The Smoothness Syndrome

25/05/2022 1:07 AM

I am sick. I am unable to sleep.

These two sentences are both related and unrelated. Though it’s true that I am suffering from fever since morning, the sickness is not what is making me restless. I have been sick of something for the past few months. It’s this something which is making me go all guns blazing against my sleep. This thought tornado couldn’t have chosen a better time; right when I need sleep the most; right when I thought the morning Sun chases away my hellish fever.

Anyway, I’m condemned to this. Now, I’ll condemn you to reading my delirious ramblings about what made me lose sleep until I doze off.

A shiny, tiled and smooth floor. A very fascinating thing to look for while flat hunting. Or so I thought. Who would have imagined that it would turn out to be my worst nightmare? I liked it initially, sliding on the floor with my slippers, as if I was skating. It was useful when I was too lazy to lift my foot off the ground. I would slide a few centimeters, get my water bottle, slide a few more, reach the kitchen and fill it. I can move my bed around much easier considering my physical strength. The table got wings as it can be found in a new corner every day. Suddenly, I felt like an omnipotent being in the microcosm of my room.

Alas, with great power, come great problems! Firstly, the office chair. Its wheels are so slippery that even a natural slope is enough to make it move. I must constantly hold myself back with the tips of my toes to not let myself be pushed back. Who cares if the wheels slip? I can put it against a wall and let go of the most important feature this chair has to offer and enjoy my smooth floor. But it’s not enough. The seat of my chair is smooth as well. This time, it would be me sliding down the chair as it gleefully curses me like I had done earlier.

To hell with the chair! I can valiantly relinquish my chair to make full use of my omnipotence. I can sit on the bed, not an issue. I can move my bed to the wall and use the wall as my back support. It’s not hard at all for the first few days until the mattress started slipping against the bed. I would be putting my entire body weight on the wall lazing around like a gorilla while the mattress slowly slides forward, pushing me down further.

The problems with the mattress didn’t end there. A good mattress needs to deform a considerable amount to accommodate your body shape but should be flexible enough to regain its shape when you get up. My mattress is so hard that it doesn’t deform. When it doesn’t deform, there is nothing which will keep my arm from moving except the friction between my arm and the mattress. The smoother the mattress, the more Normal force I have to apply on it in order to keep my arm still, which should be the least of my concerns while resting. The mattress has to be sufficiently rough to provide the necessary friction.

A frictionless world might seem very favorable on surface. There would be no dissipative forces thus the energy we put in a process would be used to the fullest. We might even achieve perpetual motion. We just need to give our vehicles a little push and they travel without stopping until they are collected at their destinations. But there’s a slight catch. The roads must be as straight as an arrow in such a world, for without friction, the vehicle can’t travel across a curved path. Friction provides the centripetal force which makes the curved turn possible. In a frictionless world, there needs to be a rope of some kind to provide the centripetal force and maneuver the turn.

You can’t walk in a frictionless world. You can’t have somebody push you because the reaction force would cause them to move in the opposite direction. Hence, whatever propels you forward must be stuck to the ground. The world must be filled with such protrusions from the ground at regular intervals to facilitate movement for all the people. The protrusions might even serve as room boundaries. It’s fun to imagine a world with straight roads connected with small curved ones navigated with the help of hooks attached to hinges via ropes. It’s fun to imagine a world where a joust might be the most intuitive form of a fight.

But not fun enough to lull me to sleep. It still eludes me.

25/05/2022 1:37 AM

Last night, I was at my girlfriend’s, and I walked home to a pool of blood. She was standing right at the head of a dead man, observing the whole scene with utter serenity. Even my entrance didn’t cause any commotion in her except a slight glance as if to acknowledge my presence. There was absolutely no panic as she guided me to help her dispose of the body. She wiped the blood off the floor as if it’s a daily chore. I was so bored by the uneventfulness of the whole activity that I didn’t bother ask her who the man is. She might nonchalantly say, “Oh, he’s just a burglar.” Or even, “he’s just my ex.” The night went smoothly after that, just as usual. We discussed about our projects over drinks, had a little too much as usual and crept into bed, too tipsy to make out.

