Wednesday, June 20, 2012

WHAT DO YOU DO WHEN YOU ARE BORED?

It is impossible for me to remain serious when I look at BBC online and see a headline:
 "Southern Baptists pick black head."  My head apparently doesn't work without playing with all the words in a sentence.  It was right up there with the TV announcer who quoted someone saying, "Raise your hands and lay down your arms."

Some of us go through life examining words  I tend to see them inside out, backwards, and for their mixed meanings, find homonyms, heteronyms, contranyms and the many other '...nyms'. Thinking of puns is a constant pursuit.  When I am stuck with someone whose words come out slowly it is torture but gives me time to pull what they say apart.  I guess these thoughts brought me to what I have done when I am somewhere with nothing to do.  Boredom is not something I do well so I do things in my head or on paper. I write backwards, upside-down, and if I am really bored, upside-down and backwards.  If boredom continues, I resort to writing with my left hand.  I have counted bald heads when I was forced to sit through a sermon in a language I didn't understand, count ceiling tiles, light bulbs in fancy light fixtures hanging from the ceiling, 

We have all been doodlers.  My doodles are more apt to be words than pictures.  If I'm stuck for a long time I might take a word, name or place to see how many other words I can make out of it.  If I'm annoyed I will make little caricatures of the person who is boring me.  I'm sure professors would not have appreciated my efforts but when they were really good, I actually took notes.

Lastly, I make lists.  I have lists about 'good things about getting old',  useless things people say, the utterances between words as they are thinking like ';you know' and 'um'.

What I have never understood is when I ask someone what they are thinking they tell me, "nothing".  I've never understood how someone can nothing in their mind

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