Destructive Distillation

I am a lonely person. Not in the sense that I don’t have enough friends, am an outcast or don’t enjoy society! But that I spend most of my time alone. I have quite a circle of friends and love parties and meeting new people. Yet the time on hand far outweighs that spent in social grooming. College (of all the ones I had to join MJ) was just an extended vacation and now that graduation is done and I feel no different! I spend most of that time locked up in my room (and a secret lab that opens through a hidden door) cut off from the world. Paradoxically sitting there all I am doing is trying to decrypt and understand the world and its peoples with all the samples and data I got. There are days that I am hardly at home and there are days I don’t leave it at all. I forever ride this sinusoidal wave of alternating social over exposure and isolation. I love the company and I rejoice the time I spend alone learning and thinking and reflecting. It all fits in the natural cycle but there are times I have gone overboard and this is the tale of one horrid such instance.

After travelling to new places and states (read ADI and GNC in Guj and CST/MCT etc in Mah) in guise of attending interview for a B-school I return home. I stay there as there was no need to go to college or anywhere else. No immediate tasks to be undertaken or duties to be performed. With nothing to really get me out of my lethargical existence I was stuck in my room as if stranded on a ship with everything for survival except for other people. In that frightening stretch of 10 days there was minimal interaction with the external world. So what was I doing in that 200 sq ft of land? I was stuck in Seattle watching it rain outside the hospital all the time. Er? Yeah! I was watching Grey’s Anatomy for heaven sake! 72 episodes in 8 days! Watching straight 9 hours of bold and beautiful in a hospital everyday has that effect of transforming your reality. TV series are addictive and I was watching it even after it jumped the shark when McDreamy and Meredith broke up again! This was no exception; I began to have dreams involving those characters. (First it was Lost, then House and Prison Break, now this, next what?) Well Grey’s anatomy experience wasn’t new. But what followed was.

The ten days of self imposed social exile had an overbearing consequence. I had temporarily lost my social bearing and my social skills were jammed akin to radio signals or something. I started to notice the overbearing fits I put out when a task had to be done outside my premises. I was nervous when there was company and hence began to dread it due to my incapability of functioning well. I was claustrophobic when people were at a close proximity. I was intimidated by public places and scared of open expanses. I even didn’t have anything to say to people I knew very well and when I did say something it would turn out to be awfully wrong and embarrassing or insulting. Yet I braved all the danger and struggled on to return to normal. I did so soon and eventually it was like it never happened and the temporary scars on my personality gone but in my memory they remain.

P.S: Thank goodness it was a show about people like Grey’s Anatomy I was hooked onto. I wonder what would have rubbed onto me if it were something like Stuart little, Ratatouille and Pinky and the Brain or something like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Clockwork Orange etc. It gives me the chills.