— पांच हजार दो सौ तैंतालीस —
I spent much of the evening last night with Tracy, with whom I had not hung out since our last movie, which was
Thor: Love and Thunder on Thursday, July 7. So it had been exactly two weeks.
This time we saw
Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, which was . . . fine. It was a movie for us to see, anyway.
There was a bit of confusion in the lead-up to the movie, though, for multiple reasons, really. First, she had to email me from her work that she forgot her phone at home. So, we had to confirm the showtime via email, which at first we agreed would be 5:40 at Regal Thornton Place in Northgate. But, I had relied only on Google Showtimes, which listed 5:40 and 8:00 at that theater, but then when I went into the Regal app to purchase a ticket, no showtime after 2:30 was available. I tried the Regal website, and it was the same there. I tried to click Google's link to a 5:40 showtime and no matter what ticketing service I got, it would go to an error page. So, no 5:40 showtime, apparently. We then agreed we would do 7:05 at the Regal Meridian downtown.
I rode my bike home from work, actually my first bike ride since I think sometime the week before last, maybe even earlier, when I fucked up my shoulder. And then I got a text from Tracy asking where I was, and then a follow-up realizing she was at the wrong theater. She had forgotten the 7:05 reschedule and gone to Regal Thornton for what we had thought was a nonexistent 5:40 showing . . . only for her to find, when actually there, that they
did have a 5:40 showing! What the shit? Well, it was too late now. She headed out to drive downtown, and I left to walk and we got there at around the same time, at 6:45 or so.
We spent the next twenty minutes chatting (okay, I took five to use the bathroom) until the movie started, in a small screening room with like five rows and maybe two other people in the room. And then, as usual, she drove me home, and I sat in her car while we chatted for so long that I ran out of any feasible time to get my movie review written before needing to go to bed. That's why I wrote it this morning instead. We don't have another confirmed plan on our calendars again until Saturday, August 6 when she'll come to the Braeburn Condos Theater to
finally get around to
The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers—we had watched
The Fellowship of the Ring back in February, and hopefully will get to
The Return of the King before the end of the year. But also, we agreed we need to schedule something else, a dinner or something, on Capitol Hill where a movie doesn't take up the majority of our time and we can spend some real time actually visiting, which we clearly like to do.
— पांच हजार दो सौ तैंतालीस —
— पांच हजार दो सौ तैंतालीस —
When I finally went inside last night, I finally met the guy from Craigslist who is renting out the guest room for a week, who goes by Eddie but his actual name is Edvinas—a Lithuanian name, from his birth country, but he's lived in the States for several years. He kind of barely has an accent, though, which I think made Shobhit somewhat jealous, as Shobhit's Indian accent remains relatively thick. I remain convinced the issue with Shobhit is that he is tone deaf, which makes it difficult to understand how to mimic another language's accent, as so much of that is tonal.
Anyway. He was sitting on the bed in the guest room with its door open when I walked in, a slightly strange sight as I am still so used to it being Ivan in there when I come home and the guest room door is open. (Ivan is now in Rutland, Vermont; I need to follow up with him to see how his new job is going.) He stood up to introduce himself, and Shobhit was right: he is very tall. He's also far thinner than he looked in his Craigslist photo, or even on the Zoom call we had. He looked thin enough in those contexts, but closer to normal; he's actually kind of rail thin. And I'm not positive, but I think I may have even seen him walk right in front of me on my bike as I had been riding home on Pine Street at the Boren bridge over the freeway, but I wasn't sure—and he certainly wouldn't have recognized me from the Zoom call then, as I had my bike helmet on. Anyway, I gave him our wifi password and that was kind of that.
I then showed Shobhit what I forgot to mention above when I was telling about my evening with Tracy: she brought me three "goodies" from Funko, which she now works for. I don't know yet what I'll do with them, they're really technically junk but I was still amused by them. A couple of them were actually items she found at other desks of former employees that left them behind. But, now I know why she had texted me asking what my ten favorite movies were, because she was looking for Funko toys from any of those movies.
She gave me three toys/collectibles: a
Kane character action figure from the original 1979
Alien movie (I think this was actually not by Funko; Tracy said this was found on someone's old desk); an
Alien Funko "Popsie"; and a 1989 version of
Funko Joker. (She knows
Batman Returns is my favorite movie of all time, but I guess had to settle for a toy from the previous Tim Burton
Batman film, which I also love, and happens also to be my favorite Joker.) Incidentally, I went to the funko.com website to search
Batman Returns, and they have one hilarious item, too expensive but also kind of awesome: "
The Penguin and Duck Ride." There have clearly been other characters from the movie made, as
evidenced by Google, but that's the only one currently available at the Funko website.
Shobhit of course couldn't give half a shit about any of this, and to say I have mixed feelings about a company making a bunch of stuff that in the end only qualifies as landfill is an understatement. But, as it happens, so far at least, it seems as an employer they are treating Tracy better than PCC ever did, so there's that.
— पांच हजार दो सौ तैंतालीस —
One last thing, which for some reason I didn't think to mention in yesterday's post: I actually spent about an hour and a half on Wednesday evening rewatching my old
memorial tribute video to Mom, on the two-year anniversary of when I first shared it on social media, about three weeks after Mom died in 2020. The post had come up in my Facebook Memories, which I usually browse in the morning but Wednesday I looked at in the evening, and I clicked on it just to revisit it for a minute—and then wound up
just watching the whole thing. And with some distance, it actually gave me some new insight about my mom, and a new appreciation that I never fully appreciated before, for how happy Bill actually made her.
Bill's death from covid a year later was a far bigger waste, after my anti-vaccine brother and nephew blithely brought it home and gave to him, but that's a whole different story. Bill had basically lost much will to live without Mom anyway, but there was something about having him around that felt like Mom's memory was being kept a live in a way no one else could do it. But, like many dedicated couples where one of them dies after a long marriage, Bill could only last about another year before he also let go.
— पांच हजार दो सौ तैंतालीस —
[posted 12:43 pm]
