I was looking at the stats of my blog today. Nobody reads my blog, like no one! I did change my address so that I could moan as much as I wanted without anyone finding out, but a big part of me does like being read, and being told I don't write too bad (!) My readership of two-and-a-half people dwindled to nothing when I decided I needed to hide, and that airing my feelings for public consumption was really not a good idea anymore, and that the whole business of honesty and putting myself out there to face the brickbats and the love, if any - well, all that was BS. I wouldn't change what I write to make it more consummable and not embarrassing to me, because I want to be able to write here about the same stuff, but some of it is rather naked, and I would rather not have people who I know but who aren't close friends, read it. I want lots of complete strangers to read it, though.
I watched a rather lovely movie yesterday. It was today really, cuz I watched it between 4 and 6 am. It's called Your Sister's Sister, and directed by a woman called Lynn Selton, and has a cast of 3 people: Rosemarie Dewitt, Emily Blunt, and my current crush, Mark Duplass. His surname will tell you that he must have at least some French in him, supported further by the fact that he is from New Orleans. He really is rather good looking and he plays a slimeball-ish midwife on The Mindy Project, my Thing to Watch of the moment. As they were saying in this long, lovely promo interview for the film, it has a lot of the actors as they are in reality, in the film.
Anyway, so, I was talking to this guy, a junior, gay, whom I've never met face à face; we've only spoken on chat and Facebook. With this guy, I can indulge all my curiosity (and fantasies) about homosexuality. He seems to live his life with an irresponsibility that I will never be able to muster. It would have been the dream once: fucking many, random people, who always seem to be available, with no emotions to worry about, with no social consequences. But after talking to him yesterday, such a life didn't seem so charming anymore. It seemed pointless, and then, scary. It must be so lonely to live your life with so few anchors. I was listening to this really charming and weird interview of Truman Capote with Robert Frost. (Who was asking him rather puerile questions, which would have passed off as charming and risque because it was 1969, and Capote was also very sportif about it. And I do think Americans enunciated their English better 40 years ago.) Listening to him answer Frost on whether he'd had more friendships or sexual liaisons, I wondered how lonely it must be, to die without a family and partner, or blood relations, when you are old and tired. My friend, this gay guy, he seems to be romping across continents with everyone he is attracted to, but then you imagine what would happen if this guy was sick, and needed people's help, but he's completely fucked himself out of the mainstream, and they wouldn't care if he lived or died.
I fear I was too open with him, and fear consequences, because Tinkerbell that he is, he has no responsibility to keep what I said to himself. He'll go "give somebody some goss" about this random senior who, do you know, said she was open to a homosexual experience, and that she thought everyone was potentially bisexual. Well, I don't suppose I said the last, though I believe so.
Footnote: Somebody on Facebook wrote about their first experience of tasting Golbarir kasha mangsho. I'll tell you my one and only experience of tasting Golbarir kasha mangsho. I used to work in Calcutta, then. On my day off, sad, depressed, because my kind, accommodating fuckwit of a boyfriend never spent enough time with me, and well, because it wasn't his day off, I buoyed myself up resiliently to go experience something I'd heard spoken about a lot. It was winter and I remember being cold, people looking at me strangely for being the only woman eating alone in that cubbyhole of a place in Shyambazar, and that the mutton was tough and very very very oily and the platter came with sweet tamarind pickle, which I think is completely pointless. By itself, going off to try kasha mangsho at Golbari's not such a terrible thing. I've gone to tonnes of places alone (and since realised that I am happier travelling and eating in company and that it need not be with my best friend or the person I am sleeping with). But the experience of Golbari is inflected with the frustration of working in Calcutta at a deadend job, when I wanted to a) go live in another city b) have a job I actually liked, and which I had a reason associated with the quality of the work, to keep. Most importantly, it was frustration for having tied my life with one who could not make me happy and did not care to try, for whom I was making all these compromises that took me further and further away from the person I wanted to be.
It has been a good thing, the break-up. Hugh Laurie's The Oranges, horrible movie though it was, had some moments which rang true. There is this point at the end of the film where Laurie's wife slaps his teenybopper girlfriend and then says, "Someday I'll thank you for this." That's how it's been for me. And though terrible things have followed, it is still a good thing that I am free of him.
Yesterday, I realised I didn't even feel that terrible hate towards him anymore. I think getting in touch with him, taking his help, and on occasion, talking with the old familiarity, has helped me move on from it. Yes, it feels like a bitch when he takes off for his trip to the Him-uh-laa-yas with his parents and wife, when I cried myself hoarse because I wanted to travel with him, but it doesn't occupy my thoughts beyond the occasional moment, and I can say I don't really care what he does.
