Person X makes me sick to my skin. I can't believe that I choose to speak to someone who does this. This is exactly what I loathe and what I fashion my whole identity in reaction to. How can I think of Person X as a friend? It feels so murky. I need to stop speaking to them for a very long time. 

smokies

I don't think I can smoke anymore.

http://www.slantmagazine.com/tv/review/looking-the-movie
This is much better, actually. Though none of them touch on the Kevin bit: how much truth he speaks and the pretty fine acting by Russell Tovey.

Looking: The Movie
BY MATT BRENNAN

JULY 19, 2016

There's a moment in the opening minutes of Looking: The Movie that feels like old times, or lost youth (it can be tough to tell the difference). Pressing against each other in a semicircular booth, sipping Mai Tais under a faded mural, Patrick (Jonathan Groff) and his friends revive arguments and repurpose jokes, slipping into the rhythms of their bygone days together. It's an unassuming sequence, peppered with details about the characters we've come to know, but it's also a potent one, sketching the faint outlines of a former life. A year since fleeing San Francisco for Denver, in the aftermath of “Looking for Home,” Patrick is in town for a wedding, and his return is a reckoning—with Richie (Raúl Castillo), with Kevin (Russell Tovey), with the person he was, is, and perhaps still hopes to be. In the movie, a lovely, bittersweet coda to HBO's underappreciated series, even the references to what's changed are a kind of reminiscence. Exquisitely nostalgic, it's as comfortable, and as complicated, as a reunion with an old friend, poring over the past in search of its promise and risking the sharp pang of regret.

In focusing on Patrick's desire to “close the chapter” and “bury the dead,” Looking: The Movie adopts his perspective, seeing the ensemble's successes through his eyes. As Dom (Murray Barlett) watches his restaurant grow, Doris (Lauren Weedman) revels in her relationship with Malik (Bashir Salahuddin), and Agustín (Frankie J. Álvarez), still with Eddie (Daniel Franzese), settles into a new gig, intimations of their own anxieties bubble to the surface, but Patrick's longing suffuses the movie with an idealistic glow. He suspects he's the last of his friends to figure it out, and Andrew Haigh's observant direction, floating through nightclubs and the city's streets, encourages empathic treatment of these doubts. As the image of Patrick alone in a mirror dissolves into a long, lingering pan across couples embracing and kissing, pairs blurring together into perfect wholes, the movie captures the poignant sense of incompleteness that we call disappointment. “This does not last forever,” Doris assures Patrick, seeing in his expression something she's been through herself. But for those in the midst of it, “this” can indeed appear infinite, its resolution out of reach.

If the movie, written by Haigh and series creator Michael Lannan, seems slight at times, in particular as it reduces Richie's boyfriend, Brady (Chris Perfetti), to a smug caricature, its depiction of a life at loose ends is nonetheless affecting, built from the naturalistic precision that's defined the series from the start. It may be that I, too, am in San Francisco for a friend's wedding, spending my time reflecting on the recent divergence of the life I'm leading from the one I'd planned, but Looking: The Movie cuts remarkably close to the bone—in particular Patrick's determination to go back over the preceding decade, as if the act of remembering might reshape the present. While the camera drifts through familiar locations (Patrick's former apartment, a bar called The End Up) and acute sensations (bad blood; cold feet; a steamy, tender fuck), the movie suggests the act of paging through a photo album, fingers caressing certain images, flipping past others. It's more selective in its attentions than the series was, with fewer jagged edges and more clean lines, but it mimics the ache of life's interstitial moments in meticulous detail, earning the sentimental affect of its conclusion: “What happens when you've sobered up, and the wedding's over, and you've lost this sense of romance?”

