Under your spell

I have been sitting on the piece of writing for the past four days. Every time I sit to write this out, my thoughts go on a different direction. This time it’s not me and my errant thoughts that are a problem, but rather the topic; the topic lends itself open to various interpretations and treatment. Keeping it leashed to what I want to actually say is the problem.

I just want to focus on words that I spell wrong, as simple as that, but apparently not so! The dangers of misspelling words are huge; nightmarish if it goes out to a larger audience and red-faced-wish-the-world-would-split-open-and-swallow-me-whole moments when you know that audience personally. Spelling errors do happen, but when that gets an embarrassing or suggestive tone, you wish you had spotted it earlier.

For me, I always dread spelling public as pubic. Seriously, every time I type that word or edit files, I’m extra cautious.

Pantry without the ‘r’ can make for some very exciting sessions. This is another word that I always double check. At one of my previous organisations, the office assistance sent this mail where the correct spelling obviously eluded her not once but twice! “We’ve noticed that the panty is always a mess. …  Please ensure that you leave the panty clean after you’ve used it”!

Auto spell check is a handy element for words that I always can never spell — privilege, refrigerator and length.  Without meaning to, I always end up making mistakes while spelling form and from, tow and two (my two always gets spelt tow, always, even now, sigh) and surprisingly change becomes chnage (which just got auto corrected).

Ironically, as I type this piece, I had to go back on almost over half the words. Misspelling you see!

Time faster Time

Is it just me or do you agree that time has got a new set of wheels? How else can you explain the whizzing speed of days and years? One minute you are in April and the next getting ready for the New Year! I always feel like I just finished buying my Christmas gifts for family and friends (which can be so exhausting) and don’t have the energy to go through another round of them just yet.

Time is relative said Einstein but I don’t think that’s applicable these days. Time just seems to fly whether or not you are having fun. Try as much to slow down your hectic schedule and you still find yourself huffing to catch up with days. I feel like I’ve lost so many days without knowing how and when they dropped off the grid. I will admit that there are a few days where time seems to drag but overall it seems like the axis of the earth has shifted into some kind of super speed.

A procrastinator like me always pushes tasks for the next week, month, couple of months, year and before you know it, it time for me to come good on promises to myself. I’m always struggling to catch up with my lazier self, it’s like I can never catch a break. Events around the world celebrate their anniversaries and I find myself wondering if it has actually been those many years. In a way, there is no more place for anything old, it is always and always immediately replaced by the new.  Everywhere it is one revolution replacing the other in more ways than one.

Sometimes, I feel that modern living is all about speed. We measure our lives in nanoseconds and get impatient by every kind of delay. A 20-second delay in page loading gets us aggravated (come to think of it, I don’t think we can stand a 3-second delay) or  the 1 minute it takes us to get food heated in the microwave makes us impatient. Is this the reason why we seem to have lost track to time. Once a upon a time now really seems like a time phase really gone.

Writing about this, got me remembering this episode on Seinfeld. Have you seen ‘The Friars Club’ episode where Kramer is trying to copy Leonardo Da Vinci's sleep patterns to experience more life?

KRAMER: Listen, uh, do me a favour, will you? I got a hot date tonight with Connie. Knock on my door, wake me up in twenty minutes, alright?

JERRY: Catnap?

KRAMER: No, no, no, no. This is evolutionary. I’ve been reading this book, on Leonardo de Vinci. See, that means 'from Vinci', did you know that?

JERRY:  That must be some book.

KRAMER: Yeah, well, turns out that the master slept only twenty minutes every three hours. Now, that works out to two- and-a-half extra days, that I'm awake per week, every week. Which means, if I live to be eighty, I will have lived the equivalent of a hundred and five years.

JERRY: Just imagine how much more you'll accomplish.

Tales of this and that

I had this thing to get and couldn’t remember it. All I could hear was I needed this for that. It’s a habit in my family, where we use the words ‘this’ ‘that’ and ‘there’ alarmingly often to substitute words we can’t get at the moment. Mostly, it works; we know what ‘this’ or ‘that’ is being referenced at the moment. Sometimes, it gets you in trouble. One rainy afternoon, I remember being screamed at by mom, for not getting the clothes off the line in time. She insisted she told me hours ago, I was adamant she hadn’t. It then dawned that she did tell me to get ‘this’ from ‘there’. With no reference to put context to either, I fell short.

Regular placeholders like Whatchamacallit or Whatshisname or even Thing'em-bob never caught in my house. We were having so much fun figuring out ‘this’, ‘that’ and ‘there’. My extended family too indulged in the extensive use of these placeholders, which made me wonder if this was some genetic defect or a family tradition passed on. Often, we would deliberately pretend to be obtuse and come up with random, unconnected items to fill in the blanks, much to their consternation, till they would scream, “Pass me the hammer, you dolts!”

Placebo effect

In medicine, there is something known as the placebo effect, when doctors administer a drug that is supposed to make you feel better but in reality is just a sham drug that is actually nothing. The effect of the placebo is that is works on the idea of perception; you believe that you are given a life changing treatment that will change your condition. This belief may in fact have a subjective positive result in you feeling your condition has improved.

