Boredom: The act of being "bored," further defined as the process by which boredom is cultivated, which in it of itself is an infinite loop of definitions and pretty boring. Every summer it comes like a huge hurricane of lassitude, a mesocyclone of monotony, a tempest of tedium...a whole lot of meteorological nothing-to-do. Unless there is an actual storm, in which case the lightning provides some mild entertainment.
But even then, those light shows are often short-lived, and with July 4th come and gone, my visually phantasmagoric diversions are limited. I have to use words like phantasmagoric and lassitude to spice things up. Oh heck, who am I kidding, even my "Word of the Day" calendar is getting uninteresting.
The vicissitude of this summer's fortune continues to fuddle me. It's not entirely uninteresting, just yet. All right, I'm putting it away.
Why are recent summers so boring compared to the ones of my youth? When I was younger, if the lightning wasn't bright enough, I'd make an aluminum foil suit and jump into the storm. I would then usually be reprimanded and sent to my room, but the point is, I wasn't bored. If I was, I had a wonderful faculty called imagination, and while it usually got me into trouble -- a la walking lightning rod -- it certainly stemmed my boredom. What do I do now, under similarly stale circumstances? I go to my local library. No imagination.
And no, I didn't even get any reading done. I picked out a ton of books ranging from an Italian language book to the essential math of John Nash to a collection of Yeats poems, all out of academic curiosity. I tried reading them there, but apparently the Chantilly Regional Library doesn't have the 5th Floor of Alderman Stacks "Silence is Golden or I'll kill you" mentality, or I was being chased by a gang of very large high school kids.Either way, it didn't work out.
I went home to try my luck, but my mind's voice was deafened by my brothers' cries of anguish while playing Halo 2 on Xbox Live (I get the impression they're not that good). When I finally found an adequate place to read, I realized it was the summer and I was trying to learn. I promptly returned the books and went back home with nothing to do. Some may tell you learning is fun, but they live cloistered, isolated lives and should not be encouraged. Instead, I went home and found a nice, cloistered, and isolated spot in my room and thought about nothing for a while. Which gave me a great thought: What better way to recapture the lost imagination of my youth than watching "The NeverEnding Story?"
"Great" was a bit of an overstatement. My buddies and I picked up the movie one day after work and decided to partake in some collective nostalgia. The funny thing is, while we thought the movie would bring back our youthful imagination and whimsy, the movie actually required more imagination, whimsy and drugs than any of us had or were willing to take to even begin to sift through its intrinsic disjointedness. Instead of reliving our childhood flights of fancy, it pretty much decimated our once-perfect perception of the movie. On the plus side, I did get the obligatory chuckle from reading the back of the DVD box: "NeverEnding Story huh? Looks more like 92 minutes runtime to me. Zing!" Yes, that was the plus side.
A few wacky experiments later and I came to the conclusion that I couldn't relive those days long gone, and that I should never screw around with time travel. I've come to terms with the inevitability of growing older -- life can't always be a carnival ride, you can't always get what you want and libraries can be surprisingly dangerous. And though I know I can't go back to the days of aluminum foil jump suits, Nerf-gun firefights, and Fire-gun Nerf fights (at least without violating a number of causality laws and destroying the fabric of existence), there is still a lot to look forward to back in C-ville.
Until then, I'll simply have to accept the slower pace of things here at home. And sure, while the free laundry, free food service, free living space, in-house gym, complimentary big screen HDTV and surround system, free wireless, pinball machine, on-demand video rental service, free automobile and Segway Human Transporter are nice, I do envy those of you who are reading this from Charlottesville. Why, upon retrospection, I'm not so sure. I think the water tastes better there, maybe. In any event, I am excited about getting back and being busy, but in the mean time, I'll enjoy the verisimilitude of hometown leisure. But I'm tossing that damn calendar.
Josh Cincinnati can be reached at cincinnati@cavalierdaily.com.
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