Groundhog Day

What if there's no tomorrow? There wasn't one today!

What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?

There’s a reason why so many people in Hollywood continue to make time loop movies, despite Harold Ramis and Bill Murray¹ having perfected the genre in 1993. Some are better than others, but they all tend to have similar themes where a central character is stuck experiencing the same time or place over and over again with some sort of barrier to overcome or larger philosophical lesson to learn. What changes are the emotions and level of acceptance of the situation, which is usually the key to exiting the loop². We’ve gone through that emotional rollercoaster with all the ups and downs. The first few weeks brought a sense freedom and adventure of exploring a new city across the world. Yesterday, we were here:

We don’t know when we’re getting out. The faint hope we had going into our last hope was quickly extinguished. The rapid update in progress in the online status tracker from over the weekend was fool’s gold and has remained in the same state since then. Our contact at the orphanage, who last predicted that we could leave “90% Wednesday, 100% Thursday” is now saying “within the week hopefully”. We don’t have the 33+ years³ Phil had to learn the piano, French, and save a kid from falling out of a tree to better ourselves and develop that sense of acceptance that will let us out. We just have each other, and we’re trying to lean into that. At this point, I’m mentally planning for a celebration of Independence from both the British and the Indians.⁴

Call me Eliud. The silver lining is that I’ve been getting up to run at 5:45 almost every morning here. Early in our time here at the hotel, Nishi and I switched bodies for about 15 minutes and I made friends with the General Manager of the hotel at a cocktail party that was hosted for some guests here. I’d heard him talking to a few other folks about running and invited myself along to their run the next morning. 3 weeks later, I think I’ve logged close to 100k of miles that I hope will translate when I come back home. I was on the fence about the half before, but I think this will drive me to register so that I can keep this up. Running here is like altitude training, except for humidity and avoiding poop, both of which will come in handy for Chicago running.

The Egg Lobby. We need to have a conversation about breakfast. Having breakfast here in India has been a stark reminder that breakfast in America is oddly and unnecessarily different than the other meals in the day. When exactly did we decide that lunch and dinner could have the same menu (generally) but that breakfast needed to be something entirely different and oriented around eggs and desserts posing as entrees? I appreciate that we’ve made inroads in recent decades and that brunch menus include things like salads and “breakfast” burgers which still capitulate to include an egg to appease the Egg Overlords…but someone somewhere must have earned a LOT of money convincing the National Restaurant Association in the early 1900s that eggs were the way to go. Please do not send me actual research that gives me the answer for why breakfast is what it is in America. Just let me break my fast as I please while I’m here.

Party of Five. We added a few more touristy activities to our roster while we wait for the Madurai police to confirm that Anika did not head up a criminal enterprise in her first 18 months of life. The girls have started getting into counting the cows they see on the side of the roads and definitely NOT getting into the new and scary bugs they saw at the ecological park we visited. It has been an interesting early window into the dynamics the sisters will have with each other with people getting annoyed, hair getting pulled, faces getting (mostly) inadvertently slapped etc. The fun part has been everyone getting together and reveling in Anika’s laughter which has been a newly consistent thing. It’s a life-giving sound for all of us. We also took a day trip to the city of Rameswaram and visited a famous/significant Hindu temple. It was a thing to do…once. It was a lot for the girls, mostly because it was blazingly hot inside the sanctum. I did pull out my best Sanskrit though as Nishi and I (and as I would learn later, Akila!) repeated the prayers at the prompting of the priest in front of us. I know even saying this cheapens the effect of the prayers, but we were hoping they’d pay off soon-ish.

To make up for the amount of sweat we emitted, we decided to treat ourselves to a trip to a local salon on the recommendation of another US family that Nishi befriended at breakfast based on her recognition from an Instagram interaction she had a few years ago.⁵ The big girls got their hair washed and straightened in a way curly hair never should be but they looked cute as hell. I got a shave and a facial and Nishi got a foot massage. It was all a nice respite from the stress of the previous 48 hours.

I may need to not overthink these so much. This post has taken me so long to write that we have just received notice that the passport has been printed. We’re hopeful that it’ll get dispatched today, so the door is open for us to leave Madurai on Friday. We’ll know in a few hours if that’s true and tomorrow is actually tomorrow.

1. The movie is almost entirely unassailable but the script did Andie MacDowell dirty. She was criminally wasted via that script.

2. Other times, it’s just figuring out the right path to survive long enough to fend off an alien invasion.

3. There are various sources that try to identify the number of days Phil Connors repeats in the movie, ranging from 34 days (just what is shown on film) to the version I like supported by an over-the-top analysis which is also somewhat supported by a revised version of an answer Harold Ramis provided.

4. Oh, the irony.

5. What a 2023 sentence.