Please note that I am eating dinner at 11 diligently, having fed dog, in case I need to go to hospital tonight. Slight fever, stomach ache, nausea: it seems like it could be something. I think I should call the doctor tomorrow morning in any case. Does it mean things are OK if these things subside?

My life is so boring. People on Facebook post about Things they did on a Sunday afternoon. I slept for two and a half hours because I caught the sun after stepping out for five minutes. I also fed the cat, brought dog home, read a long interview about James Franco, made a stylesheet of sorts for the grammar series and wrote two mails. Ate. While I was bringing her home, there was this guy from upstairs who secretly came down to smoke pot in the darkened passageway. The whole place smelt of it. I was yelling at Puti and Lily at the time so that they kept off each other, while this guy walked steadily away. I was tempted to go up and ask, gnaja khachho?, but I strongly believe in the merits of staying under the radar and being unremarkable, except about dogs and cats. That was my day, and I didn't notice any lack.
I don't mind going back to work tomorrow, and doing what I do every work day.

I have no urge for sex or romantic companionship. It's not numbness either. It just doesn't figure. Last summer it did, and I remember it being more colourful. See, if R from work can be companionless despite being so much more kickass and conventionally good-looking, it might mean that it's not about who you are. Maybe there's something more guro at work.

This is an essay my father would have liked. Or maybe he would have been dismissive and said, e toh shobai janey, lekhbar ki achhe, or, the guy is too full of himself. But the world is ending, it seems, and so it's OK if I am offering up other people's writing for a non-existent person to read.
For you, baba. Dear father. Pater.
I miss you so much. I feel so scared. I don't know where we will end up. I also think that you might have felt as exposed, as left to find your way by yourself at my age.
I wish you had grown old with me. I wish you sat in a reclining chair, with hair iron-grey by now, and read. But I am also sure you would have driven me crazy.

 "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!"

Adventures of a Curious Character

by Richard P. Feynman

He Fixes Radios by Thinking!

When I was about eleven or twelve I set up a lab in my house. It consisted of an old wooden packing box that I put shelves in. I had a heater, and I'd put in fat and cook french-fried potatoes all the time. I also had a storage battery, and a lamp bank.

To build the lamp bank I went down to the five-and-ten and got some sockets you can screw down to a wooden base, and connected them with pieces of bell wire. By making different combinations of switches--in series or parallel--I knew I could get different voltages. But what I hadn't realized was that a bulb's resistance depends on its temperature, so the results of my calculations weren't the same as the stuff that came out of the circuit. But it was all right, and when the bulbs were in series, all half-lit, they would gloooooooooow, very pretty--it was great!

I had a fuse in the system so if I shorted anything, the fuse would blow. Now I had to have a fuse that was weaker than the fuse in the house, so I made my own fuses by taking tin foil and wrapping it around an old burnt-out fuse. Across my fuse I had a five-watt bulb, so when my fuse blew, the load from the trickle charger that was always charging the storage battery would light up the bulb. The bulb was on the switchboard behind a piece of brown candy paper (it looks red when a light's behind it)--so if something went off, I'd look up to the switchboard and there would be a big red spot where the fuse went. It was fun!

I enjoyed radios. I started with a crystal set that I bought at the store, and I used to listen to it at night in bed while I was going to sleep, through a pair of earphones. When my mother and father went out until late at night, they would come into my room and take the earphones off--and worry about what was going into my head while I was asleep.

About that time I invented a burglar alarm, which was a very simple-minded thing: it was just a big battery and a bell connected with some wire. When the door to my room opened, it pushed the wire against the battery and closed the circuit, and the bell would go off.

One night my mother and father came home from a night out and very, very quietly, so as not to disturb the child, opened the door to come into my room to take my earphones off. All of a sudden this tremendous bell went off with a helluva racket--BONG BONG BONG BONG BONG!!! I jumped out of bed yelling, "It worked! It worked!"

I had a Ford coil--a spark coil from an automobile--and I had the spark terminals at the top of my switchboard. I would put a Raytheon RH tube, which had argon gas in it, across the terminals, and the spark would make a purple glow inside the vacuum--it was just great!

