The other night Ted called me on his way home from work:
T: How are you doing?
L: I’m having a mini-life crisis.
T: We are not getting a cat.
L: I know.
T: Okay.
L: Am I boring?
T: Of course you are.
L: No, really?
T: No!
L: Okay.
T: I’ll be home in time for dinner and Wheel of Fortune at 7. I think tonight’s the lucky night we’ll win the prize puzzle vacation!
L: I know! I feel it too!
(We did not win it. Yet.)
I think being boring is something everyone starts to ponder at a certain age…usually the age where you’re working hard, working often, trying to make a name for yourself in your career, save some money, get yourself in order a little bit…then all of the sudden something jolts you and you think, “Wait a minute! Am I starting to get old and boring?”
A kid in one of my acting classes – one kid out of the 200 kids and nine classes I work with every week – quit the optional after-school program because she thought the theatre class was boring. Not that I was boring, but that the class was boring. One kid out of 200 decided theatre wasn’t her thing. Totally fair. Sports weren’t my thing for the longest time and I’m sure there was a person out there – ahem, Ted – who could not fathom how sports could possibly be boring. I always work very hard to create lesson plans that are highly active, engaging, challenging, and full of games, scenes, and lots of variety – I want my kids to learn but I strive to make theatre for them as fun and exciting as it was for me as a kid. My classes and directing style has been described as many, many things, but boring has never been one of them. But, simply put, not every activity is right for everyone. I know this. But somehow, in my fragile state of being sick, overworked, and underpaid (like everyone else, right?) my mind translated this to “OMG you’re boring!”
After I fretted and pondered and considered and mused and worried and panicked and talked myself through my crisis for the next thirty minutes, I came to the conclusion that I, that we, are many things, but boring isn’t quite one of them.
Boring people don’t work in professional theatre for a living. Boring people do not book the glacier trek, dogsledding excursion, and extreme water rafting and volcano exploratory adventure via 4×4 on their Alaskan honeymoon (for future reference, they book the casino salmon bake). Boring people are not up for traveling the world or applying for jobs in different parts of the country on a daily basis. Boring people do not do things spur of the moment, randomly, as we often find ourselves doing.
We may cook dinner together every night and settle in for a solid round of Wheel of Fortune like the old folks do, but we are decisively not boring. And even if we are a little bit boring every now and then, that’s okay too :-)
Do you ever get the idea that you’re boring? How do you feel about it? What do you do to change it? Do you want to change it?
