Monday, November 29, 2010

Master of Boredom

People have many skills in life. And when you develop skills, you keep going further and further with them until you reach a certain point in your life where you feel you have mastered that or those skills. Like any used-to-be-a-monkey being on this planet I too have some skills contained in my husk of a body (lacking a SOUL). Some skills, such as drawing which I proudly admit I am decent at, have been with me for life. Others are more recent, such as the apparent ability to imitate an ostrich, chicken, pigeon and Velociraptor (maybe I hatched from an egg when I was born?).


"Name: Seán O'Beirn
Age: 1
Soul Status: Non-Existent "

But I would never say I have mastered any of these skills, but I'm continuing to develop them. One skill I have mastered however, is something I face everyday. In fact, many of you, like me, have most likely mastered this skill too but I'm calling the throne on this one because I'm writing about it. I have mastered Boredom. Now I know you're probably thinking "Duuuuuh! But Seán, boredom isn't a skill, hyuck!" which is true, it's almost as wrong as saying that Brian Cowen is pretty.


"Our Taoiseach isn't too photogenic... or any-genic for that matter"

It's a state of mind really, but challenging boredom with even the simplest of things you eventually find ways to always, and I mean ALWAYS (facebook stalking anyone?), escape boredom . So I like to call boredom a skill in the sense we do little things to eventually master our boredom. It's like a portal to developing other skills. I know it sounds a little silly to say "I have mastered my skill of Boredom". However, I think it sounds a little better than "I have mastered the skill of entertaining myself" so I think I'll stick with the previous.

When we're bored we usually begin to experiment with things around us. We will do anything to beat our boredom, which ends up literally letting our mind unhinge. This is the first phase, or as I like to call it "The Stupid Phase". I think I can honestly say, this video pretty much sums it up:



We basically go a little "Sarah Palin" crazy and release all of our energy in extremely odd and stupid ways while no one is around (no, that shelf isn't climbable...). This ends and we go into the second phase, which is "The Routine Phase". In the Routine Phase we begin to walk around the house finding things to clean or laundry to do (I for one, like to listen to the Inception soundtrack while doing this, it makes laundry time undeniably EPIC). We eat tea, we drink custard cream biscuits and we stare at something in the room that's partially covered and wonder what it is for 5 mins. This phase varies in length for everyone (depending on how many custard cream biscuits you might have) but when it ends we reach the final stage.


"The Routine Phase may last a while..."

In the final stage we reach the "Productive Stage". In this stage we find something grabs our attention longer than that of Mel Gibson trying not to be racist. This can be a skill we're good at, like cooking, or taking up something entirely new such as, in my case, writing on this very blog. It's usually something that we enjoy or have become interested in recently and we begin to build on our knowledge of it and how we use this skill. It's kind of like Angelina Jolie, she got bored one day and decided that she wanted to get into adopting, an boy oh boy, has she been refining that skill since!


"Angelina Jolie: Soon... Soon you will ALL be MINE!"

I think that the first two stages can swap around for different people but the final stage always stays put as the final stage. Eventually as each stage plays out more frequently (ala, because you're on the dole) you become quicker at adapting to boredom and soon enough, like pterodactyl on speed, you're flying it, pun intended (har har har). In the end, the moment you feel bored, you'll know when you've mastered the skill of boredom when you find something worth doing straight away instead of phases 1 to 3.

Now... begin stage 1 my pretties....



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