One day I was playing with the Ford coil, punching holes in paper with the sparks, and the paper caught on fire. Soon I couldn't hold it any more because it was burning near my fingers, so I dropped it in a metal wastebasket which had a lot of newspapers in it. Newspapers burn fast, you know, and the flame looked pretty big inside the room. I shut the door so my mother--who was playing bridge with some friends in the living room--wouldn't find out there was a fire in my room, took a magazine that was lying nearby, and put it over the wastebasket to smother the fire.

After the fire was out I took the magazine off, but now the room began to fill up with smoke. The wastebasket was still too hot to handle, so I got a pair of pliers, carried it across the room, and held it out the window for the smoke to blow out.

But because it was breezy outside, the wind lit the fire again, and now the magazine was out of reach. So I pulled the flaming wastebasket back in through the window to get the magazine, and I noticed there were curtains in the window--it was very dangerous!

Well, I got the magazine, put the fire out again, and this time kept the magazine with me while I shook the glowing coals out of the wastepaper basket onto the street, two or three floors below. Then I went out of my room, closed the door behind me, and said to my mother, "I'm going out to play," and the smoke went out slowly through the windows.

I also did some things with electric motors and built an amplifier for a photo cell that I bought that could make a bell ring when I put my hand in front of the cell. I didn't get to do as much as I wanted to, because my mother kept putting me out all the time, to play. But I was often in the house, fiddling with my lab.

I bought radios at rummage sales. I didn't have any money, but it wasn't very expensive-they were old, broken radios, and I'd buy them and try to fix them. Usually they were broken in some simple-minded way--some obvious wire was hanging loose, or a coil was broken or partly unwound--so I could get some of them going. On one of these radios one night I got WACO in Waco, Texas--it was tremendously exciting!

On this same tube radio up in my lab I was able to hear a station up in Schenectady called WGN. Now, all of us kids-- my two cousins, my sister, and the neighborhood kids--listened on the radio downstairs to a program called the Eno Crime Club--Eno effervescent salts--it was the thing! Well, I discovered that I could hear this program up in my lab on WGN one hour before it was broadcast in New York! So I'd discover what was going to happen, and then, when we were all sitting around the radio downstairs listening to the Eno Crime Club, I'd say, "You know, we haven't heard from so-and-so in a long time. I betcha he comes and saves the situation."

Two seconds later, bup-bup, he comes! So they all got excited about this, and I predicted a couple of other things. Then they realized that there must be some trick to it--that I must know, somehow. So I owned up to what it was, that I could hear it upstairs the hour before.

You know what the result was, naturally. Now they couldn't wait for the regular hour, They all had to sit upstairs in my lab with this little creaky radio for half an hour, listening to the Eno Crime Club from Schenectady.

We lived at that time in a big house; it was left by my grandfather to his children, and they didn't have much money aside from the house. It was a very large, wooden house, and I would run wires all around the outside, and had plugs in all the rooms, so I could always listen to my radios, which were upstairs in my lab. I also had a loudspeaker--not the whole speaker, but the part without the big horn on it.

One day, when I had my earphones on, I connected them to the loudspeaker, and I discovered something: I put my finger in the speaker and I could hear it in the earphones; I scratched the speaker and I'd hear it in the earphones. So I discovered that the speaker could act like a microphone, and you didn't even need any batteries. At school we were talking about Alexander Graham Bell, so I gave a demonstration of the speaker and the earphones. I didn't know it at the time, but I think it was the type of telephone he originally used.

So now I had a microphone, and I could broadcast from upstairs to downstairs, and from downstairs to upstairs, using the amplifiers of my rummage-sale radios. At that time my sister Joan, who was nine years younger than I was, must have been about two or three, and there was a guy on

the radio called Uncle Don that she liked to listen to. He'd sing little songs about "good children," and so on, and he'd read cards sent in by parents telling that "Mary So-and-so is having a birthday this Saturday at 25 Flatbush Avenue."

One day my cousin Francis and I sat Joan down and said that there was a special program she should listen to. Then we ran upstairs and we started to broadcast: "This is Uncle Don. We know a very nice little girl named Joan who lives on New Broadway; she's got a birthday coming--not today, but such-and-such. She's a cute girl." We sang a little song, and then we made music: "Deedle leet deet, doodle doodle loot doot; deedle deedle leet, doodle loot doot doo We went through the whole deal, and then we came downstairs: "How was it? Did you like the program?"

