Embrace The Boredom
T-POST® #188
Sold out!
“Do not cover. Ei saa Peittää. Må ikke tildekkes. Ne pas cover. Nicht zudecken. Nie przykrywac. Får ej övertäckas.” I repeat the lines over and over, trying to get the accent just right. But it’s difficult as there is no way for me to check if I’m doing it correctly. By now I know all the words from the warning label on the electric heater next to the toilet by heart, but I really want to nail the pronunciation. English is easy, at age eleven I’ve already watched hundreds of Hollywood action movies and modeled my accent from distinguished cultural icons such as Sylvester Stallone, Rob Lowe and Emilio Estevez. I just darken my voice and sound it out like I’m John Rambo, making a menacing threat: “DO. NOT. COVER!!!”
Finnish isn’t too bad either, my grandfather speaks a mixture of Swedish and Finnish, and it’s basically all about hard consonants and a mixture of rage and disappointment.
Once upon a time, many, many years ago, there was a state of mind popularly referred to as “boredom”.
“Ei saa PEITTÄÄÄÄÄÄH!” I roar into the sink in front of me, my hands reaching to the skies. The Norwegian version doesn’t pose any real challenge either, it’s like Swedish only adding a dash of happiness and surprise. You say everything like it’s a question: “Må ikke tilldekkes?”
Now, there’s no way to be sure, but I do think my French is getting pretty good. I’ve finally mastered the art of raising one eyebrow, so I just do that and imagine I’m trying to seduce a beautiful girl into joining me for a moonlight stroll along the banks of some river I can’t seem to remember the name of from geography class. She asks me a question delivered with a flirty gaze, and I reply: “Ne pas cover” and the imaginary girl giggles.
I suddenly switch to German, instantly taking on a role modelled on the Gestapo villain in Indiana Jones – Raiders of the Lost Ark. An evil – yet understated – smirk on my lips: “Nicht zudecken, Dr. Jones. Nicht, zudecken.”
This, however, is where I run into difficulty. In 1991 northern Sweden the 11-year-old me has yet to encounter a Polish person. All these years spent reading the words on the electric heater warning label, and still, it baffles me. “Nie przykrywac”. Say what? It seems like a typo, but I’ve checked the labels on similar radiators (at school, at friends’ houses) and the spelling appears correct. “Nie przykrywac”. It is frustrating beyond belief, and just another example of how closed off the world was pre-internet.
I find it hard even imagining my 12-year-old daughter spending countless sessions sitting on a toilet reading radiator-instructions trying to perfect her Polish. Growing up in a society where the iPad and smartphone is an integral part of your life she has little experience of the inhumane levels of boredom the Gen X-crowd had to go through on a daily basis during childhood.
The biggest difference is in those micro pauses riddling your life as a kid, all that waiting. Waiting for class to start, waiting at a bus stop, waiting for your friend to finish eating, waiting for your TV-show to start, waiting to get tucked in, waiting for soccer practice, waiting for your dad to finish work so you could get a ride, waiting for a bowl movement, waiting for your friend to call, waiting, waiting, waiting. Back then you’d just have to fill all these hundreds of slots with your own imagination – now TikTok, YouTube, Roblox and Snapchat does that for you. Waiting has become a treat. I don’t want to come across as bitter, but it just seems like they’re cheating the system.
Me, I spent a lot of my preteens spitting. Sitting at the bus stop waiting for my ride to school, I’d take great pride in creating huge pools of saliva on the asphalt between my feet. If an unsuspecting ant were to cross my path, I’d quickly reload and drop strategic spit bombs, cutting off its retreat, eventually drowning the bug in my bodily fluids. I was a spit-assassin, sent out to create terror and confusion in the ant-society.
But killing time didn’t always = killing smaller life forms. By middle school, the hype of fingerboarding had descended upon us, and this quickly became our weapon of choice against the terror of boredom. Aside from giving us something less destructive to focus on, the beauty of fingerboarding was it could be done anywhere, and you could always get better at it. The fingerboard was a miniature skateboard you operated with your middle- and index finger, and if I had put anywhere near as much effort into geography class as I did fingerboarding I’d been able to remember the name of that river in France.
Us old Gen X:ers always claim boredom was this great creative engine, but what if that’s just a myth? No one was more bored than me during the 90’s, and all that came out of it was me being able to do a kickflip-rail slide with my fingers, say “Do not cover” in seven different languages, and a marginally decimated ant-population. I guess we’ll find out when the next generation starts writing articles on t-shirts.
