— पांच हजार आठ सौ तेरह —
When I was riding my bike home yesterday, I was stopped on Pike Street, eastbound at the red light on Boren. A young woman with shoulder-length brown hair was ahead of me, standing on a Lime scooter.
I was listening to a podcast,
The Big Picture episode part of their "25 for 25" series they're doing, where they choose one movie each week that they decided is one of the 25 best movies of the first 25 years of the 21st century. This week they're talking about
Melancholia, a film I also
loved, so I was very interested in what they had to say about it.
The woman ahead of me turned around and hollered: "Headphones are really dangerous!"
I'm sure Shobhit will love reading this. But, like this young woman, he has a tendency to make a lot of assumptions about how they work and how I use them. They are
not noise canceling. I'm not blaring out my ears with them—I can hear surrounding traffic noises just fine.
At first, I ignored her. What did she expect, anyway? That I would say, "You know what? You're right!" and just put my AirPods away? People like this really annoy me. Mind your own fucking business.
She decided to repeat herself. Pointing at her ears she said, again, "Headphones are really dangerous!"
I just said: "Okay." She pointed to her broken front teeth and told me that's what happened to her. I said, again: "Okay." She turned back around, facing forward, and shook her head to herself, as of to say: "This idiot."
Should I mention that I was wearng a helmet, and she was not? It only occurred to me later that I should have said, "Riding a scooter without a helmet is also really dangerous. So?" I've never forgotten the TikTok I saw once by a working nurse who talked about the staggering number of injuries they treat for people crashing on scooters they're riding without helmets on. Far fewer people wear helmets on scooters than do on bicycles.
The last thing the lady said to me was, "You could look like this!" She was pointing at her chipped front tooth again. My thought, again later: some of us have dental insurance. I wouldn't look like that for very long. And ironically, both of us were stopped inside a well protected bike lane, with a barrier of concrete-encased planters. She was picking a dumb spot to get on her high horse. But this was the richest part: as soon as the light turned green, this lady zoomed ahead on her scooter, tilting her head back, and kicking her left foot in the air behind her, thus
riding on one foot. And
this wasn't really dangerous?
— पांच हजार आठ सौ तेरह —
I was riding home from the Six-Seven restaurant at The Edgewater Hotel on the waterfront, where my team, plus Marie in IT, had gone for a Happy Hour. It was the "P3" ("Pricing, Promotions, and Project Management") team's quarterly social outing, and it had been my idea to invite Marie out for a drink, because she works so hard on the many glitches—now slowing down, thankfully—in the wake of a key upgrade we had earlier this year.
This is maybe a ten-minute walk south of our office building, along the waterfront. Amy was the only one who drove. I decided to take my bike, so I could ride home directly from there rather than walk all the way back to the office first. But, I figured I would still walk with the other four once I had fetched my bike out of the garage.
I rode out of the garage and to the end of the block, crossing the street to wait for Gabby, Marie, Cathryn and Brandy to cross and catch up. This was a short ride, a matter of seconds, and so I didn't bother putting on my helmet. Still, Gabby hollered across the street, twice, about how I should be wearing my helmet. I tried to yell back, "I was just riding to the end of the block!" but I don't think she heard me. Anyway that wound up being the first of two instances yesterday of getting admonished in some way about my cycling safety.
For the record, I wear my bike helmet religiously. I just didn't bother for that stretch, a ride of literally only seconds, because I was going to be walking. And sure, a crash can also only take seconds, but I took a calculated risk, okay? I was hardly going fast, I was around no traffic whatsoever, it was fine.
Can you tell I'm feeling a little defensive right now?
Anyway! Drinks at the Six-Seven were lovely. I had two "Caballo Blancos," which mixed a blanco tequila with pineapple juice. The only problem was that, even on an otherwise cloudy day, in the louge area where we all sat because we went at 3:00 and they did not serve food until 4:00, Marie and I sat on a seat facing the windows, which really put both Brandy and Cathryn, sitting across from us, into silhouette view. My eyes never fully adjusted to make it easy to see them as anything better than something barely better than shadow.
There were two little ottoman-style seats on either end of the table between the two sofa-like seats that Marie and I, Brandy and Cathryn were sitting on. Gabby sat on one of those chairs at one end; Amy sat on one of them at the other end. Gabby only briefly moved to Amy's end when I asked our server to take our picture. The server took four shots, the second two in "Portrait mode"—a good idea in theory, but it put a couple of us toward the back into a bit of a blur. I only kept the first snap she took, as even though we're all posing, it was the one in which we all looked the most natural. The more snaps that got taken, the more we looked like we were just holding poses until it was over.
I had made it clear that I had told Marie we were taking her out for drinks, so we had to make sure she didn't have to pay. This was also our first outing as a five-person team rather than three, so I thought there was a lot lower chance that Gabby would insist on springing for all of us. Still, she said "This is my treat," and even ordered four, maybe five different shareable plates for the table. No one seemed to think much of it when the entire group ordered a second round of drinks. That seems kind of nuts to me, but I also happily partook, and Gabby seems to regard this kind of generosity as part of her responsibility as a manager. The food was all very good, but I've been to Six-Seven enough times (countless!) to know it would be.
