For a greeting, it has a lot of room for improvement. For example, there's the total lack of....well, of actual greeting; no acknowledgement of the other person as an individual, no inquiry as to how their day has been or what you've been up to. Nonetheless, my friend Krystal* used it every single time she started a conversation with me, be it over instant messenger, upon running into one another after a university class, or on one of our somewhat rare weekend forays to a bar or club.
"Cat, I'm bored."
The thing is, as friends, we knew one another well enough to forego the ritualistic hello-how-are-you, and as a person with a spine I'm quite capable of conversationally fending for myself, so, whatever this may say about me, it wasn't the self-centeredness that frustrated me to the point of, finally, allowing contact between us to fade. Nope, it was the boredom.
Call me judgemental, call me condescending,
Reading to your kids teaches them to read to themselves; giving them a sketchpad and a crayon once they get out of time-out for drawing on the walls with your lipstick teaches them to constructively exercise creativity; perusing a magazine or, simply, reflecting upon your thoughts while waiting for your turn at the doctor's office provides a positive example of entertainment as creation rather than consumption. Maybe, before the exponential boom in technology, such skills proved easier to osmose from one's surroundings as a form of what Neil Gaiman in Neverwhere calls "white knowledge, which is like white noise but more useful."
Nowadays, though, some external source of communication waits so often at one's fingertips that ennui is just a touchscreen away - not only if someone who hasn't first been taught, and then proceeded to practice, the art of entertaining themselves, finds themselves suddenly sans access, but also in the entertainment products themselves. TV shows, video games, texting, instant messaging - they all become, used in immoderation, their own form of background noise. The thing about learning to entertain oneself is that entertainment, like anything else, gives back what you put into it, so if you sit there just blindly consuming it you don't really get anything in return.
And what do you do then? You IM, text, call, or chase down a friend and ask THEM to entertain you! Because adulthood? Independence? Self-reliance? What on earth do THOSE mean? A friend is just an advanced form of dancing monkey, right?** And the nice thing about friends is that if they get going on one of their own interests that doesn't converge with yours, by which I mean isn't tailor-made to suit your every whim and world-view, you can just declare that that's boring, or silly, or whatever the critique-du-jour might be and they'll psychically know what to talk about instead!
Oh, no, wait. They won't. They'll just get exasperated with you acting like an overgrown child and, eventually, leave you to your mind-numbing boredom. Despite my previously ranted-about beefs with idioms and bon mots, the ubiquitous They are right in at least one respect; bored people are boring.
Thus I beg of you - please, for your own sakes and everyone else's, learn to entertain yourself. Don't buy into the mass-produced ideal of "fun;" that has its place but it's a one-trick pony. Invest in your surroundings. Write, draw, think, make. Read a book, watch a movie - but don't just sit there and absorb it, put yourself into it. You'll get so much more out of it and, in turn, have more to offer in conversation and in friendship.
This r
*Name changed because I'm not that much of a twerp.
**Can - and more importantly, will - someone please, please explain to me what's supposed to be so awesome about dancing monkeys?
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