— पांच हजार तीन सौ चालीस —
And so it begins! Today marks the start of my first full, five-day work week since the week of December 12 (which ended two and a half weeks ago). It also marks the beginning of a six-week stretch before the Next Big Thing, which is the trip to Australia.
My biggest worry, of course, is getting sick. Or rather, getting sick just as we're about to leave, or even worse, while we're traveling. I'm so tired of
news about new subvariants, always of the Omicron variant it seems. I suppose I should feel slightly more secure having had my bivalent booster, although that was in September, now four months ago, and we all know that protection wanes over time.
Since September, though—again, over a four-month period—I have had
three known exposures, all of them indoors and unmasked, at parties or family gatherings, and somehow I have escaped every one of them unscathed. Contrary to it making me feel more invincible, it makes me wonder when it will just finally be my time again. On the upside, there are no big parties or family holidays between now and the trip to Australia, so, with the except of our biweekly Action Movie Nights at the Braeburn, my potential for exposure should now be minimal.
Here's the thing though. Beth fell sick, hard and fast, at the Leavenworth Family Vacation in September. She tested immediately and it came back negative; everyone was like, "Whew! It's not covid!" Everyone went home the next day, and the day after that we all got the message on Facebook that it was covid after all. Amazingly, not a single other person got infected by her (at least not symptomatically, a point that should always be remembered)—not even Gina, who lives with her and is married to her! And then, even though both Gina and Beth
tested negative before coming to the New Year's Day get-together at Dad and Sherri's, the very next night Gina
did test positive. I was never really close to her that day, and when Gina posted to Facebook she only mentioned spending a good amount of time sitting on the couch in the family room with Sherri and Shivi. Shivi took a PCR test at school when she got back home to Purdue and, thankfully, she tested negative.
Someone with covid wound up also being at the Ugly Sweater Brunch we had at work in between those two family events, on December 16. Four people got sick after that, during which time I tested four times over the five days leading up to Christmas, I was so paranoid about it.
I wish there were some way to determine, but we'll just never know, whether I just have higher immunity due to both being up to date on all vaccine shots and boosters,
and I've had covid once before—albeit nine months ago now—or whether I've just been incredibly lucky. It could quite conceivably be both. That said, at least anecdotally speaking, I know this much: every time I hear someone has covid and I actually ask about it, they are not up to date on their booster shots. Only fifteen fucking percent of eligible people have gotten the latest, bivalent booster shot! And this is quite clearly a big part of the problem, because that booster targets the omicron variant (and, to a degree at least, its subvariants) in ways previous shots did not.
So, I am of many minds about this, particularly in the lead-up to Australia. I'd love to think I just still have strong enough immunity to rebuff exposure, but I am too nervous to think that recklessly. I would almost be relieved if I got it more than 10 days before departure, so I could be recovered and actually pretty reliably have an increased immune response—except, what if I fell sick with one variant and then was exposed to another? Feeling relief at actually getting sick would be naïve and boneheaded as well. My best tack, really, is to do whatever I can to minimize risk and not get it at all. This is going to mean wearing an N95 mask as long as possible on that 14-hour flight, which is really going to suck. We'll see whether I can actually sleep in it.
Anyway, I'm really digressing here. I haven't even gotten to the way I started my week today, which was to rip a tear in the crotch of my jeans! I will be meeting with Book Club right after work today, and today is also my exercise day. Typically on these days I do 33 push-ups when I wake up; 32 when I get home from work; and 32 just before bed, to total 100 for the day. With the outing right after work, I wanted to get the middle set of push-ups out of the way so I don't have the last two sets both to do at the end of the evening, and as is typical on Monday mornings, the office was dead, so I felt safe doing push-ups on the floor in the handicap stall in the men's room. (I wash my hands every time I arrive at work anyway, so I figured I would do this before that, thus having clean hands right after touching the floor.) I squatted down just right, and heard a small tear. I felt at my crotch, and there it was: a small hole. Fuck.
I should be fine as long as I'm careful enough not to tear it further throughout the rest of the day. I'm kicking myself, though, because there were multiple Levi's sales over the holidays, which Shobhit forwarded me emails about more than once, and every time I was like: I don't need to buy any right now; I already have spares from previous sales. Well, I'm wearing my brown jeans today, and guess what color I don't have a spare pair in? Goddammit! Note to self: going forward, be sure to have a spare in
every color upon all Levi's sales. Here I was thinking this pair was new enough not to tear so soon. And I was fucking wrong.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ चालीस —
— पांच हजार तीन सौ चालीस —
As for my weekend, it was mostly movie-centric. I never went to any movies yesterday, but I saw and reviewed a movie each day between Thursday and Saturday—I already mentioned
MEGAN in
Friday's post.
Friday evening, I went right after work to SIFF Cinema at the Uptown and saw
Women Talking, which I quite liked a lot (B+). It was easily the best of the three movies I saw last week. Watching and reviewing that took up basically all of Friday evening. And then on Saturday, from mid-afternoon through the evening was dedicated to watching the overlong (as in, three hours and nine minutes)
Babylon, which I went to really hoping to love, and I decidedly did not. Solid C for that movie.
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Thus, the highlight of my weekend, really, was when Shobhit and I met up with Danielle for brunch late Saturday morning, at a place called Stonehouse Café. It's located in pretty far-south Seattle, on Rainier Avenue, with a
beautiful view of Lake Washington across the street, and is by sheer chance virtually the midpoint between our place and Danielle's house in Renton. We quite literally met in the middle.
