Solitude Journal - Day 4 - A Soap Opera

I confess I am a bit too dramatic and emotional. I have a theory for why I am this way. It has something to do with Indian Soap operas that my mom watches. I used to be annoyed at them as a kid because we only had one small television in our living room, and there was a pecking order for who gets to choose what we watch. Somehow, I was at the bottom of that order, even below my little brother, despite me outliving him by 4 years. I was always vocal about my hatred towards overly melodramatic and unrealistic stories in the soap operas my mom puts on. But secretly I was hooked to those stories. I used to keep an eye on television from a corner of my eye (I couldn’t give my whole eye; else my brother will know that I am invested in whatever crazy weird family drama is happening on screen and I won’t hear the end of it).

These soap operas always have a female protagonist who is portrayed as a victim of the torture inflicted on her by cunning in-laws and a cruel husband. If this happens in present day, I would advice that protagonist to divorce the husband and sue the hell out of those monsters for all the harassment and trauma. But back then I was just a kid who knew little about these things, so I just kept my mouth shut and watched the television, still from just a corner of my eye. Amazing thing was that suffering and tears for that protagonist never stop, and with the unparalleled power of plot armor, she always manages to win over her husband. Now that I think about it, maybe these soap operas were created by men who were gaslighting women into staying subversive. I digress, but my main point was that watching such dramas probably played a part in me being a dramatic person who can sell a story by involving a lot of emotions. To prove this point, let me tell you about an uber ride I took from white rock lake to my home last month.

I didn’t realize that the uber driver was already on location that day, as I was busy cooling down and changing my shirt, so it took me approximately 5 mins to board the cab and I was expecting to see an angry face. But what I saw instead was a familiar South Asian face (I don’t know the guy, just the face felt familiar because he was South Asian like me). So, I decided to start a conversation, I learned that he is originally from Nepal and he is here in states for past 15 years or so. True to my making-people-uncomfortable-with-my-curiosity nature, I threw a stream of questions at him, and eventually he opened up with me. Trust me when I say he was not even drunk (I will assume this for my sake as he was driving me lol). He told me that he recently got laid off at his work, and he has had trouble finding another job. He is also middle aged now, so he feels he no longer has the mind to learn new things (which I disagreed with, but we can’t change someone’s core beliefs). What he next told me hit me right in the feels – he was like ‘I feel useless and I can no longer have any meaningful contribution to my household. I have no other skills, and I am too risk averse to start a business. I am not sure what I am going to do with my life from here on.’ So, I tried to console him and tell him that he will eventually find his way. At that point, I could sense that the shame of being caught vulnerable in front of a stranger was dawning on his mind (it is almost similar to the shame of being caught naked by the way). So to make things easy for him, I decided to share my troubles with loneliness in this strange foreign land. By the end of the ride, I wanted to leave him with a hope that things will get better for him, so I opened my mouth to say something nice like “I hope you land a job soon man”, but before I could say anything he went “take care, keep talking with your family and friends every day.” KEEP TALKING WITH YOUR FAMILY AND FRIENDS EVERY DAY?? I guess I sold my loneliness a bit too much and managed to outsadden him (outsadden is not an actual word by the way, I just coined it).     

But this dramatic and emotional nature of mine is not always a bad thing. It helps me experience life at a higher rate than others with muted emotions and less tolerance for drama. It is just like Einstein’s special relativity, which says rate at which one experiences time can be impacted by how fast they are moving through space. I completely understand if this makes no sense, as it took me two days to grasp the basic concept of relativity. But the simplest explanation goes like this - Imagine you have a twin who is equivalent to you in every humanly possible dimension. But General Stratt from Project Hail Mary still picks your twin over you for a space mission (I know it stings). Your twin gets to travel in a modern space craft at a very high speed that your beat-up Trek Domane AL 2 road cycle cannot match, even with 1000 jets powering it. Say you have spent 5 years on earth after that, riding your lowly Trek Domane on weekends and wondering if your twin is still alive. Then he shows up in front of you suddenly looking spectacular with amazing skin that makes him look younger than you. Two things to note here – your skin care definitely sucks, and he didn’t have blood transfusion from young people for de-aging. He is actually young, he didn’t experience the same time as you, i.e., an ultra-precise watch on his space craft proves that the time elapsed for him is less than 5 years. This is called time dilation, say space craft moved at 75% of speed of light (which is 5.02962472 × 10¹⁰ mph), your twin would have experienced only 3.3 years instead of 5.

How mind bending is it to know that time is not absolute and not fixed? When I learn things like this, it confirms my belief that everything we believe to be absolute is actually not. Think about the question regarding purpose of life, people will wage wars over what is the correct and absolute answer to this. A few will argue that our purpose is just to worship a god and stack up good karma points to reach heaven once we die, a few will say our purpose is to be hedonistic and take in all the pleasures life has to offer, and there are so many different viewpoints. I always used to think either everyone is right or no one is right about this, but understanding relativity changed something in my brain now. I believe purpose of life is not absolute, but it is relative to the person living that life.      

So, I have decided that for next 5 years of my life (which coincides with my H1B ending and me leaving United States), the main purpose of my life is to find out what’s the fastest marathon I can run physiologically. This is going to be an arduous ordeal. I am signing up for injuries, exhaustion, no social life (not like I have any currently), choking on energy gels, spending a fortune on running shoes, and being out on a trail in terrible weather conditions. To an outside observer at rest, this will make no sense, it’s not like I am competing professionally or have Hoka sponsoring me to do this. Yet this makes so much sense to me, purpose is relative after all. I hope I can get fast enough to experience time a fraction of nano second slower than what I would’ve experienced, if I had gone into a coma for 5 years. Even if I don’t manage to improve my marathon time, it would at least make for a dramatic soap opera that entertains my mom.