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Life Lessons

Boredom Made Boring

Copyright 2006 Ben S. Pollock

I dreamed I was in a conversation with a few younger people from the office, none of them the real people in my real office. I was saying to them something (in reality) that I have said many times over the years (and they listened, proving it a dream):

“I couldn’t handle the boredom. It was the worst kind of boredom, where you wait for someone to return your call, and deadline’s looming just close enough where you can’t start a new story.”

A wiseacre pipes up: “So why did you return to reporting?” (The speaker in the dream did use past tense.)

With no hesitation: “In the 20 years since I last reported, I learned there were many kinds of boredom.”

I have? I’m awake now and realize, yes. “And I’ve learned a bit on how to handle most of them.”

What are the forms of boredom?

• The boredom of waiting, which has two subsets:

• Waiting for the known, the case in my dream: some mayor to phone me back. At some point the wait becomes moot as the story gets written regardless, or shelved for the moment.

• Waiting for the unknown, like sitting in a doctor’s office. One unknown is how long you’ll have to sit, which is unpleasant enough. The other unknown is what the doctor will say or do to you. We like to call that boredom, dread.

• Likely expectation, which is the boredom of, say, having nearly the same lunch every darned day.

• That entertainment has become predictable is a form of monotony. Either the TV writers (or mystery novelists et cetera) have gotten worse or simply by the passing of years you have become wiser. If you’ve seen Columbo, you can predict Monk, and those are two of the better series. And yet you watch every evening, or you pursue the same genre from the library. Then exhausted from inertia you go to bed.

I not only foresee plot points, which is evidence of a decent memory, but I shout out the dialogue before it’s spoken, proving the hackdom of the scripts. My Beloved seems to like the game of whether I’m right or not, but we both know it kinda kills the show, too.

Knowing “whodunit” does not have to be boring. Good movies and good novels these days often reveal the end at the beginning. Why then don’t we just break out the Monopoly board? Sometimes we enjoy obvious plots due to vivid writing and crisp dialogue. Sometimes the characters are fascinating. The suspense then is subtle and sophisticated.

• Tedium, which happens when you fit one hour of work into an eight-hour shift. This is a sign of mastery. It’s not that smart people get bored sooner because they figure out their jobs and naturally get them done sooner. It’s not intelligence, just cleverness. A lawyer will remember the particular laws he uses often, down to the clause number. Also, the shrewd plumber doesn’t have to take time to recall “righty-tighty and lefty-loosey” a thousand times a day.

For those of us work in offices with computers: How did we pass the hours until the Internet was invented and soon found necessary?

• Writers find a boredom of writing out something that is already thought out fairly thoroughly. This is why the pros advice rookies to never talk out your story, script or novel, until it’s written down. Tackling a writing project that you’ve spoken of is lifeless; you’re stuck in the feeling, “What’s the point?”

I avoid the talk, but the thinking form slays me. It happens when I am reviewing a large book. As I read, I put notes in the margins and am continually evaluating. When I finally hit The End, I wonder, where to start? My comments are every two or three pages throughout the 560-page tome. Do I thumb through them, placing Post-it Notes to rank the main ones, or do I write freely then review and add the points missed?

That’s Boredom, friends, right here in River City. It starts with “B” and that rhymes with “D” and that stands for Drool!

Yet there is pleasure in the revisions proving I’ve mastered the book, crunching a few hundred thousand words into a 1,400-word critique that almost sounds like the ones I prefer to read.

• Blogs and journals have their own kind of writing boredom as well. It’s where you’ve started an exciting topic but toward the end you discover you quit caring. Does that make the topic and your take on it ill-advised so you hit “delete”? Is the entry worth another draft to avoid boring the eventual reader? Or just wrap it up and post?

Would you like, poor reader, to know why beets are an abomination in every form except the yummy way my friend Peggy cooks fresh ones for her Seder? OK, take my word for it: Why describe something like this?

At the top, I mentioned that boredom can be handled. Two ways.

1) Grow up. Boredom is a part of life. Any task you need to handle more than once needs routines developed for efficiency. Inherent in routine is boredom. You want your job, for example, to have a nice crop of habits so you don’t die of stress in your 20s.

This is another way that good intentions are hurting our youth. In our constant scheduling of their activities, and schemes to skirt their alleged short attention spans (kids don’t pay attention to things they find boring and are rapt for whole afternoons with projects they find fascinating), we prevent children from learning to create personal solutions to boredom. Thank goodness experts now are pushing for the resumption of play and recess.

Surprise, kids! Sometimes you do have to wait for one thing to be over before the next thing begins.

2) Every kind of boredom has inherent within it its antidote. Consider the types above and you’ll see the obvious each time: Do something else. Quit. Shave the other side of your face first. Whatever. Curing or preventing the boredom may not be the best choice in a given situation, but it is possible.

Even today, I bet, we grow up learning life lessons through boredom. My example:

Beginning in college I played in “pit bands” for campus musicals. I’d played in school bands since seventh grade. In stage orchestras I found a great way to be in on the “hey, gang, let’s put on a show” break from the boredom of studying every night. I learned the best scores were the chestnuts, by Rodgers and Hart and Porter and Hammerstein etc. Hair was my favorite, with the thrilling score and the message and the subversion. From the inside, I saw how Andrew Lloyd Webber watered down too few melodies into absolute pablum, even in his “best” shows.

These were commitments of a month of rehearsals (parties) and a weekend or two of performances (more parties). I continued this hobby after graduation.

The best musical of all, for an instrumentalist, turned out to be The Music Man, which I got to do for a community college production in a Dallas suburb. For the first time, I got paid for the hobby. This one, though, had nine straight nights of performances, a weekend then each weeknight then the next weekend.

A reporter’s job rarely ends at the stroke of 6 o’clock. Making that happen just for a week was the first misery. One night I hit the orchestra pit barely a minute before curtain and had to crawl on my belly, holding music and trombone, over greasy cables and under dusty curtains to my stand.

Composer Meredith Willson allowed a lot of spots for the band to vent the boredom of always playing softly, under the singers, with grand fortissimo choruses (It’s corny and easy, but playing “76 Trombones” is a blast.)

But halfway through the production I realized any dream I had of performing professionally was to be never in my personality. Playing the same songs, even great ones, night after night proved almost insufferable. How to describe this particular boredom? I felt sick: The love I felt for the score, not to mention the thrill of performance (though unacknowledged) was turning to resentment. My admiration for Willie Nelson and similar musicians to play their old hits nightly for decades became infinite.

For me, that show could’ve ruined music for me. Music is too important. I’ll stay an amateur.

We have a term for boredom. It’s called work.

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