"It was good," she said, "but why did you make the music with your mouth?"

One day I got a telephone call: "Mister, are you Richard Feynman ?"

"Yes."

"This is a hotel. We have a radio that doesn't work, and would like it repaired. We understand you might be able to do something about it."

"But I'm only a little boy," I said. "I don't know how--"

"Yes, we know that, but we'd like you to come over anyway."

It was a hotel that my aunt was running, but I didn't know that. I went over there with--they still tell the story--a big screwdriver in my back pocket. Well, I was small, so any screwdriver looked big in my back pocket.

I went up to the radio and tried to fix it. I didn't know anything about it, but there was also a handyman at the hotel, and either he noticed, or I noticed, a loose knob on the rheostat--to turn up the volume--so that it wasn't turning the shaft. He went off and filed something, and fixed it up so it worked.

The next radio I tried to fix didn't work at all. That was easy: it wasn't plugged in right. As the repair jobs got more and more complicated, I got better and better, and more elaborate. I bought myself a milliammeter in New York and converted it into a voltmeter that had different scales on it by using the right lengths (which I calculated) of very fine copper wire. It wasn't very accurate, hut it was good enough to tell whether things were in the right ballpark at different connections in those radio sets.

The main reason people hired me was the Depression. They didn't have any money to fix their radios, and they'd hear about this kid who would do it for less. So I'd climb on roofs to fix antennas, and all kinds of stuff. I got a series of lessons of ever-increasing difficulty. Ultimately I got some job like converting a DC set into an AC set, and it was very hard to keep the hum from going through the system, and I didn't build it quite right. I shouldn't have bitten that one off, but I didn't know.

One job was really sensational. I was working at the time for a printer, and a man who knew that printer knew I was trying to get jobs fixing radios, so he sent a fellow around to the print shop to pick me up. The guy is obviously poor--his car is a complete wreck--and we go to his house which is in a cheap part of town. On the way, I say, "What's the trouble with the radio?"

He says, "When I turn it on it makes a noise, and after a while the noise stops and everything's all right, but I don't like the noise at the beginning."

I think to myself: "What the hell! If he hasn't got any money, you'd think he could stand a little noise for a while."

And all the time, on the way to his house, he's saying things like, "Do you know anything about radios? How do you know about radios--you're just a little boy!"

He's putting me down the whole way, and I'm thinking, "So what's the matter with him? So it makes a little noise."

But when we got there I went over to the radio and turned it on. Little noise? My God! No wonder the poor guy couldn't stand it. The thing began to roar and wobble--WUH BUH BUH BUH BUH--A tremendous amount of noise. Then it quieted down and played correctly. So I started to think: "How can that happen?"

I start walking back and forth, thinking, and I realize that one way it can happen is that the tubes are heating up in the wrong order--that is, the amplifier's all hot, the tubes are ready to go, and there's nothing feeding in, or there's some back circuit feeding in, or something wrong in the beginning part--the HF part--and therefore it's making a lot of noise, picking up something. And when the RF circuit's finally going, and the grid voltages are adjusted, everything's all right.

So the guy says, "What are you doing? You come to fix the radio, but you're only walking back and forth!"

I say, "I'm thinking!" Then I said to myself, "All right, take the tubes out, and reverse the order completely in the set." (Many radio sets in those days used the same tubes in different places--212's, I think they were, or 212-A's.) So I changed the tubes around, stepped to the front of the radio, turned the thing on, and it's as quiet as a lamb: it waits until it heats up, and then plays perfectly--no noise.

When a person has been negative to you, and then you do something like that, they're usually a hundred percent the other way, kind of to compensate. He got me other jobs, and kept telling everybody what a tremendous genius I was, saying, "He fixes radios by thinking!" The whole idea of thinking, to fix a radio--a little boy stops and thinks, and figures out how to do it--he never thought that was possible.

Radio circuits were much easier to understand in those days because everything was out in the open. After you took the set apart (it was a big problem to find the right screws), you could see this was a resistor, that's a condenser, here's a this, there's a that; they were all labeled. And if wax had been dripping from the condenser, it was too hot and you could tell that the condenser was burned out. If there was charcoal on one of the resistors you knew where the trouble was. Or, if you couldn't tell what was the matter by looking at it, you'd test it with your voltmeter and see whether voltage was coming through. The sets were simple, the circuits were not complicated. The voltage on the grids was always about one and a half or two volts and the voltages on the plates were one hundred or two hundred, DC. So it wasn't hard for me to fix a radio by understanding what was going on inside, noticing that something wasn't working right, and fixing it.