— पांच हजार आठ सौ तेरह —
— पांच हजार आठ सौ तेरह —
I ate way too much yesterday. My weight was shot up significantly as of this morning. I had a third cocktail that I took to Action Movie Night, which I went to all of an hour after getting home—Shobhit went a bit more all-out than usual for the food we brought: he made a garbanzo beans dish with chaat mixed in it, to use as the base filling with rice, salsa, and small scratch-made fried flatbreads he made for wraps. "Think of them as Indian-style tacos," he later told the group.
He told me he hoped no one brought vegetarian pizzas this week, as he was doing well with coutning his points. Then, two vegetarian pizzas were brought. We shared one slice each. We also both had only two "Indian tacos" while eating before the movie, but then had more after we brought leftovers back upstairs after the movie. I had just one, but Shobhit had three, finishing up the flatbreads—he made a total of 20; 15 of them were consumed downstairs in the Community Theater; four of those were eaten by Shobhit and me, which meant that between the eight other people who came to this week's Action Movie Night, 11 other flatbreads were eaten. These were all relatively small, the size of small soft taco shells.
We had more dishes to take down than usual. I got most of it well stacked inside the insulated tote bag we usually take the food downstairs in, although I tilted the glass bowl of salsa a bit too much and the liquid inside it spilled over the side. Shobhit carried the dish full of garbanzo beans separately. We usually put our dish in the middle of the kitchen island, but we had so much this time that we set it out like a little buffet on the back counter next to the sink. All things considered, I'd say the dish was pretty popular.
Let's see if I can remember the 10 people who came this week: Tony, Jake, Ryan, Chris B, Ben, Derek, Daniel, Andy, Shobhit, and myself. That makes ten!
This was Shobhit's and my first time back in four weeks; the last one was on my birthday, and Shobhit and I were in Portland. I was a little bummed to have missed what Chris B. chose that time:
Children of Men, a near-masterpiece that is easily one of the best movies ever chosen in the history of Action Movie Night. I have seen it only twice, and the last time I saw it was a movie watch with Laney in 2011. This was also a recently discussed title in
The Big Picture "25 for 25" series, which I really enjoyed listening to. Both that podcast and some of the people last night talked about how much more relevant that movie has gotten over time.
This week it was Andy's turn to choose—his first turn since returning to regular attendance only a few months ago, after he dropped off in 2015, after only a couple of years of regular attendance (again, Shobhit and I only started attending in 2022—but this group has been going on since 2012). At one point it was revealed that I had looked up Andy's choice history, and he quipped, "Let's see what bullshit this guy's chosen." So I replied, "Yep. Exactly!"
His previous choices, 2013-2015, had been
Equilibrium,
The Ladies Man,
Barbarella, and
Idiocracy. Frankly, with that history, I did not have high hopes for objective quality in last night's choice—even though those novies were clearly all very on-brand for what had originally been called "Man Movie Wednesday" (the
excel sheet history is
still headed with "MMWed Movie List").
And, so was this week's choice:
Orgazmo, an early Trey Parker and Matt Stone (of
South Park and
The Book of Mormon) fame movie that was so deeply amateurish that it did not speak to me at all. Weirdly, it wasn't even horny enough. It's a kind of movie that I think could work better with a better budget, better writers, and better performers. To be fair, again, this is very early on in their career, but still, this was a movie I could always tell I wouldn't be into, so I never watch it. And I was right.
Shobhit laughed more at it than anyone did. He seemed to genuinely enjoy it. And for the record, I get why the people who like it enjoy it. To me, though, it's trying too hard to be John Waters-esque, and John Waters has far more talent than these guys. And not even all of Waters's films work all that well. (Side note: I have still never seen
Pink Flamingos either, and I'm not sure I ever will. I am not eager to see Divine literally eating dog shit on camera.)
At least
Orgazmo is all of 94 minutes long, so that was a relief. And it gave me enough time to finish the final episode of
Andor on Disney+ after we got back up to the condo. The series did not end on any explosive note, but was a bit downbeat, yet deeply meaninful and well-connected to
Rogue One, the film I will now be rewatching soon. I even immediately watched the first four minutes or so, but it was late and I turned it off so I could go to bed. Anyway,
Andor is easily top-five of all Star Wars productions of any kind. For me, it might be right behind
The Empire Strikes Back,
A New Hope, and
The Last Jedi. I don't care what anyone says,
The Last Jedi is amazing. As for
Rogue One, that may be #5 for me—I didn't think it was that great when it first came out, yet I gain greater appreciation for it every time I watch it. But I do still think
Andor is better.
— पांच हजार आठ सौ तेरह —
[posted 12:33pm]
