Going shopping for a pair of marathon shoes and much like buying formal wear for a wedding, being able to walk in and tell whoever greets you what you need and that you know nothing, followed by them spending 45-90 minutes deeply invested in your problem and full of incredibly specific technical trivia about the different options, IS genuinely a very pleasant experience. I can see why rich people do this every weekend.
Honestly my sense of what books are 'age-appropriate' for children to read at what ages was permanently doomed from the beginning (my dad reading the hobbit to my sister and I before bed and, having finished that, continuing directly on to Lord of the Rings. Which I consider an entirely good and correct thing for him to have done tbc).
Though if not before then then deciding to test if there was a limit beyond which adults would care about the subject of something I was reading and not just be happy it was a book in junior high probably did it. Not that the first few books of the Black Jewels series traumatized me or anything but the googling to understand some of the vocabulary did end up making most of public school sex ed pretty thoroughly superfluous by the time we got to it.
For unclear reasons (compulsively regular saving and having been with them for more than a decade?) I get an oddly nice level of bespoke service and the personal contact info of a financial adviser to help manage my retirement savings with my bank. While it does occasionally feel nice and make me sound important to say I need to go downtown for a meeting with 'my banker', the actual utility provided by this versus just a decent fintech user interface for the same needs is ...limited.
Anyway without insulting my guys intelligence or capabilities I do kind of think he got the job at least 50% off his looks. 6'4" former linebacker looking dude with a high maintenance looking beard and great skin whose both more enthusiastic about and better at small talk than any of the actual banking stuff.
Catch up tag
tagged by @dru-reblogs-stuff, tagging...I can never remember who enjoys being tagged in these. Uh @apollo-cackling @booksandchainmail @lifeattomsdiner @self-loving-vampire @the-wolf-emoji @wearethekat? Zero pressure or obligation to any of you.
🎶 Last song I listened to:
Sarajevo by The K's (random shuffle of my mid-four-digit 'every song I liked enough to rip off spotify + the albums they were on' list)
📼️ Last series:
Finished Season 2 of Dorhedoro with a friend a week or two ago. Animation is doing a decent amount of the heavy lifting, but it really is an excellent time.
🎬️ Last movie:
Does the Hadestown Proshot count? The Odyssey if not. It was a greek mythology heavy week.
🏅️ Best thing about last month:
Nothing incredibly dramatic, but overall a decent month where a bunch of good trends continued apace. Officially becoming an annoying farmshare person and this cooking how much time I'm spending monopolizing the kitcehn into an even higher gear, if I had to pick something.
📚️ Currently reading:
Station Eternity by Mur Lafferty, mostly picked up due to residual loyalty of how much of my teenage years I spent falling asleep to her hosting episodes of Escape/PseudoPod. So far is honestly pretty mid.
📺 Currently watching:
Not a thing, should get on that probably at some point.
👾️ Currently Playing:
Finally opened Baldur's Gate 3 again over the weekend after another month or two of not playing anything, so that again/still. I'll beat it eventually.
✒️ Currently Working On:
'book' review for the Silt Verses now that I've finished the last season, and another worldbuilding/travelogue series for my needlessly and pointlessly detailed fantasy setting.
Also have an incredibly 'not allowed to press backspace until the 1st draft is done' short story I'm cringing away from going through and beginning revisions now that the first draft is, in fact, done.
👕️ Currently wearing:
running shorts and my most threadbare t-shirt, because it was ungodly humid a few hours ago and I've barely gotten up since.
🤩 Current obsession:
Objectively marathon training and/or cooking, based on how I'm spending my time.
🌐️ Last Internet Search:
"Mur Lafferty" because I couldn't remember how many r's were in her name while answering above
🌶️ Sweet/Savory/Spicy?:
Savory, but all three are good and I usually like a mix in any given dish.
🎨️ Favorite color:
Stormy grey, recently
🌺️ Favourite flower:
Got to actually experience walking through a garden with a bunch of cherry trees blossoming at once this year, so still them.
☕️ Tea or Coffee:
Specifically cold-brew coffee (big batch each weekend to get through the work week, flavored with some randomly chosen spice mix as it's made that usually involved cinnamon and cardamon) has been getting me through the summer
👀️ Looking forward to:
Seeing local theater productions of Rent (big local troupe/institution, running for a couple months now, everyone loves it) and Julius Caesar (done outdoors in/on an old fort in the park by the ocean, very Local Theater(tm)) next week!
Went out with friends for my birthday (well, birthday eve, technically) and a mixture of getting a nice tasting menu at a fancy place for dinner and then a friend getting a 'chocolate and carmel monstrosity' for desert at their place after meant that I'm pretty sure a single slice of cake was more filling than the four preceding courses combined.
A much older cousin of mine (real estate agent in Pennsylvania or something) happened to be driving through town with a bunch of his friends on a, like. Cross country road trip to a golf resort?
Anyway saw him for the first time in 20 years and a half-dozen of his friends for the first time ever, and ngl my internal monologue the entire time was just loops and spirals of 'how are you real. Are any of you capable of shutting up. You cannot all possibly be this boring.'
Anyway this was my first direct exposure to the actual target audience for all the sports betting ads on tv these days. A lot of stuff makes a lot more sense now.
Listening to a friend explain the whole backstory of a feud their partner has with a mutual friend (incredibly inconvenient for everyone, especially since it's gotten to the point of the partner being uninvited from said friend's wedding in the spring) and every individual step of this is making me think I've been too hard on my proud family tradition of quiet resentment and paper-thin smiles when you can't politely find a way to avoid someone. Clear communication and emotional honesty has some really annoying failure states yk.
Got a season pass to the local Shakespeare By The Sea theater troupe back in the winter which means I am now attending the one non Shakespeare play theyre doing this summer with zero context. It is, as it turns out, a bachelor/reality tv themed beauty and the Beast retelling original musical.
So really getting the local theater experience tonight y'know.
I don't get quite so much place-nostalgia as a lot of people seem to but even given that it's somewhat awkward to perform the expected melancholy and sadness over the loss of a childhood home when my feelings towards the place have mostly bounced between 'apathy' and 'dear god I never want to be here again' for the last decade.
Did a pride event at the library as a way to catch up with an old friend/roommate who was in town, the conceit of which was a half-dozen people had volunteered as living books to answer questions (all queer immigrants of some stripe, if not officially than downstream of that being the population the org setting it up served).
- We are - well we're good at small talk absolutely, but I'm not sure we necessarily matched the spirit of the event. Comparing the list of example questions given (identity, community, experience of queerness, trauma) with what the conversations actually ended up mostly being (talking about people's work and hobbies, mostly, being enthusiastically pitched on volunteering for St. John's Ambulance, lightly bullying my friend about their French)
- Between the organizers and 'books' there was a grand total of exactly one guy of any description
- Said friend is like, talented at networking in a way that leaves me slightly in awe. Came out that one of the books is starting law school in the same town they're doing a MSW in in the fall and five minutes later they'd exchanged socials and made plans to connect when she was starting to apartment-hunt.
- Relatedly, I feel like this event gives a somewhat biased perspective on the average social and economic position of queer racialized immigrants lmao. There was a I think two participants who didn't either have or were studying for a graduate/professional degree.