A Social Experiment to Test Resilience

I was the subject of a “social experiment” the whole of yesterday afternoon. Tejas was off on a total “I have this huge reserve of energy that’s just going to waste, so I’m going to take everything that Mehvash owns and not give it back” tangent. The aim of the so-called experiment was to test my “resilience”, he said. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure of the exact meaning of the word. I’ve used it many times, to do with plants and the whole vegetarian argument, but I honestly didn’t know the exact meaning. Once home, I referred to the dictionary. This holds true for a lot of English words. Some of you might say I should be ashamed of myself, English major and all that. But I say boo you. When you’re proficient in a language, ANY language, you tend to not know the literal meaning of more than just a few. That is not the point, however, of this post.

I’m not blaming the boy. I’ve been in this mood a couple of times myself. Nikita could testify for that. I know where he was coming from. I also know a whole lot of people who go through it on a regular basis, Michelle being one of them. My point is – what makes a person get purely sadistic pleasure out of this mood? Why must one ruin another’s frame of mind out of one’s own boredom? And where do the victims of this come from? They seem to be bored themselves, annoyed out of their minds, waiting to get out of the situation and go somewhere they can have peace of mind. But they don’t take off. They’re always willing to give the annoyer a chance, saying “Let’s just stick around, it’ll wear off” Hell, I stayed the entire afternoon, when I could easily have left, thinking the mood would wear off soon enough. Well, guess what? It lasted three goddamned hours! And I, like a fool, was there throughout. In my defense, I did almost leave but then my keys were taken away, and hung on a tree. Don't ask.

I have a high tolerance level, it has been tested over and over again – not in an actual proclaimed experiment, but by many people over the years. I am aware of the level of my “resilience”*, I could tell Tejas that without being treated as a lab rat. But if he still wanted to conduct an experiment, maybe he should have tried to answer the questions I raise in this post, rather than test something that’s already been tested – that would have been an experiment worth conducting.

[*according to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary “resilience” is defined as ‘the ability of people to recover quickly from shock, injury, etc’, in case you were wondering]