revues of a cluttered mind

On Boredom

You may be bored but you’re never boring…

Wedged in a lackluster routine, you refuse to declare a state of boredom calamity. Still, you manage to pull yourself together and set-off to another day. Jumpstarting with caffeine, you can almost feel the hot coffee homogenizing with the boredom churning in your insides.

You wonder why you even drink the same black concoction with the same laxative effect the moment you feel the need to put anything in your stomach gone sullen from the 12-hour overnight fast. The strong bitter taste you fancy does not even come close to overcoming your own bitterness.

You flick the radio on, tune-in the same station, pretending you are actually amused and somehow loosened-up by the pulsating sound waves. Then you hit the shower with hopes of washing out every speck of boredom clinging in and through your skin. You take your time, too proud to concede that you are indeed a slave of your own making, a dray horse of what some people call mechanical time and for the next five hours set yourself to the task of finishing a particular load at work before you go out for lunch at exactly the same time, at the very same dining hall with your friends at work.

Between morning and noon, time seemed to stretch an eternity. You trick yourself that you are in fact enjoying what you’re doing, even sharing a few laughs with your friend on the other side of your cubicle. Then again, just when you thought you’ve dashed your way 100 meters from it, boredom stealthily inches closer, fortunately, your day is almost over.

But what have you been looking forward to at the end of each day anyway? And why do you end-up dragging on a drudge still feeling awkwardly pointless? Perhaps, folks simply need to go through such slumps to better appreciate the splendor of normalcy. Even so, when you get the impulse of wanting to experience anything close to the extraordinary—go buy yourself a one-way ticket to break away from boredom and for once, frustrate the company of misery.

Now, that’s my kid, bored but never boring…

OBITER DICTA

On our way back from the hospital, my mother and I were comfortably seated at the passenger’s seat when a passing pedicab plunged me deep in thought. To the pedicab’s rear, this blameless one-liner was written: Apparent loss is real gain.

Cynics out there must be screaming. The aphorism is swelling with optimism to be real. Well, what can I do? Aside from the obvious economic downturn to a “road to perdition” our country is facing, just recently I received this message from a dear friend: “I find nothing more depressing than optimism.”(Paul Fussell) For a moment, I thought, my friend must have ESP, as right at that time, I was nursing ambivalence: am I a quasi-optimist or a blasted skeptic?

Apparent loss is real gain. From the quasi-optimist point of view, it would be wonderful to believe that indeed, some of “God’s refusals are His real mercies”. That nothing can be all wrong because, “even a clock that has stopped running is right twice in a day.” If a little bit of Hollywood trivia could convince Cassandras out there, you must be familiar that most of the characters in Friends, were cast off in some other popular TV shows then? Take Chandler for instance, according to sources (huh?), he wanted to be part of the Melrose Place, hoping to snatch the role of “Billy” but was R-E-J-E-C-T-E-D (do you even think it would have suited Matthew Perry?) Apparently, Lisa Kudrow was also up for a role in a different show but was not accepted. In their case, their apparent loss was real gain, as they would not have bagged their respective roles in Friends and last a decade, doing something they were simply born to be part of. But then John Mayer sings, “Everything happens for a reason, is no reason not to ask myself, if I am living it riiiiiiiight….”, and you backtrack to the other side.

Apparent loss is real gain. It’s now calamity howler’s turn on the rostrum (huh?). Quit wearing your rose-colored spectacles my child. Everything is not what it seems. Why fool yourself into believing that you can actually make things happen? Come-on, you surely have seen the worst. People are born losers and you’re not about to drown yourself with quixotic ideas and end-up deeper in the mud…

Static…I hear static…I’m losing signal….

If we judge this based on the previous depositions, perhaps you’d say, the master Pollyannaism wins. Then again, the Cassandras insist, it was merely due to a lack of more ‘physical evidence’.

‘guess we have just witnessed a concession and we now rest our case.

The Plagiarist

If everything’s been said, then one way or another, we must all be guilty of plagiarism however unintentional. After two weeks of reviewing literature on a particular research project, you can only say you’ve had enough of trying-to-be-careful-not-commit-plagiarism-blues to last you a lifetime. Okay, that’s a rather inflated verbal exercise especially if it was your choice to be doing that anyway. Now, is it even about making a choice? the Elephant Vanishes: “It might not have been a question of right or wrong. Which is to say that wrong choices can produce right results and vice versa. I myself have adopted the position that in fact, we never choose anything. Things happen. Or not.” Splendid writer, Murakami… Anyone crazy should read Murakami…

Going back to our opening statement, anybody can disagree. Ever heard about that girl, Miss H, trying to get exclusive rights, some sort of a patent for the expression “That’s hot,” which she utters with an apparently expressionless tone. Look at how commercial this age has gotten. What gives? Does she expect people to purchase her words? Poor consumers.

If everything’s been said, then what’s the use for saying it again? What do you even get for saying anything for that matter? A case of plagiarism is one thing. Giving people the wrong impression is another, but didn’t someone say, “To be great is to be misunderstood?”

With so much going on around, your personal woes are the least of the world’s concerns. Every time you watch the television, or when you read a book, you get the feeling of how little you know about the world and life as a whole.

And yet, everything’s been said.

You could say it doesn’t matter if everything’s been said (or written) the one who speaketh makes the difference.