"that's main st. #1, anytown usa, sir, and the name's ma'am"

there's quite a bit to be said for a little personality. you know, a bit of spunk, an element of freshness, some imagination. in fact, breaking convention is really the key to keeping things interesting. and keeping things interesting, now that is important. it cannot be stressed enough just how important that is. let us ponder: think back (and it may require a very long jump back) to the last, say, sunday afternoon when you weren't yet old enough to have lots of stupid crap to clutter up the day and yet also no longer young enough to sustain any form of self-entertainment or any significant amount of time. put simply, when was the last time you were bored. and i mean BORED. like not only can you not think of anything to do, but if you could you wouldn't want to do it anyway, and god forbid someone else try and think up something you could do because if they know what's best for them they'll stay out of the whole thing. yes, you're bored and it's made you horribly cranky. after all, what's more frustrating than being fully aware that there are plenty of things out there just waiting to engage you, and yet finding yourself unable to to be engaged. boredom. when it strikes seriously, it's practically a medical condition. really think about that feeling. it's awful. now imagine that it was a condition. imagine the scariest of the scary: a life of incessant, perpetual boredom. (maybe people prone to boredom should wear one of those medical id bracelets so the rest of the world can be privy to understanding exactly why they're so ornery and surly all the time. then we could all just say, "ohhhhh, now i get it, s/he's got 'the boredom.'")

what to do when we have identified such a horrible force at work? among some of our very own, even (there are some pretty dull people out there)? we do the only thing we can; we come up with the best tool available to counter the horrific state. here, it seems to be that our best defense would be to produce or create things... objects, places, people, outfits, art forms, art, theatre, film, dance, books, letters, ANYTHING... that are interesting. it's really very simple, even mathematic: let's say that life works on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being unbearable due to prodigious dullness and thus excessive boredom for the liver of said life and 10 being absolutely ecstatic due to constant stimulation. and let's say, in general, it is desirable if things hover somewhere near the middle, allowing for stimulation most of the time, but also budgeting for those oh-so-necessary times when — for the sake of one's health or sanity — one simply must function on dramatically reduced brain capacity (you know, if something truly traumatic were to happen for which the psyche simply was not prepared; mistakenly catching a few seconds of a bush appearance on television, for example, when you were channel-flipping trying to ascertain which of the law and orders had a better plotline tonight — dastardly business that'd be!) so if a dull entity should arise, threatening to tip the balance in the favor of ennui, order is restored when something of the opposite persuasion — here, something worthy of a little interest — is perceived. so if we're holding steady at around a 5 and we were to encounter someone like ferris bueller's high school teacher (you know it, "bueller, bueller, bueller," etc), the scale would be knocked off balance, reaching a 3 or a 3.5. the class he's teaching turns out to be a painstaking analysis of the utilization of statistics in determining the likelihood that a book on top of a desk will remain on top of said desk and we drop very rapidly to a 2 for most, a 1.75 or others (that's clearly quite a dramatic example). fortunately, just after we are dismissed from mr. monotone's class and are attempting recovery while staggering down the hallway, an announcement from the loud speaker informs us of the possibility that a rabid dog is loose in the gym (never mind how it got there). this is interesting. thus, the scale is tipped back toward the equilibrium. throw in that the rabid dog that may be loose in the gym also seems to be barking threats of mass destruction (no, not weapons, mr cheney tattle tale man) in morse code and, poof, there you go. we're at least back to 5, possibly elevated to a solid 6. you get the idea: balance.

thus we have arrived at the fundamental import of, as vernacular has it, "keepin' it interesting" or "shakin' it up." it's vital, essential; it's life force. we are completely dependent upon the idiosyncrasy, the quirk, the different in someone or something else, the distinction, the invention, the novelty, the detail, the oddity, the "flaw", the contrast, the discrepency, all of it. they are what make it possible to get through the day. consider your day. the simple things. i have never seen the word "omelet" spelled correctly on the chalkboard of the coffee cart and breakfast grill i pass every morning on my walk to work (often different, never right). my favorite spot to sit in my favorite coffee shop is on the end of a delapidated and saggy couch with a disfigured pillow, if you want to call it that. i sit on that couch often to read a book. a book that interests me. it's a window seat, too, so i take in the passers-by. there are some interesting people out there and i can see them through the window. another daily thing, the food coop at which i shop actually has a catalogue of records all kept on index cards. yes, you heard me, index cards. you remember them? rectangular, you write on them with pens... yes, you can write things down on them and put them in these other things called file cabinets. office records on index cards? who knew? or consider some notorious fashion atrocities, another good exmample: ala cher or dolly parton (who, by the way, once said something that's just too lovely not to mention since she came up: "it takes a lot of money to look this cheap" LOVE that). people can sport hideous outfits, combinations that genuinely want to make you shield your eyes, but you can't deny that those people interest you. i am always grateful when a walking fashion cauchemar enters the scene because, as dar williams has it when she notices someone noticing someone else, when i see someone like that, i get to "play the artist" and be inquisitive or imaginative. all these seemingly insignificant things contribute to not feeling bored with our lives and the things and people that traipse into, onto or about them.