By the time the camera retreats for the last time, in a deft allusion to “Looking for Home,” Looking: The Movie can offer no firm answer, except perhaps that the only cure for the romance of retrospect is the leap of faith—the new home, the new career, the new marriage—that forces one to “adapt,” as a justice of the peace (Tyne Daly) counsels, if not quite to “change” completely. The movie recalls not Joan Didion's “Goodbye to All That,” to which I made reference in my “Looking for Home” recap, but “On Keeping a Notebook”: “I've already lost touch with a few of the people I used to be,” Didion writes, and this swansong, despite the warm optimism of its final sequence, also replicates her half-rueful remark. Move forward, Patrick urges himself. Close the chapter. Bury the dead. But his notion of the man he is, or was, remains integral to the man he might become. The one specter none of us manages to fend off is that of our former selves. We're running into them all the time.

Looking: Love, always

From here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/23/arts/television/looking-the-movie-review.html?_r=0



“Are you all right?” a friend asks the angsty video-game designer Patrick (Jonathan Groff) early in “Looking: The Movie.” It’s the guiding question of the film, one that refers to two inquiries, actually: Are Patrick and his friends, 30- and 40-something gay men in the San Francisco Bay Area, all right with the way greater acceptance — symbolized by legal marriage — is changing their lives? And is Patrick, a narcissistic relationship saboteur, all right as his friends start pairing off for life?
The movie, on HBO on Saturday night, is a delayed finale for “Looking,”which ran for two seasons on the network. Written by the series’s creator, Michael Lannan, and one of its executive producers, Andrew Haigh, who also directed, it has the show’s virtues — its loose, casual vibe, the gorgeous San Francisco locations and the excellent performances by Mr. Groff and by Murray Bartlett, as Patrick’s levelheaded friend Dom.
It also has its faults, including some surprisingly flat acting for an HBO project and a tendency to get dull when the script moves away from the personal and into the larger issues of the gay community. Those glitches are more noticeable in an 85-minute film than they were in half-hour weekly episodes.
The show was criticized during its run for making the promiscuous, neurotic, commitment-phobic Patrick its central character, as if he were standing in for all gay men. The film incorporates and disarms that critique, having the jealous blogger Brady (Chris Perfetti), Richie’s new boyfriend, loudly accuse Patrick of being bad for the gays.The movie belongs to Patrick, to an even greater degree than the series did. It’s a bittersweet romantic comedy, with a journey through self-discovery toward love against the backdrop of a wedding. Having fled San Francisco for Denver at the end of the series, following his latest horrible breakup, Patrick returns for the City Hall nuptials of his friends Agustin (Frankie J. Alvarez) and Eddie (Daniel Franzese). The action consists of a series of encounters — with his old boyfriends Richie (Raul Castillo) and Kevin (Russell Tovey); with a 22-year-old pickup; with Dom — that force Patrick to assess his choices and gently, if not all that realistically, push him toward the one we want him to make.
But Patrick was always the show’s most interesting and affecting character. Mr. Groff always made his tics, inconsistencies and operatically scaled mistakes believable, and it’s true again in the film. When Patrick goes home with the 22-year-old — a fellow video-game designer — Mr. Groff shows us both his almost giddy delight during their (quite explicit) sex and, afterward, his reflexive condescension mixed with alarm as the younger man calls him out for running away from his problems.
While it was never at the heart of the show, one of the best things about “Looking” was the rapport of Patrick and the slightly older, much wiser Dom. Likewise, the best thing about the film is a scene between the two of them in which Patrick threatens to make his most destructive mistake yet. It’s a crucial moment — funny and terrifying and difficult to pull off — that seems to come out of nowhere, but Mr. Groff and Mr. Bartlett handle it with casual finesse. In a show about loneliness and friendship, it helps to have two actors who can so easily convince us that they’re the greatest of friends.


It breaks my heart a little when I let myself think of this series being over. Perhaps it's because it showed a different life from heteronormative (how easily the words trip off one's tongue in these times) society's, because I don't fit that life either, because I am single when most people/friends are not, because it's about friendships which has always been my mainstay. I feel this desperate longing for wanting to live more of their lives through more episodes, and to say goodbye and forget about it really hurts.
My friends too have paired up, people are starting/have started families. People are also coming back after years living in other countries: I have people to go to after like an adult life's worth of training in how to not want to be with one's closest friends. But it's also now like this review says: here you are, as prepared for life as you can possibly be, and but where do you go? Do you keep hooking up with people, do you stop because it's lost its relevance? You don't, really, because you do want to have sex and are totally not in the running for shukno mohila. But you also want your Eddie: someone to bitch to, someone to tell when you find something interesting.
I was walking down to the grocery store today evening to buy bread. Without any bags to carry, I walked fast and with a straight back, and my calves felt strong and able. I want to walk as free and strong always and with someone with whom that would not be at odds.

