Typical...

I love to think of myself as a typical teenager.

I feel I have the same worries as my compatriots, similar tastes like my peers’… and even a comparable lifestyle.

In short, I consider myself to be just like every other nineteen year old out there….

So, sitting all alone and marveling at the resemblance of our society to a school of fish… yeah, I think high (read weird) thoughts when I am drunk… I was just listing factors that somehow connect all of us individuals… into a unit.

The most obvious one was of course the fact that we all think we can handle more alcohol than an average guy. Hah! Even the five chumps passed out all around the hall think the same.

Next is… how we all consider our driving skills to be at least a notch superior to the next car’s driver… directly the cause of almost all street accidents I think.

There were lots more… I regret not having had a pen and paper to jot them all down as they struck me…. Anyway, these fun facts helped me pass some time (from the edge of the couch to the floor, in terms of distance) before I hit on the one factor that united all teenagers… and provided me with enough food for thought to last into the hangover of the not so distant future.

Each member of my generation think, they have at least once faced a situation, of being in love with someone unattainable.

This is common to every single one of them… um… one of us!

We all have at some point considered ourselves to be the tragic heroes of the cruel drama… our lives.

We all have sighed like the wind… and gazed blankly out of the window… hoping we looked as much of a lover as we felt we were in our fantasies.

Even in the plainest of setups… our minds have construed some extraordinary complications in the path our happiness’… even after friends laughed at us and told us we were morons….

In short… we have always perceived our romantic ventures as something unheard of, something extraordinary… something awe inspiring… even if they could not have been more stereotypical.

If you think this were enough for us all to club together… there’s more to come.

We are even more similar when our aforesaid ‘romantic ventures’ come to their tragic and drawn out demise… or in some cases… their spectacular unexpected crashes.

Immediately our visages (this happens universally) reflect the signs of an impending apocalypse. We feel our own little universes have imploded. We all feel alien in our own homes… and that no one comprehends our feelings.

We feel that we shall never be able to love again… that this is the end of ‘us’ as we have known it. We feel our minds aging with the lessons that a single experience has taught us… we feel maturity, virtually flooding our synapses.

We all feel exactly this way… we all feel our cases are unique… and worse, more saddening than anything else that has ever occurred.

This is the hallmark of being a teenager, ladies and gentlemen. 

Thinking that we are unique in everything we do, say or feel.

I am no different.

I have felt the presence of the same insurmountable chasms (note the paradox) and stopped on the precipice of acting, during my stint as a love struck fool… which has later been declared as plain idiocy, and acknowledged as such by me.

Also… till as recently as… this evening, I was drowning in the same sorrow as my fellow brooders.

Now however, I am in a different stage… having made a new realization. It’s something on the lines of… “I am in love… which is supposed to be a great thing. So in spite of whether or not it is reciprocated… I am going to savor it.”

This new state of enlightenment… brings us to the third and final bond between teens the world over… the “it doesn’t matter if…” existential outlook.

Voila… we have ourselves and ocean, full of fishes… each basically a part of the same shoal.

Petty differences aside… like backgrounds, localities, abilities or even tastes… most of us think in almost the same manner.

Given a choice of two courses of actions… we would all subconsciously be following the pattern that our heard follows.

Yes… on a deeper level, when we dissect all of our thought patterns, we may be unique… just like we claim. But… on the whole… you and I are all the same my fellow fish… just like everyone else in the whole sea… or world, whichever you prefer.

We are all simply typical people living our typical lives.