You Never Know

Its one of those things.

Once upon a time in undergrad, I had put up a status message on Holi saying 'when variegated visages vivify life :)'.

Yes, I know.

I was squarely in the 'humaara neta kaisa ho... Oxford Dictionary jaisa ho' camp.

Extremely sophomorish.

Which was to be expected, all things considered, since I was in sophomore year.

Anyhoo.

Since holi last month, I've been trying to recollect what that status message was.

I remembered 'when ... visages vivify life'.

But for the vivified life of me, I was unable to recollect what that word in between was.

The best my mind could summon was that it was a synonym for colorful.

As the story goes, I didnt chase it further.

Coz it aint like this search has been at the forefront of my existence this last month.

Far from it.

Its rather been like one of those pop-ups that spring upon you while you're foggily browsing through yet another op-ed and disappear as soon as your mouse hovers close by.

You make a mental note to investigate the pop-up later.

Which never happens since the word 'later' is legally recognized as the cornerstone of all successful procrastination.

You must understand: we procrastinators are the true planners of the world.

We don't believe in past perfect.

No sir.

You will never hear us say "I have done what I meant to do."

We are the future perfect people.

Example: "Dont worry, I will have done it before it slips out of my mind".

And then there are the firsts amongst equals.

These be the future perfect progressive folks.

Example: "I will have been doing this for a total of zero seconds until 5 minutes before the deadline."

Anyhoo.

So today, I was going through an article when I suddenly stumbled upon this mental pop-up again.

Resolutely, I set out to find the missing word which I knew meant 'colorful'.

Diligently, I opened Google in the next tab.

Immediately, my subconscious mind fired up some neurons which took the orders from my cerebrum and hurtled them through dendrons, onto axons, past the synapses and unto the motor nerves to bid my fingertips to type "synonym of colorful".

But there's many a slip between the cup and the lip.

My neurons finally caught up with the concept of Chinese Whispers.

By the time the message passed from the first neuron to the last one, it got changed in the entirety.

What I typed out was "variegated".

Two months of intermittent thinking upstaged by one momentary lapse of concentration.

Subconscious 1 : Conscious 0

The moral of the story, dear gentle, impressionable reader, is simple:

Listen to The Beatles.

They really were onto something despite that moppy hair cutting off all air supply to their brains.

"There will be an answer, let it be".