make-the-most-of hours
Okay, let's see how quickly I can get through the reporting of my weekend! Not quite as much socializing as the previous weekend, but still plenty. It just all occurred on Saturday. I'll get to that momentarily because I feel like starting with Friday first.
Shobhit had later shifts most of the weekend, just a few hours earlier yesterday, but on both Friday and Saturday he worked until 10 p.m. at Big 5. So on Friday evening, I spent the evening watching and then reviewing the fifth and final Steve McQueen "film" in the "Small Axe" series, called Education—and even at a run time of only one hour, it's still my second-favorite of the five. And with a grade of A-minus, it's currently #6 on my working list of the top 10 films of the year. True, I'm choosing ten this year out of a broader pool about half as large as most years, but whatever, we make do with what we have to work with.
Shobhit did not start work on Saturday until 2:00, which gave me some time to take the car and run some errands, which Shobhit opted not to join me for: at about 11:30, I left for the office to exchange paperwork, and also pick up the gift bag waiting for me on my desk, with supplies for tomorrow night's Merchandising Department Holiday Happy Hour. Aside from the extra Outdoor Research branded face mask and a tin of Danish Butter Cookies, the rest of the content was both surprising and not. The part that was unsurprising was that it contained booze; the part that surprised me was how much: three ready-made cocktails, in 200ml bottles! I feel like that's kind of a lot.
On the other hand, maybe the variety of cocktails was to cover a variety of potential tastes? Because to be fair, I won't be drinking the Old Fashioned; I'm not the biggest fan of whiskey. I'll let Shobhit have that, and he may even join us, since the party starts at 5 p.m. and Shobhit will likely get home from work at about 6:00. He should sit down and say hi to everyone, actually, because then he could get a Social Review point and maybe try and get back into his rightful #1 position on the Social Review for winter—he got knocked down to #2 on the Fall Social Review I just posted this morning.
Anyway, the other two cocktails do sound tasty to me: a Cosmopolitan and a Margarita. Interestingly, these two are marked on the label as 20% alcohol whereas the Old Fashioned is 35%. All three of them have instructions on the label that just say Pour over ice and enjoy. I was thinking I might add a shot of vodka and tequila to the drinks that I have, but you know what? Maybe I can lay off a bit. It'll be fun just drinking and hanging out in a social way with coworkers at all, especially in a holiday context. I've been using Lynne's cooking dish from our 2017 Holiday Cookie Exchange as my virtual background for December, but I think I will switch it up for tomorrow, perhaps to a photo of my Christmas Tree. I could just take the laptop into the living room and have the tree literally behind me, but I'd rather be able to view everyone on Zoom on my much larger work computer monitors.
I thought I would also find my $300 holiday gift card on my desk when I was at the office on Saturday, but I didn't see it, and didn't even realize that until I got home. Brad, the acting CEO, sent an email to All Store & Office Staff on 12/15 that read, in part, Every staff person who is not in a role eligible for a bonus will receive a one-time gift in the form of a $300 PCC gift card, and my understanding ever since Cate was CEO was that I was not in any said role eligible for a bonus anymore. I expected to see the gift card on my desk on Saturday because his email also added, Gifts cards are being delivered to the stores today and we will be working hard to make sure everyone receives theirs by Friday. So now I find myself thinking, am I getting a bonus after all? Honestly my current suspicion remains that for whatever reason they just didn't get around to handing them out to office yet (although you'd think office staff would be easiest, whatever). A separate email from Darrell on 12/16 said, Your $300 gift cards will be available to be picked up at the office this Friday, if they are not picked up by Monday at 2:00 they will be mailed to your home. If you’re planning on picking up your gift bag after 2:00 Monday or sometime Tuesday and would like to pick up your gift card at the same time I’ll ask Adrienne to keep them at your desk with your gift bag. Assuming I am indeed getting said gift card, and it gets placed on my desk today, I will then have to wait to get it in the mail because it will be well after 2 p.m. by the time I am next in the office. (Also, I did check my account just to see if I got an actual bonus: not as of today, I haven't; I'm pretty sure I won't. And the $300 gift card is plenty enough for me to appreciate anyway.)