Sometimes it took quite a while. I remember one particular time when it took the whole afternoon to find a burned-out resistor that was not apparent. That particular time it happened to be a friend of my mother, so I had time-there was nobody on my back saying, "What are you doing?" Instead, they were saying, "Would you like a little milk, or some cake?" I finally fixed it because I had, and still have, persistence. Once I get on a puzzle, I can't get off. If my mother's friend had said, "Never mind, it's too much work," I'd have blown my top, because I want to beat this damn

thing, as long as I've gone this far. I can't just leave it after I've found out so much about it. I have to keep going to find out ultimately what is the matter with it in the end.

That's a puzzle drive. It's what accounts for my wanting to decipher Mayan hieroglyphics, for trying to open safes. I remember in high school, during first period a guy would come to me with a puzzle in geometry, or something which had been assigned in his advanced math class. I wouldn't stop until I figured the damn thing out--it would take me fifteen or twenty minutes. But during the day, other guys would come to me with the same problem, and I'd do it for them in a flash. So for one guy, to do it took me twenty minutes, while there were five guys who thought I was a super-genius.

So I got a fancy reputation. During high school every puzzle that was known to man must have come to me. Every damn, crazy conundrum that people had invented, I knew. So when I got to MIT there was a dance, and one of the seniors had his girlfriend there, and she knew a lot of puzzles, and he was telling her that I was pretty good at them. So during the dance she came over to me and said, "They say you're a smart guy, so here's one for you: A man has eight cords of wood to chop . . ."

And I said, "He starts by chopping every other one in three parts," because I had heard that one.

Then she'd go away and come back with another one, and I'd always know it.

This went on for quite a while, and finally, near the end of the dance, she came over, looking as if she was going to get me for sure this time, and she said, "A mother and daughter are traveling to Europe . . ."

"The daughter got the bubonic plague."

She collapsed! That was hardly enough clues to get the answer to that one: It was the long story about how a mother and daughter stop at a hotel and stay in separate rooms, and the next day the mother goes to the daughter's room and there's nobody there, or somebody else is there, and she says, "Where's my daughter?" and the hotel keeper says, "What daughter?" and the register's got only the mother's name, and so on, and so on, and there's a big mystery as to what happened. The answer is, the daughter got bubonic plague, and the hotel, not wanting to have to close up, spirits the daughter away, cleans up the room, and erases all evidence of her having been there. It was a long tale, but I had heard it, so when the girl started out with, "A mother and daughter are traveling to Europe," I knew one thing that started that way, so I took a flying guess, and got it.

We had a thing at high school called the algebra team, which consisted of five kids, and we would travel to different schools as a team and have competitions. We would sit in one row of seats and the other team would sit in another row. A teacher, who was running the contest, would take out an envelope, and on the envelope it says "forty-five seconds." She opens it up, writes the problem on the blackboard, and says, "Go!"--so you really have more than forty-five seconds because while she's writing you can think. Now the game was this: You have a piece of paper, and on it you can write anything, you can do anything. The only thing that counted was the answer. If the answer was "six books," you'd have to write "6," and put a big circle around it. If what was in the circle was right, you won; if it wasn't, you lost.

One thing was for sure: It was practically impossible to do the problem in any conventional, straightforward way, like putting "A is the number of red books, B is the number of blue books," grind, grind, grind, until you get "six books." That would take you fifty seconds, because the people who set up the timings on these problems had made them all a trifle short. So you had to think, "Is there a way to see it?" Sometimes you could see it in a flash, and sometimes you'd have to invent

another way to do it and then do the algebra as fast as you could. It was wonderful practice, and I got better and better, and I eventually got to be the head of the team. So I learned to do algebra very quickly, and it came in handy in college. When we had a problem in calculus, I was very quick to see where it was going and to do the algebra--fast.

