idle

I used to handle boredom really well. I wrote stories, played guitar, drew pictures and, after I was old enough to drive, went on excursions. My creativity was more industrious than inspired. I don't think I was particularly awesome at any of these things, but I was good enough to keep myself occupied for a while. And I figured if I did them enough, I'd eventually grow to really like doing one, and who knows, maybe it'd get me somewhere.

While it hasn't gotten me far, writing (more acurately editing) does pay my bills and I guess I should be grateful for that. But I'm far from the babbling brook of creativity I once was. I haven't done any fiction work for as long as I can remember, which isn't very long nowadays. And it's not because I haven't had the opportunity. I've had time to do this, I just haven't wanted to.

But now I'm going off track. Now I cure boredom with television (which was always part of the equation), beer and sitting on the Internet. Other than typing at this thing, sometimes I go perusing one of my favorite sites for mindnumbing activity, ThePlaCe.ru. It's a Russian site, so I can't really read anything, and I'm not really sure how I found it, but I've figured out that it provides large, high quality scans of celebrity magazine photos and things of that nature. Many of the images I've posted here have been taken, without credit from there, so I guess it's time I gave them their due, even if the owners of that site will have as hard a time reading this site as I do theirs. When I'm bored, like I was tonight, I sit and click through endless photos of starlets, pop stars, lingerie models, etc. and kind of zone out. It puts me in the same kind of state, more or less, as watching a baseball game between two teams that I care little about: relaxed, occupied and blissfully free of thought.

Sometimes I check out pictures of women I haven't heard of before, but most times I go by old standbys. Tonight, I happened to rifle through their large collection of Britney Spears images when, much to my chagrin, a thought creeped in there. More like a memory, really. That's kind of like a thought.

It was like seven years ago, and I was 22. I rolled downstairs, probably around 3pm after just waking up. I was still working at the comic book store and going to college. I sat down on the green carpet and tuned the 27-inch Sylvania console TV on MTV because that's what I did when I, as my sister put it (taking the line from Reality Bites), was in the bell jar. She's always been the more responsible, sensible and ambitious one. I've always been less proactive, I guess you could say. Anyway, I caught the video for "Hit Me Baby One More Time" for the first...time...and became somewhat aroused (not that I'm particularly proud of that). Then I realized that the face of pop music had once again been altered from scruffy looking dudes in beat up guitars to barely legal sex kittens. I think it happened while I was sleeping.

I was lying on the couch before as my roommate and her boyfriend watched the Lakers in the NBA playoffs and a Macintosh commercial sparked a discussion about desktop calculators for Windows. I said that I use that program to do all my math, and if not that, I use the calculator on my cell phone. I never needed one as a kid, I did it all in my head or on a piece of paper, but now writing down numbers seems too stressful and carrying the one sends me into sweats. The boyfriend mentioned that he checks his cellphone calendar all the time. My roommate showed us up and said she just writes things down, or simply remembers them. It keeps her sharp. I said, "I've gotten so dumb." I can't imagine why.