Here's a song from the second season which captures some of what the series is in my head:

Dear me, I never seem to cry enough, or cry. I feel like I could do with a good cry now. I am moving on. There is nothing to move on from. I felt more than I hoped I would. I see how facile it is. I see I am only being reasonable to myself, by saving myself time to be sad about other things, if nothing else. There is breeze on this June evening, it's still light out, I have moved into a flat that I like. The dog situation might become more manageable soon. I am kinda worked out with the parade of deadlines: I can't care anymore. I expect to have sex soon, but side by side you think, what's even the point? Who is this person, does he matter to me in even the smallest way, is there any need to have sex with someone who doesn't matter to you in the smallest way?
Why can't Melissa Bank write my life: divide it up into disjointed episodes written up as nifty short stories filled with witticisms and a busy-in-the-head city life? Why am I here, sitting in an empty office, wishing I could find an occasion on which to peg the completely bearable hurt and have a good cry, a cry with not enough pain or the least bit of desolation, just a keen pinch of pain, over, I dunno, someone you would have wanted to at least be on the same page as you? A lot to ask, I know. Imagine how terrible it would have been if it were someone with more selfhood, ego or spine.
Here's Gerard Manley Hopkins:

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Do you ever have the desire to stalk the shit out of someone? If only it would make them come to heel and make them fall in love with you.

I feel sad, and a little mad, that this is how it will be. That we will fall out of touch. It has already begun. I wish it could fastforward itself and come to the end of the road. But I've already accepted that I'll have to live through the slow, dimly hurtful, painful process of it: such an emotional chore, really. I also accept that you are not special, often lame, nondescript, someone whose ways I would notice and ignore, or grit my teeth against. That nonetheless you know the art of boundaries, of carving out and guarding your own time against demands on it by people who are good to you. This is something I haven't mastered. If I did, I would also be another person. If I want someone, it seems they can have me until I am almost falling apart.
Unfortunately, you are not so stupid that you don't understand what I say. None of O's new age men are. Va, va, va-t'en! Or better still, as the dictionary says, Prends tes affaires et va-t'en!

I have pain on the right of my chest. Enough pain for it to be a concern. Let me get through the night, God, and tomorrow I'll go to the doctor. I'm rather scared.

Someone teach me how to live, not to be a sponge for hurt. Someone teach me to figure out this maze of heart stuff, how everything eventually becomes heart stuff. Someone tell me what happens when one turns 35, 37, 40: how does one deal with being alone, does one remain alone, is it like having the ground beneath your feet taken away, does one find friends, does one discover support systems, does one remain strong and capable? Teach me how to live, show me what to do. I keep going from disappointment to disappointment. In fact, I go looking for it where I can.
Please make this stop. I am not a serial dater. I don't have it in me to live frivolously. There is only so much I can give of myself, and I seem to have spread myself thin to people even I don't care about. Because rejection hurts, even when it's a wishy-washy thing, where you don't care about the person, and have absolutely no intention of taking it anywhere.

