Please Explain This

There is this place on my blog dashboard where they have secret stuff tucked in. And it is secret because they don’t really want you to go there. I knew that. The rest, as they say, is history.

Among all else, this dark place also collects all the search terms that have landed people on my blog. Right on top are the terms people have used in the past 24 hours.

Ever since I have ventured into this prohibited citadel of mine, I have consistently found one rather longish phrase right on top. It says explain the term called a pleasing telephone personality.

The first time I ventured into the forbidden recess, I paid no attention to the phrase. The next time I went, I read it but it made no sense to me. I shrugged it away. The third time I went, it was still right on top and I frowned. I suppose most hopeless addicts can identify the exact moment when their addiction went from some thing you did to a roaring addiction. So ‘twas with me. I knew that moment the thing got its hook into me forever.

The less I understood what that weird phrase meant, the more frequently I checked it out. Initially, like all addicts, I scoffed at my own addiction. “I am too strong- willed to get addicted to it”, I told myself haughtily. “I don’t care a whit for it, I can take it or leave it alone, just like that”. The snap of my own fingers sounded reassuring to me.

From once in a day to twice was a matter of a few weeks. After that, the disintegration was rapid. It has reached a stage that I must check every ten- fifteen minutes. I even wake up nights and check a couple of times. When the net is down and I am not able to login, I get hysterical.

People have begun avoiding me. They think I have contacted some deadly contagious disease. They tell me I will surely die soon. There is a righteous, dutiful satisfaction to their voices. Their mouths are set in the shape of endurance. Their lips are always compressed as if they are heroically stopping themselves from saying, “I told you so.” If the other were not already driving me into decline, this surely would have. But since it can’t do the main job, it satisfies itself by chivvying me along into that decline. Sigh. Such is the way of things.

What gets my goat is the manner in which the phrase is constructed. You don’t ever say called a! And what on earth is a telephone personality?! It makes no sense at ALL. If the phrase were explain the term pleasing personality, I’d never even have looked at it. That called a and telephone have been my undoing. I am writing this so the world would know what killed me.

The thing that truly pisses me off is that in all the stuff I have written, there is only one measly story called Pleasing Personality. Can I be punished so gruesomely for such a small thing? People write reams on all kinds of twaddle… I don’t see them receiving their (just) desserts! Why me…!?

Let this be a warning to you. Veer away from such phrases. If they want to clutter up dark corners of your dashboard, let them. Live and let live. They’re dangerous, phrases of this kind. One moment you are scoffing them away and the next moment you are wondering who’d come to your funeral and whom you positively can’t bear to have come for it would make you mad enough to bring you back to life. In this agony of indecision you hover, getting closer and closer to the final curtain.

But it still doesn’t stop you from logging every ten minutes and clutching your feverish brow when you find the revolting phrase is still plastered right across the top of the list. The fact that It still makes no sense to you at ALL is almost poetically macabre.

However said, Don’t sweat the small stuff… and it’s all small… obviously didn’t blog.

If you ever loved me, explain it before I die. Please!