This was not a footnote at all, and this post is longer than all permissible limits. It's the kind the mad momma writes, those which make me want to hurl the laptop. But then, hardly anyone comes here, and it's sort of my diary, so...
I watched a rather lovely movie yesterday. It was today really, cuz I watched it between 4 and 6 am. It's called Your Sister's Sister, and directed by a woman called Lynn Selton, and has a cast of 3 people: Rosemarie Dewitt, Emily Blunt, and my current crush, Mark Duplass. His surname will tell you that he must have at least some French in him, supported further by the fact that he is from New Orleans. He really is rather good looking and he plays a slimeball-ish midwife on The Mindy Project, my Thing to Watch of the moment. As they were saying in this long, lovely promo interview for the film, it has a lot of the actors as they are in reality, in the film.
Anyway, so, I was talking to this guy, a junior, gay, whom I've never met face à face; we've only spoken on chat and Facebook. With this guy, I can indulge all my curiosity (and fantasies) about homosexuality. He seems to live his life with an irresponsibility that I will never be able to muster. It would have been the dream once: fucking many, random people, who always seem to be available, with no emotions to worry about, with no social consequences. But after talking to him yesterday, such a life didn't seem so charming anymore. It seemed pointless, and then, scary. It must be so lonely to live your life with so few anchors. I was listening to this really charming and weird interview of Truman Capote with Robert Frost. (Who was asking him rather puerile questions, which would have passed off as charming and risque because it was 1969, and Capote was also very sportif about it. And I do think Americans enunciated their English better 40 years ago.) Listening to him answer Frost on whether he'd had more friendships or sexual liaisons, I wondered how lonely it must be, to die without a family and partner, or blood relations, when you are old and tired. My friend, this gay guy, he seems to be romping across continents with everyone he is attracted to, but then you imagine what would happen if this guy was sick, and needed people's help, but he's completely fucked himself out of the mainstream, and they wouldn't care if he lived or died.
I fear I was too open with him, and fear consequences, because Tinkerbell that he is, he has no responsibility to keep what I said to himself. He'll go "give somebody some goss" about this random senior who, do you know, said she was open to a homosexual experience, and that she thought everyone was potentially bisexual. Well, I don't suppose I said the last, though I believe so.
Footnote: Somebody on Facebook wrote about their first experience of tasting Golbarir kasha mangsho. I'll tell you my one and only experience of tasting Golbarir kasha mangsho. I used to work in Calcutta, then. On my day off, sad, depressed, because my kind, accommodating fuckwit of a boyfriend never spent enough time with me, and well, because it wasn't his day off, I buoyed myself up resiliently to go experience something I'd heard spoken about a lot. It was winter and I remember being cold, people looking at me strangely for being the only woman eating alone in that cubbyhole of a place in Shyambazar, and that the mutton was tough and very very very oily and the platter came with sweet tamarind pickle, which I think is completely pointless. By itself, going off to try kasha mangsho at Golbari's not such a terrible thing. I've gone to tonnes of places alone (and since realised that I am happier travelling and eating in company and that it need not be with my best friend or the person I am sleeping with). But the experience of Golbari is inflected with the frustration of working in Calcutta at a deadend job, when I wanted to a) go live in another city b) have a job I actually liked, and which I had a reason associated with the quality of the work, to keep. Most importantly, it was frustration for having tied my life with one who could not make me happy and did not care to try, for whom I was making all these compromises that took me further and further away from the person I wanted to be.
It has been a good thing, the break-up. Hugh Laurie's The Oranges, horrible movie though it was, had some moments which rang true. There is this point at the end of the film where Laurie's wife slaps his teenybopper girlfriend and then says, "Someday I'll thank you for this." That's how it's been for me. And though terrible things have followed, it is still a good thing that I am free of him.
Yesterday, I realised I didn't even feel that terrible hate towards him anymore. I think getting in touch with him, taking his help, and on occasion, talking with the old familiarity, has helped me move on from it. Yes, it feels like a bitch when he takes off for his trip to the Him-uh-laa-yas with his parents and wife, when I cried myself hoarse because I wanted to travel with him, but it doesn't occupy my thoughts beyond the occasional moment, and I can say I don't really care what he does.
This was not a footnote at all, and this post is longer than all permissible limits. It's the kind the mad momma writes, those which make me want to hurl the laptop. But then, hardly anyone comes here, and it's sort of my diary, so...
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