Meh...

I got bored today.

Let me let that sink in for a few of you. I (me, Denise, squirrel girl, shiny objects amaze and amuse me) got bored today.

I rarely get bored and it always comes as a sort of shock to me when it happens. Talking to my mother last week she described me as the most "self-contained" of her children. I have never needed someone else to amuse me or play with me. I can sit patiently waiting for things for a very long time. Now usually, to be fair, I have a book with me. And I have been known to read the owner's manuals in cars when left too long waiting without one. But I've never much needed a lot of activity to find something to keep myself busy. And when I do start to get bored I just move on to something else. So I don't often get bored.

When Brent and I first started dating he told me his parents used to tell him that "only boring people get bored" if he would tell them he was bored. Which I thought was about the worst thing you could say to someone ever! Because everyone gets bored sometimes. Everyone. Even those of us who make up stories inside our heads for fun get bored.

So anyway...today I got bored. C and I were waiting at the dealership while they did a maintenance check on the car. I had figured it would take about 45 minutes and as they were closing in on an hour and half I was done. I didn't sleep well last night so reading my book wasn't working out too well. Stephen Hawking's idea on the theory of EVERYTHING is hard to digest through a foggy brain. I didn't want to play any of the games on my cell phone. C was playing his own game and didn't think me kicking him was all that fun, though it amused me and I realized...I'm bored...

So I started to think about it and decided that I was bored because I was over the time I had allotted in my head for sitting there. I had other errands to run today and a story I had been working on before I left the house and other things I was ready to go do and sitting at the dealership was over! So then I pondered...am I really bored or am I just restless? When made me think of the Bob Seger lyric from Night Moves  "we were just young and restless and bored..." and wondered how often people mistake restlessness for boredom. Are they really bored or are they just ready to move on to something else? And is that the same thing? Is being done with something the same as being bored with it? What would the line be between restless and bored? Would restless mean you just wanted to go do something else for a little bit and bored be that you never wanted to do it again? And how long would you have to be bored before you did something else? Like if you were really and truly bored with everything around you how long could you exist like that before you changed something? And could you ever really be bored with everything? Wouldn't that be crossing the line into depression? Which isn't boredom. It's a whole different thing. You might feel bored, but you were like bored cubed. Not just regular bored. And....

Then the service tech came to get us because the car was finished so I didn't have to be bored anymore. Thank goodness...longest five minutes of my life!