Units of Boredom in a smartphone world

Now that we all have smart phones, supposedly boredom has been eradicated, and supposedly this is For Better and For Worse. We never need be bored for a moment, and so we distract ourselves to our creative Detriment.

There is, however, a huge variability in Boredom – the micro boredom of standing in line or waiting for a bus is not a unit of time you were ever really going to fill with Creativity; I would argue that your life is much improved by being able to engage with the world, or other people, or the news, or a game, rather than being Bored for a handful of minutes. Those Micro Units of Boredom just build up sedimentary layers over time, and drag one down. Filling them with little micro bursts of entertainment is simply turning them into happy voids, rather than frustrated ones (not to mention that plenty of meaning *can* be packed into 140 characters, and therefore, the micro unit of non-boredom may not even be truly void).

There’s a next larger unit of time, which is still pretty small – a Power Nap can be fit into just fifteen minutes (and, in fact, should not be extended past twenty minutes, lest it become a sink hole of grogginess), and so can a Quick Creative unit.  So if we’re talking twenties of minutes, it’s an individual’s choice whether to try for a Quick Creative unit, or allow multiple Mico-Non-Boreds to string together. Important note: one has to be in the right frame of mind in order to engage in a Quick Creative unit – if you don’t feel the closeness of your inspiration, twenty minutes is not going to be enough to warm it up, engage it, produce something, and be ready to jump back into Responsibility Life (or whatever name you give what it is you’re doing when you’re not Being Creative). Twenty minutes engaged in Boredom can be a meditation of intended mindlessness from which one emerges refreshed, but this can also be sufficient time to fall into a funk, or ennui; much better to stave off a power burst of ennui by fucking around with your phone, I say.

So then, there are the larger chunks of time – an hour or two, the whole Swath of an Afternoon. Those, I believe, are the productive units to potentially engage in Boredom as a pursuit, the kind of Boredom its advocates are speaking of. And here, in the “I have a few hours” or the “what *shall* we do today” space of not yet pre-planned activities, one can legitimately complain of people “wasting” their time, when they could be Being Creative or Productive, because we are now speaking of a time sufficiently lengthy for those kinds of things to potentially have space to Become.

So yes, if someone defaults to passive entertainments during these longer stretches, I agree that they do lose the standing to complain about never getting anything Worthy done, because they are the one wasting the Creative Time available to them. And yes, plenty of times Creativity comes to you when you’re freaking Bored, and therefore you need to spend at least an occasional Swath of Afternoon being Freaking Bored…and see what comes to you.

**This blog post was the product of a Quick Creative Unit of time.**

Better to be the giver?

Boy, am I not sure I'm getting the right gifts for people this year.

I've had such success in past years, giving people things that I've gleaned they would like.  But this year, I'm giving things that I want to give them; not even things I want them to have; things I want to give them; things I want to be giving them.

She wants to act; I want to be giving her books of monologues; I know she can do something with them; even if they're silly, she can mine them for whatever depths they have, give them depths they don't.

I want her to be artistic; I want to be giving her something inspirational, to encourage her. I want to have enough energy (before the deadline for mailing the gift) to create a little piece of art to go with the book, to start a conversation. I want us to have a conversation over the years.

Do I imagine them looking back, years in the future, to the christmas they got that book, remembering their auntie who saw the artist in them?

Yup.

Do I know that indulging in that kind of thinking is an excellent way to disappoint myself, and put undo pressure on the gifts?

Yeah, I really do.

I'm so on the fence.

I want to be true to myself, though, and I'm the one who wants to give these gifts.  And really, from the recipient's perspective, isn't the worst thing that could happen is that they don't really like the gift?  And, who cares, it's not like it's a sweater I'm expecting them to wear. They're just books. They can be set aside; and I will still have fulfilled my own desire to have given them.

And the one to whom I want to give the "get to know yourself better" how-to-journal book....isn't she so un-knowing of herself that she is highly unlikely to be offended by being given such a book? She'd have to really take the book's exercises to heart, and learn from them, in order to get to a perspective from which she could perceive that I was telling her to Grow Up by giving her the book....by which point, she'll have grown up a little, and possibly even agree with me.

Am I trying to be a hero?

I know I'm trying to reach backwards in time to deeply remembered iterations of myself, who wanted someone to see the depths in me; that's why I want to give these gifts, because I do see those depths in them. I do want to encourage them to look deeper within themselves. (Because I'm the kind of person who's never been able to stop falling into myself, and I want more people to talk to.)

