Curious Case of a Part Time Insomniac

One realizes the true virtue of something when one experiences its extremities. The warmth in the dead of winter is best appreciated when the heater goes kaput, the value of a charger is realized when the battery level on our devices reads 1% remaining and the sight of a recently emptied toilet paper roll in the bathroom when we're done with our 'business' makes us realize that we possess emotions like shame or humiliation.

In the life I`ve known so far - I`ve been a morning person. Waking up when it is still pitch dark and dead silent outside, taking in the crisp air that is pregnant with freshness and making the first brew of strong coffee; not merely as chores but rituals that I have grown up with while pacing myself for many a day- ahead.

In order for me to be up by what would still qualify as the middle of the night for most people; 10 PM irrespective of the day of the week is when I fell asleep. The world shut down at that arbitrary point on the clock only to restart again in the wee hours of the morning and lights out wasn't merely a physical switching off of the lights but of my eyelids as well. This system literally worked like clockwork ( no pun intended) when I would wake up from my hours of necessary rest  at precisely the same time every morning.

However recently, things took a turn for the worse. For the first time in life - I found myself straying on the dark side - with being consistently awake beyond my bedtime and struggling to get some shut eye despite lying in bed for what seemed like all eternity. Being new at the insomnia circus, I didn't really know what one did to kill time. To add to the sleeplessness, the silence in the room is so thick you could literally cut it with a knife. It is like a floating entity watching you stare at it while sneering at you. 

There is only so much staring that one can do in the dark without one's subconscious going into overdrive. Some of the areas I constantly touch during such bouts of sleeplessness are stark boring but other earth shattering questions like - Why are the housewives in Desperate Housewives so desperate? Does Sex and the City actually show porn? Did the makers of How I met your mother suffer from a brain freeze post Season 2? Will there ever be a show as awesome as FRIENDS? also figure in the mix.   

If this were at home in India, I surmised that I'd have the luxury of staring at the creaky rotating fan for solace but not here. To top that I'd probably go and wake up Amma in the middle of the night and she'd very sleepily make some wisecrack about reading her Doctoral Thesis for leisure which has magical sleep inducing powers and shoo me away. 

Eventually when I did fall asleep, it was because I was bored out my wits and finally decided to take solace in the last resort - to read through an extremely drab Control Engineering textbook filled with pages and pages of equations and circuits filled with dozens of alphas, betas, gamma's, delta's, PI controllers, feedback loops, Flux capacitors and time machines to finally get some shut eye in the succeeding few moments. 

To the wiseass who coined the phrase - Mommy knows best; Amen to you kind Sir/madam.

Hello World

                             

1. This post is titled Hello World because 

a) I couldn't think of a title that would reflect the content of this post. 

b) I am trying to compensate for the fact that my first post is not called Hello World. Apparently it is an abomination on blog space to not have your first post called Hello World. Who would've thunk? 

c) 'Hello World' as a title is less obnoxious and irritating than the done to death - 'Random' (If the crazies on social networking sites who have a thousand photos under an unsuspecting album called Randomm Picx/Piczz/Pixxx had their way - they would probably name their kids Randomm)

d) Rinse and repeat pointers - a through c.

2. I do not know where 2013 went. The first half of the year warmed up pretty well and I recollect that part. The second half, oh good lord - I swear it whizzed away like it had had a cocktail of coffee and red bull for breakfast.

I`m amnestic about the second half because I don't recollect anything *insert grandpa jokes*. So I`m going to go out on a limb and state - Life happened, there.

3. What I do have is a faint recollection of my end of the year road trip to The Netherlands. It is by far super tolerant, friendly and the single most awesome country in the EU apart from Germany(who are we kidding, come on) that also has a huge chunk of people that speak proper English. Whats more, they have cities that are called Maas and Best. I had half a mind to move to the latter and taunt my friends about living in the Best city in the world - lame joke - I know.

The capital, Amsterdam though technically LOW (below sea level)  is actually HIGH, if you know what I mean. I kid you not, one of my friends actually rolled a joint and went to a police officer to get a light - that ladies and gentleman is what Tolerance looks like.  Although drinking beer on the street is a no go probably because people end up doing stuff like this.

4. The blog remained dormant for most of 2013 - I did contemplate  writing more often but contemplation was all that remained because I morphed into a big fat pile of lazybones perched comfortably in my comfort zone refusing to budge an inch. 

The realization that I liked being on the metaphorical couch in my comfy jammies is more scary to admit than the blatant lie that I was tied down by life's many challenges - like I was single handedly finding the cure to cancer while rescuing beautiful young women from burning buildings and brokering world peace simultaneously.

5. Is it just me or are people getting married and popping babies like there's no tomorrow or like its going out of fashion soon. 

A couple of close friends and I have a weekly wager as to how many wedding invites or relationship updates they got in the past week. We tally them up and decide on a winner - Yes, we're that shallow and shameless.