It is a dimension as vast as the history of yarn and as timeless as your history class. It is the middle ground between thrill and horror, happiness and sadness, excitement and dread. This is the dimension of no imagination. This is, The Boredom Zone.
If you read my first post on this blog, you’ll remember that I love excitement and adventure. There’s always gotta be something going on for me or it’s time wasted. So as you can imagine, being quarantined at home for five months is more than my mental state can handle. Right Wilson?
In college, it’s easy to avoid boredom. There’s a thousand ways to spend each second of your free time. You can hang out with friends, attend a sports game, go to a wide range of events on campus, there’s always something to do. That’s not to say you won’t go to the boredom zone every once in a while, but you usually don’t stay there for long.
One time, I got really bored in my floor’s lounge and ended up drawing head shots of Homer and Bart Simpson on the white board. I’m not sure what happened in the couple hours I left the lounge, but when I came back to the lounge a couple hours later, I was greeted to this:
I’m guessing some crazy, wily kid got bored too. Either that or an insane person broke into our lounge.
I never really got bored in my college courses thus far (with History being the exception). I’ve found ways to keep myself engaged in those classes and stay awake, which is important when you are living each day on 6 hours of sleep. I have bad sleep habits (though not as bad as some other people / best friends).
But that's college life, it’s meant to be exciting and interesting. At home, getting bored is like an expectation everyday. Boredom is practically perched on my shoulder half the time, waiting to bring me down to its level.
OK maybe my house being boring is an exaggeration. After all, I’m typing this in a room with like 200 video games, a dozen tubs of LEGO’s, and a flat screen T.V. My house is a lot of fun, but being confined within its dimensions can have its effects on the brain and get boring every once in a while.
So what do I do when I get bored?
Usually, I like to go for a run around the neighborhood while listening to music. There’s something about exercise that just takes me to a new world. I like to pretend that I’m somewhere fun and exciting rather than stuck at home (and while I’m pretending, I’m also a billionaire that can go anywhere and do anything he wants). I spend a lot of time going for runs. Usually when I am on a break like this, I go for 2-3 runs a day, rain or shine (or snow, or wind, or hail, or tsunami).
I also like going for bike rides around the neighborhood, especially with my best friend. I remember all those times we would ride around the neighborhood and open up everyone's mail boxes (cause that is what Computer Scientists consider a prank).
Speaking of my friend, he also had different ways of avoiding the boredom zone. Unfortunately, these ways were very… malicious. You see my friend is a genius programmer that loves to write code to mess with other people in his spare time. I remember once he wrote a program that allowed him to control other students' web browsers. We sat in together in Physics class, randomly rick-rolling other students laptops and leaving them so confused.
Sometimes his technological capabilities were really fun. During our Senior year, me and him took this online AP Statistics class. Unfortunately, we were the only one’s taking that class and it would get really boring sitting in the computer lab just him and me. Luckily, my friend found a way to get around the school’s no-game barriers for us to goof off. We played this tank game where you have to shoot the other player. That’s it. It was better than statistics, okay!?
Unfortunately, this technological escape from boredom led him to cross some lines he shouldn’t. The desktops in high school had these applications installed on them that allowed teachers to view the students screen and take control whenever they felt like it. It was basically a safety precaution in case students started getting off task by, for example, looking up The Bee Movie script. Cause that's what us teenagers were into right? Bees? It was all the rave.
One day, my friend got bored and tried to turn these applications off. Surprisingly, he succeeded. But he also broke the computer somehow. The teacher had to call the IT staff and literally tell him to back away from the computer. The IT guys came in and spent the entire day working on that desktop. Luckily, the teacher liked us and didn’t punish us. If only that stopped my friend from messing with their technology (good reader, it did not).
Back to the whole boredom thing. Another way I pass my free time is through writing. I like writing a lot of personal literature like this, there are so many stories for me to tell of my life. I also like writing satire articles, especially about the NFL. There’s this one writer who used to work for a site called Deadspin that would write 32 articles about why each NFL team sucks. Every year. Obviously the articles were over exaggerated, but they made me laugh. I tried writing articles similar to them. They were not as funny (very mean to the other teams though).
The problem I’ve had with boredom is that I’ve recently come across it a lot more than usual. The University of Delaware has an outrageously long winter break. It goes from the middle of December to the middle of February. A two month long hiatus from school may sound fun, until you realize that when all your friends go back to college, you’re still stuck at home. And with the Corona virus pandemic sending us all home till August (at least), I may be going stuck in the boredom zone for a while.
But in a way, boredom is a good problem to have. There are much worse things out in the world to deal with such as physical health and crime. Would you rather be bored out of your mind or sick with the Corona virus? As much as we don’t want to socially distance ourselves, it’s necessary in order for everyone to have that choice. We may be bored right now, but we won’t be forever. Until we do get out of the boredom zone, stay Matt-astic!
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