Seinfeld already said that

A couple of weeks back…

Its 9:30 in the morning, less than five hours to go to the exam and almost half the syllabus left uncovered, my phone starts playing the departed sound track softly at first gradually increasing the volume making it more and more irritating to the point that I start searching for the phone on my bed like a blind man searching for his pennies that just slipped out of his hand. Once I find it, my hand involuntarily goes to the snooze button and 2 hours later my ex-roommate wakes me up! Too late!

I sat and pondered about the snooze alarm. The snooze-alarm to me is the ultimate triumph for the marketing world. Just think of it, they advertise that their product doesn’t do what it is supposed to do and also concede that they cannot really do anything about it and that surprisingly, helps them sell more of those! I found the observation quite funny and jotted it down in my diary (the last few pages of my DBIS notebook) that night. I have had this habit of jotting down funny thoughts and random ideas as soon as I get them for quite some time now. The very next day I was watching this episode of Seinfeld I which Jerry Seinfeld while doing his 2 minute comedy routine at the beginning pretty much said the same things about the snooze alarm that I wrote down in my diary the previous night! I realized that I had already watched that episode a long time back and completely forgot about it. And when the snooze-alarm thing happened, the same things came into my head and I completely believed that they were my original lines. One more classic case of my brain trying to fool me and it successfully did! You know these brains of ours… it’s like we can’t trust them anymore.

This coincidence somehow affected me a great deal. Every time I thought of or said something there is an irritating high-pitched voice singing in my head in a teasing tone– “Seinfeld already said that, Seinfeld already said that”. So I made a mental note to blog about this and then I realized that even this Seinfeld-already-said-that singing is inspired from a Southpark episode which in turn was inspired from Simpsons and the recursion never ends! Even Seinfeld jots down his ideas as soon as they come to his mind! I read that in his autobiography. That was the boiling point, my brain was like- Holy Crap! Nothing in my world is original…
Apparently my brain works in a way that is different from others. Every time I hear something funny, I make a mental note of it and also process a list of possible realistic scenarios where I can use a line like that and have a database kind of a thingy in my thought process (ten seasons of F.R.I.E.N.D.S, nine seasons of Seinfeld plus hundreds of movies in three languages- that’s a massive database!). If I realize that I have a line that I haven’t used for quite some time now, I force the conversation in a direction where I can use that! (I don’t do this anymore). After a long seeking-for-answers analysis, I have made my peace with my brain. After all creativity is the art of hiding your sources ;)


P.S: "Reasonably" good advertising ;)