I was looking at my 2010 posts, just after I came to Delhi. And found comments by Madhura, Poushali, Oli. Such warm ones, such a lovely sense of community. I also rather liked the way I wrote. I don't seem to have changed so much in the way I thought, though I think I was closer to well, my core, then, more centred, if you will. How precise I was in my dislike for Delhi. I wrote of living intensely: the groceries, the chores, the accent I spoke in, the way I scanned the crowds, the dogs in my last flat, but how like an outlier I felt. How things have changed. I am assured of my presence in this city now, but there seems to be a haze when I think of how centred I am. I don't really work to be at one with my core, anymore. In a lot of matters, I take things as they come, and I forgive myself and let go of a million things in which actions don't match intention. I don't know where I come from or am going wrt love, having greatly become a creature of circumstance. It's greatly on the surface: I try to embrace an intimate moment entirely and then work to not attach value to it. I can't, though, not really. So there is the inevitable hurt, and you hurt and hurt until you can't understand clearly anymore what the feeling is directed toward. You look for another distraction, instead of recouping and coming back to yourself. It's rather frivolous, but how much can you care? Look at the viscerality of me: look at my body, I feel the pain in the middle of my spine as I sit, the need to pee which will have to addressed in five minutes, the complete acceptance of the desire for sex with a person I am attracted to, how I muster my energy to make rotis at 10 in the night, how I am physically unable to care about my mother anymore, how I realise it's finally time for bed when my mind seems to go on and off at about 2.30 in the morning. I feel it with every bit of my body, and it takes precedence over the need to revisit, revise and summarise my actions in my mind. I just let it hang out and move to the next thing.

I wrote with wonderment about liking to do groceries in 2010. Now, the novelty of that liking has worn off and I can repeat ad infinitum that I like grocerying and hate cooking. I know the prices of most vegetables and pick up the week's groceries fast without luxuriating in the lushness of fresh vegetables. Yesterday my mother proudly declared that all the spinach -- a kg's worth -- had spoilt. I gulped down the information physically and kept my mouth zipped: that's 20 buck's worth of spinach, I felt its weight along with the rest of the 10 kg of vegetables I carried home that day. Swallowed down my mother's blankness about defeat of the hard work it involves, that it feels bad, that it hurts that she does not understand or care for it. I made rotis over a prolonged period, texting a dude who likes indulging himself with mush he does not mean or understand, smoked a cigarette sitting on the balcony afterward, texted some more rubbish, hurting meanwhile for the reason I was hurting. The hours just whittled by, Puti coming in to lie down in my room for a bit, until I finally got up, took a bath, ate and to bed. And was far, far, far too tired in the morning to go to work. Went after half a day, and here I still am.

I love a clean slate. I like nothing as much as I like a clean slate, even if it means erasing a tonne of beautiful memories: photos, texts, any sign of personality. There's one very hard moment when you do it, but it feels healthy and refreshing the moment it's done, and I watch with interest if there is anything to build upon without the evidence of past moments. It feels fine to move on too if there isn't.
Milton is beautiful with it. Fancy, me, the illiterate, holding Milton as a talisman:

 'Thus sang the uncouth swain to th'oaks and rills,
While the still morn went out with sandals gray;
He touch'd the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay;
And now the sun had stretch'd out all the hills,
And now was dropp'd into the western bay;
At last he rose, and twitch'd his mantle blue:
To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.'

I have always loved the uncouth swain who twitches his mantle blue and moves on. I imagine that he smiles.

Men, such fuckwittage! If you are reading this, please don't anymore. Don't come to my blog, don't violate my very own corner of the Internet. Such infernal stupidity one is capable of in moments of weakness. Giving random person address to one's private blog, I tell you!
Anyway, the awful pigeons are calling their awful call, the mater has awakened me because she wanted to listen to music at 7 am and then, when I was trying to go back to sleep, 'PUTI BHETORE ASHCHHE NA!' The big boss is coming from the UK today to spin his spiel, I have an evening planned as cheap and instant escape, and I is generally tired with myself, own actions and stupidity. Not least about the blog.
I wish it were not so expensive to hire a cab, I wish I had slept longer, I wish I had worked more this past couple weeks, I hope I get to go away to McLeod this weekend, I hope I find a book as nice as The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, I hope I get to watch Masaan soon, and Inside Llewyn Davis, I hope I meet the weird Punju guy and we get to discuss poetry, I hope I sleep better this week, I hope I get a cook fast, I hope I go to meet Katyal auntie this week, I very dearly hope her leg is alright, I hope Puti's gha isn't serious, I hope for poetry, weather like the past week's, I hope I speak to A.