And I want to be the kind of person who is known for seeing the depths in other people.  I do want them to remember me that way. I am trying to build my own legacy of memory in other people's minds. I am trying to be heroic. The heroic artist auntie, who gave amazing books at christmas, even if it took you a while to figure out what on earth she'd given you.

and why.

Rain Makes Drivers Crazy in LA

Cannot Resist posting an instant message conversation from this morning. I'm M.

. . . . . . . . . . .

09:02:00: M:   Did you get lots of rain?

09:02:19: R:   Was crazy.  

09:02:26: M:   Ooh, sorry!
09:02:38: M:   I kinda lucked out, not too many dumb folks on my roads.

09:03:34: R:   Took the canyon. Parked on Sierra Hwy, guys in the car in front of me got in a fight amongst themselves.
09:03:46: R:   that spilled out onto the street, and then got back in....

09:03:49: M:   In the car?
09:03:51: M:   Good lord!

09:03:58: R:   was entertaining.

09:03:59: M:   That's, um, awesome.

09:04:32: R:   in a lock the doors, get the cell phone ready to record, plan an escape sort of entertaining way...

09:04:44: M:   Crap. You're right.....
09:04:49: M:   to be prepared in that fashion.
09:04:58: M:   Glad you're good.  :-)

09:05:56: R:   Completely parked in.  If they had attacked me, I would have sat there unless they actually broke a window.  Then I would have pinned them against another car.

09:06:12: M:   I believe it.
09:06:23: M:   But they got back into their own car after a while?
09:06:27: M:   Or did one guy take off?

09:07:03: R:   Driver and passenger swapped seats. Former driver spent some time beating on the guy in the back seat before getting in.

09:07:24: M:   speechless.
09:07:55: M:   That is just about as crazy a story as when your engine caught fire.

09:08:08: R:   Yes.

White Noise

The hotel room was entirely too quiet; no background noise, nothing but my own lumpy heartbeat in my ear canals, and the window heater/cooler lacked a fan-only option.

Inspiration: they must make a white noise app, right? Indeed, there are several free varieties, and as soon as I get it running, I wonder how it is that I've ever slept in hotels before without it.

Sweetie has tv quietly on, for his own background falling asleep noise, but unfortunately, the talking he finds relaxing (cable news) drills incessantly into my brain, preventing my drifting into sleep.

Brilliant solution: balance my phone on the side of my head, placing the white noise directly between me and the tv bloviation!

I drift off, with a smile on my face, deeply relaxing into this perfect sleep aid invention...

...until the very moment that someone updates their Facebook status, causing a vibration notice to vibrate directly into my skull, tazing me back to consciousness and raisng me several inches off the bed.

Flashback on the freeway

I merge onto the freeway and notice the personalized plate on the station wagon in front of me: GOJIRA1.

Suddenly, I am back on our honeymoon, on a misty tropical morning on Oahu, inland from the beach, in a wide grassy valley, watching young women from the Japanese contingent of our tour party jumping in and out of the twenty foot wide / three foot deep Godzilla footprint (left in commemoration of the filming of the 90's era Matthew Broderick movie), photographing each other, laughing, and screaming the creature's native name: "Gojira!! Gojira!!"

Yet another unpublished draft

So, now, my thinking goes, maybe if I have a tablet, I'll do more writing. I do believe it's the speed of the texting that gets in the way of my creativity. With micro blogging (twitter or Facebook), I make up my post first, complete in my head, and only then open the app to make the post. I don't get to Open a blank page and just start thinking, as I'm doing here, because the text input just takes to damn long, and requires even more time to fix all the auto complete fails. Besides needing arrow keys, this input on sweetie's iPad is going much better already. Even without keypad sensitivity, apparently I can touch type pretty fine just rapping on a glass screen.  Entertaining.

Skyfall

In the way that every future dystopia is less a prediction of the future, and more an exploration of the present, each iteration of a serial franchise such as James Bond is less a piece of the same continuous story, and more an exploration of our current time through the lens of familiar characters and story structures.

The current Bond movie, in performances, cinematography, and themes, illuminates some of our current moment's melancholy, our collective concerns about individuals v systems, technological hardware v boots on the ground. These concerns are complex, multi layered, not binary, and Skyfall gives itself narrative space in which to explore them. The movie doesn't believe there are any clear answers, it just knows the questions are worth exploring.

Also, a piece of automotive machinery appears in cameo, and elicited delighted applause from my opening weekend audience -- a wonderful moment of shared enjoyment and entertained respect.