Another thing I did in high school was to invent problems and theorems. I mean, if I were doing any mathematical thing at all, I would find some practical example for which it would be useful. I invented a set of right-triangle problems. But instead of giving the lengths of two of the sides to find the third, I gave the difference of the two sides. A typical example was: There's a flagpole, and there's a rope that comes down from the top. When you hold the rope straight down, it's three feet longer than the pole, and when you pull the rope out tight, it's five feet from the base of the pole. How high is the pole?

I developed some equations for solving problems like that, and as a result I noticed some connection--perhaps it was sin2 + cos2 = 1--that reminded me of trigonometry. Now, a few years earlier, perhaps when I was eleven or twelve, I had read a book on trigonometry that I had checked out from the library, but the book was by now long gone. I remembered only that trigonometry had something to do with relations between sines and cosines. So I began to work out all the relations by drawing triangles, and each one I proved by myself. I also calculated the sine, cosine, and tangent of every five degrees, starting with the sine of five degrees as given, by addition and half-angle formulas that I had worked out.

A few years later, when we studied trigonometry in school, I still had my notes and I saw that my demonstrations were often different from those in the book. Sometimes, for a thing where I didn't notice a simple way to do it, I went all over the place till I got it. Other times, my way was most clever--the standard demonstration in the book was much more complicated! So sometimes I had 'em heat, and sometimes it was the other way around.

While I was doing all this trigonometry, I didn't like the symbols for sine, cosine, tangent, and so on. To me, "sin f" looked like s times i times n times f! So I invented another symbol, like a square root sign, that was a sigma with a long arm sticking out of it, and I put the f underneath. For the tangent it was a tau with the top of the tau extended, and for the cosine I made a kind of gamma, but it looked a little bit like the square root sign.

Now the inverse sine was the same sigma, but left-to-right reflected so that it started with the horizontal line with the value underneath, and then the sigma. That was the inverse sine, NOT sink f--that was crazy! They had that in books! To me, sin_i meant i/sine, the reciprocal. So my symbols were better.

I didn't like f(x)--that looked to me like f times x. I also didn't like dy/dx--you have a tendency to cancel the d's--so I made a different sign, something like an & sign. For logarithms it was a big L extended to the right, with the thing you take the log of inside, and so on.

I thought my symbols were just as good, if not better, than the regular symbols--it doesn't make any difference what symbols you use--but I discovered later that it does make a difference. Once when I was explaining something to another kid in high school, without thinking I started to make these symbols, and he said, "What the hell are those?" I realized then that if I'm going to talk to anybody else, I'll have to use the standard symbols, so I eventually gave up my own symbols.

I had also invented a set of symbols for the typewriter, like FORTRAN has to do, so I could type equations. I also fixed typewriters, with paper clips and rubber bands (the rubber bands didn't break

down like they do here in Los Angeles), hut I wasn't a professional repairman; I'd just fix them so they would work. But the whole problem of discovering what was the matter, and figuring out what you have to do to fix it--that was interesting to me, like a puzzle.

My imagination is so vivid. I think I could live out chunks of life by just imagining about them. 

The hurt is distilled into clear grains of pain where you know exactly where you hurt and why, all pretences of a self-sufficient heart having fallen away. The music is played with some desperation mid-week in hopes of gathering together some scraps of the mind and threading them together with a semblance of logic. The day barely registers, you can see the urgency of work through a haze of swirling emotion, and pretend to be assertive and know exactly what you want. But those who know you know you are nowhere. They try to yell some sense into you, and you nod and respond, but in your head, they might as well have been talking to a sock puppet.

You smoke many cigarettes, unregistering of the health impact. Because it’s summer and you can, and because you will give in to any impulse that is a genuine impulse, because it is a fully-formed feeling.

You want to listen to the crystal clear notes of Oscar Isaac and T-Bone Burnett. They are precise and full of feeling and twang your hurt in exactly the way you want it played. Pink Floyd leaves no impact, Boyhood’s soundtrack feels too immediate and related, and silly.

In all of this, of course, there is an enclosing sense of irony at the stupidity of your own actions. How it defies all sense, logic, and how conscious you are about the irrationality of your behaviour. You also wonder in passing whether he passed on this state to you, like a contagion, because it is exactly as he had described his own behaviour, and you had been glad then that your mourning for your broken relationship was so finite and controlled within the scope of that one year: terrible grief from March to September-ish, but by December we were done. How you had prayed and told yourself that you could not possibly mourn this for years on end like that woman who wrote on that online forum, no way.