'Fuck you, fuck you, and especially, fuck you.'
Tumi jodi amar shathe na jao, ami mone kore, shomoy niye, nije giye taj mohol dekhe ashbo. Ek shathe dekhar chukti tumi korbe honour. Haha. Hahahaha. Etoi jodi buddhi hoto, bhogoban tomay meye baniye pathaten prithibitey.

Do you remember going to sleep with baba? Reading that zombie story in Shuktara and being so scared that I slept on the same pillow as him with my hand (or shoulders) touching his lightly, just holding on to some part of him while I slept? How he was so completely OK with his daughter eating up all his space?

Here's a song:

Rehna tu, hai jaisa tu
Thoda sa dard tu, thoda sukoon
Rehna tu, hai jaisa tu
Dheema dheema jhonka,
Ya phir junoon
Thoda sa resham, tu hamdam
Thoda sa khurdura
Kabhi tu ad ja, ya lad ja
Ya khushboo se bhara
Tujhe badalna na chahoon
Ratti bhar bhi sanam
Bina sajawat, milawat
Na zyaada na hi kam
Tuhje chahoon, jaisa hai tu

I have had enough of you

Now please leave me alone

To reclaim my life, my nights,

My thoughts, my head.

Don’t let’s fall

Into my old pattern

Let me not build myself

A prison of togetherness

And choke myself inside.

Give me time.

If I must come back to you,

I will.

If we were together

If we were together,

Instead of you in H--

And I in Delhi,

Here is a list of things we would do.

The thought is delightful,

Because I see

The sun beating down

And us walking down a hot road beside a lake,

You in a kurta and I in my faded salwar kameez.

It is a summer love.

Summer is when the best things always happen.

Then we watch a film

In a cooled cinema hall.

I come out feeling angry, while you

Drown in superlatives about the director’s mastery,

The actor’s dedication, and the ‘deeper meaning’

Of the film,

While I am like, ‘Duh! Everyone knows that.

Does it even bear saying?’

You ignore me, maybe even ask me to shut up.

I am a little shocked, then delighted.

What would we do,

If we were together,

Instead of you in H--

And I in Delhi?

If I had a room of one’s own,

If I were on my ownio?

On a hot, hot Saturday,

The fan would swing above our heads,

We would get bored and banter,

Make out a little,

Watch a film,

Be a little desultory

And fall asleep.

If it were a balmy evening,

Like the one on which we met,

We would smoke a joint

And get high

And laugh a lot

And argue and fight,

My heart would sway a little in fear,

But then hopefully it would relax

And I would go to bed at peace.

(What a shite piece of writing this is)

Added:

If you were in Delhi,

Or I were in H—

We would go to the old city.

Since it would be summer,

5 o’clock would find us

On the courtyard of Jama Masjid.

Before that, the moment

When the vastness of its symmetry

Reveals itself for the first time.

Inside, tentative steps,

Sharp breaths as the hot gasps of heat

Hit your feet.

Wind in my hair, the sun going down,

The sharp outline of an arch

Against a darkening blue sky.

As not knowing newer roads

Make one end up in Rome,

We would walk into Karim’s courtyard.

Selfie [sort of]

By the *sexy sadistic spanker*

Selfie [sort of]

It's okay to feel sad.To want comfort. To feel the urge to make contact, physical or otherwise. It's okay to cry. It's okay to feel like shit, like you just can't go on. It's okay to want to hope, to have hope, to feel betrayed. It's okay if it is an emotional roller coaster. It's okay to want to get off and yet not be able to. It's okay to want to hold on and let go at the same time. It's good to write. It's good to feel. It's good to numb the pain, with ice cream and watchseries and cats. It's okay to want to escape. It's okay to bother friends at odd hours. It's okay to feel angry, try to feel angry and fail. It's okay to indulge. It's okay to feel depressed. It's okay to have mood swings, to sing songs in voice subdued by tears. It's okay to once again love oneself with that old, newfound tenderness. It's okay to indulge in the breakup ritual of gifting oneself Calvin and Hobbes. It's okay to write letters, carefully composed and recomposed to oneself in one's head. Love letters. It's okay to want to escape into that reality where you can erase all your memories and yet have a happy ending. It's okay to want to move on, not want to move on, to be undecided. It's good to run, to laugh, to cook, to eat, to scratch the chins of cats and hug them to sleep. It's okay to long for a room of one's own, metaphorically and physically. It's okay to cry. Really, it is. It is okay to feel like shit. It's okay to take comfort in small things like the softness of the pillow and the purr of cats and watching cat videos. It's okay to feel banal and profound, melancholy and manic, hungry and satiated, hot and cold, driven and bored, inspired and insipid. It's all okay, all in a day's work. And it is going to be alright even if it that doesn't quite feel right, you melodrama queen, you deluded moron, you hopeless romantic, you wonderful, complex. complicated human thing. I love you, as always.

