Perhaps it’s best to start with explanations. A lot of things in life might be more pleasant if an explanation preceded them instead of us gamboling through events like happy things that gambol (?) blindly and get really confused about why water’s wet, love is just not enough (no matter how much really quite awesome songs may claim otherwise), the chicken crossed the road, etc. Life might be a little more enjoyable if it were a little more like this post is going to be and a little less like trying to learn a game of cards you don’t know by observing a bunch of Bengalis playing (i.e., completely incomprehensible, and just when you feel like you’re maybe getting the hang of it, somebody wins and you realize the goal was the opposite of what you thought, and most of the time, you don’t get what people are saying). So. Explanations are in order. Two fact about me should do, I think.
Fact 1: I am lazy. Like really. Like it pisses people off kind of lazy. But as you shall soon see, laziness is not all it’s cracked up to be. It’s quite a lot of work. So, on to…
Fact 2: I tend to over-think things. This, combined with a slight tendency to geekiness and mild OCD of the pattern-finding variety, makes things interesting.
So the explanations are done. (But I now realize that the whole explanation thing is futile because explanations make less sense than the things they explain before the things they explain unfold. Wait, I think I might have said something profound. Let’s examine that… Ah, never mind, too lazy. So, moving on.)
I live in a hostel that’s built like a pyramid. No, its construction didn’t (exactly) involve slave labour and it’s not full of dead people and fabulous wealth (snort) so the pyramid thing refers to what you first thought it referred to, before I distracted you with irrelevant details–the shape. Each floor is slightly smaller than the one below it. I have no idea what the architectural significance of this is, but since I live in the second floor, this creates many, many puzzles and challenges for me. One of the challenges revealed to me that if I were a civilization all by myself, I’d be in what Douglas Adams calls the Survival stage, for the challenge is, “How do I get to the mess to eat?” This may seem like a trivial question. But this is where I ask you to turn your attention to Facts 1 and 2.
Living in the second floor means I expend a lot of energy climbing up and down stairs. And to have to do this for every meal and water refill creates unspeakable anguish for my lazy side. To reduce the monotony and make myself feel better, I decided to over-think things. Fun. So, there are many ways in which you can reach the mess from my room. Cross the corridor, take the stairs at the end, climb down two floors, exit. Cross half the corridor, take the stairs in the middle, cross the other half at the ground floor, exit. Take the stairs in front of my room, cross the corridor at the ground floor, exit. The last option might sound good because the stairs are right in front of me, but the fact is, this is out because it would involve crossing the whole of the ground floor, which, in the pyramid structure, has the longest corridor. So, the first option? Nope. Wrong again. It IS in fact the shortest route, but there are problems. The staircase at the end of each corridor (except on the ground floor) plays host to a lovely little thing called the common dustbin. This is generally a huge plastic drum, and is often filled with… well, let’s say the cats and flies love it. It’s smelly and quite effective in killing any appetite that dares to pass it without the answer to its impossible riddles and it also has to the power to send any satisfied appetite to go commit suicide. The ancient Egyptians, had they met Mr Dustbin, would not have bothered with pressurized acid and such to keep marauders out of their tombs.
It took me just two weeks to figure it out, and the funny looks I get from other, more unadventurous, weary dinner-time travellers were answered with looks of smug superiority. I had the keen intelligence, the courage, the perseverance to figure it out! All you have to do is: Take the middle stairs, thus cleverly avoiding the dreaded Dustbin, cross the other half of the first floor corridor (which is still shorter than the ground floor’s, ha!), take the stairs at the end of the corridor, exit and reach your destination, thus achieving high score of sheer genius.
And then, you go eat mess food.
Sigh. Maybe all we do need is love :D
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