Besides, I also didn't even realize until checking my 12/11 pay stub online on Saturday that it did include my PTO payout, which ballooned my take-home to 265% its normal amount. Most of that will just get filtered into my budget column for both future travel expenses and buying myself a new iMac desktop computer anyway, which I will likely do right after the new year. Or maybe the Monday after Christmas, now that I know Shobhit has that day off.
Oh! And I nearly forgot to mention, the rest of my errands on Saturday afternoon: after the office I swung by the Central Library to both return Shobhit's book and to partake in curbside pickup to get another one of my own. It was this more than anything that had Shobhit thinking I was taking a bit long, as the line there was quite long and took a while to get through, although to be fair it did move steadily. And I got a nice Downtown Seattle 2020 photo out of it.
Then, at 3:00, I had my bonus December Virtual Happy Hour with Laney, at her request, as it was to be our last before she starts her retirement travels next month—although we still plan to do them going forward, they'll just have to get finalized as plans at later notice than before, when she knows she can park by a McDonald's or Starbucks and use their wifi to talk to me. Saturday's Happy Hour with her is what the photo at the top of this post is from.
In it, I am holding my Costco Kirkland Eggnog Wine Cocktail further spiked with two shots of rum, and this was a big, big mistake to have after what I thought was a strategic move: skipping lunch. Shobhit and I had had hash browns and eggs for breakfast and it was quite filling, especially with some veggie sausage added, but by 3:00 in the afternoon with no further food in me, this was a bad move. I didn't realize it until much later, when I had to go to bed that night with such a splitting headache I felt like I was going to throw up, but I am convinced it's because I had such a stiff drink on an empty stomach.
At least it didn't ruin the Happy Hour with Laney specifically; I got a good buzz out of it, and smartly never had any more alcohol after that. After it took literally forty minutes for me to get to a point where I just gave up on having a legit virtual background as on the Mac currently it won't offer any Skype app, and the web browser version has far more limited options and I could find no way to create a virtual background like I had once been able to in the past. I even tried switching to the iPad app and loading a virtual background there, and still I could not find the feature. What the fuck, Skype? So that's why I'm holding the iPad by my head in that photo: it was the closest approximation I could get to using that image (of the giant light-sculpture of a gift box down at Westlake Park) as a "virtual background."
Anyway, we then chatted, about all sorts of things, clear until about 6:30: three and a half hours! This is like, old-school Happy Hour with Laney time spent, and it's because her last day of work was last Tuesday and she no longer has to be concerned about getting to bed early. Also, we started earlier in the afternoon. We could have kept going, actually, except that I had other plans with Gabriel and Lea later that evening.
So let's get to that! Gabriel and Lea had surprised me several days ago by agreeing to connect via Facetime and watching together as we experienced this year's Dina Martina Christmas Show, which was forced to go virtual this year. I've been going to see this show almost annually with Evan (and later Evan and Edlen) for ages, but even if she were still doing it live in 2020, I wouldn't have been able to go with them: they moved to Portland. (Granted, if 2020 hadn't gone the way it did, they may not have had to transfer to Portland with their jobs. But that's a separate thread of thought, I guess.) I just checked my records and I saw her Christmas show every year between 2015 and 2018, for some reason not going last year, I think maybe because I tried to get Evan to go and she had been so disappointed by Dina's move from Re-bar to ACT Theater in 2018 that she just wasn't as interested.
So, this marked my fifth Dina Martina Christmas Show—my sixth Dina Martina show of any kind, as I actually convinced Shobhit to go one year in L.A. in the spring when she was doing a show down there; it wasn't nearly as good as her Christmas shows—albeit virtual this time. I had really thought it would be live, as she was selling tickets for specific times on specific dates, but once we finally got the link 20 minutes early, it was clearly a pre-recorded show that you could just play whenever you wanted.
That was a little disappointing. "So basically we just paid $22 for a movie," Gabriel said, and he was actually right. And not even a very good one: Gabriel literally fell asleep; I saw him nodding off more than once during the second half. Lea seemed to enjoy it at least a little more than he did, although from the start Gabriel made it pretty clear he wouldn't like this as much, as we began, before we all pressed "play" on "go" at the same time, with a conversation about drag and camp, how my interest was very much tied into the camp of drag's earlier incarnations, and Gabriel was much more interested in the sort of more serious avant garde fashion of contemporary drag. I was like, "Well why did you agree to do this, then?" and he replied, "I wanted to make you happy." Well, that's sweet, I guess. And, one could argue, the greatest Christmas gift of all! Apparently he has an actual gift for me that they'll be dropping by though and guess what I have for him this year: jack shit.
