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Shobhit's slow climb to catch up with Laney's current tally of Winter Social Review points continues: he met me at work at 4:30 yesterday, having taken a long and roundabout way to walk here first, in order to get his steps in. We then walked home together.
He made a taro root dish that was pretty good and I ate with a couple of mini naans. I finally made tea out of the packet Justine had made for us as a Christmas gift at work—it was all right; it had apple, pear, and orange slices; cardamom, star anise, basil. It was very well put together, but in the end made a tea with only the slightest bit of flavor. (I do wonder if it had been stronger had I actually made it, say, a month ago.) Shobhit and I decided to add some honey to it and that helped. Then we decided to add some of the decades-old pisco Alexia had given us, effectively turning it into a hot toddy and obliterating any of the original flavor. Oh well.
We then watched the last four episodes of the Peacock series
The Day of the Jackal, which in the end I thought was . . . fine. Some of the artistic license the show writers took, adding stuff that I'm told was not in the book, made very little sense. It seems obvious that a world's-best sniper hired as a hitman would avoid having a family due to its blatant liability, which was indeed the way things were in the novel. Showrunners argued that giving him a family in the show "humanized" him, but I have mixed feelings about that claim. And then he was also given a brother-in-law who was the dumbest dipshit imaginable, which didn't help wither.
That said, the show is very well shot, well paced, and very well acted. So there's that.
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Laney recently tried to argue that I should give Shobhit a Social Review point even when we do stuff just the two of us at home. She argued: if we didn't live with each other, and we went to each other's place to see a movie, I'd give that a point, right? Probably, yes. I certainly did in the first month and a half we dated before moving in together. My counter-argument was that it was too much of a default cheat.
I have since come up with a stronger counter-argument. Watching a movie together at home takes no effort whatsoever. How can I justify calling that a "social event"? I mean, technically all human interaction is social, but you know what I'm getting at here. One of us needs to be going out of our way in some way in order to get a point on the Social Review. This is why I don't count running errands, which to me is an obvious one; but I do count going out for a walk. I'm not going to give something for effectively doing nothing, aside from pressing buttons on a remote. That's not acceptable!
Laney is just trying to find ways to give Shobhit a leg up, because I keep telling her about how Shobhit wants to catch up with her. I'm still not that worried about his status in the end; he's about eight points behind her currently only because he spent three weeks in India—but there remains another month and a half before spring, when I post the next Social Review. Plus, Laney will be gone in Florida for a week this month, which will give Shobhit a chance to jump up several points while Laney can't.
I know this is all dumb. I mean, arguably. It's actually not dumb to me. It's something I enjoy! Anything that brings me joy is not dumb.
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[posted 12:33pm]