The place is
very rustic, I quite liked its ambiance a lot, and the food was . . . fine. We had agreed to meet at 10:00. I texted her, "Let's say 9:30 so you get there by 11!" She laughed at that. I actually cut it closer than I realized I was doing when I got ready, and was ready to go only right at 9:40, giving us just enough time to get there by 10:00, which we did.
Danielle arrived at 10:34.
She called me at 10:09 and said, "Are you surprised?" No, of course not. She was on her way by this point, but she said her GPS had an ETA in another 17 minutes. I guess Rylee landed on her toe horribly the night before, and woke up Saturday morning with it looking truly awful and purple. Danielle was going to take her to Urgent Care, but, being a nurse and knowing they don't do anything for toes and all she really wanted to was to confirm whether or not it was broke, she was still like, "I'm going to go to breakfast," and she would take Rylee to Urgent Care after. And, on top of that, apparently just as she was aiming to leave, the Boy Scouts came to pick up her Christmas Tree.
If it's not one thing, it's another. This is the story of Danielle's life. It's even more the story of Gabriel's life. How do I wind up surrounded by people with such hectic lives? It's weird how so much chaos is within my orbit but it almost never lands on my personally. I'd say the key difference is that they have children and I don't, but it's often things that have nothing to do with that. I was on the phone with Gabriel last night and he was recounting his misadventures with multiple car dealerships in his quest to get the new car he's now had for less than two weeks. It was entertaining to listen to, but still pretty characteristically hectic. "I have a question," I said. "Does
anything you ever do actually happen simply?" He took the briefest of beats, laughed, and said, "Fuck you."
Incidentally, Danielle has kind of embraced her identity as a "chronically late person." She even recently posted
this article as a quasi-explanation/defense of herself. (Curiously, I went back to her Facebook page and the post appears no longer to be there. Did she delete it?) Funnily enough, that link seems to suggest there are ways you can become more punctual, but Danielle is clearly not very invested in that part. I had theorized that she might be more likely to be on time when meeting at a third location, particularly a restaurant, but I was wrong. I didn't mind, really; she said she would buy me a drink. (I ordered a drink and had to pay at the counter, so she never did actually buy me a drink, but I chose not to press it.) In this case, the toe thing struck me as a legitimate excuse anyway. Granted, for all I know she'd had hours to ponder that and still got a late start out the door anyway. Whatever.
It was nice to see her, we had a nice time. She had left sunglasses at our place and I returned them to her—they had been in our condo since late November (in fact we assumed they were Shivi's and were incorrect). Danielle and I have decided to commit to hanging out more regularly this year. Her work shifts rotate in very weird ways, though, and when we were texting last week about how to put our aimed regular hangouts on my calendar, things got confused. When I suggested "every fourth weekend," I meant the third weekend of every month; if she said "every third weekend," she thought that meant every four weeks, and kept saying she needed an odd number. Finally we settled on "every five weeks," which in a 12-month year would mean a minimum of 10 hangouts a year. Sounds good to me! So, I've just put that in my calendar: five-week intervals, and will just follow up with her when the calendar date is approaching and we can either commit to that date closer to it or reschedule as needed. In any case, this helps me because at the very least it gets me to keep one day every five weeks clear of other plans in favor of hanging out with Danielle.
I'd love to do the same kind of thing with Gabriel, but it would be more of a challenge with him, largely because he lives even further away—Federal Way as an entity is even "closer" to Seattle than Tacoma, but his house is on the water and a solid six miles through town from the freeway, that stretch usually taking at least 15 minutes to drive, thereby making any drive to his place a minimum of 40 minutes, and that is only when there is no traffic so it usually inches close to an hour.
Granted, the best-case scenario drive to Danielle's is all of five minutes faster: 35 miles. Nevertheless, she spends more time in Seattle proper than Gabriel does, and god knows she spends far less time bitching about what a pain in the ass it supposedly is to drive in Seattle. Danielle and I decided our aim is to take turns with which one of us goes toward the other when hanging out. Gabriel is also just generally a lot busier than Danielle is. In her rotating shifts, she works three days one week, then four days the next; repeat. Gabriel teaches at middle school every weekday and does plenty of related work at home. I'm not blaming him for that—it goes with the territory of his chosen profession—on the contrary, I'm basically saying Danielle just has it easier, scheduling-wise.
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Anyway! What about yesterday, then? Shobhit and I ran errands, basically. We went to the AT&T Store on Capitol Hill, then the Apple Store in University Village, then the AT&T Store in University Village, in all cases to discuss my iPhone upgrade I want to have happen before we go back to Australia. I upgraded right before the last trip, also because the camera had much improved functionality; now the newer phones are far better yet, without the huge price difference that existed in 2020. I didn't order the new phone immediately but likely will a couple of weeks from now.
Then we went to Costco in Shoreline, did a bit of shopping. Came back home, and that was all the outings for the day. We both spent some time reading library books. Shobhit's capacity to burn through John Grisham novels boggles the mind; he has two checked out right now, finished one and started the other just yesterday. He was up reading Saturday night until 3 a.m., which was how I got the explanation for his rather unusual sleeping in yesterday morning until around 9:30.
Later we watched some TV. An episode of
His Dark Materials, a couple episodes of
Avenue 5. I finally got him to watch
The Menu, which is now streaming on HBO Max, as I knew he would enjoy it. Indeed, he was transfixed from beginning to end. Halfway through he even volunteered, "This is a good movie!" He loved it when the kitchen staffer named Jeremy shoots himself in the head in front of everyone. Shobhit had long been convinced this movie would wind up incorporating cannibalism somehow, but it doesn't. It's a subtle yet violent satire of "cuisine as high art" culture.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ चालीस —
[posted 12:27 pm]