You have stopped wondering today how the casual liking tipped into full-blown crazy some time yesterday, so that you haven’t even needed much action on the part of the offender to fully confirm that he did not, absolutely did not care. You have, in fact, reached the crest of this mountain, and will soon start the walk downhill towards uncaring-ness when it will not matter anymore. You also remember, in glimpses, about that one guy with whom you made a royal hash of it, and what a good thing it is that this is all happening in your head and the person in question will never have any intimation of it.

You don’t, in fact, always remember what he looks like.

This summer is shaping up to be exactly like that of previous years: heartbreak, smoke, songs listened to compulsively to douse the raging of emotions, and unsleptness.

Dear lord, help. I feel so weird. It's guy stuff again. This guy: I instinctively feel he's not right, but I am also interested, in great part, I think, because he's pleasant, not an obvious asshole, and seems so willing. Please god, don't put me through the wringer. I am happy to explore sex and finish this. Not even that would also be fine. Don't make me feel what I'm feeling now. Take away the fear, panic and desire to cry. Register the distrust of privilege, the lack of real things to talk about, that this is also banal, that this means shit. Make me whole, put back the chipped away parts.  

I am a nightmare-ridden person. I can feel an occasional cold hand snaking up my neck, just a harbinger of bad things, sad and scary things. The coattails of mortality, hearing fate snicker, etc, though I don't believe in it, from my gut. I think that contrary to all evidence, we still have choice and will. I feel scared, bogged down, my head is reeling from so much fear, and the physical weight of so much panic, and the shittiness of leaving dog behind just because she was being naughty, and my landlady's accusation that I have kutte paal liye. Of all the places I expected this accusation to come from. And also from her other words, that she probably will look for another renter. I am tired, dear god, I am tired. Tired of so many walls to break down. And how mother feels like a time bomb. And how the possibility of being back to that night in November feels like irrational fear. Everything in me balks from it. How the maid is being an absolute piece of shit, how much thoughts of Lily bog me down. And I told myself today, I am done with dogs and cats. The two bloody cats have also started coming in: everyone wants to make a home of this place, including Soni, and my landlady, a dog lover herself, possibly wants me out. It feels like one is completely powerless. One pays good money to all these people, and they still can say and do what they like to you.
Today I thought how much I would like to er, make love, to my dear friend S. But I wouldn't want to come anywhere close to any of the random guys.

I think this is the closest to contentment that I know.
Mother's BP is sort of (hopefully) getting under control.
I made a list of chores on Friday evening, and completed most of them by Saturday, and also took her to the doctor. Chores included washing clothes, buying vegetables and fish. No dry groceries this week, really. Also fixed the sink pipe and the shelf doors (a bad job, though).
I'll still take some time getting used to how washing clothes in the machine is the opposite of labour-consuming. It's like magic: how you can put in clothes and carry on with other work, with only the occasional looking-in. And it uses so much less water than the semi-automatic. Or maybe it was me who was filling the water till the given mark when it would have worked fine with less water too.
It's getting to be 5 on Sunday, and I have eaten, bathed, washed my hair. I took a very long bath today, and mixed the last round of water just for pleasure, though I was washed and done, otherwise. I would enjoy baths more if I had running hot water from a shower that pelted down thick beaded strands, like it was at the hotel in Chandigarh, and if the bathroom stayed warm for a while afterward, but this will also do, especially because that wastes a lot of water, plus it's not as cold as it was these last few days.
Mother saw a painted stork in Sanjay jheel today. I am very glad that they have begun to go to the lake and the park. She looked very nice in the bright, rani-coloured shawl I had bought her from Chandigarh. She wore a warm violet salwar, kurta and a white sweater with it.
I made doughy pasta yesterday, but got the sauce right. Ate lovely crunchy toast with butter and jam, a recent discovery. It tastes even better with honey and butter.
The poet (fawh!) texted, asking to meet yesterday. But I have no interest, and the days have been too full to accommodate that and also content. Of course I woke up remembering the Kolkata douchebag and I was texting a drunk guy who talked about how cool it was to meet his ex-girlfriend, but it's all fine.
I kept thinking of the luck potion, Felix Felicis, in Harry Potter, and how he kept having this feeling that something good would happen, but also how it was actually a placebo.

