Sunday, October 12, 2008
Boredom...
credit: Getty Images
In a previous post, I mentioned that Singapore is a boring place.
Found this on The Straits Times, thought I should share this:
Bye bye, boredom
How does one cope with the mundane? By finding a different angle and applying curiosity By tan shzr ee, culture vulture
Recently, I met a friend, R, who grew up on the following mantra.
'Our parents never allowed us to be bored,' he says. 'It's like a taboo. Only boring people get bored. You have to find another angle.'
The son of two well-known anthropologists, R spent his boyhood in Turkey (picking up urchin language on the way), worked as a builder and cowboy in the United States, read history at Oxford, taught English in Poland, learnt five languages and has since, disgustingly, mastered 15 musical instruments - from the Chinese sheng (mouth organ) to jazz piano and the kazoo.
'You have to mine for meaning in every situation?' I ask.
'Yes,' he says. 'It's fundamentally existentialist. You have to find a new dimension that is interesting.'
Easy for him to say, growing up in such an enlightened environment that has also provided innumerable opportunities for travel and discovery.
But what does the suspension of boredom actually mean, in real terms?
I have been bored many times before. Heck, I have even written a column on why it is such a lovely thing to be a slacker, to be bored, to do nothing - and then rest afterwards.
But proscribing boredom - that is a new one. Forget being born into a family of globe-trotting hippies who promise ever-new adventures just when the current ones are peaking.
How does one cope with things more mundane: an interminable business meeting, a crappy film, waiting at the dentist's without your favourite Peter Carey book, a sullen wife, being trapped in a lift with farting accountants?
You find a different angle - so R says.
Right.
I have spent hours obsessing over different grains of wood on the backs of chairs (thus making me an expert on Ikea stains). I have tried counting the individual strands of hair on a lecturer's fantastic comb-over (lecture was on obscure Indian music).
I have walked out of the cinema (or is that a cop-out?) and lousy concerts (Michael Nyman). I keep a pocketbook of Indonesian phrases and Korean drumming patterns to memorise in my wallet (for lousy cocktail receptions).
I have sighed many sighs. And I have done that uber-surreal thing and attempted to philosophise, deconstruct and academise the bored state of my boredom.
Here it goes:
'So, I'm bored.'
'Is this what boredom means?'
'I am feeling boredom at this very moment, and living the all-human emotion/sensation of existentialist apathy.'
'But in conducting this very useless mobius-strip-type conversation in my head about boredom, I am actually making my state of boredom interesting for myself. Which has caused the transcending of my boredom into a different level of...'
'Curiosity,' R says.
'Curiosity is the antidote of boredom. Very important.'
There are many types of boredom and corresponding ways of beating them, he explains.
There is soporific boredom, which is sometimes a bad thing in my book (for example, the oppressive elevator slush of Richard Clayderman) and sometimes a good thing (for example, playing El Emigrante on transience.com).
This kind of boredom sucks you into an autopilot zone of constant, nonaccelerated movement - 'static speed' and inertia, if you like.
Then, there is boredom that actually co-exists paradoxically with its antidote: curiosity. This happens when your level of curiosity is mild - it is an itch to be scratched, usually combined with an act of denial or procrastination.
A good example can be found in compulsive Internet surfing (of which I am a proud black-belt holder). You are bored. Your attention span is marginal.
But that niggling sense of wanting instant gratification and just that little bit more (in small, accumulating and deceptively harmless doses) pushes your fingers to click-click-click ever-sprawling links and hyperlinks into oblivion.
This particular genus of curiosity-boredom, which functions in an yin-yang sense, is a different blend from the earlier example of boredomtranscendence (turning your boredom on its head and transforming it into something interesting).
I ask R: 'Is it like trying to find boring people interesting - when you look at them as if they were anthropological specimens?'
'Figure out why they have come to be boring?'
'Would that be horribly clinical and inhuman?'
But R is, surely, by this time, dangerously close to breaking his taboo of boredom resistance while valiantly entertaining my existentialist non-conversations about that very subject.
I suddenly have a horrible fear of being trapped in a lift with six farting accountants.
But then, I remind myself, I could always philosophise over the dynamics of squirmy looks and their corresponding un-uttered speech bubbles ('that was you, not me'/ 'rats, I have to pee'/ 'what is the square root of 2.789?'/ 'is she sleeping with XXX?')
Failing which, there is always my little pocket guide to elementary Indonesian and that oh-god-where-did-I- tuck-it-away scrap of Korean drumming patterns to memorise, immortalised on the back of a receipt in my not-so-boring wallet.
Taken from The Straits Times
