8-6-7
I thought I was going to take myself to see the movie Dark Waters in the U District last night, but I made the truly boneheaded mistake of hopping on a #8 bus when it caught up to me on Denny Way instead of just walking to my connecting bus on Fairview as originally planned. I thought it would get me there faster, and boy howdy, was I wrong about that! The bus zoomed ahead several blocks at first, but once it was about three blocks away from Westlake, it was total gridlock. It literally took about 25 minutes just to move those few blocks.
For a few minutes I thought I'd still be fine catching the connecting bus, as there's usually an average of 25 minutes of trailers before any given movie actually starts. I finally just got out to walk the rest of the way to Fairview once the bus finally reached the stop on Denny just past Westlake; until then, the bus would move forward the length of only one or two cars for every traffic light cycle. It was truly ridiculous.
For just a moment, I did wait on Fairview at Denny at the stop for the #63 bus to the U District. But, so, so many people wanted to get onto Denny Way, that cars waiting to turn right onto Denny were keeping traffic on the right-hand lane on Fairview from moving forward either (which of course, in turn, also contributed to the delays of any traffic further west on Denny from moving forward). It was fucking insane, and even though I could see that #63 bus, according to the One Bus Away app more than half an hour delayed itself, about a block and a half away, I could tell it would likely be another ten minutes, minimum, before it reached me standing there. By this point it was already past 5:10, which was the listed start time for the movie. I'd never make it there before the movie actually started, so I finally thought, Fuck it, and walked the rest of the way home.
And I just spent the rest of the evening at home by myself. I made myself a veggie hot dog for dinner. I made some hot tea. And, since I knew I'd never get to the Crest to see it where it was playing at the only theater in all of King County (and possibly even all of Washington State), I went ahead and just watched Marriage Story on Netflix, as it's already streaming there.
I totally would have seen it in a theater if it had played somewhere downtown (or even the U District), though, and so I broke with fifteen years of convention and wrote a review of it even though I didn't actually see it in a theater. It's very likely to get at least a few Oscar nominations, though, and I wanted an established review that I could later include in my ultimate discussion about the awards early next year. It also could very well wind up on my top 10 movies of the year, I liked it so much, which further justified my reviewing it.
It's a fairly long movie, though—136 minutes—and I tend to take about an hour to write my movie reviews, so by the time I finished with that, it was past 9:00. I wrote up my projected budget for the next two weeks but then it was time to get ready for bed.
I just got back from lunch with Karen at the Six-Seven at the Edgewater Hotel, our first lunch since November 7, because scheduling conflicts kept us from being able to reschedule the second-November lunch which by default would have put it on Thanksgiving Day, which we obviously couldn't do. So, we had plenty to catch up on.
I told her a little bit about my weekend in Idaho last weekend, though not a lot; most of that already got covered in the photo digest email, for which she is one of the roughly 50 people I now have on the distribution list. We talked a lot about Shobhit's and my impending trip to Australia in late February and early March, as all the latest planning and bookings have taken place and been finalized in the weeks since Karen and I last had lunch.
Otherwise, though, lunch was pretty much business as usual. Split the gyro sandwich. Appreciate the gorgeous view of Elliott Bay from that restaurant, even though it's gray and overcast today. It's still beautiful! Then I walked back, and at least then the weather was slightly less wet and cutting as it had felt walking down there to begin with.
Now, though, I need to get back to work.
[posted 1:19 pm]