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.
With a little luck, the cure for my bout of boredom was a woman named Nikki.
Nikki was, for the most part, not substantively distinct from the countless other women I'd set my eyes on over the years. She was a fitness buff and a dance team instructor at a high school in the suburbs, so while she was maybe a little more lean and cut than I usually went for, variety is the spice of life as they say. I'm serious. You ever wake up with mind control powers, don't restrict yourself to an endless buffet of bikini model types. Play the field. Snag a girl who's a head taller than you. One with more piercings than you'd have thought a person had places to pierce. A black chick with an ass so big it frightens you. And so on -- you get the idea.
Nikki, I guess, wasn't so far outside the conventional. Gorgeous face, body so trim her big tits look almost too perky to be real, thick blonde hair -- but platinum blonde, like she was left on a beach for a decade or two. She even wore smart girl glasses once in a while. When she wanted to look smart, I guess. We had a bit of an age gap between us, wth her only in her late 20's or so, but sue me if my appetites haven't aged as quickly as my bones. (Besides, in her social media profile, she'd described herself as an "old soul," so there.) She was hot, for sure, but still quirky enough to be intriguing.
Now yes, the point of all this was to make a game of it, but I had to cheat at least a little bit at the onset to do some of the groundwork. After all, I didn't want to go to all this trouble only to find out I'd picked a dud. A few years back I'd had a date with this eastern European chick I picked up at the airport, and... I tell ya. Everything seemed normal right up to the moment I got my pants off, and then the poor thing couldn't stop crying. I didn't even want to know what had happened to bring her to that point. Even though I could (and did) reach in and squelch all that ugliness inside her, it definitely killed my mood. Hopefully her next date went better, both for her and for the lucky guy who landed her.
Uninterested in risking a repeat of that unpleasantness, I poked around inside Nikki's head to make sure she was a candidate, and was pleased to find everything healthy and hetero. Nikki liked dudes, was sex-positive, and wasn't in a committed relationship. Yes, yes, I could simply make her straight and single, but that always seemed sorta mean-spirited for one, and for two, the whole point was to give myself a challenge. I'd be breaking the rules of my own game if I started out by making her into someone she wasn't.
With the target in my scopes, I got to work. This wasn't going to be easy, and might not work regardless. Still, for the first time in a long time, maybe I wouldn't look out at all the acres of mindscape out there and feel that same old problem.
***********************************
Nikki blew her whistle and waved the squad over. It was heady, sometimes, how much respect these girls showed her, even now watching her with breathless anticipation for her feedback on their new routine. She'd studied dance since first grade, after all, and had even participated in some professional shows. These girls were right to value her input, as she had helped shape them into one of the top high school dance squads in the state.
"Great work on that, ladies," she opened, but she didn't let their relief stand long. "Tricia, your timing was about a half beat behind on the kicks. Make sure you're leading the music, not letting it lead you. Morgan, great form, but don't forget to smile. Lindsay, dynamite work out there! How many hours of practice did it take you to nail it like that?"
"I dunno. A lot," said Lindsay guardedly.
"Well it paid off, girl. I want you to take the new girls and work with them in a group, show them how it's done. Can you do that for me?"
