I know its been a very long time since I had blogged and trust me there have been days in which I thought I would never get back to writing them. But its just that I have been really busy; No, seriously. Work, for some reason, has surprisingly become an engaging event for me and it’s not a struggle anymore to wake up and get to work everyday. Ofcourse when its time to get up from the bed every morning I honestly wish that it was a Saturday, but once the getting up part is conquered it has gotten much easier. Infact, these days when I am putting on clothes before work, in my mind, I am going over the day’s tasks and prioritizing them. When I start with my shoes I think about people I need to contact that day for getting the tasks done. When I get into my car and shift to reverse out of the parking lot, I am thinking why is it not Saturday yet but by the time I hit the road I am back into work mode. It’s a wonderful feeling, mostly.
So that’s been the main reason for not being able to blog for months now. It’s strange that I am in this situation since I never thought I would take work seriously. I don’t mean doing a lousy job, but actually thinking of work when you don’t really have to, like on Sundays while watching ’30 Rock’ on Hulu. Which reminds me, did I tell you that I have become a believer? Yeah. Me. Total complete believer. If there is one thing people never tell you about is that once you start something with even a little bit of creative involvement, its very hard to keep the flame going. When the creativity fades your product doesn’t do justice to your initial intent for starting the task, a fact some of my blog posts reflect. Once you miss a couple of deadlines you had set for yourself, then you get kind of depressed about not being able to finish it, and that starts a vicious cycle. You desperately want to finish the task(s) at hand before yet another deadline, but you don’t want to do a half-assed job of it so you convince yourself to wait for the right mindset to start thus missing the deadline again. More deadlines missed causing more stress leading to more procrastination – vicious cycle. It’s not really vicious – the oil spill in the Mexican Gulf, that’s vicious – but a cycle nevertheless. The most successful way of getting out of this creative-block cycle is a jolt of reality. A sudden life altering event that is so immediate and profound that it actually alters life, at-least in a metaphorical sense. As a smarter person might have guessed already, such an event is what shook me out of my cycle and made me realize that actually I wasn’t that busy. I was just pushing off blogging by pretending to be occupied with something else. The working, talking to people, driving the car and playing video games - all of this was just another reason I used to put off writing for your reading pleasure. All of this was changed with one unbelievable, totally and completely shocking event.
‘30 Rock’ is one of my favorite shows on the Internet. Yes, I am one of those smart people who watch TV shows for free through internet at their convenience disturbed only by short snappy ads. If you are one of those ‘persons’ who still watch shows on “the TV” at set times and sit through long commercials of snickers and jeans, please hang a red scarf in front of your cave so that I can avoid you when I drive by. For the rest of the normal people of this century, I am telling you, you should totally check out this show. Its really funny and Tina Fey, the show’s creator and lead actor, and other writers seem to gifted at their jobs. Sure sometimes the jokes are predictable and bizarre, but I think that adds to the show's personality. Tina Fey’s role is especially entertaining; she plays a 40 year old head writer for a C grade TV show with seriously weird quirks that makes her personal life pathetic at best. She is basically a kind of older, white, female version of me. It’s hilarious. One of my favorite things about the show is that it frequently has famous stars do cameos. This includes people like Al Gore, Buzz Aldrin, Brian Williams and Jerry Seinfeld among others. I recently found myself thinking about these stars’ appearances and wondering how they would get a booking from a famous celebrity to do, what is usually, a 30 second part. Surely, Al Gore, a former VP of US of A, would have thought to himself why he should appear as custodian personnel before actually agreeing to do the part. I convinced myself that these ‘celebrities’ are not really celebrities when it comes to TV/Movie industry. If you think about it these people are mostly B to C-List celebrities and, I assume, they live near by and become available at moments notice. When I think of a true A-List star like, say, Matt Damon they would be extremely busy making their excellent and not-even-good movies and, more importantly, might feel that a non-prime time comedy show isn't going to do any good to their stardom. I often think about stuff of such nature.
Infact I thought about this exact scenario, including said actor Matt Damon, this past Saturday evening as I walked out to watch Iron-Man 2. You have to admit, it’s a pretty good logic. Stars like Matt Damon are too busy and too famous to do a small cameo in a little known comedy show that I happen to like. The partially awesome movie got over and I went to bed. I woke up the next day, Sunday morning, headed to Hulu and started the recent episode of ‘30 Rock’.
Yes, you guessed it right, if you guessed that Matt appeared on the show. The moment Matt Damon came on the show, I almost dropped the cup of coffee I was holding. It’s unbelievable. Can you imagine the percentage point in probability that the one movie star, among hundreds, I thought would never come on this specific show appearing in the very episode that I was about to watch? I’ll tell you what the odds are; it’s very minuscule. It gets weirder when you think about the timing of it. The show actually airs on Thursday nights, so Matt appeared on the show on Thursday, but I had my little brain-storm only on Saturday, which means, had I watched the show on Thursday this whole sequence of events would not have occurred. I decided not to watch the show on Thursday, Friday or Saturday and that, my dear reader, has resulted in this one-in- a-gabizillian event of Matt Damon featuring on the episode in less than 12 hours after I thought about it. If your mind is not already blown, you are probably watching shows on TV instead of a computer.
And that is how I became a believer. If such a random occurrence can result from such other smaller random occurrences, then surely anything is possible. If you think harder you’ll realize even nothing is possible. This whole universe is meaningless and purposeful at the same time. Think of the possibilities; Aliens could exist; Scientologists could be right; Matrix could be true; Larry King could be human; everything is true and nothing is certain. Nothing is certain except one thing.
I am a Believer of Random.
Again, as a smarter reader would have already guessed, this is the ground shattering event that snapped me out of my blogging-hiatus and spurred me to write this blog. It’s understandable if you would like to use this same event to break your cycle as well, but I urge you to go after your own. Because I believe life altering events are personal. If not, they should be.
But no matter what you believe after reading this blog, believe this – Matt Damon made me do this!!
