I decided that I'd set a goal for myself to reach out to at least one person whom I haven't kept in contact with (even though I swore up and down that I'd never forget them, and we'd stay in touch). In a way, for me, it's almost as if I were doing wrong by them by not keeping up my side of the acquaintanceship. Mind you, things like facebook and twitter give an illusion of keeping in contact, but in reality, there are many folk with whom I have not had a good conversation, even though I deeply enjoy their company, and love talking to them. I felt guilty, and pledged to do something about it.
So I did. I reached out, and sent an email to a couple of people, as of Wednesday of last week. Today, when I got back to work, my inbox was filled with love from the people whom I'd lost contact with. If I am strictly honest with myself, I will likely end up losing touch with those same people again, but for now, our two souls have connected, and a small spark of kindness has been released into the world. There's just something about writing a letter to someone which (to me) is a lot more personal and meaningful than pressing a "like" button on something. I don't expect all my correspondences with people to always be deep and meaningful, but when they are, I enjoy them.
This goes back to how a lot of my friends work: we'll enjoy our time together immensely, then we'll go back to life as usual. Then, once in a while, we'll "find" each other again, and pick up where we left off. There's no guilt about not keeping in touch better than we "should", because both of us lead very busy lives. Trips happen, work happens, life happens. In between it all, somewhere, one needs to keep living, breathing, eating, and sleeping.
The reason I deleted that facebook account was because so much of the interaction was automated. It would tell me all kinds of things that I didn't really care about. I wasn't bothered about someone's score on some game. I'm not concerned whether or not a random person out there likes some dumb video about something that isn't all that funny to begin with, but every idiot is watching it with rapt attention. I'll be here reading my book, thank you.
It's also the reason I'm finding myself increasingly isolated from people who don't "get it". While I've had my nose stuck in a book all week, they're watching countless hours of mind-numbing TV, and expect me to care or keep up with it. Honestly though, I'm not bothered. I haven't kept up a TV watching diet in a very long time, and I have no intention of starting now. My escape has become reading books from the library or my own personal collection. I've been enjoying myself by listening to podcasts with interesting content that I'm learning from. I enjoy cooking, and learning new things about food.
My mother and I spoke last night, and she was so excited about that garlic peeling with two bowls trick. She tried it, and it worked. Now both of us have learned to peel garlic quickly, and are cheerfully throwing it into all kinds of things. I enjoy a lot of the youtube cooking videos that people create in their own kitchens. http://youtu.be/A9WnwK0cMng video that I was watching the other day taught me to make vada using urad daal, which means that the soaking process only takes about 1 1/2 hours, versus overnight. I didn't have any white rice in the house, so I used poha instead. It was a dream! The vada came out crispy and perfect. In fact, it stayed crispy even after sitting around a bit. It's a very cute video, because I understand both the mother and daughter, and they really are saying (more or less) the same thing.
I'm not sure quire where I'm going with all this. I just wanted to get my thoughts down, before they go flying off somewhere else, as they are wont to do.