Side note: I only buy Gabriel a gift when I happen to see something and it makes me think, Gabriel needs to have that. This has occurred many times over the years, but it doesn't happen every year. I see no sense in getting him something otherwise, as a gift that is borne of nothing more than seasonal obligation is meaningless and wasteful. That said, it must be noted he has given me a hell of a lot more this year than I have given him, in terms of both generosity of the holiday spirit, and especially his support when my mom died. I honestly worry that I won't be able to come through for him as well in similar circumstances as he did for me.
Anyway, it must be said: the Dina Martina Christmas Show was a bit of a disappointment, but honestly, kind of on-brand for a kind of entertainment I love that I wanted to share with Gabriel. Several times over the years I have tried to show him, say, a TV show I think is great, and he'd come in on an unusually sub-par episode, giving him a disappointing first impression. So it is with Dina Martina, which would have been far better introduced to him as a live show. This plainly pre-recorded "virtual" Christmas Show was absolutely not the same, even if it did still give me a few laughs, Lea several genuine chuckles, and Gabriel one or two courtesy chuckles. Until he fell asleep.
When it ended, I decided to save them the trouble of feeling they had to be gracious by saying, "Okay, I know that wasn't great." They both laughed at that—louder than either of them had at anything during the show, in fact. On the upside, both before and after the show, we had pretty stimulating conversation, and it was nice just to get to spend some time with them, as it always is. It's because of how often we have done so that they ranked #4 and #5 on the Fall Social Review that I posted just this morning, with eight points each! (Meaning we hung out, virtually, eight times over the past three months, which is actually pretty frequent.) Not that Gabriel gives a shit about the Social Review, in fact he's typically openly contemptuous of it (just as he is of my conceptualization of a "Birth Week") but whatever! He wasn't contemptuous of anything on Saturday, in fact he was, as I said, quite generous of spirit. Like Ebenezer Scrooge on Christmas morning! I hope he runs through his neighborhood on Friday morning shouting "Merry Christmas!" at all his neighbors' houses.
As for Sunday, I watched and reviewed another movie: Ma Rainey's Black Bottom, which has many flaws but I still liked quite a lot.
I actually felt pretty productive over the weekend, and especially yesterday. I did watch another "Christmas movie," as I decided to call it—Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut; I even posted about it. It's a very long movie though, and I tried to watch it on Saturday but found I did not have time to finish it, so I finished it yesterday. I do not believe I had seen it since first watching it in theaters in 1999, and I have to tell you, that movie makes way more sense to a 44-year-old—particularly a married one—than it did in 1999 to a 23-year-old. I did bring this up to Gabriel on Saturday, knowing he really loves this movie; I did not realize it's in his top two favorites, alongside The Godfather, which to me is kind of an extraordinary take. But, whatever. I was actually surprised by how genuinely entertaining it was. In 1999, I kind of just didn’t get it. Also, in 1999 it probably came across to me as over-sexualized, and by 2020 standards it's actually relatively tame. Besides, even though the plot has a lot to do with sex and jealousy, the whole film is very cerebral and as a result really not "sexy" in the slightest.
I still love the scene with Alan Cumming as a hotel clerk shamelessly flirting with Tom Cruise, and I love how much Kubric shamelessly plays with all the rumors about Cruise being secretly gay. There's a lot of meta elements to that film, given its subject matter about a marriage under strain and the fact that Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman split up right after it.
Gabriel said there's a Christmas Tree in every scene. I could swear I could not find one in the orgy scene—I did look—but maybe I missed it. (This Rolling Stone piece just says "nearly every scene," so maybe he's wrong; not even this compilation of the movie's Christmas Trees on YouTube shows anything inside the orgy mansion—just a brief look at one outside as Tom Cruise pulls up in his taxi.)
Anyway! After I was done with that movie yesterday, I spent a good amount of time finishing up this morning's Social Review post. Then I made salad with tofu for dinner; and I watched an episode of The Flight Attendant on HBO Max; three episode in and I'm kind of having a blast watching it. Once Shobhit got home we watched the first three episodes of season six of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
[posted 12:23 pm]