Ma's BP is still very high: 170/100. I have been panicking since last night. The doctor added another medicine. But now she feels discomfort after the second Nebicard of the day. I just don't know why this is happening. I so so don't want to go through a major event again and don't want her to.
Looking at Facebook, I feel incredulous at how many people are completely untouched by such loss and illness and how for some, it just doesn't seem to end. And also incredulous at how I am not allowed someone to depend on. That others are also going through parents' illness but they don't panic like me because all their stakes are not in one person. 

I am going to write a series of short posts about all the things I had meant to write since I meant to write so many things, then didn't.

I feel SO SO cold. Temperatures are supposed to have gone up from today, but after a bath and change of (I think) month-long home outfit, I eventually piled on the following:
a t-shirt
a woollycot shirt
a thick sweater
a padded jacket
a shawl worn like a skirt over woollycot pajamas
half-fingered gloves (because, why not, when the aim is to be completely warm)
tupi
double-layered shoe-like sockers from Nepal

C had bought these lovely double-cover gloves from Nepal, which is infernally stupid since she lived in Bangalore at the time, and is now in sweltering Singapore. I was shivering on my way back last night and thinking that they must be languishing and forgotten somewhere in her vast cupboard, if not given away without being worn. It was also stupid of me to not have bought a pair since I could have made good use of them, but I wasn't into gloves then.

I went to Sri Lanka. My travel companions were quite a duo. I don't plan to travel with them again, though half a country away, I am happy to be friends and exchange pleasantries.
I am growing embittered with how things have fallen/are falling into place with most of my friends while I stay stuck and get ever more mired in my life which I don't want. Though if I weren't so discontent with the bits I don't like, I would see that it's purposeful and challenging, which I really need, because I am not really self-motivated. Also, my self is untarnished by compromise which always make me treat myself badly.

Two of my authors have fallen through this week. I am struggling to come out of a half-year haze. Things are becoming like at my last place of work, and it's hard to care. I recently went on a work trip and laughed and said mad things like I don't have the chance to do much of anymore. Perhaps it's because the person I was with is new to the company, and is not a little mad herself.
I am actually very scared about the work situation.

Ma's pressure, we found at the cardiologist's, yesterday, was 190/90. He increased her medicines and said it would come down, and maybe it's the cold. Also said the way to check the condition of the heart and arteries was to do a stress echo once in every two years. He also pooh-poohed me down when I asked about testing microalbumin. The treatment won't change, he stated, while staring at me like I'd asked him to eat a horse.
I now pray like I used to before, for help, for her health, for my work. I have broken and have no room for that anger for F anymore.

Office has so many people. So many that one has to speak to and deal with, who annoy you, bore you, whose speech is like white noise but who have made themselves important.

I feel so lost. It's like my life is only about running this house, and listening to ma's tantrums when she's in a mood. Things are happening at work which no one bothers to tell me about, and which I am not that ambitious to keep regular tabs on. I get intimations of things going very wrong, which, just give it a bit of time, will tell very badly on us, and it makes me even more hopeless. I could sit on the Internet, and do chores all day, and go to bed, and not register beyond a point that things might slip away at this rate.
What resilience do you muster when at the end of two weeks, your mother tells you, amar khabarey kichhu meshabi na. Jodi amay merey pheltey chao, tahole mishiyo. I think I need to get away, from this house on a daily basis, and for a holiday. Imagine living in your own house, paying your own rent, taking care of your mother, and feeling pushed out of your own house, as a bloody single woman. I would really like to ask those people who tell me to find someone and settle down, HOW?

How do you remember the face of someone you fucked just once?

I'm so tired, I haven't slept a wink
I'm so tired, my mind is on the blink
I wonder should I get up and fix myself a drink
No, no, no.

I'm so tired, I don't know what to do
I'm so tired, my mind is set on you

Not.

You know what happened, don't you? The massive internal bleeding in the lower GI tract? We came back yesterday, and I hope, dearly hope she is getting better. I think I am losing my mind, my health. I am so overwhelmed, there is no method to my day today: I am just dealing with things as they come. My plans cover, I think, 30% of what needs to be done. 

