Today’s Dilemma

Dated – March, 2012

You know you’re leading a boring life when your day’s dilemma is whether you should eat Dosa (again!) for lunch or eat the North Indian lunch, which by the way is not even human, leave alone belonging to any part of India! I am pretty sure I’ll go with the latter. Don’t even ask me why.

Writing cured my toothache. Or, so I’d like to believe. It’s hurting less today. I think the key reason is that it is a Friday. Now, on Fridays, the body’s reaction to everything is different. Say if the boss struts up to me and says meeting at 9:30 pm tonight; instead of immediately taking a Jet Li stance, I’d just smile and think ‘Inner Peace and two days of furniture-like existence coming up! Yayy!’. Or if the boss says ‘you left yesterday at 5:57 pm, which makes you short of 9 hours by all of six and a half minutes’; instead of writing a long mail on how I spent those 6.5 minutes constructively by thinking of increasing the team’s productivity while sitting in the loo, I’d just say I’ll do overtime on Monday. I’ll throw in half a minute more for good measure. Mondays suck anyway! 😀 So, you get my point right. Fridays are just so full of cheer and happy thoughts!

I need to make some real to-do lists. Not the Task list on my Outlook which reads –

• Make an excel sheet to track value added activities
• Make resume to find another equally thought-invoking job
• Complete the e-learning ‘Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’

It’s a horrid list, the Outlook one. What I need to make is a real list with really important things to do. Like brush twice a day and floss. Finish the book I left midway a month back (Have you read books by Murakami? Not good if you’re depressed!). Write letters, not emails. Whatever happened to snail mail, I keep wondering. In school, I had this pen friend. No, not an imaginary friend! A real pen friend. World seemed so simple back then. We used to write these long long letters to each other about the agony that life was. Too much homework, TV shows, cute boys, crushes. I think paragraphs after paragraphs were written when these said crushes would one day turn to look our way for a micro second and then smile for another millisecond. These letters made me live and relive someone else’s happiness and sorrows vicariously. They were a concrete proof of someone’s existence, something I could hold on to. Now, when I look around, the world has become one big social network, at its anti-social best! We don’t call friends when they have a baby; we ‘like’ their status! Few months back, someone put up a status saying she has turned from being in a relationship to being single. Then, someone else went ahead and liked that status! I can’t figure whether to be appalled or to be amused. Friends don’t call anymore; they drop one-liners or write on your Wall. I can write a book on how much I hate these social networking sites. Anyway, I will save that for an angry day.

Getting back to my task list and adding on to it. Make up to this one friend who I think has almost given up on me. Write those music CDs I promised some dear people. Fix my latest travel plan (psssstt..its a secret….white sand beaches + a type of cuisine = my next vacation! Go figure!). Get my parents a long due anniversary present! Wash shoe-laces. I don’t think I have ever washed them! They don’t look so white anymore. Ponder over growing older and wiser (this is the birthday month after all). Fix the broken sink (marked with a red flag!). So on and so forth.

On a different note, is ‘The Artist’ that good? Last I heard such rave reviews of a movie, I went to the theater and slept in the first twenty minutes. Twice! I can’t tell you the name of that movie, because people always give me the ‘Oh dear! There must be something seriously wrong with her’ look. I can’t give you scope to judge me, that too on my own blog! But seriously, is the movie that good?

By the way, I dealt with the lunch dilemma with a hidden third option – chicken biryani. 🙂 I think life is all about these hidden third options. The ones that are not in-your-face, but lurk somewhere behind. The engineer who chose to become a writer. The banker who gave up all the money to train kids in sports. The MBA grad who decided to travel and call ‘Everyday a Sunday’. True stories all of those. They all took that hidden option. Maybe, that’s where your happiness lies. Probably, mine too.