Every night has been almost the same with her. We never have any problem nights. If there’s any misunderstanding, it will be sorted out within minutes. She is ready with a solution. In the eight years of our relationship, we never had a proper argument. Obviously, every decision can’t go in my favor, but I don’t regret taking the ones that don’t. Except, I don’t think it’s me. It’s her. She is the one who’s making this relationship smooth sailing. Sometimes, it feels like she is living life for a second time, possessing an arsenal of experiences. She’s paving me a road in the frictionless world as I glide on it at uniform velocity. As long as I am slower than her rate of laying the road, I am safe. I wonder if it’s a boon or a bane.

Even her memories are not taking me to the shores of sleep. I fear I might capsize.

25/05/2022 2:03 AM

The other day, I was having a bowl of Aloo Bhujia with a disposable paper spoon. I spilt half of it on the ground in my vain attempts to scoop it with the spoon. The culprit again is the friction or lack thereof. The bowl is so smooth that the Aloo Bhujia being scooped flies out of the bowl. 25 grams of Aloo Bhujia wasted per day. I have it every day at the same time. In fact, I do the same things every day. I meet the same set of people, attend the same meetings, talk about the same things in the meetings while pretending we are all doing something different each day. Life goes on in circles. It’s so rhythmic that it becomes mundane. Now, I am not saying rhythm is bad. In fact, rhythm is beauty but a lifetime of fitting in does make you lose all your rough edges. You will be just a cog in the wheel and it’s so comforting that you can’t not be a cog.

I see rhythm everywhere. Perhaps, it can be more appropriately called template. I see hundreds of rocks made into the same sculpture, thousands of words making up the same novel and lakhs of students possessing the same illusion of choice in career. It’s all paved out for us. Nobody needs to lift a muscle. Just enter the machinery, exit with a desirable result. The result is also not hard to compute. Train a machine learning model on a significant dataset for a few years and you will be equipped to convert the future people to numbers. It’s true and I hope so that computers can’t predict everything and there is a human factor which makes the impossible possible. But it doesn’t make money for the big guns. Consumer choices need to be modelled accurately for capitalists to sell their goods off. They can either make their computers account for the unpredictability or make the world predictable. The first step in the making of such a world is the creation of templates.

I wish I could predict my sleep time.

25/05/2022 2:24 AM

I gave up all my comfort and decided to watch a film by putting the chair against the wall, planting my left foot firmly on the floor to get enough friction and crossed my right leg over the left. My legs started slipping against each other like how the film slipped from my mind just after finishing it. It’s not like the film has a very complex plot and it completely went over my head. In fact, it’s the opposite. It had a very generic plot explored in a very generic way that you just couldn’t care enough. I feel with the advancements in digital technology, the makers tend to ignore the little details in the films, like walking for example. People have walked in films since eternity but it’s a different actor doing it, a different camera capturing it and a different editor cutting the scene. Surely, there has to be something different about it. But it all feels the same. It feels like something we have seen in a thousand other films.

I attribute this smoothness in films to indifference, to the scene as well as to the people involved. There’s nothing startling me as an audience in most of the scenes. Consider a scene in which a character walks across the room and opens the door and leaves. Nowadays, you have extreme flexibility with the cameras, and you can move them as you want. So, people are shooting it as a continuous scene just because they can. When you can do something so easily, you don’t tend to ponder over it to see if it’s the right choice. I’ve seen such scenes in numerous films that at this point the opening of the door becomes redundant information to me. You might as well cut the bit and it doesn’t make any difference, rather it could make the film even crisp and interesting.

I wish that film could sing a lullaby to me.

25/05/2022 2:38 AM

I fucking can’t sleep. I’m used to cursing my sleep because it interrupts me right when I watch a film, but now when I need it, it taunts me. I can’t even trick it by playing a film now hoping I would sleep through it. There are some films like the one I mentioned above that are so conformant that I want to sleep through them. But I can’t. They make me motionless, stuck in a slumber of apathy. They are so smooth sailing that it’s irritating. A good film needs to startle the viewer sometimes. It needs to be able to shake you to the core. At least push you a little. There should be some abruptness to it. Just like how I abruptly end this memoir.