A Hitchcock’s Tale

After a long time, I spent a day alone at home today. I have been away at college for the past 2 years and have forgotten what it is like to take care of my parents’ house when they are away. In the past 2 months I have been reading a lot of Hitchcock’s short stories which I bought from the streets of Mumbai. And I never thought I would be able to relate a day in my life to one of those stories.

The story obviously revolved around a murder. A husband was exceptionally tired of his squanderer of a wife who had some new purchase to show him every time he came home. He was not only getting exhausted of his wealth, but was also losing interest in her and wanted a divorce. Since divorce would mean a more expensive option, he decided to kill her. A well sketched out plan of her murder with a perfect alibi of a vacation, he comes home and kills her. While he was disposing off her body he started being constantly disturbed. Salesmen, marketers, neighbours were all in their full swing that day. While answering each of those calls and rudely cutting them off, he realized that maybe his wife wasn’t really at fault. Maybe she was just keeping her head above water and yielding to all the forces that surrounded her daily. The story ends with his guilt of not being able to understand a day in the life of a homemaker.

I had at least 5 different people ring the bell until afternoon, answered about a dozen calls on the landline and none of them were for me. Frustration reached its peak when the doorbell and the phone were ringing simultaneously when I was having a shower. I also started to realize that my mom can more easily have bad days at work at home than I in the office. I remember cribbing about the unnecessary team meetings and conference calls I had to attend at the cost of getting some work done at the desk. Work space at home is so much worse. And it gets taken for granted and completely unnoticed because you are in a place called home.

I was narrating this to my dad who at the end of it smiled and asked if I too spent a lot today. I laughed it off but thinking of it more closely I probably spent more at home today than I would on an average bill at a café with my friends.

Documented Thought#1

This inspired piece of writing is courtesy the movie 'Crazy, stupid, love.' Most of my random thoughts emerge from the after taste of movies, music and books. I was in one of my crappy moods this afternoon, no particular reason really(just one of the innumerable reasons why I love being a woman). So, I got a movie to watch to just make me feel better and guess what? It worked! It had Ryan Gosling in it and that cheered me up quite a bit. But I am sidetracking here. The reason why I started talking about that movie is for one dialogue where Mr.Gosling says, "Ask me something very personal." It probably means nothing to most people, but of all the things that happen in the movie, which is a lot, this is what I'm probably going to remember the most. I have an innate inability of sharing my thoughts and feelings. I can't go up to my friend and say that I need to talk to them about something that I have been thinking. I wait for the perfect moment to say something that's been running on my mind for months. I re-run the entire scenario in my head quite a few times too. Mostly these things come out better when I'm mildly intoxicated. Even then its not like I just start talking. I ask the person to ask me anything they wish to and I promise to answer it very honestly. This for some would be pretty surprising as I normally keep myself heavily guarded.

I was reading a few articles on social sharing of emotional situations and what it does to us. It is a chapter called 'Long lasting cognitive and social consequences of emotion:social sharing and rumination'. It was one of the first search results on the topic. There was a very interesting research that they spoke about. A person while watching a movie in which there is something gruesome, is less likely to cringe his/her face in the presence of other people than when alone. This means that people are less likely to socially share negative experiences than positive and among negative experiences social emotions like shame or others like sadness are less shared.

So I guess even though everyone has an urge to share most of their emotions, the memories that cause most pain or sadness becomes difficult to share. Even when we do share these memories, the delivery of these thoughts would make sure that we do not cast ourselves in bad light.

Finally, I found another insight from another article, that for people who are not comfortable sharing their emotions, and feel that certain conversations are heading towards something personal, they bring in academic or intellectual explanations to maneuver their way away from the intimidation of the personal topic.

Why start blogging now?

All these days I was scared to start a blog. To have my thoughts leave my head and enter a space which was beyond my control was way too intimidating. Then again, I also thought I din't have anything worthy enough to be typed. A week ago however, I attended a class by a famous HR professor who told us that we have a great tool that they lacked when they were growing up - blogging. To get your thoughts out there is a power and to put them on a blog gives it clarity. There a lot of thoughts in my head, and today sitting at home and reading a lot of other people's blogs gave me the courage to start one of my own.

Happy Reading people! Will keep you posted!