Things to Do When You’re Really Bored

Now that the weather is finally getting warmer and you’re doing far less shivering and stamping your feet to avoid frostbite,

you may find yourself looking for ways to fill the time. As a public service, here are some ideas.

1) Go through the grocery shelves and pick up a dry roasted food you’ve never tried before. Dry roasted chic peas weren’t too bad. Dry roasted seaweed? I’ll let you try that one yourself.

2) Try to deliberately drop your keys. Considering how often keys drop out of my hands you’d think this would be easier than it is. Is this evidence of key sentience?

3) Stand on a busy street corner and refuse to drink anything before you find someone who actually wants to have a star named after them from that stupid company that advertises on the radio.

3a) Wait, that’s not a thing to do when you’re really bored; that’s something to do when you want to die of thirst.

4) Read aloud an instruction manual from an appliance made in China, and note all the unintentional humor.

4a) Fair is fair. Take a class in Chinese and watch the Chinese speakers hide their amusement at your pronunciation.

5) Listen to an hour of Sean Hannity on the radio and count the number of times he miss-uses the word, literally. My number was 3 which should be pro-rated to 9 as I had to shut it off after 20 minutes. It’s figuratively mind-blowing that they let that guy broadcast.

6) Take a friend to a courtroom during a trial and sit near the jury box. Periodically hold up a sign that says, acquit, and have your friend periodically hold up a sign that says, convict. See who gets thrown out of the courtroom first.

7) Take a walk in the park and watch the squirrels. When you see a squirrel on the ground, cross his path so that you are between him and the tree he just left. I’ve only done this with upstate New York squirrels, so I don’t know if this happens everywhere, but the rodents of Albany freak.

8) Sew an orange vest and put it on a stuffed animal. Then carry it around and tell people it’s your service animal.

8a) Take the vest off the stuffed animal and put it on yourself. Then go to Home Depot. Do the same thing with a black and white stripped shirt at Foot Locker.

9) Stand outside a government building with a sign that says, “Yeah!” If someone asks you what you’re protesting, say, “You’ve got a point.” Then take out a magic marker and change your sign to “Heck Yeah!”

10) Stare a cat in the eye until he or she looks away. It makes you feel like you’ve established dominance, but the cat still won’t come when you call it.

It may also poop on your pillow.

11) Dance all by yourself in front of a dog. Dance until he turns his head in that universal canine gesture that means, “Humans are inscrutably odd.”

12) Take a plain t-shirt and two pieces of paper. Write, “something funny” on one sheet and tape it to the front of your shirt. Write, “something meaningful” on the other paper and tape it to the back of the shirt. Then go out on the street and try to give the shirt away to a stranger.

Or, if you want to be like me, you could just veg out on the couch and eat Pop Tarts.

Beloved George Carlin was many things, bur rarely boring.