My mother gave me no quarter in the second half of the day, and I was again close to tears. I want to work, I am very worried about work when I have time to think of it, but where's the time? Today I spent 2 hours intermittently, I think, trying to find my glasses within the house, until ma suggested I check the phone table, and there it was, one arm poking out, looking like a phone wire. So much groceries later, I rush in after finding and feeding a cat and decide to make the chicken stew myself. By then it was 8.30, and sugar checking (down to 115) and panicking about insulin and gyan from O later, I am totally disoriented with no plans, ranting on WhatsApp to M. Monsieur K calls and I am so tempted to give him a piece of my mind in language of my heartfelt choice but I instead talk in clipped tones in pretend how-do-I-care mode. 

Eventually I randomly match with two OK-ish dudes on Tinder, because, who actually cares, and then start swiping left mechanically because, why not. 

I am scared about not finding a full-time maid by the time this attendant goes in 6 days, and with my luck, I might not. There are the doctors to check up with, the surly cook will come tomorrow and make faces and cook horrible food, and the whole gamut of tomorrow will start and go on and on like Groundhog Day, except there's nothing to change but only to put on the best possible face and deal with it. 

What is this, what is happening? How does one change this, make it better, bring the situation under control? Please help, please help.

Tomorrow is chhoti Diwali (rolling eyes, here) and I am going home. Kanna pachhe, because there will be so much chaos, at home while leaving, and then on the way, at the station. Because I wanted to send off the syllabus to my author, scan and send chapters to another author, speak to someone who might help me find a series editor, and all my bloody office forced us to do today was celebrate Diwali. We had to dress up in the shinies, play musical chairs, eat the lunch organised, and then everyone went home before 3, barring a few. Of course I didn't play musical chairs. I really really resent being forced to conform to someone's definition of culture, fun and celebration, that it has to be so loud and shiny, that shitloads are spent on what is a smokescreen to take focus away from shitty increments, and a reorientation of focus from quality work to loud show.
I have hardly worked. I mean, I have, but it's more like dragging the weight along, rather than rushing ahead to do as much as I can and sneaking in some more, if possible. I feel angry, tired and bored all the time. Oh, and also cold, since we are in the season of is it/isn't it winter.
My loud and attention-needing colleague really annoys me, my boss came wearing a wedding sari, for heaven's sake, and I know nothing will get done the moment I push away from this dusty, dirty, smoggy, awful city.
My mother is a constant thorn on my mind. Where would I even start if I have to write about her. I have a photo of me which has distinct hints of mortality. My hair is silvering in sad and different ways that it didn't before. And there is no boy in sight. I wish I could go out on a fun date with someone normal: not really an obvious asshole, you know? I have felt so old and unpartnerable these past few days, like, how could I even imagine that someone might want to spend their life with me. 

I want to speak out about the supposed taboos of friendship once and for all.

As a friend, you are expected to be delighted when your friends announce their weddings, their pregnancies, when the kid is born, when the marriage happens. But when you are single, don’t have plans to wed and are not particularly interested in kids – even when you feel all of these – you feel left out of life, you feel like life is passing you by. I wish I had more friends my age who felt this way, who were still looking, you didn’t feel like jumping on to the bandwagon because – middle age. I wish there were avenues in this our society where you could channel your energies as a single woman and have your very different achievements recognised just as much as important milestones as those two above. Like, hitting the 1 lakh mark in salary, yay! Was made manager, yay! Was given a team of people to manage, yay! Took solo trip, has managed to keep ageing parents healthy into their 70s, sterilized X no. of dogs this year, etc.

I am tired of feigning happiness for things that mean nothing to me. It’s like I am looking in at a party which seems interesting but not really, but everybody’s at it, and it seems so happening that it’s only out of intellectual willing that you decide to stay out of it. I survived news of your marriages, now I don’t want to hear about your babies, people! Please take your smug-married things *away* from me. And quit pretending that it’s perfectly fine to expect your single friend to be excited and happy when you tell them about happenings which, by not being a part of, I am setting myself up to be a pariah. Don’t pretend that that isn’t loud, rude, uncouth and unkind.

I *don’t* want to travel with a pregnant friend, I don’t want to be have to take care of her all the time, this is also my only trip of the year, and I deserve to relax too. I’ve also had a hard year.

I wish I could crawl into a hole for a few years and come out after everyone of these smug married people had had their babies. 

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: