Month: April 2019

I was sitting at lunch the other day and I realized that every time I was the new kid at school, I always encounter the same four types of people. Perhaps I should call them personalities rather than people as these qualities can describe anyone and everyone.

First, there is the ‘Forget Me Nots’. The Forget Me Not is that person who you met on the first week of school who reminds of someone. You can’t tell exactly who the Forget Me Not is like but you recognize something about them. Maybe it’s their pretentious eyebrows that seem to have been carefully crafted or their permanently plastered smile- these tend to be the more identifiable traits of the Forget Me Not- all you know for a fact is that this person’s face has made an appearance in your life once before. After a few weeks of observation, you have concluded that the Forget Me Not is simply another version of the person you knew initially, perhaps even a carbon copy. 

Speaking of carbon copied other versions, I like to call this next type of person the iPhone. The iPhone can do every basic thing that their peers can do, but they claim to be doing it better. They believe that their word on this matter is all it takes to convince their peers. Just like an iPhone, their demeanor that implies their superiority but once you peel back their pretty mask there are just about as basic as the rest of us. Even though you don’t like her, you just can’t avoid her- just like an iPhone. 

Then there is the Recliner. The Recliner is the most laid back person you have ever encountered.This is that person who decides that they only need to participate in life when they feel they are needed. These people can normally be roaming the hallways with their bathroom pass casually peeking out of their oversized sweatpants. They are typically on a first name basis with school security guards. They have been charged with cheating on their assignments several times, but never have they actually been convicted of an honor code violation. They probably even know the principal’s grandmother from bingo night or something. 

Finally, you meet – but never get to know- the Disappearing Act. It’s only the second month of the school year, and they have already decided that it’s time for a getaway. They stopped showing up to school for days at a time, then weeks at a time, then finally for a solid two months. Since their sudden disappearance, you have heard of their whereabouts precisely four times, three of these four times being from the rumors that they have sent flying about them. They drop hints about their location via various forms of social media, but that’s about it. 

Once you have met these four people, you have met everyone. You basically know everyone in town. You might as well have grown up here. 

All rights reserved © 2019 Josephine Joyil

I have to be honest, I haven’t watched movies in a while. To give you an idea, I had to think long and hard just to find a movie to accuse of changing my life. It’s not because I don’t have the time – I don’t have time, but that’s just not the reason- I just don’t find them very appealing anymore. I feel that I have entered a period in my life in which I do not want to waste my time doing meaningless tasks. I categorize watching movies as meaningless as they don’t impact your life in any profound way and no one’s forcing you to do it anyway. This isn’t true about all movies- just those that present themselves to me. I find it quite ironic that it was a movie that helped me realize this.

It was a summer day. I don’t remember which day or which summer – perhaps it was five years ago or a nine years ago- but I remember that the day started off promising. It was one of those summer days in which you wake up when the day is already half over, but you have hope for the day to be promising nonetheless. My family and I had the grand idea of spending the prime of the day at the movies. At the time, we were on vacation in India. My brother and I had not been accustomed to the unforgiving Indian humidity so naturally our solution to this problem was to to camp out at the movies where the air conditioning will cool the air around us to our liking.

I believe the movie playing was Turbo. As I remember it, it was either a movie about a really fast snail that wanted to race or a slow snail that wanted to be fast so that it can race. Either way, we were watching snails race and I can tell you it was about as exciting as it sounds. The movie was about an hour and a half long, and after watching it I felt robbed of an hour and a half. My cousins, who were also on vacation in India, braved the humidity and went fishing while I watched snails race. At dinner, we talked about our day and I remember my cousin Richie, who was about four or five years old at the time, boasting about seeing a jellyfish wrestling a salmon. Now I don’t believe this tale, but I wasn’t there to see it, so I couldn’t say anything about it.

Now I know this may see quite exaggerated, but these events really did happen- besides Richie seeing a salmon wrestling a jellyfish, I just put that in there to make an essay about snails racing more interesting- and that day, I realized that I had been wasting too much time in front of the screen. It made me wonder why I started watching movies in the first place and I realized that it was supposed to be used as a distraction. When I was a kid, my parents gave me a screen to distract me with Scooby Doo or Tom and Jerry while they went about finishing the tasks that life demands of them to do. They never took the screen back, so whenever I got bored, I tuned to the screens as a means of a distraction. Growing up, I would finish my homework and then run straight to my TV to get a dose of some of that good distraction. When I realized this, I had realized that I had lived the better part of my life distracted. There was a day that children went outside to play and made up stories about seeing jellyfish wrestling salmon, but now children are too distracted by their screens to bother to go outside.

I decided that I did not want to live half distracted, but then I realized that I could not live in any other way. Without a distraction I get bored easily, I realized, I need the distraction. We depend on this distraction. We crave for a distraction. We need something to take out minds off the causes of our anxiety. We have an irrational fear of what the future holds for us. While we anxiously await the future, we are restlessly waiting for the tedious present to pass. We sold out time for a distraction, and in doing so we have allowed ourselves to be enslaved by the distraction.

All rights reserved © 2019 Josephine Joyil