knew nothing else except the pacing of this movie, I would have assumed it would bore both Shobhit and Ivan to death. It seemed to be the opposite in both cases, and I was the only one that didn't really get much into it.
Anyway, I would have loved to have been able to do something with Ivan to give him another Social Review point over the weekend, but it was not to be. He spent the day yesterday with Drew, the first time they hung out since Ivan told him he just wanted to be friends, and he even posted a bunch of photos of them at MoPop, particularly in the horror exhibit. When Ivan told me last Monday that Drew would be coming over this weekend, I asked if he would be staying the night. Ivan cracked, "If I can't find anyone else by then." It made me think there actually was a possibility Drew would stay the night, but when I asked on Saturday when Drew was coming, Ivan said "I told him to come tomorrow morning." So I guess he's pretty committed to them just being friends now. I had assumed I would even see Drew at some point, but so far as I can tell, they never came to the condo yesterday, and just spent the day out and about. Shobhit and I left yesterday before Ivan was even out of bed. If Drew does not come again next weekend, in all likelihood I'll never see him again. I kind of liked him; he seemed like a pretty decent guy.
I do intend to suggest to Ivan that we have at least one last dinner before he goes, to happen either next weekend or on Tuesday the 13th, last I heard intended to be his first day off work after his last day, and also the day before he flies out. So I should get at least one or two more Social Review points out of him yet.
Shobhit and Sachin are the only ones who got Social Review points out of this past weekend, though. I'll get to that momentarily. I suppose I could mention Friday evening, which was . . . a little different. Shobhit decided to go to some kink event. I don't even know where it was or what it specifically entailed. I did ask him later how it was and without providing any detail he said it was good. I have no more information about it, and don't especially care either, to be honest. But, since he was off doing that and I had no other plans, and my visit to Steamworks on Wednesday was pretty much a bust, I decided to try again -- and it was beyond worth it. I was in and out in about forty-five minutes, but it was intense enough that I could barely walk home afterward. Still, I was home by about 9:00 and that gave me enough time to watch the episode of Black Mirror called "Metalhead," which freaked me out a little. I thought I'd try staying up long enough at least to say hi to Ivan once he got home from work, but since he wasn't on his typical 10:40 bus and I was tired, I went to bed. Ivan probably got home on the 11:10 bus I don't know for sure because I was out cold; Shobhit came home close to midnight. I didn't even wake up when he came to bed.
I was leaning toward not even putting yesterday's outing on the next Social Review, because just accompanying Sachin to meet with a real estate broker regarding a house he's making an offer on in Kent -- that's a pretty business-focused favor Shobhit was doing for a friend, and I was just along for the ride, reading my library book much of the time. I would hardly call that social.
Shobhit kept being kind of a dick to Sachin, in my opinion. We arrived at his apartment in Bellevue and because Sachin wasn't already downstairs waiting to let us in, Shobhit complained countless times over the next few hours about having been kept waiting. Jesus Christ, we waited no more than about five minutes. It was not a big deal, and I don't know why Shobhit insisted on making it one. To Sachin's credit, he kept just letting Shobhit's stupidly critical comments roll right off his back. If everyone responded to Shobhit the way Sachin does, the world would be a better place. Of course, it would also be a better place if Shobhit didn't act like a dick for no good reason to begin with.
For Shobhit's part, when he was sitting at the desk with Sachin across from the real estate broker in their fifth-floor downtown Bellevue office, he really was pretty impressive in his attention to detail asking questions designed to make sure everything was on the up and up for the offer Sachin was about to make. Sachin freely admitted he's not nearly as detail oriented as Shobhit is, and he openly appreciated his input and assistance. And then, when that meeting was over, Sachin asked if we wanted to go out to lunch. "I'm buying!" he said. Well shit, we won't turn that down!
We went to Mayuri, the Indian grocery store Shobhit loves to shop at, first. And then we went back to Udupi Café, the place Shobhit and I had lunch at on the sixth day of my Birth Week (April 26) last year. It's a South Indian place with a buffet, and we ate a lot. So much so that neither Shobhit nor I ate any dinner yesterday. We did share a small bottle of blackberry wine that he had stuffed my Christmas stocking with, though. We were just finishing those and watching One Day at a Time on Netflix when Ivan got home from his day with Drew.
But before that, we actually went back to Sachin's place and hung out there for a little while. It was about 4:30 before we were actually leaving again. Which was fine; after watching so much movies and TV all day on Saturday, I was glad to have a day of spending quality time together while not staring at a screen. I read my book a bit while Shobhit and Sachin chatted in Sachin's living room. He did bring out his box of games, and tried to teach me how to play poker, but I was so bad at even retaining the rules that he gave up after just a few hands. Also, Sachin concluded, he just can't enjoy poker unless he's gambling actual money with it, and we had tried doing it just with chips. Doing that did kill maybe half an hour, though.
In the end, though, going to lunch wouldn't have been necessary to yield a Social Review point for both Shobhit and Sachin -- they would have gotten it just from hanging out at Sachin's place for a while. It was actually kind of nice just hanging out there for a bit.
But, we had to come back home eventually, and so we did, getting home sometime around 5 p.m. We watched several episodes of the second season of One Day at a Time, a Netflix original sitcom I only know about because of Marc Maron's recent podcast episode talking to Rita Moreno -- who is awesome in it. The sitcom style and structure is very conventional, enough to put off anyone who derides sitcoms, but that only matters if you refuse to look past the surface. This show turns out to be subversive in a multitude of ways, all of which would keep it from ever airing on the major broadcast networks, and the more I watch it, the more impressed I am with it -- especially the serious issues it tackles in its second season. I highly recommend it.
[posted 12:13 pm]