In all honesty, when I am committed to write and inertia takes over, I apply a short cut. I write in a free form, a verse form. It cuts my work time into half and I am not worried about the coherence of the thought or how clearly it flows, or how grammatically flawless it is. But at the end of it, I get a feeling that I had cheated on the exam.
Is working smart a vice? Sometimes I look at it as such.
But to ponder I choose today. And the subject matter was lurking in my head ever since I binge watched the doc series about Johnny Depp case on Netflix. Now my age old attention span is something only I can understand, especially when it comes to confining myself to a screen and holding myself captive to someone else's thoughts. But I did watch through two episodes out of 3 in one sitting and that's some sort of power that subject had over me and I have to care to admit.
But while I was watching it, my mind did drift back and forth into the awareness that my attention span is being stretched. And I didn't break character after all - I wasn't as captivated as I thought I was because the chunk of my attention was consumed in analyzing why and how this subject is sucking me into it. Domestic discord isn't new to me, I had passive exposure to it growing up in a household that had two class A alpha parents. And I'd be lying if I say I don't actively go through it from time to time as a grown up in a long standing, relatively solid matrimony. When familiarity takes the foreground, there are things that become inevitable - for instances, contempt in big and small doses should be expected.
Especially after many winters to my married back and two children, I have to say, I am breaking the conditioned 'good girl' mold and speaking my mind without dimming myself just so I accommodate the other party. Empathy I understood, should be applied in two parts - One in understanding why the other party did what they did and not judging them, and the other in speaking up and telling how I don't need to bear the burnt of their wounds if they choose the easier way to deal with their demons by taking it on others.
Now the Johnny in question might be dapper and debonair , with a few (need a fact check here) Oscars standing proud in his curio. What's eating Gilbert Grape is a film I can watch again and again being partially amnesiac towards my attention span. And Amber might shine like an amber in a no moon night, sporting a smile that lights up the whole court room and making a heterosexual female (that's moi) watching her with a half agape mouth. But both of them are human. And the last time I checked, no human is perfect.
Now, I get ever so slightly flustered when 'the love of my life' phrase is thrown around liberally. A lot of things that we assume as love are not love and in a co-dependent relationship such as a marriage, it is near impossible to love in the truest sense of the word. There was a clear give and take in this relationship as with all of them and I don't for one thing need to take sides or cheer one party cause both of them are humans in a marriage. While the proceedings carried on, I had a strange sense of watching something staged and I wouldn't know why - could be one of my biases, could be my skepticism or could just be the fact that there's a civil case of domestic discord, a topic as mundane and commonplace as snowing in north pole and both the parties are privileged and privy to things that most pedestrians are not.
End of the day, I had no sympathy for either but I do empathize with both and I also do understand, it was a marriage of equals and none who so ever had a back seat so to speak. At the end of the day, what happens between a couple is not entirely know to the couple themselves as we as human beings are not honest with how we look at ourselves most of the times. We don't apply the critique to us that we liberally apply to others.
Now, is the topic the civil case or the guilty pleasure I had watching it? It is said that the human brain likes problems. We fetishize conflicts like nothing else, we like being in tricky situations as it is an addiction to the ego - case in point, we enjoy thrill, drama and violence. We like solving puzzles, sorting through mazes. We do not seem to value peace, quiet and stability as much as we are drawn towards the former - Or I would have let my exhausted, period drained backside to get extra sleep and rest instead of partaking in the pressing issue that's being televised. Pretty people of the virtual world, let me tell you it is the work of the larger than life Ego that's never wrong, ever!
So yeah, that's with the guilty pleasure. That seems to take over most of us unless we have busted the loop and fallen out of it. It is easy they say, the ones that got to the other side - ocher robes and a hut in Himalayas are entirely optional.
The maze, the mind, the madness :)
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