what me bored?

 I can walk and chew gum at the same time.  Likewise I can be yapping and think carefully and reflect at the same time.  Actually yapping is kind of my way of thinking and reflecting, like using pencil and paper to do arithmetic.  Many years ago I read a maxim that you don't really know anything well unless you write about it.  Thoughts drift in and out of your head, and that's all well and good but you need the concentration of writing to get a firm grip on what you are talking about.  Sometimes what seems to be a brilliant idea evaporates as you attempt to put it into words.  

And I don't see what is so bad about yapping to hear myself yap.  I paint to watch myself paint.  I am the first person to behold my latest masterpiece.  Besides telling a story or revealing a truth, choosing the words, assembling the sentences, watching the cadence, slipping between subjects and then repeating a theme (the flip flops and lawyer thing), all a good time, and hopefully amusing my readers, though apparently not this time.

Myself I find politics endlessly interesting, but I am not going into all the inside baseball on that because I know Old Dog will not be amused.  I might be able to get Beagles into it.  In the grand old days he and I would be snarling and at each others throats, banging those computer keys like a barrelhouse piano morning and evening, evening and morning.  Good times.  I miss those days.

I don't catch the connection between being a psych major and being bored.  I am not often bored, in fact I bore a lot of people by telling them that the only times I was bored was when I was working.  Oh I see here where I said that I found all the recent hoopla about octopi a little boring.  I meant the hoopla not the animal.  

Way back at Gage Park High I sat next to a girl who was a year older than me, and seemed maybe a little wiser than me, and one day the subject of boredom came up.  There was a saying going around at the time in those school spirit pep days of the fifties that a truly intelligent person is never bored, and I brought that up to impress this older woman.  But she was not impressed, she was sort of a proto beatnik, lots of things are boring she answered, would have blown smoke in my face if we were allowed to smoke in Spanish class.  

I was surprised to hear her say something against a commonly held truth at the time, you didn't often go against common wisdom in the fifties.  Everybody liked the same things, Ed Sullivan, to name one, bestselling books, smash hit movies, Life magazine, and they were all boring.

So I was bored as a teenager (but isn't that expected for a teenager?), and later bored when I was working, but other than that I am not often bored.  

Okay maybe a tad bit bored with the cooking instructions, but if the subject had been balloon animals I would have been wide-eyed the whole length of the discourse.

I don't sleep that well these days.  Often like today I go to bed at ten thirty and wake up full awake at two thirty, with nothing to do.  Thanks Old Dog for giving me something to do.  Feeling a little tired now and maybe I can get in a couple more hours before the newspaper arrives.