How Random?

How random? I asked myself. My friends had all gone home for Easter holiday, and I was alone yet still. Being alone is a curse one might say. But I say that it can be a gift. A gift only one can cherish if he/she understands the feeling of having time to oneself. Thoughts tend to run in our head when we are alone. We get some ‘me’ time to ourselves. In my precious ‘me’ time I usually listen to music, watch a movie, trek through YouTube channels. This time I sought to do something infrequently done. I decided to think. I know how weird and stupid I sound.  But how often do we think, not think regular things. What clothes I am going to wear today? How much work I would need to do to pass the test? The thoughts provoked by these questions are very ordinary. No. I am speaking of the random notions that go inside our head. The involuntary action of staring into space, thinking about nothing else but of how you will talk to the girl sitting beside you, random scenarios being acted out by the cast of your imagination, even though you knowing her for a while now never had ‘really’ spoken to her. This for some us may seem to be very common, ‘’Thinking about girls you say, we men always do it’’. But how often do you think in specifics? How often do we form conversations in our head that make us smile and say to ourselves “how foolish, she would never fall for that you crazy bastard?” How often do we simulate her reaction and then change the parameters in our thought in attempt to get a different simulated result? I think I have been doing this very recently, at least the acknowledgement of it.    

Just the other day I noticed this jelly of a man, his head close to being bald, with his wife or girlfriend, shopping for groceries, in their mid thirties I presumed, his partner totally flamboyant with her pink top, yet not flashy enough to take people’s eyes of his protruding belly. As I sort of spotted them while waiting in a queue at the till, a strange thought sparked in head, “When this couple makes love, does she hold onto the fat of his belly? What does she think when she sees him naked? Love indeed is strange. It’s how they say ‘beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder’.”  Or when it comes to my turn to pay at the till, the woman handing over my change made me think to myself “my my woman, clean your  fingernail, they are big and they scare me, if those come anywhere near my face ever I will scream.”  It was strange of how I in the moment thought those meaningless things. I guess we all need entertainment. Even when doing mundane tasks such as shopping.

------------------------------------------------Nirjhor Barua (2/04/11)