It was a pretty good Thanksgiving this year. S's parents came into town on Thanksgiving Day, and they're staying with us through the end of the month. We used to go visit them every Thanksgiving when they lived in South Carolina, but ever since they moved to Florida, we usually only go when the kids have at least a week off from school -- midwinter break, spring break, and the like. S's mom usually does the cooking when she's here (or anywhere else, for that matter), but since they flew in on the actual holiday itself, we decided to go the carryout route. We got a meal from a DC restaurant called Unconventional Diner. I thought the food was excellent, but I might have been the only one. The kids ate a little bit of turkey and mashed potatoes (and bread rolls and pie, of course), but wouldn't touch any of the other sides; S is always on some sort of weird diet, so she didn't eat a bunch of the dishes; and S's parents are vegetarian and only really like Indian food, so they had only very small portions of a few things. S's mom cracks me up--she dumped a bunch of crushed pepper flakes on her Brussels sprouts,* but still didn't eat them because she said they were undercooked. They weren't--they were a delightful, firm, but yielding consistency--but she likes her vegetables cooked almost to a paste so that you can easily eat them with dosas or chipatis.
*It reminded me of the time we went to IHOP, and she order a three-ingredient omelet and picked jalapeños for all three.
I've been trying to be more chill this year with the wasted food. It drives me crazy to throw out food, but it's almost impossible to avoid in situations like this. We have a bunch of leftovers, and as I just laid out, I'm really the only one who eats it, and I can't eat it all. As much as I love turkey and stuffing, I don't want it every meal for four straight days. Plus, I want to eat S's mom's food too. I love her cooking. So, here's the plan: I froze a giant tray of turkey and a container of this really good soup that came with the meal. Then I'll eat what I can throughout this weekend, and Sunday night I'll compost whatever is left and try not to be annoyed by it.
I've already accepted the fact that throwing away desserts is totally fine, since they aren't good for you anyway (except for your taste buds)--alcohol, as well. In fact, Thanksgiving Day, I poured myself a whiskey for my yearly whiskey and soda, but we didn't have any soda, so I figured I'd just drink whiskey on ice, but it was so harsh (I've never been big on hard liquor), I tossed it down the drain after one sip. Then S and I had some wine with dinner, but we each wanted only one glass, so I dumped out about half the bottle. In my younger days, I would have finished it, but now it's like, why give myself a hangover? It's better off to pour it down the sink than down my gullet. I also could save it, but it would sit in our fridge and turn to vinegar before we'd have the occasion to finish it. Plus, new bottles of wine are never in short supply around here. They always just show up in our cabinet. I think the same wine bottles just get passed around and around in our friend circle. Each time somebody has a get-together, everybody else takes a bottle of wine they got from a previous get-together at their house and brings it to the house of the people having a get-together this time.
In other holiday weekend news, we went to see Trolls Band Together yesterday. It's fine. It's tolerable because it has a bunch of singing of songs from boy bands back in the day, so it's got the nostalgia thing going for it. We went to a matinee showing, and going to a matinee showing at a mainstream movie theater is kinda depressing, in the same way shopping at a big-box store in the middle of a weekday is kinda depressing. For one thing, there's no box office, anymore. They are all boarded-up, and you buy tickets from the little machine (or online, as we did, and presumably most everybody else). At the theater we go to, the box office is downstairs and the lobby and theaters are upstairs, so there was nobody even there when we walked in. It felt like going into an abandon building. Then the escalator was broken, and the place just looked run-down in general. There is popcorn all over the lobby carpet. The little arcade is full of old, shabby games. A bunch of urinals are out-of-order in the bathroom. There are only two people working the concession stand, and they're both completely uninterested young adults, surely making minimum wage. Then, when you walk back to the theater area, you see an entire other concession stand, totally and permanently shut down, and that's the part that really gets me. Once upon time, this theater was so lively that it made sense to have a second concession stand, and now it's just empty space. It's like seeing pictures of those abandon Olympics venues.
In general, the decline of the movie theater is one of the sadder aspects of modern life for me. It was surely happening before the pandemic (as a kid there were at least five theaters within a ten minute drive of my house, when I went back for a visit about ten years ago, I realized there were none), but the shutdowns definitely exacerbated it. I like it better the old way, but maybe that's just me being an old man about it. I mean, the flip-side is that we live in an absolute golden age of streaming,* and that's pretty cool in its own right. Also, if you go to the theater on a weekend night for a popular movie, it is still quite popping.
*In fact, with streaming I have the opposite problem, in that there is too much of it. I can't sort through it all, and if something isn't good right away, I totally get FOWAISWABOISOT: Fear of watching an inferior show when a better one is surely out there. I'm not saying the writers' and actors' strikes were good, but the fact they slowed things down a lot has really helped my alleviate my FOWAISWABOISOT.
Alright that's all for now. I gotta get up and stretch. I can feel my back and legs stiffening up on me. My back has always been temperamental, but of late my upper calves have started randomly getting really tight on me too. It's always something. I can't complain too much though. I'm in reasonably good health at the moment. I just busted out five miles on the treadmill, and then did 50 pushups, 50 sit-ups, and 50 squats, and got to and from the gym in my sister-in-law's apartment building before my hour of parking expired -- not too shabby for somebody old enough to reminisce about a time when moviegoers purchased tickets from actual human beings.
Until next time...
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