Conquering Boredom

Entertainment.

Part of what’s so exciting about diving headfirst into 2010 is the fact that we’re finally getting into the decade wherein a lot of the lame Tom Clancy novels I read during middle school were set, giving me the ability to laugh at their outlandish predictions of what human technology would be able to accomplish in the course of 20 years. One series in particular, Tom Clancy’s Net Force, tracked the efforts of an elite team of federal agents who patrolled the Internet in the 2010s, which by that point is accessible by a full body virtual reality hookup that rendered the Internet as a vast three dimensional expanse through which users would wander, gathering information as they did.

Today, Firefox choked trying to load Wikipedia.

It’s been a pretty crazy decade. For the past ten years, everything has been getting smaller and faster* to the point that games which in 2000 required all the power a Nintendo 64 could muster now can fit on a handheld device so small you could hide it inside your own ass and probably forget it was even there. To that end, I feel as though 2000-2009 could be considered “The Decade Of Conquering Boredom.”

*There’s a sex joke here, waiting to be found.

Don’t get me wrong – even in the year 2000 it was sort of irresponsible to live in America and suggest that you were bored at any given time. One of the most profitable industries in America is the one that exists to try to and keep us from being bored. For example, turn on your TV right now and start flipping through the channels – sooner or later you’re going to see an episode of COPS. At that point, it’s a scientific fact that you won’t be bored for between one and 22 minutes.

However, while at the time boredom had been conquered in the home, the fact was that millions of people spent entire minutes of their day without anything to occupy their minds – riding the bus, walking to school, driving – and needed something to stave off the inevitable horror of being alone with their own thoughts. A GameBoy alone would not cut it – not anymore, at least.

So along came the iPod and wireless Internet and cell phones that played video games and phones inside iPods and now here we are. The shining light of entertainment has taken great steps to cleanse the land of actual, certifiable solitude. I mean, who just sits in a park and watches people walk by anymore? Only hobos and pedophiles, both of whom probably have all kinds of entertaining things going on inside their heads without an iPhone’s assistance.

While this propagation of tiny entertainment technology has been great for most people, the real victims here are men. Yes, men. Please, allow me to explain.

In the 1996 film Swingers, Jon Favreau (when he was thin) is at a bar with his friend Vince Vaughn (when he was thin), trying to get over his ex girlfriend. Having had his confidence bolstered by his friends over the last 80 minutes or so, Favreau is ready to get back into the dating world, and looking around the bar, he sees this:

Not a great picture. Just rent the damn movie. Blu-Ray.

Now, if you’re looking to meet somebody in a bar and you see Heather Graham, and she’s not already sticking her tongue down some ex-JV football star’s throat, you’re having an incredibly lucky day. Hell, even if you see Heather Graham and she is making out with some other guy, I’d still recommend buying a lottery ticket – I mean, c’mon, it’s Heather Graham. All I’m saying is, while I haven’t been to a lot of bars, I’ve been to enough to know that Heather Graham is not the sort of person you’d expect to see in one.

She’s all alone, they make eye contact, he goes over to her, there’s some swingdancing, Vince Vaughn makes an asshole of himself, and Favreau gets her number. It’s a happy ending – like any ending that involves Heather Graham.

This scene, more than NHL Hockey ’94 and the fact that swingdancing was cool, definitively makes Swingers dated. Still a great movie, yes, but dated.

In 2009, if by some fantastic coincidence a lovely specimen of womanhood such as Heather Graham were sitting at a bar without at least three men clinging to her like horny barnacles, she would not be just staring at her cocktail, all but inviting Jon Favreau to come over and entertain her. No, she’d have her cell phone out, and she’d be texting one of her friends, or playing a game, or checking her email. She’d be reaching out through social networking in search of something more entertaining than her current surroundings, and putting away her phone in favor of Jon Favreau, who at his best wasn’t especially good looking anyway, would probably seem like a drag.

Boredom is the building block of how people meet. Our cell phones and iPods, while trying to keep us entertained, deprive us of the desperate need to talk to somebody for lack of anything better to do – in essence, they give us something better to do. When choosing between meeting new people or texting the ones we already know, it’s pretty much a given which one somebody is going to choose.

Two and a half years ago, I was sitting in a waiting room in the journalism school with several other people, preparing to audition for the student public access TV station. It was highly boring in there. Sitting next to me was a guy in 15-year-old red and black striped sweatpants, a 1995 Rose Bowl sweatshirt, and a jean jacket who smelled profusely of cigarettes. I thought for all the world that he was a hobo or a male prostitute who had wandered onto campus in a coked up stupor, and wished that I’d brought my iPod so I could pretend to be busy in case he tried to talk to me.

When, inevitably, he did, I wound up getting to know Mike Whitman, Smoker of Cigarettes, and one public access TV show later we’re looking for a nice little fixer-upper somewhere in Vermont. He’s no Heather Graham, but I think you get the point.

Truman Capps admits that, in spite of all this, he wouldn’t turn up his nose at an iPhone if Apple makes a deal with Verizon.