Mirror mirror on the wall..

Met an old friend today. It’s that time of the year when west-gone birds come home to roost - for a bit, what with Christmas vacations and all. Old friends have a way of bringing you face to face with a self that you barely recognize now. They remember things you used to say and do, things which you yourself have forgotten. They surprise you at times with their acute observations, their little windows into your soul.

Most of all what surprises you is how you used to be. Am I the same, slightly ditzy, seemingly carefree thing now that I was then? Life was that simple? Or is just the rose-tint of nostalgia that makes it seem so…so endearing?

So we got discussing about this and that. A girl we both know, me - on the fringes, as one of the most staid and conservative people ever, is getting married. She met the guy on a flight. She is a Southie - steeped-in-the-wool, he a Catholic. People never cease to amaze. Another woman, who met her now-husband through Orkut came up. She met him via a common birthday community.

Almost makes me feel conventional. One may question the almost bit. Engineer-IT-MBA. What’s not conventional? On the other hand, have come to believe that convention really does not exist. It is just a façade. Everybody has a funny, irregular, mould-breaking story to their lives, which is at most times hidden from public view. But yes, the eccentricities-oddities, well-hidden though they might be, definitely do exist. Perhaps just a scratch of a nail below the thin ice.

One thing has definitely changed about me. I used to revel in my oddness. I used to like being ditzy, irregular, forgetful, crazy, irrational at times, impulsive. Unapologetic. No longer. I have spent the last year ironing all of them out. Trying to get discipline and sense in. Caution. Responsibility. Look-before-you-leap kinda thing. It’s there in my writing even. The style, the content. Suddenly it’s a different set of attributes that seem desirable.

The face I saw in the mirror today, when I met him and the day I met those two, was somebody else’s. What is it? Growing-up? B-school? Life?