Nice brief by Mike Crowley in defense of boredom. Unlike him, I've no Blackberry chirping in my pocket to whip out (to hear Crowley tell it, the Blackberry is virtually rendering boredom extinct, though I don't know what good it does you if you haven't just received e-mail), but I've erected my own line of largely impenetrable defenses against the horrors of an idle moment. I don't, for instance, walk places anymore. Walking is cell phone time, and it keeps me in touch with the family. And nor do I stare at the TV -- too boring, particularly during commercials. I stare at the TV while surfing the net on my computer, reloading this page for more comments and my RSS feed for new posts and my news pages for fresh information.
Crowley, for one, never really explains why we should return to boredom. He lightly denigrates our hyperkinetic habits that stave it off, and I'll agree with that. But boredom doesn't look better by comparison, the choice seems to be mediocrity or manic multitasking. You a dullard or a stereotype? That's why folks like Crowley, and for that matter myself, should align ourselves with the "The Idler" movement, the Lakoffian attempt to reframe crushing boredom as pleasant idleness, and do for it what the slow-cooking movement did for the oven. Take Tom Hodgkinson's How To Be Idle, which addresses most of the moments in life (naps, lunches, fishing, afternoons, etc) where you'd be most likely to whip out the Blackberry and explains why idleness is both the less monotonous and more courageous choice in each of them. Take his chapter on going out (or, rather, on "staying in"), the scourge of all who want to be idle but don't want to be lame:
One goes to a trendy bar and feels au courant for a few minutes, until one learns that in the depths of the trendy bar is a VIP room; perhaps that is where the real action is, you think. Get into one of these VIP rooms and you'll find that the really cool people have gone up to a private hotel room. Get to the private hotel room and you find that you are talking to the hanger-on rather than the star. Talk to the star, and discover they are boring. It's all really too much psychic effort. So the declaration that you are going to "stay in" is a victory for the soul, I believe. It means that, for a night at least, you have put aside the world and its seductions. You have said to yourself, "I don't care." You are going to create your own little paradise of duvets, televisions, and pizzas, your own castle of indolence.
In other news, I have the day off (happy Patriot's Day!), and aside from blogging, I plan to be idle, and maybe even bored.
