How my boredom will kill you…

Its been two almost two months since the vacations started and since then, I've been waging war. Against Boredom. Although I've had a few victories in some minor, irrelevant battles, it is with great sadness that I wish to say that I've now lost and been taken prisoner. Life in a PoW camp isn't easy, and especially when you have such a formidable captor, escape is impossible, and eventually I will die.

College students like me are the most susceptible people to boredom, and the story of the guy bringing along an assault rifle in his lunch box and gunning down his mates in some American University after an argument whether Portugal is in Australia, or an eye infection; is proof. We're an easily confused bunch, with the attention span of a goldfish, and I'm no different.

What an average person would do during a vacation is catch up on lost sleep, watch a few movies and read some books. But since this is what I do anyway, I'm really lost and have no idea what to do with so much time on my hands. (I must confess, that is partly the reason why I'm doing this - blogging). Reading newspapers is fun - for a minute, until you're done with the comics, there's never anything worth watching on TV, and when you've exhausted the other options of watching some sitcoms, standing on your head, juggling eggs, scooping up broken eggs, making an omelette, and then throwing up; which took me half an hour to do, it dawned on me that this was going to be a Long vacation.

The next thing I could think of doing was, doing all that over again, properly, this time. So I sit myself with a cup of coffee, bring out the newspaper, and then my neighbour's, after having nicked it; and spent an hour reading and re-reading adverts and catalogues for dining tables, crockery sets and hair growth clinics; recipies for scrambled eggs; and a whole bunch of other things that in no way would affect me, you, or anybody else I know. On TV, I watched Nigella Lawson making cookies (YUM!), convinced myself that the Nicer-Dicer from TeleBrands was humanity’s greatest achievement since inventing the wheel and making a fire, and then watched a Music Television channel that showed no music, but did make a great deal about some guys driving a car. I could then stand on my head for a whole minute longer than I could earlier and didn't throw up the scrambled eggs I made.

Boredom then led me to the phone- I called up friends I hadn't talked to for years, and then went on to listen to their stories of how they've ended up in some Siberian labour camp of a college and how their professors were descendants of Nazis who escaped the Nuremberg trials. I gave them my sympathy, and said goodbye, until the same time next year, when I will call them up again, either forgetting this time's experience, or fully willing to go through it again.

Happily though, now things look a bit brighter. Two more weeks to go and I do think I'll make it to the end. I cannot wait to get back to college, and then, a week in, start yearning for the vacations again. Seriously speaking though, I'd stay away from public places if I were you, because the last week is the hardest, and with so many like me on the loose, you'd never know when one of us might lose it and decide to make a shopping mall our very own private shooting range.