floral winds

— पांच हजार छह सौ अट्ठाईस — Big news at work today. It won't seem like big news to you, and indeed it isn't big news to you, but it's huge news to me: by the end of this month, all of Floral will be transitioned from Grocery to the Produce department—which means that, for the first time in over twenty years, I won't have to deal with it! I mean, if we want to get real here, I'll probably have to serve as a sort of "consultant" for them for a while, as I have the data relationships both internally and with the vendors. Honestly I can see a lot more of the skus that get delivered before they've been entered taking longer to get set up. I'd love to be proven wrong about that, but either way I am thrilled by the idea of washing my hands of that department. The way I see it, this makes more sense anyway; Floral is a very perishable department, in similar ways to the rest of Produce, and to be fair they are already well versed in last-minute additons of codes and such. I just know that I had an exchange with one of the store POS people a dew weeks ago about this and he was truly convinced that Floral, which never gets the attention it deserves at the store level (apparently), will be even worse when managed by Produce. Time will tell; we may all just be underestimating the abilities of Produce managers. Not that it'll matter that much to me after June 30, when I simply won't have to worry about it anymore. This is actually going to free up a lot of my time and work load. — पांच हजार छह सौ अट्ठाईस — — पांच हजार छह सौ अट्ठाईस — I made an unusual decision about my commuting yesterday, just because of the weather: it was a really windy day, and not only did I not feel like cycling in it, neither did I feel like walking in it. I opted to ride buses all the way to work in the morning, which meant transferring to a second bus downtown rather than walking that last mile as usual; I also made the choice to catch the #8 all the way up Capitol Hill after work rather than walking home. I got home at 5:08 this way, unusually early when I'm not cycling. Even riding more buses than usual, though, the wind really fucked up my hair. I had to wait by the bus stop for a few minutes to catch the first bus, after all; and walk a block to catch my connecting bus downtown; and walk another couple of blocks from the final bus stop to my building. That was all the time needed for the wind to blow my hair into a wind swept mess. Not that anyone particularly noticed, of course. My hair didn't look terrible, it was just much less deliberately formed than usual. I'm sure I was the only one who hated it, but I did. The extra bus riding did give me extra time to read Dune though, so that was nice. We had pizza for dinner after I got home. I made chai. We talked about going for a walk, which Shobhit wanted to do to get steps in but I did not particularly want to do out in the wind again—although by then the breeze was much lighter. The walk got dismissed though when Shobhit got really locked into the reporting on Indian election results last night. This was largely because the results were showing reason to be cautiously optimistic: Narendra Modi did not lose power, but he was widely predicted to win in a landslide, and that's not what happened, as his party did not retain the decisive majority in Parliament that was expected. This is all very nuanced, of course, but it seemed to indicate some actual hope for the future, as opposed to the authoritarian, Hindu-nationalist direction Modi was taking the country. Whether this has any implications for the rest of the world remains to be seen. That may be a stretch. But authoritarianism did seem to be spreading globally, and it would be nice to see a similar spread of pushback. — पांच हजार छह सौ अट्ठाईस — [posted 12:32 pm]

walkies and talkies

— पांच हजार छह सौ सत्ताईस — By far the biggest event of this past weekend was the afternoon I spent with Laney on Saturday at Seattle Pride in the Park, which I already posted about yesterday in its own dedicated entry. The rest of the weekend was relatively unremarkable. I can't even remember now what I did on Friday evening, except that I did not go to a movie, and Shobhit worked an evening shift that night. I probably watched some episodes of a TV show on Max or something. I just hung out with Guru at home, I guess. — पांच हजार छह सौ सत्ताईस — Yesterday I went for a walk with Shobhit, feeling gratitude that if we had to have a gray, drizzly day this weekend, it happened on Sunday rather than at Pride in the Park on Saturday—which was also overcast most of the day, with tiny hints of sprinkles only occasionally, but it did not rain. Yesterday was colder and definitively wetter. Shobhit took his umbrella on the walk and I, not feeling like carrying an umbrella, took my hooded rain coat instead. Why buy that nice rain jacket unless I actually use it on warmer(ish) rainy days? It's too light to use in the dead of winter but was perfect for yesterday. We walked north up 15th Avenue E, all the way to Volunteer Park. We cut through Volunteer Park and over to 10th Avenue E, which veers over into Broadway to the south. That was when we encountered the huge line we learned was people waiting to vote for the Mexican President at the Mexican Consulate of Seattle. We walked to QFC, where Shobhit bought his lottery tickets. And then we broke apart at the Light Rail station, where I rode to the U District and then took myself to the one movie I have to see in the theater this week: a critically acclaimed Japanese movie called Evil Does Not Exist that I thought was just okay at best. In the first half hour I fought hard to stay awake, and that was after having a solid night's sleep. — पांच हजार छह सौ सत्ताईस — — पांच हजार छह सौ सत्ताईस — I also watched a couple of documentaries over the weekend—two of them yesterday alone, which I watched with Shobhit on HBO/Max: Spacey Unmasked, about what a predatory piece of shit Kevin Spacey is; and MoviePass, MovieCrash, about the rise and inevitable crash of MoviePass. Shobhit was a lot more engaged with the MoviePass doc, both because that one had a lot more to do with investing and financials and mismanagement of money, and because he was convinced Spacey Unmasked was only made because Kevin Spacey is gay, which is an objectively insane take. Sometimes Shobhit takes a while to realize that just because he isn't aware something exists, that doesn't mean it does not exist. He kept asking like there haven't been enough documentaries made about straight predators, even though there have been multiple films (both documentary and narrative) made about Harvey Weinstein—the only one he could cite—and others made about Roman Polanski, and Woody Allen, and Michael Jackson. And those were just the few I searched for online in the space of about two minutes. Besides, it doesn't even matter whether those other movies exist. Spacey took just as much advantage of privilege afforded him due to being a huge star as anyone else, and the world should know the specifics of what an awful person he is. Not only that, but I found Spacey Unmasked to be far more sensitive to the fact that he's gay, and how the struggles of being in the closet were related to his abhorrent behavior, than a movie like this ever would have been twenty, ten, maybe even five years ago. I found nothing homophobic about it at all and was genuinely impressed by that. Shobhit's problem is that he takes a knee-jerk reaction to something and then runs with it without considering the plethora of nuances. Anyway, we also watched this week's episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. Then he went back to, of all things, Hallmark's "Christmas in June" airing of Christmas Hallmark movies. They're all so formulaic and so, so dumb, and Shobhit is practically addicted. And he doesn't even care about Christmas! Quite an enigma, Shobhit is. — पांच हजार छह सौ सत्ताईस — [posted 12:41 pm]