keeping all this in mind, i find it somewhat paradoxical (bear with me here) that we are constantly — and i mean constantly — declaring to ourselves, each other, and oh, yeah... all those people who don't live in america, too, that we are such an incredibly "fast-paced" society. you know, the united states in 2005, never a dull moment here, right? we've got things to do, we've got things to do while we're waiting to be able to do the primary things to do, we've got space fillers to take care of any sort of lapses in between those things to do, and then we have fillers for the time when we've decided that what we are going to do is not do anything. which is ok, because we never really have any time in the first place, right? the internet, the cell phone, the ipod, the blackberry, all of it... it all makes for an air of an ostentatious, high-speed, mechanism-type plane of existence. never a dull moment. not us. but i often feel as of late that it's really just the opposite; it's precisely because we don't tolerate dull moments, that we have hoards of them. we just fail to notice because we're too busy with our fillers and our TTD [things to do, see above]. consider how all of our devices actually affect the way things work. we talk (or, take your pick and insert here: play video games, download ringtones, take pictures, etc) on cell phones while we walk. listen to ipods on the train. e-mail on blackberries on planes. GOD FORBID we have a thought. whatever would we do with such a thing? e-mail has made the art of letter-writing as obselete as a movie on beta (yeah, i don't know what it is either). entire books — huge stories of entangled webs of lives and moments and wars and relationships — have been pieced together using nothing but letters. see now, i find that interesting. netflicks, fresh direct, online shopping...they take care of the need to leave your apartment for food, movies, clothing and anything else you might desire. good thing we don't have to go outside; something might "happen," we might meet someone, see something, think something about something we've seen or someone we've met. yikes. gives me chills just thinking about it. remember when you had 4 different remotes on your coffee table? it was always a shot in the dark as to whether you'd grab the right one and if so, your brain could recall what exactly you were to do with it once you did. not to worry now, though, because we have developed the omniscient remote control. i'm not saying i relish in inconvenience (especially electronically induced inconveniences), but you get my point. or back a second to the index card filing system, which of course at every other venue in this country has been replaced by computerized logs. remember when there were librarians who knew about books and things that people wrote in them? take a walk to your local library and tell the librarian you're looking for a copy of "a handful of dust" by evelyn waugh because you heard "that little lady's quite a firecracker and wanted to check her out." i'd be willing to wager that he or she won't bat an eye. (sincere apologies to you stellar librarians out there; i know you know your stuff, and i also wouldn't dare to assert that all librarians from the days of the dewey decimal were competent). it's the same job, and yet look at the difference in the mold for its contribution to the shaping of the person in it. seems to me we are asking for the dull, going out of our way to conjure it up...

let's play quick association. ready? THE 1950's!

did you think "conformity?" though i feel most of us have no idea of the social, historical, and political context for this fairly intense era of convention and "the norm," many of us at least know that it took place. we know that all the houses were lined up in rows and they all looked the same and had women who all looked like each other in the kitchen cooking meals for the kids and her husband who would return from his job that was just like every other woman's husband's job in the car that was unrecognizable among all the other ones on the block because — you guess it — they all looked alike. what a torturous existence, we think. we anjoy mocking it. we make our leave it to beaver jokes and generally look down upon that time and its inhabitants as ignorant, silly, trivial. we even made a movie out of the sentiment not too long ago ("pleasantville"). but i wonder if we may be better served by easing off these sort of judgments about those laughable, ovaltine-drinking primates. until, at least, we take some time to process our own societal and cultural frameworks.

ah yes, america in 2005. the efficiency. the productivity. the awareness. the individuality! or is it the mass consumerism, the idiot in the white house... oops. ah yes, the, uh, fast-pacedness, the incredible universal intelligence? we're just so frighteningly interesting. or frightening for that matter. (utopias can be pretty sketchy, right aldous?) so maybe just frightened? the perk, we remember, of comformity is that it's safe. we can make ourselves unrecognizable; as unrecognizable as a sedan in the driveway of a development in 1953. and we don't need the cleaver house to do it.

i leave you with the following, excerpted from an article entitled "name change to protect the innocent," written by stacey showe in the times.
...a little tale about a road called hooker lane. not crackwhore circle, not prostitute place. just hooker lane...

those who walk the street on hooker lane here in the cos cob section of town are people of the l. l. bean-wearing, exercise-the-dog sort, and they're tired of the giggles and the borscht belt zingers that follow the mere mention of their address.
"when you order something from a catalog, for example, and you give the street, there's snickering, always snickering," said nick kopeloff, 66, a retired physician and an avid photographer, who has endured 27 years of such reactions.
"it's grating," lisa o'connor, said.
It's so grating that the residents want to change the name. In recent months, they gathered signatures of 9 of the street's 11 homeowners on a petition seeking the change. this monday, the representative town meeting — consisting of 230 people elected to represent the town's 12 districts — is scheduled to vote on rechristening the street stonebrook lane. for a town where lacoste shirts and country club memberships are a virtual birthright, even the genesis of the new name seems apt: a resident suggested it after spotting the name in a new westchester development on his way home from playing golf.
from more than 30 names, all as bland as vanilla pudding, they winnowed down the list and took a vote. stonebrook lane was the victor.
dr. kopeloff said it has a "nice, innocuous ring to it."

a nice, innocuous ring. yes, that it does.