Winner Takes It All

Because jobs in my field are hard to find these days, I've decided my financial plan is simply to win PowerBall. It's a nice jackpot this week: $122 million if you take the cash rather than the annuity. Even after taxes, that's, well, it's enough money for the rest of my life. I bought 10 tickets, so clearly I'm going to win this thing. In spare moments, I've been trying to figure out what I'm going to do with some of that money. If a check for $122 million won't burn a hole in your pocket, then nothing will.

Of course I'll buy a new car, and book a trip first-class on Emirates Air so I can experience the private sleeping compartment. That's maybe $200K, though, leaving me with an awful lot of change. I really like my current house even though it lacks a pool, so I'll re-landscape and have one put in. That still leaves me with way too much money. One advantage of spectacular wealth would be my ability to avoid winter altogether should I so choose, so I decided that I'd buy a winter house someplace warm.

Because I love mid-century modern architecture, Palm Springs seems like the most logical winter destination. Plus, I could attend the Indian Wells tennis tournament every year. So, yesterday I went onto the Palm Springs MLS to see about dropping a couple of million and helping to revive the California economy.

Can you imagine my joy when I discovered that for $3.25 million I can purchase Twin Palms, Frank Sinatra's actual house? This feels like an incredible bargain; it even comes furnished. I can't wait to have sex in Frank Sinatra's bed, or for my cat to shed in Frank Sinatra's ugly chair. My dog has a weird propensity to crap on concrete rather than grass, and Frank Sinatra's house has an amazing patio for him to defile. Twin Palm means family fun for everyone.

The drawing is tonight, so I can go pick up my check tomorrow and buy the place over the weekend. If you don't have any Labor Day plans, come fly away to Palm Springs.

The Real Reality Show

In a fit of boredom I watched The Hills last night. If you've never seen it, you're probably either smart or lucky. It's a "scripted reality" show, whatever that means, and it's probably the dumbest show on TV. The "plot" centers around a bunch of self-involved twentysomethings having fake conversations about each other at night spots around Los Angeles. As far as I can tell, that's the show's entire premise: relatively telegenic people talking about each other while they eat or get drunk. The experience led me to wonder why my life hasn't been made into a reality show, "scripted" or otherwise. I'm at least as interesting as that bunch of dimwits.

Here, for example, would be the past 24 hours of my life:

Shot of me pinned down in bed, dog holding down my legs, cat holding down my arms. VO: I knew it was morning and time to get up. What I didn't know is how much I would change by the end of the day.

Shot of me at the computer, while the dog jumps up and down and runs in circles around me. VO: The internet is so interesting! I knew it was time to take a shower and leave the house, though. I smelled.

Shot of me in my car. VO: It's time to get gas!

Camera pans through my living room, close-up of me lying on the couch reading the NY Times. VO: Monday's op-ed pages suck. I knew I was hungry, but I didn't know what I would eat.

Montage of me pulling things from the refrigerator while the cat rubs against my legs and the dog stares longingly. VO: Anjou pears are a healthy and delicious snack. Will I ever get my work done for the day? I wonder if anyone is out to lunch right now, talking about me.

Cut to shot of empty restaurant. No one is talking about me.

Evening, living room in darkness. Camera finds me lying on my couch, watching LBJ documentary. As screen fades to black, VO: How could I have known that morning that the evening would find me tired all over again? It was a lesson I had to learn the hard way.

End credits.

Next week on "A Real Boring Life": interior of diner, where I am sitting at the counter reading the paper. VO: I wonder if they'll poach eggs for me today?

Blogging To Go, Please

Sometimes writing an entire post containing both ideas and words feels like too complex a proposition, even for me, who is pretty much never without words. For those of us who eschew paragraphs and desire either immediacy or the visual, there's Tumblr, a site for micro-blogging. Some users include short written posts, but many instead create narratives or evoke emotions by posting photographs or images. Tumbler seems to aim to be a lot like Twitter, where the longer blog post is replaced by a series of updates throughout the day.

I'm not convinced anyone wants to keep up with my daily activities, which involve reading, writing, editing, and making sure the dog pees when he's out in the yard, but fans of social networking all over the world are making a go of this kind of communication. It's sort of like sending an instant message out to the world, and seeing where it sticks.

I recently spent some time exploring Tumblr, and while diary-like sites by 20 year-olds abound, I also found some little blogs that are worth checking out. Somewhere out there exists a man who realized that if Garfield were removed from each day's Garfield comic, we would be left with a daily meditation on alienation and paranoia. The images on Garfield Minus Garfield are indeed scary, haunting, and pretty funny.

I can see becoming addicted to the Cutest Puppy Ever site, a production of the "Cute Puppy Institute." I can see hours of my life wasted trying to figure out how much of this site is irony, how much sincerity. Today I'm going with 90% irony, but that's because I'm in a mood to feel good about humankind.

White people complain about the darndest things, and you can find some of them collected on White Whine. It really does suck when Whole Foods is out of arugula, you know?

One final link for you comes from Blogspot rather than Tumblr, and it's something you may have heard of, but I recommend a visit if you haven't been there before. Post Secret is a project where people anonymously send in a postcard, either storebought or handmade, on which they've written a secret, and each day some of these are posted. This site will tell you more about our collective state of mind than any Gallup Poll, I promise.

It's a damp and rainy day, so go ahead, waste some time in cyberspace.

And You Think You're Bored

I stumbled across this site yesterday. It's the funniest thing I've seen in awhile. Put your mouse over the blue word and click. You'll be glad you did.

On Boredom

I read somewhere once that the average American changes careers four times, the average American woman seven times. I'm assuming the higher number for women has to do with time off to have kids, although I haven't had any children and right now I'm contemplating career number four. I can only speak for myself and will say that the reason for the career changes is incredibly easy to pinpoint. I get bored. What's odd is that I've managed to make several careers out of doing things I love to do, things I willingly do in my spare time. Why then do I get bored once those activities become tied to my income?

Here's another way of looking at it. When I'm at home, I never get bored. I can amuse myself endlessly reading, writing, watching a movie, talking to the dog, whatever - a day goes by before I know it. Move my butt to an office, though, and the very same activities - surfing the web, or writing copy, or even making phone calls - become torture. I spent the last couple of months at my last corporate job staring at the wall most of the day, dreaming of quitting. And now I spend some time every day staring at the wall, dreaming of what I'll do with my life next.

Boredom is undoubtedly a large component of all lives, and one that gets little attention. No one wants to admit to getting or being bored; it feels like a failure of will, or of imagination. And it feels selfish, given the quality of contemporary lives and the variety of amusements available to us. Slaving 12 hours a day in a sweatshop wouldn't leave much leisure time for boredom, after all. In that sense boredom is a commodity available only to those who can afford it. I should be thankful that I have the luxury of my ennui.

Or is that not it at all? By that theory, a homesteader would have never been bored because of the continuous labor involved in building and keeping the home, and in growing and harvesting crops. The single mother who works three jobs in order to pay the bills would never be bored. The manual laborer would never be bored. Yet accounts of homesteading include discussions of the relentless loneliness and boredom associated with life lived in that kind of isolation. I have a diary kept by a Pennsylvania farm wife at the turn of the last century and reading it makes evident the fact that she was incredibly bored even though her days were filled with labor. Perhaps boredom is simply part of the human condition.

Perhaps the problem is that we are meant to live in packs, traveling together and subsisting communally. Once we decided to break off into smaller family units and stay in one place to raise crops it was all over for us. Maybe we're meant to be constantly on the move. Hunting and gathering doesn't make much sense these days, so I may as well just keep changing careers.