Living is so difficult. I am completely tired and out of my wits. I wish someone would show me the way to getting what I want. Today, I am not even sure what I want. My mind is an emotional void. Someone I like does not seem to like me back enough, or my liking switches off abruptly, which is almost as hard to accept as not being liked. I am too tired to want to meet other people. Online dating is so tiring: what are we looking for in such frenzied fashion? At such speed, you can barely even seek out sex, and that does not seem to matter soon enough. You are left with the rag and bone shop of the heart and the one thing you don't want to do is work it some more. But there is the anxiety that if not this, then what? It's exactly the very worst thing to do in the circumstances: go running about when you should be recouping. I feel stupid and non-adult.
I can barely register the 2 things that matter and prop up my world: my work and ma's health.
Scary, no? Scary, scary, scary, scary, scary.

Darling

Darling,

You are half a stranger.
How does one fall in love with a stranger
Over three conversations
And one night when everything
Came together perfectly?

Your fillums,
Your love
For talking about yourself,
Your voice on the phone
As deep as when we spoke
In my room
Through the night,

How you go on
And on
About the same thing
How miserable you are
How bored you are
How desperate you sound
When you call me
(On those two nights)

It will pass
When life starts
For you again.

Will you forget me
Ignore me
Will I be an adult about it?
Will I push you away
From today
So you can
Never hurt me?

Will it be
A weekend love
Played out over the phone
Drawing on the memories
Of a perfect ordinary night?

I am falling in love with you.
It is a very uncool, uncouth
Thing to say
In the world of flinty singletons
Protecting armoured hearts.

I might hate you tomorrow,
As I already do a little
In anticipation
Of the pain
I am about to inflict on myself.

But now,
Deep down,
Loving you (what I know of you)
Feels perfect.

P.S.
Filmmakers are a sodden, self-obsessed lot.
They get depressed, they drink
I think you are a borderline alcoholic,
Or going that way with bold and sure steps.
You have no idea how to hold someone
So much smaller than you.
But we played very well, and very long
That night.
In that, we were a perfect match:
A size ten and a half.

Everyone has gone home and my floor is completely silent. It's Friday.
But how does it matter? When the sky outside can no longer be seen through the blinds, it will be no different from the other days of the week when I go home at what seems the dead of night.
The world outside registers only cursorily. My visual registers are this office floor, daylight seen through the room adjoining the kitchen at home, and the kitchen at night; maybe the bathroom when I have to take a bath.
The head registers are (now) in Jo Nesbo -- Harry Hole's self-proclaimed rictus of a smile -- I am waiting for him to kill the antagonist in gruesome fashion as I slow-read the remaining one-sixth of the book the second time; The Vague Woman's Handbook which is stalled in Delhi February winter before the Metro cut permanent tracks across the way we planned our days; ma's doctor's appointment and the delayed tests; my friends. Rubbish Tinder occasionally bobs up, the Internet leaves its mark in everything, everything. And oh, WORK, and the fear and anger that go with it.
I am not unhappy, there is still always the peace that comes with your heart being yours, your decisions independent of others' selfish, selfish desires. The actual happinesses seem magnified manifold, as if one were on I dunno, ganja, LSD? Like the KJR trip. The passing minute heartbreaks that happen seem to tear up the heart, so terrible it feels to want something from someone and to not get it. Then, that is cut away, and peace restores itself, like finding your balance again after swaying briefly on an aal.
One grows up, one grows older.