When I was a kid, I remember being bored on a pretty regular basis. "A good problem to have" is what my dad always called it. I suppose for him, it must have seemed that way. After all, a bored kid is the main ingredient in a manual labor pie. My dad had a passion for curing me of that boredom. The man never seemed to run out of ways to fill my idle time. Vacuuming, dusting, dishes, sweeping, mopping, scrubbing, tidying... and that was just the indoors stuff.
The man owned a two acre plot of land. There was a
lot
of outdoors stuff.
Now I don't say that to complain. My childhood was a happy one, and even if those chores never inculcated in me a desire to keep my own home so fastidious as his, they certainly taught me perspective. Not so much the perspective he meant to teach me, I suppose; elbow grease is still not something I produce in any impressive quantity. Same goes for cleanliness, for discipline, or even the simple capacity to shut my yapper when I get to whining about petty troubles. No, what I learned from those days, more than anything else, was this: how to turn drudgery into something halfway entertaining.
Because what else is a kid to do? I was a kid before the era of smartphones or ipods. So when I was set to the task of pulling every last weed on those acres, bent over with my ass in the air in the scorching sun getting eaten alive by mosquitoes ripping up every unauthorized plant I could find... I learned to make a game of it.
What else was there to do, right? Challenge myself to pick the thistles sans gloves -- an incentive structure that promoted excellence. Practice the moonwalk while vacuuming. Beating the dust out of the rugs put me in the batter's box at the world series. Cleaning my room became an exhaustive search for the buried treasure that, legend held, was enshrined somewhere in this temple -- perhaps beneath the Pit of Laundry. Elaborate gesticulation inserted into the process of washing the dishes was Mr. Miyagi's way of turning me into the ultimate karate fighter.
(It did, once or twice, result in a broken dish, but I reiterated to my parents that all life was about balance.)
Fast forward to today. Boredom is an omnipresent threat lurking on the borders of my consciousness. I don't have much, if any, chores to attend to, but even the most fulfilling routine, with sufficient repetition, becomes precisely that -- routine. Now I'm in my forties, more than comfortable financially, gainfully employed when I feel like being gainfully employed, and by any standard, living the dream.
Literally, in fact. And not figuratively literally, but literally literally. See, twenty-some years back, I had this dream where I could probe the thoughts and feelings of others. Only when I woke up... it was still there. I could sense my then girlfriend's grumpiness; my boss's smug satisfaction as he chewed out one of my coworkers for a petty infraction; the impotant rage of a nearby driver as his lane slowed to a stand-still. I'm not proud to say I went ahead and pilfered a gold star idea from a colleague competing for a promotion and proposed it up the chain right before he could. Promotion achieved, pay raise secured, girlfriend pampered and indulgence reciprocated.
Sure enough, with a little concentration, I learned to alter those thought patterns. Like anything, it got easier with practice, and as months became years, it became rather
too
easy. I quit my job, but left the firm with a golden parachute of massive proportions. Rent payments for my deluxe skyrise pad in the city were no longer required upon the realization of my new landlord that I had saved his life. (Or saved his family's lives? I don't even remember any more.) My girlfriend was a nice girl, and pretty-ish, but I didn't kid myself about my capacity to stay faithful with these new tricks up my sleeve. I cut her loose shortly before I failed to stave off the temptation, cosseting my ego by gifting her a handsome, well-to-do young stud to replace me. Then to reward myself for my generosity, I brought home a nice tasty professional cheerleader.
For a long while, I forgot all about that "good problem" of my upbringing. I mean, how big of an asshole would someone have to be to get a gift like mine and have the audacity to complain about it? About anything, really. It could solve nearly any problem, and even when my own biology was on the fritz, it meant the best treatment from the best doctors as their highest priority. I got to go anywhere, meet anyone, have anything, screw anybody.
That's not to say there were no drawbacks. Not quite. After all, the more a person has, the more paranoid they're apt to be about protecting it. It's lonely, sometimes, not being able to tell anyone about this power of mine, to have even my closest friends and family in the dark about what all I can do -- at least not without blanking their memory after or inventing an excuse for them to cling to secrecy. An unfortunate necessity, though. Nobody wants to go through their day worried about what insane methods a concerned citizen might use to eliminate someone like me for the supposed greater good, or to extort favors, or whatever else.
Even so, living this particular secret has been a net amazing experience.
Only...
OK, just try to hear me out. We all have those dreams of winning the lottery, right? Likewise, we've all probably had some sanctimonious douche canoe remind us as we rattled off our lottery dreams that most lottery winners actually wind up miserable, that money only buys happiness up to a certain extent. Well, today, I am my own sanctimonious douche canoe it looks like, because... I hate to say it, but there's some truth to it. Having everything and earning nothing actually does get tiresome after a while. Like, imagine your favorite food at your favorite restaurant. Great, huh? Mouth-watering and perfectly prepared. Now imagine that you got to eat that whenever you wanted. So you start to eat it every other meal. For weeks. Months.
Years
. At what point does a treat cease to become a treat? It's Halloween, except your parents owned a costume shop and a candy store and you had a spare key to both.
So yeah, here I am, two decades and change into this perfect life, and... so help me, I'm beginning to have that good problem again. But lucky for me, my dear old dad unwittingly taught me how to cope.