![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Andy, and movies
Mar. 17th, 2005 04:05 pmJust said goodbye to Andy, one of my oldest and dearest friends- I've known him since his family moved to Potsdam, back in -gulp- 1982. He was the first person I seriously watched movies with on a regular basis, patiently listening to me go on and on about why I just had to stay up to 2:30 in the morning to tape Citizen Kane; as far as that goes, he was in the first film exercise I ever directed, at the tender age of 13 or so. (Odd, to think that the only other person I talked about movies with back then has been dead for almost fifteen years.) We'd stay up all night reading comic books, and plan excursions to the long-lost Dream Days comic book store in Syracuse; although he was much more handsome/socially well adjusted/popular than I was (he was president of our student body our senior year) he was a geek, or at least enough of one for us to find a common language- no easy task with the angry, maladjusted being that was myself.
We stayed in touch after college, as he moved to Seattle, and then Japan; when I started coming out to friends about ten years ago, he was the first person I told; when he got married, I was there (personal to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
reazik: he asked after you the other day). It's hard to sum up twenty-three years, some of them among the most difficult years in my life; hard to express the gratitude I feel at still being able to laugh over those times, and talk over a movie after the fact (Last movie we saw: Bruce Willis in Hostage. Well done for what it was, but I've seen this too damn many times. Last good movie we saw together: Garden State. Zach Braff uses his own deadpan demeanor to good effect, and I haven't seen Natalie Portman seem so unaffected in a movie since The Professional; too, Braff manages to write dialogue that's funny and philosophical without sounding like Writer Writing for ActorsTM. How about Ian Holm's Joisey accent?)
...but, yeah. I'm working very hard this year at losing the tiny, childish voice deep inside me that can't stop saying "...but what about me?" when friends' lives change like this; to accept change for the inevitable river's current that it is, for them and for me, and to be grateful that that current is carrying them to new joys, and new opportunities. Thank you, everyone who has helped me learn this lesson. Thank you, Andy.
(ETA: And congratulations to my apartment mate, who's in a movie mentioned in the New York Times. (free registration required) (They spelled his name right, too!)
We stayed in touch after college, as he moved to Seattle, and then Japan; when I started coming out to friends about ten years ago, he was the first person I told; when he got married, I was there (personal to
reazik: he asked after you the other day). It's hard to sum up twenty-three years, some of them among the most difficult years in my life; hard to express the gratitude I feel at still being able to laugh over those times, and talk over a movie after the fact (Last movie we saw: Bruce Willis in Hostage. Well done for what it was, but I've seen this too damn many times. Last good movie we saw together: Garden State. Zach Braff uses his own deadpan demeanor to good effect, and I haven't seen Natalie Portman seem so unaffected in a movie since The Professional; too, Braff manages to write dialogue that's funny and philosophical without sounding like Writer Writing for ActorsTM. How about Ian Holm's Joisey accent?)...but, yeah. I'm working very hard this year at losing the tiny, childish voice deep inside me that can't stop saying "...but what about me?" when friends' lives change like this; to accept change for the inevitable river's current that it is, for them and for me, and to be grateful that that current is carrying them to new joys, and new opportunities. Thank you, everyone who has helped me learn this lesson. Thank you, Andy.
(ETA: And congratulations to my apartment mate, who's in a movie mentioned in the New York Times. (free registration required) (They spelled his name right, too!)