How many times in our lives have we faced this placebo effect? Whether we’ve been the ones to administer it or the ones who get the dose? We have all deceived ourselves, others and more at some point or the other. Was it to make ourselves feel good or was it for the good of others?  Were our motives truly honest or were we fooling ourselves into believing that we were actually doing some good.

Deception is what we do every day. We force ourselves into believing that there is a reason valid enough to support these lies. In the beginning it may be something we do just to placate ourselves but over time, the reiteration of the lie completely obscures the truth. In times of trouble we pacify ourselves into believing that this phase is just transitory; that it will change and we will feel better. “ I am much better” we say this to ourselves over and over again that even if we don’t feel any better, we force our minds to accept that things have changed, have improved.

The truth is always harder to accept when you realise that you are not among the selected few to actually receive the real cure. We cannot accept that life has decided to skip us over for someone else. We’ve been handed the placebo instead of the real thing. It surely sucks. So what are we going to do? Are we going to fight, scream and shout or are we going to the do the next best thing which is to accept? We all have our ways of making peace with ourselves—rebellion, anger, submission, indifference, pathos, acceptance and denial.

When we deceive others, there is to an extent something clever about it, but when we deceive ourselves it is simply pathetic. Yet we never desist. We know that there is nothing more that can be done for us, so we do what we do best, ignore it and hope that it goes away. Sometimes, it does. Sometimes we do effect a positive change, because we have worked around the problem and tackled it in a roundabout way. And sometimes, despite what we do, there is nothing we can change. The harm is permanent and the end is inevitable.

Trying to change

So J introduces me to the GOOD 30-Day challenge. As I'm reading through it, I wonder if I could do something similar, not exactly the kind of challenges they set, but maybe borrow from their ideas. I could definitely do the talk to a relative and send a postcard, though at a later stage.

As my first task, I step into a restaurant/cafe and ask them for their take-away menu. Believe me, this is hard for me, and what helped was I did it on an impulse. If I sit to think and analyse, I'm always doomed. I get flustered easily so calling in for anything is a task, as I assume that people will always judge me on how I speak, how confident I sound and if I even know what I'm calling in for.

The second thing I did was let someone else take the taxi before me. If I haven't grumbled enough, getting a taxi to work is hard and fighting fending off people ready to 'steal' your taxi is even harder, so the idea of me willingly letting someone else take a taxi before me, even if they got there after me is a BIG task. I did it and felt better and almost felt as if I deserved a humanitarian award gold star.

Maladjusted

As people we are all used to making adjustments just to get what we want, whether we like it or not, and as Indians we are more familiar with the term. Whether in school, college, in the train or the bus, we always squeeze to make place for that one more person in our lives, on our seats and sometimes even on our toes.

I have nothing against making adjustments just to accommodate that one more person, but not at the cost of my well-being. I get all irritated and fidgety when I am squeezed and scrunched; I feel encroached upon. The feeling is worse when it happens in church. I mean, I make all the effort to get there well before time so that I can sit comfortably in a decent enough spot, and then the latecomers straggle in and ruin my peace. I know, I am supposed to display charity and goodness especially in the house of God, but I cannot, honestly cannot. How can I when my shoulders are scrunched in, I have someone nudging and jostling me every time I move?

For the last few weeks, I’ve had to sit up, squeezed just to make place for a pregnant woman, a lady with a child and a younger girl and her sister. If there is place, it is indeed shameful to deny someone a seat, but when we are already shoulder to shoulder, how can the usher expect us to adjust? I cannot pray when I am distracted by people stepping on my toes and elbowing my sides. What is the use of pray when I want to shove the next person or am grumbling about the lack of decency in people? When we were asked to shift and make place for the pregnant lady, there was place to sit, but the lady next to us wouldn’t move her kid who was sleeping across the bench. This only meant that I had to move forward so that the pregnant lady could be seated.

Okay, so you make the place, but then the newcomer decides that they want more. They start shifting, moving forwards and backwards till they can rest their backs. Hello? Whatever happened to being grateful that you got to at least park your butt? Even the fourth-seat passenger in the train will ask you to try and move! What happens then is that you have to take your shoulders in, sit with your legs crossed and lean towards the next person, all the while making you look like the interloper!

Thoughts

So I got lazy. Four days of my leave are almost over and all I did was shop, eat and sleep. Hence the laziness to get online and type.

I can think of nothing other than finishing season 3 of CSI. I am addicted to it and have to replace it with something else. I guess I will start with Game of Thrones and refresh my memory before the new season starts; besides I have to start reading the books that have inspired the series.

Speaking of book, I have started reading Room by Emma Donoghue and must say it is very interesting. Will review it later.

J, you've always been a motivator and inspiration to me and with ABC you did just that. The writing is easier for me now, and though I haven't really polished the style, I am happy that nevertheless I'm writing.

We never got to deciding the prize, though. I guess we both deserve to share it.