Bored

“Perhaps the world’s second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.”
Cecil Beaton

Bored

Years ago, my boss used to call me at 10pm-ish now and then. At first it freaked me out, at that hour it must be important. I soon learned that she knew that I was getting home from a show and she was drinking wine and wanted to gossip.

Now that football season is here (yay), I won’t be watching as much Hallmark Channel. This is a very good thing. In entertainment, one needs a balance of contrived romance vs contrived violence.

With Hallmark, you can see the formula. Very early on there will be an intimate moment when the guy tucks a curl of her hair behind her ear or brushes off some flour from her cheek. This is intimacy but with an innocent intent.

Another thing that they do is the Interrupted Kiss. This is their first kiss and we are cheering them up but it will be delayed until the end of the movie. It is formula and it works so they do it in a lot of their movies.

But, they are very lazy writers. That Interrupted Kiss is always the phone ringing. It could be a hundred things. The phones are a very big part of Hallmark movies. And it bugs me, why is everyone always calling our heroine?

Now that I see it so obvious on Hallmark repetition, I see it everywhere! Sitting in a restaurant, someone will be texting or snapchatting but there is nothing to say. Some of these guys have many little conversations going on that are empty. They are bored.

My mom told me once, “a bored child is a dull child” and it had a powerful impact on me. I do NOT want to be dull! Yet, millions of people are in this cycle of lack of engagement with their surroundings. This can’t be good.

For me, the whole smart phone thing is like that character in The Phantom Tollbooth who very nicely asks our hero to move a pile of sand from here to there using tweezers. And he does, for a while, but he Learns The Lesson.

How do I know this is true? Personal experience. One morning my internet and cable were out. I had nothing. I “found myself” cleaning that kitchen at 7am. I was active and making my life cleaner, something I’d’ve ignored if I had YouTube available. It was a bone fide surprise that I was cleaning at 7am.

It feels to me that we have an entire nation, and maybe the world, who are bored. This could be a holding pattern waiting for Something Big like the atmosphere collapsing and I can dig that. If you are waiting, why move?

And, here you are, reading this. I get it.

Because I am older (old!) I can be accused of not embracing new technology or even older technology — but, in my older wisdom, I say “Show me the profit.” If I could think of any reason to send a picture of my dinner to anyone that would make the world a better place, then I’d do it. As of right now, I see constant texting and twittering and cat videos and click bait as Massive White Noise.

How can anyone willingly live in that stuff?